On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Peter’s concept of fun. Plus digital adventures with AWS Cloud Quest game, much-wanted Google price increases, and a labyrinthine run-through of the details of Azure Health Data Services.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

• AWS gamifies cloud training with the release of Cloud Quest, along with two new initiatives in a bid to build foundational cloud skills for younger people.
• Google announces price changes while framing it as “choice”: Some services will decrease in price while others will increase.
• Microsoft launches Azure Health Data Services, the details of which turn out to be super fun trying to get your head around.

Top Quotes  

• “If you’ve ever wanted the job of living in a 3D world where a construction worker runs up to you and tells you that the server running in this weather app is failing and helping them figure this out, this game is for you. And you can earn gems and build and it feels very much like Roblox…. I give it an A for effort and an F for execution.”
• “One of the arguments that people have made against the cloud forever is that once you’re locked in, they’re gonna jack the rates up, and then you’re screwed because you’re stuck there. It’s that exact thing. This is now giving credence to those naysayers who traditionally will say that’s not really true. … Now we have an exact use-case: Google did it. So what’s to stop Azure and AWS from doing it?”

AWS: Slay the Dragon and Rescue the Cloud

• New bigger and badder EC2 X2idn and X2iedn Instances for you to throw your money away on are now here — supporting memory-intensive workloads with higher network bandwidth.
• If you’re excited about Pi Day, Jeff Barr helps celebrate with a bragging blog post on the number of objects Amazon S3 now boasts (with some fun galaxial anecdotes to boot).
• ⬆️ A feature we can finally appreciate: Amazon ECS Update Service API now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags.
• And moving onto an AWS feature we don’t care about, Amazon ECS now supports on-premises workload orchestration on Windows OS.
• More Windows support arrives, this time for containerd runtime on EKS starting with Kubernetes 1.21. We don’t know about you, but we’re starting to get releases mixed up here. 
• Don’t get fooled by the marketing folks: There’s still work for the dev team to do with the general availability of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags.
• ️ We’re not sure who wants to use this, but Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports mysql_fdw extension for Amazon Aurora, MySQL and MariaDB Databases. Wait… wasn’t that just patched in Log4j?
• ️ Get your role-playing gear on, as AWS Cloud Quest has been announced. There are two new initiatives from AWS to help build foundational cloud skills. Use them as a reward or a punishment for your children — you decide!

GCP: Announcement of the Week

• ✂️ You may see a price cut… or a price increase (uh-oh) with updates to GCP’s infrastructure capabilities. Of course, it’s framed as giving you more “choice”. 
• Techcrunch breaks it down with a nice summary. In short: If you don’t touch it very often, your pricing probably went down.
• Hacker News has some interesting commentary worth thinking about when choosing your cloud provider.
• Maximizing savings on Cloud Spanner just got easier with new committed use discounts (yep, CUDs). Imagine a whole bunch of Google salespeople wearing a chewing cow t-shirt with the tagline just chew our CUD!
• With an eye on the bottom line and a march toward reducing, customer support offerings are changing. Say goodbye to existing Silver, Gold and Role-based support services, which are ending May 31.
• ✊ Layoffs, breakdown of trust and tensions build with Google’s leadership under fire from employees.
• If there must be firings, let it be from marketing, because the Chronicle team is publishing on Medium about security operations instead of the official Google blogs. 

Azure: Health and Data and Services, Oh My! 

• Azure partners is everyone’s favorite topic, and Microsoft doesn’t disappoint. An Azure Ponzi scheme allows resellers to generate margin by cutting their own deals with the ISPs on the marketplace.
• ️ Justin is in line for a medal for making it all the way through the details of the Azure Health Data Services launch. 
• From Text Analytics, de-identification and event notification through to Synapse Analytics and FHIR capabilities as well as Microsoft Power BI, there’s a wealth of information for you to pore over at your leisure.
• ️ There’s even a pricing model based on consumption and only paying for what you use. Have fun!

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin jumps ahead again and Peter just can’t catch a break. The scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon MSK Connect now supports external secrets and configuration with config providers 
• Amazon Comprehend launches entity-based sentiment analysis 
• AWS Systems Manager Change Manager now supports taking actions on multiple change requests together 
• Public preview: Azure Purview workflows
• Public preview: Azure Backup support for trusted launch Azure Virtual Machines  
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall significantly reduces service cost 
• AWS Cost Anomaly Detection supports integration with AWS Chatbot 
• Zscaler, Okta, CrowdStrike seek to combat zero trust ‘confusion’ 

Things Coming Up:

• AWS Summits – US – April-October, APAC – May, EMEA – April-June
• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) – Data Cloud Summit – April 6th
• IBM Think – May 9th-13th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe – May 10th-12th |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• Kubecon EU – May 16th-20th
• Google Next – June 6th-8th
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US – August 2nd-4th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC
• MS Build – TBC