On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a brave new world for Ryan, who learns all kinds of things. Plus the Okta breach leads to customer outrage over not telling them for months, AWS announces its new Billing Conductor, and Google expands Contact Center AI for a reimagined customer experience. 

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

• Okta is in big trouble with furious customers after it fails to disclose a security breach… for months. 
• AWS announces the brand new and very welcome AWS Billing Conductor to much fanfare and great rejoicing.
• Google expands end-to-end with Contact Center AI for a touted “reimagining” of the customer experience.

Top Quotes  

• “The breach is bad enough, but then the handling of the communications of it is really what seals the deal and where you really do all the damage. It’s one thing if someone attacks you and gets in through something unintended … that’s not going to shake my confidence in using a company. But someone who’s hiding it, someone who’s clearly dancing around it, makes me think that they’re not well organized.”
• “Google is notoriously bad for customer support … and it’s very difficult to be a satisfied customer of Google when you have to deal with their support channels. So anything they can do for anybody to make the customer experience less frustrating is good. Let’s hope that this doesn’t just turn into another agent, please situation where all you want to do is break out of the system and just speak to a real person who can apply some logic.”

General News: Okta Breach Shenanigans

• Change your credentials immediately. Customers are raging at Okta, which manages 100 million logins but failed to disclose a security breach for months. Just who is running things over there?

AWS: Money Money Money

• ⛳ Donald Trump’s golf courses are going to be very unhappy to learn that AWS is investing $2.3 billion in UK data centers over the next two years, taking advantage of the Moray West Wind Farm off the coast of Scotland — creating 1000 jobs and injecting £500,000 into the Scottish economy.
• Billing and accounting departments across the land rejoice as AWS announces its very welcome and much improved AWS Billing Conductor.
• Sharing is caring: AWS Lambda console now supports the option to share test events between developers.

GCP: ReAImagining Customer Experiences

• “Agent, please.” Let’s hope Google’s Contact Center AI expansion won’t leave customers as frustrated as they usually are and that this is a step in the right direction for support.
• ️ Go go go! Announcing Go 1.18, now generally available with Google Cloud. But will Rust eat Go’s launch? 
• Google is leading the way to our zero-trust future with its new CA Service.

Azure: Got Your PhD in Acronyms Yet?

• ️ Epic new instances as HBv3 VMs for HPC are now generally available with AMD EPYC CPUs with AMD 3D V-Cache. Quite a mouthful.
• Private Link support for Azure API Management now allows you to secure your APIs. Maybe no one wants to standardize APIs, but can we at least standardize instance names across clouds so we know what we’re talking about? 
• We’re surprised new graphics card-based instances are being deployed, but here we are with NVads A10 v5. COVID-related supply chain issues, maybe?
• ✨ Azure has added new features to Azure Virtual WAN, including two new partners — Fortinet and Versa — to expand SD-WAN capabilities, branch connectivity, custom traffic selectors, and more.

Oracle: After Weeks of Silence, a Story Emerges

• The OCI VP says the need to take advantage of microservices in order to use the cloud is a myth. Not quite: It’s just if you don’t take advantage of micro services, you’re paying through the nose for cloud services.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin rockets ahead while Peter’s absence leaves him continuously flagging, with the scores standing at: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Backup Audit Manager adds new controls to help prove compliance of maintaining immutable backups across AWS Regions and accounts
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports tds_fdw extension for SQL Server Databases
• Amazon RDS supports itemized billing for RDS Storage, IOPS and backup features
• Amazon Chime SDK now supports sessions with up to 10,000 live participants 
• Zscaler, Okta, CrowdStrike seek to combat zero trust ‘confusion’

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

April 6th – Data Cloud Summit

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• AWS Summits

April 12th – Paris

April 20th-21st – San Francisco 

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• 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