On The Cloud Pod this week, with the first half of the year full of less-than-ideal events, the team is looking forward to another next six months of less-than-ideal events. Also, everyone is excited to see how they can manipulate the AWS BugBust Challenge for a free ticket to re:Invent.           

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

• 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.

• JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. 

This week’s highlights

• AWS launches the BugBust Challenge in the hopes of finding and fixing 1 million bugs. The challenge aims to help developers improve code quality, eliminate bugs and boost application performance while saving millions of dollars in application resource costs.
• Google has announced new features for Cloud Monitoring Grafana plugins. The new features include popular dashboard samples, more effective troubleshooting with deep links, better visualizations through precalculated metrics and more powerful analysis capabilities.  
• Azure VM Image Builder service is now generally available. Image Builder will make it easier to build custom Linux or Windows virtual machine images.

Amazon Web Services: Does Not Have Bugs 

• AWS announces the world’s first global competition to find and fix 1 million software bugs. We don’t think they’re referring to Amazon bugs, just software bugs in general.
• AWS launches customized images for Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. If you’re looking to reduce the time it takes to build images, that’s a good thing: otherwise it’s a fully managed service, so we’re not sure that users will care.    
• ‍♀️ Amazon announces new Java Detectors and CI/CD Integration with GitHub Actions for CodeGuru Reviewer. We’re amazed by how quickly GitHub Actions is being adopted.     
• ❓ AWS acquires communication technology company Wickr. We want to know why Amazon is buying this: maybe they’re trying to enhance their enterprise and public sector application suites. 
• AWS now supports container images to simplify continuous integration tasks. Continuing to build the ecosystem around serverless applications is a smart move by AWS.   

Google Cloud Platform: Smart Player

• Google announces that a new public dataset for Google Trends is now available for preview. This is really cool.   
• Google introduces a new Tau VM family that extends Compute Engine’s VM offerings. If you’re using some of the older VM classes, this is a reminder to check out the new ones that could save you money.    
• Google announces a new version of Transfer Appliance for the US, EU and Singapore regions. It’s new and improved — they just haven’t told us how.        
• Google announces new features for Cloud Monitoring Grafana plugins. Grafana is one of our favourite visualization tools so this is great.  
• Google launches three security and scalability improvements for Cloud SQL for SQL Server. This is a smart play: these  capabilities will help differentiate Google’s product offering through improved performance.    

Azure: Gives You Ingestion

• Azure introduces the Ingestion Client for Azure Speech. Getting a full-blown scalable and secure transcription pipeline is great, but we really don’t like the name.   
• Azure VM image builder service is now generally available. We’ve found a customer who is able to pay Hashicorp to update to Go.     
• Azure has built a cloud adoption framework for retail. We hope they extend this beyond the Azure lens: it should tie back into the much larger digital transformation story for the sector. 
• Azure has partnered with Red Hat to offer Red Hat JBoss EAP on the Azure App Service. It’s nice to see digital app services available from Microsoft.   

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin stuns everyone with his multimedia power move so takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (11), Ryan (5), Jonathan (8), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Expansion of the public preview of on-demand disk bursting for Premium SSD to more regions
• AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard solution v1.1 adds support for AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline related metrics
• CloudWatch adds 14 new Metric math functions
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Now Supports r5.8xlarge and r5.16xlarge Instances
• Configure GitHub Actions workflows with a new GitHub Action for building serverless applications
• AWS Control Tower announces accessibility, console and performance improvements
• AWS Client VPN launches desktop client for Linux 
• AWS Lambda now supports SASL/PLAIN authentication for functions triggered from self-managed Apache Kafka
• Google joins the O-RAN Alliance to advance telecommunication networks

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• State of FinOps Update — July 8 (virtual)
• Amazon re:Inforce — August 24–25 — Houston, TX
• Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)