On The Cloud Pod this week, with a couple of no-shows, Justin and Ryan’s Happy Hour includes returning guests Matthew Kohn and Sara Tumberella. Also, the team is curious to see what’s going to change at AWS with its new CEO.             

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

• Amazon has finally launched OpenSearch 1.0. They’re hoping to make the transition to as simple as possible for open-source Elasticsearch users.
• AWS customers can now pre-pay for their usage. This will allow customers to pay future invoices automatically. 
• Google announced the general availability of its new Google Cloud Certificate Authority Service (CAS). It hopes the service will help address the increased need for digital certificates.    

Top Quotes  

• “I’m curious to see if you can do things like optimization, where you can reference a security group rule many times across multiple security groups. [You could] simplify a lot of your ecosystem by having maybe a catalog of rules that you apply selectively.”
• “I still haven’t seen much talk about what they’re doing with Beats, and if they’re going to fork Beats as well. Initially, they weren’t going to, but then it sounded like Elasticsearch basically pulled the rug out from under them on that too. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that also get forked at some point in the future as well.”

General News: Red Tape

• New AWS CEO Adam Selipsky faces bureaucracy challenges. It will be interesting to see what he keeps and what he changes.  

Security: Ryan’s Going to Space 

• Research suggests security tools are fighting for attention, and there’s a rise in false-positive alerts. When companies want the latest and greatest security applications, they often end up competing with each other, and it makes troubleshooting difficult.       

Amazon Web Services: Setting Fire to Dumpsters  

• AWS announces new VPC security group rule IDs. We’re curious to dig into the details: for example, will it allow users to reference one security group rule across multiple security groups?     
• AWS launches OpenSearch 1.0. We get the impression AWS is handling this project differently, by really investing in the community. 
• AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance. We think they should offer a big discount as an incentive. 
• AWS lowers data processing charges for AWS PrivateLink. It’s always good to see a price reduction, especially if you’re sending a lot of data.
• Amazon CloudFront announces new APIs to locate and move alternate domain names (CNAMEs). This is just Amazon silently fixing a major security flaw.
• AWS announces the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Dallas and Philadelphia. Bad news for those hoping it would go to U.S. East Two: Unfortunately these local zones are limited to the dumpster fire of U.S. East One. 
• One of Amazon’s oldest services, Simple Queue Service (SQS), turns 15. This makes us feel really old but good to see it still has some great use cases.   

Google Cloud Platform: Party Time

• Google announced the generally availability of Google Cloud Certificate Authority Service (CAS). It’s very competitive when held up against the Amazon equivalent, in terms of price and functionality. 
• Google Cloud SQL for MySQL releases IAM database authentication. Other cloud providers already have this, so it’s great to see Google finally joining the party.     

Azure: Always the Bridesmaid  

• Azure introduces a new online technical training program, Inside Azure for IT. Azure is still not as widely used as Amazon, so hopefully this move will help more people get familiar with its environments.
• ✨ Azure’s Apache Spark Connector for SQL Server and Azure SQL is now generally available. This is another indication that SQL runs the world because it’s the technology and language everyone is familiar with.  
• Azure enables Zero Trust using Azure Lighthouse for privileged identity management. This will be very handy when debugging: You can give someone access, but only for a short period of time, and you know the kill switch is already in there.
• Azure announces the preview of the disk pool-enabling Azure Disk Storage. We didn’t know that Azure had iSCSI so this is really cool! 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan seems to be having a bad day, so Matt tries to make him feel better with this week’s pity point, leaving scores at Justin (11), Ryan (6), Jonathan (8), Peter (2). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Cloud Map supports configuring negative caching for DNS queries
• Amplify Flutter now supports Null Safety 
• AWS Organizations increases quotas for tag policies 
• AWS Shield Advanced no longer requires AWS WAF logging 
• Amazon announces new AWS Deep Learning Containers to deploy Hugging Face models faster on Amazon SageMaker 
• Amazon Textract announces improvements to detection of handwritten text, digits, dates, and phone numbers 
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports central monitoring of VPC routes for AWS Network Firewall 
• AWS Systems Manager Application Manager now supports full lifecycle management of AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks 
• AWS Storage Gateway adds support for AWS Privatelink for Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Access Points 
• AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ as an event source  
• Amazon Kendra releases Web Crawler to enable website search 

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
  • Security Summit — July 20th
  • Retail and Consumer Goods Summit — July 28th
• 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)