On The Cloud Pod this week, if you were impressed by Matthew Kohn’s ability to wing it last time, then you’re in luck because he’s back. Also, the team hopes AWS is listening to the show and reading these notes, so it can get on with creating its own unified agent for CloudWatch.              

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 has launches HIPAA eligible Amazon HealthLake. The service enables information exchange across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and others parties.   
• Google previews new Cloud IDS for network security. The system makes it easier to manage threat detection from the cloud.
• Microsoft announces the evolution of the Azure Migration Program (AMP). The new Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) will help enterprises improve their apps while moving them to Azure.

Top Quotes  

• “I have a couple of customers that I sent this [HealthLake] press release over to, and they’re very excited. They have no idea how they want to use it yet, but they’re very excited to figure out how to do something interesting with it. So I’m really curious to see how people actually start to play with this, and figure out how to use it to be beneficial for their companies.” 
• “I was surprised that they limited the open-source UDP proxy to just gaming. I get that there’s some undifferentiated heavy lifting that is provided with session management security. But a UDP proxy that scales is something valuable to most companies that are using some legacy protocols. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this expand a little bit to enable some other UDP use cases in the future.”

Amazon Web Services: Swimming Upstream

• AWS has launched a HIPAA eligible service for customers in healthcare and life sciences, called Amazon HealthLake. We recommend checking out the pricing before getting excited, as it seems expensive to us.
• AWS EBS io2 Block Express volumes are now generally available. Make sure you’re caffeinated when you dive in: it’s a complex space.
• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.21. Nice to see Amazon delivering on its promise of faster releases of upstream versions.  
• AWS Private Certificate Authority now integrates with Kubernetes.This makes it much simpler to deal with on-premise or hybrid kubernetes clusters. 

Google Cloud Platform: Busy Bees

• The new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. This takes the company’s total region count in Asia Pacific up to 10.
• Google introduces Quilkin, a tailor-made, open-source UDP proxy for game server communication. This gives game servers some much needed protection.  
• Google releases a new Ops Agent that leverages OpenTelemetry. If someone could tell AWS to please take note of this and come out with its own unified agent for CloudWatch, we would appreciate it.   
• Google releases gcloud storage for faster cloud storage transfers. This is going to be highly convenient for customers with large data files.
• ☁️ Google makes Cloud IDS, a new network security offering, available in preview. This is really handy for security teams who may not be super experienced with the cloud. 
• Google releases several new features for Cloud Armor. Being able to build per-client rate limiting into your existing service is a great feature, because it’s hard to do when you’ve reached a certain scale.
• Google is integrating its private catalog with Terraform-driven deployments. Customers can get a report of who has not updated to the latest and greatest version.
• ⚰️ New Google features are now in preview for Cloud Logging. By the time we publish this episode, we’re guessing Google will have announced the impending doom of Google Chat.    

Azure: Level Playing Field  

• Microsoft Azure receives new features and enhanced migration services. Azure Virtual Desktop only came out a year ago, and the company is already releasing a product to make it less complicated. 
• The Azure Migration Program (AMP) is now the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP). It will support your hilariously old operating system — but you’ll have to pay through the nose for it.
• New opportunities for partners are unveiled at Microsoft Inspire 2021. We think that moving towards sustainability is a great play for Google, but we don’t understand how partners will fit in. 
• ⛔ Shared disks on Azure Disk Storage are now generally available on all Premium SSD and Standard SSD sizes. We don’t have a use case for this, but we would rather keep our containers stateless.
• Azure Firewall Premium provides a next generation firewall capability for highly sensitive and regulated environments. We feel like some of these features should be standard, so everyone’s security is on the same level. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The Lightning Round rules have been thrown out, so Ryan took a point from Peter, while Justin won this episode’s pity party and took this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (12), Ryan (6), Jonathan (8), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Mark individual best practices as not applicable within the AWS Well-Architected Tool
• Amazon Lightsail now offers object storage for storing static content
• AWS CloudFormation now supports more stacks per AWS account
• Amazon Lex launches support for Indian English
• New AWS Solutions Implementation: Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS
• Amazon EC2 now supports custom time windows for Scheduled Events
• AWS Systems Manager Automation now supports upgrade of SQL Server 2012
• AWS RoboMaker WorldForge now supports adding doors to indoor residential simulation worlds 
• Better integration between Azure Monitor and Grafana
• Azure App Service Migration Assistant PowerShell-based experience
• Announcing availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Microsoft SQL Server for Amazon EC2

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• 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)