On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a merry-go-round of vacations, with Jonathan returning and Ryan escaping while Peter tunes in from Hawaii. Also, there is some big news in an otherwise quiet week.               

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 announces that Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) users can now assign IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes to EC2 instances. It should help simplify the process of using container and networking applications that require multiple IP addresses.
• AWS releases a new feature for SAM CLI, SAM Pipelines. It provides quick and easy access to the benefits of CI/CD, making it easier to get out new products faster and check for errors.
• Microsoft has acquired security platform CloudKnox, which was designed to work across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. 

Top Quotes  

• “I hope to see more of these [SAM Pipelines-style features]. It’s been one of my mental blocks. I’ve been using serverless ever since Lambda was announced, but building into a pipeline is such a chore. And Jenkins is such a chore in itself. So if you have a canned way to deploy a pipeline, it’s great.”
• “I think it [CloudKnox] had a potential to be really interesting and really valuable. But Azure was actually building a lot of these capabilities into their cloud natively, including least privilege access. And Google’s building that kind of stuff too. So I don’t know if there’s a long runway left for them to get a lot of adoption and a lot of new customers, or if they’re going to be replaced by the cloud providers over time, and ultimately not be needed.”

General News: Don’t Off Slack

• Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion. Hopefully they don’t kill slack because we do not want to use Teams. 

Amazon Web Services: Winning

• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud customers can now assign IP prefixes to their EC2 instances. Being able to assign multiple IPs is super helpful, so there are some great use cases for this. 
• AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Pipelines is a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI. We hope to see more of these types of announcements, this out-of-the-box function is so good.
• AWS is releasing the Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller. We’re hoping the high price tag is just to slow the stampede of people who want to use this.  

Google Cloud Platform: Looking Fantastic

• Google publishes a simple visualization of how GKE works. We highly recommend these, they’re a great introduction to GCP services.  
• Google has also published a helpful visualization on bridging data silos with Data Fusion. Another one worth calling out because it’s just so helpful. Seriously!
• Google now allows customers to run Windows Server containers on Anthos clusters on VMWare in on-premise environments. Anthos’ plans for world domination — but we’re not sure there will be a huge amount of interest in this.  
• Google launches Data Validation, a crucial step in data warehouse, database or data lake migration projects. This is really useful for large data migrations. 
• ‍♀️ Google releases new features for its Looker reporting tool. Bringing in data from other clouds to do side-by-side comparisons is fantastic.     

Azure: Turning Tides 

• Microsoft has acquired cloud security platform CloudKnox. Azure was already building some of these capabilities natively, so we’re not sure how long CloudKnox has to live. 
• Microsoft has recently released its own Linux Distro. Steve Ballmer might just be eating his hat, given his well-known dislike of Linux.  
• Deploying Microsoft’s new Linux Distribution as a VM comes with challenges we’d rather not deal with. We’ll wait until it’s a container, so all we have to do is download it. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Fresh from vacation Jonathan took advantage of poor, vacationless Justin and grabbed this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (12), Ryan (6), Jonathan (9), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Azure Active Directory support for Azure Relay is now in public preview
• AppLovin builds on Google Cloud to transform mobile marketing
• Amazon Textract announces specialized support for automated processing of invoices and receipts
• Amazon Kendra releases WorkDocs Connector 
• Easily enable AWS Config recording and deploy Conformance Packs across your organization using Quick Setup
• Announcing the General Availability of AWS Local Zones in Denver
• Amazon Releases Virtual Andon 2.2 – A digital notification system for manufacturers
• AWS Snowball now supports multicast streams and routing by providing instances with direct access to external networks
• AWS Snowcone now supports multicast streams and routing by providing instances with direct access to external networks

 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 — Registration is now open
• KubeCon — October 11-15th — Los Angeles, California + Virtual
• HashiConf — October 19th–October 22nd — Virtual
• SnykConf 2021 — October 5–7, a free virtual conference
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)