On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is back in full force and some are sporting fresh tan lines. Also, it’s earnings season, so get ready for some big numbers — as well as some losses.               

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 is finally killing off EC2-Classic. EC2 was launched in 2006, with one instance type (m1.small), security groups, and the US-EAST-1 Region. 
• The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services is out, and AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle have all made it. Although some scraped in by the skin of their teeth.
• Get consistent Kubernetes definitions with the new Anthos Config Management feature. The Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) helps users define and update resources with minimal effort on their part.

Top Quotes  

• “I would say Google’s getting market share because they are able to leapfrog everyone else on Kubernetes, big data, and machine learning.”
• “Considering all the different vendors that are involved in a hospital, just being able to have a standard data format with FHIR is huge. And they also now power that with the cloud. There are lots of really interesting use cases that get unlocked with this [Azure Healthcare APIs] solution.”

General News: Earn Baby Earn

• Google’s parent company, Alphabet, crushed earnings expectations. It still lost a lot, though. Increasing the price of YouTube TV could have limited the damage.
• Microsoft’s revenue is up 21% overall. Azure’s revenue doubled, which is nuts. 
• Amazon’s revenue is up 27% overall — but that’s down from the 41% year-on-year increase the company saw in Q2 of 2020. It’s starting to see post-COVID-19 corrections.

Amazon Web Services: Not Fit for Consumption

• AWS named as a Leader for the 11th consecutive year in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services. It’s interesting to see the 20% renewal push included, which is clearly a sore point for AWS customers.   
• ️ AWS support for Internet Explorer 11 is ending. It’s past time to move on to a more modern browser.  
• ‍♂️ AWS has announced the general availability of IOT SiteWise Edge. It’s interesting that it’s offering this as a service that runs on the user’s hardware — in the name of risk mitigation, perhaps? 
• ☠️ AWS has announced the retirement of EC2-Classic. You might think it’s taking a leaf out of Google’s book, but it’s been trying to kill this for years.
• AWS has released CDK Pipelines, a construct library for its Cloud Development Kit. We like a model that allows some things to use CDK while others use declarative infrastructure or different definitions.
• AWS is releasing smaller EC2 G4ad instances, which it says will offer prices 40% better than comparable GPU-based instances. All we want to know is how much does it cost to run the workload: if it’s cheaper, we’re all in.

Google Cloud Platform: Mousey

• Google is named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. Google’s moving in the right direction, but it only just squeaked in — again.
• The new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open. There are also more subsea cables coming to the Australia and New Zealand area.
• Google introduces Cloud Build private pools. Unlike Cloud Build, this feature actually works and is pretty good.
• Google adds the declarative Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM), a new feature for Anthos Config Management that helps improve consistency with Kubernetes. This is bigger news than it seems.     

Azure: Getting Stronger

• Azure is also named in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. If it can get execution under control, it could overtake AWS.
• VMware Site Recovery Manager is now generally available for Azure VMware Solution. We highly recommend it for teams struggling with a DR workstation.
• Immutable storage with versioning for Blob Storage is now in public preview. It’s weird that it will be in France, especially since there are such strict rules in the EU around personal data.
• Azure Backup now supports Archive Tier for backups of SQL Server in Azure VMs. We don’t want our cloud provider to start opening backup files and moving data around: this should not be a thing.
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare expands its portfolio with Azure Healthcare APIs. Considering all the different vendors involved in a hospital, just being able to have a standard data format with FHIR is huge.

Oracle: Needs Glasses

• Oracle is nearing the Leader quadrant in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. We’re surprised it’s in the visionary quadrant: We don’t think the company has had the right vision — which is why it’s behind everyone else.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan’s tactic was to confuse Peter as much as possible so he takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (12), Ryan (7), Jonathan (9), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Service Catalog announces improvements to the Getting Started Library
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler announces new automated onboarding process for AWS Lambda functions
• Amazon CloudWatch adds support for trimmed mean statistics  
• Amazon Elastic Block Store now supports idempotent volume creation
• AWS Control Tower announces improvements to guardrail naming and descriptions
• Amazon WorkSpaces Adds Support for USB YubiKey Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) +Authentication on PCoIP Windows WorkSpaces
• Agents can now set their next status while still on an active contact in Amazon Connect  
• Google introduces improved maintenance policies for Cloud Memorystore 
• Amazon Redshift simplifies the use of JDBC/ODBC with authentication profile
• AWS Config support for AWS Backup Services
• Amazon EKS now supports Multus

 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)