On The Cloud Pod this week, everyone’s favorite guessing game is back, with the team making their predictions for AWS Summit and re:Inforce — which were not canceled, as they led us to believe last 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 CTO talks about continuous configuration (CC) at Amazon in his latest blog post. CC has made it possible for the company to keep services running while it also adapts and reacts in real-time. 
• Google launches monitoring and troubleshooting for virtual machines (VMs). Developers will be able to access visual guides talking them through various scenarios.  
• Microsoft launches a lawsuit in response to AWS winning a $10 billion NSA contract, the content of which is reportedly related to the organization’s attempts to modernize the way it stores classified data.  

Top Quotes  

• “When it comes to streaming VR, you can be very smart about what you send to a consumer and what you don’t. I mean, there’s still enough compute power locally that it has a good idea of what most of the scenes can look like. So potentially, local computers do the background or the bits that are complex, and you just stream the complexity with the bits that do need to be latency sensitive.”
• “I feel like all the monitoring tools out there have been missing this [monitoring and troubleshooting for VMs] for a long time, in that they seem to have all the features you need, but then getting the things you want is so difficult.” 

General News: Here We Go Again

• Amazon has won a secret $10 billion cloud computing contract from the NSA. This is JEDI all over again: Microsoft is not happy and has already launched a lawsuit.
• AWS CTO Dr. Werner Vogels talks about continuous configuration at Amazon. There are a lot of helpful tips in this article, particularly if you’re in Dev, DevOps or Ops.  

Amazon Web Services: A Good Brew

• AWS Codebuild allows project owners to make build logs and artifacts publicly accessible to anyone outside of AWS Console. This is a great way to build trust in your product: thumbs up from us. 
• AWS continues to muddy the waters of Glue DataBrew with announcements about logical conditions, numerical format transformations, Tableau Hyper, and AWS Lake Formation. At least it finally has a cohesive package for ETL and Glue DataBrew. 
• Amazon API Gateway now enables customers to authenticate clients using certificate-based mutual TLS. This will help if you already have an on-premise CA and want to natively migrate to the cloud.
• Amazon Redshift now allows you to share data across accounts. You have to be in the same region, but this still solves a huge problem.
• Amazon makes available EC2 M6i instances, powered by the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. This is effectively a hardware refresh, not necessarily a capacity increase.

AWS Summit and re:Inforce Predictions: We Don’t Do These Well

Prediction rule: If it’s already been officially announced by Amazon, then it doesn’t count. It needs to be in the rumor mill, and somewhat specific.

• Ryan

1. AWS will not announce any new services at the Summit or re:Inforce keynotes.
2. AWS will highlight a case study on benefits/cost of Graviton.
3. AWS will give us something better than SCPs. 

• Peter

1. Multi-Region Cognito pools.
2. Organization-level networks.
3. Significant feature update for deploying Lambda@Edge.

• Jonathan

1. How AWS can protect you from ransom attacks.
2. Improvements or new features around CloudFormation validation.
3. User behavior analytics tool for WorkSpaces.

• Justin

1. Bandwidth ingress/egress cost reductions.
2. Aurora Serverless/Aurora MySQL 8.0 support and V2 in general availability.
3. Tools to make SCPs easier to author, test and validate.

• Honorable Mentions

1. SIEM
2. Redshift ML
3. Egress whitelisting
4. DLP
5. New Amazon CEO Andy Jassy will make an appearance
6. First OpenSearch release
7. EKS Anywhere general availability
8. New-ish AWS CEO Adam Selipsky won’t trash Oracle

Google Cloud Platform: Partnering Up

• Google-commissioned study highlights the importance of sustainability for IT leaders. We hope this translates to people choosing to pay more for sustainable practices. 
• Google customers can now stream VR and AR content from Google Cloud with NVIDIA CloudXR. Unless you have a dedicated Wifi network, you won’t be able to use it to its fullest capacity.  
• Google launches monitoring and troubleshooting for VMs in context. All the monitoring tools have been missing this for a long time. 
• Google highlights the success of Google Cloud Partner Advantage on its second anniversary. The company has made a conscious effort to focus on partnerships, and we hope this continues.

Azure: Not So Secret   

• ⭐ Users can now resize peered Azure virtual networks with no downtime. We wish there was the option to swap out VPCs on other cloud providers.
• ️‍♀️ Azure Government Top Secret is now generally available for U.S. national security missions. For the public, that means increased complexity in the Azure world, with four available offerings.
• Microsoft-owned GitHub is rolling out its browser-based Codespaces coding environment to GitHub Team and Enterprise (cloud) plans. You’ll be able to code on the go, even if you only have an iPad and no laptop.
• Azure Migrate makes it easy to discover and assess ASP.NET apps at-scale. This is a great way to know what your migration looks like.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan really wanted to give the point to Jonathan for not saying anything at all, but Justin takes this week’s point with blob inventory movies, leaving scores at Justin (13), Ryan (8), Jonathan (9), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports Usage Metrics
• Amazon EMR now allows you to easily identify latest releases that have the applications you need
• AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices now supports high performance NFS data transfer
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon S3 Access Points to simplify access control
• AWS Systems Manager Change Manager now supports AWS IAM roles as approvers
• AWS Snow Family now enables you to remotely monitor and operate your connected Snowcone devices
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler adds recommendation support for Python applications
• Detect multicollinearity and easily export results in a few clicks with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Capacity Rebalancing for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
• AWS Transfer Family expands compatibility for FTPS/FTP clients and increases limit for number of servers
• Azure Blob storage – Inventory generally availability

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Amazon re:Inforce — August 24–25 — ** NOT CANCELLED, just Virtual **
• 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)