On The Cloud Pod this week, the results of the AWS Summit prediction draft are in. It was probably worth getting up early for — especially if you’re Jonathan.

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

• At the Summit, AWS announces AWS Backup Audit Manager, sealing the prediction draft winner: Congratulations, Jonathan.
• Outside the Summit, AWS announces MemoryDB for Redis, new split charge rules, and cybersecurity updates.
• Former AWS leader Charlie Bell is joining Microsoft. What his role will be is unclear, but we speculate that he’ll play some part in improving Azure availability.

Top Quotes  

• “I suspect that certificate-based access to the console is going to be more prevalent. I don’t know of this in Microsoft Azure or Amazon, but I also know that this is one of the things popping up in custom security audits or in documentation that I’ve started to see more and more, which is, how do you control access to this publicly available API?”
• “This could be an additional $5 billion boost in revenue for Microsoft Office 365, which is important to us because Microsoft 365 is included in the Azure number and reported as one line item. So a $5 billion increase could be a pretty big increase in revenue and growth that Azure could then tout and say, We are finally the biggest, fastest-growing cloud.”

General News: Later Days

• GitHub is saying goodbye to password authorization, but you can still create a personal access token to log in. 

Amazon Web Services: We’ve Reached the Summit

• Redis users in select regions can now use Amazon MemoryDB to boost their application performance with data durability, microsecond read, and single-digit millisecond writes. Unlike ElastiCache, MemoryDB does not require adding a cache from your database to achieve low latency.
• Amazon EC2 turns 15 this year. Launched with a single instance in 2006, there are now over 400 variations of instances. Happy birthday, EC2 — next year we’ll buy you a car. 
• Good news for finance pros: AWS Cost Categories will now allow you to create split charge rules to allocate shared costs to different categories. Time to bust out the corporate card. 
• ☁️ IAM Access Analyzer users can (finally) get rid of localized cloud trails and consolidate them into a single account. This makes us super happy, except for Justin, who lost a point in the prediction draft because AWS did not announce this at the summit.
• AWS has released its Backup Audit Manager, which tracks changes to a backup plan or vault, and automatically generates daily reports. While we’re fans of the update, it did cost Ryan his chance at winning the prediction draft. 
• Amazon announces two new cybersecurity initiatives. First, it will release internal Amazon security awareness training to the public. It also plans on upleveling security with free hardware authentication tokens. More details to be shared in October, i.e. Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Google Cloud Platform: Keeping Quiet this Week

• ️ In a relatively uneventful week (likely because of the AWS Summit), Google introduces the One-Click Triton Interference Server in Google Kubernetes Engine to help jumpstart NVIDIA GPU-enabled ML interference projects.
• Google announces certificate-based access via VPC service controls for BeyondCorp Enterprise. The goal is to protect against theft by only granting access when the credentials and a verified certificate are both present. 
• This week, Google rounds up its list of the top five launches of 2021, including Vertex AI and GKE Autopilot. Our list looks a lot different.  

Azure: Time for Fresh Blood

• Former AWS guru Charlie Bell is headed to its biggest rival: Microsoft. No word yet on what the 23-year Amazon veteran will do there, but we suspect he’ll play a role in availability, which has been a pain point for Azure.
• As of October 1, Microsoft Office will increase cloud office suite prices for businesses. Microsoft claims the increase reflects the value added by its 1,400+ updates over the past 10 years, as well as the 24 apps it’s created, including Power BI, OneDrive, and Yammer. 
• According to the Microsoft bean counters, the office suite price increase could drive up to $5 billion in revenue, officially making Azure the fastest growing cloud. 
• Azure announces it will be retiring various features, beginning as soon as March 2022 through August 2024. The hit lists includes multiple Virtual Machines series and the Cloud Services (classic) deployment model. Contact your customer advocate to see how you’ll be affected. RIP.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ In a shocking twist, all lightning round answers are disqualified and no one grabs the point, leaving the scores at Justin (14), Ryan (8), Jonathan (9), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Windows 11 public preview is now available on Azure Virtual Desktop 
• General availability: AKS support for Kubernetes 1.21 
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports auto scaling
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Asynchronous Inference, a new inference option for workloads with large payload sizes and long inference processing times  
• Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now automates deprecation of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) 
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports automatic segmentation using MongoDB and Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source 
• IPv6 endpoints are now available for the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service, Amazon Time Sync Service, and Amazon VPC DNS Server
• The new Amazon DynamoDB console is now your default experience to help you manage data and resources more easily  
• Introducing CloudWatch Container Insights Prometheus Support with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry on Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS 
• AWS IoT Core now supports MQTT retained messages    

 Things Coming Up

• State of FinOps Update 
• AWS Storage Day 2021 – September 2
• AWS Re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas
• Google Cloud Next – October 12-14, 2021 – Register Now – Virtual
• SnykConf 2021 – October 5-7 – Virtual Conference – Free Registration
• KubeCon – October 11-15th
• HashiConf – October 19th-October 22nd – Virtual