On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases new features including Managed Grafana, GCP Serverless solves the cold start problem, and Wiz hacks into CosmosDB.

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 shows no sign of slowing down after the Summit, making Managed Grafana generally available and releasing new features for VPC, CloudFormation, and CloudWatch.
• Google introduces new capabilities to minimize cold starts, giving serverless customers the option of using — gasp! — servers. 
• Wiz finds a critical security flaw in CosmosDB which allowed it to hack into thousands of Azure customers’ databases. Looks like Microsoft needs to make some calls.

Top Quotes  

•   “I just think about all the companies who were … trying to build their own ML models for document recognition and how far they are versus how far Amazon and Google are and Azure. … this is the reason why using your cloud vendor might be the better choice. Because they’re not even getting this kind of scale and or price reduction for anything they’re doing on top of ML.”
• “I think the main benefit for this change is going to be shared tenancy systems because, with virtualization, everytime there’s a context switch between different tenants on the CPU, you have to throw away that entire cache. The smaller that cache is, the faster that’s going to be, and the better overall performance you’ll get from the system.”
• ”There’s servers behind everything. So nothing’s serverless just how exposed are you to it? And to me, I  think that level of exposure where it’s no longer serverless is if I have to patch it.”

General News: Docker goes “Full Oracle”

• Docker announces it will begin charging enterprise customers to use it’s desktop app. Enterprise companies with over $10 million in revenue or greater than 250 employees have until January 31st, 2022 to buy the subscription. In Justin’s words, “that’s just dirty.” 

Amazon Web Services: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

• To enable East-West traffic, Amazon has removed some VPC routing restrictions, allowing users to inspect, analyze or filter all traffic flowing between two subnets.  
• AWS CloudFormation users are sharing a collective sigh of relief as they can now disable the automatic rollback when a cloud formation fails and retry stack operations from the point of failure. Peter is jumping for joy.
• AWS announces a 32% price reduction for Amazon Textract users in 8 regions as well as a 50% reduction in processing times for asynchronous jobs. Fast or cheap? We choose both.
• Cloudwatch dashboards now support custom widgets, enabling users to tailor their content by adding visualizations, displaying information from multiple data sources, and adding buttons. 
• Good news, Amazon VPC customers: you can now resize your prefix lists to better manage network security and routing! This update comes after Azure’s move to allow resized prefix lists. #Twinning.
• ✨The wait is over — Amazon Managed Grafana is available to the public. They’ve also added shiny new features including upgrading to V8, the ability to query data with a JSON data source plugin, and more. 

Google Cloud Platform: Servers are the New Serverless

• In a delayed announcement, Google shares that Cloud SQL for Postgres (finally) supports Linux Huge Pages by default. Welcome to the early 2000’s, Google.
• To alleviate the cold start problem, GCP Serverless is allowing users to specify a minimum number of their application instances to keep online during low demand. 

Azure: Wiz Cracks Cosmos DB 

• Microsoft sent thousands of awkward emails this week warning customers that their data could be compromised because of a critical security flaw in Azure’s flagship Cosmos DB. 
• Wiz reports how it hacked into what it’s calling “ChaosDB” and what that could mean for Azure customers. TLDR: if you’re a Jupyter Notebooks user, change your key ASAP.  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Fresh from his AWS predictions win, Jonathan takes this week’s lightning round point with a Frank Lloyd Wright reference, making the scores Justin (14), Ryan (8), Jonathan (10), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Systems Manager enables additional application management capabilities 
• AWS Copilot now supports Pub/Sub architectures 
• Amazon VPC Announces New Routing Enhancements to Make It Easy to Deploy Virtual 
• Appliances Between Subnets In a VPC 
• Amazon Aurora supports PostgreSQL 13 
• Introducing Dynamic Partitioning in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose C

 Things Coming Up

• State of FinOps Update 
• Azure Data Governance Event – September 28th 
• SnykConf 2021 October 5-7 – Virtual Conference – FREE Registration
• KubeCon – October 11-15th
• Google Cloud Next – October 12-14, 2021 – Register Now – Virtual 
• HashiConf – October 19th-October 22nd – Virtual
• Announcing the Government & Education Summit, Nov 3-4, 2021 
• AWS Re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas