On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes there was something else on tap, not just NetApp. Also, AWS Storage Day has come and gone again, and Azure is springing into the enterprise cloud.

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

• The third annual AWS Storage Day brought a few presents, including new features for files and transfers.
• One announcement was the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Hell has frozen over, and you can now get Netapp Filers on top of AWS.
• Azure announces the launch of Spring Cloud Enterprise, a managed service for Spring optimized for enterprise developers.

Top Quotes  

•   “I assume this is all built natively on top of AWS, and they are managing the service for you on EC2. If that’s the case, I believe this is the first of this type that AWS has offered. We’ve talked about Google partnering with people to operate appliances on your own VPCs, same as Azure. So this is probably the first of many partner integrations.”
• “I don’t know if it’s [Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points] they wanted, but I think at these prices, they definitely didn’t want it. If the price was more attractive or if it was simpler to process and calculate — more predictable — I think people would potentially be excited about this.”

General News: Whisk It

• DigitalOcean acquired three-year-old startup Nimbella, which develops multi-cloud serverless software. It’s an interesting alternative to, say, building its own serverless stack with OpenWhisk. 

Amazon Web Services: Hell Has Frozen Over

• ⛄ Here’s what happened at AWS Storage Day 2021. We recommend you check out the recordings, because it actually wasn’t a snooze fest.
• AWS announces general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. If you want to import data into a data lake, this would be one way to do it.
• AWS announces Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering to optimize costs for workloads with changing access patterns.This gives you some flexibility that you didn’t have before — but it’s still expensive.
• AWS lays out how to accelerate performance and availability of multi-region applications with Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points. Be aware of the complicated costs associated with this. 
• AWS announces new features for S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Tiny chunks of data stored en masse become very challenging very quickly, so it’s good to see a solution.   
• AWS Transfer Family simplifies managed file transfer workflows with low code automation. It’s great to have a local no-code option, but who writes the integration for a file once it’s been uploaded? Then it’s no longer no-code. 

Azure: Stuck in the ‘90s 

• Azure announces Spring Cloud Enterprise, featuring fully managed VMware Tanzu components and advanced configurability for Spring Boot apps. More complicated than it should be for Spring — will anyone even use this?  
• Azure announces integration of the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform in Azure Spring Cloud. It’s so complicated to manage you need an APM tool to view the details.
• Azure announces general availability of Server Message Block Multichannel for Azure Files. No more wondering why the server down the hallway is taking 45 minutes to copy 5GB.
• Azure announces that everyone will be able to reserve storage capacity on Azure Files for premium, hot and cool tiers. Even better, committing in advance means you’ll get a discount.    
• Azure puts elastic virtual machine profile and automatic scaling for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets in public preview. The option to configure ephemeral workloads is a welcome addition.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Preparation is the key to success and Jonathan is Mr. Prepared, so he wins this week’s point, making the scores Justin (14), Ryan (8), Jonathan (11), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar now supports third-party calendar imports, giving you a more holistic view of events
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer adds new inconsistency detectors 
• Cross-account event discovery for Amazon EventBridge schema registry
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports migrating multiple databases in one task using MongoDB as a source
• Amazon Monitron launches a new ethernet gateway device
• Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights adds support for Microsoft SQL Server FCI and FSx storage
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS WAF log filtering  

 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