121: Blue Origin finds new “dummy” to go to space

Is sending the former CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world to space a good idea? On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the potential economic catastrophe that could follow if Jeff Bezos becomes space junk. 

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 provides cloud directory services, enables remote access, eases onboarding and offboarding of users and enables zero trust access models.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon is sending the old junk it found in the attic into space.
• Google is now fully qualified to direct traffic.
• Azure turned its out-of-office message on and hoped no one would notice.

General News: Frenemies 

• ⛄ Snowflake had its annual user conference and announced some new tools and features. Pretty good! 
• Jeff Bezos is joining the first human flight to space with his company Blue Origin. This is super risky, even if he’s no longer CEO. 
• Fastly blames global internet outage on a software bug. This is the right way to address outages — nice one, Fastly! 

Amazon Web Services: Watch This Space

• Amazon announces auditing feature for FSx for Windows File Server. This needs an acronym. 
• AWS has added a third availability zone to the China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet. Nice to see. 
• AWS Sagemaker Data Wrangler now supports Snowflake as a data source. Smart move.       

Google Cloud Platform: Sneaky Sales Tactics

• Google announces the release of container-native Cloud DNS for Kubernetes. Powerful building block or Achilles heel? 
• Google announces new capabilities for Cloud Asset Inventory. Makes so much sense to come from the provider because they know what you have.   
• Google releases new Microsoft and Windows demos on Google Cloud Demo center. This is absolutely not a sales tool… 
• Introducing Google Cloud Service, Kf for Cloud Foundry, on Kubernetes. Another good pathway to Google.
• Google’s Artifact repository now supports Java, Node.JS and Python. We think it’s great it’s included Python.  
• Google is releasing a fully managed zero-trust security solution using traffic director. We wish there was a demo for this.     

Azure: Getting Fit

• Azure announces a name change and new features for Windows Virtual Desktop service. This is really just a rebranding exercise.  
• ⛰️ Azure is changing the pricing structure for Azure Sentinel and Monitor Log analytics. The cheaper it gets, the more you will store.    

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ After a slightly subdued round, Justin takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (10), Ryan (5), Jonathan (7). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Identify and Copy existing objects to use S3 Bucket Keys, reducing the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS)
• Amazon EKS pods running on AWS Fargate now support custom security groups
• Amazon Keyspaces now supports customer-managed customer master keys (CMKs) for encryption of data at rest to help you meet your compliance and regulatory requirements
• Amazon SNS now supports SMS Sandbox and displays available origination IDs in your account
• AWS Glue Studio now allows you to specify streaming ETL job settings
• Amazon SageMaker model registry now supports rollback of deployed models
• Google Cloud VMware Engine now HIPAA compliant
• Azure: Advancing in-datacenter critical environment infrastructure availability

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• Amazon re:Inforce — August 24–25 — Houston, TX
• Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)