On The Cloud Pod this week, the whole team definitely isn’t completely exhausted. Meanwhile, Amazon releases MSK Connect, Google offers the Google Cloud Digital Leader certification, and DORA’s 2021 State of DevOps report has arrived. 

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

• Users of AWS’s fully managed Apache Kafka service can now use MSK Connect to easily set up and deploy Kafka Connect clusters. 
• GCP releases the new Google Cloud Digital Leader training and certificate program, which trains users on all things Google in just four classes. 
• Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team publishes the 2021 State of DevOps, identifying key trends. 

Top Quotes  

•   “From a least-privileged perspective, it’d be better to have a purpose-built tool that does one thing really well — what you need it to do — versus building out this huge AWS CLI you have to install on every server and expose attack vectors if it has the wrong permissions.”
• “Digital transformation is such a broad thing for so many industries … and giving them this cloud knowledge helps them drive outcomes from a technical perspective, and map the business need to the technical need …  It’s helpful for [business users] to get a little bit of language, but also for the technical person to actually learn how to translate technical ideas into business ideas that have value.”

General News: F5 Absorbs Threat Stack

• F5 sets its sights on Threat Stack, paying $68 million to add this Boston-based cloud monitoring company to its growing list of cloud and security software acquisitions. This recent buy brings F5’s investment in cloud monitoring capabilities to over $2 billion. 

AWS: MSK Connect – the New Easy Button for Managed Kafka Service users

• ️ AWS is eliminating undifferentiated heavy lifting for users of its fully managed Apache Kafka service, by introducing MSK Connect, which allows users to configure and deploy a connector using Kafka Connect with a few clicks. 
• ⌨️ Amazon Redshift users can now use RSQL, a fully-featured command-line client, to interact with their clusters and databases. Working as a complement to the PostgreSQL psql command line tool, RSQL is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS X.

GCP: Anointing Future Digital Leaders

• Google introduces the new Cloud Storage trigger in Eventarc, which eliminates the need for audit logs and supports bucket filtering. Now you can do what you’ve always done in Eventarc, only better. 
• Google has answered its customers’ prayers with its new Cloud Digital Leader training and certification program. The program is designed to help individuals and teams get to grips with the cloud as a business tool in just four classes. 
• It’s Justin’s favorite time of the year: Google has released the latest DORA report. The 2021 State of DevOps report includes key insights around burnout, team performance, and implementing DevOps capabilities with good documentation. 

Azure: Finally, a Week Without Security Issues

• ✨ Azure announces its one cool September update — Azure SQL Managed instances are now available in Terraform Registry, making infrastructure easy to deploy. 
• AKS releases a new scale-down mode, which lets users select if they would like their nodes to be deleted or deallocated when scaled down. This allows for faster operating speeds, and nixes the need to pre-provision nodes and pre-pull container images. 
• The AKS Run command is now generally available. Users can now remotely invoke just-in-time commands in an AKS cluster through the AKS API.  
• ✅ The FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB) has awarded Azure VMware Solutions FedRAMP High Authorization, which validates its security and compliance for a wide range of public sector, industry, and enterprise use cases. It also proves that the government has a lot of VMware. 
• Azure VM Backup makes packaged pre-post scripts generally available. These scripts convert file-consistent backups to database-consistent snapshots, which are instantly recoverable by Oracle and verifiable via RMAN. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan nabs the point this week, despite — or maybe because of — major exhaustion, leaving the scores at Justin (15), Ryan (9), Jonathan (11), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Extract custom entities from documents in their native format with Amazon Comprehend
• Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights adds account application auto-discovery and new health dashboard
• Amazon RDS now supports X2g and T4g instances for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostrgreSQL Databases
• AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow Supports AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry
• AWS RoboMaker now supports container images in simulation
• AWS Announces General Availability of the Amazon GameLift Plug-in and AWS CloudFormation Templates for Unity
• Amazon Connect Chat now supports passing a customer display name and contract attributes through the chate user interface
• Amazon Detective supports S3 and DNS finding types, add finding details
• Optimizing Waze ad delivery using TensorFlow over Google Vertix AI
• Azure Monitor Agent and Data Collection Rules now support Windows Server 2022

 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