On The Cloud Pod this week, Justin may be out but the cloud stops for no one. Also, AWS announces a New Zealand region, GCP releases GKE Backup, and Azure Functions 4.0 is now in public preview. 

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

• Grab your togs and sunnies! AWS is opening a New Zealand region to serve Asia Pacific. The move is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs in the next 15 years.  
• GCP users can now protect their GKE workloads with GKE Backup, which helps automate recovery tasks and shows reporting for compliance and audit purposes.
• Azure Functions 4.0 has arrived — in public preview, that is. It’s expected to be generally available by November 2021, just in time for the .NET 6.0 release.

Top Quotes  

• “Microsoft Excel is still the most powerful tool for making business decisions. And [Amazon QuickSight] is the same thing: It’s a way to visualize the raw data you have. Being able to ask a service a question in normal words is gonna be super powerful.”
• “It’s funny because for at least the last 18 months, this has been my daily life: Thinking hard about how software makes it from environment to environment and into production. And no matter where you’re hosting this workload — what cloud provider, what technology — there are trials and tribulations and hurdles that have to be overcome … So I’d like to see more of these bespoke deployment technologies that are really focused on doing one thing really well, rather than doing all things.”

AWS: AWS says ‘Kia Ora’ to its Newest Region: New Zealand

• With the newly available Amazon QuickSight, business users can use natural language (read: normal words) to quickly create interactive BI dashboards and receive accurate insights and data visualizations. 
• Look out, Kiwis and hobbits: Amazon is set to open new data centers in New Zealand by 2024, adding the AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region to its 81 existing availability zones. It’s estimated that the new region will create 1,000 jobs in the next 15 years, but we believe it will have an even bigger impact. 
• ️‍♂️ Tracing support is now generally available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. Users can now send telemetry data to various AWS applications as well as partner destinations. Telemetry, dear Watson. 
• AWS releases AQ UA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift RA3.xlplus nodes. This new distributed and hardware-accelerated cache enables Redshift to run up to 10X faster than AWS competitors by boosting certain query types. Magic!
• AWS users can now easily select, detect and manage sensitive data with Amazon Macie. Using machine learning and pattern matching, users can create custom alerts based on the specific data governance and privacy needs of their organizations. 
• You can now (finally) replicate individual repositories to other regions and accounts with Amazon ECR — instead of all images in the registry.  
• Christmas has come early this year for Amazon EC2 users. Windows Server 2022 AMIs are now officially available on AWS, meaning you can now enjoy the latest Windows features. 

GCP: Making Stateless Stateful with GKE Backup

• Google expands its cloud storage capabilities, allowing users to choose from a larger selection of regions for their data replication, rather than the previous dual-region buckets.
• Google releases GKE Backup to help users protect, manage and restore stateful application data — or basically make your containers VMs. 
• ☁️ Google announces the release of Google Cloud Deploy, which allows users to define delivery pipelines and targets for each release, making continuous delivery to GKE faster and more reliable.

Azure: Welcome to the Azure Peep Show

• 4️⃣ Azure Functions 4.0 is now in public preview and is expected to be released in November 2021 to coincide with the planned release of .NET 6.0. (How are we only on version 6?) Functions 4.0 will also support the following versions: Node.js 14; Python 3.7 and 3.8; Java 8 and 11; PowerShell 7.0; and Custom Handler
• ☕ Java apps users can soon view richer data from their functions applications — i.e. requests, logs, metrics — with Azure Monitor’s application insights integration with Azure Functions on Linux. Currently in public preview, the integration will feature monitoring for the application insights Java 3.x agent. 
• A twofer! Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL Pipeline Support are now in public preview. Users will be able to fully automate testing and delivery in multiple services, and craft DB update commands against the database. Just make sure you have a tested rollback process first.
• Also in public preview is the Azure Resource Health For Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server. This new feature helps monitor database health and alerts users to widespread issues and “non-platform” events. 
• Terraform support from Azure Database for PostgreSQL — Flexible Server is in public preview. This comes a mere four and a half years after Azure Database for PostgreSQL was first in public preview. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan wins the point this week with a not-so-subtle jab at DevOps engineers, bringing the scores to Justin (15), Ryan (9), Jonathan (11), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Announcing general availability of Azure AD-joined VMs support
• Startup Harness tackles ‘hated’ DevOps tasks with its intelligent automated platform 
• Amazon EC2 Fleet instant mode now supports targeted Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations
• Understanding Cloud SQL maintenance: how do you manage it?
• Google introduces Quota Monitoring Solution: Single Dashboard with Alerting capabilities
• Public preview: At-scale management of Azure Monitor alerts in Backup center 
• AWS WAF now offers in-line regular expressions
• AWS Ground Station announces Licensing Accelerator 

 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 
• Microsoft Ignite – November 2–4, 2021
• AWS re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas