On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is running at half-duplex without Peter and Ryan. Plus Cloudflare R2 is here, Facebook died for a day, and AWS releases Cloud Control Plane. 

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

• Cloudflare’s new R2 service is making waves in the cloud object storage space, offering incentives like no egress fees and lower rates than its competitors. 
• Influencers, boomers and bored teenagers collectively screamed on October 4th as Facebook and its associated apps experienced an unprecedented six-hour outage. 
• AWS Cloud Control Plane offers developers an easier way to manage their third-party and AWS services with a new set of common APIs.

Top Quotes  

• “The bigger impact is actually WhatsApp, because for a large portion of the world, Whatsapp is the primary method of communication. If you go … to different countries overseas … everyone’s on WhatsApp. Everybody. So to not have that communication is a huge loss. And you have to wonder, does Facebook need to think about diversifying their backend in some way? Should all of their DNS be inside Facebook?” 
• “[AWS Cloud Control API] is probably going to be a requirement for any new services that launch in AWS … which means that we will no longer be waiting weeks or months for new services to be available in CloudFormation.”

General News: The day that Facebook died (for six hours)

• ☁️ Cloudflare is getting into the cloud object storage market with its new, competitively-priced R2 Service. Unlike other storage services, Cloudflare is nixing the dreaded egress cost, and will charge 10% less than AWS, its largest competitor. 
• Facebook is having a rough week. On October 4th — the day before a former employee testified to Congress about the social media giant’s negative impacts — Facebook accidentally unpublished itself and its affiliated apps for around six hours. A seemingly routine update caused issues with its BGP routes: Read the company’s account of events here.  

AWS: On a mission to control the cloud

• In a rush to release before the next AWS summit, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is now generally available. With Prometheus, users can easily monitor their containerized apps at scale, and new features like alert manager and ruler let users integrate SNS with various destinations.
• ️ AWS releases Cloud Control API, a new set of common APIs designed to help developers manage their AWS and third-party services. According to AWS, three groups will benefit the most from Cloud Control: builders, APN partners like HashiCorp, and customers. We’re not so sure about this last group.
• Terraform is building off the AWS release by previewing its own AWS Cloud Control Provider, which will help users access capabilities faster through automatic codebase generation. 
• AWS Graviton2 processors can now run Lambda functions, boosting performance by up to 19% at a 20% reduction in cost. Faster run times at a cheaper price? Yes, please!
• ️ VMware Cloud is now available on AWS Outposts, removing the need to design, procure, and manage your on-premise IT infrastructure. 
• Amazon OpenSearch (previously Elasticsearch) now supports cross-cluster replication. Users can now automatically copy and synchronize indices from one domain to another in the same or different AWS accounts or regions. 

GCP:  Watch out Azure, GCP is coming for you

• Google is reportedly reducing its cut of third-party software sales from 20% to 3% in order to compete with Microsoft Azure. While Google has yet to confirm this claim, it has said that fee changes are “in the works.”
• ✅ Google introduces Workflow callbacks which require a call to a specific endpoint before executing a workflow. In other words, users can now build in requirements like approvals, validation or events to route their workflows correctly. 
• In honor of VMworld, Google releases updates to VMware Engine, which can now spin up VMware for you in 30 minutes. Additionally, Google releases an autoscaling feature, and makes the VMware Mumbai Region generally available. 
• Google announces updates for Cloud KMS, namely a key inventory dashboard that will increase transparency around its crypto inventory. Additionally, Google’s PKCS#11 standard will now allow users to access keys in the Cloud KMS open-source library. Justin is a fan. 
• Google has taken the hassle out of Pub/Sub Lite by introducing Pub/Sub Lite Reservations. Users can now manage throughput capacity for many topics with a single number. This cuts down on unnecessary work while also driving down costs — a win-win!

Azure: VMware expands across the map

• Users of Azure Firewall Manager — a security management service that allows customers to automatically deploy firewalls — can now easily manage DDoS Protection Plans on virtual networks. This update does not require any application or resource changes, and can be enabled on any new or existing virtual network. 
• Say goodbye to the Azure NetApp Files waitlist. Generally available in 2019, Azure is (finally) removing the waitlist so more clients can migrate and run their production workloads through the tool. 
• Azure is adding several updates to its VMware Solution, including run commands, placement policies, and disk pools, among others. The company is also expanding VMware Solutions by adding Brazil South and East US 2, for a total of 17 global regions. 
• NetApp Files Datastores are coming soon to Azure VMware Solutions. This update will enable users to create NFS datastores and mount them on clusters in their private cloud. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin and Jonathan decide to give themselves both a participation point for showing up and recording, making the scores Justin (16), Ryan (9), Jonathan (12), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Lambda now supports triggering Lambda functions from an Amazon SQS queue in a different account 
• AWS announces AWS Snowcone SSD 
• Announcing the release of Swiss German dialect speech recognition support
• Now — AWS Step Functions Supports 200 AWS Services To Enable Easier Workflow Automation
• Introducing Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2, a Free Web-based Query Authoring Tool for Data Analysts
• Google’s released updated N2D VMs with latest AMD EPYC CPUs enable on average over 30% better price-performance  
• Improve your Google security posture with new Overly Permissive Firewall Rule Insights
• Microsoft to launch financial services cloud on November 1, 2021    

 Things Coming Up

• State of FinOps Update 
• 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