On The Cloud Pod this week, the team’s collective brain power got a boost from guest hosts Rob Martin of the FinOps Foundation and Ben Garrison of JumpCloud. Also, AWS releases Data Exchange, Google automates Cloud DLP, and Azure Synapse Analytics is available for pre-purchase. 

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

• AWS announces Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, which will allow users access to and management of third-party data. Watch out, Snowflake.
• Google is making its Cloud Data Loss Protection (DLP) automatic so users no longer have to worry about manually monitoring their data. 
• Azure has made Azure Synapse Analytics available for pre-purchase for customers looking to manage their analytics workloads. 

Top Quotes  

“There’s always that line: If you build a module that is very effective for users across the board, regardless of what they’re doing, at some point it just becomes a resource. It’s pretty tough to build complex modules that everybody’s going to use as-is, and not want to end up making their own.”

“I do not envy security people in this current climate. The proliferation of cloud computing, edge computing, has really had to get a lot of creative minds working together to try and secure data outside your four walls of sanctity. … And so it’s good to see big companies starting to chime in and address that, because I think it’s just going to continue to keep growing.”

General News: Hashicorp + AWS =  A Match Made in Heaven

• At .conf21, Splunk announces a new workload-based pricing model for its smaller customers that will help drive retention. Clearly Splunk has been listening to TCP complaining about its insanely expensive model. 
•   HashiCorp releases the public beta of HCP Packer, which allows teams to track and automate build updates across their packer and terraform workflows. 
• AWS and HashiCorp are partnering to make developers’ lives easier with new terraform modules for AWS, as well as an API path that will enable users to quickly deploy AWS resources while keeping modules lightweight and composable. Justin is stoked for this!

AWS: AWS Data Exchange is Coming for Snowflake 

• AWS releases its Security at the Edge: Core Principles whitepaper to help business and technology leaders ensure their cloud network security extends to workloads running on the edge. The paper points out three strategic areas to address: AWS Services at the edge location, AWS security best practices, and additional edge services.
• AWS Glue Crawlers now support Amazon S3 event notifications, making discovering data sets simpler and reducing the cost and time a crawler needs to update frequently changing tables. 
• AWS is adding Networking Competency for consulting partners (like our sponsor Foghorn) who have deep domain expertise in network and security policy. These partners can help customers mitigate latency, improve availability, and enhance application experiences.
• ❄️ AWS announces Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, which allows users to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data. This seems to be directly competing with Snowflake, which also offers data exchange capabilities. #Frenemies.                

GCP: Stop Losing Data with Cloud DLP — Now Automatic!

• Google is making Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) automatic. While there’s been no word on pricing yet, automatic Cloud DLP offers benefits like continuous monitoring and low overhead, and users can now deploy it across their organizations. 
• GCP releases Spark on Google Cloud, AKA the first autoscaling serverless spark solution. With Spark, Google customers can cut down time spent on managing Spark Clusters (which is a pain), enable data users of all levels, and retain flexibility of consumption.   
• To follow up on its Google Next Announcement, Google releases a new set of best practices for Architecture Framework that will help users optimize their GCP workloads, making them secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective. 

Azure: Making it Rain With Pre-Order Discounts

• Discount alert: Customers who pre-purchase Azure Synapse Analytics can save up to 28% on their workloads. Users can now simplify their analytics workloads by keeping their data preparation, data warehousing, and big data analytics in a single, secure workspace.
• Azure partnered with Arm Technologies and Scalys BV to release the Enclave Device Blueprint, with the goal of popularizing confidential computing at the edge. 
• With Azure HDInsight, users can now restrict public ingress traffic, giving them the ability to reverse resource providers to cluster communication, bring private link-enabled resources for HDInsight clusters, and restrict public IP addresses. Strange how excited Azure is to restrict public access to its own products. 
• Azure Machine Learning helps customers (or at least the five of them that Forrester interviewed) drive their three-year projected ROI up to 335%, improve data scientist productivity by 25%, and reduce data scientist onboarding time by 40%. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Guest host Rob Martin wins the point this week, but since he’s not an official contender, Ryan awards the point to himself, leaving the scores at Justin (16), Ryan (10), Jonathan (12), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Public preview: AKS support for Kubernetes 1.22 
• Public preview: IPv6 for Kubenet 
• Generally available: IP-based website protection for Azure Static Web Apps
• Public preview: Customize Azure Static Web Apps authentication with a serverless function  
• Amazon VPC Flow Logs now supports Apache Parquet, Hive-compatible prefixes and Hourly partitioned files 
• AWS Outposts adds new CloudWatch dimension for capacity monitoring 
• Empowering cloud sustainability with the Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard 
• Network Load Balancer now supports TLS 1.3 
• Announcing Amazon WorkSpaces API to create new updated images with latest AWS drivers 
• AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Amazon CloudFront  

 Things Coming Up

• State of FinOps Update – Nov 18 Mini-Summit
• Announcing the Government & Education Summit, Nov 3-4, 2021 
• Microsoft Ignite – November 2–4, 2021
• AWS re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas
  • Meetup as a Service 
• Meow Wolf, Anthos team for multi-cloud app management in art shows 
• Open Source Strategy Forum – NYC (in person!) Nov 9-10