On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes for time-traveling data. Also, GCP announces Data Lakehouse, Azure hosts Ignite 2021, and Microsoft is out for the metaverse. 

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

• GCP releases its data lakehouse, a new architecture that offers low-cost storage in an open format. The real question is, can we book it on Airbnb?
• Microsoft kicks off Azure Ignite 2021, announcing new capabilities for its hybrid, multicloud and edge computing platforms. 
• Microsoft also unveils plans for its own metaverse, including upgrades to Teams, Dynamic 365 Connected Spaces and more. 

Top Quotes  

• “I’m a big fan of IDE for coding and that integrated environment to reduce context shifting, but when you’re talking about access to data, Jupyter is something that’s hosted, that you can protect and grant access to, versus an IDE like RStudio. It becomes a much trickier scenario to maintain any kind of data sovereignty, or protect that in any way, just because, by its true nature, you have to open it up.”
• “Between the Facebook Metaverse and Microsoft, who’s going to win the race? Everyone wants to build “Ready Player One.” And Facebook owns Oculus and they have all my data, then they can get my brain as well: They can just monetize the crap out of my profile. And then Microsoft  has their augmented reality things… . But I think the power of the Azure cloud actually gives them the advantage versus Facebook, in my opinion. “

General News: ‘Tis Earnings Season

• ​​ Microsoft was the first to announce its quarterly revenue, boasting a $45 billion increase. This jump of 22% beats Wall Street expectations, and includes Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn commercial revenue, Office 365, and Xbox.  
• Google also posted impressive results, rounding out the quarter at $18.9 billion, up a whopping 68% from one year ago. Much of this success came from Google Ads and GCP, where revenue was up 45% or about $5 billion. 
• Due to ongoing supply chain issues and labor shortages, Amazon missed the mark on its earnings forecast, posting a profit of $3.2 billion, a 49% decrease from last year. AWS, however, outperformed (as usual), with a 39% rise in revenue to $16.1 billion. 

AWS: The Official Cloud Storage Provider of MI6

• Now generally available, AWS Babelfish allows users to migrate from expensive, proprietary MSSQL to the Amazon Aurora compatible edition. With Babelfish, customers can move their apps in a fraction of traditional migration times. See ya, Microsoft!
• Following the recent launch of M6i, AWS has released C6i — a new instance that offers 15% improvement in compute price performance and up to 9% higher memory bandwidth when compared to C5. 
• ⌨️ AWS releases new attribute-based instance type selections (ABS) to help users express and translate instance requirements — e.g. VCPU, memory, storage, etc — to simplify the creation and maintenance of instance type configurations.
• MI6, the UK spy agency and home of James Bond, chooses AWS as its partner to scale cloud computing. This contract is estimated to be worth $689 million to $1.38 billion over the next decade. Can’t say Dr. No to that.
• AWS is now allowing users to run their Windows containers with AWS Fargate, which removes the need to provision, scale and manage Windows compute infrastructure. Finally a way to run containers that isn’t totally awful. 
• In collaboration with RStudio PBC, Amazon is releasing the first fully managed RStudio workbench integrated development environment (IDE) in the cloud. RStudio users can now synchronize their RStudio notebooks with Amazon SageMaker through underlying EFS storage. 
• ☁️ Justin is pumped for AWS CloudFront, which now supports configurable CORS, security, and custom HTTP response headers. This will save users time by removing the need to configure their origin, or use custom Lambda@Edge or CloudFront functions to insert headers. 

GCP:  Enjoy Your Stay at the Google Data Lakehouse 

• ⭐ With the highest marks possible, Forrester names Google AppSheet a leader in low-code platforms for business developers in Q4 2021. Gold star for you, Google — we mean, Alphabet.
• Django ORM can now fully support Cloud Spanner. This third-party database is a powerful component of the Django web framework and can now be powered by the Python Cloud Spanner library. 
• GCP’s data lakehouse is open for visitors! Combining the benefits of data warehouses and data lakes, GCP has released a new data framework for low-cost storage in an open format. It’s accessible by a variety of processing engines, while also providing powerful management and optimization features. 
• Now in preview, Google Cloud Spot VMs allow users to improve total cost ownership with discounts of up to 91%, plus increase automation and integrate seamlessly with simple one-line changes. Unlike preemptible VMs, GCP Spot VMs have no time limit, and can be terminated anytime within 30 seconds — hence the giant discount. 
• ️ Google makes Cloud Domains generally available, allowing all users to easily register and manage their domains in a single click.

Azure: Watch Out Facebook: Microsoft Talks Metaverse at Ignite 2021 

• Good news! You can now overpay for Azure Firewall Premium in more regions. This update also comes with Terraform support, web category check (available in preview), and more.  
• In an effort to close the cybersecurity skills gap in the U.S., Microsoft is creating a national community college curriculum to grow the number of cybersecurity professionals to 250,000 by 2025. This is part of Azure’s $20 billion commitment over five years to improve security solutions.
• Logz.io is now generally available. With Logz.io, users can seamlessly provision accounts and configure Azure resources to send logs from Azure Portal. So basically, it’s Elasticsearch. 
• Azure announces general availability of Ephemeral OS disks for VM support, with additional VM sizes. With this feature, users can create ephemeral OS disks for their VMs that don’t have the cache or have insufficient cache. 
• With the now generally available Azure Data Explorer Insights, you can get comprehensive monitoring of your Azure Data Explorer Clusters, along with a unified view of performance, cache, ingestions and usage. 
• At Ignite, Azure announces major upgrades across its hybrid, multicloud and edge computing platforms. These upgrades include new cloud capabilities, data features, and the SQL Server 2022 (in gated preview), which will be “the most flexible, scalable, and cloud-connected SQL Server release yet.”
• Microsoft is after the metaverse. At Ignite 2021, Microsoft announced its plans for a hybrid metaverse, powered by Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces (now in preview) and Mesh for MS teams. Additional applications like the Azure OpenAI Service, MS Loop, MS Customer Experience and Context IQ will help build and guide the metaverse journey. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan scores the point in this lightning round, due to his enthusiasm for Amazon EC2 spot placement. This leaves the points at Justin (16), Ryan (12), Jonathan (12), Peter (1). . 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Public preview: Multiple backups per day for Azure Files 
• Video walkthrough: Set up a multiplayer game server with Google Cloud 
• AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager launches new APIs to simplify network and route analysis in your global network
• Amazon EKS Managed Node Groups adds native support for bottlerocket
• Amazon Textract launches TIFF support and adds asynchronous support for receipts and invoices processing
• Introducing Amazon EC2 Spot placement score    
• Amazon DevOps Guru increases coverage of Amazon EKS metrics and adds metric view by cluster  
• Azure trusted launch for Virtual Machines now generally available
• Google announces Zero Trust workload security with GKE Traffic Director is now GA
• Google now allows you to quickly, easily and affordably backup your data with BigQuery table snapshots 
• Public preview: Near real-time analytics for telemetry, time series, and log data on Azure Synapse 
• AWS Secrets Manager increases secrets limit to 500K per account

 Things Coming Up

• State of FinOps Update – Nov 18 Mini-Summit
• Join us on Azure IaaS Day: Learn to increase agility and resiliency of your infrastructure  – November 17th
• AWS re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas
  • Meetup as a Service