On The Cloud Pod this week, the pod squad is down to the OG three while Ryan is away. Also AWS announces serverless pipelines, GCP releases Spot Pods, and Azure introduces Chaos Studio. 

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 releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines to save development teams time. These pipelines streamline CI/CD configurations for AWS applications. 
• In the spirit of savings, new GCP Spot Pods help GKE Autopilot users run fault-tolerant workloads while spending less money. Hooray!
• Azure Chaos Studio helps development teams wreak controlled havoc with a managed experimentation service, allowing them to safely build, break and optimize their apps with reckless abandon. 

Top Quotes  

• “I think for some people when they’re looking at, OK, we’re gonna make this commitment to a different architecture, at that point in time, they’ve looked at serverless versus containerized apps, and most companies went the containerized apps route, but that might change in the next wave.” 
• “Python 3.10 looks really interesting. It’s got a bunch of new features … around data handling specifically, which is really what people have been using Python for for years: bioinformatics and data science. But it has really neat features around matching different schemas of data and things like that.”

AWS: Finally, a Pipeline We Can Get Behind

• ⏲️ AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines, a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI, to help users simplify CI/CD configurations for AWS serverless applications. The new feature will help development teams minimize the amount of time spent creating pipelines, while also ensuring safe deployments. 
• With AWS Fault Injection Simulator, users can now create and run FIS experiments that check the state of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and run SSM automations. We hope the only fault injections you have are in your EC2 instances, not in your Thanksgiving turkey. 
• AWS customers running Windows containers rejoice: New Amazon ECS Exec allows you to execute commands or get information directly from your Windows container shell. Magic!
• Amazon is doubling down on Canada. AWS announced plans to open a second Canadian region, in Calgary, bringing the company’s total region count to nine. The Calgary region is set to open in late 2023 or early 2024, and AWS has committed to using renewable energy to help build it out. 

GCP: Hitting the Spot with New GKE Autopilot Spot Pods

• ️ Google is making it easier to improve application scale-up times with its “revolutionary” (read: evolutionary) new feature: GKE Image Streaming. Users can enjoy drastically reduced container pull-times, and simultaneously boot up applications while GKE streams container data.
• The one notable announcement to come out of the Google Cloud Public Sector Summit this week was GCP’s release of RAD Lab: a cloud-based sandbox environment to help technology teams spin up projects quickly and compliantly. We can’t wait till this hits the private sector.
• If you’re running GKE Autopilot and are looking for savings, we have the answer: GKE Spot Pods. Save on fault-tolerant workloads and dev/test clusters by using Spot Pods to run them on GKE Autopilot. 

Azure: Brace Yourselves, Azure Chaos Studio is Coming

• Azure Automation now supports PowerShell 7.1 in preview. With PowerShell 7.1, users can develop and execute runbooks for infrastructure and operational automation scenarios as cloud and hybrid jobs across Azure and non-Azure machines. 
• Managed Identities is now supported by Azure Automation in Azure Public, Gov, and China Cloud, allowing runbooks to easily access other Azure AD protected resources. 
• Now in preview, Azure Chaos Studio gives dev teams a fully-managed experimentation playground to help track, measure and mitigate faults with controlled chaos engineering. Along with this announcement, Azure is also releasing landing zone accelerators, which allow teams to deploy pre-configured environment implementations. 
• Azure Bastion is a new fully managed PaaS that allows you to connect to a virtual machine using your browser and the Azure portal with secure RDP/SSH connectivity over TLS. 
• 2️⃣ Here’s a twofer: Azure Functions 4.0 and .NET 6 support are now generally available. Functions 4.0 is available in all regions on Linux and Windows for multiple languages, while .NET 6 supports both in-process and isolated execution models. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ With Ryan away, Jonathan capitalizes on the opportunity to pull ahead into second place, making the scores Justin (16), Ryan (12), Jonathan (13), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet now support automatic instance termination with Capacity Rebalancing 
• AWS Backup adds support for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and Neptune
• Amazon EC2 now supports access to Red Hat Knowledgebase
• AWS Batch introduces fair-share scheduling
• AWS announces a new capability to switch license types for Windows Server and SQL Server applications on Amazon EC2
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports retry policies and resume
• Amazon DevOps Guru now Supports Multi-Account Insight Aggregation with AWS Organizations    

 Things Coming Up

• AWS re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas
  • Meetup as a Service