On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan grapples with life in the confusion matrix. Plus money money money with Q4 2021 earnings announcements, shiny new digital badges from AWS, and Google Serverless Spark lights the way on data processing and data science jobs.

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.

This week’s highlights

• Q4 2021 earnings: Amazon and Microsoft are killing it with impressive cloud revenues (the only part we care about), and Google is losing money but its cloud is still growing.
• Nothing much from AWS (again) as performance reviews continue over there; but there are some new digital badges to show off your AWS cloud storage knowledge.
• Serverless Spark is now available on Google Cloud to simplify data processing and data science jobs, allowing more focus on code and logic, and less on managing clusters and infrastructure.

Top Quotes  

• “There’s the rub: it’s in the details as usual. You do need to operate as a business and achieve that transformation together. No matter what, any kind of migration is going to have an impact on product delivery and feature roadmap, which will have an impact on the ability to sell. So it really does take everyone marching to the same tune in order to get that done, or it just causes infighting.”
• “The safest move is always to take a small [proof of concept], push that, and do your cloud landing zone with that… But then you’re left — at a certain point — with the thing that makes you the most amount of money [not fitting] your plans… It’s a huge risk: a lot of businesses get stuck trying to modernize. How do you justify the interruption to the revenue streams and the lack of feature delivery while you’re doing that transformation to the thing that pays all the bills?”

General News: Q4 2021 Earnings Are In and It’s Looking Good

• Some serious cloud revenue growth reports from AWS, Microsoft, and Alphabet with growth at 40% or higher, despite Amazon losses. And if you ever want to own Google stock, now’s your chance.
• ⏩ Meanwhile, VentureBeat reports on best practice for strategically maximizing the ROI of cloud migrations, although one or two of those metrics are questionable. 

AWS: Performance Reviews Keep Things Quiet

• Now you can demonstrate your cloud storage knowledge and skills with brand new shiny digital badges! Very pretty — and good to stick on the resumé.
• ⚖️ 52 AWS cloud services declare adherence to the CISPE Data Protection Code of Conduct in compliance with the GDPR. Tricky but important.
• We’re very glad to see that VPC Support for App Runner is finally here. It took a while!
• You can now replicate existing objects with Amazon S3 Batch Replication. If S3 was Amazon sliced bread, this would be the best thing since sliced bread.

GCP: Visual Interface is Just No-Code — Right? 

• ️ A new visual user interface for Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text API is unveiled, and is seemingly another move toward no-code visual workflow development. Perhaps it has its place?
• Google Serverless Spark is now available, simplifying data science and processing jobs — saving lot of money and headaches in the process.
• Assured workloads are now generally available for the EU, strengthening Google’s European data sovereignty offerings. Is EU GovCloud on the horizon? Azure might have beaten Google to it.
• ⛏️ Crypto mining threats are always an interesting challenge, and VM Threat Detection in Security Command Center promises to undermine them.
• ⚙️ Optimizing for reliability, performance and cost efficiency is hard. Thank Google for admitting this, and for building a system (Kubernetes) that does none of those things.

Azure: Your Container Is Not a VM: Treat It Like One Anyway

• Azure announces the public preview of its Payment HSM service, as a truly “premium” solution. Someone’s definitely happy.
• Justin refuses to to reactivate his Azure account to test this, but there’s a private preview of AKS’ cluster persistent volume backup. If you can’t beat them, join them!

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The scores remain the same this week — equal with AWOL Peter dragging behind — and stand at Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Azure Anomaly Detector adds synchronous multivariate detection and improved anomaly interpretation
• Generally Available: Recovery points extended to 15 days with Azure Site Recovery
• AWS Secrets Manager now supports rotation windows
• Amazon EC2 customers can now use Recycle Bin to recover from accidental deletions of Amazon Machine Images
• AWS Storage Gateway enables on-premises users to recover previous versions of files on Amazon FSx File Gateway
• Getting Started with Google Cloud Logging Python v3.0.0
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot now provides Confusion Matrix and additional new insights for classification problems
• Best Buy Selects AWS as Its Strategic Cloud Provider

Things Coming Up:

• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• IBM Think – May 9-13th
• Kubecon EU – May 16-20
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th