On The Cloud Pod this week, order in the court! Plus tackling those notorious latency issues with AWS Local Zones, things get quick and rusty with AWS s2n-quic, and GCP flexes with Dataplex data mesh.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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

• AWS takes on network latency issues — its customers’ #1 complaint — with AWS Local Zones.
• AWS is getting quick and rusty this week with s2n-quic, its new open-source protocol for Rust implementation.
• GCP announces Dataplex in Google Cloud is now generally available, enabling the creation of the data mesh view.

Top Quotes  

• “We must be hitting some huge brick walls in web performance that are really hurting certain application workloads that require low latency, because if you look at both these announcements back-to-back, they’re really trying to improve performance.”
• “This is definitely a hard problem for companies to solve. Data is not going to be uniform, and you’re going to have many different sources of it, and you want it to all play nice together so it’s usable across a larger view than it used to be. I like these types of solutions, where they’re applying governance and a way of doing things that’s not just everyone reinventing these wheels — which is what we’ve been doing up until now.”

General News: Order in the Court! Judge Ryan Presides

• ⚖️ Best Buy selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider, but Peter and Ryan argue that it may not be all that exclusive. 
• ☁️ VentureBeat reveals that Optimizely is partnering with Google Cloud. Justin thinks the reason the company chose GCP over AWS comes down to wanting to feel special.

AWS: Goodbye Network Latency?

• With AWS’ announcement of the global expansion of AWS Local Zones, will its customers’ number one complaint (network latency) be finally addressed? No doubt a good move forward.
• AWS is also getting quick and rusty this week with the introduction of s2n-quic, the new open-source QUIC protocol for Rust implementation. For encryption nerds, this is it.
• The general availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is sure to be a great enablement — not to mention a massive cost saving for those using the age-old solution of full data replication between buckets.
• Amazon comes to the rescue with auto-adjusting budgets — something to add to budgets, not a tool to replace them. Super valuable nonetheless!

GCP: The Great Dataplex Data Mesh Flex

• You can now build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex — very fancy and very helpful.
• If you’ve got security concerns (who doesn’t?), the new FIDO security key support answers the clarion call. Strengthen protection for your GCE VMs today.
• Cloud Spanner myths are busted… or are they? Jonathan calls BS on at least one. You decide!

Azure: Spring Clouds Bringing Rain

• ️ Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise is now available in preview, and we’re not quite sure what to think. Is it really just PaaS being sold as a weird integration?
• Application Gateway now supporting mutual authentication is a godsend.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Peter’s back in the game but Justin pulls ahead of the pack, rendering the scores Justin (2), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon Redshift announces support for unloading data to JSON files 
• Announcing Amazon QuickSight’s new community hub 
• Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports Delayed Replication
• AWS Transfer Family now supports login banners
• Announcing Amazon Redshift Cross-region data sharing   
• Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights adds support for Amazon EKS Fargate using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry 
• Announcing Automatic Workload Management for Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling
• ​​Microsoft’s New Security Chief Says It Is Time to Take Shelter in the Cloud

Things Coming Up:

• AWS Summits – US – April-October, APAC – May, EMEA – April-June
• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) – Data Cloud Summit – April 6th
• IBM Think – May 9th-13th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe – May 10th-12th |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• Kubecon EU – May 16th-20th
• Google Next – June 6th-8th
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US – August 2nd-4th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC
• MS Build – TBC