Google Biglake takes the feature of the week with the ability to federate data from multiple data lakes. On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the most expensive way to run a VM (Oracle wins). Plus some exciting developments, an AWS OpenSearch 1.2 update with several new features, and Azure’s having a party, so bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP).

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

• The Cloud Pod goes fishing on Google BigLake with a new tackle box and a whole lot of data.
• AWS opens up the market with its OpenSearch 1.2 update boasting several new features and which could attract more customers.
• Azure implements a fancy new bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) policy.

Top Quotes  

• “Are they saving BigOcean for the next layer of unification above when we need to aggregate multiple BigLakes?”
• “It is good to be able to do it, and I still pity the poor companies who need to migrate IP addresses and anchor their IPs to a provider in order to get their DVR functionality. So this now makes that possible, however bad a pattern that is in the cloud.”

General News: Decisions, Decisions

• ️ VentureBeat discusses how to choose the right AWS region for your business, but they seem to be missing a few considerations (sovereignty, anyone?). Also, picking a region isn’t a great idea for a business (like an e-commerce site) that needs to be multiregional to survive if things go sideways.

AWS: Opening up the Search Nice and Wide 

• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 — maybe AWS bribed the Kubernetes governance board because they were tired of trying to keep up with Kubernetes’ quarterly patch releases.
• ‍ Good news for console users who no longer have to click through five separate pages of configurations, with the new and improved Amazon EC2 console launch experience.
• Cue applause track: AWS Organizations now provides central AWS account closure. We’ve been waiting for this for years.
• Amazon EC2 now performs automatic recovery of instances by default — a no-brainer, really.
• Killing the need for all those expensive backup software solutions, AWS Backup now allows you to restore virtual disks from protected copies of your VMware virtual machines. You can use it for decades.
• Could there be a more expensive way to run a VM than VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts? Yes, as it happens: Oracle. But this is a not-so-distant second place.   
• Not ideal, but there should be a workaround, as Amazon EC2 now reduces the visibility of public Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) older than two years.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service releases OpenSearch version 1.2, with new features which could appeal to more customers.         

GCP: It’s Fishing Season, so Let’s Get on the BigLake

• Cloud Spanner gets some juicy cost reductions for scaling costs (up to 50%!) and a whopping double the provisioned storage.
• If you’re excited about all things big data (we know we are), Google has announced new capabilities with Google BigLake and Spanner Change Streams.

Azure: Azure’s Partying, so Bring Your Own IP Addresses

• Increased remote storage performance with Azure Ebsv5 VMs is now generally available, offering some serious IOPS.
• It’s about time: Azure previews its VMs with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors — Ultra Disk Storage isn’t available yet, but it is coming soon.
• Bring your own… IP addresses? Azure’s new BYOIP policy offers a Custom IP Prefix. Fancy!
• How do you build a spot market? Witness the preview of AKS capacity reservation support.
• There’s now dedicated host support in AKS, too. Is the Azure team listening to the Cloud Pod and copying our great ideas?

Oracle: It’s Baseball Season

• ⚾ To support strategic objectives, the San Francisco Giants proudly choose the ‘best’ cloud provider as their sponsor — no prizes for guessing who they went with.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ With Ryan AWOL, Jonathan gets a leg up this week, making the scores Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Public preview: Azure Bastion support for Kerberos authentication 
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now enables you to change the throughput capacity of your file systems
• The AWS Lambda console now supports bulk update of layers
• Sustainability Pillar is now available in AWS Well-Architected Tool
• Amazon ECS announces increased service quota for container instances per cluster   
• Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler now supports Databricks as a data source  
• Announcing general availability of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, powered by Apache Iceberg  

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

• AWS Summits

April 20th-21st – San Francisco 

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• IBM Think – May 9th-13th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe – May 10th-12th |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• Kubecon EU – May 16th-20th