On The Cloud Pod this week, the team establishes that Justin may be immune to COVID. Plus all the latest from the AWS Summit, Azure Red Button team up on DDOS defense, and engines are revving in the great VMware showdown. 

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 AWS San Francisco Summit kicks off with a ton of new generally available stuff, but not-so-impressive attendance (looking at you, COVID).
• Microsoft and Red Button buddy up on DDOS defense testing initiative.
• AWS, Google and Oracle rev their engines for the VMware top spot. 

Top Quotes  

• “Really shows you the power of partnership … There’s finally some easy button for testing these things. Because you always dream: Maybe I could create my own DDoS situation, which seemingly I do occasionally by accident, but intentionally would be nice this time.”
• “I don’t necessarily trust their math, but assuming that it’s reasonably correct, it seems like a good market for Oracle to go after if you’re gonna try to compete with those three platforms — I don’t see a ton of people moving straight to the cloud on VMware. But that’s a pretty compelling argument and potentially a way of getting VMware customers to the cloud quicker: let’s just do it now if we don’t have to get off of VMware.”

General News: Great Expectations

• Gartner anticipates big growth (20.4%) in public cloud spending for 2022!

AWS: Everything Generally Available

• ️ Finally, you can use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resource — just how it used to be, and makes a whole lot more sense.
• You might be excited for the confusingly named Amazon CloudWatch for Ray — if you can work out what it is (we couldn’t). Something to do with machine learning?
• ️ One for the data scientists: Announcing the Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference, which should prove a boon for infrastructure management.
• Now the guru can tell you your code sucks, too: Introducing the power of operational issue automatic detection in Lambda Functions with Amazon DevOps Guru for Serverless.
•   IoT TwinMaker is now generally available, and while your host doesn’t understand, luckily Ryan is on hand to talk about its uses.
• AWS Amplify Studio is also now generally available. Justin’s keen to play with it, but Ryan’s convinced it’s compensating for the shortcomings of a managed platform. You decide!
• Aaaand finally, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is now generally available. Nothing says success like a sequel interface.

GCP: Start Your Engines

• Fixing problems it caused in the first place, here’s version selection for Terraform solutions.
• Google revs its engine with seven reasons why its WMware beats the competition. 

Azure: Push the Button

• Microsoft and Red Button team up for attack simulation testing. Now you can run that DDOS attack you always dreamed of without the risk of the FBI knocking on your door.
• Controls to block domain fronting behavior on customer resources are now generally available. Our question: How is this an opt-in choice? Just… turn it on, Azure.

Oracle: A Busy Week

• ️ Gartner hits bullseye, asserting that Oracle users fail to get that moving apps to cloud means business transformation. 
• ♻️ Oracle goes green with accelerated sustainability commitments in the form of environmentally conscious data center provider partnerships.
• The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution spring release is here, and Oracle is going hard on comparisons with AWS. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin firmly leads the way with the scores at Justin (5), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Announces General Availability of openCypher support for Amazon Neptune
• EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you set a default instance warm-up time for all instance scaling and replacement actions
• Amazon Kendra releases Box Connector to enable search on documents in Box Enterprise repository
• Amazon Macie adds support for discovering more types of sensitive data
• Amazon SES V2 now supports email size of up to 40MB for inbound and outbound emails by default     
• New AWS Wavelength Zone in Toronto – The First in Canada   

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly)

May 17th – Google Security Summit

June 9th – Applied ML Summit

• AWS Summits

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• Microsoft Security Summit – May 12th
• 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
• Amazon Re:Mars – June 21st – 24th 
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th → Now Moved to Boston
• 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
• Google Cloud Next – October 11th – 13th 
• Oracle Cloud World – October 16-20th 
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC
• Microsoft events – TBD Check for status