On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter’s been suspended without pay for two weeks for not filing his vacation requests in triplicate. Plus it’s earnings season once again, there’s a major Google and SWIFT collaboration afoot, and MSK Serverless is now generally available, making Kafka management fairly hassle-free.

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

• Earnings season is upon us once again, with billions earned and lost. Who are the winners? 
• MSK Serverless is now generally available as a boon for Kafka management.
• Google and SWIFT uproot the financial world in announcing a huge cloud-based collaboration. 

Top Quotes  

• “It’s hard to call a 32% increase for Azure earnings a slowdown, but it is definitely slower than what they saw in 2021 and the boom of the pandemic. But the overall trend is everyone’s gonna keep adopting cloud hyperscalers to host their infrastructure.”
• “The important thing about this is that it’s signaling a change in compliance controls; all these financial organizations with very traditionally physical hardware in Iraq in the data center [had] no way to move to the cloud. So whether it’s through advocacy or proof of process, being able to virtualize all these things is going to be huge and will open up a massive market for new customers.”

General News: Earnings Are In, and It’s Looking… Good?

• ️ Imagine earning $116.4 billion and then still losing money. But fear not after such a rough quarter, Amazon: AWS revenue is here to save the day at 37%.
• ⭕ Meanwhile, Google revenue increased slightly below expectations, and GCP is still losing money — but $43 million less than last year.
• Finally, Microsoft has Azure to thank for its 32% growth.

AWS: A Truly Kafkaesque Affair

• ️ MSK Serverless is now generally available, offering a reduction in the overhead of managing Kafka.
• ⛸️ Amazon EC2 instances get some storage-optimizing icy processing power. (You just know there’s still a whole team of DBAs that doesn’t think this is good enough.)
• Last on the AWS front: There are new management features for EC2 key pairs. We’re ecstatic!

GCP: Last Chance to Register for the Google Cloud Security Summit

• GCP offers some CISO perspectives on security updates, as well as a reminder to register for the upcoming summit.
• No-code solutions provide some nightmare fuel, as SAP BTP announces five new capabilities. What could go wrong? 
• ☁️ Build and flaunt your cloud skills with a nice new certificate, available from Google’s Coursera training course.
• ️ SWIFT and Google are looking to revolutionize the world of finance as they announce a major cloud-based collaboration.

Azure: Premium Class Warfare

• In what seems a little underhanded, Azure announces new investments to help accelerate a move to them. We’re still not sure about creating a ‘premium class’ of Microsoft users (especially since its security updates).
• We’re also not sure if the general availability of object replication on premium blob storage and the increase of the rule limit is a joke or not.
• You know a nerd wrote this article about the Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) by the way it opens: “Threat intelligence at scale!” 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The team agrees that no one earns the point this week, with the scores remaining at Justin (5), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon RDS Data API now supports returning SQL results as a simplified JSON string
• Public preview: Static Web Apps support for preview environments in Azure DevOps  
• Amazon Relational Database Service on AWS Outposts now supports storage autoscaling
• Amazon RDS now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)   
• AWS Snow Family now enables you to remotely monitor and operate your connected Snowball Edge devices
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now supports suppression of files and folders in code reviews  
• AWS AppConfig Feature Flag Lambda Extension announces support for Arm/Graviton2 processors
• Amazon RDS Performance Insights now allows you to more easily see metrics for any time interval   

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

May 17th – Google Security Summit

June 2nd – Startup Summit

June 9th – Applied ML Summit

June 28th – Sustainability Summit

• AWS Summits

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• Microsoft Security Summit – May 12th
• 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