On The Cloud Pod this week, the team struggles with scheduling to get everyone in the same room for just one week. Plus, Microsoft increases pay for talent retention while changing licensing for European Cloud Providers, Google Cloud introduces AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, and AWS announces EC2 support for NitroTPM.

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

• Big changes are afoot with Microsoft on both pay and European licensing fronts.
• A very busy Google finds time to release AlloyDB for PostgreSQL. 
• NitroTPM gets Amazon EC2 support. 

Top Quotes  

• “I hope that it’s the exact opposite of TK and Google Cloud — that they’re really focused on the values and the culture and providing meaningful work. Especially during the last year in the pandemic, a lot of people have realized there’s a lot of different priorities; that money is good — it doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys a lot of things that can make me happy — but it’s getting that fulfillment, and enrichment is also super important. Not just a slog.”
• “The problem is they’re not building power plants fast enough to support all of the power demand they have in this country. So there’s a possibility that these cloud providers may get pushback on building data centers in the region, which can have a huge detrimental impact. So keep an eye on that.”

AWS: Some Dynamite Announcements

• AWS teams up with IBM in a SaaS-based partnership. Interesting that it’s IBM, but money talks, and there’s no better time to do it. 
• EC2 now supports NitroTPM and UEFI Secure Boot, which is an interesting pivot for the security-minded.
• ️ Open source supply chain security gets a nice big $10 million investment from AWS.
• ⚙️ If you need the functionality, you’ve got some nice EKS Anywhere curated software packages to choose from, which are now in public preview.
• ️ CloudWatch improves the console experience, which no one really wants. There’s a lot more Amazon can be doing.

GCP: Busy Little Bees

• ️ AlloyDB for PostgreSQL promises freedom from expensive legacy databases. Here’s to hoping it works.
• Google Cloud employees are seemingly at loggerheads with management on the subject of growth. Is it really a representative sample, though?
• The U.S. public sector gets Autonomic Security Operations (ASO). Great news if you can’t hire an army of security analysts.
• The Cloud Pod is all for what furthers the use of temporary ended keys, which SAML’s federated workloads do. Increased flexibility… but probably a step backwards for actual directory.
• Google saw Amazon’s $10 million investment and raised it with the introduction of its new Assured Open Source Software (OSS) service.
• ️ Anthos Multi-Cloud promises standardization, security, and governance across environments.
• Google Cloud at KubeCon EU announces new projects, updated services, and ways to connect. (KubeCon’s been a little dark for Ryan the last few years.)

Azure: It’s All About the Money 

• Microsoft has jacked up its pay in an attempt to retain talent. Great if you’re money-hungry!
• Nice job copying Amazon, Azure: The new DNS Private Resolver is now in public preview.
• ️ In the shortest announcement ever, Container Apps now support log streaming and console connect. After Justin read the documentation four times and only understood about 40% of it, he decided it wasn’t worth it.
• What’s not to love about going green? Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability accelerates sustainability progress and business growth from June 1.
• ⚖️ Microsoft responds to European Cloud Provider feedback with specifically vague and non-binding principles and programs for maximum plausible deniability.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The scores remain unchanged with Justin in the lead (5), followed by Jonathan (2), Ryan (1), and Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Control Tower can now use customer provided core accounts
• Amazon VPC now supports multiple IPv6 CIDR blocks
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds support for canary resources deletion when a canary is deleted
• Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring now supports sending mirrored traffic to Gateway Load Balancer backed monitoring appliances  
• Administer AWS Single Sign-On from a delegated member account in your organization 
• AWS PrivateLink announces support for IPv6   
• Maintenance made flexible: Google Cloud SQL launches self-service maintenance
• Extending BigQuery Functions beyond SQL with Remote Functions, now in preview     
• Google Cloud is forming a dedicated Web3 team 

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

Startup Summit – June 2nd

Applied ML Summit – June 9th

Sustainability Summit – June 28th

• 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