On The Cloud Pod this week, the team talks tactics for infiltrating the new Google Cloud center in Ohio. Plus: AWS goes sci-fi with the new Graviton3 processors, the new GKE cost estimator calculates the value of your soul, and Microsoft builds the metaverse. 

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 fires up the Graviton3 processors for some big energy savings.
• Google develops the new GKE cost estimator for people who aren’t curious about cost.
• Microsoft Build comes out of nowhere to deliver awesome, scary AI-driven tools with much mention of metaverse (yuck).

Top Quotes  

• “This feature isn’t developed for you because you’re curious about the cost. This is developed specifically for the people who are not curious about the cost. It’s a big red number. When they’re doing the deployment, it’s like, oh, I should probably not do that.”
• “I cannot wait for the robot overlords to completely school me at code. This is gonna be hilarious… and frightening.”

General News: HashiCorp Extends Its Reach

• ️ Ryan is slightly embarrassed by how much he’s excited about the new HCL Extension for Visual Studio Code 0.1 announcement.

AWS: Abiding by the Laws of Graviton3

• Storage company NetApp continues to buck industry trends with Backup and FSx support for ONTAP. Don’t forget to check out the TCP Talks interview with Anthony Lye, Executive VP and General Manager of NetApp.
• ⚡ New AWS-designed Graviton3 Processors power Amazon EC2 C7g Instances, now generally available. 
• Control Tower now supports concurrent operations for preventive guardrails. Awesome if you’re just starting, tougher if you’ve been at it for a while.
• If you’ve been waiting for Kendra to give you something you actually cared about in dev, here you go: Jira connector enables document search on Jira repository.
• Great news: Incident Manager expands support for runbook automation. We love announcements like these.
• Ryan now has even less excuse for not trying Resilience Hub, after it adds support for Terraform, Amazon ECS and more.
• ️ Once again, AWS admits that multicloud is a real thing, with DataSync’s flexible file movements across Google Cloud and Azure.

GCP: Changing Behavior One Cost Estimate at a Time

• The new GKE cost estimator seems designed to ward off expensive new deployments.  
• ️ Unless you’re a total data nerd you won’t likely use PSP’s new open source cryptographic hardware offloading. Interesting nonetheless, and could be great technology to try at scale.
• Ryan thinks policy guardrails for Terraform on Google Cloud CLI preview is a huge announcement and readily acknowledges he needs to get out more.
• Finally for GCP this week, Ohio’s very own Columbus houses a brand new data region.

Azure: Unleashing the Terrifying Power of AI-written Code

• ️ It’s what we wanted all along: HostProcess Containers is now in public preview. Great when you need it, but you should try really hard to not need it — it’s last resort territory.
• Neither Microsoft nor our listeners told us about this, but Microsoft Build delivers a dazzling array of tools for builders: AI now writes your code, something something metaverse.
• Don’t you just love paying the market for the marketplace? NGINX is in public preview.
• Jonathan really doesn’t understand the need for Ledger in Azure SQL Database. (A database is meant to be dynamic — it makes no sense for static data.)

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Because Peter is still in the dungeon and the team is looking out for him, the scores remain the same: Justin (5), Jonathan (2), Ryan (1), and Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon Chime SDK now supports video background replacement and blur on iOS and Android 
• Public preview: Azure Digital Twins 3D Scenes Studio
• General availability: Azure Backup supports backup of Write Accelerator enabled disks  
• Amazon EC2 enables customers to protect instances from unintentional stop actions
• Scale your cloud-native apps and accelerate app modernization with Azure, the best cloud for your apps
• Announcing Multi-Account Support for AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager  
• Google Cloud establishes European Advisory Board 
• Run your fault-tolerant workloads cost-effectively with Google Cloud Spot VMs, now GA
• GKE workload rightsizing — from recommendations to action 
• Unlock real-time insights from your Oracle data in BigQuery
• Draft 2: An open-source project for developers building apps on Kubernetes   
• General availability: Azure Backup support for trusted launch Azure Virtual Machines 
• Public preview: Azure Stream Analytics no code editor
• Introducing the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform    

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

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