On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the new Madrid region’s midday siesta shutdown. Plus: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, Azure gets paradigmatic with 5G, and you can now take the 2022 Google-DORA DevOps survey.

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

• Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, in one of the largest-ever acquisitions.
• Google Cloud and DORA team up to bring us the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey.
• Azure calls 5G a “paradigm,” but is it just hype?

Top Quotes  

• “This is an interesting reverse on the large cloud providers getting into the silicon business, which makes sense to me — that they want to control their supply chain and optimize. … Is Broadcom going to start becoming like a cloud provider? That’s interesting. I wouldn’t suspect that.”
• “What [is Azure] trying to do? Are they trying to sell us on [5G]? Are they trying to change the way we develop? Because we’re just going to waste our time developing stuff that requires some of these things, and then the infrastructure is not going to be there to support it.”

General News: Diversifying the Portfolio

• In one of the largest acquisitions ever (just shy of Dell’s EMC takeover at $67 billion and Microsoft’s Blizzard acquisition at $69 billion), Broadcom acquires VMware for $61 billion. This could have big implications for enterprise.

AWS: Need for Speed

• If you need a lot of disk space to log transactions, you’re in luck: Amazon EC2 M6id and C6id instances buff up their storage by up to 7.6TB.
• Ryan’s usually doing whatever he can to avoid this, but if you need Elastic Volumes and Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) support for io2 Block Express, you’ve now got it.                                   

GCP: the State of DevOps in 2022

• ✅ Why do IT leaders choose Google Cloud certification for their teams? In case you were wondering, here’s a puff piece with the answer.
• ️ If you need to change streams with Cloud Spanner, you can now do so. A cool feature, but it does need to be by email (there’s no homing pigeon option… yet).
• If you want to learn a whole bunch of irrelevant HPC jargon, this is the blog post for you.
• You can now take the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey, launched by Google and DORA.
• Eliminate hotspots in Cloud Bigtable, but remember just as “no good plan survives first contact with the enemy,” no data structure plan survives general availability.
• The super useful Network Analyzer detects service and network issues. Always on and always free to use — very nice!
• ️ Like Ryan, you might want more out of Confidential Computing, which is now generally available. 
• The team considers a field trip to Madrid as Google opens a new region there.
• Granular instance sizing for Cloud Spanner could prove very useful for startups and early projects on a budget, with production workloads running for as low as $40/month.

Azure: Getting a Little Meta

• In a somewhat puzzling move, Meta selects Azure as its strategic cloud provider for AI and PyTorch purposes. Maybe they don’t want to support their own data science teams?
• Azure calls 5G a “paradigm” instead of an “upgrade”. But is it really even required?
• Now you’ve got more places to hide your money as Switzerland adds two extra regions to its existing one.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin (5) continues resting on his laurels, with Jonathan (2) and Ryan (1) tailing behind and Peter (1) still in the dungeon.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon Lightsail containers now supports deploying images from Amazon ECR private repositories      
• AWS Launch Wizard now supports SQL Server deployments using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
• Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached now supports encryption of data in transit
• AWS IAM now supports WebAuthn and Safari browser for multi-factor authentication with security keys        

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

Sustainability Summit – June 28th

• 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