On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team whizzes through the news in record time. Plus: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions, and there’s another win for NetApp with Azure VMware Solution.

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 Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports up to 300 staging and target accounts, which seems like a small number for some enterprises with thousands.
• With the power of Anthos, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions — continuing the trend of service monetization regardless of host location.
• Another win for NetApp, the home of choice for Azure VMware solutions optimization. 

Top Quotes  

• “If you’re really doing auto scaling [and] traditional cloud native, you don’t use the service because you’ve already built it into your app. So this is for legacy IT operations like SAP, Oracle, and others. Three hundred or 3,000 covers small and medium business, but large enterprise has way more than that.”
• “When Anthos first was announced, and Outpost for AWS, we talked about how likely it was that more and more cloud-native services were going to be made available anywhere, on any cloud, in any data center. It’s definitely a pattern of monetizing the services regardless of where they’re hosted.”

AWS: Bouncing Back From Disaster

• ️ Amazon EMR Serverless is now generally available, a cool feature running big data applications (and Outpost too). But it’s interesting that it’s been branded “serverless” when it’s clearly a managed service.
• ⛑️ Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports 300 staging and target accounts, but we can’t help wondering how this helps the largest enterprises.
• Step Functions launches a workflow-based interactive application workshop, and it looks like a golden age for developer experience is close at hand.
• Amazon Route 53 announces IP-based routing for DNS queries, which is going to make things complicated. So preoccupied with whether or not they could integrate, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

GCP: Complexity on Top of Complexity

• Google Chronicle offers context-aware detections, alert prioritization and risk scoring for  its Security Operations. But wouldn’t you want to protect everybody from everything?
• ✅ A boon for customer choice and flexibility: Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and database solutions. On prem, running Kubernetes and Anthos? Justin loves this.
• Yeehaw! Time to grab that 10-gallon hat and run your server, because the new Google Cloud region in Dallas, Texas, is now open.

Azure: It’s All About the Datastores

• ️ Azure VMs get a performance boost for data intensive workloads. You never can get enough storage optimization.
• Azure introduces comprehensive new skilling guides. Microsoft has been running training programs for more than three decades, so they’ve got their pattern down by now.
• NetApp does it again as the datastore of choice for Azure VMware Solution, now available in preview.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin (5) tells Jonathan (2) to try his best to win 0 points, safe from Ryan (1) and Peter (1) in the dungeon.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts are now available on AWS Outposts
• Amazon Kendra releases GitHub SaaS & On-Prem Connector
• AWS Security Hub now receives AWS Config managed and custom rule evaluation results 
• Amazon CloudFront now supports TLS 1.3 session resumption for viewer connections 
• AWS IoT Device Management announces an 80% price reduction for Secure Tunneling 

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

Sustainability Summit – June 28th

• 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