On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Jonathan’s penance for his failures. Plus: Microsoft makes moves on non-competes, NDAs, salary disclosures, and a civil rights audit; AWS modernizes mainframe applications for cloud deployment; and AWS CEO Adam Selipsky chooses to be intentionally paranoid.

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

• The Balmer era is officially dead: Microsoft curbs non-competes, drops NDAs from worker settlements, disclose salary ranges, and even launches a civil rights audit. 
• AWS launches their new modernization service for mainframe applications, now deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments.
• AWS CEO Adam Selipsky “choose[s] to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company through turbulence. 

Top Quotes  

• “We’ve talked about how garbage those [noncompetes] are, the problems they’ve had with them, executives leaving, Amazon going to Microsoft, then getting sued and all the mess of that. So I’m super glad they’re finally starting to see a tide swell change in technology where that’s no longer a thing.”
• “I always felt like Amazon was going to just create a mainframe as a service offering — buy a bunch of IBM mainframes that they sell out to you — because that’s been a model of mainframe for a long time: CPU slicing, rentals and that kind of thing. But it seems like now they’re going to go down this other path where the answer is [that] you convert to a more modern architecture, which is interesting.”

General News: It’s a New Era

•   The times they are a-changin’, as Microsoft revises its position on non-competes, NDAs, and salary range disclosure, while launching a civil rights audit. Take that, Amazon!
• Target CIO Mike McNamara jumps away from AWS with a scaled move toward multicloud architecture. Target allegedly has 4,000 engineers, which seems like a lot.
• Archera vents via Venturebeat about the unmanageability of cloud costs, calling for standardized billing. While it might be helpful and even valuable, this seems a road too far traveled.  

AWS: Modernized Mainframes and Intentional Paranoia

• ️ You can now take advantage of AWS’ new modernization service for mainframe applications, deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments.
• ♻️ There are some nice enhancements for MGN, including DR configuration and Linux to Rocky Linux and SUSE Linux Subscription conversions.
• AWS CEO Adam Selipsky admits, “I choose to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company into a turbulent world.
• ☎️ A nice feature so long as you don’t use it for bad things, Amazon Connect now offers high volume outbound campaign capabilities. This clearly exists because customers only answer around 10% of the automated calls they receive. Why? Because it’s all spam.
• With AWS Managed Microsoft AD, you can finally you can finally disable ciphers, amongst other things. Amazon, what took you so long?
• Justin doesn’t actually hate the new AWS Bills page experience. Not exactly high praise, but in a world where all billing pages are terrible, it’s surely something.

GCP: Big and Powerful

• Bad scheduling in the press corps led to the very late release of this announcement about 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud. Pi Day was March 14.
• Google reimagines AutoML and announces Vertex AI Tabular Workflows.
• For those in ML teams who don’t really know what they’re doing and want to just take advantage of marketplaces of prebuilt ML AI code, they now can thanks to Google and NVIDIA.
• To help secure sensitive data, Google announces two new BigQuery capabilities: Column level encryption functions are general available, and there’s a preview of Dynamic masking.
• ☹️ If you know the Obama “not bad” meme, you’ll know the reaction Justin had to gcpdiag, the new open source troubleshooting tool.
• Like all regional announcements, the new cloud region in Milan provides Ryan with the perfect opportunity to add it to his travel list.

Azure: Facial Recognition Is Coming for Us All

• ️ Azure SDK for Go is now generally available. Why not?
• There’s now a 16MB limit per document in API for MongoDB, which is in public preview. (That’s an 8x increase for those who want math.)
• ️ And if you want to play with that new feature, you can do it locally via the Linux emulator with Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB, now in public preview.  
• Learn what’s new in Azure Firewall, and there’s a lot: Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) signatures, TLS inspection (TLSi) Certification Auto-Generation, and web categories lookup are all now generally available. Additionally, Structured Firewall Logs and IDPS Private IP ranges are both now in preview.
• Azure Cognitive Services promises to be responsible with its AI investments and facial recognition safeguards. Only time will tell…
• Hot on the trails of AWS and Google, Azure hops on the firewall manager bandwagon with Azure Firewall Manager promising simplified, centralized network security management.

Oracle: Breaking News: Oracle has Finally Fixed its RSS Feed

• Someone working at Oracle must listen to The Cloud Pod, because Justin is now receiving Oracle news! Oracle announces that more startups are choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) over other cloud platforms, citing customers that no one has ever heard of like Aleph Alpha and Aindra Systems. 
• ️ While on an Oracle earnings call after the AWS outage, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison took the opportunity to quote a (definitely real) anonymous customer who told him “Oracle never ever goes down” — never mind the five incidents that have happened since December 8th. 
• Oracle releases OCI DevOps Service, an end-to-end CI/CD platform where developers can commit their own source code to a repository, build and test software artifacts, and run deployments to OCI platforms.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ New ideas abound as Peter’s disappearance becomes yesterday’s news. Now you can vote for the winner each week via The Cloud Pod Slack Channel. Until those votes come in, the scores stand at Justin (5), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2), Peter (1, although we’re not sure how).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Reduce read I/O cost of your Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database with range partitioning
• Introducing managed zone permissions for Cloud DNS
• Announcing private network solutions on Google Distributed Cloud Edge         
• New – Amazon EC2 R6id Instances with NVMe Local Instance Storage of up to 7.6 TB 
• Azure API Management reusable policy fragments
• Public preview: Azure Cosmos DB serverless container storage limit increase to 1TB

Things Coming Up:

• 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