171: AWS Snowcones in Space

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally returns with some beer-based bets about Amazon extending its TLS deadline. Plus: Terraform drift detection for managing infrastructure, chilling tales of Amazon’s CodeWhisperer ML advances, and Anthos on-premise options finally arrive for your platform of choice. Plus the cloud talks about AWS SNOWCONES in SPACE!!!!!!

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

• Terraform Cloud finally adds drift detection to help manage infrastructure, now generally available after its 2020 preview.
• Amazon’s crazy “ML-powered coding companion,” CodeWhisperer, is here for our jobs.
• Google expands its Distributed Cloud platform with Anthos on-premises options. 

Top Quotes  

• “I’m surprised it’s taken so long. Because I mean, the reality is if you’re in a plan, and the plan doesn’t require any changes, then there’s been no drift. So what was the obstacle in delivering this as a feature sooner?”
• “Not only they’re training their own machine learning models, but they’re also generating code. Not concerned at all.”

General News: Drifting in the Right Direction

• While everyone’s been a little afraid to pull the trigger, HashiCorp announced drift detection in Terraform cloud, which is in a public beta. Pretty exciting!
• ️ HashiCorp also announced the launch and free public beta of HCP Boundary, but what’s their long-term vision?

AWS: Whispering Sweet Somethings to the Machine

• SageMaker Ground Truth now supports synthetic data generation, promising to reduce time and training costs for model operations. Getting enough data to actually train a model could be hard… (fake it til you make it?)
• Your new “ML-powered coding companion” CodeWhisperer now writes code for you. We’ve joked about it before, but Alexa really is one step away from upskilling to coding.
• Peter’s betting two beers at his local pub on Amazon extending the deadline on this one: TLS 1.2 is to become the minimum TLS protocol level for all AWS API endpoints. There’s currently just under a year to get yourself sorted. Good luck!
• Apparently, even space has (AWS) Snowcones: Amazon sends one to the International Space Station
• As EKS improves control plane scaling and update speed by up to 4x, get ready for a lot of step function workload.
• Imagine waiting 10 years for private IP VPNs… well, we did, and here they are, introduced by AWS Site-to-Site VPN.

GCP: Anthos Attracts

• Google expands Distributed Cloud platform with Anthos on-premises options running on your virtual platform of choice. Very neat. 
• Apparently the Google Cloud product manager listens to the show, because we now have billing info at our fingertips in the latest Cloud Console mobile app to show it’s not costing you $100 million a day.
• ️ Neat new Cloud Armor edge security policies and proxy load balancer support is now generally available.
• ️ And if that wasn’t exciting enough, Cloud Armor also announced even more features including rate limiting, adaptive protection, and bot defense.
• ️ Public sector agencies are getting new sustainability offerings to improve climate resilience… so, they have a new insurance company as a customer, right?

Azure: Dispatches From the Space Race

• ️ Azure’s Orbital Ground Station as Service (GSaaS) aims to reduce costs for satellite operators while extending their mission life.

Oracle: The Story of All Stories

• Oracle’s got your back this week, with a dedicated region allowing you to run your stack wherever you like (although it’s a stretch to call it a region).

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ After all the desperate talk of crowdsourcing points last week, Peter finally returns to host the lightning round. Jonathan manages to snag the point this week, making the scores Justin (5), Jonathan (3), Ryan (1), and Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Support announces an improved create case experience 
• Public preview: Create an additional 5000 Azure Storage accounts within your subscription 
• Amazon has a plan to make Alexa mimic anyone’s voice 
• AWS Fargate now fully supports multiline logging powered by AWS for Fluent Bit

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