On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses shorting Jim Chanos amid the great cloud giant vs. colo standoff. Plus: Google prepares for a post-quantum world, Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available, and master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union.

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

• Future forward Google prepares for a post-quantum world, while most corporations won’t catch up for a long time.
• Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available (so the hidden Mac Mini under that developer’s desk can finally be replaced).
• Master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union.

Top Quotes  

“Quantum computing has been taken very seriously from a security perspective. Conservative estimates [are] 10 to 20 years before we have quantum computers large enough and reliable enough to run short algorithms to factor these large primes. But we’re starting … It’s going to take a long time for businesses to actually catch on and realize and modernize and adopt this before the bad things start to happen. If they ever do.”

“The big issue is from a federal government perspective: In a world where quantum computing can actually go through those primes fast enough and decrypt all this data … it’s a huge national security risk [and] a huge problem for the world. … Does it follow into the corporate world as quickly? No. Will it become a big issue when it happens? Hell yeah. There’ll be a Y2K-level disaster that we’ll have to be dealing with.”

General News: Walmart Muscles In

• ️ Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff? Big leagues short-seller and Enron prophesier Jim Chanos seems to think so… or maybe that’s all part of his plan.
• Walmart saw that and said, Well, we’re doing it too: Their CTO claims they’re now the largest hybrid cloud in existence. Having 10,000 massive buildings at their disposal must be convenient.

AWS: New York, New York

• ️ EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available. Thanks to Apple’s licensing agreement, they have to be turned on for 24 hours minimum.
• ️ Identity and Access Management gets IAM Roles Anywhere for workloads outside of AWS, removing a huge and clunky obstacle to adoption. Awesome.
• EC2 Auto Scaling customers can monitor their predictive scaling policy with Amazon CloudWatch, but we’re left wondering how to close the loop on having to monitor the monitoring service to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.
• If you’re a .NET developer leveraging AWS for all your compute needs, you’re in luck — there’s a streamlined deployment experience for .NET applications in .NET CLI and Visual Studio. Huge sales ahoy.
• 3️⃣ In the first of three New York summit announcements, three new serverless analytics offerings are generally available.
• In preview at re:Invent, the Cloud WAN managed service is now generally available. But beware of inter-region data transfer charges, which could get very expensive.
• First you partner, then you kill them: DevOps Guru offers recommendations and log anomaly detection to quickly detect and resolve issues.

GCP: The Future Is Scary

• ️‍♀️ Google is preparing for a post-quantum world, as mathematicians and cryptographers from all over the world race to develop algorithms before disaster strikes.

Azure: Why, Microsoft, Why!?

• The legacy agent callback config from log analytics workspaces rejoices at the public preview of Monitor Agent’s new migration tools, and we’re super happy for you. For everyone else, this is crazy — why not just build the migration tool into the actual agent itself?
• ️ 30’s a strange limit for supported window server containers, but there we go. Obviously the support team is happy — just decrease the number of containers until it works.

Oracle: The Sometime-Master of Marketing Returns

• A story to die for: Oracle introduces its new sovereign cloud regions for the European Union. Spare a thought for poor Accenture, who have to build products around this.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin (6) jumps ahead again with the rest of the team trailing behind — Jonathan (3), Ryan (2), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS re:Post introduces profile pictures and inline images 
• Amazon WorkMail now supports invoking Lambda to fetch availability (free/busy)  
• AWS Security Hub launches 36 new security best practice controls
• Amazon QuickSight launches APIs for account create
• Amazon Athena enhances console and API support for parameterized queries
• Amazon GuardDuty introduces new machine learning capabilities to more accurately detect potentially malicious access to data stored in S3 buckets     
• Multicloud reporting and analytics using Google Cloud SQL and Power BI  
• General availability: Azure Database for PostgreSQL—Hyperscale (Citus) supports PostgreSQL minor versions
• General availability: Azure Active Directory authentication for Application Insights
• General availability: Azure Application Insights standard test for synthetic monitoring
• IN, NOT_IN and NOT EQUAL query operators for Google Firestore in Datastore Mode

Things Coming Up:

• AWS re:Inforce – July 26th-27th → Now Moved to Boston
• SCALE 19X – July 28th-31st 

• Cloud Native Builder Day 
• Devops Day LA
• Postgres @ SCALE

• 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 16th-20th 
• Kubecon US – October 24th-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC
• Microsoft events – TBD Check for status

After Show:

• Apple spent eight years trying to build a self-driving car. The team chatted about this and self-driving cars in general after the show.