On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses facial recognition avoidance tactics. Plus: Waving farewell to CentOS 7 with the rise of Rocky Linux, Amazon traverses the new Cloudscape, and the U.K. heatwave spells disaster for Oracle and Google data centers.

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

• As CentOS is put out to pasture, say hello to Rocky Linux, named in honor of CentOS late co-founder Rocky McGaugh.
• Cloudscape Design System is the latest AWS open source wonder for web application building.
• The great British heatwave of 2022 burns Oracle and Google data centers to a crisp.

Top Quotes  

• “It answers the question of who we shout at if there’s a bug at zero day and the community doesn’t get around to fixing it. Now we can shout at Google.”
• “It’s probably a sign of further issues to come unless they do some productive work. Because it’s one thing to … build a data center in Utah [where] it gets up to 45 degrees C and the sun’s heating the air under some land. And that’s a completely different situation than heating up Europe, which is … much less expected to have those kinds of temperatures so far north. … So it’s going to be time to invest in HVAC business.”

General News: The Best Data Lake Is the One With Your Boat on It

• ️ VentureBeat offers up its top 10 data lake solution vendors this year. If you also don’t know what a data lake is, fear not (it tells you).

AWS: Open Source Because They Can’t Sell It?

• AWS suits up for battle against Microsoft and Google with its server chip. Fire up the Graviton!
• Cost-saving automated and easily modifiable EBS Elastic Volumes are here. (Just watch out for a pesky potential price increase.)
• The very cool VPC Flow Logs for Transit Gateway will make things much more efficient.
• AWS announces neat new AppConfig Extensions. Step one: Enable feature. Step two: Figure it out yourself. Step three: Profit, profit, profit.
• ☁️ AWS goes open source with Cloudscape Design System for building web applications.
• ️ More epic work from Amazon as EC2 R6a Instances join the M6a and C6a club, now rolled out across all three primary node types. You’re welcome!

GCP: The Rise of Rocky

• Stunned reactions all around here at The Cloud Pod: Model co-hosting enables resource sharing among multiple model deployments on Vertex AI. A great use case, with the next step being making it entirely serverless.
• For those of you who live in the Linux world like your hosts, you’ll be waving goodbye to CentOS 7, as Rocky Linux (named in honor of one of the late CentOS co-founders) makes its debut.
• Welcome the Arm-based Tau T2A to the VM family. Will Google start selling the Graviton Three to the other cloud providers making it a $12 billion business?
• Batch is ostensibly a new managed service for scheduling batch jobs at any scale, but let us know if you see what’s managed about this. You’ll be managing everything else, so there’s no value add. Good luck if you do use it!

Azure: Sovereignty Is the Buzzword

• If you were already confused about Premium and Ultra Premium storage, we have a new flavor to add to your nightmares: Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage, which is now in preview.
• Azure’s facial recognition approach has changed, and the engineers among you may be feeling as conflicted as Ryan about it. On the other hand, demand facial sovereignty! Tell Azure (and AWS) that you refuse to be identified — an interesting use case and neat business model.
• ⚖️ Gateway Load Balancer is now generally available in all regions. A feature we’re all glad exists that we don’t need to take advantage of.
• Microsoft and Netflix buddy up, and all we’re wondering is if Microsoft is trying to poach some of that sweet, sweet cloud revenue Netflix pays AWS.
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is its answer to Oracle. Nothing new here, just a rebrand — some lipstick on a pig.
• What’s new for Azure Stack HCI at Microsoft Inspire 2022? Find out all the latest therein.
• ₿ If you’re into Bitcoin, Azure’s confidential ledger is now generally available, and is apparently a better solution to banks’ compliance and technology requirements than what they’ve been using for so long already. Why care now about the distributed immutability of a ledger? (Unless it’s not a better solution.)
• For those of you who aren’t cutting costs and need a new way to burn your money faster, Azure SQL Managed Instance hosts premium-series hardware which is now generally available. 

Oracle: The Data Centers Are Burning

• Both Oracle and Google experienced data center knockouts in London due to the U.K. heatwave. We want to know the hows and whys: Did external dependency fail? Power delivery to the data centers? Or was it the data center itself and the HVAC system inside?

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan snags the point this week, creeping up to equalize with Jonathan and making the scores Justin (5), Jonathan (3), Ryan (3), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon Timestream announces improved cost-effectiveness with updates to metadata metering
• AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript is now generally available
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Network Firewall strict rule order with alert and drop configurations   
• OCI Queue limited availability program 
• Australian Government certifies Oracle Cloud Infrastructure under the Hosting Certification Framework  
• Moving data from the mainframe to the Google cloud made easy

Things Coming Up:

• 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 – TBD
• Microsoft events – TBD Check for status

After Show:

• Slack is making some free plan changes (Business+ or custom enterprise plans aren’t affected). Live from Sept. 1, 2022, there’ll be a small price increase, and free users get 90 days of messages and uploads instead of the 10,000 message and 5GB limit of yore.