On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets skeptical on Prime Day numbers. Plus: AWS re:Inforce brings GuardDuty, Detective and Identity Center updates and announcements; Google Cloud says hola to Mexico with a new Latin American region; and Azure introduces its new cost API for EC and MCA customers.

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 re:Inforce brings us Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective and IAM Identity Center releases, updates and name-changes for additional protection and headache.
• Google Cloud adds a third Latin American data region to its collection — this time, in Mexico.
• EA and MCA customers now benefit from Azure’s new Cost Details API for better HR and finance management.

Top Quotes  

• “This must always have been their plan. Amazon did not build that block Inspection Service just so that Orca could serve their own customers. They must have had an eye on the huge customer base of people using EBS Volumes to do this exact same thing. So it’s no surprise [as they’ve] had almost two years of sole ownership of the service to deliver this to customers. I’m not surprised at all to see an enhancement like this. And it’s awesome. Really.”
• “Microsoft is in a lucky position, because the Windows ecosystem has been very services heavy for a long time. … They’ve got this unique position where they can deprecate … they can pivot to new APIs more quickly than AWS, who are stuck with so many customers [and it’s] very painful for them to deprecate … It’s lucky that [Microsoft] don’t have customers that would push back against this, because they’re used to constant change.”

AWS: re:Inforcing Prime Numbers

• #️⃣ There may well be some spin in Jeff Barr’s latest brag on behalf of Amazon for its Prime Day 2022. Impressive numbers nonetheless!
• New malware detection for EBS Volumes with GuardDuty is the first of three announcements hot out of AWS re:Inforce — very similar to Orca Security malware snapshot and restore functions.
• ️ The second offering is Amazon Detective’s support for Kubernetes Workloads on EKS, for improved security investigations. There’s nothing not to like here, and it shows exactly why we use managed services.
• Finally, the terribly named AWS IAM Identity Center — which you may remember was previously called AWS SSO — promises to scale your workforce access management. They could’ve called it “AWS Centaur,” but instead opted for two words that mean absolutely nothing.

GCP: Making US Automakers Happy One Latin American Region at a Time

• Google Cloud says hola to Mexico, as it adds a third Latin American data region following Santiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. If there are further updates within the next three to four years, Ryan has kindly volunteered to be The Cloud Pod’s reporter on the ground.
• 0️⃣ Not “no code,” just… “low code:” Next-gen Dataflow covering Prime, Go and ML is here. See if you can get as excited as your hosts.
• Pretty neat with nice integrations across it, the generally available BigLake allows you to unify data lakes and warehouses.

Azure: The Buzzword Is Deprecate

• HR and finance rejoice: Both Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) customers benefit from the Microsoft Cost Details API, now generally available.
• ⬆️ If you’re doing patch management — which you will be if you’re running Windows on Azure — you’ve got the public preview of Update Management Center to get hyped about. More importantly, it’s a very nice and easy graphic dashboard to say that you’re in patch compliance. 
• And if you’re unhappy with MSIs, you’ll love the general availability of VM Applications, designed to manage and deploy applications to VMs and VMSS. Another package manager? Great! Just what we need.

Oracle: Taking a Walk on the Wild Side

• Oracle decides that if you can’t beat them, you should join them, as it announces its database service for Azure. Multicloud for managed services? This level of integration at the UX level is kind of nuts. If you make a website that looks like somebody else’s website, it’s usually called a scam, right?

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin would’ve awarded the point to Ryan if points were being awarded, but they’re not. As such, the scores remain at: Justin (6), Jonathan (3), Ryan (3), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports ChaosMesh and Litmus experiments 
• AWS Backup adds support for Amazon RDS Multi-AZ clusters 
• AWS WAF adds sensitivity levels for SQL injection rule statements 
• Amazon Macie introduces new capability to securely review and validate sensitive data found in an Amazon S3 object 
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports fast database cloning 
• Now programmatically manage primary contact information on AWS accounts  
• Enable post-quantum key exchange in QUIC with the s2n-quic library

Things Coming Up:

• 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:

• Google fires the engineer who claimed its AI was sentient. Obviously revealing company secrets is a big no-no, but it does raise interesting questions about how we’ll test sentience in the future.