On The Cloud Pod this week, the team chats cloud region wars to establish the true victor. Plus: AWS Storage Day offers a blockhead badge, all the fun of the Microsoft Dev Box, and Google sends people back to sleep with its Cloud Monitoring snooze alert policy.

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 Storage Day 2022 marks the fourth annual event streamed live on Twitch, with its File Cache service announcement and five new available learning badges.
• Google now offers alert policy snoozing in Cloud Monitoring for maintenance or non-business hours.
• Microsoft previews its Dev Box, a managed service enabling developers to create cloud workstations.

Top Quotes  

• “I found it completely shocking that this didn’t exist in AWS — that you only had enable/disable — when first moving over there. So this is a fantastic feature for Google Monitoring. I love it.”
• “This seems like one of those things I’d like, but half the fun of starting a new project is installing a new version of Python or something that completely hoses my local laptop. And I spend the next three or four days frantically trying to undo what I’ve done that breaks six other things.”

AWS: It’s Storage Day!

• ️ AWS livestreamed its fourth annual Storage Day on Twitch, and Ryan is rather excited about getting his hands on that blockhead badge for core storage competency. Plus, the new File Cache service promises to accelerate and simplify hybrid cloud workloads.
• Continue to be blown away by the theory of HTTP/3 (and if you’re like Ryan, dread the day you have to troubleshoot it), as Amazon CloudFront now supports it.
• Now available in US regions (with a likely quick extension with increased adoption and understanding of the service): AWS Private 5G.
• Amazon and Splunk co-announce the release of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project with a lot of partners… but (interestingly) no Elastic.
• If you’ve been holding off on that move from Dockershim to the new launcher, now’s the time to do it before it’s too late: Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.23.
• Apparently Amazon Cognito enables native support for AWS WAF, but we’re not entirely sure what they’re enabling here — it feels like something they should have already been doing.

GCP: Hitting the Snooze Button

• ❓ Query Library offers new tools for increasing developer productivity. You should eventually be able to actually save your queries into a custom Query Library, but we’re still waiting on this.
• A snooze, not a pause: Google Cloud Monitoring can now send alerts to sleep, which is perfect for maintenance and non-business hours.  
• ☁️ Google Cloud Deploy gets several awesome new features this week, including faster onboarding with Skaffold, delivery pipeline management and expanded enterprise features.

Azure: Microsoft Dev Box Treats

• Microsoft announced its new cloud region in 2019. Two and a half years later, Qatar is finally here. 
• ‍ Microsoft previews its Dev Box, a managed service that enables developers to create cloud workstations and focus on writing their code instead of building environments to run it.

TCP Lightning Round

• ⚡ The lightning lightning round this week (sans Peter) keeps the scores at: Justin (6), Ryan (4), Jonathan (3), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Optimize resources across your organization using AWS Compute Optimizer from a designated account
• The Amazon Chime SDK announces elastic channels
• Amazon EBS adds the ability to take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance 

Things Coming Up:

• 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:

Post-pandemic remote working, Apple’s enforcing three days a week in the office with a new deadline in place.