2019: We hardly knew thee – Episode 53

Your co-hosts recap 2019 and make predictions for the year ahead on the first episode of 2020. We’re skipping the Lightning Round this week to focus on a collaborative Q&A segment pulled from our Slack channel.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

• 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.
• Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. 

This week’s highlights

1. Our top 3 favorite headlines of the year.
2. Google released a white paper to help you comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA.)
3. We read your questions from our TCP Slack channel for our first Q&A!

2019 Cloud Computing Predictions and Headlines Recap

Last year (episode 4), we shared our predictions for what might happen in 2019.

Peter took the lead, predicting container-based models would continue to see more adoption over serverless. Justin — who predicted mergers in cloud providers would create a new top contender, and Jonathan, who predicted an acquisition of Slack — haven’t been vindicated. (Yet!)

Our 3 favorite headlines of the year.

Justin:

• Google Anthos is probably the best thought-out strategy for being multi-cloud with Kubernetes (if currently pricey.)
• Azure Tardigrade uses machine learning to address hardware failures before they impact uptime.
• Cloudwatch Container Insights shows off the power of Cloudwatch.

Peter:

• Transit Gateway became a viable method of creating a global network.
• DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility) sets the direction for new business models for SaaS companies.
• EKS SLA reaches a 3 nines standard of reliability.

Jonathan:

• Google’s Explainable AI provides a way we can understand and begin to implement machine learning in important areas like healthcare.
• Wavelength brings super-low latencies to mobile gaming, and hopefully more.
• Microsoft supports GitHub developers with popular tools.

Honorable Mention:

Microsoft pivots to Chromium. Flash, Silverlight, we’ll miss you.

2020 Cloud Technology Predictions

We also made a few bold predictions for the year ahead.

• Justin: Amazon and Microsoft will work hard to compete with GKE.
• Peter: Kubernetes workloads will double in the next year.
• Jonathan: Amazon will open data centers across growing African economies, RISC-V based RISC instances will release (and Slack will be acquired this year for sure.)

Pivotal Information

VMWare has acquired Pivotal, establishing a foothold in Kubernetes with the latest in a string of acquisitions. Expect to hear more at VMworld August 30-September 3, 2020.

EKS Security

Amazon EKS now offers security groups to public endpoints. Another basic feature we should have had already, but certainly a welcome one.

Weather, Whales and a White Paper

The Cloud Foundation Toolkit was released to provide templates that will help you get started on Google Cloud. Not only is this available for Google’s Cloud Deployment Manager, but Terraform modules are also available on Github.

If you’re making over $25 million in revenue and interact with California law, you’ll want to read Google’s white paper on complying with the California Consumer Privacy Act. And if not, you still may be interested in the 5 petabytes of NOAA data available on Google Cloud. You can see  an example of the data with a humpback whale tracker.

Answering Your Burning Questions —  Our First Slack Q&A

A big thanks to Ian McKay, Rob Martin, Derek Helmick and Wayne Taylor who submitted questions on our Slack channel for our first podcast Q&A segment. 

The Q&A starts at 39:00. 

Did you like the Q&A? Let us know on Slack —  we may make it a regular feature!

This week, you asked us about what you should expect to see in 2020. We talked about:

• Where we’ve seen and where we might see #NoCode. 
• The troubles Oracle will be seeing.
• If we still expect flexible instances.
• The troubles and opportunities of automatic cost optimization.
• Potential spin-offs.
• Who’ll break out their numbers.
• A lot about the future of serverless

We’re back to our regular news roundup format next week, so feel free to leave us questions on anything cloud and we’ll read them on our next recording.