On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets judicial on the Microsoft-Unity partnership. Plus: Amazon acquires iRobot, BigQuery boasts Zero-ETL for Bigtable data, and Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is in public preview. 

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

• iRobot signs an agreement with Amazon for its acquisition. To what end remains known to Amazon and Amazon alone.
• Google offers a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery.
• Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now in public preview.

Top Quotes  

• “Almost all of Amazon’s big acquisitions have always been about something indirect. The Whole Foods acquisition was really about the logistics supply chain behind the scenes of moving that around — they kept the brand … and they have the same footprint for stores … but now they have a lot more infrastructure for AmazonFresh. And I suspect for iRobot it’s the same thing.”
• “This is super handy for huge datasets where you want to track trends over a long time. It’s always really difficult and you always end up compromising somewhere — by not loading or querying your full dataset, because you can’t get it from A to B, or trying to run the query against two separate data sets and combining the results. So this is a nice thing to have for those users who have data across these multiple places.”

AWS: We, Robots

• Those who hate working in Amazon warehouses might not have to have anything to complain about anymore, as Amazon agrees to acquire iRobot.
• If you need to get up to speed with Graviton, you’ve now got Graviton Fast Start, which helps move workloads over to AWS.
• ️ VMware’s interesting cloud workload protection feels like a continued diversification away from virtualization as your main revenue stream.
• ☁️ CloudWatch Evidently, Amazon’s second product to help with feature flagging, adds support for creating target customer segments for feature launches and experiments. Neat!
• In what seems like a cost-saving announcement, Lambda gets tiered pricing (but most enterprise customers already have this pricing experience).

GCP: It’s A Big World Out There

• ❓ You can now benefit from a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery.
• ‍An on-premises Windows workload nice-to-have offers support with Certificate Authority Service.
• ☁️ Second generation Cloud Functions is now generally available. So are they moving to Knative or away from it?
• Great news if you’re in the Asia Pacific region outside of Singapore and Australia, with more Google Cloud regions on the way.

Azure: Unity is Strength

• Microsoft and Unity buddy up for the sake of digital creators, 3D artists and game developers across the world. Whether it’s all-in on Azure or just a simple partnership is a topic of hot debate.
• ️ VMware VMs get a modernization boost with Site Recovery, now generally available. See how many times it mentions “experience” in one announcement. 
• If you were skeptical about that one, Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now in public preview. They’ll charge you when you use it (because they know you’re always going to use it).
• VM insights with Azure Monitor agent are also in public preview. Hopefully they do this a little better than Amazon did.
• 3️⃣ As all things come in threes, the third public preview is Azure Dedicated Host support for Ultra SSD. Next in line is Ultra premium, Ultra Premium Ultra, and Ultron discs, before we move to crystal storage or something biological.
• ✨ Either it’s Gartner Magic Quadrant update season or Azure thinks they have something to brag about, because Microsoft is apparently a leader in Gartner’s 2022 edition.

Oracle: Peter’s Back! Bring Out the Oracle Story

• OCI Code Editor makes developing with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure a whole lot easier. Is this top of the list for all the cloud features you could develop and release? You decide.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan edges a touch closer to Justin this week, making the scores: Justin (6), Ryan (4), Jonathan (3), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Public preview: Azure Dedicated Host restart 
• AWS Data Exchange increases the asset size limit to 100GB 
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports PostgreSQL 11 and In-Place upgrade from PostgreSQL 10
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports sharing of pipeline entities across accounts  
• Amazon S3 adds a new policy condition key to require or restrict server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C)  
• AWS Direct Connect expands AWS Transit Gateway support at more connection speeds  
• Introducing Google Cloud and Google Workspace support for multiple Identity providers with Single Sign-On 

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-December 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBD
• Microsoft events – TBD Check for status