On The Cloud Pod this week, Matthew Kohn joins the team as a substitute for Jonathan and Peter, who have gone AWOL. Also, Google demonstrates again why its network is superior to the other cloud providers.        

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.

• JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. 

This week’s highlights

• AWS now allows crash-consistent AMIs without requiring a reboot. No more manual processes needed. 
• Google is building a subsea cable named Firmina. The cable, to be comprised of 12 fiber pairs, will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America.
• Oracle announces improvements to its block volumes. Its Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume comes with up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/s throughput per volume and is generally available across all OCI commercial regions and on all interfaces. 

General News: Not Dead Yet

• Hashicorp Vagrant 3.0 will maintain its Ruby-based features while being ported to Go. We thought this was on a path to death but apparently not.   

Amazon Web Services: Proceed With Caution

• AWS announces a new region in Tel Aviv, Israel. AWS clearly realized it was behind the other cloud providers on building new regions. 
• Amazon launches AWS Proton in general availability. There are some super cool improvements that have been done to this.
• ✔️ Amazon EC2 now allows you to create crash-consistent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This is one of our EC2 wish list items — it’s great to tick it off the list.
• AWS announces per second billing for EC2 Windows Server and SQL Server Instances. It’s nice to only be billed for what you actually use.  
• AWS removes NAT Gateway’s dependence on Internet Gateway for private communications. This has been a big annoyance for a while so nice to see it sorted!

Google Cloud Platform: Just Figure It Out

• ‍♀️ Google is announcing the general availability of Ubuntu Pro images on Google Cloud. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to embrace open source by purchasing an enterprise product.
• PLAID guest posts on the GCP blog talking about using Anthos Clusters on AWS. This is a really interesting blog post.  
• ☁️ Google is announcing a new model for multi-project cloud monitoring. We don’t understand this one.  
• Google announces Firmina, an open subsea cable it’s building from the East Coast to Argentina. This is why its network is superior to others.      

Azure: Will Make Your Head Explode

• ️ Azure is launching its newest sustainable datacenter region in Arizona. But why is it in Arizona?

Oracle: Give Us Your Soul   

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a new Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume. Of course it came up with this — Oracle needs it to support its own product. 
• Oracle announces Java Management Service (JMS) is now generally available. This just seems like a great way for Oracle to audit you and bill you more.   

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ In his absence, Peter takes this week’s point but the team won’t tell him why just to confuse him, leaving scores at Justin (10), Ryan (5), Jonathan (7), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Azure IoT Edge integration with Azure Monitor is now in public preview 
• AWS App Mesh introduces enhanced ingress traffic management capabilities
• Amazon EC2 adds new AMI property to flag outdated AMIs
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports callback capability
• Support for SQL Server in data flows using Azure Data Factory & Azure Synapse
• AWS Backup now supports crash-consistent backups of Amazon EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance
• Azure Monitor Agent and Data Collection Rules now generally available
• Amazon Translate is Now Integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Events and Amazon EventBridge
• Introducing AWS Elemental Link UHD: a device to send live UHD video to AWS
• AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority now supports more flexibility for CAs shared across accounts
• AWS Resource Access Manager enables granular access control with additional managed permissions

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• Amazon re:Inforce — August 24–25 — Houston, TX
• Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)