Ep 71: Now Open AWS WFH Region

We crown the winner of the AWS Summit Draft Picks on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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

While it wasn’t a particularly accurate set of predictions this year (with no honorable mentions scoring and even the tiebreaker non-functional), Justin managed to squeak out a win by correctly predicting a price cut in EC2, S3, or Networking and the Covid Crazy Growth Numbers. Jonathan scored the only other point with his prediction of improved DLP Tools for S3.
Amazon Macie simplified its pricing plan and dramatically reduced costs. Is the 80% price cut the new way of announcing a product is generally available?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud cut prices across all regions for Standard Reserved Instances and EC2 Instance Saving Plans.
Inter-Region Data Transfer prices have been reduced for data coming out of São Paulo, Bahrain, Cape Town and Sydney.

‍⚖️ Amazon filed a second, concurrent bid protest to the Department of Defense. Microsoft and Amazon continue to snip at each other in public blog posts.

COVID-19

️ Amazon will allow non-warehouse employees to work from home for at least five months. Microsoft updated their WFH policy, and will give employees the option to work remotely through October.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer has seen pricing changes. Now CodeGuru’s terrible payment model is much less terrible.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports Kubernetes version 1.16. It’s good to see they’re putting out these updates progressively faster.
‍♂️ A new wizard will allow for simplified creation and management of Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters. This should clean up some of the EKS console nicely.
AWS Identity and Access Management introduced basic password strength requirements. Thank goodness.
AWS Internet of Things Device Management service’s Device Jobs feature now costs 90-95% less. That’s big savings if you’ve got a fleet of IoT devices.
⛓️ AWS launched a new integration between AWS CodeBuild and AWS Step Functions services. This one’s really exciting from a DevOps perspective.
Amazon Eventbridge is now generally available. It’s probably still in its early days; expect plenty of updates.
UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service is now generally available. Expect even more tiers in the future.
️ The new Heapothesys benchmark from Amazon Corretto promises to simulate workloads that affect garbage collector latency.
❓ New query monitoring capabilities are available in the Amazon Redshift console.
New EC2 M6g instances, powered by AWS Graviton2 with Arm-based chips, are now available.
The enterprise search service previewed at Re:invent Amazon Kendra is now generally available.

The managed secondary index Blob Index for Azure Storage is now in preview.
Microsoft announced the preview of the next generation of Azure VMware Solution. This is Microsoft’s solution to Google buying CloudSimple who Microsoft had used to provide their VMware.
Azure announced plans to open their first datacenter in New Zealand.
You can now preview the premium tier for Azure Data Lake Storage.
Azure Blob Storage announced new data protection and recovery capabilities.
Instance protection, custom scale-in policy, and terminate notifications are now generally available for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
Microsoft and Redis Labs partnered to create new capabilities for Azure Cache for Redis.
Azure Front Door Rules Engine is now in preview.
Azure Spot Virtual Machines are now generally available.

️ The Google Cloud Data Catalog metadata management service is now generally available. This is going to be applicable to a lot of businesses.
️ The Las Vegas GCP region is now online.
✈️ On May 8, Blue Medora’s metric and log management solution BindPlane was highlighted on the Google Blog.
The Google Cloud Architecture Framework is now available for everyone to study.
Astra, DataStax’s Cassandra as a service, is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

⚡ Jonathan takes this week’s point tying it up at Jonathan (five points), Justin (five points) and Ryan (zero points). Hang in there, Ryan!