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

• We crown the winner of this year’s AWS Summit Draft Picks!
• Amazon and Microsoft keep slinging blog posts over JEDI.
• We’re all just trying to stay sane, honestly.

AWS Summit: Draft Picks

• 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.

General News

• ‍⚖️ 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.

AWS

• 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.

Azure

• 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.

Google

• ️ 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.

Lightning Round

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

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights now allows you to save queries
• Amazon Chime adds new policies to govern meeting access
• Azure DevOps update to configure deployment strategies from the Azure portal
• Parameter support is now available with service actions in AWS Service Catalog
• Automating BigQuery exports to an email
• Enhanced monitoring capabilities for AWS Direct Connect
• AWS Systems Manager adds support for patching Debian and Oracle Linux instances
• Control your email flows in Amazon WorkMail using AWS Lambda
• Amazon Connect Now Supports Automatic Offline Agent Status
• AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for new services on Android
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer announces pull request dashboard
• AWS Trusted Advisor adds 5 Cost Optimization checks