Ep 78 – Honey, I built an App

Architect Matt Kohn fills in for Peter 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

• Ian McKay has cool tools for the new Honeycode service.
• Amazon shoots for the stars with their new Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business unit.
• A new family of Virtual Machines boast powerful performance benchmarks.

AWS: Business! In! Space!

• Amazon’s No-Code solution has finally shipped in the form of Amazon Honeycode, fully managed and now in beta. Friend of the show Ian McKay has created Honeycode export and appflow integration projects which add a lot of usability to the service.
• After a six-month beta period, Amazon CodeGuru is now generally available featuring CodeGuru Reviewer and CodeGuru Profiler. CodeGuru is still sticking to Java support, so if you’re working in another language, you won’t find much here.
• AWS CodeCommit now supports a limited set of Emoji Reactions to comment on pull requests and commits. The set includes , , , and “ship-it”, though we’d have rather used , , , and .
• AWS announced a foray into the space sector with the launch of the Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business unit. AWS appointed former director of Space Force Planning Clint Crosier to lead the unit.
• On the last day of June, AWS launched AWS App2Container to help containerize currently running applications without the need for code changes. Once this applies to applications other than .NET 3.5+ and Java, we expect this to be adopted like hotcakes.
• On the first of July, AWS announced the Porting Assistant for .NET, a tool to port .NET Framework applications to .NET Core running on Linux. This should clean up the last of the .NET apps in the next, say, 25 years.
• Amazon Relational Database Service instances are now available on AWS Outposts with mySQL and PostgreSQL support. The management fee can be a bit pricey, but compared to what you’d already be paying for Outpost, you probably won’t even notice.

Azure: I Studied the Blade

• The first release of Docker Desktop’s integration with Microsoft Azure is now complete. Now if only Docker Desktop would stop updating so incessantly.
• Azure Load Balancer customers can now use the Insights blade using Azure Monitor for Networks. There’s certainly some potential here.
• Azure now supports automatic image-based upgrades for custom images, integrating with Shared Image Gallery. 

Google: Making Money Move

• Google is rewarding steady-state, predictable usage with new committed use discounts for Cloud SQL. Automatic discounts are a lot more marketable than trying to sell someone on a savings plan.
• Google announced the new Accelerator-Optimized family of virtual machines, based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU. Let us know if you have a use case for this kind of power. Minecraft? Cryptocurrency mining?
• Deutsche Bank and Google have partnered to lead the banking industry into a new, cloud-based paradigme. Deutsche Bank recently received a $150 million penalty for a lack of oversight over the accounts of then-registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. So, you know, the go-to trusted leaders in the banking industry.

Lightning Round

• ⚡ Justin takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (six points), Justin (eight points) and Ryan (two points). Thanks to our honorary Peter for judging this week!

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Pipelines now supports Linux/ARM64
• Durable Functions now supports Python 
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now use their own Prefix Lists to simplify the configuration of security groups and route tables 
• Azure Storage 200 TB block blob size is now in preview
• Company branding feature is now available on your organization’s Azure AD sign-in page   
• Amazon Connect allows you to continue engaging with your customer after an agent hangs-up
• AWS CodeDeploy now enables automated installation and scheduled updates of the CodeDeploy Agent 
• AWS CodeBuild Now Supports Additional Shell Environments
• Amazon EMR uses real-time capacity insights to provision spot instances to lower cost and interruption 
• Introducing EC2 Launch v2 to simplify customizing Windows instances
• EC2 Image Builder can now produce and distribute encrypted AMIs  
• Amazon Forecast now supports generating predictions for 10X more items