Ep 81 – Azure & GCP … Are you ok?

It’s an unexpectedly short and sweet conference week on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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.
• Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud.

This week’s highlights

• Alphabet and AWS release their first all-pandemic quarterlies.
• Google leverages their machine learning horsepower.
• You can get your kicks on our Route 53 console rant after the lightning round.

General: Growth Mindsets

• For the first time in its 16 years as a public company, Alphabet’s quarterly sales have dropped. This is of course due to pandemic-related macroeconomic effects. It will be interesting to see if the ad revenue business model is changed long-term.
• Despite being less than anytime in the last two years, Amazon reported AWS revenue up 29%. The retail end of Amazon is faring even better, with sales up 43% in North America.

COVID-19

• Google Cloud AI and Harvard Global Health Institute have partnered to create the COVID-19 Public Forecasts model. You can query the forecasts for free in BigQuery or download as CSV.

AWS: Accepting Applications

• Anomaly and threat detection for Amazon Simple Storage Service is coming to Amazon GuardDuty at an 80% discount. You can get a 30 day free trial of the improved and affordable service even on accounts already enabling GuardDuty.
• The new AWS Community Builders Program is now open for anyone (to apply to). If you’re as interested as we are, be sure to sign up before September 15.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service resources can be found in AWS Toolkits for Visual Studio Code using AWS explorer view. Tools like this that make things easier on developers are a good investment for AWS.
• AWS CodeBuild now supports Test Reporting for code coverage. This will go a long way to help CodeBuild catch up to some of the more mature options on the market.
• AWS Security Hub has released 19 new security controls for Foundational Security Best Practices standard and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. They’re nice and all, but automating your security controls can mean automating some of your security spend too.
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now supports full repository analysis. Now if only it supported anything other than Java. We’d even take TypeScript.

Google: Aren’t You Conferencing Right Now?

• Google has set records for AI performance with their latest supercomputer. The metrics are all a little too hard for us to parse here at TCP, but if you’re a fan of machine learning go ahead and give this one a gander.
• Google’s Certificate Authority Services is now in beta. It’s certainly needed, but let’s hold out and see what the pricing is going to be before we adopt.

Azure: Lightning Round Material

• Azure Bandwidth is moving to a source-destination billing model next month. If you’re processing your Azure bill using automation or machine learning, make sure you’re prepared for this change to break that in September.
• ️ The Azure Monitor Community Repository is now public for members to share Azure Monitor artifacts. If you have an amazing Azure Monitor script to submit or are just trying to figure out how to use Azure Monitoring, go check it out.

Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (seven points), Justin (nine points) and Ryan (three points).

Other headlines mentioned:

• Elastic Load Balancing simplifies your AWS bill by introducing a new billing section
• AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS now supports UDP load balancing with Network Load Balancer
• AWS DeepComposer launches new learning capsule that deep dives into training an autoregressive CNN model
• Manage access to AWS centrally for OneLogin users with AWS Single Sign-On
• Amazon Aurora Supports In-Place Upgrade from PostgreSQL 10 to 11
• Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations Now Support Windows BYOL    
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports centralized logging of AWS WAF logs  
• AWS CodeBuild now supports parallel and coordinated executions of a build project 
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to HTTP endpoints 
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to New Relic
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to MongoDB Cloud  
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to Datadog
• Amazon Lightsail now offers cPanel & WHM instance blueprint 
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports enhanced premigration assessments 
• Amazon Translate now supports Office documents