On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team misses Rob and Ben. Also, AWS Gaudi Accelerators speed up deep learning, GCP announces that its Tau VMs are an independently verified delight, and Azure gets the chance to be Number One for once (with industrial IoT platforms.)

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 is using Gaudi Accelerators to speed up deep learning models — for nearly $10,000 a month. 
• Google announces that Tau T2D VMs are now available in preview, and takes the opportunity to report that Phoronix has identified these Tau instances as the best price-performing ones yet. 
• Azure bags the Number One spot in the Gartner Magic Quadrant category of Industrial IoT Platforms. We’re wondering how much schmoozing Microsoft had to do to pull this off. 

Top Quotes  

“I guess [AWS Gaudi Accelerators] solve the problem of lack of availability of NVIDIA CPUs. It’s almost impossible to buy a decent graphics card, and I’m sure the cloud providers are suffering horrendously with not being able to scale their machine-learning instances the way they wanted to, because of the chip shortage.”

“We’ve said it for a long time now that with Google coming to the market when they did, it was very easy to take all the major gripes of AWS and Azure and improve on them. And they banged it out of the park. So kudos to them, because it is a much better user experience than [what you get with] the other two cloud providers.”

General News: HashiCorp Increases Access to its Service Mesh

HashiCorp introduces its new Consul API Gateway to help route traffic to applications running on the Hashicorp Consul Service Mesh. This seems like an early release, given its fairly basic capabilities.

AWS: Rolling Out Gaudi Accelerators — Not Architecture

• AWS announces AWS Panorama, which is an appliance and SDK that allows users to process video data at the edge of their locations. AWS Panorama was first introduced at the last re:Invent, and is now generally available. 
• Amazon joins Microsoft, Google, IBM, Honeywell and more in the race to build a quantum computer, partnering with Caltech to open a new center in Pasadena.  
• 4️⃣ To save Peter some time in the lightning round, we combined four Amazon DocumentDB updates into one announcement: Users can now enjoy additional support for access control; support for $literal, $map and $$ROOT; capabilities for storying, querying, and indexing Geospatial data; and a JDBC driver that connects from BI tools and executes SQL queries.
• ❓ Amazon’s new Strategy Recommendation Service helps customers analyze their application portfolios and determine the best way to migrate to the cloud. This seems like a souped-up version of 20 questions to Justin. 
• At re:Invent 2021, you can help Amazon make history — and win yourself prizes — by participating in the largest ever bug-busting competition. But first you have to convince your boss to fund your ticket to a conference where you do a bunch of free work for Amazon.
• ️ To help Oracle customers manage their databases, AWS has released a custom Amazon RDS, which offers new control capabilities that enable DBA access and customization of database environments. 
• ️ EC2 DL1 Instances are now generally available and powered by Gaudi (not the Spanish architect.) Gaudi Accelerators will help train users’ deep learning models, creating more accurate natural processing, recommendation systems, video recognition, and more — all for the low, low price of $9,5620.60 a month. 

GCP: Releases Best Price-Performance Tau VMs — Until Graviton3?

• GCP announces that Tau T2D VMs are now available in preview, and points to Phoronix’s independent reporting which noted that these Tau VM instances deliver better performance than Graviton2 M6g. Reading between the lines, this has us thinking that a Graviton3 announcement is in the near future. 
• At Google Cloud Next, GCP announced a load of new no-code apps that will be integrated into Gmail, with Appsheet being the first. Users can build custom, no-code applications like forms and approval routings, and send them directly through email. 
• Vertex AI is launching a new Reduction Server to improve the speed of data parallel training on GPU clusters. This new and improved aggregation algorithm doubles the algorithm bandwidth for all-reduce operations, and accelerates ML training. 
• Check out the nine things that Forrest Brazeal loves about GCP identity and environments. Forrest has been a guest on TCP Talks, and recently joined Google as Head of Content, having previously been hailed as an AWS Serverless Hero. 
• For the first time, GCP offers cross-cloud analytics across GCP, AWS and Azure with BigQuery Omni. Data teams will be able to break down data silos to securely and cost-effectively analyze data across clouds. The future begins in Q4 for AWS customers and select Azure customers. 

Azure: A Glimpse of the View From the Top

• Azure releases Visual Studio Code — known only by us as GitHub Codespaces Lite  — in public preview. This new, web-based code editor runs in your browser with no install, and you can get it here for free. 
• Justin found a Gartner Magic Quadrant where Azure is number one, and it’s for Industrial IoT Platforms. It leads the quadrant with its flexible business systems, strong security approach (nevermind the recent breaches), and its global ISV/SI Partner ecosystem. 
• In its 2021 IoT Signals report, Microsoft finds that 90% of surveyed organizations are adopting IoT — shocker. It also found that COVID-19 has accelerated IoT adoption across industries, and that IoT security is a top priority among those surveyed. 

Oracle: Just Earned Itself a New Subscriber

• ✅ After Oracle changed its website yet again, Justin realized that he hasn’t been getting updates because Oracle broke its RSS feeds. He has since subscribed to the newsletter and will be collecting Oracle news from now on. Thanks, Justin!

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ With a reference to the recent “Dune” release, Ryan wins the point, making the scores Justin (16), Ryan (11), Jonathan (12), Peter (1). 

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Introducing support for AWS KMS customer-managed keys for encrypting artifacts by Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics 
• AWS Security Hub adds support for cross-Region aggregation of findings to simplify how you evaluate and improve your AWS security posture 
• Amazon RDS Proxy now supports Amazon RDS for MySQL Version 8.0 
• Amazon QuickSight launches SPICE Incremental Refresh 
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds support for time-series data
• AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows now supports defining custom cutoff behavior for tasks  
• Disable default reverse DNS rules with Route 53 Resolver 
• Amazon CloudFront adds support for client IP address and connection port header     
• AWS Local Zones Are Now Open in Las Vegas, New York City, and Portland
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports Spot Interruptions

 Things Coming Up

• State of FinOps Update – Nov 18 Mini-Summit
• Announcing the Government & Education Summit, Nov 3-4, 2021 
• Join us on Azure IaaS Day: Learn to increase agility and resiliency of your infrastructure  – November 17th
• AWS Re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas
  • Meetup as a Service