It’s Peter’s washing night so please enjoy the soothing sounds of the odd spin cycle as we dive into the huge news coming out of Amazon on The Cloud Pod this week. 

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.

• Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

• America’s version of Queen Elizabeth has stepped down.
• Google is a bit late to the party but brings the ice so we forgive its team.
• Azure is trying to claim it came first but the chicken says otherwise.

Follow Up: A Bit Slack

• Slack explains how the January 4th outage occurred. It was all Amazon’s fault. 
• FogOps for Linux is now available via the AWS Marketplace. Congratulations on getting FogOps on the marketplace, Peter!
• General News: It’s Earnings Season!
• Microsoft releases its earnings. This is nuts.  
• Alphabet also released its earnings. We hope all the money it’s investing in infrastructure and data centers pays off in the long run, because that’s a big loss. 
• Amazon announces financial results and CEO transition. That’s some crazy profit. 
• ‍♀️ Outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addresses employees. But who will head AWS now?  

Amazon Web Services: Bon Voyage, Bezos

• AWS launches multiple private marketplace catalogs for AWS organizations. Not a problem any of us have so not wowed by this. 
• AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3 is now generally available. We like it but don’t like the pricing. 
• Amazon Macie announces a slew of new capabilities. Check out our sponsor OpenRaven, which is much better at solving the same issue and is much cheaper.

Google Cloud Platform: Stop Blaming Our Database

• Google announces a CentOS 7-based Virtual Machine image to achieve optimal Central Processing Unit and network performance on Google Cloud. We had to look a few of these terms up.
• Google introduces Cloud SQL Insights, a simple tool that helps developers understand database performance issues. Much better than the Amazon offering!  
• Google launches SQLCommenter to help developers write queries using an object-oriented paradigm. This is super cool and we love it.
• Google introduces VM Manager to operate large Compute Engine fleets with ease. We’re shocked this has taken so long to be introduced. 
• Eventarc brings eventing to Cloud Run and is now generally available. Not much to say about this except it’s great to see this available. 
• ⛔ New Cloud DNS response policies simplify access to Google APIs. And we thought the Google Doc APIs were hard to use before…

Azure: The Great Pretender

• Azure Resource Graph unlocks enhanced discovery for ServiceNow. Really cool.
• Automate application life cycle management with GitHub Actions. Low code app development, just rolls off the tongue…
• Microsoft’s Azure Quantum is now in preview. Not the world’s first, just so you know. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes the lead as he wins this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (2), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports Amazon API Gateway in API blueprint
• Amazon Transcribe Medical now provides automatic Protected Health Information (PHI) identification
• Amazon GuardDuty introduces machine learning domain reputation model to expand threat detection and improve accuracy
• Amazon Elastic File System triples read throughput
• AWS Control Tower now provides bulk account update
• AWS Control Tower now extends governance to existing OUs in your AWS Organizations
• Amazon SES now lets you assign a configuration set to an email identity
• Discover, review, and remediate unintended access to Secrets Manager secrets using IAM Access Analyzer  
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports tempdb on local instance store with R5d and M5d instance types
• Amazon S3 Batch Operations adds support for Delete Object Tagging