GCP puts the Cloud Pod on Ice – Episode 54

Your co-hosts kick off their first regular news episode of the year with Consumer Electronics Show 2020, Google Cloud Next 2020 and Justin’s Oracle adventure.

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.
• Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. 

This week’s highlights

1. Amazon flexes its tech at the Consumer Electronics Show with an automotive exhibit.
2. Use coupon code GRPABLOG2020 for $500 off your ticket to Google Cloud Next 2020.
3. Justin does a bit of investigative journalism to understand Oracle’s new boot volume backup announcement.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 — Cars and CAs

Those attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week saw Amazon show off the practical uses of AWS technology and machine learning at their automotive exhibit. The exhibit includes an array of demonstrations from an in-vehicle digital assistant to car-to-home integrations to a fleet of autonomous cars in China. We’d like to see this sort of in-vehicle technology have constant cloud connectivity, where software updates can continue to be pushed out.

And speaking of updates, you may have already seen a notification or email for AWS’s upcoming 2019 certificate authority. From the article:

“If you are using Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), or Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and are taking advantage of SSL/TLS certificate validation when you connect to your database instances, you need to download & install a fresh certificate, rotate the certificate authority (CA) for the instances, and then reboot the instances.” -Jeff Barr

Yeah, it’s a chore and it sucks to do, but if you use it and you don’t update your CA, you’ll have an outage. Is doing this once every five years really so bad?

Lastly, in all AWS regions except China, you can now use Private DNS names to access your AWS PrivateLink based services. We’re happy to see it.

Azure Recaps Cost Management for 2019

While Azure’s been quiet since Christmas, their cost management program manager published an article this week recapping the tools they’ve released over the last year to help you monitor and optimize the costs of your cloud operations. Not only can you now use Azure Cost Management to analyze your Azure and AWS spends, but GCP support is on the horizon too.

Google: Access, Freeze, Next

The new Serverless VPC Access will now allow you to place an elastic network interface in your virtual private cloud and connect to your App Engine or Cloud functions serverless applications.

The new Archive storage class, which will store your data for $1.23 per terabyte per month, is also available now. It’s a competitive price point, and we can think of some use cases for it, like storing tax documents.

The last new Google offering isn’t a service — it’s tickets to Google Cloud Next 2020. The event runs April 6-8 in San Francisco and tickets are $1,699, or $1,199 if you use coupon code GRPABLOG2020 by February 29. 

If you’re in the Google Cloud space, we recommend going. And if you can’t make it, your favorite cloud podcast hosts will make sure you don’t miss out on the pertinent updates. 

Justin’s Adventures in Oracle Cloud

Oracle has handed down a mysterious declaration of the… present? On January 7, the company’s cloud infrastructure blog released a post with the headline “Cross-Region Boot Volume Backups for Instance Disaster Recovery, Migration, and Expansion.” Does this imply we can’t back up non-boot volumes? Or does it imply we already could? 

Well, the article doesn’t say, so Justin decided to do some digging. Here’s what he found in his free trial of Oracle:

1. The console is very hardware-centric.
2. The “Copy to Another Region” button, which was mentioned in the article, doesn’t exist until you enable a second region.
3. You can potentially make an unbootable Linux instance if you don’t properly put it into fstab.
4. Now we know: You can backup both boot and non-boot volumes.

Lightning Round

Jonathan took the first point of the year for hoping Amazon Translate’s Batch Translation will help us understand Larry Ellison’s keynote addresses. That’s a solid 100% lead!

Other headlines mentioned:

• Introducing AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar
• Amazon Comprehend launches multi-label custom classification
• Amazon SES now lets you use your existing IP address ranges to send email
• Amazon QuickSight launches new analytical functions, Athena Workgroup and Presto VPC connector support