Episode 72: 13 Reasons Why This Episode is Better Than the Last One

Your co-hosts cover conferences past and yet to come 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

• We take a good, hard look at the ways Google Cloud has AWS beat.
• Microsoft Build 2020 featured the fifth most powerful computer in the world.
• Google Cloud Next is here to stay for a long, long time.

General News: Let Me Count the Ways

• Peter Wayner of InfoWorld wrote an article listing the 13 ways Google Cloud beats AWS. Well…he didn’t say they were all good reasons.

AWS: That’s a MTHFL

• AWS announced the Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes called cdk8s is now in alpha. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?
• You can now use Attribute-based access control with EC2 Instance Connect to define Secure Shell access permissions based on attributes. It’s good to move away from passing around all those extra keys.
• ‍ State Manager features for Systems Manager now integrate with AWS CloudFormation. Assuming we’re parsing the naming conventions correctly in these press releases, that’s good news!
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler added -javaagent switch, and CodeGuru Reviewer now supports Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud. Obviously, profiling and reviewing are totally different services —   how could anyone get those mixed up?
• ❓ The AWS CloudTrail console has been redesigned. It’s just the S3 user interface again, so it’s not a very intuitive interface.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports environment files to store environment variables for containers using the EC2 Launch type.
• The new Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Best Practices Guide for Security is available for anyone to read for free. Nice to see, but why isn’t this a part of cdk8s?

Azure: Like a Regular Computer, but More Super

• Azure landed a big contract with FedEx to provide cloud and AI services for delivery logistics. FedEx publicly (and angrily) severed ties with Amazon last year. 
• The Microsoft Build 2020 conference came and went, and we got to see plenty of new and improved tools. One big ticket item from Build 2020 was the bundle of improvements to Visual Studio Codespaces. Also premiering at Build 2020 was the first result of the partnership between Microsoft and the OpenAI company, a new supercomputer billed as the fifth most powerful in the world.

Google: The Purgatory of Conferences

• ✉️ Google Cloud will be supporting the new NVIDIA Ampere Architecture and the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU. Fill out the form in the article and Google will be in touch with you, apparently.
• The Google Cloud VMware Engine will offer customers a service to migrate and run their VMware environment in Google Cloud.
• ️ Cloud Armor for Cloud CDN for origin server protection and support for hybrid deployments are now generally available in the Security Command Center.
• Google Cloud Next will be a nine-week digital event series starting July 14. We will not be doing nine prediction shows, but we’ll keep you up-to-date as the conference news drips in.
• The Register turned its attention toward Google Cloud’s struggle to meet demand (after mocking Azure for that same struggle not long ago). Oracle, on the other hand, has plenty of resources to spare (and is willing to brag about it).

Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan takes this week’s point and his first true-blue point as a host, tying it up at Jonathan (five points), Justin (five points) and Ryan (one point). Congratulations, Ryan!

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 PowerShell and CLI are now generally available
• Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript supported on Ubuntu
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Bulk Insert on highly available DB Instances using Amazon S3 Integration
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
• AWS Single Sign-On supports zero-downtime external IdP certificate rotation
• AWS Artifact service launches new user interface
• Easily backup and restore your SAP HANA database to and from Amazon S3 with AWS Backint Agent
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports empty values for non-key String and Binary attributes in DynamoDB tables
• Amazon Forecast now supports new automated data imputation options for the related and target time series datasets
• AWS Secrets Manager is now FedRAMP compliant
• AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds Traffic Splitting Deployment Policy