Episode 73: The Cloud Pod Celebrates BigQuery’s 10th Birthday

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

An unusually short AWS segment this week featured new Backup customizations.
Azure is bringing their HoloLens2 to a new set of countries.
We celebrate BigQuery’s 10th birthday and the accompanying BigSale.

Jonah Jones of the AWS Open Source Blog published an article on how to use the PromCat (Prometheus Catalog) to monitor AWS services used by Kubernetes. It’s great to see Prometheus and Kubernetes continue to take over the world.
You can now opt-in or opt-out of AWS Backup services at the account level. Opt-in is nice and all, but opt-out provides peace of mind to the largest user base.
️ Information on AWS regions and servers is now available programmatically in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. It’ll be nice when we see other tools pulling this data.

HoloLens 2, the latest in Azure’s “mixed reality” glasses technology, is now available in 10 countries and will be coming to more soon. Once the technology becomes as functional as it is in the advertisements, we’re going to be thrilled to play with it. There’s a lot of potential here for industrial applications that are already being explored.
The Azure Arc preview now supports Kubernetes which was hotly requested in customer feedback. Expect to see some very interesting use cases from Azure Arc in the next 12 months.

️ After dropping out early in the JEDI contract competition citing conflicts with its AI principals, Google has signed a seven-figure contract with the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit. Google anticipates that this may lead to future business deals with branches of the DoD.
Serverless VPC Access now features ingress settings. It’s really nice to see a tightening down of function access on VPCs and vice versa. This should make a lot of people happy.
Google’s new open-source tool IAP Desktop allows users to access and manage Windows VMs conveniently and securely. Glad to see Google supporting the zero-trust remote admin access story.
Data warehouse BigQuery turns 10 years old this May, and Google is celebrating. The story of BigQuery is a long one full of the development of now common tools. Google is honoring the occasion in several ways, including the BigQuery data challenge and discounted BigQuery slots sold at 5% the normal cost for six months. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend checking BigQuery out for yourself.
OneFS for Google Cloud, a versatile, efficient and high-capacity storage solution by Dell Technologies, is now generally available. If you’ve been wondering what happened to Isilon since the acquisition by Dell, this is it.
☕ Cloud Functions for Java 11 is now in beta and open for anyone to try out. If that seems like a lot of Java versions to you, you’re not alone. Most of us are still figuring out Java 8. Slow down!

⚡ Justin takes this week’s point, taking a narrow lead at Jonathan (five points), Justin (six points) and Ryan (one point). Let’s see if he can stay on top!