Episode 76: IBM Blames Cloud Pod for Outages

Your hosts (minus Jonathan) talk outages and instances 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

• Mark Russinovich (twitter: @markrussinovich) published a guide on scaling-up during the pandemic.
• Sagemaker Ground Truth lets robots see in 3D.
• Check out our interview with Spot CEO Amiram Schachar.

General News: Not Our Fault

• IBM assigned the cause of a several-hour global outage on June 10 to an unnamed third party. We can expect a full formal report from IBM soon.
• Data warehouse specialist company Snowflake is rumored to be filing for initial public offering at $20 billion, 1,333% of its valuation just two and a half years ago. It’s just a matter of time until Amazon Redshift makes a move to break into Snowflake’s space.

COVID-19

• Chief Technical Officer at Azure Mark Russinovich detailed how Azure scales Microsoft Teams during the pandemic in what appears to be a face-saving measure after Azure’s recent capacity issues. It’s a weighty article — we recommend checking this one out for yourself if you’re encountering any scaling issues of your own.

AWS: The Third Dimension is Data

• AWS CodeArtifact, a managed artifact repository service, is now generally available. Everyone has to store their Build Artifacts somewhere, so this is an exciting tool, especially at this price point.
• ️ Amazon Sagemaker Ground Truth can now label 3D point clouds using a new editor and assistive labeling features. We don’t know how this one works but expect widespread adoption in advanced machine learning.
• New EC2 instances with Graviton2 processors are now generally available. Whether you choose C6 or R6, expect some hefty price-performance improvements.
• AWS Lambda functions can now connect to Amazon Elastic File Systems. Sure, some people may make the point that this runs counter to the purpose of Lambda, but just think of the use cases!
• ️ The AWS CloudFormation Guard open-source command-line interface is now available in preview. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of remediation, and it’s good to see that made easy.

Azure: An Instance of Poor Optics

• The live video analytics platform Azure Media Services is now in preview. Enjoy your automated live video feed analytical capabilities, Department of Defense! Pinky swear you’ll be responsible with it?
• Azure released several new instances this week based on Cascade Lake: Ddv4, Ddsv4, Edv4, Edsv4, Dv4, Dsv4, Ev4 and Esv4. You know Azure, if you make your naming and pricing conventions this obtuse, we’ll start to think you just like watching your marketing department squirm.

Google: Just Another Fire in the Wall

• ️ Google released a Github repo to help customers use the cloud monitoring dashboard API they released earlier this year. We love to see this trend back to basics.
• Google has introduced two new beta features to Google Cloud firewalls: hierarchical firewall policies and firewall insights. You can expect a lot of exception requests forwarded to your security team.
• Derek Phanekham and Rick Jones published a blog post this week explaining why they prefer using Netperf to measure round-trip network latency in the cloud. In this masterclass in writing a smear article, they have marketed against Amazon without ever mentioning AWS. Bravissimo!

Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (five points), Justin (seven points), and Ryan (two points). And the lead grows!

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Budgets in Cost Management now accounts threshold edits and alert limits above 100%
• Azure App Service hybrid connections for Linux apps is now available
• Azure Kubernetes Service upgrade improvements are now in preview
• Amazon CloudFront enables configurable origin connection attempts and origin connection timeouts
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds support for IMDSv2 and Service Linked Role for Managed Updates
• Amazon Aurora Snapshots can be managed via AWS Backup
• AWS Compute Optimizer Now Supports Exporting Recommendations to Amazon S3
• AWS Transfer Family enables Source IP as a factor for authorization
• AWS Certificate Manager Extends Automation of Certificate Issuance Via CloudFormation
• AWS Amplify Console now supports deploying and hosting web apps managed in monorepos
• AWS Service Catalog now supports sharing portfolios across an organization from a delegated member account
• Amazon ECS Capacity Providers Now Support Delete Functionality
• Google is introducing Spark 3 and Hadoop 3 on Dataproc image version 2