Episode 80: The Cloud Pod now with more Seoul

Ian Mckay fills in for Jonathan on this week’s double-stuffed 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.
• Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud.

This week’s highlights

• A string of attacks deletes, but does not leak, unsecured databases.
• Cloudfare’s Matthew Prince plans to be the next top dog of data.
• Following the eight weeks of Next’ 20 we’ll get three weeks of Re:Invent.

General: Cat Got Your Data?

• It’s earnings season and revenues are up for Azure, but for whatever reason Azure isn’t happy with it.
• Aqua Security announced Aqua Wave and Aqua Enterprise. Check out our interview with Liz Rice for more. 
• The rash of automated “Meow” attacks has deleted at least 3,800 databases. The deleted text is replaced with random text and the word “Meow”, hence the name. And deleting unsecured databases does keep it from being leaked…
• Matthew Prince of Cloudflare believes their new Workers Unbound platform will beat the big three providers on performance and price. Good luck making money on those margins.

AWS: Remote Viewing

• It’s official: Re:Invent will be all digital this year. Not only that, but it will run for three weeks starting November 30.
• ️ AWS’s 77th availability zone will also be their fourth in the Seoul Region.
• The new Amazon Interactive Video Service allows you to integrate live video to your apps and websites. Doesn’t seem like there’s much difference from MediaLive.
• The Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for Terraform and the CDK Pipelines construct library for AWS CDK are now in preview.
• ☎️ The new Contact Lens AI features will help optimize contact centers using Amazon Connect. Connect is really taking the contact center world by storm with its ease of adoption.
• Amazon now offers “d” variants to all three of their Graviton2 EC2 instances.
• Amazon has reduced the prices for their Amazon RDS for SQL Server Enterprise Edition database instances in the Multi-AZ configuration by about 25%.

Google: A Series of Tubes

• ⚖️ The new External HTTP(S) Load Balancing integration will bring the HTTP(S) load balancing capabilities of all Google Cloud serverless offerings into parity with each other.
• The most recent version of gRPC includes xDS API support.
• The new Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP) will help enterprises migrate to the cloud simpler and faster than before.
• ️ Google Cloud Armor now features Managed Protection Plus, curated Named IP lists and pre-configured WAF rules all in beta.
• Google Cloud announced a slate of infrastructural upgrades, including a new transatlantic cable. If you’re in Australia or India, keep an eye out for when this comes online in 2022.

Azure: Following the Blueprints

• Azure has made the new Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework available in the Azure Architecture Center. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
• Azure shared disks and other Disk Storage enhancements are now generally available.
• ‍♂️ The next generation of Azure Stack HCI features native Azure Hybrid capabilities.
• Network File System 3.0 for Azure Blob storage is now in preview. Beware the Blob!

Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (seven points), Justin (eight points) and Ryan (three points).

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon SQS Now Supports New Console Experience
• New Amazon Elastic File System console simplifies file system creation and management 
• AWS Global Accelerator launches One-Click Acceleration for Application Load Balancers
• Announcing automatic backups for Amazon Elastic File System   
• Java 11 for Azure Functions is now available in preview  
• AWS X-Ray .NET Auto-Instrumentation Agent is now available in beta
• Announcing AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now generally available for production use
• AWS CodeBuild now supports accessing Build Environments with AWS Session Manager
• Azure SQL Database—A performance optimization change to default settings is coming soon
• Amazon Elastic File System increases per-client throughput by 100%, from 250MB/s to 500 MB/s 
• Amazon CloudFront announces Cache Key and Origin Request Policies
• AWS Control Tower console update adds more visibility into OUs and accounts
• Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI add support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication of private workers
• Easily enable operations best practices across AWS accounts and Regions with AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup  
• Eight ways to optimize costs on Azure SQL
• HTTP compression support now available in Amazon Elasticsearch Service 
• Introducing AWS Purchase Order Management (Preview) 
• You can now Improve website performance with Lightsail Content Delivery Network