Episode 82: Azure says “How About them Apples, Open Usage Commons”

It’s a new week, and that means you can be sure that Google Next is still going on… and of course, we’ve got a new episode of The Cloud Pod.

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.
• 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.
• live@Manning: Sign up for RustConf and Manning’s Women in Tech conferences here.

This week’s highlights

• Foghorn has two new solutions we’d love for them to advertise with us.
• Azure advances the open-source front.
• Oracle wins the 4th place medal in the VMware race. What would a 4th place medal be — aluminum?! 

JEDI: Wait and See

• ⏱️ The Department of Defense has been granted an additional month to issue its remand decision. Neither Amazon nor Microsoft have objected to the delay.

COVID-19

• AWS is supplying Moderna with the computing as they work on their COVID-19 vaccine. Our deepest gratitude to the 30,000 human subjects in the phase 3 trials.

AWS: Brought to You by Foghorn

• The AWS Wavelength 5G partnership is now available in Boston and San Francisco. Inevitably though cloud platforms, like the iphone, will need to break free from their provider-locks.
• TCP sponsor Foghorn has developed VPC-In-A-Box℠ for Amazon VPC creation and management, and the Fog360 Security security analysis and visualization service. Send all your questions our way!
• ️ The new AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that features a new default mesh configuration. It’s an interesting concept for sure but it might not be for the best.
• AWS Glue 2.0, now generally available, starts jobs ten times faster and has one tenth the minimum billing time. Apparently this is enough to make people like Glue!

Google: YouTube Tutorials

• An International Data Group study predicts that Google Cloud Partner revenue will more than triple in the next five years. If you’re liking what you’re seeing from Google Next, reach out to your partner.
• ️ Google Cloud is launching the Google Cloud Security Showcase, a collection of instructional videos for specific security challenges. We recommend checking these out if you need cloud security demystified.
• The new Google Cloud Security best practices center offers security advice and tools for those migrating to the cloud. If you liked the Security Showcase but want more depth and prefer text to video, this is for you.
• Google Cloud Spanner has launched multi-regions in Asia and Europe. If you hear Spanner and start worrying about lock-in, check out Emily Omier’s article featuring our very own Justin here.
• ❓ BigQuery is more accessible now that the purchase minimum has been reduced from 500 slots to 100. That works out to $1,700 per month.
• Google Cloud’s free tier now includes a free trial program, the always-free tier program, and many other new resources. 

Azure: Better Together

• Microsoft has created Open Service Mesh in competition with Google’s Istio. Unlike Istio, Open Service Mesh will be donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
• Azure Cloud Shell is now open sourced on GitHub. If you’ve got any issues with Cloud Shell, now you can go fix them yourself.
• The NCas T4 v3 virtual machines are now available in preview. If you ever have a use case for this kind of horsepower, good luck remembering what it’s called.
• ☕ Java Message Service 2.0 over Advanced Message Queuing Protocol on Azure Service Bus is now in preview. 

Oracle: Us Too But Better

• Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is now generally available. Though Oracle is late to the VMware game, they believe their security, availability, and user control differentiates them from the rest.

Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (seven points), Justin (nine points) and Ryan (four points). You’re poor in points Ryan, but you’re rich in fan support!

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon VPC Flow Logs extends CloudFormation Support to custom format subscriptions, 1-minute aggregation intervals and tagging
• Amazon Lex launches accuracy improvements and confidence score
• Amazon Transcribe launches custom language models
• AWS AppSync releases Direct Lambda Resolvers for GraphQL APIs
• Amazon Elastic Container Service launches more network metrics for containers using the EC2 launch type
• Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs now supports wildcard custom domain names 
• AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS now included in Compute Savings Plans 
• New digital course: Configure and Deploy AWS PrivateLink
• AWS Solutions: Serverless Bot Framework adds support for securely integrating with third-party APIs