Episode 83: The Cloud Pod takes a Quantum Leap

Your hosts set right what once went wrong in this week’s quantum 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

Amazon and Rackspace may be growing closer soon.
Your hosts may or may not know how quantum computing works.
Google is now available for 35 more minutes out of the month.

General: High Stakes

Reuters reported that Amazon is looking to acquire a stake in cloud infrastructure and services company Rackspace Technology. It is unclear exactly how much of the company Amazon may buy.

AWS: A Discrete Quantity of Computers

⚛️ You can now run Amazon Braket on real or simulated quantum chips. We’ll try to explain quantum computing to you if we ever understand it ourselves.
AWS Step Functions has been updated to Amazon State Language. Alright, let’s learn this thing the hard way!
AWS Security Hub Automated Response & Remediation is now generally available. It’s an old architecture, but cool to see formalized.
The new Distributor capability of AWS Systems Manager installs and manages third party agents, and that’s pretty cool.
AWS Fargate for Elastic Kubernetes Service and Elastic Container Service now supports Elastic File System. It’s the interface that really makes it work.
️ Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports EC2 Inf1 instances.
✍️ Serverless icon Ben Ellerby wrote an article about SLS-Dev-Tools for Serverless on the AWS Open Source Blog. If you’re doing a lot of serverless work, we recommend giving this one a read.
Application and Classic Load Balancers now support HTTP Desync Mitigation Mode — and it’s free!
Amazon EC2 C5ad instances with 2nd generation EPYC processors are now generally available.
️ Systems Manager Explorer now features a multi-account summary of AWS Support cases. Let’s just wait and see this get replaced by Organizations within the year.
The WorldForge capability in AWS RoboMaker creates virtual worlds to simulate your robots in. Expect to see use in the automatic vacuum market.
️ ACM Private Certificate Authority now supports Private CA sharing. Now you can afford to use this in a multi-account environment!

Google: More Nines

9️⃣ Google announced that BigQuery uptime has been upgraded from 99.9% to 99.99% availability. That works out to five minutes of downtime a month instead of 40.
Pali Bhat posted a list of 21 improvements to observability on the GCP blog. Shockingly, none of them were trainings this time around.
The Nvidia GPU on Anthos in hybrid environments partnership project is now in beta. GPUs and Anthos? Sounds expensive.

Azure: Ctrl+Alt+U+Delete

The latest entry in the Azure Advancing Reliability blog series focuses on incident communication. It’s a fantastic series, and we recommend checking it out.
Azure Blob Storage’s data recovery now includes soft delete for containers in public preview. You pay for data you’ve already deleted so that you can then un-delete it.

Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (seven points), Justin (10 points) and Ryan (four points). I’m sorry Justin, but technically that does put you at fewer nines.

Show Notes

This week’s highlights

General: High Stakes

AWS: A Discrete Quantity of Computers

Google: More Nines

Azure: Ctrl+Alt+U+Delete

Lightning Round

Other headlines mentioned:

Other Episodes

Episode 120

120: The Cloud Pod crosses the data streams

Episode 78

Ep 78 – Honey, I built an App

Episode

Episode 11 – Screaming in the last week of the cloud pod