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.

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Data Factory managed virtual network support is now in public preview 
• AWS Transfer Family adds predefined security policies to choose cryptographic algorithms
• Amazon Cognito User Pools now supports customization of token expiration  
• AWS Lambda now supports custom runtimes on Amazon Linux 2 
• AWS Lambda now supports Go on Amazon Linux 2 
• AWS Lambda now supports Java 8 (Corretto)
• Amazon S3 Access Points now support the Copy API  
• Amazon Connect adds cut, copy, and paste to the contact flow designer
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Now Supports Up To 500 Nodes Per Cluster
• AWS Site-to-Site VPN Now Supports IPv6 Traffic
• Amazon Textract now detects and extracts text even more accurately from tables 
• Amazon Connect now returns agents to their previous status after finishing an outbound call
• Amazon EKS now supports UDP load balancing with Network Load Balancer
• Amazon EKS managed node groups now support EC2 launch templates and custom AMIs
• Amazon EKS support for Arm-based instances powered by AWS Graviton is now generally available
• AWS Cloud9 releases enhanced VPC support