Episode 85 – The Cloud Pod Plays Buzzword Bingo on Machine Learning

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts introduce the idea of plaques to commemorate a feature suggestion becoming a product.

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.
• When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW

 This week’s highlights

• Active Directory just will not die.
• Someone is excited about Google’s Data Fusion pipelines. We just don’t know them.
• Azure gets features that AWS and Google already have.

General: Did You Do Your Homework?

• Former Google engineer Steve Yegge resurrects his blog to explain why Google’s deprecation policy is killing user adoption. We’re still bitter about Google Reader.
• The Cloud Pod is sponsoring the Rust Conference and Women in Tech conference. We’re super excited about both of these conferences and supporting more women in the technical world. 

Amazon Web Services: So confused

• AWS launches second Local Zone in Los Angeles for customers requiring very low latency. This caused massive confusion when they launched the first one as they already had a localized region concept  they forgot about.
• ⚰️ Connect to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory seamlessly with new AWS Linux feature. No one has jumped on board with killing Active Directory yet. Someday we’ll get there.
• AWS now lets you log all Domain Name System queries to understand how your applications are operating. We don’t really know why you would want this (except maybe Jonathan).
• AWS launches Bottlerocket to improve security and operations of containerized infrastructure. Really a joy to set up and makes you feel really secure, without needing a therapist. 
• AWS Site-to-Site now supports Internet Key Exchange that allows customers to connect to other cloud providers. Like Superman in disguise, there’s more to this under the surface. 
• Publish and deliver messages with payloads of up to 2GB through Amazon Simple Notification Service. Great that they’ve made it easier. 
• AWS CloudWatch Logs now lets you leverage the integrated development environment for software application creation, debugging and deployment. At what point does the madness stop?  
• ️‍♂️ New third-party test compares Amazon GuardDuty to network intrusion detection systems. Finally they’ve realized why they need that private DNS log. 
• AWS announces an 86%+ price reduction for IoT Events. Harry Potter would be proud.

Google Cloud Platform: Full of Buzz Words We Don’t Understand 

• TabNet is available as a built-in algorithm on Google Cloud AI Platform making it easier to build machine learning models. We’re out of our league here, please don’t judge us.   
• GCP launches Data Fusion pipelines for Cloud Composer to save time while ensuring workflow accuracy and efficiency. Someone out there is super excited about this.  
• ⚡ MySQL 8 is enterprise ready with Cloud SQL and makes database workloads more resilient in the event of a problem or outage. The ability to roll back changes at the data level makes this a really important improvement.   
• Google announces new capabilities to simplify Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) for businesses to realize the value of AI. Being able to prove a model does what it’s supposed to do without bias towards things like race or gender is really important. 

Azure: Copycat

• A new feature supports upstream sources to automatically download universal Packages with Azure Artifacts. An ‘us too’ announcement if we’ve ever seen one.
• Azure Cost Management + Billing empowers customers to better understand their cloud costs. Billing… Painful, right? But good to see it built in.  
• Microsoft makes the process of attaching a new child zone to their parent zone more user-friendly. Does anyone know if Amazon does this?  
• ️ Here are five ways to optimize your backup costs with Azure Backup. Made us chuckle.  

TCP Lightning Round: Weekend Update

⚡ This week’s lightning round is a weekend update so the jokes will either hit or miss terribly — please judge us harshly. Scores remain the same at Justin (11 points), Jonathan (seven points) and Ryan (four points). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Monitor Logs – Log Analytics REST APIs general availability  
• Azure Data Explorer: Create a table with the new 1-click experience 
• Amazon Corretto 15 Release Candidate (RC) 
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now Supports Trace Flag 692 
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Major Version 2019 
• Using Amazon Textract with AWS PrivateLink 
• AWS Systems Manager now supports all current versions of Ubuntu 
• Amazon CloudFront announces real-time logs
• Amazon EC2/Spot Fleet now supports modifying instance types and weights on the run