Your hosts have an action-packed episode in store for you on The Cloud Pod this week, and Ryan is back after surviving the wild Oregon forest.  

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.

• Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. 

 This week’s highlights

• Amazon is helping you figure out where your money is going. 
• Google isn’t wowing anyone with its AI Platform Prediction improved reliability.
• Azure has some underwhelming improvements you should read about.

General News: This Is What Happens When You Go On Vacation  

• ️ VMware, Inc. is acquiring SaltStack, Inc. to enhance its vRealize cloud management software suite. It’s interesting that this comes only a few weeks after Chef was acquired.    

Amazon Web Services: Always Comes Through For Us

• AWS launches Glue Studio, which provides a simple visual interface to compose jobs that move and transform data and run them on AWS Glue. Surprised it wasn’t just an integration with Visual Studio Code.
• AWS Backup now supports application-consistent backups of Microsoft workloads. This is not the cloud way to do it. 
• AWS Security Hub has released 14 new automated security controls for the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard. Typical Amazon — gives you a control that costs you more money.    
• ⚠️ Preview the Anomaly Detection and alerting now available in AWS Cost Management. It’s great to have these features for those weird quirky things that can happen when you’re spending money. 
• Usability improvements for AWS Management Console are now available. Some of us are super grumpy with this and others super happy, so up to you to decide! 
• AWS backtracks on plans to block old-style S3 paths. You now have some unknown time period plus a year to sort this out. You’re welcome?  

Google Cloud Platform: The Detectives On The Case

• Cloud Run for Anthos now includes an events feature allowing customers to easily build event-driven systems on Google Cloud. We’re a bit on the fence about this one.   
• ️‍♂️ GCP launches Chronicle Detect, a threat detection solution to help enterprises identify threats at speed and scale. Really interesting that Azure and Google are heavily into threat intelligence so we’re curious to see if Amazon steps up as well.  
• Google releases new enhancements for better monitoring and logging for Compute Engine VMs. If these enhancements were the default, then this would be awesome.  
• ️ Cloud Monitoring now gives zero-config, out-of-the-box visibility into Compute Engine VM fleets. 
• AI Platform Prediction with improved reliability & ML workflow integration is now generally available. We were not wowed by this. 

Azure: Welcome To Snoozeville

• Azure has announced several new Azure Infrastructure capabilities. None of us were particularly excited about this one.  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin and Ryan have joined the queue with Jonathan taking this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (13 points), Jonathan (eight points) and Ryan (four points). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Blob storage point-in-time restore now generally available
• New MERGE command for Azure Synapse Analytics
• COPY command now generally available in Azure Synapse Analytics
• Column-level encryption for Azure Synapse Analytics 
• Announcing the General Availability of Amazon Corretto 15
• Amazon Connect decreases outbound telephony rates for the second time this year in Europe  
• Amazon Aurora Increases Maximum Storage Size to 128TB
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Supports pglogical Extension  
• AWS Launch Wizard now supports SQL Server Always On deployments on Linux 
• Amazon Textract has improved accuracy of detecting currency symbols, key value pairs and checkboxes
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics strengthens end-to-end canary run debugging with X-Ray traces
• You can now queue purchases of AWS Savings Plans
• Amazon Redshift Spectrum adds support for querying open source Apache Hudi and Delta Lake