On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is shocked the rest of the team managed so well without him while he was on vacation.

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

• Progress is tapping its inner Freddy Kruger after acquiring Chef.
• AWS is soothing the burns of many with its Compute Optimizer.
• Google is behind the eight ball with the launch of its healthcare API. 

General News: On The Chopping Block

• IBM is splitting itself into two public companies to focus on high-margin cloud computing. We’re not sure about this strategy so we’ll keep an eye on this one.
• Google will give up direct control of the Knative cloud open-source project. We’re glad to see this is getting closer to a resolution.
• ‍ Business application platform Progress is making job cuts at recently acquired enterprise automation technology company Chef. The cuts included part of the Chef engineering team — when you’re buying a product company, that doesn’t seem like a good play. 

Amazon Web Services: In Happier News

• Amazon S3 on Outposts expands object storage to on-premises environments. If only this had existed a year ago!   
• AWS Systems Manager now enables developers to view, author and publish Automation runbooks directly from Visual Studio Code. We like this!
• Amazon launches several new features with Redis 6 compatibility to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. These enhancements are making it well on its way to being useful on a big project.
• Amazon SageMaker leads the way in machine learning and announces up to 18% lower prices on GPU instances. That’s a huge price cut that we think is great!
• Three new security and access control features are now available in the Amazon S3 update. This is a big improvement for customer experience.  
• AWS launches a new Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool called IAMCTL. Ryan is nerding out about this. 
• AWS Compute Optimizer now analyzes additional Amazon Elastic Block Store metrics to generate enhanced Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type recommendations. A great solution to a problem that has burned us all at some point.  
• ‍♂️ Preview AWS Lambda with extensions for operational tools for monitoring, observability, security and governance. We thought for sure that PureSec would be on this list.     
• Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights, now available in preview, to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions. This is what we wanted AWS X-Ray to do but it never did.   
• Manage EC2 Spot limits from the Amazon EC2 console and the Service Quotas console. This is pretty great!
• AWS makes the open-source CloudFormation Guard compliance tool generally available. Good to have a rules-based engine! 

Google Cloud Platform: Missing Parts

• Google launches Healthcare Consent Management API to give healthcare application developers and clinical researchers a simple way to manage health data. A nice appetizer but where’s the rest?  
• ‍♀️ Google introduces HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Cloud Run, enabling faster server response times for applications. More features for Cloud Run is great but then you get the next announcement…  
• ❓ Google extends Cloud Functions to build end-to-end solutions for several key use cases. Who is even running Ruby on Rails in production these days?
• ‍ Understand production performance with the new Google Cloud Profiler history view. The application performance measurement space is hard and crowded.  

Azure: They’ve Got The Goods

• Optimize Azure workloads with the new Azure Advisor Score. This is a great place to find out what’s broken in your Azure account.  
• New GitHub Actions for Azure enables deployments to multiple Azure services. Drink the GitHub Actions Kool-Aid with us. 
• Azure Machine Learning helps customers stay ahead of challenges with new features announced at Microsoft Ignite. To code or not to code?  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin is back with a bang and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (14 points), Jonathan (eight points) and Ryan (four points). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• The no-code dream strip comic
• Amazon Textract supports customer S3 buckets
• Amazon SageMaker Processing now supports built-in Spark containers for big data processing
• Amazon MSK adds supports for Apache Kafka version 2.5.1
• Amazon MSK can now automatically expand cluster storage
• AWS CodePipeline now Supports git clone for Source Actions 
•  AWS CodePipeline now Supports GitHub Enterprise Server
• Amazon WorkDocs now supports Dark Mode on iOS
• Azure Repos adds a default branch at the org-level
• Azure Data Lake Storage static website now in preview
• Amazon EFS integrates with AWS Systems Manager to simplify management of Amazon EFS clients
• AWS DeepRacer announces new Community Races updates
• New Datadog integration with Azure offers a seamless configuration experience