Episode 97: S3 Buckets land the key to success

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team admits defeat and acknowledges they are not experts in machine learning. Joining them in that club is the rest of us.  

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.
• Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon is helpfully pointing out all your mistakes. 
• Google knows you have deep pockets and wants a piece. 
• Microsoft is really bad at keeping secrets.

General News: Jonathan Called It

• Salesforce has acquired Slack for $27.7 billion. We’re hoping Chatter will die a horrible death now. 

Amazon Web Services: Error 404 

Amazon explains the Thanksgiving Kinesis outage that occurred in North East Virginia. We feel bad for the Ops team that had to support this. 

re:Invent Continued

• Amazon adds stronger Read-After-Write consistency to S3. A really fantastic technical feat.   
• Amazon announces S3 Replication support for multiple destination buckets. Nice and simple!
• Amazon S3 Replication now has the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets. Super excited about this!
• Integrate Amazon Honeycode with popular SaaS applications, AWS services and more. It’s finally usable now. 
• Amazon announces new AWS Region is in the works for Melbourne, Australia. It will also use 100% renewable energy, which is cool.
• Fully serverless batch computing with AWS Batch Support for AWS Fargate. Batch is a weird service to begin with. 
• Amazon debuts Trainium, a custom chip for machine learning training in the cloud. We’re confused by this one.
• Amazon HealthLake stores, transforms and analyzes Health Data in the Cloud. Machine learning, while confusing, is great for the healthcare industry.  
• Amazon launches Lookout for Metrics, an anomaly detection service for monitoring business health. A very cool tool! 
• AWS Audit Manager simplifies audit preparation. There is a lot of money in auditing and this will save you money.  
• Sagemaker Announcements
  • ‍♀️ Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager simplifies operating machine learning models on Edge Devices. We didn’t know people wanted this but apparently they do.
  • Amazon SageMaker Clarify detects bias and increases the transparency of machine learning models. This is trying to solve a big issue for developers which is great.
  • More Sagemaker announcements:
    • New – Profile Your Machine Learning Training Jobs With Amazon SageMaker Debugger
    • New – Managed Data Parallelism in Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training on Large Datasets  
    • Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training Deep Learning Models With Billions of Parameters
    • New – Store, Discover, and Share Machine Learning Features with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store
    • Introducing Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, a Visual Interface to Prepare Data for Machine Learning
    • New – Amazon SageMaker Pipelines Brings DevOps Capabilities to your Machine Learning Projects
    • Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Simplifies Access to Pre-built Models and Machine Learning Solutions

Google Cloud Platform: Hello, It’s Me

• Google is acquiring backup and disaster recovery provider Actifio. A smart play!
• Google announces the general availability of Container Threat Detection. A nice feature. 
• Google launches Anthos on bare metal. Google, letting you buy the hardware and then charging you for using it.
• ❓ Google Cloud Functions now supports .NET core 3.1. We don’t have a clue about this one.  
• Forester names Google Cloud a leader in the latest Forrester Research IaaS Platform Native Security Wave. Joke’s on us — those dots are randomly placed.  
• Dataform is acquired by Google and is now free for all users. We guess this is nice.  
• ️ GCP has released a new terraform module for provisioning load balancers optimized for serverless applications. They better be building this into the service.   

Azure: Been Quiet All Year

• ♻️ Microsoft to establish its first datacenter region in Sweden. Paying for it to be sustainable doesn’t make it sustainable, Microsoft.
• Microsoft to establish a new datacenter region in Denmark. Not as sustainable as the Swedish one though. 
• Effective before Thanksgiving all Azure Premium File Tier customers got more IOPS for free. We’d love to know what the underlying reason is behind this announcement. 
• Microsoft announces cloud innovations across US Government data classifications. A not-so-secret secret.    

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The millennial basher also known as Jonathan takes this week’s point but Ryan is thrown a bone with half a point, leaving scores at Justin (16 points), Jonathan (11 points), Ryan (six and half points) and Jacques (one point).     

Other headlines mentioned:

• New – SaaS Lens in AWS Well-Architected Tool
• AWS Marketplace Now Offers Professional Service
• Managed Entitlements in AWS License Manager Streamlines License Tracking and Distribution for Customers and ISVs
• Introducing AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub
• Introducing the New AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency  
• Introducing AWS SaaS Boost
• AWS ISV Accelerate, a co-sell program for AWS Partners
• AWS Foundational Technical Review Lens now available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool  
• AWS Marketplace Announces APIs for Private Marketplace
• AWS Security Hub adds open source tool integrations with Kube-bench and Cloud Custodian
• AWS CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors
• AWS announces General Availability of Amazon GameLift Feature Update  
• Amazon S3 Bucket Keys reduce the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS)
• Announcing Amazon Elasticsearch Service support for AWS Glue Elastic Views