Episode 98: AWS tries the JEDI mind trick again

In its final week, re:Invent continues to deliver a slew of announcements, which are captured on The Cloud Pod this week. It came and went quickly for the team unlike Google Cloud Next, which seemed to go on forever.

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 and Microsoft are acting like children that need to be separated. 
• Infrastructure nerds are rejoicing at re:Invent.
• You can spend while you sleep with Google.

General News: Everyone’s Favorite Topic

• A heavily redacted version of AWS’s latest protest against Microsoft and the JEDI contract has been unsealed. Trump made them do it.
• U.S. Treasury and Commerce Department communications were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on security vendor SolarWinds. Go hug a security team this week. 

Amazon Web Services: The Presents Keep On Coming

re:Invent Continued

• AWS launches the VPC Reachability Analyzer to measure reachability between two endpoints without sending any packets. Anything that makes life easier is a win. 
• The re:Invent infrastructure keynote lacked announcements but gives insight into how AWS thinks about data centers. Old school infrastructure nerds, take note of this one.
• AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EMR on Elastic Kubernetes Service. EMR fans will be super happy about this. 
• AWS has released an Infrastructure Code Template generator to make it easy to start using Spot Instances. You can go straight to production now, no testing! Just kidding… Please test. 
• Amazon EBS reduces the minimum volume size of Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD Volumes by 75%. This is kind of nice!
• Amazon EC2 announces new network performance metrics for EC2 instances. Troubleshooting these is a nightmare, so this will be great.
• AWS has expanded the capability of the AWS transit Gateway for SD wan with the new AWS Transit Gateway Connect. Thank you, Jesus!!
• Amazon EMR Studio makes it easier for data scientists to build and deploy code. We’re glad to see this one.  

Redshift

• Amazon Redshift announces Automatic Table Optimization.
• Amazon Redshift introduces data sharing (preview).
• Amazon Redshift announces support for native JSON and semi-structured data processing (preview).
• ☝️ Amazon Redshift now includes Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL databases as new data sources for federated querying (Preview).
• ️ Amazon Redshift launches the ability to easily move clusters between AWS Availability Zones.
• Amazon Redshift launches RA3.xlplus nodes with managed storage.

More re:Invent News

• AWS has announced a new partnership with Grafana Labs. Nice to see this is a partnership, not AWS cannibalizing an open source vendor.  
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a new fully managed service and is 100% compatible with Prometheus. Justin narrowly missed getting a prediction point with this one.
• New AWS Systems Manager consolidates application management. This is a weird one.   
• Amazon launches AWS Fleet Manager, a new console based experience in Systems Manager. This is nice!
• ❄️ New AWS Systems Manager Change Manager allows ops engineers to track, approve and implement operational changes to their apps and infrastructure. Direct competitor to Snow? 
• Amazon launches new AWS cloudshell, with the goal of making the process of getting an AWS-enabled shell prompt simple and secure. Justin got his Christmas present early with this one.
• ‍♂️ AWS is launching a Fault injection simulator in 2021 to make it easier to discover an application’s weaknesses. We really like this one.

Google Cloud Platform: Beware

• Google is releasing minimum instances for Cloud Run, its managed serverless compute platform. We tried to figure out the cost but the calculator hadn’t been updated.
• Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight. A great cautionary tale.
• Automatically right-size Spanner instances with the new Google Autoscaler. Why is this not a feature of Spanner?
• In the spirit of the holidays, Google is using its AI technology to bake the perfect cookies. Yum!  

Azure: They All Must Be Working On JEDI

• Microsoft introduces steps to improve internet routing security. Super long blog post for this one.  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan is nipping at Jonathan’s heels and has taken this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (16.5 points), Jonathan (10 points), Ryan (nine and half points) and Jacques (one point). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Security Hub now supports bidirectional integration with ServiceNow ITSM
• Simplify EC2 provisioning and viewing cloud resources in the ServiceNow CMDB with AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow
• AWS IDE Toolkit now available for AWS Cloud9  
• Amazon QuickSight now supports Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and adds new box plot and filled map visuals
• AWS Global Accelerator launches custom routing
• Announcing Unified Search in the AWS Management Console
• New – FreeRTOS Long Term Support to Provide Years of Feature Stability
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard now supports organization-wide event aggregation
• AWS Lambda now supports self-managed Apache Kafka as an event source