The Cloud Pod: A Masterclass in Cloud Architecture – Episode 56

Your co-hosts move from the atmosphere to DigitalOcean as they recap the week in Cloud on this episode of The Cloud Pod.

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.
• Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. 

This week’s highlights

Microsoft releases an ambitious plan to erase its carbon footprint.

Amazon slashed prices for two services.

Google Cloud fights for market share as connections change with Epic and Sabre.

Justin’s Adventures in Oracle Cloud Revisited

On Episode 54 we featured an investigative segment where Justin sought answers as to whether non-boot volume cross-region backups were available yet. And while that sleuthing was still an informative experience, Max Verun, a Product Manager at Oracle, has reached out to let us know that those answers were also in paragraph two of the very article we linked to. 

Thanks, Max. We’d love to have you on the show sometime.

Microsoft and DigitalOcean Make Major Reductions (But Not the Same Kind)

Microsoft has declared an ambitious plan to remove all of the carbon it has ever emitted from the atmosphere, a goal that far outstrips that of other tech giants. Currently carbon neutral, Microsoft plans to use a combination of forestation, reforestation and other carbon sequestration technologies to go carbon negative and completely remove its legacy carbon footprint.

DigitalOcean, on the other hand, is reducing its workforce by about 10 percent with a round of layoffs. Co-founder Moisey Uretsky assured the public that the move is a strategic one, and not indicative of any sort of poor financial health.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — New Features and Price Reductions

AWS announced four new features this week, starting with:

1. AWS Health organizational view, which can now aggregate health events across all accounts in your organization.
2. Perhaps as a step towards Fargate support for EFS, Amazon ECS now supports EFS filesystems in ECS task definition.
3. Over the next year, the Osaka Local Region will expand to a full AWS Region.
4. And finally, AWS Key Management Service will now allow customers to create asymmetric customer master keys.

Amazon also announced two price reductions; EKS service now costs 50 percent less per hour, and CloudEndure Highly Automated Disaster Recovery now costs a hefty 80 percent less per month per server.

Azure Accounts for Emissions

♻️ Azure released the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator this week to help companies with their own emissions goals by allowing them to track the impact of their IT infrastructure. Microsoft plans for its cloud data centers to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy within the next five years.

Google Burned by Medical Records

☁️ Google announced Premium Support this week —   a multi-tiered set of services to serve enterprise and mission critical needs of Google Cloud customers.

Epic Systems (a major medical records vendor), is warning customers it will stop working on integration with Google Cloud, opting instead to focus on Azure and AWS. The move is a blow to Google’s efforts to catch up to those cloud providers in market share. Perhaps the blow will be softened by its 10-year contract with Sabre Corp. Sabre operates a payment platform and posted $3.78 billion in revenue for its most recent fiscal year.

️ The new CIS Google Kubernetes Engine Benchmark can be found in the Security Health Analytics Dashboard for any of you serious about Kubernetes and security. For those of you serious about Anthos, you’ll be happy to see that the new “Architecting Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure with Anthos” masterclass is now available. 

Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes his first point of the year by committing to the bit and making a pun on the ANSI READ COMMITTED isolation level. Jonathan is still in the lead with two points to Justin’s one. 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Security Hub releases the ability to disable specific compliance controls
• AWS Security Hub releases integrations with 4 new partners
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EBCLI) is now open source
• AWS Glue adds new transforms (Purge, Transition and Merge) for Apache Spark applications to work with datasets in Amazon S3
• AWS Client VPN now Supports Port Configuration
• AWS Systems Manager now provides flexible reboot options for patching
• Query Volume Metrics Now Available for Amazon Route 53 Resolver Endpoints
• AWS CodePipeline Enables Stopping Pipeline Executions
• New Azure blueprint for CIS Benchmark