The Cloud Pod Faster on Azure… No Wait AWS – Episode 58

Your hosts are joined again by Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) who is filling in for Peter as we recap the week in cloud.

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

• It’s earnings season as the top dogs show their growth.
• Azure gets back in the headlines with a bold but contested study.
• Google fulfills an old TCP prediction with reports of a unified service.

Certificates of Doom Update

Amazon has given customers an extension until March 5, 2020 to rotate their SSL/TLS certificates. Previously, rebooting or manually changing a relational database service (RDS) instance would automatically switch to the new certificate authority, even if the customer didn’t have their application ready to do so.

IBM Changes Leadership

Speaking of new authorities, major changes are coming to IBM. Arvind Krishna will replace current CEO Ginni Rometty on April 6 and current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will become president. Hopefully the changes in leadership and the acquisition of Red Hat will be what IBM needs to turn around what’s been a rough decade for the tech giant.

Earnings Season

It’s that time of the year where financial analysts are breaking out the line graphs to show investors just how much their holdings are growing. Let’s see what the quarterly reports had to say this time around:

• Microsoft saw a rebound from slowing cloud growth last quarter with Azure up 62 percent, Surface up 6 percent, and LinkedIn up 24 percent.
• Google Cloud growth was strong enough for the company to brag, but still lags behind AWS, Azure and even Google’s own YouTube.
• Amazon joins the Trillion Dollar Club alongside Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft after a strong holiday season. Amazon also released their tax details to push back against accusations that it does not pay its taxes. Amazon paid about a 6 percent tax rate in 2019. For context, if Amazon was just a person living in Seattle, it would have to pay a 37 percent federal income tax.

New From AWS 

️ Amazon released a Desktop Client for its AWS Client VPN service last week. That’s cool, but we just wish it were open-sourced.

Azure Makes Bold Claims

Breaking a streak of quiet news weeks, Azure announced selective disk backup for their Azure Backup service. Previously, a virtual machine could be backed up wholesale, but you could not isolate critical disks.

The research firm GigaOM recently published a study finding that SQL servers run up to 3.4x faster and up to 87 percent less expensive on Azure VMs than on AWS EC2. AWS released its own comparisons having taken issue with several facets of the study’s design.

Microsoft Teams went down for three hours on February 3 due to an expired SSL certificate —   an embarrassing oversight that calls for some #HUGOPS.

Google Sends a Unified Message

✉️ Just as we predicted back in April, Google will unify its messaging services. Perhaps as a Slack competitor, the new service will incorporate Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Expect more details in April or May.

Oracle Crosses New Borders

Oracle launched five new regions, bringing their total to 21. Notably, Oracle is now the first cloud provider to open a region in Saudi Arabia with the opening of their location in Jeddah.

Lightning Round

⚡ With a nod to comics history, Justin takes this week’s point in the lightning round. The score is two for Justin, two for Jonathan and guest zero.

Other headlines mentioned:

• New support for Network Security Group flow logs, a feature of Azure Network Watcher
• Azure DevOps—Release and pipelines events now available in the audit logs
• Amazon Managed Cassandra Service now supports ordering clauses in CQL queries and AWS CloudTrail logging
• Hyperledger Fabric on Azure Kubernetes Service Marketplace template 
• Azure Site Recovery now supports customer-managed keys
• Azure Service Fabric 7.0 Second Refresh Release
• Amazon Redshift supports per second billing
• Amazon Polly Launches Brand Voice
• AWS Storage Gateway is now available on Linux KVM hypervisor
• Amazon Translate is now FedRAMP compliant
• AWS RoboMaker supports sudo access inside robot and simulation applications at runtime

Remember to go and follow @ryron01 and DM @thecloudpod1 to request your free The Cloud Pod sticker!