All this news and more, this week on The Cloud Pod! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• The Cloud Pod takes a dip in the Workspaces Pool
• The Cloud Pod Lineage view is suspect
• A Gitlab, A BitBucket, and a Blueprint build a Workspaces Pool
• AWS goes for a Jamba Juice 
• Google Cloud Autokey does exactly what it sounds like
• Oracle LLM Heatwaves send us to the Amazon Workspace Pool
• Jonathan is unimpressed with this weeks show
• ️Highway to the DataZone 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat! 

General News

01:03 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2024: Cloud Maturity is Elusive but Valuable

• Hashicorp just released the results of its State of Cloud Survey, and guess what? Cloud maturity is pretty elusive. Weird…
•  Hashicorp finds that 8% of organizations qualify as Highly Mature, this results that the biggest benefits are cloud is only going to a small group of truly mature organizations. 
  • Justin wonders if this is part of the cloud repatriation push? 
  • Are other listeners seeing some of this, especially on places like LinkedIn? We’d love to hear. 
• Trailblazers are finding faster development speed, lower costs and reduced risks while others continue to struggle to create haves and have nots with enterprises getting different business outcomes. 
• Hashicorp collected responses from almost 1,200 technology practitioners and decision makers at organizations with more than 1000 employees. 
• 66% of respondents report that they have increased cloud spending in the last year, but 91% believe they are wasting money in the cloud, and 64% are experiencing a shortage of skilled staff.
• 45% of low maturity organizations are still waiting for their cloud strategy to pay off!
• One of the key takeaways from the survey is that the path to cloud maturity increasingly relies on platform teams to help automate and systemize cloud operations. 
  • However, only half the respondents 42% say they rely on centralized platform teams to standardize cloud operations throughout their organization. 
• Platform teams help manage cloud, but also help address the skills shortage that has long plagued enterprise cloud adoption.
• If only they’d pay for training.

03:22 Jonathan – “The skill shortage thing really bugs me sometimes because there are plenty of skilled workers around and the reccs aren’t open for them. So I don’t think there aren’t qualified staff… yeah, it’s not a shortage because of the lack of people. It’s a shortage because we’re not prepared to spend the money on the people.”

08:24 Terraform AWS provider tops 3 billion downloads

• Hashicorp’s Terraform AWS provider has just celebrated its 10 year anniversary, and has now surpassed three billion downloads.  
• Cool. 
• If only 3 billion people were actually upscaled and knowledgeable in Terraform, they wouldn’t be having a problem with software maturity in the cloud. 

08:40 Ryan – “To be fair, about a billion of those downloads are me trying to figure out which version I need. Do I switch between Brew Link or some other tool to trick my operating system into doing the right thing?”

AI Is Going Great – Or, How ML Makes All It’s Money

09:13 Announcing the General Availability of Databricks Assistant and AI-Generated Comments

• • Databricks is announcing the general availability of Databricks Assistant and AI-Generated Comments on all cloud platforms. 
  • Databricks is making these features available at no additional cost for all of their customers. 
  • Databricks assistant was built to be the best AI-Powered productivity tool for enterprise data.  
    • The assistant is one of the fastest growing Databricks features ever, with over 150,000 users leveraging it every month to generate code, utilizing Databricks Assistant Autocomplete.
    • It will also troubleshoot errors, create visualizations and dashboards. 
  • A tool like an assistant needs access to high-quality metadata in order to produce the best results.  
  • The other feature launching in GA is AI-Generated comments in Unity Catalog. This feature leverages generative AI to provide relevant table descriptions and column comments. Since launching the feature Databricks says 80% of table metadata updates are AI-Assisted. 
  • This is one of the best ways to improve assistant answers. Providing descriptive comments for tables and columns greatly improved the accuracy of responses in their benchmarks. 
• “The introduction of the Databricks Assistant has made it easier for our user base to improve their skill set. By seamlessly integrating into our development cycles, it has significantly enhanced productivity for our expert data scientists, engineers, and analysts. Users can comprehend, generate, optimize, and troubleshoot code faster than ever before. With the continuous growth of the Databricks ecosystem and the ongoing advancements of the Databricks Assistant, next-level tools are more accessible.”  — Nicholas Heier, Senior Manager, General Motors

AWS

12:35 Amazon WorkSpaces Pools: Cost-effective, non-persistent virtual desktops

• You can now create a pool of non-persistent virtual desktops using Amazon Workspaces and share them across a group of users. 
• As the desktop administrator you manage a portfolio of persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops using one GUI, command line or set of API powered tools.  Users access the desktops via browser, client app or a thin client device. 
• Workspaces pools has the following features:

Each user gets the same applications and the same experience. When they login they always get a fresh workspace thats based on the latest configuration for the pool, centrally managed by their administrator. 

If you enable application setting persistence for the pool, users can configure certain applications settings such as browser favorites, plugins and UI customizations to persist. You can also access persistent files or object storage external to the desktop. 

• This is a great use case for remote workers, tas workers, contact center workers or students. 
• The pool can be configured to accommodate the size and working hours of your user base, and you can join the pool to your organization’s domain and AD. 
• Pricing for a windows Desktop:

Persistent: 2 VCPU, 8GB of memory, 45.00 per month 

Pool: $148 dollars for 720 hours.  

More reasonable: 20 days a month for 8 hours a day.  $36.19

Make sure you scale it, and make sure you do your maths. 

14:03 Jonathan – “There was a time when the API for workspaces was absolutely terrible or missing. So the fact that they’ve called it out in the blog post is good news.”

14:19 Amazon WorkSpaces introduces support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 

• In addition, AWS now supports Red Hat Enterprise LInux on Workspaces Personal. This includes built-in security features that help organizations run virtual desktops securely, while increasing agility and reducing costs. 
• Interested in Pricing? You can find that info here. 

17:54 Introducing end-to-end data lineage (preview) visualization in Amazon DataZone

• Amazon Datazone is a management service that catalogs, discovers, analyzes, shares and governs data between your organization’s data producers and consumers. Engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts, and business users can easily access data throughout your organization using a unified data portal. 
• Now in preview, a new API-driven and OpenLineage-compatible data lineage capability will provide an end-to-end view of data movement over time. 
• It helps users visualize and understand data provenance, trace change management, conduct root cause analysis when a data error is reported and prepare for questions on data movement from source to target. 
• Reading through this press release they just keep using the same words, but we’re not sure the author fully understands what this is either. 
• Except maybe Jonathan. He understands everything. 
• Data lineage can reduce the time spent mapping a data asset and its relationships, troubleshooting and developing pipelines and asserting data governance practices. 
• If you’re in the DataZone, good luck to you. 

19:16 Jonathan – “It’s just a chain of custody for data instead of a physical object. So you kind of attach metadata to the data to say where it came from. And every time you do something to it, you record in a log that you did something to it, especially in data science, where we’re enriching things or transforming things or cleaning out some types of records or whatever. It’s just a way of keeping track of who’s changed what since it came from where it came from. If stuff goes wrong in the future, you know where it went wrong.”

20:35 Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports GitLab and Bitbucket repositories, with blueprints and Amazon Q feature development

• Amazon is announcing they are furthering their integration between CodeCatalyst with Gitlab and Bitbucket, in addition to github. 
• Using the Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket repositories extension for CodeCatalyst simplifies managing your development workflow.  
  • The extension allows you to view and manage external repositories directly within CodeCatalyst. 
• In addition to the added support you can now create a CodeCatalyst project directly in github, Gitlab or bitbucket cloud from a blueprint  by adding the blueprint to an existing code base in the repository you can speed up your development.  
  • These pre-built blueprint templates provide a source repo, sample code, CI/CD workflow and integrated issue tracking to get you started quickly.  

22:16 Ryan – “Yeah, standardization in general is fantastic for this. And it’s so much easier to navigate lots of many, many separate little repos when you know how they’re organized, you know what’s supposed to be where. And it really removes a lot of the need for as much documentation because of that too. And what documentation you do need, you can include in the blueprint or at least the templates.”

23:22 AI21 Labs’ Jamba-Instruct model now available in Amazon Bedrock

• Jamba-Instruct, a powerful instruction-following large language model, is now available on Bedrock. 
• Fine-tuned to instruction follow and built for reliable commercial use, Jamba-Instruct can engage in open-ended dialogue, understanding context and subtext, and complete a wide variety of tasks based on natural language instructions. 
• Jamba instruct has a 256k context window, and has the capability to ingest the equivalent of a 800 page novel or an entire company’s financial filings for a given fiscal year. 
  • This large context window allows Jamba-Instruct to answer questions and produce summaries that are grounded in the provided inputs, eliminating the need for manual segmentation of documents in order to fit smaller context windows. 
• With strong reasoning and analysis capabilities, Jamba-Instruct can break down complex problems, gather relevant information and provide structured outputs. It is ideal for enterprise use cases such as enabling Q&A on call transcripts, summarizing key points from a document, building chatbots and more.  

24:45 Jonathan – “You can get Jamba for free, I think, from Hugging Face. It’s a good model though, and it’s a lot more efficient. It’s significantly more efficient than other LLMs that are around. It uses a hybrid algorithm, hybrid model. So you’ve got the kind of traditional LLM generator, and then you’ve got this new thing called Mamba, which is like a selective attention thing.”

27:34 Optimizing Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for speed and scale

• Jeff Barr has a great write up on the recent speed and scale improvements to SQS.  
• Amazon Simple Queue Service is one of the oldest services, launched in 2006, and is a fundamental building block for microservices, distributed systems and serverless applications with processing over 100M messages per second at peak times. 
• While it’s been tremendously successful there are always opportunities to improve and Jeff wants to share some of the recent things they did to reduce latency, increase fleet capacity, reduce power consumption and mitigate an approaching scalability cliff.
• Like many services, SQS is implemented using a collection of internal microservices. For this article Jeff focuses on the Customer Front-End which accepts, authenticates, and authorizes API calls such as CreateQueue and SendMessage, which are in turn routed to the storage backend.  
• The backend microservice is responsible for persisting messages sent to standard (non-fifo) queues. Using a cell-based model, each cluster in the cell contains multiple hosts, each customer queue is assigned to one or more clusters, and each cluster is responsible for a multitude of queues. 
• The original implementation used a connection per request between the front and back end. Each front end had to connect to multiple backend hosts, forcing the use of a connection pool and also risking reaching an ultimate, hard-wired limit on the number of open connections. While you could throw hardware at the problem and scale out, it’s not always the best way, it just moves the moment of truth (scalability cliff) into the future and does not make efficient use of resources. 
• After considering several solutions, the SQS team invented a new, proprietary binary framing protocol between the customer front-end and storage back-end. The protocol multiplexes multiple requests and responses across a single connection, using 128-bit IDs and checksumming to prevent crosstalk.  
  • Server side encryption provides an additional layer of protection against unauthorized access to queue data. 
• The new protocol was put into production earlier this year, and has processed 744.9 trillion requests as of the blog post.  The scalability cliff has been eliminated and they’re looking to see if they can put the protocol to work in other ways. 
• Overall the performance improvement has reduced dataplane latency by 11% on average, and by 17.4% at the P90 mark.  
• Customers benefit from this too, with messages sent by SNS now spending 10% less time “inside” before being delivered.  In addition, the current fleet can now handle 17.8% more requests than before.  

31:25 Justin – “I was thinking about the, you know, the fact that using 128 bit ID to check some, to rent the cross talk and to basically identify the multiplex streams going across the packet. And I was just thinking about how many, how many combinations there are in 64 bit IP space. And then like thinking about what that means at 128 bit ID, I was like, wow, that’s some processing.”

GCP

32:55  Making Vertex AI the most enterprise-ready generative AI platform

• Google says the use of AI has been impressive, and customers like UberEats, ipsos, Jasper, Shutterstock and others are accelerating their gen AI use cases into production with google cloud. 
• Some of the examples of innovations Google has seen since the release of Gemini 1.5 Pro and multi-modal use cases
  • A fast food retailer is using Gemini to analyze video footage from its stores to identify peak traffic periods and to optimize store layouts for improved customer experiences. The retailer also plans to combine this video analysis with sales data to better understand the factors that drive efficient and successful service.
  • A financial institution is processing scanned images of identification with submitted data forms, leveraging Gemini’s multimodality to automatically (and quickly) process both images and text to compare information for accuracy and help customers more conveniently open and access accounts. 
  • A sports company is leveraging Gemini to analyze a player’s swing. By overlaying Gemini’s insights into their existing application, the AI’s analysis enhances the functionality of their swing analysis tool.
  • An insurance company can now analyze dashcam footage of accidents using Gemini to better understand and describe scenarios. This analysis can help calculate risk scores and even provide personalized driving tips based on observed behaviors.
  • An advertising and marketing services company is revolutionizing video description solutions by developing real-time streaming capabilities for both description and narration. This innovation streamlines video creation, increases efficiency, and allows for personalized content.
• With all of this Google is working to make Vertex the most enterprise-ready generative AI platform and they have several new capabilities they want to point out.
• Gemini 1.5 Flash combines low latency, competitive pricing and their groundbreaking 1 million-token context window, making it an excellent option for a wide variety of use cases at scale. 
• Gemini 1.5 Pro now has a context window of up to 2 million tokens. 
• Imagen 3: gives you faster image generation and superior prompt comprehension.
• Plus the expansion of the available models to include Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
• New context caching for Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash allows you to enable in public preview. 
• As context length increases, it can be expensive and slow to get responses in long-context applications, making it difficult to deploy in production. With vertex AI context caching customers significantly reduce input costs by 75% leveraging cache data of frequently used context. 
  • Google is the only provider to offer a context caching API today. 
• General Available of Provisioned throughput lets customers responsibly scale their usage of Google’s first party models, providing assurances for capacity and price. 
• Grounding with Google search announced at Next.
• Grounding with High-fidelity, announced in experimental preview, is a purpose-built to support such grounding uses cases from financial services, healthcare, insurance that can be sourced only from the provided context, not the models world knowledge. 
• Data residency requirements can now be met for 23 countries with at-rest guarantees. 

37:36 Justin – “I think about the coffee use case, right? So the retail point of sale gives you details like, hey, the coffee was sold to Ryan, but then when they gave it to him and it was made wrong and they had to then go remake it, like that’s not that the POS typically doesn’t capture where potentially the video stuff can do that. So you could, there’s all kinds of interesting use cases of how you can start to improve churn in your product margin. You can start helping for training baristas like Hey This barista made 12 coffees today that had to get remade. You know, there’s something wrong. Do we need to retrain them on something? So, it’s maybe a little nanny state -ish, but I also could see how some of these things could benefit some organizations that need to be very cost effective.”

39:58 New Cloud KMS Autokey can help encrypt your resources quickly and efficiently

• Encryption is a fundamental control for data security, sovereignty and privacy in the cloud. 
• While google cloud providers default encryption for customer data at rest, many organizations want greater control over their encryption keys that control access to their data. 
• CMEK – or Customer-Managed Encryption Keys – can help you by providing flexibility in cryptographic key creation, rotation, usage logging and storage.  
• While CMEK provides the additional control that many organizations need, using it requires manual processes that require time and effort to ensure the desired controls and configurations are implemented. 
• To help make CMEK configurations more efficient, Google is announcing the launch of KMS Autokey in preview. Cloud KMS Auto Key automates key control operations for CMEK and incorporates recommended best practices that can significantly reduce the toil associated with managing your own encryption keys, which can help developers complete their projects faster. 
• Cloud KMS autokey eliminates the manual effort in key creation, Keyrings and Keys are generated automatically during resource creation, and the necessary IAM roles for encryption and decryption operations are assigned at the same time.  
• Autokey also simplifies key selection by automatically choosing the appropriate key type for each resource, reducing complexity and manual effort. 
• When using the Cloud KMS Autokey, you accomplish three vital goals:
  • Ensuring consistent practices
  • Creating granular encryption keys
  • Increasing your productivity

41:16 Ryan – “Implementation will be key on this one, right? Cause it’s, it’s the difference between, they’ve created a wizard that creates KMS keys or they’ve really, you know, taken stuff, manual toil that, you know, this is probably not the biggest problem, right? But also it just reduces it. And, you know, and also it’s from my perspective, having worked with keys for a long time, I might be more familiar with these practices where someone who’s just learning about these, like it’s great way to kind of learn how to manage these things when it’s sort of automated as part of the backend.”

43:20 Google Cloud expands grounding capabilities on Vertex AI

• Vertex AI Agent Builder was introduced in April, and there are several new capabilities to help you build more capable agents and apps
  • Grounding with Google Search is now Generally Available, with dynamic retrieval, a new capability to help balance quality with cost efficiently by intelligently selecting when to use Google search results and when to use the models training data
  • Grounding with High-Fidelity mode for grounded generation with reduced hallucinations. 
  • Grounding with third party datasets is coming in Q3, these capabilities will help customers build AI agents and applications that offer accurate and helpful responses. They are working with providers like Moody’s, MSCI, Thomson Reuters and Zoominfo. 
  • Expanding Vector search, which provides embeddings-based RAG, now offers hybrid search in public preview.  

44:12 Justin – “Wouldn’t it be nice to talk about like a new storage thing or anything but AI?”

45:12 Google Cloud Marketplace now lets customers buy ISV solutions from channel partners

• Google is now allowing Marketplace Channel Private Offers, which enables channel partners to maintain their relationships with customers as partner of choice.  
• This comprehensive program allows customers, ISV Partners and channel partners to efficiently transact private offers via channel-partner-initiated sales of third party solutions listed on the google cloud marketplace.  
• This builds on the capabilities introduced last year, allowing ISV partners on the Google Cloud Marketplace to extend discounts to select resellers. 

46:07 Ryan – “So it’s like, I still want to pay you, but I also want that to count against my cloud commit.

47:25 Gemma 2 is now available to researchers and developers

• Google is releasing Gemma 2 to researchers and developers globally. 
• Available in both 9 billion and 27 billion parameter sizes, Gemma 2 is higher-performing and more efficient at inference than the first generation, with significant safety advancements builts in.
  •  In fact, at 27B, it offers competitive alternatives to models more than twice its size, delivering the kind of performance that was only possible with proprietary models as recently as December. And that’s now achievable on a Single NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU or TPU host, significantly reducing deployment costs. 
• Gemma 2 was built on a redesigned architecture, engineered for both exceptional performance and inference efficiency. Here is what makes it stand out:’
  • Outsized Performance: at 27B, Gemma 2 delivers the best performance for its size class, and even offers a competitive alternative to models more than twice its size. 
  • Unmatched efficiency and cost savings: The 27B gemma 2 model is designed to run inference efficiently at full precision on a single Google Cloud TPU, Nvidia A100 80GB Tensor Core GPU or Nvidia H100 tensor core GPU, significantly reducing costs while maintaining high performance. (yeah it runs real slow on Justin’s M1 macbook… )
  • Blazing fast inference across hardware: Gemma 2 is optimized to run at incredible speed across a range of hardware, from gaming laptops and high-end desktops to cloud-based setups. 
  • Academic researchers can apply to the Gemma 2 Academic Research Program in order to receive Gemma 2 credits, and new Google Cloud users may be eligible for up to $300 in credits. 

49:39 Announcing expanded Sensitive Data Protection for Cloud Storage

• Google is announcing Sensitive Data Protection discovery service now supports cloud storage, in addition to previously supported BigQuery, BigLake and Cloud SQL.  
• SDP discovery now supports the most common services used by their customers to store data on google cloud. 
• Sensitive data protection discovery provides continuous data monitoring to identify where sensitive data resides, in order to help manage security, privacy and compliance risks.  

50:15 Ryan – “Wow! I just, yeah, I’ve always just assumed that this was available. In fact, like, you know, it’s recently been in talks trying to use this. And so glad they announced this. Yeah, this would have been terrible.”

50:37 Capacity Planner now displays GPU usage and forecasts of the GPU’s in your Google Cloud project or organization. 

• There wasn’t a whole blog post about this, just a little announcement, but essentially there’s a Capacity Planner update. 
• It now displays GPU usage, and forecasts of your GPU usage. 
• And yes, the purpose of this is to get people to buy reservations. 

Azure

51:19 How hollow core fiber is accelerating AI

• So, let us first assure you that your RSS feeds aren’t broken – there’s been no new blog posts from Azure in 3 weeks, but, in our ongoing commitment to you – our listener – we dug until we found SOMETHING to present.
• And yes… we are talking about Fiber Optics. But also somehow AI? 
• Microsoft is dedicated to working with the newest and greatest technology to power Scientific breakthroughs and AI solutions. One of these was highlighted at Ignite in November and that was Hollow Core Fiber, an innovative optical fiber that is set to optimize Azure’s global cloud infrastructure, offering superior network quality, improved latency and secure data transmission. 
• HCF was developed to meet the heavy demands of workloads like AI and improve global latency and connectivity. (I’m pretty sure AI was not at the forethought, and this is just MS just sprinkling everything with a little AI)
• HCF uses a proprietary design where light propagates in an air core, which has significant advantages over fiber built with a solid core of glass. An interesting piece here is that the HCF structure has nested tubes which help reduce any unwanted light leakage and keep the light going in a straight path through the core. 
• Light travels faster through air than glass, HCF is 47% faster than standard Silica glass, delivering an increased overall speed and lower latency.  It also has a higher bandwidth per fiber.  
• Honestly, we’re just glad to see advancements in Fiber. 
  • The AI tack on…ehhhhh. 

OCI

54:46 Oracle Announces Industry First In-Database LLMs and an Automated In-Database Vector Store with HeatWave GenAI

• • Oracle is announcing the GA of HeatWave GenAI, which includes the industry’s first in-database large language models (LLMs), an automated in-database vector store, scale-out vector processing, and the ability to have contextual conversations in natural language informed by unstructured content. 
  • These new capabilities enable customers to bring the power of generative AI to their enterprise data without requiring AI expertise or having to move data to a separate vector database. 
  • Heatwave Gen AI is available immediately in all Oracle Cloud regions, OCI dedicated regions and across clouds at no extra cost to HeatWave Customers. 

• “HeatWave’s stunning pace of innovation continues with the addition of HeatWave GenAI to existing built-in HeatWave capabilities: HeatWave Lakehouse, HeatWave Autopilot, HeatWave AutoML, and HeatWave MySQL,” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle. “Today’s integrated and automated AI enhancements allow developers to build rich generative AI applications faster, without requiring AI expertise or moving data. Users now have an intuitive way to interact with their enterprise data and rapidly get the accurate answers they need for their businesses.” 

• New features include:
  • In-database LLMs 
    • Simplify the development of generative AI applications at a lower cost. Customers can benefit from generative AI without the complexity of external LLM selection and integration, and without worrying about the availability of LLMs in various cloud providers’ data centers. 
  • Automated In-database Vector Store
    • Enables customers to use generative AI with their business documents without moving data to a separate vector database and without AI expertise. All the steps to create a vector store and vector embeddings are automated and executed inside the database, including discovering the documents in the object storage, parsing them, generating embeddings in a highly parallel and optimized way, inserting them into the vector store making HeatWave Vector Store efficient and easy to use. 
  • Scale-out vector processing
    • Delivers very fast semantic search results without any loss of accuracy. HeatWave supports a new, native VECTOR data type and an optimized implementation of the distance function, enabling customers to perform semantic queries with standard SQL. in-memory hybrid columnar representation and the scale-out architecture of HeatWave enable vector processing to execute at near-memory bandwidth and parallelize across up to 512 HeatWave nodes. 
  • heatwave Chat
    • Visual code plug-in for MySQL shell which providers a graphical interface for HeatWave GenAI and enables developers to ask questions in natural language or SQL. The integrated lakehouse Navigator enables users to select files from object storage and create a vector store. Users can search across the entire database or restrict the search to a folder. 

56:43 Jonathan – “It’s like copilot. It’s our copilot, isn’t it?”

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud! Visit  our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloud Pod

Titles we almost went with this week:

• The Cloud Pod Isn’t a Basic Bitch
• New AWS Data Solutions Framework – or – How You Accidentally Spent $100k’s
• A PSA on Shared VPCs in AWS
• ☁️Amazon Doesn’t Even Pay Attention to Climate When it’s on a Building
• Vector Search I Hardly Know Her 
• Google Migs are Less Fun than Russian Migs
  AI Can Now Attack Us; Who Didn’t See That Coming
• ️Who is Surprised That AWS is Using More Power Than the Rest of the State of Oregon
• Spend all the Dinero in Spain

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. 

AI is Going Great (or how ML Makes all Its Money)

01:24 Disrupting malicious uses of AI by state-affiliated threat actors

• In this week’s chapter of AI nightmares, ChatGPT tells us how they are blocking the usage of AI by state-affiliated threat actors. Awesome; things went from bad to worse in one week. Cool. Cool cool cool. 
• In partnership with Microsoft Threat Intelligence, they have disrupted five state-affiliated actors that sought to use their AI service in support of malicious cyber activities
• These actors generally sought to use OpenAI services for querying open-source information, translating, finding coding errors, and running basic coding tasks. 
  • Charcoal Typhoon (China affiliated) researched various companies and cybersecurity tools, debugged code and generated scripts, and created content likely for use in phishing campaigns.
  • Salmon Typhoon (China affiliated) translated technical papers, retrieved publicly available information on multiple intelligence agencies and regional threat actors, assisted with coding, and researched common ways processes could be hidden on a system.
  • Crimson Sandstorm (Iran affiliated) used OpenAI services for scripting support related to app and web development, generating content likely for spear-phishing campaigns, and researching common ways malware could evade detection.
  • Emerald Sleet (North Korea affiliated) identified experts and organizations focused on defense issues in the Asia-Pacific region, to understand publicly available vulnerabilities, and used OpenAI services for help with basic scripting tasks, and drafting content that could be used in phishing campaigns.
  • Forest Blizzard (Russia-affiliated) primarily for performing research on open-source data into satellite communication protocols and radar imaging technology, as well as for support with scripting tasks. 
• OpenAI says the capabilities of the current models are limited, they believe it’s important to stay ahead of significant and evolving threats. 
• To continue making sure their platform is used for good they have a multi-pronged approach:
  • Monitoring and Disrupting malicious state affiliated actors
  • Working together with the AI ecosystem
  • Iterating on Safety mitigations
  • Public Transparency 

03:59  Ryan – “I do like that all these state-sponsored actors, they’re just like us, asking basic scripting questions.”

AWS

06:46 Announcing the Data Solutions Framework on AWS

• AWS is announcing the release of Data Solutions Framework on AWS (DSF), an opinionated open source framework that accelerates building data solutions on AWS.  
  • It can take days or weeks to build end-to-end solutions on AWS with infrastructure as code (IaC) and following best practices, but with DSF it takes hours and you can focus on your use case. Cool!
• DSF is built using the CDK to package infrastructure components into L3 CDK constructs atop AWS services.  
• L3 constructs are opinionated implementations of common technical patterns, and generally create multiple resources that are configured to work with each other. 
• One of the constructs creates a complete data lake storage solution with three different S3 buckets, encryption, data lifecycle policies, and more.  
  • This means that you can create a data lake in your CDK application with just a few lines of code, and be sure it follows best practices and is thoroughly tested.  
• DSF is available in TypeScript and Python packages through npm and PyPi. 
• Some of the things DSF will set up as a data engineer you get access to Spark EMR tooling, DataLakeStorage and DataLakeCatalog. 
• The tooling leverages codecommit, codepipeline, codebuild, S3, KMS, Spark EMR Serverless, Cloudformation and Glue Data Catalogs.

17:43   Ryan – “…none of the things in this are new, but it’s the packaging of it all together, where you just sort of – with a few simple lines of SDK code – really have the full infrastructure for a full DataLake. And so, it’s super cool, because this is always what, as a customer, you’re sort of wanting, like give me the easy button.”

10:25 API Gateway now supports TLS 1.3 

• API Gateway finally supports TLS 1.3 on its regional REST, HTTP and WebSocket endpoints.  TLS 1.3 on APIGW works by offloading encryption and decryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to API Gateway. 
• TLS 1.3 optimizes for performance and security through the use of one round trip TLS handshake, while exclusively supporting ciphers that offer perfect forward secrecy.  

10:45   Justin- “I assume this is also a prerequisite for them to be able to support mutual TLS on API Gateway, which would be probably the last big feature I think they’re missing on the API Gateway.”

11:36   Matthew – “…the one piece of it I don’t like is that they didn’t do it, which makes sense across the board on all the different flavors of API gateway, but that’s because CloudFront would need to actually handle 1.3 also. So I get why they’re slowly rolling it out, but you know, just doing a regional means someone’s going to go in there and try to do it on global and not understand why. And then you’re going to go bang your head on the wall until you really sit down and figure out, oh yeah, this is actually a CloudFront API gateway under the hood.”

12:40 Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring protects clusters running in shared VPC

• GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring, now protects workloads running in shared VPCs across all supported compute services.
• VPC sharing allows multiple AWS accounts to create their application resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, into shared, centrally-managed VPCs.  
• Customers use shared VPCs to simplify network management across different accounts in the organization, providing cost benefits and reduced operational overhead with fewer VPCs to manage. 
• Its at this point that Justin, Ryan, and Matthew would like to point out that we **really discourage** the use of shared VPCs, and warn there be “SHARP EDGES THAT WILL CUT YOU DOWN THIS PATH.”

13:57   Ryan – “I mean, even I’m glad they’re fixing this with GuardDuty. I hope that they’re not implementing too much complexity on the backend, making it either very complicated to run or changing the results. But like, today I learned that previously you couldn’t run GuardDuty and inspect those workloads, right? And so I’m sure that GuardDuty is one of many.”

18:18 One of Oregon’s smallest utilities is suddenly among the state’s biggest polluters. Why? Amazon data centers 

• Amazon needs to look really hard at their Climate Pledge Arena to remember that you’re supposed to be making your data centers sustainable! Right? Did we just imagine that? 
• The Oregonian has a report that one of Oregon’s smallest utilities is now one of the state’s biggest polluters, and it’s all because of Amazon’s data centers. 
• This isn’t a recent development per the report; the increases started in 2018, and by 2020 its carbon emissions had doubled and in 2021 doubled again.
• The Umatilla Electric Cooperative is responsible for 1.8 million tons of carbon emissions annually, even though it only has 16,000 customers.  
  • It is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses among all Oregon utilities.
• Amazon capitalized on hundreds of millions of local tax breaks to subsidize multiple datacenters in the cities of Boardman and Hermiston, areas where the regional power grid has little access to renewable energy. Super sustainable, right? 
• Oregon is many years away from expanding its transmission capacity, and with Amazon planning at least 10 more data centers in the region, eastern Oregon’s carbon footprint will only get worse. ULTRA sustainable. 
• Both Amazon and Umatilla Electric say they’re committed to fighting climate change and to finding clean energy to power the data centers. 
  • In fact just this month Amazon announced a deal to start buying renewable power from a wind farm in neighboring Gilliam County… but it only represents 4% of their need. 
• Umatila used to rely on renewable hydropower from federal dams to meet its modest energy needs.  
  • As federal hydropower had already been largely allocated to Umatillas electric existing market, they have had to buy the power on the open market and nearly all available power to buy comes from fossil fuel power plants
• Amazon isn’t the only data center in Oregon that is drawing a tremendous amount of power; joining them is Apple, Facebook, Google and even X, which run large data centers in Prineville, The Dalles and Hillsboro.
• The Bonneville Power Administration estimates that data center electricity use in Oregon and Washington will more than double by 2041, requiring power equivalent to a third of all homes in the two states. 
• Amazon is committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, but when Oregon lawmakers considered a bill to make datacenters subject to the state’s clean energy rules, Amazon mounted a furious lobbying campaign to kill it. Weird, huh? 
• Amazon is supporting legislation to support offshore wind power, battery storage and clean energy incentives. 
• But those efforts are not enough when the transmission infrastructure isn’t big enough to address all that power. 

22:13   Matthew – “There was a podcast I listened to at one point where saying there’s a lot of these green initiatives. Everybody wants to do it. The problem comes down to the way all this works is like it has to come down to like transmission lines. And like, if you say, I’m going to build a wind farm over here, you got to pay for all the infrastructure after that to trans to do it. So you end up like, Hey, this 50,000, this hundred thousand dollar project now, it costs you a million dollars. You got to redo it. So like, it almost feels like we have to look at the way we kind of handle our electrical grid to support these. So a simple wind farm over here doesn’t end up costing billions of dollars.”

GCP

23:43  Google Cloud expands access to Gemini models for Vertex AI customers

• Gemini has been moving at a blazing pace since it was announced in December. 
• Now Gemini 1.0 Pro and Ultra are available to you via Vertex, as well as the first Gemini 1.5 model has been released for early testing in a private preview on Vertex. 
• Gemini 1.5 pro is a mid-size multi-modal model optimized for scaling across a wide-range of tasks, and performs at a similar level to 1.0 ultra, their largest model to date.  
  • 1.5 pro introduced a new breakthrough experimental feature in long-context understanding –the longest context window of any large-scale foundational model yet.  
• Apps can now run up to 1 million tokens in production. 
  • This means 1.5 pro can process vast amounts of information in 1 go, including 1 hour of video, 11 hours of audio, and codebases with over 30,000 lines of code or over 700,000 words.
• Larger context models allow you to reference more information, grasp narrative flow, maintain coherence over longer passages and generate more contextually rich responses. Some use cases:
  • Accurately analyze an entire code library in a single prompt without the need to fine-tune the model, including understanding and reasoning over small details that a developer might easily miss, such as errors, inefficiencies and inconsistencies in code.
  • Reason across very long documents, from comparing details across contracts to synthesizing and analyzing themes and opinions across analyst reports, research studies  or even a series of books. 
  • Analyze and compare content across hours of video, such as finding specific details in sports footage or getting caught up on detailed information from video meeting summaries that support precise question-answers. 
  • Enable chatbots to hold long conversations without forgetting details, even over complex tasks or many follow-up interactions
  • Enable hyper-personalized experiences by pulling relevant user information into the prompt without the complexity of fine-tuning a model. 
• Vertex will allow you to customize your models, augment the gemini models via Grounding, and manage and scale gemini in production.  
• You can also use Gemini to build search and conversational agents via Vertex AI search and AI Conversation. 

25:29   Ryan – “This is moving way too fast for me. Like, Gemini 1.0 Pro used something like 32,000 tokens, right? Or maxed out at that? I can’t. I think that’s it. And now they’re scaling up to a million, like a week later, like it feels like. Like it’s crazy. You’re going to be able to run this against so many things.”

27:13 Feel the Next ‘24 love: Full session library is now live

• The session catalog for Next is live… which you might say “Next.. Isn’t that months away… NO IT ISN’T!! It’s April 9th – 11th! 
• We’re annoyed that we can’t at least flag these sessions as interesting as registration has yet to open for them, but some that jumped out at us as we clicked through the tracks:
  • Build an Internal Developer Platform on GKE Enterprise- OPS304
  • Build Telemetry Pipelines for cloud Operations with OpenTelemetry – DEV233
  • Distributed techniques for large language models – OPS 213
  • A guide for enterprises: how to implement generative AI applications: AIML145
  • AI and Modernization on your terms: From edge to sovereign to cross-cloud SPTL204
  • Goodbye, deployment headaches: Cloud Deploy and Vertex AI unite
  • Cloud compromises: Lessons learned from Mandiant investigations in 2023
  • Preventing data exfiltration with Google Cloud’s built-in controls – SEC304
  • Non-relational databases design patterns: How Shopify leverages them to power their business – DBS300
• Little tidbit… The AI and ML track has 183 results… There are only 43 advanced technical sessions. Everything else is much less.

33:21 Introducing vector search in BigQuery       

• With the new advanced AI and ML technologies revolutionizing the way organizations use their data, offering new opportunities to unlock your potential. Google is announcing the public preview of Vector Search in BQ, which enables vector similarity search on BigQuery data. 
• This functionality, commonly referred to as approximate nearest-neighbor search, is key to empowering numerous new data and AI use cases such as semantic search, similarity detection and retrieval augmented generation with a LLM.
• Vector search is often performed on high-dimensional numeric vectors, aka embeddings, which incorporate a semantic representation for an entity and can be generated from numerous sources, including text, image or video.  
• BigQuery vector search relies on an index to optimize the lookups and distance computations required to identify closely matching embeddings. 
• Couple of use cases of this type of solution:
  • Given a new (batch of) support case(s), find ten closely-related previous cases, and pass them to an LLM as context to summarize and propose resolution suggestions.
  • Given an audit log entry, find the most closely matching entries in the past 30 days.
  • Given a picture, find the most closely-related images in the customer’s BigQuery object table, and pass them to a model to generate captions.

35:15   Justin- “I definitely see the advantage of it. Like, you know, I, my trick is I just like, I select SQL server row one. And if that’s the data I want, then I assume that row two is also similar to it. That’s how I do it. It’s not really the right way to do it. Yeah. There’s a wildcard. I just, yeah. Select all put it in an elastic search cluster, do a search, see what I come up with. All kinds of, all kinds of ways to solve this problem.”

35:40 Introducing Managed Instance Groups standby pool: Stop and suspend idle VMs

• At Google Cloud they are constantly working on providing cost-efficiency improvements to your infrastructure (which they then negate with price increases in other areas…)
• *They say* that one of the best ways to save money is to stop or suspend your compute engine VMs, to avoid compute charges for idle instances. 
  • However, if you manage your applications with Managed Instance Groups (MIGs), this capability hasn’t been available until now. 
• Now with Standby Pool for managed instance groups you can pause and resume VMs, manually or as part of a MIG automation. 
• This is a new way for MIGs to reduce costs when pausing applications, or enable a MIG to respond faster to increased load with pre-initialized VMs. 

36:23   Matthew – “So this is the AWS auto scaling cold or whatever they called it, which is like a server that you can have on the side that like you can just boot up. And the only reason I ever saw to use this feature, was if you were auto scaling or MIG scaling in this case, I guess, Windows servers, just because they take so long to boot up. Because Windows…It was a nice feature. We set this up for one person at one point and it did dramatically help it, you know, Windows by default, I think it takes like 15 minutes to boot up. So just having the server there and essentially stopping it off hours; kind of lets you do fake auto scaling without actually doing auto scaling. So you’re stopping/starting servers. It’s a significant savings.”

Azure

37:54 Microsoft to invest $2.1B in Spain to expand AI and cloud infrastructure 

• MS is expanding its footprint in Spain by 2.1 billion dollars over the next 2 years. 
• The investment goes beyond just building a data center, and is a testament to their “37 year commitment to Spain, its security, development, and digital transformation of its government, business and people”. 
• This comes just after they announced a 3.44 billion dollar investment in Germany.

38:31   Justin – “I mean, if I were to be a betting man, they’re all trying to get ahead of the EU data center moratorium because they can only build for so long before they hit the moratorium limit. Because they also have power transmission problems in Europe, if you didn’t know.”

40:00 General Availability: Azure NetApp Files Standard Network Features – Edit Volumes

• Azure is announcing the general availability of standard network features, edit network features for Azure Netapp Files. 
• Standard network features provide you with enhanced virtual networking experience for a seamless and consistent experience along with security posture for Azure netapp files.
• You can now edit an existing Azure Netapp File volume and upgrade basic network features to standard. 
• Standard networking gets you new features like:
  • Increased IP limits for the VNETs with Azure Netapp Files volumes on par with VMs to enable customers to provision volumes in their existing topologies/architectures. 
  • Enhanced network security with support for Network Security Groups 
  • Enhanced network control with support for User-Defined Routes to and from Azure netapp Files delegated subnet.
  • Connectivity over active/active VPN gateway setups for high availability connectivity to ANF from on-prem.
  • ExpressRoute FastPath connectivity to Azure Netapp Files. FastPath is designed to improve the data path performance between on-premises networks and Azure virtual networks. 

42:22   Matthew – “I just feel like it’s kind of also the way Azure is, is security and reliability. You always have to go to the higher tiers, which just drives me a little bit crazy. Like it’s not built in day one whereas with AWS, I feel like, you know, their motto is designed for failure. So like most of the managed services are by default and you don’t have an option. Like you can’t launch a load balancer without two subnets. You can’t launch, you know, your database without multiple subnets; they’re just there where Azure feels like you always have to think about it. I’m like, I don’t want to think about it. This is why I’m paying for a service – do it for me.”

Continuing our Cloud Journey Series Talks

50:35 Five key things to consider when building a cloud FinOps team 

• You may be under tremendous pressure to save costs and one of the things we’re a big fan of is building out a Finops capability to help drive optimization processes in your company. 
• Google has a blog post here that talks about five key things to consider when building your FinOps team
• 1. Define your goals and document them in a cloud FinOps charter
  • Set a clear set of goals and objectives. Without a well defined purpose, your team may struggle to align efforts and demonstrate value to the organization.  This FinOps charter outlines the teams mission, goals, strategies and responsibilities
  • The charter should have several benefits:
    • Guidance in uncertainty
    • Executive Buy In
    • Prioritization
    • Efficiency
• 2. Develop a Cloud FinOps Lexicon
  • A lexicon or shared glossary of terms ensures that everyone on the team speaks the same language, reduces misunderstandings and promotes clarity
• 3. Establish a cloud FinOps culture
  • Key things are Cross-functional Collaboration, Continuous Improvement, and Democratizing cost visibility
• 4. Define a set of KPIs and metrics to measure progress (What gets measured gets managed)
  • You need to gauge the success of your cloud FinOps team and its cost optimization efforts, it’s crucial to define a clear set of KPI’s and success metrics that can accurately measure progress and drive financial accountability and value realization in your org. 
  • As you think about these metrics, make sure they are readily measurable that can be used as your team matures. You can begin to track unit economic metrics.  
  • Some metrics to consider:
    • Cloud Enablement: This could be done by measuring the number of business leaders trained or certified by the total number of cloud learners across the org
    • Cloud allocation or the amount of tagged costs to responsible business owners. This metric supports both showback and chargeback models and reflects the underlying effectiveness and accuracy of resource tagging and cost attribution
    • Cloud optimization realized savings: Allows the metric to keep a pulse on inefficiencies that exist in the organization and allows business to focus on achieving cost savings, thereby capturing the true value of running their workloads on cloud
    • Forecast Accuracy. Measuring forecast accuracy enables companies to understand what will happen and if they do what they plan and also allows for better control of cloud spend allocations
    • Finops Automation is measured by evaluating the number of automated recommendations implemented as a percentage of the total list of automated recommendations generated that result in cost savings. 
• 5.Choose your tooling strategy carefully and reevaluate it frequently.
  • Selecting the right tools for your cloud FinOps is critical. However, the cloud technology landscape is constantly evolving and new tools and services are introduced regularly. 
  • Consider the following factor when considering tools:
    • Scalability
    • Integration
    • Cost and ROi
    • Customization
    • Technology
    • User-Friendliness

52:17   Matthew – “…make sure you have executive buy in probably you’re starting this whole fin op started because your CFO is freaking out about the bill, but you know, making sure that not just the CFO, you know, your CTO and other organization members all agreed. This is something you’re going to do so you don’t have one side of the house fighting the other and you’re sitting there in the middle just going cool. We’re here.”

57:35   Ryan – “…it’s super fun to watch that transformation happen, from taking a dev team who hasn’t had any visibility into their costs to the initial stages of bewilderment of why is everything expensive, to actually making architecture choices based off of cost-driven data. And it’s not always comfortable, but almost every team that I’ve seen do that transformation, they’re excited by the end, right? It’s not like, oh, I had to do this and they’re jaded about it. And so like, it is one of those things where it allows some really cool decisions and it’s, you know, when you have the visibility, when you have that insight and, you know, like I said, access is clear and transparency is part of your culture.

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud! Just a reminder – if you’re interested in joining us as a sponsor, let us know! Check out our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloud Pod

Titles we almost went with this week:

None! This week’s title was SO GOOD we didn’t bother with any alternates. Sometimes it’s just like that, you know? 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:27 – Quick reminder – Finops X Foundation Conference is almost here! 

• This is the annual FinOps Foundation Annual User Conference, and it is taking place June 29th through the 31st in Beautiful San Diego, California. 
• Hundreds of your fellow practitioners will be sharing their FinOps knowledge, collaborating in chalk talks and networking together.  
• Why should you attend? Great question. Let me tell you. 1) There’s a party on an aircraft carrier. Need more? You got it. 2) You can learn best practices when it comes to FinOps and save your company lots of money – you’ll be a hero! (Look at the economy and current interest rates. Heroic is an understatement.) Need another reason? Look no further! Justin will be there! We know you’ve always wanted to chat with him in person. No? How about free stickers? Free stuff is good. Everyone loves stickers. 

02:47 New Relic is back on the pod – and they’ve got something new 

• New Relic just launched Grok, their new AI observability assistant 

• • If you remember a few weeks ago, we had someone from New Relic on the pod, and they told us **something** was coming, but weren’t quite ready to tell us what it was – and now, it’s here! 
  • New Relic is throwing their hat into the AI ring – Grok.
  • Grok will allow engineers to use large language models to help utilize natural language when performing many of the routine tasks in New Relic, like setting up instrumentation, building reports, or managing accounts.
  • Engineers can sift through the data more easily and come through their unified telemetry data without having to write complex queries.
  • From New Relic: “Observability tools exist to serve the DevOps and DevSecOps movements. Engineers use observability tools to get the data they need to operate and secure the software they build,” said New Relic Chief Product Officer Manav Khurana. “The reality, howeve r, is that it’s hard for every engineer to translate a question they have into a data model, sift through their tools to find the right data, and then translate data back to an insight in natural language. That’s why DevSecOps practices are lagging behind all the innovation in Observability tooling. Now with Generative AI, there will be an explosion of new software developed in a completely different way, creating even more complexity to operate and secure software.” 

04:28 Jonathan – “It’s funny they called out specifically the DevSecOps, though, as a team that needed this kind of assistance.”

04:40 Justin – “Well, I mean, I think DevSecOps as a practice is really still pretty immature. I think the DevOps movement was a little bit more active because it was also the time we were doing web scale. We were doing a bunch of things. And so there was a lot more momentum behind DevOps.”

AWS

8:10 Introducing Athena Provisioned Capacity

• AWS is not launching the ability to provision capacity when running your Athena Queries. As many of you know, Athena is a query service – based on presto – that allows you to analyze data in S3. 
• Data sources include on-premise and other cloud systems, and use standard SQL queries; and Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage. 
• Until today, you only paid for the queries you ran, but the times, they are a changin’.
• Now you can get dedicated queries and use a new workload management feature to prioritize, control and scale your most important queries, paying only for the capacity you provision. AWS says customers have been asking for this feature for some time, as Athena costs can get out of hand right quick, and it was difficult to forecast those costs. 
• To solve this, they are introducing the capability to provision dedicated query processing capacity at scale, and with provision capacity, you can provision a dedicated set of compute resources to run your queries, and this always-on capacity can serve your business critical queries with near-zero latency and no queuing. such as cost, concurrency, and query prioritization.
  • Users now have control over workload performance characteristics such as cost, concurrency and query prioritization. 
  • Users only pay for the capacity provisioned – not for the actual usage.  This will help bills stay predictable. 
  • You reserve the capacity in Data Processing Unit (DPU). A single DPU is equivalent to four vCPU and 16gb RAM. The minimum capacity you may provision is 24 DPU for 8 hours. This new provisioned capacity for Athena is ideal for those of you running any volume of queries, but the sweet spot to start using provisioned capacity is when you spend $100 or more per month on Athena, which is a pretty low break even point. 
  • It seems to be built with an 8 hour workday in mind; you can turn it on in the morning and turn it off at night, then just pay for on demand queries outside of those hours. 

10:30 Jonathan – “$100 is pretty easy to reach with Athena…I think I’d kind of like to find a middle ground where you can just literally set a maximum maximum concurrency for Athena without paying for provision capacity upfront to say, okay, don’t let me spend more than this, but I still want to use it from the serverless pool.”

12:28 Justin – “I can see how this makes a lot of sense in a SaaS app, especially one that’s potentially querying different data sources that aren’t owned by a company, because what would prevent you from embedding a thing into your product? Customer goes and points it at their S3 bucket has 25 petabytes of data in it and runs this tool and gets data out of it, but now all of a sudden you have a bill that’s very large based on all that data consumption that could be probably problematic.”

14:25 – AWS Compute Optimizer identifies and filters Microsoft SQL Server workloads

• Did anyone else read this announcement from AWS and initially assume it meant Compute Optimizer is telling us we need to kill all of our SQL server workloads? No? Just us? Ok – moving on. 
• AWS Compute Optimizer now supports inferred workload types by filtering on the Amazon EC2 instance recommendations.
• This inferred workload type features ML, and automatically detects the applications that might be running on your AWS resources. 

14:52Justin – “When they say ML here, I assume they mean we had a regex that basically said, oh, hey, your EC2 instance is using a Microsoft with SQL Server license included, **or** that it’s an EC2 instance that potentially has an inbound port on port 1433, which would be Microsoft SQL Server. So I’m not really sure how much ML is actually there. But it’s a nice idea.”

16:09 Ryan – “I really did just read this as optimizers just no longer going to target Microsoft SQL workloads. It’s just going to exclude them from any optimization.”

GCP

17:06 It’s EXTREMELY important for all of you to know that Google’s #1 priority is optimizing your costs. Let’s just get that out of the way first thing. 

• It’s so important to them they’re now offering discounts! Specifically, they’re offering committed use discounts for RHEL and RHEL for SAP on Compute Engine. These new CUDs can save you up to 24% when compared to on-demand PAYG prices. 
• Once your commitment is created with your RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) based systems, you will now automatically receive the discount and when your commitment runs out you’ll just revert to on-demand pricing.  Once you are in an active commit, you cannot cancel or edit it. 

18:49 Cloud Storage FUSE and CSI driver now available for GKE

• Interestingly, Amazon had recently announced the same thing…
• GCP has said many of their customers are leveraging Kubernetes with stateful workloads and data on Kubernetes, but customers are looking for more integrated solutions across compute and storage.  
• Enter Cloud Storage FUSE – objects in cloud storage buckets can be accessed as files mounted as local file systems, providing a frictionless experience for applications that need file system semantics (as long as you don’t actually try to do file things on them.)
• Cloud Storage FUSE is available today in Preview, with official Google Support. 
• Fuse capability supports GCS, providing portability, massive scale, streaming data support, built-in support for GKE Standard and Autopilot, non-privileged access, and authenticating out of the box and extensive support for accelerators to make your life easier.

20:36 Ryan “This is another thing that’s going to blow up in my face when you make me run SQL servers on Kubernetes.”

22:45 Justin – “So if any of our listeners have done SQL Server on Kubernetes at any level of scale and either failed horribly or were successful, I’d love to hear from you.”

(Jonathan would like to request that everyone only send their horror stories.)

Azure

24:17 – New Azure Virtual Desktop features to answer our customers’ top needs

• Lots of new features for the Azure virtual desktop this week
• Updates include FSLogix profiles for Azure AD, which joined VMs in Azure Virtual Desktop.
• If you’re not familiar with FSLogix ( like we weren’t) it’s apparently a more fancy version of your desktop experience on an RDP thing. And yes, “thing” is the technical term.
• Additionally, there’s a fix for the FSLogix 2210 bug – and they’re REALLY excited about this. 
• Azure Virtual Deskop Insights at Scale – Reporting of key information across resources in one view
• RDP Shortpath for public networks using the STUN protocol; which improves the transport reliability of Azure VD connections over public networks by establishing a direct UDP-based data flow between the remote desktop client and session hosts. 
• Symmetric Nat support for Azure Shortpath
• Watermarking on Azure VD
• Private link for Azure Virtual Desktop
• Microsoft Teams Application Windows Sharing – Which begs the question, what OTHER bugs live in Azure VD that this was a bug that needing fixing?

26:10Justin – “Every screenshot you get has Microsoft Azure in the background, so everyone knows you’re using Azure.”

30:52 Next up, for those of you who like to burn money using firewalls on Azure, they now support the virtual WAN with their first SaaS offering

• • The offering is coming from Palo Alto networks, where you can subscribe to the “next generation firewall” which is an Azure native ISV service. 

•  “At Microsoft, we are dedicated to ensuring that Microsoft Azure is the most trusted and secure cloud platform. With the preview release of the Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure, we are pleased to expand our ecosystem of native ISV solutions and provide customers and developers with more options to meet their security needs. This collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft combines the scalability and reliability of Azure with Palo Alto Networks expertise to help safeguard our customers against the latest threats.”—Julia Liuson President, Microsoft Developer Division at Microsoft.

• “More and more of our customers are running their business critical applications in Azure and are looking to us to help keep those workloads secure. With Cloud NGFW for Azure we are excited to combine Palo Alto Networks best-in-class security with the scalability and reliability of Azure to provide our mutual customers the ability to run their applications with confidence. As a managed Azure Native ISV service, we are proud to deliver the ease of use customers expect from a cloud native experience.”—Lee Klarich, Chief Product Officer, Palo Alto Networks.

27:55Matt – “This is the opposite of cloud native.”

27:57Ryan – “Well, it’s at least not a virtual device, plugged into your network and just sort of duct taped to the outside saying ‘look, security!’ You know, so if you’re going to use Palo Alto for these services, and maybe you’ve already got a whole bunch of investment for an on-prem work site; like at least this is a path forward that I can do. It’s got some scalability. I’m hoping it’s got a deep integration that’s beyond the virtualization presentation layer.”

Continuing our Cloud Journey Series Talks

31:52 Taking a little side step today – instead of talking about cloud native, we’re taking a look at an article recently put out by HashiCorp. 

• • Why you should run your platform team like a product team (hashicorp.com)
  • Ryan, Jonathan and Justin discuss this very issue often times when they talk about building services. The article is a great recap of some of their most recent content regarding CCOE. 

33:50 Ryan – “ These infrastructure focused teams are were becoming platform teams, whether they knew it or not, right? Cause that’s how complex the business has become, and how fast things need to move. That’s really the only answer. You’re gonna have too many customers to sort of just run infrastructure in a traditional way.”

34:27Jonathan – “I think those SLAs are the important thing for me because there’s always the assumption if you’re an infrastructure team or operations team that you’ll provide 100% uptime, you’ll always be on call, you’ll always jump on the current need of the day. And I think the move to the mindset that actually we’re building platforms and development teams are our customers sort of helps formalize the idea that actually this is a service and we do have an SLA and you are a customer and we have to take your needs into consideration, but also the needs of the rest of the business.”

38:09 Jonathan – “I think even having a product manager for the platform itself would be interesting because typically that’s a very customer-facing role in the business’s customers, rather than internal customer-facing role. I think the person who takes on that role would probably have to be somebody who’s very familiar with the platform itself.”

46:34 Justin – “Definitely check it out. If you’re looking to build a platform team or you’re running a cloud platform team that is trying to move to DevOps and DevSecOps, and make your team better, this is a great article for food for thought and to kind of get you thinking in the right direction about IT as a service.”

Spotted on the Horizon

Next week on the Cloud Pod Podcast…

News From the Clouds That Didn’t Make the Main Show

AWS

• Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection adds on-demand scanning
• AWS SimSpace Weaver Snapshots are now generally available
• AWS Config now supports 23 new resource types
• Amazon EC2 now supports AMD SEV-SNP
• Amazon RDS now supports M7g and R7g database instances
• Amazon EC2 C6id, M6id, R6id instances are now available in additional regions
• Amazon MSK now offers multi-VPC private connectivity and cross-account access
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports Amazon EC2 Instance disk fill
• Amazon Managed Grafana now supports workspace configuration with version 9.4 option
• AWS Verified Access is now generally available
• Amazon S3 now applies two security best practices to all new buckets by default
• Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud are now available in three new AWS Regions
• Amazon CloudWatch adds new console capabilities and data visualizations  
• Amazon Location Service adds support for long distance matrix routing
• Amazon QuickSight launches two suites of data ingestion APIs
• AWS Lambda adds support for Java 17
• Contact Lens for Amazon Connect evaluation capabilities are now generally available
• AWS IoT Core Device Advisor announces support for MQTT over WebSocket
• Amazon SageMaker accelerates local ML code conversion to remote jobs       
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-sagemaker-data-wrangler-image-data-preparation/ 
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/aws-compute-optimizer-filtering-tags/ 
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/aws-security-hub-four-integration-partners/ 
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-aurora-serverless-v1-postgresql-13/           
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/aws-health-publishes-events-eventbridge-primary-backup-regions/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-sns-message-data-protection-additional-regions/
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-sns-fifo-topics-five-regions/
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-inspector-vulnerability-intelligence-database/ 
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-efs-replication-aws-regions/ 

GCP

Azure

• Azure Event Hubs Dedicated self-serve scalable clusters for mission critical Kafka, AMQP and HTTPs workloads 
• Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL Data Encryption with Customer Managed Keys
• General Availability: Centrally Managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server
• Public Preview: Azure API Management and Microsoft Defender for APIs integration
• Public Preview: Azure Monitor Metrics Dataplane API released
• Generally available: Azure Monitor alerts now suggests signals to alert on
• Generally Available: Operation Abort in AKS
• Generally Available: Inbound IP restrictions for Azure Container Apps
• Public preview: Session affinity for Azure Container Apps
• Generally Available: TCP support for Azure Container Apps
• Generally available: Synthetic GraphQL
• Generally available: API Management Authorizations
• Public Preview: Support for Azure VMs using Premium SSD v2 in Azure Backup            

Oracle 

• Experience the power of stable diffusion and NVIDIA Live Portrait at Open Data Science Conference 2023
• Using OCI Network Firewall for SSL decryption   
• Creating a disaster recovery solution and migrating SQL Server databases with reduced downtime using log shipping on OCI  
• https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/dr-migration-sql-server-database-log-shipping 

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud, we would like to thank our sponsors Foghorn Consulting. Check out our website, the home of The Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at thecloudpod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #thecloudpod

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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.

This week’s highlights

• AWS: AWS opens new Melbourne Region infrastructure in Australia
• GCP: Google lays off 12,000 employees, 6% of its workforce.
• Azure: Microsoft announced the layoff of 10,000 employees; 5% of their workforce.

Top Quotes  

• “If you want that velocity you really have to democratize your access to cloud and your usage of cloud, and with that, you have to expand out the list of responsible parties to people with the proper business context”
• “There’s all kinds of mistakes you can make; many more mistakes I think you can make by deploying incorrectly or insecurity in the cloud than you can do in the private data center”
• “I think it’s important to keep the context of why you are shifting to the cloud; what is important to the business in terms of value”

AWS: AWS opens new Melbourne Region infrastructure in Australia.

• Now Open — AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in Australia
• ️️ This is the second infrastructure in Australia, offering an alternative to Perth.

GCP: Google lays off 12,000 employees; 6% of its workforce.

• 0️⃣ Alphabet to let go 12,000 employees amid broader tech layoffs
• Alphabet Chief notes that hiring was aimed at an economy different from current realities..

Azure: Microsoft announced the lay of 10,000 employees; 5% of their workforce.

• 0️⃣ Subject: Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity
• Even with the severance cost of 1.2 billion dollars, while laying off workers in certain roles, they will be hiring in others.

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

• GRC needs to address security based on the initial principles behind their typical security practices rather than trying to simply replicate old practices in the new cloud space.
• There is credibility to the concern security teams have for the higher risk of mistakes when deploying incorrectly or insecurely in the cloud.
• Summarily, the goal of the shift to the cloud will determine the approach to defining security standards, and with the way the cloud works, security teams need to get actively involved with the implementation of security protocols..

Other Stories

• Announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Lagos, Lima, and Querétaro
• AWS will invest $35B to expand its Virginia data center presence
• Announcing Porting Advisor for Graviton
• Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) now manages IP Addresses in your network outside your AWS Organization
• A new Google Cloud region is coming to Kuwait
• Microsoft deepens commitment to OpenAI in Azure cloud and enterprise products with reported $10B stake
• Azure Native New Relic Service: Full stack observability in minutes
• Amazon QuickSight launches data bars for tables
• Increased field limits and performance improvements for Pivot table in Amazon QuickSight
• AWS announces Amazon provided contiguous IPv6 CIDRs blocks
• AWS Pricing Calculator now supports optimized pricing estimation for EC2 Dedicated Hosts
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now generally available
• AWS Managed Services (AMS) customers can now change response for Config Rules
• Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments now supports Aurora MySQL 3 (with MySQL 8.0 compatibility) as a source cluster
• Amazon Polly launches five new male NTTS voices
• Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.8.34
• Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now allows you to specify environment variables for your tuning jobs
• Announcing comprehensive controls management with AWS Control Tower
• Announcing runtime management controls for AWS Lambda
• AWS Elemental MediaLive adds timecode burn-in
• Amazon EFS increases the maximum number of Access Points per file system
• Amazon RDS Multi-AZ with two readable standbys for RDS PostgreSQL now supports inbound replication
• Amazon Detective adds Amazon VPC Flow Logs visualizations for Amazon EKS workloads
• Amazon AppFlow announces 10 new connectors
• Amazon Connect now enables long lasting, persistent chat experiences
• Announcing the new private offers page in the AWS Marketplace Console
• Amazon EC2 Launch Templates now support AWS Systems Manager parameters for AMIs
• Amazon Kendra releases Microsoft Yammer Connector to enable messaging search
• Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account Metric Streams
• Amazon S3 File Gateway increases maximum file shares per gateway from 10 to 50
• Amazon S3 File Gateway now supports DOS attributes
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator announces increased quotas for target resources
• Amazon OpenSearch Service announces enhanced dry run for configuration changes
• Amazon MWAA is now PCI DSS compliant
• Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports enforcing SSL/TLS connections
• Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account Metric Streams
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now gives recommendations about activating predictive scaling policy
• Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud clusters launch up to 30% faster in private subnets with Amazon EMR
• EBS direct APIs are now available in new AWS Europe and Asia Pacific Regions
• Amazon EMR Serverless introduces account-level vCPU-based service quota
• Validate AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) templates with CloudFormation Linter to speed up development
• Announcing SKU pricing rules for AWS Billing Conductor
• Optimize Cloud Composer via Better Airflow DAGs
• Building an automated serverless deployment pipeline with Cloud Build
• How to do multivariate time series forecasting in BigQuery ML
• Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service provides seamless, secure data storage
• Cloud to Edge for efficient, agile, and sustainable retail
• From Teams to PowerPoint: 10 ways Azure AI enhances the Microsoft Apps we use everyday
• Create more integrated cloud experiences with over 1,400 connectors
• Public preview: Incremental snapshots for Ultra Disk Storage
• Generally available: Indirect enterprise agreement on Azure Cost Management and Billing
• General availability: Application security groups support for private endpoints
• General availability: Mount Azure Storage as a local share in App Service Windows Code
• Classic VM retirement: extending retirement date to September 1st 2023
• Azure Machine Learning – Generally availability updates for January 2023
• Public preview: Azure Database for MySQL – Logic Apps and Power Automate integration
• General Availability: Active Directory Connector for Arc-enabled SQL MI
• Azure Machine Learning – Public preview announcements for January 2023
• Public Preview: Container insights support for AKS hybrid clusters
• Public preview: Tribal Group events available to Azure Event Grid customers
• Generally available: Azure Active Directory authentication for SQL Server 2022
• Public Preview of Viewing SQL Server Databases via Azure Arc
• Public Preview: Microsoft Purview access policies for SQL Server 2022
• Deploying OKE with native pod networking in split-compartment mode
• Announcing OCI File Storage replication

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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.

This week’s highlights

• Witness the magic of AWS Fargate scaling of applications — harder, faster, better, stronger.
• Ooooh! Unveiling brand new shiny features for Oracle Support Rewards.
• Better planning with more routes: GCP unleashes Optimization AI, API for Cloud Fleet Routing (CFR). 

Top Quotes  

• “Because of that Fargate-specific limitation, [with] the first three services you’re concurrently updating, you’ll actually get a much faster rate through ECS test launches, but that fourth service will be slower. At that point, if the math works out where you’re better off hosting it on EC2 … it’s a lot more complex. I’ve worked with a lot of teams on trying to get ECS services to scale faster, and usually I look at them a little skeptically — do you really need this fast?”
• “In terms of looking at lists of interview questions from Google algorithm questions and the traveling salesman problem and optimizing journeys through multiple locations, multiple cities, everything else, it’s a really hard problem. It only gets exponentially more difficult. And then the more efficient you are with that, the more it costs the environment, the more it costs in time or it costs money. So yeah, it’s actually a worthy problem to solve.”

General News: Microsoft Feels the Heat

• We’re feeling the pain of Microsoft’s licensing, as its tactics to win the cloud battle lead to new antitrust scrutiny.

AWS: A Very Fargate Indeed

• NetApp’s ONTAP, so line up your glasses for a very fine update indeed. Check out the podcast where we interviewed their very own Anthony Lye. #ShamelessPodcastSalesmanship
• AWS Fargate now delivers faster scaling of applications, and you can see it in action with ECS. Understand token buckets and how AWS uses them, and if you need a hero, Vlad Ioenscu is here.
• ✅ Microsoft Active Directory geeks rejoice: a favored topic of the masses with configurable synchronization launched via Single Sign-On.
• ♨️ The Log4j saga simply won’t die: Apache hotpatch issues get a report here.    

GCP: Taxi, Please

• Combining data and cross cloud analytics: BigQuery Omni is here, and customers are going to be very happy.
• API for cloud fleet routing appears in the form of Optimization AI — your route’s going to be a lot easier now.

Azure: The Beauty of Grafana

• Extend that Azure SQL Migration for Azure Data Studio and make those dreams come true.
• ️ Visual Studio Code extension for Azure Container Apps is now in preview, so get a good look while you can.
• You’re stylistically spoiled with Azure Managed Grafana’s data visualizations, now in preview.

Oracle: Second Prize…

• Oracle Support Rewards has some shiny new features.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ There’s not much of a move this week, with the scores standing at Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2), Peter (1)

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• General availability: Azure Archive Storage now available in Switzerland North 
• Azure Purview is now Microsoft Purview 
• Introducing DevSecOps Solutions from AWS DevOps Competency Partners 
• Crate.io extends database service offering to Google Cloud  
• General availability: Azure Cosmos DB autoscale RU/s entry point is 4x lower
• Amazon Kendra releases Quip Connector to enable document search in Quip repository 

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

• AWS Summits

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• IBM Think – May 9th-13th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe – May 10th-12th |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• Microsoft Security Summit – May 12th
• Kubecon EU – May 16th-20th
• Google Next – June 6th-8th
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• Amazon Re:Mars – June 21st – 24th 
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th → Now Moved to Boston
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US – August 2nd-4th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Google Cloud Next – October 11th – 13th 
• Oracle Cloud World – October 16-20th 
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC

Microsoft events – TBD Check for status

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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.

This week’s highlights

•   AWS Cloud NGFW cost calculations leaves us comfortably numb.  
• GCP boasts big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded hosts.
• Azure is once again shutting the Front Door with a new, modern cloud service. 

Top Quotes  

• “I’m ready to make my [AWS] re:Invent next year’s first prediction, which will be an AmazonBasics version of that for 1/10th of the cost.”
• “I’m very curious to actually see the comparison … in cost because, assuming performance is relatively similar, cost is what this always comes down to.”

AWS: Pay Less, More Often!

• Helping you bleed cash by the hour instead of writing one big annual check, AWS presents the new Cloud NGFW. Ouch.
• Knock yourself out with up to 10 GB ephemeral storage supported with AWS Lambda. It’s cheap (at $0.0000000309 for every GB-second), but they’re not giving it to you — they’re selling it to you.
• We’re slightly concerned about the general availability of AWS Proton support for Terraform Open Source and its effects on potential future innovation.
• ️ Amazon hops on Google’s gamification bandwagon with Amazon GameSparks now in preview.

GCP: GCP Equalizes With a Quiet Week

• Nice job, Google: a feature with an edge over other cloud providers that offers big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs. Awesome!

Azure: It All Comes Down to Costs

• Azure shutting the front door on us once again with the now generally available modern cloud CDN service, Azure Front Door. This probably gives them a competitive advantage over AWS for at least a week or two.
• In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft announces its intent to establish an India datacenter region in Hyderabad. As that’s where most of their employees are, how was there not one there already?
• ⚖️ It’s like UPnP for cloud, so do not use lightly: Azure Load Balancer now allows you to manage port forwarding for a backend pool. We seriously recommend discussing this with your security team in advance.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Peter finally levels up, making the scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Generally available: On-demand capacity reservation with Azure Site Recovery safeguards VMs failover
• General availability: Azure Bastion native client support 
• Managed entitlements in AWS License Manager now supports license usage for AWS Marketplace licenses 
• Amazon RDS Free Tier now includes db.t3.micro, AWS Graviton2-based db.t4g.micro instances in all commercial regions
• Amazon RDS now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) on RDS Service APIs
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling instance lifecycle states are now available via the Instance Metadata Service   
• Amazon Kendra releases Slack Connector to enable Slack messaging search 

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

April 6th – Data Cloud Summit

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• Azure Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid cloud flexibility digital event – April 13th 9:00 AM-11:00 AM Pacific (5 reasons to attend)
• AWS Summits

April 12th – Paris

April 20th-21st – San Francisco 

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• IBM Think – May 9th-13th

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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.

This week’s highlights

• Cloud status pages aren’t reflecting reported issues, in what appears to be a cover-up by error-shy cloud providers.
• AWS introduces a new carbon footprint dashboard to help customers track their sustainability for cleaner, greener living.
• Following on the heels of AWS and Azure, Microsoft Defender now provides security on Google Cloud, and is also available for Azure Cosmos DB.

Top Quotes  

“Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it’s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can’t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There’re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something’s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don’t think they’re trying to mislead anybody.”

“They’re so strong in other areas, I think it’s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you’re really good at and just keep doing it better.”

General News: Move Along, Everything’s Fine Here

• It seems like cloud providers are on a customer gaslighting mission, with cloud status pages not reflecting reported issues. 

AWS: Continuing Its Tradition of Silly Names

• In a badly timed announcement, AWS shows off its new unified Health Dashboard. It does make sense to keep it in one place, though.
• Amazon S3 showcases important, super valuable new additional checksum algorithms. If it’s computationally expensive, push it back onto the client. 
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools has two new hibernation and scale-in features — a great solution for penny-pinchers who invested in Windows.
• The new AWS CloudSaga tool allows for security event simulation and testing. A great first step in what should prove to be cheaper than bringing in a whole team to do it. 
• How many IPv6 workloads are you running? Now you can connect them to IPv4 Services.
• Six months too late for Jonathan, AWS’ new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool allows customers to track sustainability, helping to reach those clean and green goals.
• GCP: Slow News Week 
• It’s incredible how difficult it can be to find something in the marketplace when you know exactly what you’re looking for. Luckily, here are four ways Google Cloud Marketplace simplifies buying cloud software.

Azure: Ring, Ring

• ☎️ If you’re a telco operator looking to sell cloud services, you’re in luck. The new Azure for Operators solutions and services are paving the way for the future of telecoms.  
• ️ In a nice strategic play, Microsoft joins AWS and Azure as it expands Defender security to Google Cloud.
• Logz.io now integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure. Why didn’t Microsoft just buy it? Simple: so that Elasticsearch remains somebody else’s problem.
• More moves from Microsoft Defender, now available for Azure Cosmos DB. We just wish it had come a year ago.  

Oracle: Finally Fixed its RSS Feed

• ️ Oracle announces its new on-demand capacity feature, which probably should’ve already been available.
• Skipping out on AI and ML and going the data science route, Cloud Guard Threat Detector is now available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Does this mean Oracle can be sued if things go wrong?

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ With Ryan absent this week, Justin jumps ahead, but Peter’s still flagging behind, rendering the scores Justin (3), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS QnABot adds support for Genesys Cloud contact center, client filters and sensitive information log redaction
• AWS App Runner adds a Java platform
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Network Firewall Centralized Deployment Model   
• Students, start your engines! AWS DeepRacer Student Virtual League is now underway 
• AWS Trusted Advisor introduces Priority for AWS Enterprise Support customers (Preview) 
• Amazon Fault Injection Simulator now supports Task-Level Faults for Amazon Elastic Container Service         
• Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights adds support for Helm chart using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

Things Coming Up:

• AWS Summits – US – April-October, APAC – May, EMEA – April-June
• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) – Data Cloud Summit – April 6th
• IBM Think – May 9th-13th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe – May 10th-12th |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• Kubecon EU – May 16th-20th
• Google Next – June 6th-8th
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US – August 2nd-4th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC
• MS Build – TBC

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.

• JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. 

This week’s highlights

• In a move that shows it supports open source when convenient, AWS introduces new Cloud Map capabilities, and U-turns on proposed charges after 30 days. The new console still sucks, by the way.
• GCP introduces the very welcome Bigtable autoscaling feature, with new optimizing and manageability features and improvements.
• Oracle comes bearing over a hundred gifts from its blog, and gives us a look inside a data center. 

Top Quotes  

• “I’m starting to wonder what’s going on over at AWS. We’ve talked about the Orca issues, the security rollout … And now we have this: We’re turning on things in your account that are going to cost you money. I saw the earnings… they look pretty good, so I’m not entirely sure why they’re turning on features that cost money — with no notice — and putting the onus on me to turn this stuff off.”
• “So isn’t that really just a rehashing of the same problem that most IT professionals have been doing for the last 20 years? On the other hand, I don’t want to manage my own legacy Oracle footprint, so the fact that they’re going to take that, move it to the cloud, and then run it for me — I’m all for that.”

General News: Zero Trust ‘Hijacked’ by Network Security Firms 

• 0️⃣ Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry gets us wise to network security firm marketing tactics, highlighting that practicing zero trust and investing in network security are incompatible with each other.  

AWS: Not Amazon’s Best Month… 

• In a ridiculous move that completely violates the trust of its customers, AWS attempts to charge after a 30-day trial when no one is paying attention — but everyone noticed. First Orca, now this.
• Watch out you don’t make your CFO cry with the launch of the very nice but very expensive new Amazon X2iezn instances.
• AWS shows its open-source credentials — but only because it’s convenient — with the rollout of the new AWS Cloud Map MCS Controller for K8s.

GCP: Coming for Crypto

• Cloud Bigtable’s new autoscaling feature promises cost optimization and improved manageability. Two times the data for the same price and it autoscales? We’re sold.
• ⛏️ GCP launches a new dedicated Digital Assets Team, with the first big customer being the IRS. Mine, baby, mine.

Azure: Multitasking and Convenience 

• Azure’s UI team are clearly excited about the company’s new cost management features. And now finance teams can have the satisfaction of being super busy.
• Some convenient logging and performance features come with Azure Firewall’s new rollout: but we don’t really care about the white paper.

Oracle: Over 100 Blog Posts in a Week!

• Multi-Cloud Strategies Should Consider Oracle Cloud to Modernize Legacy Oracle Footprints — yes you should, if you’re spending billions of dollars on Oracle licenses. 
• ️ Now you can see the power behind Oracle’s data centers, with a view inside one. Interesting, although a little late to the video trend.
• A gift that just keeps on giving, the Oracle feed just announced a no-code (oh no) solution, with Oracle Visual Builder now available and running natively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan gets the point this week, equalizing with Ryan and Justin, and leaving poor Peter in the dust, with the scores standing at Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Cloud Map API now supports IPv6
• Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports query execution plan capture for RDS for Oracle
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds support for Apache Parquet file format
• Improved progress updates for blue/green deployments in Amazon OpenSearch Service
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now delivers to Honeycomb
• Amazon AppFlow now provides Amazon Honeycode connectivity to several cloud applications     
• Amazon Textract adds synchronous support for single page PDF documents and support for PDF documents containing JPEG 2000 encoded images
• AWS Step Functions adds mocking support for testing workflows locally
• Amazon MSK now offers the ability to scale storage throughput up to 1000 MiB/s per broker  
• Azure Key Vault increased service limits for all its customers

Things Coming Up:

• 7 reasons to attend Azure Open Source Day – February 15th
• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• IBM Think – May 9-13th
• Kubecon EU – May 16-20
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe
• 10-12 May 2022  |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US
• August 2-4, 2022
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event
• The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
• October 18-20, 2022
• AWS Summits – US April-October, APAC – May, EMEA – April – June
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec-2 (assumed)
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th
• Google Next – June 6th – 8th 2022
• Oracle OpenWorld
• MS Ignite
• MS Build

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.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us.
• Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product.
• Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up.

Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare

• ‍⚕️ Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare. 
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool!
• Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this.    
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn’t throwing up barriers. 
• AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement.  
• ⌚ AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch. 

Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B

• ️ Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on.  
• GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song.   
• Google has made the Doc AI solutions generally available. If you’ve sent a fax lately, you know how expensive it is.   
• Google announces new multi-instance NVIDIA GPU on the Google Kubernetes Engine. What a massive risk for the tech industry — having one company that manufactures all the chips.   

Azure: Short Notice

• Microsoft brings Azure supercomputing to the UK Met Office. Supercomputers and the Cloud are finally colliding.     
• Microsoft is joining the Redhat Summit this week to announce several new RHEL capabilities for Azure. It did a terrible job of giving us the heads up about this event.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes the win and this week’s point with an easy dig at information security, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (3), Jonathan (6). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Ground Station now supports data delivery to Amazon S3
• AWS Cost Categories introduces a details page 
• AWS Secrets Manager Delivers Provider for Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI Driver
• AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter and Explorer now integrate with AWS Security Hub for diagnosis and remediation of security findings
• AWS Nitro Enclaves now supports Windows operating system 
• AWS Cloud9 now supports Amazon Linux 2 environments
• Google Cloud Spanner launches customer-managed encryption keys and Access Approval

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Save the date: AWS Containers events in May
• AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19
• AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13
• Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital)
• Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th 
• Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)