While waiting on tenterhooks to find out who will win the U.S. presidential race, the team welcomed guest Jacques Chester to The Cloud Pod this week. 

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.

• Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. 

• Manning Press is offering a 40% discount on any Manning Publication, and we highly recommend Knative in Action by guest Jacques Chester. Use the code PODCLOUD20 to receive 40% off; additionally, the first five people who retweet this episode from the official @thecloudpod1 twitter account will get a free copy. 

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 AWS will be enjoying fondue in Switzerland.
• 🚨 Google is clearing out the old junk in the attic.
• 🚨 Dr. Microsoft is now taking appointments. 

General News: Money, Money, Money

• 🙄 Microsoft has reported its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2021. Microsoft is over 2020 already.    
• ☠️ Google’s parent company Alphabet crushed expectations for both earnings and revenue in its third-quarter earnings results. This could be a good sign it’s not planning on killing Google Cloud just yet. 
• 💪 Amazon reports $96.1 billion in Q3 2020 revenue. Overall a pretty strong quarter!

Amazon Web Services: Spend Or Save?

• 🔐 Amazon launches AWS Nitro Enclaves to carve out isolated environments on any EC2 instance that is powered by the Nitro System. A great increase in security for no additional cost.  
• 🎉 Customers can now use Jira Service Desk to track operational items related to AWS resources. This is great for the start-ups and smaller organizations that are using Jira!
• 🤗 Amazon announces new Application Load Balancer Support to make it easier to use gRPC with your applications. Another great feature!  
• 🤤 New AWS Europe region will allow customers to run their applications and serve end-users from data centers located in Switzerland. Happy for Europe but can we get more in the U.S.? 
• 🤢 AWS delivers up to 2.5x the deep learning performance with new GPU-Equipped EC2 P4 Instances for machine learning. We hope you’re sitting down because this bad boy is expensive. 
• 🤷‍♀️ AWS gives advice for customers dealing with Docker Hub rate limits and teases a new solution for public container images. There’s some bad news and good news here.     

Google Cloud Platform: Always Rebuilding

• 💯 Google introduces a new version of Cloud Shell Editor immediately available in preview on ide.cloud.google.com. We’re so glad software engineers had nothing to do with the Tower of Babel or we’d still be in Babylon rebuilding for the 100th time.     
• 🏁 Google launches Eventarc, a new events functionality that allows you to trigger Cloud Run from more than 60 Google Cloud sources. We’re a big fan of this architecture pattern.  
• 🚫 Google launches two new Object Lifecycle Management rules designed to help protect data and lower the total cost of ownership within Google Cloud Storage. Or, as Ryan would say, “You can now delete an object that is no longer useful to you.” 
• ❓ Google releases three features in Preview for the Cloud Content Delivery Network. We like negative caching — it sounds completely ridiculous.  

Azure: Did Something In The Cloud

• 😂 Azure Monitor for containers now supports the preview of capacity monitoring of Persistent Volumes (PV) attached to Azure Kubernetes Service clusters. Is it too soon to joke about PV Management Premium?  
• 🕵️ Microsoft announces the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Super curious about this one. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ The team is polite and lets their guest win with Jacques taking this week’s point and Ryan also scoring as runner-up, leaving scores at Justin (15 points), Jonathan (nine points), Ryan (six points) and Jacques (one point). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Site-to-Site VPN now supports health notifications
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for increased change stream retention and ability to watch change stream events on a database or the entire cluster
• Amazon Neptune now supports Apache TinkerPop 3.4.8 in the latest engine release
• Amazon Kendra adds Confluence Server connector 
• EC2 Image Builder now supports AMI distribution across AWS accounts
• Amazon Textract announces improvements to reduce average API processing times by up to 20% 
• Introducing new visualization features in AWS IoT SiteWise: Status Charts, Scatter Plot and Trend lines
• HoloLens 2 Development Edition is now available for purchase in the United States
• Amazon SES now offers list and subscription management capabilities
• Azure allows you to now have Up to 10 read replicas for MySQL – Flexible Server