This week on The Cloud Pod, the team is getting ready to share their predictions for re:Invent, and that may or may not involve greasing the palms of some Amazon employees.

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. 

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Amazon is becoming a connoisseur of international cuisine with its new region.
• 🚨 Google is borderline nefarious in the scientific community.  
• 🚨 Azure adds a long overdue feature. 

Amazon Web Services: Spicing Things Up

• 🍛 AWS announces the new Hyderabad region in India will open in mid-2022. We’re surprised at how long this took to happen.    
• 🕒 AWS launches managed messaging service Amazon MQ for Rabbit MQ. Only took three years of Justin whinging. 
• 🤷 Amazon now allows customers to proactively manage the EC2 Spot instance lifecycle using the new capacity rebalancing feature. Not sure this needed a whole blog about it. 
• 👌 AWS announces AWS Gateway Load Balancing for easy deployment, scalability and high availability for Partner Appliances in the cloud. Thanks for helping us out, Amazon!   
• 🖌️ AWS makes it easier to export DynamoDB table data to S3 with no code writing required. At lots less Lamda spackle, we like it.   
• 🛁 AWS announces a full set of features across the storage family as part of AWS Storage Day 2020. Buckets, buckets and more buckets.    

Google Cloud Platform: Doing What It Does Best 

• 🤡 Google Cloud SQL now supports Postgres 13. Next up, Google announces deprecation of Postgres 13… Just kidding.        
• 💖 GCP launches a unified console for document processing with Document AI platform. For anyone who hates data entry, you’ll love this!  
• 😲 Google is launching a public preview of a suite of fully managed AI tools designed to solve medical challenges. Google has been accused of using scientific peer reviews to pimp its own products and not contributing to the science.    

Azure: Late To The Party

• 🥶 Azure announces Monitor Application Insights Java 3.0 is now generally available. Pretty cool!   
• 🤩 Azure launches powerful new features in Azure Cache for Redis. Good news for anyone excited about Redis Enterprise on Azure. 
• 👍 New enhanced DNS features for Azure Firewall are now generally available. Finally!

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin hums “We Are the Champions” while taking this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (16 points), Jonathan (nine points), Ryan (six points) and Jacques (one point). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon Fraud Detector launches the ability to delete additional resource types in AWS Console and SDK
• Amazon Translate allows user to specify a part of the text to not be translated – Do Not Translate
• Amazon Connect has just reduced its 44th telephony rate this year
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports defining a custom name for your domain endpoint
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Database Mail
• AWS Client VPN announces self-service portal to download VPN profiles and desktop applications 
• Amazon Polly launches a British English Newscaster speaking Style
• Now you can export your Amazon DynamoDB table data to your data lake in Amazon S3 to perform analytics at any scale
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for MongoDB 4.0 and transactions
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB 4.0 compatibility) as a target
• AWS Snowball Edge now supports Windows operating systems
• Archive and Replay Events with Amazon EventBridge
• IP Multicast on AWS Transit Gateway is now available in major AWS regions worldwide
• A New Integration for CloudWatch Alarms and OpsCenter