This week on The Cloud Pod, the team used their slightly cloudy crystal balls to share their predictions for Re:Invent 2020. They hope Amazon doesn’t ruin them before the event.

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 spoils the prediction party by revealing a new product just before Re:Invent.
• 🚨 Google is making sandcastles by itself in the sandbox. 
• 🚨 Azure is smart enough not to announce anything exciting right before Amazon’s big day.

Amazon Web Services: Crushing Hopes and Dreams

• 💡 Amazon Lightsail lets developers easily deploy containers in the cloud. This is like the cloud version of candy-flavored tobacco — somebody out there will be excited.
• 📸 Amazon announces visual data preparation tool AWS Glue DataBrew. Really cool — we wish they’d created this sooner! 
• 👏 AWS Key Management Service now supports three new hybrid post-quantum key exchange algorithms. We’re just happy that the defense is ahead of the offense this time.
• 😡 Amazon launches AWS Network Firewall, a highly available, managed network firewall service for VPC. Peter is angry that Amazon killed one of his Re:Invent predictions.
• 👓 Introducing Amazon S3 Storage Lens for organization-wide visibility into object storage. We think the dashboard is built on years of customer complaints, not experience.

Re:Invent Predictions

Prediction rule: If it’s already been officially announced by Amazon, then it doesn’t count. It needs to be in the rumor mill and somewhat specific.

• Peter
  • Integration between Sumerian and Chime/Slack (messaging service) for virtual in-person meetings
  • Major upgrade to CloudWatch/Logs/GuardDuty/CloudWatch Events (SIEM) but an actual SIEM product. Will have its own name or does something to GuardDuty
  • Robot SDK for tight integrations into AWS Cloud
• Jonathan
  • Serverless graph database
  • Live migration for some instance types between EC2 hosts so maintenance events don’t cause the same level of damage
  • Detailed discussion of their use of IOT and AWS services for COVID-19
• Justin
  • Snowflake report generation and capabilities in Redshift or new tool
  • Cut in Bandwidth or C, M and R Instances by 10% minimum
  • A Cloud Shell
• Ryan
  • Control plane for managing Kubernetes on premise or in other clouds
  • An AI/machine learning-based observability tool
  • COVID-19 response highlights the adoption rate of cloud computing because of the pandemic.

Google Cloud Platform: Trying to Outshine Amazon

• 💰 Google launches Anthos Developer Sandbox to make it easy to learn how to develop on Anthos. We like Anthos; we just don’t want to pay for Anthos. 
• 🤷 Google announces Artifact Registry is now generally available. This makes a lot of sense but we wonder why this wasn’t prioritized very early on when people were just doing development?
• 🎫 Google introduces Voucher, a service to help secure the container supply chain. We’re curious to see how this works. Vouchers can be photocopied, can’t they? 
• ❄️ Google adds several new capabilities in the security space for Google Cloud. Very cool!
• 🥡 The 10 most popular sessions from Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir. Some interesting takeaways here. 

Azure: Not Trying to Compete With Re:Invent

• 👍 Azure announces the preview of Azure Files SMB Multi-channel on premium tier. Great if you can figure out how to enable it.
• Azure Firewall Premium is now in public preview. This makes us mad.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡Jonathan wasn’t distracted by Re:Invent so he takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (16 points), Jonathan (10 points), Ryan (six points) and Jacques (one point).

Other headlines mentioned:

• .NET 5 now available in Azure App Service
• AWS Step Functions now supports Amazon EKS service integration
• Amazon Kendra adds user tokens for secure search
• Amazon Athena announces the availability of engine version 2
• AWS Lambda now makes it easier to send logs to custom destinations
• AWS Systems Manager Explorer now provides a multi-account, multi-region summary of AWS Config compliance
• New Amazon S3 console improves upload speed, simplifies common tasks, and makes it even easier to manage storage
• AWS Step Functions now supports Amazon API Gateway service integration
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds support for hot reload of dictionary files
• Amazon MSK customers can now use Cruise Control to more easily scale and balance resource utilization within clusters
• Amazon Textract adds handwriting recognition and support for new languages