On The Cloud Pod this week, the team looks back on the incredibly weird year that was 2020 and how all we want is to give each other a hug (but we don’t because social distancing is important).

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.
•   Open Raven, the cloud-native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon hurts Google’s feelings with its harshly worded message.
• Google is tapping into its inner dictator by vying for world domination.
• Azure wants you to know it made something cheaper.

Recapping the Shit Year That Was 2020

The Predictions That Were Made for 2020

• Justin: Amazon and Microsoft will work hard to compete with GKE.
• Peter: Kubernetes workloads will double in the next year.
• Jonathan: Amazon will open data centers across growing African economies, RISC-V based RISC instances will release (and Slack will be acquired this year for sure).
• No One: A global pandemic and Ryan would join the podcast (coincidence?). 

Favorite Announcements of 2020

Ryan:

• AWS Serverless host and run applications, bringing it closer to what developers need. Tooling, savings plan
• Covid-19 response, from each vendor, from public data lakes, responding to capacity needs, database of research and overall support of WFH
• A big shift for Container Ecosystems, Split from enterprise/developer, Docker.com on downward trend, download limits

  Peter:

• Google’s creation of the Open Usage Commons for trademarks
• Amazon Braket
• WFH trend — which may be permanent

 Jonathan:

• Solarwinds Hack, and the risk of a supply chain hack occurs
• Confidential Computing and the enclave needs.
• Amazon added the ability to assign IAM permissions when called via another service (like Cloudformation)

Justin:

• AWS HoneyCode
• Azure Orbital
• Developer Anthos

Honorable Mentions:

• Bottle Rocket OS
• Big Query turned 10, BigQuery Omni
• BabelFish TSQL to PostgreSQL translator
• Multi Cloud — via containers (Cloud run, Lambda, etc.)
• Mac Instances
• Cloudfront change propagation speed up

Predictions for 2021

• Jonathan: Braket and other quantum technology will become mainstream and start breaking TLS.
• Peter: The biggest blocker to cloud adoption will be costs, with individuals spending too much and debt of poor cloud migrations.
• Justin: Verticalization of the cloud Fintech, Health, Retail, etc.
• Ryan: WFH will be a permanent trend, further breaking traditional security.

Amazon Web Services: Eff You, Google

• AWS launches Amazon Location to add maps and location awareness to your applications. Looks cheaper than Google Maps but still need to check.  
• AWS Load Balancer Controller version 2.1 is now available with support for additional Elastic Load Balancing configurations. Happy to see this!  
• AWS now supports Domain Name System Security Extensions for Route 53. A huge oversight that has been missing for years, so this is great!

Google Cloud Platform: Going For World Domination

• Google announces more new regions for 2021. This is big — they’re the first cloud provider with multiple data centers in Germany.
• Google introduces a new dashboard creation experience in Cloud Monitoring. Yay!
• Google launches a single command to build and deploy your code to Cloud Run. Brought to you by the Department of First World Problems.
• Google releases Dataproc Metastore to simplify technical metadata management. You would think it would have priced based on a scaling model. 
• Google listened and has announced more Cloud Spanner productivity features. How nice!

Azure: Just Cheap

• Azure shares five ways to save costs by running .NET apps on Azure. It’s very focused on cost visibility.  

TCP Lightning Round

Justin takes out the competition with this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (17.5 points), Jonathan (10 points), Ryan (9.5 points) and Jacques (one point). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Five more free services now available in the Azure free account 
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source
• AWS CodeBuild is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) Region
• AWS DeepComposer launches new learning capsule that dives deep into Transformer models
• Amazon Chime now supports joining meetings from Echo Show 8
• AWS Config launches ability to save advanced queries
• Use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate your AWS Data Migration Service source and target database credentials  
• AWS OpsHub for AWS Snow Family is now available for Linux
• AWS Artifact makes compliance documents easy to download and share