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