On The Cloud Pod this week, The Team are on the brink and three more months of the pandemic will likely push the podcast over the edge into an abyss of garble that no one can understand. 

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 has a gender reveal party and introduces its latest bundle of joy.
• 🚨 Google is eating croissants for breakfast.
• 🚨 Azure is dangling a pair of juicy fruits in front of us.

Follow Up: The Mad Men Are Back

• 🤔  Amazon announces its “Other” business segment, which consists mostly of its advertising business, has surpassed its “subscription services” segment. There’s speculation that Andy Jassy might split Amazon’s advertising business out once he becomes CEO. 

General News: Rolls Right Off The Tongue

• 😒 Vantage, an AWS Console alternative, has acquired ec2instances.info. They better not mess it up!  

Amazon Web Services: Undoing Your Hard Work

• 👾 New Amazon Elastic Block Store Local Snapshots on AWS Outposts makes it easier to meet data residency and local backup requirements. It’s like playing a video game and building up your weapons, only to start from scratch when you move regions. 
• 👶 Amazon introduces CloudFront Security Savings Bundle. We appreciate the savings, but not sure about the bundle.

Google Cloud Platform: Our Buzzword Bingo Is On Point

• 🙈 Google launches improved troubleshooting with Cloud Spanner introspection capabilities. We love these types of tools, except if they’re on SQL Server.
• 🤷 Google launches Apigee X to help enterprises manage their digital transformation assets. What is it with X? What happened to 8 and 9?
• 🤳 Google introduces real-time data integration for BigQuery with Cloud Data Fusion. For people who don’t want to read, they just want to see pretty pictures. 
• 🦘 Google introduces Assured Workloads Support. The Aussies will always be the best.  
• 🥐 The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service. Bonjour! 

Azure: Protecting The Dangling Things

• 😂 Azure Defender for App Service introduces dangling DNS protection. Don’t expect any jokes about the dangling DNS here, they’re saving it for the Lightning Round.  
• 🐎 The Azure DDOS team has released their 2020 year in review report. We wonder if DDOS attacks are trojan horses most of the time?

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan dangles the lead in front of the rest of the team by taking this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (2), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Defender for App Service introduces dangling DNS protection
• Announcing Availability of the Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure for US Government Customers
• You can use bash scripts to refresh an Oracle Autonomous Database with this post.
• New digital curriculum: Managing Amazon S3
• Application Load Balancer now supports Application Cookie Stickiness
• AWS App Mesh now supports mutual TLS authentication
• Announcing AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes version 1.3.0 with mTLS support
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now customize reverse DNS for their Elastic IP addresses
• AWS Backup Events and Metrics now available in Amazon CloudWatch
• Take actions before and after patching to improve safety during patch installation
• General availability: Soft delete for Azure file shares is now on by default for new storage accounts
• General availability: Stop/start functionality for Azure Database for MySQL
• Additional IOPS feature for Azure MySQL – Flexible Server in public preview  

 Things Coming Up

• Microsoft Ignite – March 2-4 2021 (Digital)
• Microsoft Build – May 19-21st (Digital) 
• Google Cloud Next – Not Announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28-30th)
• AWS Re:Invent – November 29th – December 3rd – Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World