On The Cloud Pod this week, the team weighs the merits of bitcoin mining versus hacking. Plus: AWS Trusted Advisor prioritizes Support customers, Google provides impenetrable protection from a major DDoS attack, and Oracle Linux 9 is truly unbreakable.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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.

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 AWS Trusted Advisor offers a new Priority capability for Enterprise Support, offering a prioritized view of critical risks.
• 🚨 Nothing’s touching Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date, with a whopping 46 million requests per second (RPS).
• 🚨 The new Oracle Linux 9 comes with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK).

Top Quotes  

• 💡 “This is really just institutionalizing the knowledge that the Enterprise customers are already getting from their account team. And it probably really helps — in the event that the AWS account team experiences churn for those customers — not to be negatively impacted. It probably makes it really easy for new people on that AWS account team to come in and know where the other team left off. I don’t think it’s really a new feature — just a new way to access data that customers are already getting.”
• 💡 “Ignoring those Tor nodes — which didn’t make a whole lot of traffic — that’s 12,000 requests a second per source IP, on average. That’s enormous.”

AWS: A Trusty Advisor’s Priorities

• 🧑‍🔧 Finally, AWS has found a use for Mechanical Turk, with its new Priority capability for Trust Advisor.
• 🔭 If you’ve been curious about what’s happening during domain updates of the OpenSearch Service, you now get more visibility into validation errors during blue/green deployments.
• 📜 Great news for license-holders and clearly by popular demand: RDS for Oracle now supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for read replicas.

GCP: Heavily Armored Cloud

• 🥝 Google Cloud is saying goodbye to its IoT Core service in 2023. How about instead of turning it off, just stop selling it? 
• ✂️ You can benefit from operating system Committed Use Discounts (CUD) with workload predictability. Now, get some cuts on your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) — with savings of up to 79%.
• 🛡️ There’s much fanfare at Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date. It didn’t last long though, because the attackers gave up — probably deciding there was no value in continuing.
• 🔍 Chronicle SecOps Suite now offers curated detections for SOC teams. Now you’ve got them, what do you do with them? Well, be on the lookout out for a follow-on service from Google, probably coming soon. 

Azure: It Must Be Kubernetes Week at Azure

• 🤔 In a strange announcement that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Public IP Capability for Azure VMware Solution is now generally available. What does “the ability to receive up to 1000 or more Public IPs” actually mean? Come on, Azure.
• 🤝 If you’re in the Kubernetes camp, you get a big change with the general availability of Kubernetes 1.24 support. (For most people this isn’t a big deal and you don’t care.)
• 🤗 It sounds expensive, but it’s dedicated: Azure Dedicated Host Support is now general available.
• ⌨️ It’s mind blowing that key management system integration with AKS wasn’t already a thing, but there we go.       

Oracle: Surviving a Train Wreck

• 🚆 If you were super excited about the general availability of Oracle Linux 9, you get cloud-ready platform images now available in OCI, with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK).

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan makes the dad joke of the century, but fails to snag the point from Justin. The scores stand at: Justin (7), Ryan (4), Jonathan (3), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Amazon RDS now supports setting up connectivity between your RDS database and EC2 compute instance in 1-click
• Now capture AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection logs using Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Cost Categories now support Out of Cycle cost categorization  
• Amazon EKS announces cluster-level cost allocation tagging 
• Azure UAE North Availability Zones

Things Coming Up:

• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event 🎉 The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Google Cloud Next – October 11th-13th 
• Oracle Cloud World – October 16th-20th 
• Kubecon US – October 24th-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBD
• Microsoft events – TBD Check for status

After Show:

Elon Musk’s lawyers are bringing in a Twitter whistleblower as part of the ongoing plan to back away from buying the social media giant.