For our New Years Resolution, we decided to change some of our show. First, we have cut the lightning round in favor of our new Cloud Journey series, where we will talk about core cloud concepts over several episodes. We are also covering only the larger stories from the cloud providers, we still want to provide you with all of the news, so you’ll find it in the show notes; if you enjoy the aggregation, subscribe to our newsletter to get the show notes to get your mailbox weekly.  Share your feedback through our website or join our slack team. 

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team follows up on the news from Salesforce’s last episode, as workforce cuts ensue as a fallout of the noted decline in productivity, with more on 2023 predictions from Peter, including general expectations in the tech space, while also highlighting the new Graph-explorer tool by Amazon Neptune, GCP security trends for the coming year, the CES Conference and CCOE from the new Cloud Journey Series.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions focused 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: Amazon Neptune announces a new open-source low-code visual exploration tool, the Graph-explorer.
• 🚨 GCP releases an article on security trends to expect in 2023.
• 🚨 The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

Top Quotes

• 💡 “A lot of traditional security operations has been at the infrastructure level; tracking packets and using the header information of those packets for identification, and none of that really works on cloud anymore”
• 💡 “It’s not just how to use cloud technology, which is what the IT teams were focused on, it’s how do you provide the value of cloud into your business and succeed?”
• 💡 “Understanding the advantages of why you want to adopt Cloud is really important for a business, even before they start the CCOE” 

Follow up:

• After discussing Salesforce and their “less productive” employees a few weeks ago, Salesforce has followed up by laying off 10% of their workforce.
• 👤 After missing last week’s episode, Peter shares his 2023 prediction; The recession will be more severe than expected, resulting in significant layoffs as companies are forced to get more competitive with automated solutions.
• Peter’s favorite announcement for 2022; Aurora Serverless V2

5 things to look out for in tech

• Five Things to Watch in Tech 2023
• Big Changes ahead in 2023 for big tech with poor valuations, justifying their software against slashing budgets and the next big thing; is it AI, AR, VR?

AWS: Amazon Neptune announces Graph-explorer

• 👤 Amazon Neptune announces a new open-source low-code visual exploration tool, the Graph-explorer.
• ️🕵️ This react-based Web app will create a seamless browsing experience for Labeled Property Graphs (LPG) or Resource Description Framework (RDF).

GCP releases an article on big security ops trends to expect in 2023.

• 0️⃣ 5 security operations trends and tips for 2023
• These trends include SOC teams handling of cloud environments, the use of AI by attackers, changes in staffing of SOCS, and continuation of hybrid work for Anywhere Security Operations workers

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

• Defining CCOE; an Amazon invention.
• While a variety of skills will be required for professionals who will work in the CCOE, it is crucial to understand the relevance of such a team, compared to the usual IT teams companies have.
• Most importantly, companies need to realize that the goal is to integrate cloud systems in such a way that it promotes the growth of the business.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Transfer Family announces built-in PGP decryption for file uploads
• Updated whitepaper available: AWS Security Incident Response Guide
• Blue/Green or Canary Amazon EKS clusters migration for stateless ArgoCD workloads
• Announcing firewall status message for AWS Network Firewall
• AWS Organizations console adds support to centrally manage region opt-in settings on AWS accounts
• AWS License Manager now supports commercial Linux subscriptions discovery and governance
• Amazon Connect now allows contact center managers to join ongoing calls
• Amazon RDS announces integration with AWS Secrets Manager
• Amazon RDS now supports renaming Multi-AZ deployments with two readable standbys
• ROSA now provides an AWS Management Console experience for satisfying ROSA prerequisites
• AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator adds support for importing virtual machine images
• Nimble Studio now supports configurable persistent storage and new EBS volumes
• Amazon Nimble Studio now supports EBS Snapshots with Auto Backup
• Amazon EKS Anywhere now supports single-node clusters on bare metal
• Amazon EKS Anywhere now supports cluster lifecycle automation with GitOps and IaC tools like Terraform
• AWS announces Amazon EKS Anywhere on Nutanix
• Amazon Rekognition improves accuracy of content moderation for images
• New to Chronicle: Regular expressions and reference lists
• Document AI adds three new capabilities to its OCR engine
• General availability: Encryption using CMK for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• The future of mobility is now: Five themes to watch at CES 2023
• Access Jupyter notebooks within OCI Data Flow service

After Show

• Your hosts geek out about CES this week