This week on The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the fine art of writing the podcast show notes so there are bullet points for when Peter shows up without doing the homework.      

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.

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Amazon is catering to the unimaginative with its version of a vanilla milkshake.
• 🚨 Google now performs commitment ceremonies but they come at a cost.
• 🚨 Azure did an online pastry course and can now make croissants. 

General News: La France Est Méconnaître Amazon (France Is Ignoring Amazon)

• 😴 VMware picks longtime executive Raghuram as its new CEO. So many people were overlooked for this position.  
• 🍟 France says Google and Microsoft Cloud Services are OK for storing sensitive data. Bit of a snub for Amazon.    

Amazon Web Services: Busy Little Bees

• 🚀 AWS SaaS Boost released as open source. Sounds more like a product than it actually is.   
• 🦆 AWS announces general availability of AWS Application Migration Service. If play is to lift and shift, with no thought of transformation at all, this is for you.    
• 🛡️ AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0 is now generally available. It’s great that this supports more than just cloud transformation. 
• 🦹‍♂️ AWS Premium Support launches Support Automation Workflows (SAW). This will make the exchange of data so much easier. 
• 🗳️ Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new lower-cost storage tier. This is great news for everybody. 
• 😐 Amazon announces the release of EKS 1.20 — the raddest release ever.  
• 🏃 AWS launches another way to run containers with App Runner. Just in case you don’t want to use one of the other billion container services.     

Google Cloud Platform: Here To Confuse You

• ⭐ Google will bring Starlink satellite connectivity to enterprises in late 2021. Cool!  
• ☁️ Google is offering new committed use discounts for Cloud Run. Commit yourself to Google.
• 🔒 Google is announcing several new ways to ensure your Cloud Run environment is secure. Thumbs up!
• 🤺 Enhance DDoS protection and get predictable pricing with Google’s new Cloud Armor service. Making this a per customer thing doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.  
• 🌀 Google launches new managed machine learning platform Vertex AI. A very powerful release.   
• 🤷 Google releases LaMDA to improve conversation technology for chat bots. Not to be confused with AWS Lambda…
• 🥔 Google launches the next generation of its custom AI chips. But it’s not ready yet.   

Azure: Viva La France!

• 🏰 Microsoft to upgrade cloud products’ data controls in European Union. Lots of interesting use cases for this one.  
• 😧 Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain service on September 10, 2021. We’ll help you — it will only cost you a suitcase full of cash and a helicopter. 
• 👏 Azure Static Web Apps is now generally available. Static is great until you want to have any type of interaction.    

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin exacts his revenge on Ryan for stealing his jokes last week and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (8), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• General availability: Azure Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99%
• Amazon EMR 6.3 now supports Apache Ranger for fine-grained data access control
• AWS WAF adds support for log filtering
• Amazon Connect adds near real-time insights into voice call, chat, and task activity
• Now use AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar to prevent desired-state updates during critical events
• AWS License Manager now provides historical license usage reporting
• Amazon Macie supports criteria-based bucket selection for sensitive data discovery jobs
• Google’s Translation API Advanced can translate business documents across 100+ languages  
• Amazon Transcribe improves live subtitling with partial results stabilization
• Google now allows you to automate your budgeting with the Billing Budgets API
• General availability: Announcing lower pricing for provisioned throughput on Azure Ultra Disks
• Ground processing with space data 5x faster with Azure

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th 
• Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• Amazon re:Inforce — August 24-25 — Houston TX
• Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)