On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s got his detective hat on. Plus Akamai steps up to CloudFare with Linode acquisition, AWS’ CloudFormation Hooks lift us up, and EPYC instances are now available.

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

• 🚨 Akamai notes CloudFare’s aggressive pivot to edge computing and acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m.
• 🚨 AWS announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, which should prove very useful.
• 🚨 Amazon provides EPYC-powered instances, with up to 15% improvement in price-performance.

Top Quotes  

• 💡 “When AWS announces general availability of an instance, I have never been unable to launch that instance to test it. … I can’t say the same thing for workloads on GCP.”
• 💡 “If you ever take a laptop that has no security patches on it and you put it on a network … it’ll be hacked within minutes. It’s crazy how bad it is, actually. This is what we always talk about: it’s when you get hacked, not if you get hacked. Because if you have vulnerabilities, there’s always a chance. It’s just a matter of time before someone figures it out.”

General News: Akamai Steps Up Its Game

• 🛡️ Capitalizing on existing relationships, F5 unveils its new cloud platform with a huge advantage in security — but it might be a tough sell.
• 🉐 Akamai acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. Clearly Akamai saw what CloudFare was doing and thought I gotta get me some of that.

AWS: Getting Its CloudFormation Hooks In

• 🪝 AWS announces the general availability of its CloudFormation Hooks. Very nice.
• 🪵We wish we’d had Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer’s new security features back in December — now it’s February and no one cares about Log4j anymore. 
• 🪢 A nice freebie comes in the form of improved performance for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).
• ⛰️ Epic new EC2 c6a instances are powered by EPYC processors, providing up to 15% price performance improvements next to c5a instances. And there was much rejoicing.
• 🛑 Protect your login page against credential stuffing attacks with AWS WAF Fraud Control.
• 🏠 We don’t completely hate the new Billing console home page experience. Actually, it’s pretty good.
• 🤔 Ryan thinks AWS’ Migration Hub Refactor Spaces (now generally available) sounds cool, but he’s suspicious as to how effective it will actually be.

GCP: Also Wants To Be Epic

• 👷 Vertex AI has nifty new training features to help you build, deploy, and scale ML models faster.
• 🚃 GCP hops on the EPYC bandwagon with the availability of C2D. Confidential Computing support is on the way.

Azure: FLASH! Ah-ahhhh…

• ⛑️ Azure provides increased management capabilities with the improved Azure Hybrid Benefit and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
• ⚡ Project Flash is the latest effort from Azure catering to evolving virtual machine (VM) availability monitoring needs.

Oracle: Someday It’ll Have Big Bills

• 🧱 Oracle decided not enough of its customers are complaining how expensive it is to run, so it’s joined the FinOps Foundation, and can now raise its prices.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ If you were here for Peter this week, sorry: You had to put up with us three again. (He should be back next week.) The scores remain Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Running faster motor sport simulations on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 
• AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management now supports new version of Chef Automate
• Amazon Connect launches Amazon CloudWatch support for Chat metrics
• Amazon Neptune now supports up to 128TiB of storage per cluster
• Amazon Neptune ML now supports custom models and SPARQL query language
• AWS Organizations console now lets users centrally manage alternate contacts on AWS accounts

Things Coming Up:

• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• IBM Think – May 9-13th
• Kubecon EU – May 16-20
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe
• 10-12 May 2022  |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US – August 2-4, 2022
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18-20, 2022
• AWS Summits – US April-October, APAC – May, EMEA – April – June
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec-2 (assumed)
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th
• Google Next – June 6th – 8th 2022
• Oracle OpenWorld
• MS Ignite
• MS Build