On The Cloud Pod this week, we’re back to a full house (at least for one episode.) Plus, introducing AWS open-source Cloud Map, GCP announces new Bigtable autoscale feature, and Oracle gives us a retro tour of a data center.

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.

• JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. 

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 In a move that shows it supports open source when convenient, AWS introduces new Cloud Map capabilities, and U-turns on proposed charges after 30 days. The new console still sucks, by the way.
• 🚨 GCP introduces the very welcome Bigtable autoscaling feature, with new optimizing and manageability features and improvements.
• 🚨 Oracle comes bearing over a hundred gifts from its blog, and gives us a look inside a data center. 

Top Quotes  

• 💡 “I’m starting to wonder what’s going on over at AWS. We’ve talked about the Orca issues, the security rollout … And now we have this: We’re turning on things in your account that are going to cost you money. I saw the earnings… they look pretty good, so I’m not entirely sure why they’re turning on features that cost money — with no notice — and putting the onus on me to turn this stuff off.”
• 💡 “So isn’t that really just a rehashing of the same problem that most IT professionals have been doing for the last 20 years? On the other hand, I don’t want to manage my own legacy Oracle footprint, so the fact that they’re going to take that, move it to the cloud, and then run it for me — I’m all for that.”

General News: Zero Trust ‘Hijacked’ by Network Security Firms 

• 0️⃣ Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry gets us wise to network security firm marketing tactics, highlighting that practicing zero trust and investing in network security are incompatible with each other.  

AWS: Not Amazon’s Best Month… 

• 💳 In a ridiculous move that completely violates the trust of its customers, AWS attempts to charge after a 30-day trial when no one is paying attention — but everyone noticed. First Orca, now this.
• 😭 Watch out you don’t make your CFO cry with the launch of the very nice but very expensive new Amazon X2iezn instances.
• 🎮 AWS shows its open-source credentials — but only because it’s convenient — with the rollout of the new AWS Cloud Map MCS Controller for K8s.

GCP: Coming for Crypto

• 🤑 Cloud Bigtable’s new autoscaling feature promises cost optimization and improved manageability. Two times the data for the same price and it autoscales? We’re sold.
• ⛏️ GCP launches a new dedicated Digital Assets Team, with the first big customer being the IRS. Mine, baby, mine.

Azure: Multitasking and Convenience 

• 💵 Azure’s UI team are clearly excited about the company’s new cost management features. And now finance teams can have the satisfaction of being super busy.
• 🔥 Some convenient logging and performance features come with Azure Firewall’s new rollout: but we don’t really care about the white paper.

Oracle: Over 100 Blog Posts in a Week!

• 💭 Multi-Cloud Strategies Should Consider Oracle Cloud to Modernize Legacy Oracle Footprints — yes you should, if you’re spending billions of dollars on Oracle licenses. 
• 🗄️ Now you can see the power behind Oracle’s data centers, with a view inside one. Interesting, although a little late to the video trend.
• 👷 A gift that just keeps on giving, the Oracle feed just announced a no-code (oh no) solution, with Oracle Visual Builder now available and running natively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan gets the point this week, equalizing with Ryan and Justin, and leaving poor Peter in the dust, with the scores standing at Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Cloud Map API now supports IPv6
• Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports query execution plan capture for RDS for Oracle
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds support for Apache Parquet file format
• Improved progress updates for blue/green deployments in Amazon OpenSearch Service
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now delivers to Honeycomb
• Amazon AppFlow now provides Amazon Honeycode connectivity to several cloud applications     
• Amazon Textract adds synchronous support for single page PDF documents and support for PDF documents containing JPEG 2000 encoded images
• AWS Step Functions adds mocking support for testing workflows locally
• Amazon MSK now offers the ability to scale storage throughput up to 1000 MiB/s per broker  
• Azure Key Vault increased service limits for all its customers

Things Coming Up:

• 7 reasons to attend Azure Open Source Day – February 15th
• 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