Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter again as we practice social distancing on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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.
• Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. 

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Details emerged from the ongoing legal battle surrounding the JEDI contract.
• 🚨 Amazon shows off its new operating system.
• 🚨 Powershell 7.0 brings long-awaited features to Windows.

General News

❌ Due to the ongoing global pandemic, AWS Summits have been (responsibly) cancelled in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco and Brussels. Hopefully we’ll see these events move online.

👩‍⚖️ Court documents from Amazon’s injunction have been unsealed. The documents reveal that Microsoft’s bid included “non-compliant storage” which was not counted against them. The Department of Defense responded that Amazon’s bid did not include technically compliant storage either.

📰 Our very own Justin Brodley made the news! His comments are included in an article covering a cloud alternatives panel discussion at Altitude 2020. 

🗂️ VMware Inc. overhauled its portfolio of products to focus on Kubernetes support. Expect to see the whole host of products available by May 2020.

AWS: 

⏰ The new CloudWatch composite alarms will allow you to combine alarms and get a clearer picture of what is happening when something goes wrong.

🔊 You can now host your applications with the AWS Amplify Console via S3 and CloudFront. If you checked out Amplify last year, it’s changed a lot since then so it might be worth another look.

🗃️ AWS Serverless Application Repository now allows you to share applications with Organizations. Anything you can manage at an organizational level is a huge benefit.

💸 If you’re looking to build your resumé, AWS Certified is offering the new “Database – Specialty” certification. A practice exam costs $40 and the specialty exam at testing centers worldwide costs $300. 

🆕 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service has updated to support Kubernetes version 1.15, just in time for Kubernetes version 1.16 to make it outdated in a few weeks.

🎆 Amazon announced the public preview of the new Bottlerocket operating system. The OS is open-sourced, Linux-based and purpose-built to run containers.

Google: 

📱 Google Cloud announced its strategy to support the telecommunications industry in three areas: 5G monetization, data-driven experiences and operational efficiency. With AWS and Google partnering with telecommunication companies, will we see Azure or Oracle follow suit?

🌏 Google announced it will launch new cloud regions in Deli, Doha, Melbourne and Toronto. Google has emphasized that they are committed to building their datacenters sustainably.

📷 Compute Engine now features the machine images resource, which streamlines instance creation by capturing all the information you need during image creation. If you spend a lot of time creating custom images in Google Cloud, this may be a great time-saver for you.

Azure: 

📝 Azure announced that Backup Explorer will now feature a preview of Backup Reports, allowing you to analyze your backup solutions. Nobody likes paying attention to backups, so the ability to take a quicker look is welcome. But the day when we won’t have to manage our backups at all can’t come soon enough! 

🐢 Powershell 7.0 is now generally available, finally implementing features other languages have had for decades. 

Lightning Round

⚡ No score this week while Peter’s away, but tune in for another edition of hand-crafted cloud computing industry humor! Stay healthy out there.

Other headlines mentioned:

• Web Application Firewall with Azure Front Door service now supports exclusion lists
• Vulnerability scanning for images in Azure Container Registry is now generally available
• Azure Security Center supports integration with Azure Monitor alerts
• Improved resource governance for Azure Analysis Services
• Provision AWS Chatbot configurations with AWS CloudFormation
• AWS RoboMaker simulation now supports GUI streaming for robot and simulation applications
• AWS WAF adds Anonymous IP List for AWS Managed Rules
• New features in Azure Cosmos DB Jupyter notebooks are now in preview
• Amazon EKS adds envelope encryption for secrets with AWS KMS
• Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility supports in-place upgrade from PostgreSQL 9.6 to 10
• Announcing column-level access control for Amazon Redshift
• AWS CodeCommit Introduces an Open Source Remote Helper
• AWS adds the ability for customers to enable AWS Local Zones themselves
• Preparing for TLS 1.2 in Microsoft Azure
• Export Power BI reports to PDF, PPTX, or PNG files using REST API