The Cloud Pod Is As Free As Github For Teams

Ryan Lucas and Ian Mckay fill in for Jonathan on this week’s free-tier episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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

💸 GitHub has switched to a freemium business model — core features will be free to all users, and premium features like Security Assertion Markup Language will require a paid plan. This is a great new direction, though they may lose a few paid customers tempted to downgrade to the new free tier.

🧙 The new AWS Launch Wizard for Solutions and Pricing (SAP) service will orchestrate resource provisioning to help customers deploy or migrate SAP workloads. If you’re paying the premium for a big fancy SAP instance, you’re going to want to be invested in how your infrastructure is set up.
🌱 Amazon unveiled a giant pile of Beanstalk updates this week. The AWS Elastic Beanstalk console is now generally available, and upcoming features can be followed the roadmap on GitHub. New generations of Docker, Corretto and Python platforms built on Amazon Linux 2 will all run applications on Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk has added API support for listing platform branches. Beanstalk is looking to be a very popular option for smaller developers, and is getting more impressive with every update.
👛 You can now preview Amazon RDS Proxy with PostgreSQL compatibility, which resolves connection pool issues. This is going to be a super helpful service and at about three cents per hour to run a proxy, it’s also extremely cost effective.
🆕 AWS Fargate updated to version 1.4.0, with new features including EFS Endpoint Support, consolidated 20gb ephemeral storage and new options for metrics and statistics. You have a month to test before this becomes the default version.

📚 Google published “Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems” aka “the SRS book.” You can purchase a physical copy or download a copy for free on the Google SRE website. Their previous book, the SRE book, changed practices across the industry and formalized those practices that it did not change, so the SRS book is sure to make an impact.

🔎 You can now quickly look up the name of a Virtual Machine from its IP addresses using Azure Virtual Network reverse DNS lookup. And only 10 years behind Amazon!
🆙 The new virtual machine scale sets automatic image upgrades will allow you to safely and automatically deploy new versions of custom images to scale set virtual machines. There’s always some apprehension around automatic OS upgrades, but is it really worse than the risks if you forget to upgrade your security?
🤷 Many-to-many relationships (relationships between tables where both columns are non-unique) in Azure Analysis Services are now generally available. Now anyone who wants to can make their performance “very very bad.”

⚡No time for our special format this week, but we’re still not assigning any points.

🔨 Cool Tool number was released by our very own Peter Roosakos in an article for Foghorn Consulting. The quickstart cloudformation template will help your company set up Amazon Workspaces quickly, simply, and securely. AWS is offering free Workspaces for up to 50 remote workstations until June 30.
🔧 Cool Tool number two comes from our guest Ian Mckay who published AWS Account Controller on Github. AWS Account Controller is an exciting one-click cloudformation template SSO application that can automatically create and delete AWS accounts without the human authentication normally required.