On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the conspiracy theory surrounding media coverage of daylight savings and continues counting down to re:Invent. 

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.

• Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. 

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Amazon sells a whole bunch of stuff on its website.
• 🚨 Google is nosy and wants people to know what files you’ve been looking at.
• 🚨 Azure wants people to think more with its new knowledge center.

Amazon Web Services: Getting Excited for re:Invent 

• ⛰️ Jeff Barr shares how AWS helped to make Prime Day a reality for its customers. Congratulations to the Amazon Ops and Dev teams for this amazing feat. 
• 🎀 AWS Global Accelerator announces the ability to override destination ports used to route traffic to an application endpoint. Pretty neat! 
• 🏗️ AWS is launching AWS Distro for Open Telemetry in preview. We’re excited to see what this builds out to become.   
• 🤪 AWS launches fully managed publishing/subscribing messaging service enabling message delivery to a large number of subscribers. This is great and we already have use cases for this.  
• 🏆 Amazon introduces the AWS Load Balancer Controller to simplify operations and save costs — a huge win for anyone using EKS today.  
• 🤷 AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas. Sounds good unless you’re trying to make smaller CloudFormation templates.     

Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Confused

• 🥔 GCP is introducing new Scale-in controls for Compute Engine, to prevent the autoscaler from reducing a managed instance group size too far. We’re a bit confused by the term “Scale-in.” 
• 🔍 GCP improves security and governance in PostgreSQL with Cloud SQL. Great for companies that are highly audited.
• 😺 Google updates Firebase with new emulator and data analysis tools. Really great stuff!  

Azure: Busy Building Services It Promised For JEDI

• 🥳 Microsoft announces multiple new features for Azure VPN Gateway in public preview. Some of these are amazing!  
• 🔌 Azure introduces the Knowledge center to simplify access to pre-loaded sample data. That electrical smell is the Team’s synapses firing on this one.   
• 💡 Azure has announced that it will establish its first cloud datacenter region in Taiwan. It feels a bit like they’re trying to sell this as a good idea.    

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan was on his game and took this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (15 points), Jonathan (nine points) and Ryan (five points). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon Redshift announces support for Lambda UDFs and enables tokenization
• Amazon AppFlow supports importing custom dimensions and metrics from Google Analytics to Amazon S3
• AWS Shield now provides global and per-account event summaries to all AWS customers
• Amazon SNS now supports selecting the origination number when sending SMS messages
• AWS App Mesh supports cross account sharing of ACM Private Certificate Authority
• Amazon RDS for Oracle supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Oracle Data Guard physical standby database
• AWS Step Functions now supports Amazon Athena service integration
• Amazon Kendra now supports custom data sources
• Announcing two new on-demand digital courses for Game Tech
• New digital course: Advanced Testing Practices using AWS DevOps Tools 
• Pause and Resume Workloads on I3, M5ad, and R5ad Instances with Amazon EC2 Hibernation
• Now customize your Session Manager shell environment with configurable shell profiles