The Three Musketeers have gained their D’Artagnan and take on the world (metaphorically and from home) on this week’s 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

• 🚨 Take a break with us and enjoy a music video.
• 🚨 Oracle managed a whole two headlines this week!
• 🚨 Jonathan called it: AWS opens the Africa (Cape Town) Region.

General News: Chime After Chime

• • 🎵 Tim Leehane and Spencer Johnson released a working-from-home anthem titled Chime After Chime we just had to share with you.

• 💰 Security company Rapid7 will acquire SaaS platform DivvyCloud for $145 million.

COVID-19

• 🔮 Zoom picked the dark horse of cloud platforms Oracle for their next upscaling deal. Zoom is moving around 93 years of video through Oracle servers every day.
• ❓ AMD revealed an anonymous customer (probably Oracle or Microsoft) deployed 10,000 new Epyc servers in just 10 days.

 AWS: Summit Predictions

• Jonathan
  1. Improved DLP Tools for S3
  2. AI Powered submarine to explore the depths of the ocean
  3. ES service will pivot to Open Distro for ElasticSearch
• Ryan
  1. Docker Exec based Debugging tools/capability
  2. Remote Debug capabilities for Lambda Functions
  3. Security Code Scanning service (similar to code guru). (static and dynamic code analysis)
• Peter
  1. Direct Competitor to Anthos
  2. DLP for VPC, always wanted a layer 7 like proxy. Filtering/Domain Whitelisting
  3. A caricature of larry ellison will appear on the screen in the slides
• Justin
  1. Price Cut in EC2, S3 or Networking
  2. Covid Crazy Growth Numbers (service dig on Azure)
  3. A Diplo T-shirt will be worn by Werner Vogel

Honorable Mentions: 

• Amazon Crucible their first person shooter game, online multiplayer game
• Dr. Matt Wood will make a passionate attempt for people to love sagemaker
• 6 foot distancing robots
• Keyspaces will be on the HIPAA BAA list 
• Detective Named/Sherlock named security tool
• In person events for 2020 will be canceled
• New Region coming in a few years.  

Tie BreakerHow many new features for year, will AWS say they:

• 70 – Justin
• 200 – Peter
• 150 – Ryan
• 157 – Jonathan

AWS: Global Reach, Mediocre Branding

• 📛 The butt of TCP jokes at Re:Invent — Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Services — has rebranded to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) and became generally available.
• 🙏 AWS Transfer for Secure File Transfer Protocol now supports File Transfer Protocol and File Transfer Protocol over SSL/TLS. Please, please don’t use File Transfer Protocol if you’re transferring data of any sensitivity.
• 📗 AWS published their guide to CloudWatch Synthetics in a blog post. In fact, we set it up for The Cloud Pod and it’s running cleanly.
• #️ Amazon AppFlow promises to automate the data flows between AWS services and SaaS apps. This might actually be a good piece to build onto #NoCode.
• 💬 AWS Chatbot is now generally available for anyone to use for ChatOps. They’ve added quite a bit since we last saw this at Re:Invent.
• 🌍 You can cross it off your predictions bingo card: AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region and AWS Europe (Milan) Region are open for business.
  • The promised xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/705/
• 💸 Those of you carefully budgeting your cloud spends may be interested to know that cost controls are now available for Amazon Redshift Spectrum and Concurrency Scaling.
• 🗼 AWS Control Tower will allow you to create and manage multi-account environments. That fixes an entire half of the problem!
• 🦸 AWS Glue promises to manage streaming data automatically. Break out the acetone because this is Super Glue now.

Google: 

• 🆓 Anthos support for Multi-cloud is now generally available. All the boundless freedom of locking into Anthos!
• 🔄 Migrate for Anthos has been updated with enhanced Virtual-Machine-to-container conversion capabilities. It’s a big deal assuming it actually works.
• ❔ Thomas Kurian stated that Istio will be donated to “a foundation,” but did not specify what foundation or when. Expect Istio to go to the WWF sometime in 2040?
• 🛡️ Shielded Virtual Machines are now the default for Google Compute Engine. It’s just common sense to employ robust default security settings.
• 💳 Rumor has it that Google is looking to purchase Kubernetes startup D2iQ. Neither company will comment, but this appears to us to be a talent hire.

Azure: A Strong Third Place

• 💲Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage promises yet another way to increase the efficiency of your spend.
• 🏥 Microsoft admitted the ongoing global pandemic led to capacity constraints in some Azure regions. We anticipate a mixed response to Microsoft’s decision making…but we appreciate the transparency.
• 📛 If you didn’t think there were enough cloud service brand names to keep track of, then there’s good news for you: Visual Studio Online has rebranded to Visual Studio Codespaces.
• 🤷 Microsoft is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. Not much of a feat for a company of Microsoft’s size.
• 🥉 Azure Kubernetes Service support for Windows Containers is now generally available. Somehow Microsoft is the third of the big three to support Windows containers.
• 🛏️ Strange bedfellows Azure and Red Hat will jointly manage new OpenShift services, and you can thank IBM.

Oracle: Wait, Oracle?!

• 📉 Microsoft hiked up the Windows Server licenses and Oracle is passing those losses on to you.

Lightning Round

• ⚡ Somehow Ryan makes his debut with an unprecedented negative one point by the end of this week’s lightning round. Better luck next time?

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Storage Gateway automates creating new virtual tapes on Tape Gateway
• AWS Storage Gateway increases Tape Gateway write and read performance by 2x
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds improved multi-key indexing capabilities
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports organizational units for policy scoping
• Amazon EKS managed node groups allow fully private cluster networking
• Amazon SageMaker now supports Inf1 instances providing high performance and cost-effective machine learning inference
• CloudWatch Application Insights for .NET and SQL Server now supports AWS Lambda and CloudWatch Events
• Azure Functions—Java 8 support on Linux is now in preview
• Introducing Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) for human reviews of machine learning predictions
• Kernel Live Patching is now available in Preview for Amazon Linux