On The Cloud Pod this week, news has been a bit slow coming out of the Cloud Providers; the team suspects they might be curled up on the floor in fetal position after the events of last year.

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.

• Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Amazon has gone to the gym over the holidays and is now kicking butt.
• 🚨 Helping teach us the ways of the cloud, Google is.
• 🚨 There’s nothing remotely funny about Azure this week. 

General News: Ryan Doesn’t Want to Wear Pants

• 🙄 Amazon has kicked controversial social media platform Parler off AWS. The multi-cloud people are going to be unbearable now.    
• 💌 Amazon defends its decision to suspend in response to Parler’s lawsuit. Most people don’t know Amazon sent Parler notices for months — it’s not like they weren’t warned.   
• 👎 F5 Networks to acquire edge-as-a-service startup Volterra for $500M. There’s so much buzzword lingo in this announcement, we suspect this service will lack substance.
• 👒 Red Hat buys Kubernetes security startup StackRox. We’re surprised Google didn’t buy it.
• 🔨 Pat Gelsinger is stepping down as VMWare CEO to replace Bob Swan at Intel. We think he has a very long road ahead to get Intel back on track.

Amazon Web Services: Family Time

• 🤞 AWS announces Transfer Family now provides support for EFS file systems as well as S3. Would be nice if this would tie into Incognito or Simple Directory Service.    
• 😐 Amazon EMR now supports Apache Ranger for fine-grained data access control. Neat. 
• 🤷 Achieve faster database failover with Amazon Web Services MySQL JDBC Driver now in preview. Why not just re-resolve the DNS?      

Google Cloud Platform: Ruby Red

• 👌 Google Cloud Function is bringing support for Ruby, a popular, general-purpose programming language. YES.
• 📚 Google kicks off the new year with free Google Cloud training. We might just take them up on this!

Azure: In Azure We Trust

• 😏 Azure SQL Database named among the top three databases of 2020. It doesn’t mean people like it, just that it’s popular.
• 🦹‍♀️ Backup for Azure Managed Disk is in limited preview. Nothing says “no security concerns” quite like taking a copy of production data and storing it somewhere else. 
• 🤗 Azure and HITRUST publish a shared responsibility matrix. We wanted to make a joke here but this is actually super helpful. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan said a lot and therefore wins this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (0), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Step Functions adds support for AWS Glue DataBrew jobs to prepare data in analytics and machine learning workflows
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows to define 40 instance types when defining Mixed Instances Policy
• Amazon CloudSearch announces updates to its search instances  
• Amazon EC2 API now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)
• Customers can now tag resources in the Amazon Braket console
• Amazon Redshift now supports fine-grained access control on COPY and UNLOAD commands
• Amazon Lightsail now supports IPv6
• AWS Snowcone now supports multicast streams and routing by providing instances with direct access to external networks
• Amazon SNS adds support for message archiving and analytics via Kinesis Data Firehose subscriptions
• The graphical user interface of Porting Assistant for .NET is now open source
• Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights now available on AWS Graviton2