On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan is getting his beauty sleep so you’ll have to make do with the comic stylings of Justin, Peter and Ryan.

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.

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Amazon is turning into a beautiful butterfly.
• 🚨 Google is helping to monetize Jonathan’s beauty sleep.
• 🚨 It’s the end of the world, we can Azure you.

Amazon Web Services: The Weird Kid in Class

• 🦋 AWS announces Amplify Flutter is now generally available. Get your flutter on in the cloud. 
• 👽 Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.19. Weird use case, but OK.  
• 👏 AWS Direct Connect announces native 100 Gbps dedicated connections at select locations. No discount for more data — well done, Amazon. 

Google Cloud Platform: Jonathan’s Money Maker

• 🍰 Easily build Kubernetes applications that span multiple clusters with Google’s new multi-cluster services (MCS). Now you can have your cake and eat it, too!
• 😴 Google announces general availability of Service Directory. Now Jonathan makes money while he sleeps.
• 😐 Google announces 9TB SSDs to bring ultimate IOPS per dollar to Compute Engine VMs. Still not that exciting. 

Azure: Lost in Space

• 🔥 Azure announces Firewall Premium is now in preview. No more excuses for sticking with standard firewall protection.
• 🤣 Microsoft will establish its next U.S. datacenter region in Georgia’s Fulton and Douglas Counties. Not only did Georgia go blue, they went Azure blue.  
• 👩‍🚀 Azure announces partnership with HPE and the upcoming launch of the Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2). Also known as SkyNet. 
• 🧠 Azure has added the ability to backup Linux systems with Azure Backup. This is such a no-brainer; all cloud providers should have this.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin will have nightmares about supporting more than 2 TB of memory in SAP HANA but at least he takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (3), Ryan (1), Jonathan (2). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Automatic Azure VM extension upgrade capabilities now in public preview
• Azure Backup for SAP HANA: Soft limit increased from 2 TB to 8 TB
• Azure Databricks Achieves DoD Impact Level 5 (IL5) on Microsoft Azure Government  
• AWS Fargate increases default resource count service quotas to 1000
• Update content of inbound and outbound emails using AWS Lambda in Amazon WorkMail
• AWS WAF adds support for JSON parsing and inspection
• Amazon Simple Email Service launches a redesigned service console experience
• AWS Scheduled Actions of Application Auto Scaling now support Local Time Zone
• Amazon Aurora Global Database supports managed planned failover 
• Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring is now supported on select non-Nitro instance types
• AWS Cloud9 launches visual source control integration for Git  

 Things Coming Up

• Microsoft Ignite — March 2–4, 2021 (Digital)
• Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) 
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World