On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan has returned and is sitting in his garage letting it get darker and darker before he turns a light on.  Gartner says low-code is growing!! NOOOOOO!

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

• 🚨 AWS is teaming up with TV to make hockey more exciting. 
• 🚨 Google is no longer stuck in the 90s. 
• 🚨 Oracle thinks it’s ruggedly handsome — it is not.

Follow Up: Somebody’s In Trouble

• 🌞 SolarWinds hackers downloaded some Microsoft source code for Azure, Exchange and Intune. Intune is probably the most damaging — this is not good news for Microsoft.

General News: The Glowing Puck

• 💲 Gartner is reporting that Low-Code development tool growth has grown 23% this year. Gartner, pay to play.  
• 🏒 AWS provides the National Hockey League with cloud, AI and machine learning services. It’s great to see computer tech adding to viewer engagement. 
• 👍 Hashicorp announces the general availability of the Terraform Cloud Operator for Kubernetes. It’s an interesting solution to a very hard problem. 

Amazon Web Services: Everyone’s On Vacation 

• 😯 Amazon EC2 Mac Instances now support macOS Big Sur. Completely stunned by this, aren’t you.
• 🎉 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now shows scaling history for deleted groups. This actually solves a small but annoying problem for Justin.   

Google Cloud Platform: Jumping Back To 1994

• 👏 Google introduces schedule-based autoscaling for Compute Engine. Finally catching up to Azure and AWS, both of which have had this for a few years now.  
• 🔨 Google adds several new features to Google Cloud VMware Engines to support workloads moving from the cloud. We just want the VMware tools.   
• 🦖 Google launches Cloud Domains to make it easy to register and use custom domains within its platform. Should have had this a long, long, long time ago.  

Azure: Copying Things That Are Good Ideas

• 🤷 Introducing private Azure marketplace for simplified app governance and deployment. Apparently this is a thing people want. 
• 🚪 Azure Front Door enhances secure cloud CDN with intelligent threat protection. Shut the front door. 
• 🤩 Azure announces Image Builder Service is now generally available. Patching of existing images is really cool and not something we’ve seen in other offerings.

Oracle: Tacky

• 📷 Oracle has released a photo of its roving ruggedized infrastructure. The price isn’t too bad!  
• 😒 How to manage your GoDaddy domain with OCI DNS. Because Oracle doesn’t have a register. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan takes this week’s point as he outwits the rest of the team, leaving scores at Justin (3), Ryan (1), Jonathan (3). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Datadog integration with Azure: Public Preview
• Azure Purview available in public preview in South Central U.S. and Canada Central
• Azure provides new disk bursting metrics 
• Amazon Connect now provides disconnect reason for Voice Calls & Tasks
• Amazon Redshift Query Editor now supports clusters with enhanced VPC routing, longer query run times and all node types
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Trace Analytics, a new feature for distributed tracing
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service add support for Reporting in Kibana
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for Standard Edition
• Access Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur

 Things Coming Up

Events that the cloud pod is aware of, if you have an upcoming event you’d like us to mention on the show please message at [email protected] or use our contact form.

• 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