Episode 74: The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back

The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back — Episode 74

Your co-hosts have cooked up a good one 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

🚨 Your co-hosts cover DockerCon 2020.
🚨 Chef announced several new features at ChefConf 2020.
🚨 Google Cloud Platform (GCP) teaches you how to take an online certification exam.

💸 Mirantis has released the first major update to Docker Enterprise since it acquired the platform in November — a loss for the startup community.
🎙️ Over 60,000 people registered for the online DockerCon, the first DockerCon after the loss of Enterprise. During the keynote, Docker CEO Scott Johnston announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft.
📈 Chinese cloud titan Alibaba’s revenue grew 62% in the first quarter of 2020, though it remains behind AWS, Microsoft and Google for now. With the regional advantage, it seems all Alibaba needs to do is maintain parity with AWS features to stay on top.

👩‍🍳 Predominant Configuration Management software platform and TCP punching-bag Chef held their virtual ChefConf where they debuted several new capabilities.
- Chef Compliance now features Chef Compliance Audit and Chef Compliance Remediation.
- Chef Desktop helps IT managers centrally deploy, manage and secure an organization’s laptops, desktops and workstations.
- Chef Infra and Chef Automate now integrate with ServiceNow Configuration Management Database.

✍️ Upgrading contracts for SaaS and usage-based products on the AWS Marketplace is now easier. Look to this for grabbing those high-volume discounts when scaling up.
🔑 AWS Single Sign-On now integrates with Okta Universal Directory. This one’s a sure-fire hit.
📱 AWS Amplify iOS and Amplify Android libraries and tools are now available. We…are not a group of iOS experts here at TCP. Let us know what you think of these!
📋 Elastic Load Balancing now supports TLS Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation policies. It’s great to be able to create rules at this specific level.
🤒 Amazon Elastic Container Service now features container health checks and load balancer views. Maybe this works well for a Netflix-style use case, but it just feels unintuitively designed.
🛡️ The curated Threat Landscape Report is now available on AWS Shield. Threat Events are only increasing in frequency and scope, and they show no sign of stopping anytime soon.
✂️ Amazon Redshift compilation times have been cut in half.

📊 Azure Peering Service is now generally available, featuring the routing preference option. Reader beware: the graphs in this article are not to scale.
🤝 Microsoft and Docker partnered to integrate Docker Desktop with Azure and Visual Studio. Let’s hope this doesn’t come with too hefty an initial download.
🗺️ Azure Maps Creator is now in preview. We’ll likely see some popular adoption of this once people are allowed back onto large campuses.
💽 The new Dd v4-series and Ed v4-series Virtual Machines featuring powerful local SSD storage are now available. Come on Microsoft, surely you’ve got a better marketing department than this?

😊 Smart Analytics Frameworks for AI Platform Notebooks is now in beta. We’re not sure what it is, but we’re sure it’s going to be great.
👨‍🏫 Google Cloud announced skill badge, learning path and remote certification exam initiatives. If you’ve never taken a virtually proctored exam, Google even included a helpful guide on YouTube.
🌏 Cross-region replication is now available for Cloud SQL.

⚡ Ryan takes this week’s point, putting the score at Jonathan (five points), Justin (six points) and Ryan (two points). That’s a 100% increase!