Episode 75: The Cloud Pod Deletes Everything (But Keeps Copies)

Your co-hosts announce parity with the leading cloud-computing podcast hosts 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

🚨 Amazon is suing their former vice president of marketing.
🚨 AWS introduces new instances.
🚨 Google pulls the perfect hat-trick and celebrates parity with AWS three times.

👨‍⚖️ Amazon is suing their former vice president of marketing Brian Hall over the breach of his non-compete agreement after taking a position with Google Cloud. We will see whether Amazon’s inconsistent enforcement of their non-compete agreements will give Hall a win in court.
🤝 Slack is partnering with AWS, integrating Slack Calls with Amazon Chime. For an interview with Chime GM Sid Rao, check out friend of the show Corey Quinn’s podcast Screaming in the Cloud.
🆕 Rackspace rebranded this week to “Rackspace Technology.” This shift mirrors their move from selling equipment to selling services.

💸 AWS launched new EC2 instances, this time bumping up to second generation AMD EPYC processors. Well, it’s cheaper than the Intel counterpart.
🤖 EC2 G4dn bare metal instances are now available with up to eight NVIDIA T4 GPUs. You’ve got to be working on some seriously cool machine learning projects to need something this expensive.
🔍 You can now find the machine-learning powered anomaly detection feature and interactive SQL tools in Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Chamberlain and Boyce (inventors of SQL) should be proud — it’s everywhere these days.
❓ You can now write the results of an Amazon Redshift query to an external table in Amazon S3. What on earth is this supposed to be building to?
🚫 You can find new failover testing features in the resiliency toolkit in AWS Direct Connect. If you’re thinking of using this for Chaos Engineering, we warn you: please don’t.

♻️ Azure Files now protects you from data loss using Soft Delete, analogous to your home computer’s Recycle Bin. We know the Recycle Bin is revolutionary but please, hold your applause!
⁉️ Forced Tunneling and SQL FQDN filtering are now available on Azure Firewall. Somebody needs to re-do their press release because we just can’t seem to tell what these guys were thinking.

😰 Table-level access controls are now available in BigQuery. Well, this is going to be a support nightmare.
🎊 Google Storage now features three new security tools: V4 signature support, hash-based message authentication and uniform bucket-level access. It’s good to see parity features, but the pomp around it always seems excessive.
🗣️ The Recommendation Hub (which aggregates all of Google Cloud’s Reccomender tools) is now in open beta. We recommend Google change the name as soon as possible because it’s terrible.
🤷 Google announced “an updated Compliance Resource Center” this week. So, it’s just like AWS Artifact.

⚡ Peter’s gone so no points this week, leaving the score at Jonathan (five points), Justin (six points) and Ryan (two points).