The Cloud Pod Confidential — Episode 79

Your hosts kick off the nine weeks of Google Next 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

• 🚨 We kicked off this year’s Google Next by crowning our draft picks winner!
• 🚨 Friend of the show Ian Mckay wrote a tool to automate your auto-remediation.
• 🚨 Azure is here too. (We just wanted them to feel included this week.)

Google: What’s Next?

• 🥇 The Google Cloud Next keynote address was this week, and Jonathan has taken the win for our draft picks by predicting new collaborations and productivity tools in Google Meet. Congratulations, Jonathan!
• 😠 Google launched the Open Usage Commons framework to support Open Source development. Google has donated the ISTIO trademark to the Commons, upsetting IBM.
• 🦾 AutoML Tables has received several user-friendliness features, including explanations for online predictions. (Not that any of us use AutoML.)
• 🕸️ Google is releasing Network Endpoint Groups, which is a collection of network endpoints to use as backends for some load balancers. This is what you need to have if your hybrid cloud isn’t going to be just a transition.
• 🔮 The new Active Assist portfolio of tools promises to help you reduce the complexity of your cloud operations. Moving around the complexity, how very… Oracle of you.
• 🗳️ Assured Workloads for Government, now in private beta, promises to help government customers, suppliers and contractors meet the security and compliance standards of federal agencies. The compliant-but-not-isolated model can be expected to bleed out into non-governmental workloads.
• 🤔 BigQuery Omni will allow you to access and analyze data across your multi-cloud environment. It’s a solution to the data gravity problem, but keep in mind it’s still an onramp to GCP.
• 🤐 The Confidential Virtual Machines product, now in beta, is the first tool in the Confidential Computing portfolio. Apparently this is revolutionary, but we’re only sold on “neat.”
• 📧 The new Customer to Community (C2C) platform is an exclusive community for cloud professionals among Google Cloud customers. We expect invitation emails from all the major cloud providers soon.

AWS: Who Remediates the Autoremediator?

• 📸 You can now create Elastic Block Store snapshots from any block storage data. It’s really just an API right now, but there’s bound to be a third-party tool waiting in the wings to take advantage of this.
• 🆕 AWS has made the first major updates to the Well-Architected Framework —  don’t expect a total overhaul though.
• 📛 Following the release of cdk8s last month, AWS has released the cdk8s+ class library. The jury’s still out on the tool, but we’re in agreement that the naming is awful.
• 📰 You can now use AWS Organizations to manage content policies for the CodeGuru Profiler, Comprehend, Lex, Polly, Rekognition, Textract, Transcribe and Translate machine learning services. You made sure to read the entirety of the license agreement, right?
• 🤝 Docker and AWS have partnered to bring the Docker Desktop and Docker Compose applications to Amazon Elastic Container Service. They must have been jealous of the Docker attention Azure has been getting.
• ✈️ The new AWS Copilot Command Line Interface tool can automatically set up the infrastructure needed to run containerized applications. Think of it like kubectl for ECS.
• 🔢 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports Kubernetes 1.17. Finally, only one major version behind, as it should be.
• ⛩️ AWS App Mesh now supports virtual gateways for ingress configuration. The key here is that this is an envoy proxy you don’t have to manage.
• 🤖 You can now implement automatic drift remediation for AWS CloudFormation using CloudWatch and Lambda. Friend of the show Ian Mckay even wrote a tool to automate the setup of your automation.

Azure: Nifty!

• 🤷‍♀️ Advanced threat protection within Azure Storage now covers Azure Files and Azure Data Lake Gen2 API. Neat!
• 🤷‍♂️ The Azure Maps visual for Power Bubble layer is now in preview. Wow!

Lightning Round

• ⚡ Jonathan takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (six points), Justin (eight points) and Ryan (two points). Jonathan also wins the “most wins this week” competition!

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS DeepRacer Evo and Sensor Kit now available for purchase 
• AWS Secrets Manager now enables you to attach resource-based policies to secrets from the AWS Secrets Manager console and uses Zelkova to validate these policies
• EC2 Image Builder can now stream logs to CloudWatch 
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for cross-region snapshot copy 
• Amazon Keyspaces now enables you to back up your table data continuously by using point-in-time-recovery (PITR)
• Support for X-Forwarded-For (XFF) header is now available for AWS WAF 
• Amazon Athena adds support for querying Apache Hudi datasets in Amazon S3-based data lake 
• Label Videos with Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth