On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts just want to be wowed and Ryan is off motorcycling somewhere in the desert.

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.
• When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW

 This week’s highlights

• 🚨 Fighting words from Amazon over JEDI loss. 
• 🚨 Microsoft has gone to crazy town with their AWS connector pricing. 
• 🚨 Oracle taps their inner millennial to win the Tik Tok U.S bid.

General: A Bit Picky 

• 💰 Business App Platform Progress will acquire automation technology company Chef for $220 million. That’s a bargain price when you look at their recurring revenue.  
• 🥇 Pentagon reaffirms Microsoft as winner of $10B JEDI cloud contract. Nobody says the government is the most efficient at doing anything so picking the second best cloud vendor is unsurprising.    
• ⚔️ AWS has responded to the Pentagon reaffirmation of Azure with a harshly worded blog post. Well, life’s just not fair.
• 🥳 Foghorn Consulting (sponsor alert!) are teaming up with Hashicorp and sponsoring a virtual Q&A with Kelsey Hightower on September 24. Head to The Cloud Pod Slack page after to discuss!

Amazon Web Services: You’ll Need Some Pain Relief

• ☁️ AWS named Cloud Leader in Gartner’s Infrastructure & Platform Services Magic Quadrant. Gartner, are you listening to The Cloud Pod? 
• 👍 Amazon CloudFront now supports Transport Layer Security v1.3 for improved performance and security. Good move for privacy, but will cause a lot of pain.   
• 👓 Amazon CloudWatch now monitors Prometheus metrics to reduce monitoring tools needed for application performance degradation and failures. Might be worth the money — we’ll see.   
• 🛒 Bezos’s likely Amazon successor is an executive made in Bezos’s image. Considering the source, are they floating this idea to see how people react?  
• 🚀 AWS turns its focus to the space sector with appointment of director of space policy. We can’t get over the fact Amazon has a space division…  
• 🙋 AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) adds support to automate access across AWS Organizations accounts. This is super helpful AWS!  
• 👌 Enjoy a performance benefit of up to 40% at a 20% lower cost with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud T4g. Why would you deal with the complexity of event driven infrastructure?!  
• 🤝 AWS and Docker extend collaboration to launch new features in Docker Desktop. This is a great way to have your developers break production.
• 🥜 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports assigning EC2 security groups to Kubernetes pods. We think this is great!      

Google Cloud Platform: Didn’t Know News Could Be So Vanilla 

• 🏃‍♀️ New Google Cloud documentation feature makes it easier to run code samples. Pretty cool, but clearly a slow week for Google Cloud Next. 
• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Google Cloud API Gateway is now available in public beta. Surprised this isn’t just Apigee?     
• 🖥️ Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio is expanding. This news was met with an unimpressed silence.  
• 🛢️ Suggested queries beta launches for Cloud Logging to analyze logs quickly. This is really scraping the bottom of the “announcements” barrel.

Azure: Read The Fine Print

• 🌼 A fully managed service for Spring Boot apps is now generally available with Azure Spring Cloud. A pricing model only VMWare and Microsoft could love.  
• 💲 Connector for AWS in Azure Cost Management + Billing is now generally available. Free for the first 90 days, then turn it off.    
• 🖼️ Visual Studio Code extension for Azure Cache for Redis enables access to caches under an Azure subscription and view data. We had a hard time figuring out what the use case is for this.  
• 👋 Nutanix and Microsoft will swap license credits under the new Azure deal. Hardware vendors are having to find new ways to make money these days.
• 🏢 Azure Cost Management + Billing’s cost allocation preview for Enterprise and Microsoft Customer agreement accounts are now available. Not huge news, really just a “you’re welcome” from Microsoft. 

Oracle: Welcome Back Larry

• 💃 Oracle beats Microsoft and wins bid for video sharing platform TikTok in U.S. We expect AWS to sue. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡Justin increases his lead again by taking this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (12 points), Jonathan (seven points) and Ryan (four points).

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Cost & Usage Report now offers Monthly Granularity
• Meetings readiness checker APIs help developers ensure that end-users can join Amazon Chime SDK meetings from their devices
• AWS AppSync simplifies GraphQL query prototyping in the AWS Console with GraphQL Explorer and Cognito integration improvements
• AWS X-Ray launches Auto-Instrumentation Agent for Java
• AWS X-Ray launches anomaly detection-based actionable insights in preview     
• Azure Data Explorer Kafka Connector – Improved delivery guarantees, schema registry support, and Confluent certification 
• You can get a AWS quick starts for OpenShift 4
• Amazon WorkDocs supports auto-provisioning for all directory users
• Automated deployment of Always On availability groups through the Azure portal  
• Amazon CloudWatch releases a Java client library for Embedded Metric Format
• Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage is now generally available
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports More Time Zones