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On The Cloud Pod this week, the team acknowledges the very real issue of canine confusion as a result of everyone wearing face masks.

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.

Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform.

This week’s highlights

🚨 Amazon is in the Halloween spirit with its tricky new feature.
🚨 Google is solving a potentially nonexistent problem for retailers.
🚨 Microsoft is sending Azure into spaaaaaaaaaaace to power satellite projects.

🤔 HashiCorp Consul is now available in public beta while Vault is available in private beta. We’re hesitant to trust anything from HashiCorp.
💔 Terraform 0.14 is now available in beta and includes feature improvements in security, visibility and stability. Justin looks forward to the upgrade that breaks everything later this year.
❄️ HashiCorp Consul 1.9 introduces new service mesh visualization tools. Pretty minor but cool!
😄 HashiCorp launches Boundary for simple and secure remote access based on trusted identity. We see huge potential in this.
🗡️ HashiCorp launches Waypoint, a new open source project that provides developers a consistent workflow. These types of announcements are a dagger through Ryan’s heart.
📦 HashiCorp introduces Consul Terraform Sync, a new tool for automating network infrastructure. Really powerful but really packed in a way we don’t understand.

👍 Amazon launches Cloudwatch Synthetics Recorder, a Chrome browser extension, to help monitor endpoints and APIs. We hope this does better than others we’ve tried in the past.
🗿 Amazon announces better cost-performance for Amazon Relational Database Service databases. Has some rough edges but once you overcome them, this is rock solid.
🤗 Amazon Aurora now enables dynamic resizing for database storage space. Nice that you’ll now only pay for the storage you actually use!
🙏 Amazon announces AWS Budgets Actions to reduce unintentional overspending. Thank you, Jesus!
🤣 AWS announces AWS Budgets is now free. We wonder if the budget action could be to turn off Budget Actions?
🎺 Amazon Redshift now supports the ability to query across databases in a redshift cluster. This makes us think there’s something much bigger coming for them not to trumpet this.
👷 AWS Lambda now supports AWS private link allowing access to Lambda functions securely. A very handy thing to have.
🛡️ Amazon CloudFront announces Origin Shield, a centralized caching layer. The name makes us mad — where is the shield!?

🛒 Google announces more control over when routine maintenance occurs for Cloud SQL. We don’t think this is going to be that big of a deal for retailers this year because of COVID.
🙃 Google announces lower pricing for its Cloud Content Delivery Network. Super nice!
🍀 GCP has released several new user-friendly SQL capabilities. If you were struggling with BigQuery, then you’re in luck!
🤓 Lending Doc AI, now in preview, provides industry-leading data accuracy for documents relevant to lending. This is digitizing a manual process — there’s nothing intelligent about it but still going to be very useful.

📣 Zone Redundancy for Azure Cache for Redis is now in preview. Stay tuned for its next announcement.
❓ Microsoft launches Azure Space to power satellite projects. Curious to see what else it will add to this portfolio.
😍 Microsoft has designed a Modular Datacenter for customers who need cloud computing capabilities in hybrid or challenging environments. Lots of use cases for this one!

Oracle: We’re Bigger

💪 Oracle announces a new service designed to help customers run challenging transaction processing and data analytics. This is just a flex.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan steals this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (15 points), Jonathan (eight points) and Ryan (five points).