RSA: The Silence Of The Clouds

Your hosts talk about AWS Lambda, Azure’s Cybersecurity of Things and Google’s loquacious AI on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

🚨 AWS Lambda sees savings and supports Dart.
🚨 Your kitchen appliances are safer with developments in the Internet of Things.
🚨 It’s the last week of our trial of the new Lightning Round format. Comedy’s hard.

TCP News

☁️ ICYMI, check out our second episode of TCP Talks: Finops in the cloud with Rob Martin. We learned some things about financial operations, and we’re sure you will too.

AWS Lambda Updates

🐑 AWS Compute Savings Plans now apply to your AWS Lambda workloads. That’s nice, but even a decent percentage of such a cheap service probably won’t impact your expenses all that much. In addition, those Lambda workloads now support Dart, an open-source programming language made by Google. If you’re making mobile apps, you’ll be happy to use this. If you’re not making mobile apps, you probably didn’t need to read this paragraph.

🔒 AWS Identity and Access Management now allows you to control access for requests made on your behalf by AWS services. It’s a great security feature. We’re looking forward to AWS taking this a step further at this year’s re:Inforce conference.

🔑 Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports previous Secrets Manager versions and can read keys directly from JSON objects. It’s going to be much more convenient now that you can use one key instead of, say, 10.

🌿 AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr outlined a laundry list of updates to Amazon FSx for Lustre in this blog post. All these changes add up to SageMaker integration, to make SageMaker more attractive to customers.

Spherical Things

📠 At this year’s RSA cybersecurity conference, Azure announced several improvements to Azure Security Center for Internet of Things (IoT). It’s good to see the time and energy being put into IoT security. Your personal computer may be secure, sure, but what about your internet-enabled refrigerator?

🔵 After nearly two years of the preview phase, Microsoft Azure Sphere is now generally available. For a one-time fee, IoT manufacturers will get a chip containing Sphere’s components and OS updates for its lifetime. Rest assured that your Vitamix blender will be protected against hackers.

I, Customer Service

🤖 Google’s Contact Center AI Dialogueflow now features the beta for Mega Agent: an update that will increase the number of customer intentions the AI can recognize to 20,000. Chatbots and interactive voice responses are using improvements like these to create ever-more seamless emulations of human customer service associates.

🗂️ Application Manager has come to Google Kubernetes Engine, bringing a platform-as-a-service layer to Kubernetes

🕸️ Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory has now entered general availability. Managed Service allows you to control your Active Directory without managing your infrastructure, the whole point of cloud native services.

🦆 If you work with legacy mainframe applications, Google’s acquisition of Cornerstone may help you migrate to the cloud. Previously, licensing agreements on emulators held these migrations back, but by re-writing the applications to be cloud native, this problem should be circumvented.

🔐 Google was at RSA this week, where they introduced several security improvements to Chronicle. One such improvement should sound familiar to any digital native: reCAPTCHA Enterprise, which builds on reCAPTCHA specifically for enterprise security concerns.

Lightning Round

⚡ It’s the final week of our trial period of the new Lightning Round format. Let us know what you think on our Slack channel! (We’ll return to our old format next week. Writing jokes about cloud computing is hard!)

Other headlines mentioned:

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RSA: The Silence of the Clouds – Episode 61