Peter’s returned from his trip to Asia and the band’s back together on this 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

• 🚨 Registration for Amazon Re:Mars 2020 is now open! Academics can use code ACAD20REMARS for a discount.
• 🚨 Google releases several new tools for building and managing data pipelines.
• 🚨 We tried out a new format for our lightning round!

Amazon Web Services: To Infinity and Beyond

🔭 Registration is open for the Amazon Re:Mars 2020 robotics and technology conference running June 16-19 in Las Vegas. Tickets cost $1,999, but astronauts get in free! Academics and students registering with a .edu email address can use the discount code ACAD20REMARS if a couple grand is too pricey.

🗺️ AWS Sync Routes is available on the AWS Open Source blog to allow you to synchronize routes across tables. If you’ve got only a few VPCs, you might have the right use case for this.

🐦 AWS CodeDeploy’s blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS now include “linear and canary deployments.” Hidden in that announcement is the implication that they seem to have invented linear deployments.

👁️ You can now use a full-screen narrative editor with a preview mode thanks to enhancements to Amazon QuickSight. You can also add static and dynamic URLs within those narratives.

📐 If you’re a Well-Architected Framework practitioner, the new Serverless Lens for AWS Well-Architected Tool may improve your architecture assessments.

🌎 If you (somehow) have a workload that can tolerate lost events, the Multi-Region Asynchronous Object Replication Solution may be for you. We’ll hope for a global bucket option to replace this down the line with something more elegant. 

Azure’s Safety and Retiring

🦺 Mark Russinovich, Chief Technology Officer of Azure, published Advancing safe deployment practices detailing Azure’s best practices for their deployments. If you use Azure, we absolutely recommend giving it a read.

👴🏽 Azure will retire their App Center Auth and Data Preview services on May 3, 2020. Developers using these services will have to migrate to Azure AD B2C, Azure Cosmo DB and Azure Notification Hubs. You can find help with your migration on the Migration Experience in the App Center portal.

Google’s Pipeline of Pipeline Services

🚰 The Cloud Data Fusion service, based on the open-source Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), will help you build and manage data pipelines on a greater scale than CDAP is intended for. Google Cloud also published an article this week on how to use Cloud Composer and their sizing guide to plan and build those pipelines. New Data Flow observability features promise to let you diagnose and remediate those pipelines faster and cheaper than ever before.

🖥️ You can now run Windows Server containers on Google Kubernetes Engine. Windows machines may be a pain sometimes, but hey, you might save some money on licensing fees this way if you’re using them.

🔜 And finally, Migrate for Compute Engine will now let you migrate and replatform your Windows Server 2008 R2 systems… into Windows Server 2012. Well, maybe you’ll be able to squeeze another three years of compliance out of this, but no promises your apps still work afterward.

Lightning Round

⚡ No points this week as we try a new format styled after Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” Let us know what you thought on our Slack channel.

Other headlines mentioned:

• EC2 Price Reduction in the Sao Paulo Region (R5 and I3)
• 12 additional AWS services and 2 features authorized at DoD Impact Level 4 and 5 for AWS 
• GovCloud (US) Regions
• Introducing the new Azure Monitor Log Analytics table pane (Schema)
• Native Azure Active Directory authentication support and Azure VPN Client now available
• New Azure SQL Database automatic tuning default settings—March 2020
• Azure Key Vault—Private endpoints now available in preview
• Backup Explorer is now in preview
• Introducing content filtering for Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon Personalize can now use 10X more item attributes to improve relevance of recommendations
• Amazon EC2 adds the ability to easily query the billing information of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
• Use the new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to gain more insights into your DAX clusters’ performance
• Announcing AWS Ground Station Cross Region Data Delivery
• AWS CodeBuild Adds Support for Amazon EFS
• Now rerun commands with AWS Systems Manager Run Command in just a few clicks
• Amazon VPC Flow Logs Now Support 1-minute Aggregation Intervals
• Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 
• 140-2 for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)