Your hosts join the rest of the world in phoning one in 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

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 More conference cancellations roll in due to the ongoing global pandemic.
• 🚨 Amazon Redshift made several improvements this week.
• 🚨 We take a look at a bug-hunt by a Site Reliability Engineer at Google.

General News: Working From Home

📴 As the pandemic response ramps up across the world, teleconferencing services like Slack and Zoom have struggled to meet demand. Microsoft Teams users in Europe reported difficulty logging into the service. If you’re looking for an open-source web conferencing application, AWS recommends you use Jitsi. If you’re a startup with more AWS credits to spend than money, we recommend you check it out.

🚫 In the continued wave of canceled conferences, Microsoft moved the May 19-21 Build developer conference to a virtual-only format. Even virtual conferences aren’t entirely safe bets, as Google has postponed Google Cloud Next 2020: Digital Connect. Perhaps they will try to wait until they can safely host a physical conference again, but who knows when that will be?

AWS: Redshifting Into Gear

🟥 Amazon Redshift now allows users to pause and remove clusters so they are not billed for their use while unneeded. In other Amazon Redshift news, the cloud data warehouse now supports materialized views functionality. We suspect that Redshift will be going serverless before long.

🚪 As a part of its release, API Gateway will offer private integrations with AWS Elastic Load Balancers and AWS CloudMap. There’s a lot there, but we wish it had a Lambda endpoint.

🌎 Amazon ElastiCache for Redis announced Global Datastore, a fully managed service for secure cross-region replication. It’s great that they’re doing what they can to make this easy, but you should be aware of the limits of a service like this.

📦 AWS AppConfig now integrates with Amazon Simple Storage Service to store and retrieve app configurations. Previously, users had to store their application configuration as SSM parameters or SSM documents.

Google: Running the Wheels Off

🔍 In some fun Google news this week, solutions architect at Google Cloud Steve McGhee published a blog post detailing how their Site Reliability Engineers track down easily-overlooked errors. The team tracked the issue until they discovered the casters on a server had failed, tilting the server and causing one of the racks to overheat.

🔌 You can now attach six and nine terabyte local solid state drives to your Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines. That’s pretty big for local storage, but don’t rely on keeping all your data on them.

Azure: Leading the Pack (Except Amazon)

🔗 Azure Virtual Network network address translation (NAT) is now generally available to provide on-demand connectivity to machines. Is it the ‘90s again?

🏆 In its inaugural report, Forrester named Microsoft as a leader in Functions-as-a-Service. Here’s the catch — they came in behind Amazon. Poor Microsoft — normally when you pay for an investigation, they award you first place.

🧾 Form Recognizer now boasts several new features including customized training, layout API and prebuilt receipts. Our conclusion? Privacy is dead.

🕵️‍♀️ Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VM) is now available, allowing you an in-depth view of your VM’s performance. There’s still a ways to go, but it’s good to see an answer box solution for this since monitoring has become so much more difficult in the move to cloud.

Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes this week’s point in a dramatic tiebreaker! By our count, that’s three points to Jonathan’s two. Stick around after this week’s Lightning Round for remote working tips for staying sane and productive. Stay safe out there, and stay healthy.

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Launches Docker on AL2 Platform (Beta)
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Elasticsearch versions 7.4
• Power your Azure GPU workstations with flexible GPU partitioning
• Amazon Managed Cassandra Service now helps you manage access to your keyspaces and tables by using AWS IAM roles and federated identities
• AWS App Mesh launches support for end to end encryption
• Amazon Athena now publishes CloudWatch Events for Athena query state transitions
• AWS Security Hub adds new fields and resources to the AWS Security Finding Format
• Azure SQL Database default configurations are changing