This Episode Is EPYC!

We follow continuing stories with the JEDI contract, GigaOM and our new Lightning Round format 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

🚨 Amazon makes progress contesting the JEDI contract.
🚨 AWS and Azure introduce shared cloud block storage.
🚨 Google shows signs of shifting priorities.

Arrested Development

👩‍⚖️United States judge Patricia Campbell-Smith has granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt work on the JEDI contract by Microsoft. She also ordered Amazon to post $42 million in the event the injunction was issued wrongfully.

AWS Not First to Share Blocks

🥞CloudFormation StackSets users can now manage multiple AWS accounts. We recommend you get your organizational units structured properly now so you’re ready for when that must-have feature for your organization is added.

💽AWS customers running Linux on Ec2 can now attach provisioned IOPS (io1) EBS volumes to Multiple Ec2 instances. Be careful though: wielding fine control over your data means taking responsibility for your data losses, as well. This news comes a day after Azure announced their own Azure Shared Disks, which was, for those sweet brief hours before AWS’s announcement, the industry’s only shared cloud block storage.

What’s in the Box?

🧪Azure released a new GigaOM study which backs up the findings from the GigaOM study we covered on episode 58. How incredible — Azure, which paid for the scientific (and unverifiable) study, was found to be the best at everything once again!

📦The Azure Backup service now offers a preview of the Azure Data Box. You can kick-start your large-scale backups by loading up to 80 terabytes of data into the Data Box and sending it to Azure, where it will be integrated into a standard cloud backup.

Google Shifts Focus

📐Google has introduced several new features for Sole-Tenant Nodes from GCP, including live migration within a fixed node pool for BYOL, a Node Group autoscaler and migration between sole and multi-tenant nodes.

👁️Adding the new Stackdriver Trace to Stackdriver Logging will grant you full-stack observability, natively. Product managers at Google describe the Logging and Trace pairing poetically as a loving relationship, and technically as a particularly efficient management tool.

✂️Less romantic are the job cuts resulting from a recent restructuring at Google Cloud. Though fewer than 50 are expected to be laid off and many of those could be re-hired internally, the cuts must be reported under California law. Observers speculate the company will focus more on large enterprise, international and AI services.

🖥️The new AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine is now in beta. It’s some pricey tech though, so run your numbers thoroughly before you buy.

🗃️Dell EMC, HPE, Netapp, Portworx, Pure Storage and Robin.io are the first partners to achieve Anthos Ready Storage qualification. Come on Google, it’s storage. It doesn’t need a certification. This is pure marketing.

🆕Stackdriver Cloud Monitoring dashboards API is now available. The dashboards API will allow you to create, update, delete and read configurations of your dashboards. It’s nice to be able to manage dashboards as code.

✉️And lastly, this week in Google news: Tom Krazit of Protocol published an opinion piece on Valentine’s Day positing that Google’s delays in donating Istio to an open-source nonprofit may signal shifting priorities. Holding onto ownership of projects may feel right after losing out on reaping the rewards from Kubernetes, but the hit to Google’s reputation as an open-source thought leader may just prove more costly in the long run.

Lightning Round

⚡ We continue with week two of our three-week trial period of the new Lightning Round format. Let us know what you think on our Slack channel!

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This Episode is EPYC!