117: Justin is out, Peter’s distracted by his parents, Jonathan is just British and Ryan is probably tipsy…. But we had one job and we’re recording!

This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus. 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 The Pentagon has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy . Amazon has given developers the happy ending they’ve always wanted . Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt . JEDI: Play Nice Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project . Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn’t play nice together. Amazon Web Services: We’ve Made All the Money AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus . That’s an awful lot of samples. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering . Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees! AWS Organizations launches a new console experience . We’re excited to try this out! AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK . This is great. AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster . This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market. AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston . They’re continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages. Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts . A big hooray for people using Outposts. Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview . Hopefully this is better than predictive text, which is often highly inappropriate. Google releases a handy new Google Cloud, AWS and Azure product map . This press release has an Oracle smell about it. Browse and query Google Cloud Spanner databases from Visual Studio Code . We can see this being welcomed by developers. Azure: So Pretty Azure releases a new logo . We think it kind of looks like a Google icon. Multiple new features for Azure VPN Gateway are now generally available . Really great features! Enabling Azure Site Recovery while creating Azure Virtual Machines is now generally available . Something about this feels clunky. The next installment of the low code development series is now available . Spoiler alert: it’s not that riveting. TCP Lightning Round ⚡ Ryan blatantly stole Justin’s jokes but still takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7). Other headlines mentioned: Amazon QuickSight Launches Threshold Alerts Amazon DevOps Guru now generally available with additional capabilities Amazon Pinpoint Announces Journey Pause and Resume Azure Backup: Operational backup for Azure Blobs is now generally available Append blob support in Azure Data Lake Storage is now generally available Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports up to 10x faster tuning and enables exploring up to 20X more models Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports cron expression for scheduling Amazon CloudFront announces price cuts in India and Asia Pacific regions Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers AWS Graviton2 (M6g, C6g, R6g, and R6gd) instances3 Amazon Athena drivers now support Azure AD and PingFederate authentication Migration Evaluator announces a faster way to project AWS cloud costs with Quick Insights Amazon EKS managed node groups adds support for Kubernetes node taints Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Save the date: AWS Containers events in May AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet)