About this episode
Your hosts are back at it — well some of them are. Ian Mckay ( @iann0036 ) fills in for Peter this week as we cover all of the triumphs and troubles in cloud. 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 Ian Mckay gives an Aussie perspective on the AWS outage in Sydney . Amazon streamlines permissions with the IAM policy simulator . Google competes with AWS with competitively priced services. Amazon Pressures Pentagon, Suffers in Sydney ⚖️ On January 22, Amazon filed a motion to halt work on the JEDI contract between Microsoft and the Department of Defense until a court rules on the protest filed by Amazon last year. Expect more news here as the story develops through February. That same day, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a six hour outage across multiple services in the Sydney region “including EC2, elastic load balancing (ELB), relational database service (RDS), AppStream 2.0, ElastiCache, WorkSpaces and Lambda.” After the issue was resolved, Amazon assured customers it will use this experience to learn and improve future operational performance. AWS Adds, Updates and Improves AWS DataSync has received an update: You can now use DataSync to quickly transfer large amounts of data to and from Amazon FSx for Windows File Server . Previously, DataSync was not fully compatible with Windows applications and environments. ️ All seven sizes of the T3 instances are now available on single-tenant hardware . It might help you meet your compliance goals by physically isolating your machine from other AWS accounts, but the unlimited bursting capability makes us wonder what use cases Amazon has in mind for these. ️ Amazon GuardDuty has globally released a threat detection enhancement which should allow customers with common architectures to see fewer false alarms, and ultimately 50 percent fewer alerts overall. You can now export Amazon Relational Database Service or Amazon Aurora snapshots to Amazon Simple Storage Service as Apache Parquet. Compared to uncompressed text, Parquet is twice as fast to export and takes up one-sixth the storage space. The new Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy simulator will allow administrators to test new permission boundary policies without removing the old ones, heavily streamlining the process of implementing new permissions. ❌ Amazon announced that Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image security support will be phased out over the next few years until June 2023, instead of June 2020. This should give users the time they need to move from Amazon Linux 1 to Amazon Linux 2. Google Kills and Creates Services If you’re a data scientist, you’ll be pleased to hear that Google Cloud’s Dataproc has been updated with several new features: autoscaling and notebook support, logging and monitoring enhancements for SparkR job types, accelerator support for GPUs, and scheduled cluster deletion. The NVIDIA T4 GPU AI deployments are now over 60 percent cheaper , which also makes them cheaper to run than their AWS counterpart, the g4dn.xlarge. BigQuery rolled out their January update announcement which included several new interesting features including new machine learning capabilities. ⚰️ Google announced it will shut down its low-code App Maker service on January 19, 2021. Google claimed the move was due to low usage, but it is likely that Google is simply shifting focus over to the recently-acquired AppSheet. Google Cloud’s new Secret Manager service offers sensitive data storage at 15 percent the price of AWS Secret Manager. Expect AWS to make a competitive price drop soon. ❓ Forrester Consulting released a study claiming four ways Anthos delivers a return on investment to customers. Well , it reads more like a paid advertisement than a study. You can check out Justin’s analysis on Twitter here . Lightning Round ⚡ There are no points awarded in the Lightning Round this week, leaving the score at one for Justin and two for Jonathan. Other headlines mentioned: AWS Cloud Map supports editing custom service instance attributes in the AWS Console New AWS Public Datasets Available from Ford, NASA, and NREL AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds support for Windows Server 2019 and .NET Core 3.1 AWS Control Tower introduces lifecycle event notifications AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority Now Offers CloudFormation Resources AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate Now Supports In-Place Upgrade to Chef Automate 2 Amazon RDS for MySQL Supports Authentication with Active Directory