Justin and Jonathan kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he’s been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can’t move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap.   

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

• Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us.
• Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product.
• Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up.

Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare

• ‍⚕️ Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare. 
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool!
• Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this.    
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn’t throwing up barriers. 
• AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement.  
• ⌚ AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch. 

Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B

• ️ Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on.  
• GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song.   
• Google has made the Doc AI solutions generally available. If you’ve sent a fax lately, you know how expensive it is.   
• Google announces new multi-instance NVIDIA GPU on the Google Kubernetes Engine. What a massive risk for the tech industry — having one company that manufactures all the chips.   

Azure: Short Notice

• Microsoft brings Azure supercomputing to the UK Met Office. Supercomputers and the Cloud are finally colliding.     
• Microsoft is joining the Redhat Summit this week to announce several new RHEL capabilities for Azure. It did a terrible job of giving us the heads up about this event.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes the win and this week’s point with an easy dig at information security, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (3), Jonathan (6). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Ground Station now supports data delivery to Amazon S3
• AWS Cost Categories introduces a details page 
• AWS Secrets Manager Delivers Provider for Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI Driver
• AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter and Explorer now integrate with AWS Security Hub for diagnosis and remediation of security findings
• AWS Nitro Enclaves now supports Windows operating system 
• AWS Cloud9 now supports Amazon Linux 2 environments
• Google Cloud Spanner launches customer-managed encryption keys and Access Approval

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Save the date: AWS Containers events in May
• AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19
• AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13
• 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)