On The Cloud Pod this week, the team heads down a Cisco business model rabbithole. Plus cloud status pages struggle with reality, AWS is tracking carbon footprints, and Microsoft sees serious security business growth with Defender. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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

• Cloud status pages aren’t reflecting reported issues, in what appears to be a cover-up by error-shy cloud providers.
• AWS introduces a new carbon footprint dashboard to help customers track their sustainability for cleaner, greener living.
• Following on the heels of AWS and Azure, Microsoft Defender now provides security on Google Cloud, and is also available for Azure Cosmos DB.

Top Quotes  

“Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it’s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can’t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There’re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something’s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don’t think they’re trying to mislead anybody.”

“They’re so strong in other areas, I think it’s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you’re really good at and just keep doing it better.”

General News: Move Along, Everything’s Fine Here

• It seems like cloud providers are on a customer gaslighting mission, with cloud status pages not reflecting reported issues. 

AWS: Continuing Its Tradition of Silly Names

• In a badly timed announcement, AWS shows off its new unified Health Dashboard. It does make sense to keep it in one place, though.
• Amazon S3 showcases important, super valuable new additional checksum algorithms. If it’s computationally expensive, push it back onto the client. 
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools has two new hibernation and scale-in features — a great solution for penny-pinchers who invested in Windows.
• The new AWS CloudSaga tool allows for security event simulation and testing. A great first step in what should prove to be cheaper than bringing in a whole team to do it. 
• How many IPv6 workloads are you running? Now you can connect them to IPv4 Services.
• Six months too late for Jonathan, AWS’ new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool allows customers to track sustainability, helping to reach those clean and green goals.
• GCP: Slow News Week 
• It’s incredible how difficult it can be to find something in the marketplace when you know exactly what you’re looking for. Luckily, here are four ways Google Cloud Marketplace simplifies buying cloud software.

Azure: Ring, Ring

• ☎️ If you’re a telco operator looking to sell cloud services, you’re in luck. The new Azure for Operators solutions and services are paving the way for the future of telecoms.  
• ️ In a nice strategic play, Microsoft joins AWS and Azure as it expands Defender security to Google Cloud.
• Logz.io now integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure. Why didn’t Microsoft just buy it? Simple: so that Elasticsearch remains somebody else’s problem.
• More moves from Microsoft Defender, now available for Azure Cosmos DB. We just wish it had come a year ago.  

Oracle: Finally Fixed its RSS Feed

• ️ Oracle announces its new on-demand capacity feature, which probably should’ve already been available.
• Skipping out on AI and ML and going the data science route, Cloud Guard Threat Detector is now available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Does this mean Oracle can be sued if things go wrong?

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ With Ryan absent this week, Justin jumps ahead, but Peter’s still flagging behind, rendering the scores Justin (3), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (0).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS QnABot adds support for Genesys Cloud contact center, client filters and sensitive information log redaction
• AWS App Runner adds a Java platform
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Network Firewall Centralized Deployment Model   
• Students, start your engines! AWS DeepRacer Student Virtual League is now underway 
• AWS Trusted Advisor introduces Priority for AWS Enterprise Support customers (Preview) 
• Amazon Fault Injection Simulator now supports Task-Level Faults for Amazon Elastic Container Service         
• Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights adds support for Helm chart using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

Things Coming Up:

• AWS Summits – US – April-October, APAC – May, EMEA – April-June
• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) – Data Cloud Summit – April 6th
• IBM Think – May 9th-13th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – Europe – May 10th-12th |  Registration Open  |  CFP Open
• Kubecon EU – May 16th-20th
• Google Next – June 6th-8th
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• AWS Reinforce – June 28th-29th
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual – US – August 2nd-4th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBC
• MS Build – TBC