On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is in the doghouse and he’s been suspended (with full pay). Plus, we’re comfortably numb with AWS Cloud NGFW, GCP suspends hosts for big savings, and Azure is once again shutting the Front Door on us. 

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

•   AWS Cloud NGFW cost calculations leaves us comfortably numb.  
• GCP boasts big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded hosts.
• Azure is once again shutting the Front Door with a new, modern cloud service. 

Top Quotes  

• “I’m ready to make my [AWS] re:Invent next year’s first prediction, which will be an AmazonBasics version of that for 1/10th of the cost.”
• “I’m very curious to actually see the comparison … in cost because, assuming performance is relatively similar, cost is what this always comes down to.”

AWS: Pay Less, More Often!

• Helping you bleed cash by the hour instead of writing one big annual check, AWS presents the new Cloud NGFW. Ouch.
• Knock yourself out with up to 10 GB ephemeral storage supported with AWS Lambda. It’s cheap (at $0.0000000309 for every GB-second), but they’re not giving it to you — they’re selling it to you.
• We’re slightly concerned about the general availability of AWS Proton support for Terraform Open Source and its effects on potential future innovation.
• ️ Amazon hops on Google’s gamification bandwagon with Amazon GameSparks now in preview.

GCP: GCP Equalizes With a Quiet Week

• Nice job, Google: a feature with an edge over other cloud providers that offers big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs. Awesome!

Azure: It All Comes Down to Costs

• Azure shutting the front door on us once again with the now generally available modern cloud CDN service, Azure Front Door. This probably gives them a competitive advantage over AWS for at least a week or two.
• In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft announces its intent to establish an India datacenter region in Hyderabad. As that’s where most of their employees are, how was there not one there already?
• ⚖️ It’s like UPnP for cloud, so do not use lightly: Azure Load Balancer now allows you to manage port forwarding for a backend pool. We seriously recommend discussing this with your security team in advance.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Peter finally levels up, making the scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Generally available: On-demand capacity reservation with Azure Site Recovery safeguards VMs failover
• General availability: Azure Bastion native client support 
• Managed entitlements in AWS License Manager now supports license usage for AWS Marketplace licenses 
• Amazon RDS Free Tier now includes db.t3.micro, AWS Graviton2-based db.t4g.micro instances in all commercial regions
• Amazon RDS now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) on RDS Service APIs
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling instance lifecycle states are now available via the Instance Metadata Service   
• Amazon Kendra releases Slack Connector to enable Slack messaging search 

Things Coming Up:

• Google Cloud Summit Series (Updated Regularly) 

April 6th – Data Cloud Summit

May 4th – Google Workspace Summit

• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• Azure Modernize and Migrate with Hybrid cloud flexibility digital event – April 13th 9:00 AM-11:00 AM Pacific (5 reasons to attend)
• AWS Summits

April 12th – Paris

April 20th-21st – San Francisco 

May 4-5th – Madrid

May 11-12th – Berlin

May 18th – Tel Aviv

May 23-25th – Washington DC 

• IBM Think – May 9th-13th