111: The Cloud Pod now available at 9600 bps, 8 bits and 1 stop bit

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is feeling nostalgic and a little nerdy, as you can see from the show title — a throwback to Serial Console and its ability to add a ton of characters when you didn’t want it to. 

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.

• Amazon should be singing a different tune.
• Google has astonished us all by actually sharing something interesting.
• Azure is the strict school principal that just canceled lunch. 

• VentureBeat predicts industry clouds could be the next big thing. Justin will take the royalties check anytime, VentureBeat.

• Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS is now generally available. Surprising because we don’t remember it going into beta.
• AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry adds StatsD and Java support. We’re glad to see the continued investment in OpenTelemetry. 
• AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard solution is now generally available. The solutions library is a Rube Goldberg machine. 
• Amazon Lookout for Metrics is now generally available — perfect for Ryan, who has no machine learning experience. 
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new Auto-Tune feature for improved performance and application availability. We wish Amazon would open source this.
• AWS SSO credential profile support is now available in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code. Thank you, Jesus.
• Amazon is developing a chip to power the hardware switches that shuttle data around networks. Apparently Google and Apple are also doing this.
• Troubleshoot boot and networking issues with new EC2 Serial Console. Must be useful for someone, maybe the people using enclaves?  

• Google wants customers to rethink their cloud migration strategy. Actually quite an interesting blog post — no, this is not sarcasm!  
• Google BigQuery was named a leader in the 2021 Forrester Wave: Cloud Data Warehouse. We actually agree with this; it really is a great product.  
• Google announces Cloud SQL for SQL Server now comes with Active Directory authentication. Helpful only if you are on GCP Active Directory.  

• ❄️ Azure has released several new compliance management capabilities to the Azure Security Center. We think this is really, really cool.
• Microsoft named a leader in the 2021 Forrester Wave: Function-as-a-Service Platforms. Congratulations to Microsoft.  

⚡ Justin cuts through the awkward silence and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (4), Ryan (3), Jonathan (5). 

• Backup for Azure Managed Disk is now generally available
• Amazon EKS now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter
• Amazon WorkDocs offers additional sharing controls throughout its Android app
• Amazon SageMaker now supports private Docker registry authentication
• Amazon API Gateway now provides IAM condition keys for governing endpoint, authorization and logging configurations  
• Amazon Timestream now supports Amazon VPC endpoints
• Create forecasting systems faster with automated workflows and notifications in Amazon Forecast 
• AWS Config adds pagination support for advanced queries that contain aggregate functions
• AWS WAF adds support for Request Header Insertion 
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports Event Subscriptions
• Announcing AWS Step Functions’ integration with Amazon EMR on EKS
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service v2
• AWS Security Hub integrates with Amazon Macie to automatically ingest sensitive data findings for improved centralized security posture management  
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds Model Explainability

 Things Coming Up

• Public Sector Summit Online — April 15–16
• Discover cloud storage solutions at Azure Storage Day — April 29
• 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)