Episode 85 – The Cloud Pod Plays Buzzword Bingo on Machine Learning

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts introduce the idea of plaques to commemorate a feature suggestion becoming a product.

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.
• When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW

• Active Directory just will not die.
• Someone is excited about Google’s Data Fusion pipelines. We just don’t know them.
• Azure gets features that AWS and Google already have.

General: Did You Do Your Homework?

• Former Google engineer Steve Yegge resurrects his blog to explain why Google’s deprecation policy is killing user adoption. We’re still bitter about Google Reader.
• The Cloud Pod is sponsoring the Rust Conference and Women in Tech conference. We’re super excited about both of these conferences and supporting more women in the technical world. 

• AWS launches second Local Zone in Los Angeles for customers requiring very low latency. This caused massive confusion when they launched the first one as they already had a localized region concept  they forgot about.
• ⚰️ Connect to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory seamlessly with new AWS Linux feature. No one has jumped on board with killing Active Directory yet. Someday we’ll get there.
• AWS now lets you log all Domain Name System queries to understand how your applications are operating. We don’t really know why you would want this (except maybe Jonathan).
• AWS launches Bottlerocket to improve security and operations of containerized infrastructure. Really a joy to set up and makes you feel really secure, without needing a therapist. 
• AWS Site-to-Site now supports Internet Key Exchange that allows customers to connect to other cloud providers. Like Superman in disguise, there’s more to this under the surface. 
• Publish and deliver messages with payloads of up to 2GB through Amazon Simple Notification Service. Great that they’ve made it easier. 
• AWS CloudWatch Logs now lets you leverage the integrated development environment for software application creation, debugging and deployment. At what point does the madness stop?  
• ️‍♂️ New third-party test compares Amazon GuardDuty to network intrusion detection systems. Finally they’ve realized why they need that private DNS log. 
• AWS announces an 86%+ price reduction for IoT Events. Harry Potter would be proud.

• TabNet is available as a built-in algorithm on Google Cloud AI Platform making it easier to build machine learning models. We’re out of our league here, please don’t judge us.   
• GCP launches Data Fusion pipelines for Cloud Composer to save time while ensuring workflow accuracy and efficiency. Someone out there is super excited about this.  
• ⚡ MySQL 8 is enterprise ready with Cloud SQL and makes database workloads more resilient in the event of a problem or outage. The ability to roll back changes at the data level makes this a really important improvement.   
• Google announces new capabilities to simplify Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) for businesses to realize the value of AI. Being able to prove a model does what it’s supposed to do without bias towards things like race or gender is really important. 

• A new feature supports upstream sources to automatically download universal Packages with Azure Artifacts. An ‘us too’ announcement if we’ve ever seen one.
• Azure Cost Management + Billing empowers customers to better understand their cloud costs. Billing… Painful, right? But good to see it built in.  
• Microsoft makes the process of attaching a new child zone to their parent zone more user-friendly. Does anyone know if Amazon does this?  
• ️ Here are five ways to optimize your backup costs with Azure Backup. Made us chuckle.  

⚡ This week’s lightning round is a weekend update so the jokes will either hit or miss terribly — please judge us harshly. Scores remain the same at Justin (11 points), Jonathan (seven points) and Ryan (four points). 

• Azure Monitor Logs – Log Analytics REST APIs general availability  
• Azure Data Explorer: Create a table with the new 1-click experience 
• Amazon Corretto 15 Release Candidate (RC) 
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now Supports Trace Flag 692 
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Major Version 2019 
• Using Amazon Textract with AWS PrivateLink 
• AWS Systems Manager now supports all current versions of Ubuntu 
• Amazon CloudFront announces real-time logs
• Amazon EC2/Spot Fleet now supports modifying instance types and weights on the run