The Cloud Pod Automatically Redacted

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we cover all the news you can use on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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.
• Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. 

• AWS restructures its sales force.
• Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect is canceled.
• Who’s else is excited to re-network their printers!?

️ We’re proud of the Bonus Episodes we’ve produced lately. Check out our interviews with Rob Martin and Ben Kehoe!

✈️ Check out Aviatrix’s panel on Multi-Cloud architecture and networking — featuring our very own Justin Brodley. And if you’re here because you saw Justin’s panel, welcome to TCP!

Global research firm Gartner has named AWS the top leader in Cloud AI developer services. Gartner categorizes industry leaders as having a complete vision and the ability to execute on it. Microsoft and Google were close behind, though unlike Microsoft, Google spread the news.

Amazon Transcribe can now automatically redact personally identifiable information. You can rest assured when a robot collects your personal information for data analysis, it will use discretion in what it shares with humans.

️ AWS Global Accelerator users may now use their own IP addresses and tag resources. We already had AnyCast, but the tagging is nice.

Faced with tougher competition, AWS plans to double the size of its sales team. This will be the first major sales restructuring for AWS in several years.

AWS Config’s advanced query feature now supports configuration aggregators. This feature will save you a ton of sweat managing a large AWS footprint.

️ If you’re going to provision a steady stream of AWS accounts, you’ll be happy to know AWS Control Tower now offers a simplified, single-step option under the Account Factory link.

️ The NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is now generally available. The more data tools like this, the better.

️ Google Cloud opened its third West Coast region with the Salt Lake City region (us-west3). Las Vegas will be Google’s fourth West Coast region later this year.

️ Google Next ‘20 has been canceled reimagined, amid concerns over COVID-19 (Coronavirus). Instead, attendees will be refunded and can register for Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect, which will be much like the original, but free and online. Remember to wash your hands and don’t touch your face.

Google Kubernetes Engine is innovating by increasing prices directly, a bold move against the grain of price reductions. Starting on June 6, 2020, GKE clusters will accrue a management fee of 10 cents per cluster per hour. We’ll see if Google walks this back as the PR fallout rolls in.

Azure has partnered with Skytap to bring IBM Power 9 servers to Azure datacenters. That’s another RISC chip in the cloud, for those counting.

Azure’s February 2020 billing update has been released, compiling all the changes to your finances and financial management. Like and subscribe to the Azure Cost Management YouTube channel for help optimizing your spend.

️ The worst networking issues stem from getting your printers to work. But maybe not anymore? Universal Print brings printing to the Azure cloud. If you’re looking for a place to migrate your printing loads as Google Print shuts down, this may be the place for you. (If you don’t mind not being able to print when the internet’s down.)

⚡ While we plan to return to the old Lightning Round format, we’ll use the new format when we have guest hosts. Listen to the episode for the biting wit of Ryan Lucas!

Justin is rewriting the entire deployment orchestration for TCP.net in Terraform. Jonathan discovered a nuance in PowerShell. Nobody ever said IT was easy (except marketing.)

• Amazon Connect announces per-second billing, saving customers up to 5% in telephony costs
• Amazon MSK can now stream broker logs to CloudWatch Logs, S3, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service
• Azure Virtual Network service endpoint policies feature is now available 
• Azure Load Balancer TCP resets on idle timeout is now available
• Amazon Lightsail now supports resource monitoring, alarming and notifications
• Amazon Connect makes it easier to customize the caller experience by adding attributes to existing contact flow blocks
• Amazon FSx now enables you to create and use file systems in Shared Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs)
• Automate index management with Amazon Elasticsearch Service
• Build k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) similarity search engine with Amazon Elasticsearch
• Amazon Neptune refreshes the console experience to simplify management of your database
• AWS Secrets Manager now supports larger size for secrets and higher request rate for GetSecretValue API