On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the future of the podcast and how they’ll know they’ve made it when listeners use Twitter to bombard Ryan with hatred when he’s wrong.

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.

This week’s highlights

Amazon gives Justin a long overdue birthday present.
Google wants to educate the people.
Azure has a new best friend but could they be a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

General News: Goodbye, Friend

The Apache foundation has decided to send Mesos to the attic. This makes us sad because we loved the concept.

Amazon Web Services: Happy Birthday, Justin

New AWS WAF Bot Control to reduce unwanted website traffic. This is great!
️ AWS is releasing the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall to defend against DNS-level threats. Pricing is interesting on this one.
AWS launches CloudWatch Metric Streams. After years of complaints, they’re finally fixing this issue.
AWS Lambda@Edge changes duration billing granularity from 50ms down to 1ms. Nice price cut!
AWS Direct Connect announces MACsec encryption for dedicated 10Gbps and 100Gbps connections at select locations. AWS has fulfilled their promise to Justin — three years later.
Amazon announces new predictable pricing model up to 90% lower and Python Support moves to GA for CodeGuru Reviewer. If this goes down next week, blame Ryan.

Google Cloud Platform: So Pretty

Google is releasing an open-source set of JSON dashboards. This is super important.
Google announces free AI and machine learning training for fraud detection, chatbots and more. We recommend you check these out.
Google Clouds Database Migration Service is now generally available. Everything is so beautiful on paper.
Google introduces request priorities for Cloud Spanner APIs. This just reinforces the fact that we don’t know how Cloud Spanner works.

Azure: Best Friends

Microsoft’s new low-code programming language, Power FX, is in public preview. Terrible name.
Microsoft announces new solutions for Oracle WebLogic on Azure Virtual Machines. They’re running WebLogic on Azure because of some product requirement.
The U.S. Army moves Microsoft HoloLens-based headset from prototyping to production phase. You don’t get JEDI, but you get HoloLens!
️ Microsoft launches Azure Orbital to deepen the value chain for geospatial earth imagery on cloud. Reminded us to watch Lord of War again, it’s a good movie.

Oracle: Win Dinner With Larry

Oracle offers free cloud migration to lure new customers. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will fly you to his private island — but if you don’t sign up, you have to make your own way back.
Oracle and Microsoft expand interconnection to Frankfurt, adding a third location in EMEA. Don’t invite Oracle into your data center.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Anyone who makes fun of the Canadian accent wins so Justin takes this week’s point and the lead, leaving scores at Justin (5), Ryan (3), Jonathan (5).

Other headlines mentioned:

Things Coming Up

112: The Cloud Pod bots are in control