On The Cloud Pod this week, news has been a bit slow coming out of the Cloud Providers; the team suspects they might be curled up on the floor in fetal position after the events of last year.

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.

Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

Amazon has gone to the gym over the holidays and is now kicking butt.
Helping teach us the ways of the cloud, Google is.
There’s nothing remotely funny about Azure this week.

General News: Ryan Doesn’t Want to Wear Pants

Amazon has kicked controversial social media platform Parler off AWS. The multi-cloud people are going to be unbearable now.
Amazon defends its decision to suspend in response to Parler’s lawsuit. Most people don’t know Amazon sent Parler notices for months — it’s not like they weren’t warned.
F5 Networks to acquire edge-as-a-service startup Volterra for $500M. There’s so much buzzword lingo in this announcement, we suspect this service will lack substance.
Red Hat buys Kubernetes security startup StackRox. We’re surprised Google didn’t buy it.
Pat Gelsinger is stepping down as VMWare CEO to replace Bob Swan at Intel. We think he has a very long road ahead to get Intel back on track.

Amazon Web Services: Family Time

AWS announces Transfer Family now provides support for EFS file systems as well as S3. Would be nice if this would tie into Incognito or Simple Directory Service.
Amazon EMR now supports Apache Ranger for fine-grained data access control. Neat.
Achieve faster database failover with Amazon Web Services MySQL JDBC Driver now in preview. Why not just re-resolve the DNS?

Google Cloud Platform: Ruby Red

Google Cloud Function is bringing support for Ruby, a popular, general-purpose programming language. YES.
Google kicks off the new year with free Google Cloud training. We might just take them up on this!

Azure: In Azure We Trust

Azure SQL Database named among the top three databases of 2020. It doesn’t mean people like it, just that it’s popular.
‍♀️ Backup for Azure Managed Disk is in limited preview. Nothing says “no security concerns” quite like taking a copy of production data and storing it somewhere else.
Azure and HITRUST publish a shared responsibility matrix. We wanted to make a joke here but this is actually super helpful.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan said a lot and therefore wins this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (0), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1).

Episode 101: AWS plays the Parler games