On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is shocked the rest of the team managed so well without him while he was on vacation.

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.

Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform.

This week’s highlights

Progress is tapping its inner Freddy Kruger after acquiring Chef.
AWS is soothing the burns of many with its Compute Optimizer.
Google is behind the eight ball with the launch of its healthcare API.

General News: On The Chopping Block

IBM is splitting itself into two public companies to focus on high-margin cloud computing. We’re not sure about this strategy so we’ll keep an eye on this one.
Google will give up direct control of the Knative cloud open-source project. We’re glad to see this is getting closer to a resolution.
‍ Business application platform Progress is making job cuts at recently acquired enterprise automation technology company Chef. The cuts included part of the Chef engineering team — when you’re buying a product company, that doesn’t seem like a good play.

Amazon Web Services: In Happier News

Amazon S3 on Outposts expands object storage to on-premises environments. If only this had existed a year ago!
AWS Systems Manager now enables developers to view, author and publish Automation runbooks directly from Visual Studio Code. We like this!
Amazon launches several new features with Redis 6 compatibility to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. These enhancements are making it well on its way to being useful on a big project.
Amazon SageMaker leads the way in machine learning and announces up to 18% lower prices on GPU instances. That’s a huge price cut that we think is great!
Three new security and access control features are now available in the Amazon S3 update. This is a big improvement for customer experience.
AWS launches a new Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool called IAMCTL. Ryan is nerding out about this.
AWS Compute Optimizer now analyzes additional Amazon Elastic Block Store metrics to generate enhanced Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type recommendations. A great solution to a problem that has burned us all at some point.
‍♂️ Preview AWS Lambda with extensions for operational tools for monitoring, observability, security and governance. We thought for sure that PureSec would be on this list.
Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights, now available in preview, to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions. This is what we wanted AWS X-Ray to do but it never did.
Manage EC2 Spot limits from the Amazon EC2 console and the Service Quotas console. This is pretty great!
AWS makes the open-source CloudFormation Guard compliance tool generally available. Good to have a rules-based engine!

Google Cloud Platform: Missing Parts

Google launches Healthcare Consent Management API to give healthcare application developers and clinical researchers a simple way to manage health data. A nice appetizer but where’s the rest?
‍♀️ Google introduces HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Cloud Run, enabling faster server response times for applications. More features for Cloud Run is great but then you get the next announcement…
❓ Google extends Cloud Functions to build end-to-end solutions for several key use cases. Who is even running Ruby on Rails in production these days?
‍ Understand production performance with the new Google Cloud Profiler history view. The application performance measurement space is hard and crowded.

Azure: They’ve Got The Goods

Optimize Azure workloads with the new Azure Advisor Score. This is a great place to find out what’s broken in your Azure account.
New GitHub Actions for Azure enables deployments to multiple Azure services. Drink the GitHub Actions Kool-Aid with us.
Azure Machine Learning helps customers stay ahead of challenges with new features announced at Microsoft Ignite. To code or not to code?

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin is back with a bang and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (14 points), Jonathan (eight points) and Ryan (four points).

Episode 89: Azure gives The Cloud Pod an advisor score of 100