The Cloud Pod

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

• Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we review the latest batch of cloud news. AWS re:Invent 2019 is just a month away and there’s no shortage of announcements this week either.

This week’s highlights

• AWS re:Invent 2019 session catalog is live. If you haven’t gotten into the panels you want, you’ll have to get on a waitlist. We’re also considering a podcast meetup! Please let us know if you’d be up for that. Reach out on Twitter or through the contact form.
• Look at migrating from Oracle. It may take some time and effort to accomplish, but the savings Amazon’s had are results that bear an attempt at repeating.
• You might be in luck if you have an open-source project. AWS is offering promotional credits to promote certain open-source work. Amazon completes massive migrations from Oracle After moving 75 petabytes of data involving 100+ teams, Amazon has finished migrating the last database of their first-party programs from Oracle to AWS services. The slashes in operational costs and latency may have the Amazon teams happy, but Oracle will definitely be watching to see if their other customers will be tempted to follow suit. A 90 percent reduction in cost would be an enticing prospect to switch providers of any service, and half the latency is nothing to sneeze at either. Amazon looks to be taking some of those savings and turning them right back around into more projects. Of note, they will be offering promotional credits to those working on open-source projects, especially if you are working in Rust. If you manage to get a whole year of funding through Amazon that will mean more time working on what you really care about and less trying to keep the grants coming in every quarter or, worse, every month. Rounding out AWS news, we discussed four other stories:
  1. VPC security groups come to Firewall Manager. Finally. You’d think this would be included day one, but at least it’s here now. Maybe soon it’ll be updated to include federated access?
  2. New M5n/R5n EC2 instances will offer up to 100 Gbps networking speeds. If you need to move around larger sets for machine learning, for instance, the price is reasonable.
  3. EC2 instances will also be available in Arm-based bare metal form. The bare metal probably won’t grant much of an efficiency edge anymore, but hey, maybe it will help meet especially strict compliances.
  4. AWS announced that another 18services

Welcome to episode 243 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a bit of a slow new week, but we’re not hitting the snooze button! This week Justin, Matthew and Ryan are discussing more changes over at Broadcom after VMware buyout last year, HPE buying out Juniper Networks, why all the venture capital money seems to be going into trying to take down Nvidia, and changes to WHOIS lookup over at AWS certificate manager. Plus we’ll find out exactly what that special something is that makes Justin the perfect executive.

Titles we almost went with this week:

• New Years Happened and there is no Good New News
• The Cloud Pod Was Always Security Challenged
• Azure Shows the Health of Their Business by Springing into Discounts
• Network Gear Powers AI – Who Knew?

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very niche market of cloud engineers? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

Follow Up

01:48 More news from Broadcom – and this time they’re coming after the cloud. Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

• Remember in November when Broadcom bought VMware for $61 billion dollars? Well, the reorganization from that purchase is continuing.
• Broadcom is reportedly ditching the majority of their VMware Cloud Service Providers as part of the shakeup of the partner program.
• Notable companies in the CSP program include Oracle, Azure, Rackspace, and Google. These larger companies most likely won’t be impacted (yet.)
• It’s suspected that they will get moved over to a new partner program, but Broadcom is culling it down to only the largest partners to remain in the program.
• There are lots of smaller cloud players who are in the CSP who will likely be impacted and should keep an eye on this over the next few months.
  • https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/search-result
• It’s a bad look for Broadcom, as they told the EU that acquiring VMware would increase competition in the cloud space – but cutting partners out of the program seems to be a consolidation to me.

03:29 Ryan – “I wonder if this is just going to be like new sales or something. Cause that seems very short notice if you’re on VMware as on one of these smaller cloud providers, that seems incredibly risky.”

03:45 Matthew – “I feel like they have to have something lined up. Or let me rephrase that. I would assume slash hope they have something lined up because otherwise they’re gonna really piss off a lot of people.”

General News

04:40 Hewlett Packard Enterprise buying Juniper Networks in deal valued at about $14 billion

• HPE is buying Juniper Networks in an all cash deal valued at $14B, which will double the HPE networking business.
• HPE will be paying $40 per share, prior day close was 30.19.
• The transaction will strengthen HPE’s position at the nexus of accelerating ma

In this episode of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Miles Ward, the founder of the Google Cloud’s Solutions Architecture practice. Currently, Miles leads the cloud strategy and solutions capabilities as the Chief Technology Officer for consulting and IT services company SADA.

Startups have helped increase the popularity of open source products among enterprise businesses. Changing systems can be a struggle for larger, more traditional companies. But legacy businesses also want to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, which requires shedding clunky, legacy systems.

“Those building blocks make it so that companies operate at a certain rate of change. And I know zero companies asking me to slow down their rate of change,” he notes.

The evolution of product compatibility is also discussed. Product sellers need to help customers understand how much of their system fits and how much doesn’t fit in one solution compared to another, Miles says. Customers need to have a clear understanding of what’s involved and how much work it’s going to be.

In addition, Miles shares his thoughts on the role of the CTO as well as the benefits of rebranding a product everybody hates.

Featured Guest

Name: Miles Ward

What he does: As CTO of SADA, Miles leads the cloud strategy and solutions capabilities. His remit includes delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization; and engaging with customers on their most complex and ambitious plans around Google Cloud.

Key quote: “There used to be big crunchy legacy impediments to adoption... But it’s 2021 — live in the future, that shit works. Now it’s more about making it easy enough and predictable enough to consume that folks can unlock the business justification.”

Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter

Key Takeaways

• Gone are the days when products from different technology providers, like Oracle or SAP, couldn’t work together to solve a customer problem. These days, companies need to make products easy and predictable enough so customers can unlock the business justification straight away.
• For Google Cloud, the next phase of growth will require investment in higher-level relationships with customers. Miles references his experience with current Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian (TK).
• “TK is super focused about spending the majority of his time face to face with customers,” he says. “He’s not doing it to be a glad-hand, he’s deal making and proposal pushing and thinking through the machinery of how to build higher level relationships.”
• There’s a huge opportunity to help the “the real world divisions inside of real world businesses” — not just serve the IT department.
• Miles says, “I think there’s a bunch of cloud providers that are working really hard now to facilitate the plumbing and governance and oversight and security controls and operational management of what is — not a hybrid between their data center, and a cloud — a hybrid between their SaaS fleet and the couple of things they still need to run on their own.”
• Worried about leveraging a Google solution and then having them pull the plug on it? Miles doesn’t think you should be too concerned about deprecation.
• “I think they have heard this feedback really loud and clear,” he says. “There’s a whole bunch of people that have made it really obvious that if

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter again as we practice social distancing 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.

This week’s highlights

• Details emerged from the ongoing legal battle surrounding the JEDI contract.
• Amazon shows off its new operating system.
• Powershell 7.0 brings long-awaited features to Windows.

General News

Due to the ongoing global pandemic, AWS Summits have been (responsibly) cancelled in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco and Brussels. Hopefully we’ll see these events move online.

Court documents from Amazon’s injunction have been unsealed. The documents reveal that Microsoft’s bid included “non-compliant storage” which was not counted against them. The Department of Defense responded that Amazon’s bid did not include technically compliant storage either.

Our very own Justin Brodley made the news! His comments are included in an article covering a cloud alternatives panel discussion at Altitude 2020.

VMware Inc. overhauled its portfolio of products to focus on Kubernetes support. Expect to see the whole host of products available by May 2020.

AWS:

The new CloudWatch composite alarms will allow you to combine alarms and get a clearer picture of what is happening when something goes wrong.

You can now host your applications with the

The DOD awards the coveted Jedi contract, the MS ignite Draft, Earnings season and more this week on The Cloud Pod.

Sponsors:

• Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up Topics

• Pentagon awards controversial $10 billion cloud computing deal to Microsoft, spurning Amazon
• Even after Microsoft wins, JEDI saga could drag on

General News/Topics

Earnings Season

• Microsoft’s cloud shines again as it easily tops earnings targets, but Azure slows
• Despite AWS cloud growth, Amazon shares sag on lower forecast
• Google Cloud fails to lift Alphabet enough to please investors

AWS

• 200 Amazon CloudFront Points of Presence + Price Reduction
• Native Container Image Scanning in Amazon ECR
• AWS Global Accelerator Now Supports EC2 Instance Endpoints

Google

• Updates make Cloud AI platform faster and more flexible
• Advancing Customer Control in the Cloud
• Swipe right for a new guide to PCI on GKE
• Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly’s shortened cloud migration
• What’s happening in BigQuery: New features bring flexibility and scale to your data warehouse

Azure

• Preview: Server-side encryption with customer-managed keys for Azure Managed Disks
• New in Stream Analytics: Machine Learning, online scaling, custom code, and more

MS Ignite Draft

Jonathan

1. Digital Assistant to compete with Alexa or Google Home.
2. 3 more Azure Regions in US
3. More or Improved tooling for Devops Community

Peter

1. Istio for AKS
2. 1 more region in Canada
3. Visual Studio Online

Justin

1. Azure Portal Redesign
2. Sagemaker/Databricks like Competitor.
3. Oracle on Stage

Lightning Round (Jonathan 12, Justin 16, and Guest 4):

• AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate Now Supports Custom Domains
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Adds Support for Change Streams
•