Azure & GCP ... Are You Ok?

It’s an unexpectedly short and sweet conference week 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.
Commvaultis data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud.

This week’s highlights

🔻 For the first time in its 16 years as a public company, Alphabet’s quarterly saleshave dropped. This is of course due to pandemic-related macroeconomic effects. It will be interesting to see if the ad revenue business model is changed long-term.
🔺 Despite being less than anytime in the last two years, Amazon reported AWS revenueup 29%. The retail end of Amazon is faring even better, with sales up 43% in North America.

🤝 Google Cloud AI and Harvard Global Health Institute have partnered to create theCOVID-19 Public Forecastsmodel. You can query the forecasts for free in BigQuery or download as CSV.

💲 Anomaly and threat detection for Amazon Simple Storage Service is coming to Amazon GuardDuty at an80% discount. You can get a 30 day free trial of the improved and affordable service even on accounts already enabling GuardDuty.
📥 The new AWSCommunity Builders Programis now open for anyone (to apply to). If you’re as interested as we are, be sure to sign up before September 15.
💾 Amazon Simple Storage Service resources can befoundin AWS Toolkits for Visual Studio Code using AWS explorer view. Tools like this that make things easier on developers are a good investment for AWS.
📋 AWS CodeBuild nowsupports Test Reportingfor code coverage. This will go a long way to help CodeBuild catch up to some of the more mature options on the market.
🔒 AWS Security Hub has released19 new security controlsfor Foundational Security Best Practices standard and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. They’re nice and all, but automating your security controls can mean automating some of your security spend too.
📊 Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now supportsfull repository analysis. Now if only it supported anything other than Java. We’d even take TypeScript.

🤖 Google hasset records for AI performancewith their latest supercomputer. The metrics are all a little too hard for us to parse here at TCP, but if you’re a fan of machine learning go ahead and give this one a gander.
🎓 Google’sCertificate Authority Servicesis now in beta. It’s certainly needed, but let’s hold out and see what the pricing is going to be before we adopt.

💸 Azure Bandwidth is moving to asource-destination billing modelnext month. If you’re processing your Azure bill using automation or machine learning, make sure you’re prepared for this change to break that in September.
🗃️ The Azure MonitorCommunity Repositoryis now public for members to share Azure Monitor artifacts. If you have an amazing Azure Monitor script to submit or are just trying to figure out how to use Azure Monitoring, go check it out.

⚡ Justin takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (seven points), Justin (nine points) and Ryan (three points).