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On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter is spending the next 12 hours in a rejuvenation chamber like a regular villain straight out of a James Bond film.

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 is on a mission to replace humans so we can go on holiday permanently.
🚨 Google is a bit early with the April Fools’ joke.
🚨 Azure is, much to our surprise, ahead of everyone else for once.

Amazon Web Services: Battle Bots

😞 Amazon announces Alexa Conversations is now generally available for voice app development. We’re still a bit disappointed in her voice — it would be nice to hear something a bit more natural.
🍬 Amazon launches computer vision service to detect defects in manufactured products. Soon we’ll just be sitting around eating bon bons — we can’t wait!
🎎 AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region now open to all, with three availability zones and more services. We think this is a reaction to the huge cloud growth in Japan.
🏅 AWS DeepRacer League’s 2021 season launches with new Open and Pro divisions. Apparently it’s gone virtual and is being dominated by experts.

Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Jealous

👩‍✈️ Google introduces GKE Autopilot, a revolutionary mode of operations for managed Kubernetes. Autopilot makes it sound like an Oracle product.
🤣 Google announces the Risk Protection Program to enhance trust in cloud ecosystems. Google wants you to pay insurance in case its cloud goes down…
👍 Google extends BigQuery BI engine for faster insights across popular BI tools. Pretty cool!
👏 New enhancements for Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog including Terraform support. This is pretty good for internal teams managing private catalogs.

Azure: Killing It

🐑 Microsoft has announced a trio of new industry clouds. We think other providers will follow very soon.
😬 Microsoft to establish the first datacenter region in Indonesia as part of Berdayakan Ekonomi Digital Indonesia initiative. Justin apologizes for butchering the name of that initiative.
💀 Azure is killing off a bunch of its products. No, the dates aren’t wrong — 2024 is a leap year:

Azure Ignite: Don’t Get Excited

😐 Innovate across hybrid and multi cloud with new Azure Arc capabilities. Bit of an anti-climax.
👜 Azure releases several new capabilities for Azure Data and AI. A mixed bag of capabilities.
🧐 Introducing Azure Percept, an easy-to-use platform for creating responsible edge AI solutions. But it still requires a human… so manage your expectations.
💩 Satya Nadella shares the five attributes that will drive the next generation of cloud innovation. Do not watch it! Jonathan has a peg on his nose so he doesn’t have to smell the bullshit.
😺 Introducing Microsoft Mesh, a new mixed-reality platform powered by Azure. Actually kind of cool.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡Saved from watching Satya Nadella’s keynote meant Jonathan hadn’t been bored to death and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (3), Ryan (1), Jonathan (4).

Other headlines mentioned:

Things Coming Up

107: The Cloud Meshes with Microsoft