On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses why Ryan’s yelling all day (hint: he’s learning). Plus: Peter misses the all-important cloud earnings, AWS Skill Builder subscriptions are now available, and Google Eventarc connects SaaS platforms. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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

• 🚨 Earnings time is upon us once again, and it’s apparently doom and gloom all around as tears of loss are wiped away with $100 bills.
• 🚨 AWS makes its Skill Builder subscriptions available with more than 500 courses and four new learning experiences. (The Cloud Pod is now registering signups for a virtual proctor while you take the test.)
• 🚨Google Eventarc for events enthusiasts unifies and integrates supported SaaS platforms. 

Top Quotes  

• 💡 “Teams is a huge focus. The last two years have been companies figuring out how to remote work for the first time ever. That’s not a sustainable thing —  those two years’ growth is all just pandemic.”
• 💡 “I do like the way that they’re presenting a lot of this training. I don’t learn well in the classroom setting — I learn by doing, so any kind of hands-on labs or the jams which I’ve done in person at re:Invent are better for me to learn the internet intricacies of different services. So I love this.”

General News: Earnings, Damned Earnings, and Negative Analysts 

• 💵 First up for reported earnings is Microsoft, where no one’s really hurting. (Wait until you see the other guys.)
• 😢Sadly, Google still hasn’t figured out how to make money on GCP. Ad revenue is down.
• 🤦 Amazon suffers slower demand amid another net loss. Rivian takes a big hit, so if you were hoping to see it turn around, it hasn’t.
• 🙅 Of course, all of this bad news means Google and Microsoft have scaled back hiring efforts. Coupled with high inflation and bad interest rates, an economic bloodbath in the next 12 months looms.
• 🪓 Oracle axes U.S. staff as part of a plan to lay off thousands — mainly in marketing and customer experience. This could signal a step back from opening so many new data centers.

AWS: Building Skills One Course at a Time

• 🌐 Handy new IPv6 support appears for AWS Global Accelerator.
• 🌎 Already five years too late, CDK for Terraform is now (finally) generally available. 
• 👐 Amazon OpenSearch Service gets a trifecta of boosts in the form of advanced log and application analytics, OpenSearch version 1.3 support, and support for EBS gp3 volume type.
• 🧿 For those who need Neptune at scale, the Amazon Neptune Global Database is the perfect solution. As a growing service, it’s a great thing to have.
• 👷 Giving problems to solve instead of document-based learning is what AWS Skill Builder Subscriptions sets out to do with its 500+ courses and four new learning experiences. Pretty cool!
• 🛡️ You can now build AWS Config rules with AWS CloudFormation Guard — perfect for those who aren’t full-time developers who can still lend a hand in security.
• 👓 So long as you don’t leave it on all the time, running Visual Studio software on Amazon EC2 could save money. At the same time, it looks like no-code isn’t going to be a thing that soon.

GCP: Let’s All Come Together Now

• 👌 To avoid heavy lifting, stream data with Pub/Sub direct to BigQuery. (No pipelines needed!) It’s like an ETL without the “T.”
• 👷 If you were super excited about AWS Skill Builder and wanted certification but via GCP, your calls have been answered: Meet the new Professional Cloud Database Engineer certification.
• 🔒 Keep it secret, keep it safe: Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and MySQL local user password policies pop up for protection.
• 🙌 Eventarc promises to connect, unify, and integrate supported SaaS platforms for event management and infrastructure.

Azure: Well on the Way to That Government Contract

• 🤔 In a one-sentence press release, US West 3 sees a price drop. For what, and why, remains a mystery.
• 🎅 Microsoft threat intelligence solutions leverage its acquisition of RiskIQ in its bid to up security posture and hunt for bad guys.
• 📈 If you needed that certification to do government work, you’re good to go with the newly ICSA Labs-certified Azure Firewall Premium.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ With scorer Peter still absent, this week sees the round robin once again. The scores remain: Justin (6), Jonathan (3), Ryan (3), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• General availability: Next hop IP support for Azure Route Server 
• Generally available: Azure Public IPv6 offerings are free as of July 31
• AWS Support launches a new AWS Support Center console domain 
• General availability: Reservation administrator and reader roles in the Azure Portal 
• Now in Preview – Amazon WorkSpaces Integration with SAML 2.0 
• Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports enforcing SSL/TLS connections 
• AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET now provides automated refactoring recommendations 
• VM Import/Export now supports Windows 11 
• AWS Ground Station announces a new antenna location in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region
• AWS Secrets Manager connections now support the latest hybrid post-quantum TLS with Kyber

Things Coming Up:

• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• DevOps Enterprise Summit US Flagship Event 🎉 The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – October 18th-20th
• Google Cloud Next – October 11th-13th 
• Oracle Cloud World – October 16th-20th 
• Kubecon US – October 24th-28th
• MS Ignite – November 2nd-4th
• AWS Reinvent – November 28th-Dec 2nd (assumed)
• Oracle OpenWorld – TBD
• Microsoft events – TBD Check for status\

After Show:

• If earnings weren’t disappointing enough, it could be time for Google employees to fix their resumes: Their CEO emphasizes productivity, focus and efficiency with a ‘Simplicity Sprint.’