It’s a Wednesday so things could be better, but spare a thought for the team as they battle Mother Nature on The Cloud Pod this week.
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.
 
- Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.
 
This week’s highlights
- 🚨 Amazon is forking people off big time.
 - 🚨 Google wants to help you lose those pandemic lockdown pounds.
 - 🚨 Azure didn’t overwhelm anyone with its “problem.”
 
General News: The Elastic Kerfuffle
- 🤣 Elastic blames Amazon for forcing it to change its licensing. One of the most ridiculous blog posts ever.
 - 🍽️ Logz.io looks to launch a true open-source distribution for Elasticsearch and Kibana. Everybody’s forking now.
 - 💀 AWS has also announced that it will also fork its project for a truly open source Elasticsearch. The beginning of the end for Elasticsearch.
 - 👏 Logz.io followed up its previous announcement by announcing it’s combining its efforts with Amazon. This is great news for the open-source community.
 
Amazon Web Services: Let’s Talk
- 👍 AWS Lex has released a new console experience and new V2 APIs to make it easier to build, deploy and manage conversational experiences. We’ve played with it and it’s very nice.
 - 🤫 Amazon CloudWatch Agent now supports OpenTelemetry APIs and Software Development Kits. Could be a sign it’s about to make a lot of investments in OpenTelemetry and is moving away from CloudWatch.
 - 🚓 Amazon GuardDuty enhances security incident investigation workflows through new integration with Amazon Detective. Integrated security — we like it!
 - 😒 Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android now support screen share. It’s great it has functionality that other apps have had from the start.
 - 🤩 Amazon ECS Agent v1.50.0 allows customers to execute interactive commands inside containers. This makes Justin’s life complete.
 
Google Cloud Platform: Making Peter’s Dreams Come True
- 🤗 Google announces the general availability of its comprehensive zero trust product offering, BeyondCorp Enterprise. An amazing name for a product.
 - 😃 Google launches Cloud Operations Sandbox to bring Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture to its customers. A really good way to learn about something that’s been around forever.
 - 😭 Introducing WebSockets, HTTP/2 and gRPC bidirectional streams for Cloud Run. But then the security team tells you it’s not supported and you have to rip it out.
 - 🏃♀️ Build your own workout app in five steps, without coding, on AppSheet. Peter’s app won’t count past one step or one ounce.
 - 🤷 Google wants to help you work at warp-speed in the BigQuery UI. We don’t know if this is radical but it’s nice.
 
Azure: The Problem Child
- 🙃 Azure continues to drop monthly updates for Cost Management and Billing. Because apparently it’s still a problem.
 - 🎈 Azure Availability Zones in the South Central U.S. datacenter region add resiliency. Woohoo!
 - ⚔️ Introducing seamless integration between Microsoft Azure and Confluent Cloud. The partnership battle continues.
 
TCP Lightning Round
⚡ Scores are tied as Justin wins this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1).
Other headlines mentioned:
- Justin’s guest appearance on Security Voices
 - Generally available: Copy Blob support over private endpoints in Azure Storage
 - Azure App Service Authentication portal experience is now in public preview
 - Amazon Redshift doubles managed storage quota to 128 TB per node for RA3.16XL and RA3.4XL node-types
 - AWS Shield Advanced now provides mitigation metrics and network traffic timelines
 - Amazon CloudWatch Agent Now Supports macOS on Amazon EC2 Mac instances
 - Amazon MSK now supports the ability to change the size or family of your Apache Kafka brokers
 - Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports JSON syntax to help you read and write data from other systems more easily
 - Amazon ECS announces increased service quotas for tasks per service and services per cluster
 - Amazon ECS now supports VPC Endpoint policies
 - Amazon EBS announces CloudWatch metrics with 1-minute granularity on all EBS volume types