The Cloud Pod Enjoys A Snowcone

Your hosts see a new cloud on the horizon and anticipate a flood on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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

☁️ HashiCorp has launched the HashiCorp Cloud Platform featuring managed Consul as the single initial service. HashiCorp is currently soliciting feedback on the alpha version of HashiCorp Cloud Platform and is planning on releasing Vault next.

🍧 The AWS Snow family of devices is now joined by AWS Snowcone, a four-and-a-half pound eight terabyte data storage and transfer device, both the most storage and least weight yet. Don’t lose it though — this little guy runs around $2,000.
🦥 Aurora Global database now supports write request forwarding for low latency global data reads. This is fantastic news for lazy devs like us.
😃 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups now support the Instance Refresh feature, eliminating the need for custom scripts and systems. This is a long-anticipated feature for TCP. We can’t believe it’s taken until 2020!
📚 The new Lambda Powertools library within the Serverless Lens for the Well Architected Framework features Tracer, Logger and Metrics as its three core utilities. Using these tools to get yourself set up will save you a lot of strife down the line.

🤝 Azure and Udacity are partnering to launch a scholarship program and the free Azure Machine Learning course to address the growing demand for AI specialists. We’ve had good experiences with Udacity so this offering appeals directly to us.
🦾 Azure is catering to users new to ARM templates with new features including a template Quickstart gallery and Azure Resource Manager Tools in Visual Studio Code. How did we ever get by without this?

🔐 Google rolled out Transport Layer Security 1.3 featuring updated ciphers and low handshake latency as the new default for Cloud CDN and Global Load Balancing customers. Of course, you’ll still have to be ready to work with 1.0 since some people just won’t upgrade from their 2001 edition of Internet Explorer.
🦍 The Apigee adapter for Envoy is now in beta. If you’re not a fan, you can still use Kong as the last remaining standalone API company.
❓ Google’s Cloud Monitoring service now features the Cloud Pub/Sub channel in beta. If an error is fixed before you learn of it, did it even really happen?
🌽 In a blog post this week, Rob Long and Maciek Różacki detailed how Bayer Crop Sciences uses Google Kubernetes Engine clusters to perform complex genetic analysis on developing crop strains. These guys put 15,000 nodes in a cluster — it’s absolutely buckwild.
🗺️ Google has opened a new cloud region in the (sinking) city of Jakarta. Of course, Google may kill the product well before the water rises.

⚡ Jonathan takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (six points), Justin (seven points) and Ryan (two points). It’s still neck-and-neck!