On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter turns into an old man in his yard, yelling at cloud providers. 

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.

• Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. 

 This week’s highlights

• 🚨 The big cloud providers must not tell lies about their cloud customers.
• 🚨 Google keeps us guessing if features will survive after the Preview.
• 🚨 Microsoft launches the world’s smallest Machine Learning degree.

General News: An Expensive Gimmick

• 🤡 Microsoft, AWS and others boast of exclusive cloud customers that aren’t actually exclusive to them. At the end of the day, being “all in” is a gimmick. 
• 💰 Palo Alto Networks, Inc. announced it’s adding four new cloud security modules to Prisma Cloud. All for the low, low price of a lot of money.     
• ❓ Red Hat, Inc. ties Ansible automation to Kubernetes cluster management to improve automation in cloud-native infrastructure. The only thing that’s going to make Kubernetes easier to manage is a whole bunch of Ansible catalogues and code that you don’t understand.
• 😡 Spinnaker-as-a-service startup Armory raises $40M in new funding. This makes us all cranky — these giant one-stop solutions are not the answer.  

Amazon Web Services: Strangely Quiet

• 💚 Amazon EventBridge now supports Dead Letter Queues, making event-driven applications more resilient. We love this! 
• 🏇 Amazon EKS now officially supports Kubernetes version 1.18. We’re taking bets on when version 1.19 comes out.

Google Cloud Platform: Apply Sunscreen

• 🧯 Google announces that all new GCP products will launch in Preview or General Availability. Tread carefully here — we’ve been burned by previews before where features don’t make it into General Availability.   
• 😕 Google launches support across Google Cloud for buildpacks to easily create container images. Don’t be fooled: Problems you had with Docker files are still there, you’ll just be further away from understanding them.    
• 😷 Open access is now available for the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) on Google Cloud. This sort of data aggregation could be phenomenal for medical research. 
• 😊 Google Cloud is offering no-cost data analytics training. We think this should be free all the time.  

Azure: What Is This, A Degree For Ants

• 🐜 Microsoft announces an advanced Azure Machine Learning Nanodegree program with Udacity. Are they calling it a nanodegree because it’s teeny tiny? 
• 🤣 Azure launches new alert query examples topic in Log Analytics. No comment, this just makes us laugh.
• 🤷‍♀️ Azure and Intel commit to delivering next generation confidential computing. We struggled to comprehend all the details of this one.   

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin takes the cake and this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (15 points), Jonathan (eight points) and Ryan (four points). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Azure Files premium tier is now available in more regions with LRS, ZRS and NFS support
• AWS Glue supports reading from self-managed Apache Kafka
• AWS Cloud Map simplifies service discovery with optional parameters
• AWS Lake Formation now supports cross-account database sharing  
• CloudWatch Application Insights offers new, improved user interface
• Azure Data Lake Storage immutable storage is now in preview