In its final week, re:Invent continues to deliver a slew of announcements, which are captured on The Cloud Pod this week. It came and went quickly for the team unlike Google Cloud Next, which seemed to go on forever.

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 and Microsoft areacting like childrenthatneed to be separated. 
• 🚨 Infrastructurenerds are rejoicing at re:Invent.
• 🚨 You canspend while you sleep with Google.

General News: Everyone’s Favorite Topic

• 🍑 A heavily redacted version of AWS’s latest protest against Microsoft and the JEDI contracthas been unsealed. Trump made them do it.
• 🤗 U.S. Treasury and Commerce Department communications were reportedlycompromised by a supply chain attackon security vendor SolarWinds. Go hug a security team this week. 

Amazon Web Services: The Presents Keep On Coming

re:Invent Continued

• 🏆 AWS launches the VPC Reachability Analyzer tomeasure reachabilitybetween two endpoints without sending any packets. Anything that makes life easier is a win. 
• 🤓 The re:Invent infrastructure keynote lacked announcements but gives insight intohow AWS thinks about data centers. Old school infrastructure nerds, take note of this one.
• 🤩 AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EMR onElastic Kubernetes Service. EMR fans will be super happy about this. 
• 😲 AWS has released anInfrastructure Code Template generatorto make it easy to start using Spot Instances. You can go straight to production now, no testing! Just kidding… Please test. 
• 👍 Amazon EBSreduces the minimum volume sizeof Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD Volumes by 75%. This is kind of nice!
• 👻 Amazon EC2 announcesnew network performance metricsfor EC2 instances. Troubleshooting these is a nightmare, so this will be great.
• 👼 AWS has expanded the capability of the AWS transit Gateway for SD wan with thenew AWS Transit Gateway Connect. Thank you, Jesus!!
• 😃 Amazon EMR Studio makes it easier for data scientists tobuild and deploy code. We’re glad to see this one.  

Redshift

• 👌 Amazon Redshift announcesAutomatic Table Optimization.
• 📊 Amazon Redshiftintroduces data sharing(preview).
• 🤝 Amazon Redshift announces support fornative JSON and semi-structured data processing(preview).
• ☝️ Amazon Redshift now includesAmazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQLdatabases as new data sources for federated querying (Preview).
• 🗺️ Amazon Redshift launches the ability toeasily move clustersbetween AWS Availability Zones.
• 📦 Amazon Redshiftlaunches RA3.xlplus nodeswith managed storage.

More re:Invent News

• 🍲 AWS has announced anew partnership with Grafana Labs. Nice to see this is a partnership, not AWS cannibalizing an open source vendor.  
• 😔 AmazonManaged Service for Prometheusis a new fully managed service and is 100% compatible with Prometheus. Justin narrowly missed getting a prediction point with this one.
• 😕 New AWS Systems Managerconsolidates application management. This is a weird one.   
• 🍰 Amazon launches AWS Fleet Manager,a new console based experiencein Systems Manager. This is nice!
• ❄️ New AWS Systems Manager Change Manager allows ops engineers totrack, approve and implement operational changesto their apps and infrastructure. Direct competitor to Snow? 
• 🎅 Amazon launches new AWS cloudshell, with the goal of making the process of getting an AWS-enabledshell prompt simple and secure. Justin got his Christmas present early with this one.
• 👯‍♂️ AWS is launching a Fault injection simulator in 2021 to make it easier todiscover an application’s weaknesses. We really like this one.

Google Cloud Platform: Beware

• 🤷 Google is releasingminimum instances for Cloud Run, its managed serverless compute platform. We tried to figure out the cost but the calculator hadn’t been updated.
• 💲 Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experimentended with a $72,000 billovernight. A great cautionary tale.
• 🔧 Automatically right-size Spanner instances with thenew Google Autoscaler. Why is this not a feature of Spanner?
• 🍪 In the spirit of the holidays, Google is using its AI technology tobake the perfect cookies. Yum! 

Azure: They All Must Be Working On JEDI

• 🎄 Microsoft introduces steps toimprove internet routing security. Super long blog post for this one.  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan is nipping at Jonathan’s heels and has taken this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (16.5 points), Jonathan (10 points), Ryan (nine and half points) and Jacques (one point). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• AWS Security Hub now supports bidirectional integration with ServiceNow ITSM
• Simplify EC2 provisioning and viewing cloud resources in the ServiceNow CMDB with AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow
• AWS IDE Toolkit now available for AWS Cloud9  
• Amazon QuickSight now supports Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and adds new box plot and filled map visuals
• AWS Global Accelerator launches custom routing
• Announcing Unified Search in the AWS Management Console
• New – FreeRTOS Long Term Support to Provide Years of Feature Stability
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard now supports organization-wide event aggregation
• AWS Lambda now supports self-managed Apache Kafka as an event source