Your co-hosts settle into the winter holidays by unwinding from Re:Invent and recording the last episode of The Cloud Pod of 2019.

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.
• Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. 

This week’s highlights

1. Amazon picks fights with Microsoft, the New York Times and the President.
2. Oracle’s finances reflect the trouble we predicted they’d be in when Amazon pulled out.
3. Google sets its sights on dramatically increasing its market share by 2023.

Return of the JEDI

It’s official: the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract has been awarded to Microsoft to modernize the Department of Defense’s IT systems to the tune of $10 billion. Amazon, which anticipated that it would be awarded the JEDI contract, believes the decision was politically motivated, and that Microsoft is under-equipped to deliver on their promises, highlighting the dangers of a vulnerability in such a sensitive system.

In case you missed it, Sundar Pichai will be taking over as the new CEO of Google. Since he was already the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, don’t expect any drastic changes.

And speaking of CEOs, Safra Catz is now officially the sole CEO of Oracle following the death of her co-CEO Mark Hurd. After Amazon’s migration, she’ll have to deal with the company’s revenue challenges and falling stock prices. It’s not a great time for Oracle as the company continues to lose face with CIOs after years of licensing audits and exorbitant penalties.

Football in the Amazon

Amazon may have lost the contract with the DoD, but it can proudly claim to be the cloud computation provider for the Seattle Seahawks. Not only that, but Amazon will be partnering with the entire NFL for a new safety initiative  analyzing impact data with a “digital athlete.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy gave an interview in his basement and explained  why AWS is in a better position to pick up large enterprise clients. As for the competition, AWS is going after Microsoft hard. Amidst all this, The New York Times put out a critical piece about Amazon or A.W.S (note the periods to comply with New York Times style). It has met heavy criticism of its own. 

More personally, our own Jonathan Baker gave us a first-hand account on how he won the Re:Invent 2018 hackathon, and his hack which recently went live to benefit GameChanger Charity.

Azure Tries to Stay in the Headlines

Azure dropped a few stories during re:Invent. But don’t get too excited — there’s nothing big to see here. Regardless, here are the “new” services Azure announced:  

• Multi-protocol access on Data Lake Storage will allow you to store different data types together.
• Operational excellence will act like Trusted Advisor, but for Azure.
• Proximity placement groups will let you put resources near each other to improve latency.

Go(ogle) Big or Go Home

Google released three new upgrades and two new services this week.

New Services:

• Data Fusion is Google’s new High Powered ETL service.
• Transfer Service for on-premises data promises to make large migrations of data into the cloud simple, swift, and safe.

Improved Services:

• Google’s WAF has received a few new capabilities.
• Three new features for Cloud Code will allow you to debug without leaving your IDE.
• Google Cloud is now FedRAMP High authorized.

But the biggest news for Google might be from reports that management wants to beat Amazon (or at least Microsoft) in market share in the next three years. They deny plan B is to quit the cloud business entirely. With Google’s track record of axing products that don’t succeed,  they’d better do a good job of denying it — nobody wants to hitch their wagon to a platform that might get canned.

Lightning Round

Jonathan may have taken the last point of the year, but Justin still wins the war with a total of 18 points to Jonathan’s 14. Better luck next year, Jonathan.

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon SQS now supports 1-Minute Cloudwatch metrics 
• Alexa for Business adds end of meeting reminders, intelligent room release and meeting room utilization metrics 
• 55 additional AWS services achieve HITRUST CSF Certification 
• Attach multiple Elastic Inference accelerators to a single EC2 instance 
• Amazon EC2 Spot Now Provides Instance Launch Notifications via Amazon CloudWatch Events 
• Amazon Connect announces AWS CloudTrail support for APIs 
• DNS Resolution for EKS Clusters Using Private Endpoints 
• AWS CodeBuild Now Supports Cross-Account Resource Sharing 
• Unique Identifier helps troubleshooting VPC Service Controls perimeter 
• AWS launches ML Embark program to help enterprises adopt machine learning 
• Amazon FSx adds enhancements to the AWS Management Console
• Amazon EC2 Fleet Now Lets You Preferentially use Available Capacity Reservations 
• Amazon MQ introduces throughput-optimized message brokers 
• AWS Security Hub integrates with Amazon Detective 
• AWS CloudFormation updates for Amazon API Gateway, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon S3, AWS IAM, Amazon ECS, Amazon RDS, Amazon ES, AWS Lambda and more 
• Announcing ICD-10-CM and RxNorm Ontology Linking for Amazon Comprehend Medical 
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Launches the Windows Web Application Migration Assistant 
• Amazon SES now enables you to configure DKIM using your own RSA key pair