On The Cloud Pod this week, the team heads down a Cisco business model rabbithole. Plus cloud status pages struggle with reality, AWS is tracking carbon footprints, and Microsoft sees serious security business growth with Defender. 

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.

Top Quotes  

“Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it’s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can’t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There’re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something’s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don’t think they’re trying to mislead anybody.”

“They’re so strong in other areas, I think it’s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you’re really good at and just keep doing it better.”