Your co-hosts cover conferences past and yet to come on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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We crown the winner of the AWS Summit Draft Picks on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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COVID-19

The Three Musketeers have gained their D’Artagnan and take on the world (metaphorically and from home) on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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Honorable Mentions: 

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Ryan Lucas and Ian Mckay fill in for Jonathan on this week’s free-tier episode of The Cloud Pod.

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Your hosts meet online to work on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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We’re donating profits of our sticker sales to the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Research Response Program through July 1, 2020.

The Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights feature, which gives users an overview of their operational problems, is now generally available. CloudWatch Contributor Insights is also generally available for DynamoDB, though it is 50 percent more expensive per million log events than Insights not for DynamoDB. You can build some neat automation around this.

Back in Episode 51, we covered the new instances with ra3.16xlarge nodes, and now Amazon is adding instances with ra3.4xlarge nodes, which lack the excess power of ra3.16xlarge. At a quarter of the price of the larger larges, that’s some considerable savings.

Amazon Redshift now features elastic resize, allowing users to change node types within minutes. This will be helpful if you want to make the move to those cheaper instances.

If you’re looking for something fun while sheltering in place, you may be pleased to hear that AWS DeepComposer is now generally available (and with new features!) You can buy an Amazon keyboard for $99 or a generic for $50.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports In-Region Read Replicas on SQL Server Enterprise Edition in the Multi-AZ config with Always On Availability. Careful though, you can really rack up a bill this way if you’re careless.

Amazon announced that Amazon Elastic File System has quintupled its speed for General Purpose mode file systems to 35,000 read operations per second. That leads into our next headline: Amazon Elastic

Jonathan is out with a back injury, so it’s just Justin and Peter on this week’s intranational episode of The Cloud Pod.

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Business for web conferencing applications has boomed this month. Microsoft Teams gained 12 million users in a week and Slack’s paid version gained over 7,000 customers since the start of February. Hopefully people continue to use these tools to stay more connected even after we’ve gotten through this pandemic.

With AWS testing centers closed, AWS Certification is now offering all exams online with online proctoring. Considerations are being made for those who need to reschedule.

The price of Amazon GuardDuty use over 10,000 gigabytes (GB) was reduced from 25 cents to 15 cents per GB.

The normally quiet CloudFront announced they have cut propagation times down to five. Propagation times used to average between 17 and 35 minutes. CloudFront has always been cost-effective, but now it’s as efficient as it needs to be.

Amazon QuickSight launched image support on dashboards through the insight editor. Neat, but indicative of a slow news week.

AWS Site-to-Site VPN now enables you to use digital certificates for all site-to-site connections. This is great for mobile devices or other cases without static IP addresses.

In our developing coverage of the JEDI contract, AWS has now charged that the DoD is unfairly granting Microsoft a “do-over” on flawed portions of its bid.

The UpdateShardCount API for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams upgraded from a 500 shard capacity to a 10,000 shard capacity. If you want to work with social

Your hosts join the rest of the world in phoning one in on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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As the pandemic response ramps up across the world, teleconferencing services like Slack and Zoom have struggled to meet demand. Microsoft Teams users in Europe reported difficulty logging into the service. If you’re looking for an open-source web conferencing application, AWS recommends you use Jitsi. If you’re a startup with more AWS credits to spend than money, we recommend you check it out.

In the continued wave of canceled conferences, Microsoft moved the May 19-21 Build developer conference to a virtual-only format. Even virtual conferences aren’t entirely safe bets, as Google has postponed Google Cloud Next 2020: Digital Connect. Perhaps they will try to wait until they can safely host a physical conference again, but who knows when that will be?

Amazon Redshift now allows users to pause and remove clusters so they are not billed for their use while unneeded. In other Amazon Redshift news, the cloud data warehouse now supports materialized views functionality. We suspect that Redshift will be going serverless before long.

As a part of its release, API Gateway will offer private integrations with AWS Elastic Load Balancers and AWS CloudMap. There’s a lot there, but we wish it had a Lambda

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter again as we practice social distancing on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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Due to the ongoing global pandemic, AWS Summits have been (responsibly) cancelled in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco and Brussels. Hopefully we’ll see these events move online.

Court documents from Amazon’s injunction have been unsealed. The documents reveal that Microsoft’s bid included “non-compliant storage” which was not counted against them. The Department of Defense responded that Amazon’s bid did not include technically compliant storage either.

Our very own Justin Brodley made the news! His comments are included in an article covering a cloud alternatives panel discussion at Altitude 2020. 

VMware Inc. overhauled its portfolio of products to focus on Kubernetes support. Expect to see the whole host of products available by May 2020.

The new CloudWatch composite alarms will allow you to combine alarms and get a clearer picture of what is happening when something goes wrong.

You can now host your applications with the AWS