Your co-hosts discuss the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense, the UK Home Office and more on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

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

Amazon seeks a restraining order in a move to contest the JEDI contract.

Our first 2020 prediction comes true in a Microsoft/IBM team-up.

Jonathan takes a 200 percent lead in the Lightning Round with Amazon Cognito.

Matters of National Security

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going to court over allegations that the $10 billion JEDI contract was awarded to Microsoft due to improper pressure from the president as part of his personal issues with Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos. Expect the temporary restraining order to be granted or denied on February 11. Amazon may try to drag out proceedings until after the election — and a more favorable administration.

For those of you running Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016, be sure to grab the new patch advised by Microsoft and the National Security Agency. The patch solves a vulnerability that was found in a decades-old component called CryptoAPI, and would allow an attacker to copy the digital signature of legitimate software.

Amazon Web Services — Seven Short Sweet Stories

Though AWS may be hoping to stall the JEDI contract, business as usual shows no sign of slowing. Here are the seven AWS stories we talked about this week:

You can now go to Github for the public roadmap of AWS Elastic Beanstalk and voice any of your input.

UK Home Office (think Department of Homeland Security) has announced they’ll renew their public cloud services deal with AWS for another £100 million over four more years. To put that in context, it’s 0.13 percent the size of JEDI.

Former Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Ariel Kelman has left to join Oracle, and in his absence, AWS is taking the opportunity to reorganize its executive ranks.

Amazon EFS introduces two new features: EFS access points and IAM authentication/authorization.

Amazon VP of Technology Bill Vass gave a December interview outlining an ambitious vision for AWS storage.

New features for AWS backup include entire EC2 Instance backup, EFS Single File Restoration and Cross-Region Backups. (Be advised: If you’re using software RAID, you’ll still need to flush your file systems disc first.)

Those of you with EC2 G4 instances will find an upgrade available at no additional cost; new NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstations are optimized for GPU-intensive workloads.

Azure’s Privacy Up to Snuff

Azure is the first major cloud provider to achieve the new ISO/IEC 27701 privacy standard Privacy Information Management System certification, the new international standard. 27701 is an extension of the existing 27001 standard. This is the latest development in a continuing trend of Azure leading the pack in matters of privacy.

Google’s RISC-y Moves

Google Cloud now offers IBM Power Systems as part of their cloud solutions. It’s not RISC-V, but we’ll still count these RISC-based instances as a point for Jonathan in the 2020 predictions we made in Episode 53.

Google Cloud has released new cloud network benchmarking tools as a part of their Perfkit benchmarker. It’ll be a good thing for Google to point to and say “Hey, our network’s running fine.”

Google is expanding its Retail Acceleration Program to serve more customers in 2020. This may be a hit among the many retailers who don’t want to go to AWS (and therefore their competing retailer Amazon) for their cloud services.

On January 14, Google a