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:

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.

Amazon may have lost the contract with the DoD, but it can proudly claim to be the cloud computation provider for the Seattle Se

Sponsors:

Your co-hosts are back from Thanksgiving and Re:Invent, and we’re running through all of it for you. In this episode, we cover the lead-up to opening day. Next week, we’ll release an episode fully devoted to Re:Invent coverage. 

We’re one step closer to actually paying for what we use with the announcement that EC2 T2 instances will support Unlimited Mode at the account level. If your workload is spread out among multiple accounts, this will be something you should look at. But if you’re looking for load balancer updates, there’s a new batch of those for you too. We especially like the Weighted Target Groups, which have been needed for blue/green deployments for a while now.

Migrating to the cloud has gotten a bit easier with differential and log restores on RDS for SQL servers. Like a lot of the recent announcements, simplicity was highlighted in the announcement of increased availability of DynamoDB tables using global table replicas. 

“It’ll only take a few clicks” makes it sound like Amazon thinks clicking things must be very taxing on us.

CloudTrail Insights will alert you to unusual activity at a cost of 35 cents per 100,000 write management events analyzed. It’s hard to know yet whether how expensive that will end up being, but it sounds cheap. AWS Single Sign-On will connect to Azure AD, making it easier to migrate to Amazon, and AWS Secrets Manager will make it easier to rotate your secrets by handling it at the API level.

AWS is moving from role-based to attribute-based access control and will be implementing Tag Policies to allow you to control the standardization of your tags. Implementing these should serve to become better organized with less pain. WAF has grown up, having gained a number of improvements. With a threat research team maintaining the rules, you’ll have protection even before you customize your rules.

AWS Service Catalog Connector for Service Desk has been announced, and it’s nice that it isn’t 10$ per user per month. Debugging got a little less painful with the new beta for visualizations in CodeBuild, and another beta for “Cloud Debugging” with JetBrains IDE. CDK now features Java and .Net, which will help developers most comfortable in those languages join CDK. CDK also has a new Toolkit to visualize CDK apps in a native sidebar. And speaking of native, Correto is now supported natively in Beanstalk.

You now have access to a preview of Amazon CloudWatch that includes a way to set up automatic analysis of the top contributors to systems performance. Another preview for CloudWatch is Synthetics, a way to test for customer experience even when no customers are having experiences.

You’ll no longer have to poll an API to receive an event for ECS tasks and instances now those events are available as CloudWatch events. Another way CloudWatch has grown into a strong aggregation point.

Redshift will now automatically and by default sort tables where a sort key is specified.

AWS Chatbot can now run commands in Slack for you, and we’ll be happy to use it to generate support cases.

Your co-hosts celebrate the one-year anniversary of the podcast by returning to the place where it all started – AWS Re:Invent. Joining us once again is Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) as we recap the largest week in Cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

On episode 49, we drafted each of our top three picks for what we thought would be announced at Re:Invent. It’s a three-way tie for first! Each one of us correctly guessed one of our three picks, and nobody guessed that Anderson .Paak would make a musical appearance, leaving the tie unbroken. (Peter predicted that Formula 1 racing would be included, but it was a runner-up choice and goes uncounted.)

Moving on to Re:Invent, we cover the announcements day-by-day:

Sunday

AWS launched DeepComposer, the world’s first machine learning enabled keyboard. The 32-key, 2-octave keyboard is designed to help developers to get hands-on with AI. You can train the program to generate compositions based on musical genres, but don’t expect any compelling vocals from it yet, though. Check out the announcement for sample selections. For only $99 you will be able to buy a MIDI keyboard (worth about $50) with the AWS logo on 

DeepRacer, a machine-learning based toy from yesteryear has received its own upgrades (a stereo camera and LIDAR sensor) which allow the cars to be trained to race each other physically in addition to virtually.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer launches for free as a way to get an overview on your access control policies — it mathematically analyzes access control policies attached to resources and determines which resources can be accessed publicly or from other accounts. 

A preview version of

Sponsors:

Your co-hosts are back from Thanksgiving and Re:Invent, and we’re running through all of it for you. In this episode, we cover the lead-up to opening day. Next week, we’ll release an episode fully devoted to Re:Invent coverage. 

We’re one step closer to actually paying for what we use with the announcement that EC2 T2 instances will support Unlimited Mode at the account level. If your workload is spread out among multiple accounts, this will be something you should look at. But if you’re looking for load balancer updates, there’s a new batch of those for you too. We especially like the Weighted Target Groups, which have been needed for blue/green deployments for a while now.

Migrating to the cloud has gotten a bit easier with differential and log restores on RDS for SQL servers. Like a lot of the recent announcements, simplicity was highlighted in the announcement of increased availability of DynamoDB tables using global table replicas. 

“It’ll only take a few clicks” makes it sound like Amazon thinks clicking things must be very taxing on us.

CloudTrail Insights will alert you to unusual activity at a cost of 35 cents per 100,000 write management events analyzed. It’s hard to know yet whether how expensive that will end up being, but it sounds cheap. AWS Single Sign-On will connect to Azure AD, making it easier to migrate to Amazon, and AWS Secrets Manager will make it easier to rotate your secrets by handling it at the API level.

AWS is moving from role-based to attribute-based access control and will be implementing Tag Policies to allow you to control the standardization of your tags. Implementing these should serve to become b

AWS is getting ready for the biggest event of the year, Re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas.  Your Co-Hosts do their best to guess what AWS may announce, we cover some preannouncement news, and more!

NOTE: This episode was recorded on November 20th, to let the co-hosts enjoy Thanksgiving! This episode is AWS specific, as well as our first show after the Re:Invent conference. If you want to stay up to date on Azure or GCP in the interim, follow our Twitter @thecloudpod1 or join our Slack Channel.

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Lightning Round (Jonathan 13, Justin 18, and Guest 5): 

Docker sells off its enterprise business to Mirantis. Amazon gets upset with the pentagon and launches a data exchange. Azure wins a lucrative contract and GitHub actions.  Google buys cloudsimple complicating things for the VMWare on Azure offerings.

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Jonathan – Follows up on Redshift

Lightning Round (Jonathan 13, Justin 18, and Guest 5): 

AWS releases new RI option called the savings plan, IBM builds a financial services cloud, and @jeffbarr celebrates 15 years of blogging for AWS!