This week on The Cloud Pod, the team admits defeat and acknowledges they are not experts in machine learning. Joining them in that club is the rest of us.  

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.
• Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon is helpfully pointing out all your mistakes. 
• Google knows you have deep pockets and wants a piece. 
• Microsoft is really bad at keeping secrets.

General News: Jonathan Called It

• Salesforce has acquired Slack for $27.7 billion. We’re hoping Chatter will die a horrible death now. 

Amazon Web Services: Error 404 

Amazon explains the Thanksgiving Kinesis outage that occurred in North East Virginia. We feel bad for the Ops team that had to support this. 

re:Invent Continued

• Amazon adds stronger Read-After-Write consistency to S3. A really fantastic technical feat.   
• Amazon announces S3 Replication support for multiple destination buckets. Nice and simple!
• Amazon S3 Replication now has the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets. Super excited about this!
• Integrate Amazon Honeycode with popular SaaS applications, AWS services and more. It’s finally usable now. 
• Amazon announces new AWS Region is in the works for Melbourne, Australia. It will also use 100% renewable energy, which is cool.
• Fully serverless batch computing with AWS Batch Support for AWS Fargate. Batch is a weird service to begin with. 
• Amazon debuts Trainium, a custom chip for machine learning training in the cloud. We’re confused by this one.
• Amazon HealthLake stores, transforms and analyzes Health Data in the Cloud. Machine learning, while confusing, is great for the healthcare industry.  
• Amazon launches Lookout for Metrics, an anomaly detection service for monitoring business health. A very cool tool! 
• AWS Audit Manager simplifies audit preparation. There is a lot of money in auditing and this will save you money.  
• Sagemaker Announcements
  • Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager simplifies operating machine learning models on Edge Devices. We didn’t know people wanted this but apparently they do.
  • Amazon SageMaker Clarify detects bias and increases the transparency of machine learning models. This is trying to solve a big issue for developers which is great.
  • More Sagemaker announcements:
    • New – Profile Your Machine Learning Training Jobs With Amazon SageMaker Debugger
    • New – Managed Data Parallelism in Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training on Large Datasets  
    • Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training Deep Learning Models With Billions of Parameters
    • New – Store, Discover, and Share Machine Learning Features with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store
    • Introducing Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, a Visual Interface to Prepare Data for Machine Learning
    • New – Amazon SageMaker Pipelines Brings DevOps Capabilities to your Machine Learning Projects
    • Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Simplifies Access to Pre-built Models and Machine Learning Solutions

Google Cloud Platform: Hello, It’s Me

• Google is acquiring backup and disaster recovery provider Actifio. A smart play!
• Google announces the general availability of Container Threat Detection. A nice feature. 
• Google launches Anthos on bare metal. Google, letting you buy the hardware and then charging you for using it.
• Google Cloud Functions now supports .NET core 3.1. We don’t have a clue about this one.  
• Forester names Google Cloud a leader in the latest Forrester Research IaaS Platform Native Security Wave. Joke’s on us — those dots are randomly placed.  
• Dataform is acquired by Google and is now free for all users. We guess this is nice.  
• GCP has released a new terraform module for provisioning load balancers optimized for serverless applications. They better be building this into the service.   

Azure: Been Quiet All Year

• Microsoft to establish its first datacenter region in Sweden. Paying for it to be sustainable doesn’t make it sustainable, Microsoft.
• Microsoft to establish a new datacenter region in Denmark. Not as sustainable as the Swedish one though. 
• Effective before Thanksgiving all Azure Premium File Tier customers got more IOPS for free. We’d love to know what the underlying reason is behind this announcement. 
• Microsoft announces cloud innovations across US Government data classifications. A not-so-secret secret.    

TCP Lightning Round

The millennial basher also known as Jonathan takes this week’s point but Ryan is thrown a bone with half a point, leaving scores at Justin (16 points), Jonathan (11 points), Ryan (six and half points) and Jacques (one point).     

Other headlines mentioned:

• New – SaaS Lens in AWS Well-Architected Tool
• AWS Marketplace Now Offers Professional Service
• Managed Entitlements in AWS License Manager Streamlines License Tracking and Distribution for Customers and ISVs
• Introducing AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub
• Introducing the New AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency  
• Introducing AWS SaaS Boost
• AWS ISV Accelerate, a co-sell program for AWS Partners
• AWS Foundational Technical Review Lens now available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool  
• AWS Marketplace Announces APIs for Private Marketplace
• AWS Security Hub adds open source tool integrations with Kube-bench and Cloud Custodian
• AWS CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors
• AWS announces General Availability of Amazon GameLift Feature Update  
• Amazon S3 Bucket Keys reduce the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS)
• Announcing Amazon Elasticsearch Service support for AWS Glue Elastic Views