Episode 98: AWS tries the JEDI mind trick again

The Cloud Pod

In its final week, re:Invent continues to deliver a slew of announcements, which are captured on The Cloud Pod this week. It came and went quickly for the team unlike Google Cloud Next, which seemed to go on forever.

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 and Microsoft are acting like children that need to be separated.
• Infrastructure nerds are rejoicing at re:Invent.
• You can spend while you sleep with Google.

General News: Everyone’s Favorite Topic

• A heavily redacted version of AWS’s latest protest against Microsoft and the JEDI contract has been unsealed. Trump made them do it.
• U.S. Treasury and Commerce Department communications were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on security vendor SolarWinds. Go hug a security team this week.

Amazon Web Services: The Presents Keep On Coming

re:Invent Continued

• AWS launches the VPC Reachability Analyzer to measure reachability between two endpoints without sending any packets. Anything that makes life easier is a win.
• The re:Invent infrastructure keynote lacked announcements but gives insight into how AWS thinks about data centers. Old school infrastructure nerds, take note of this one.
• AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EMR on Elastic Kubernetes Service. EMR fans will be super happy about this.
• AWS has released an Infrastructure Code Template generator to make it easy to start using Spot Instances. You can go straight to production now, no testing! Just kidding… Please test.
• Amazon EBS reduces the minimum volume size of Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD Volumes by 75%. This is kind of nice!
• Amazon EC2 announces new network performance me