Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – Matthew, Jonathan, Ryan and Justin are all here to bring you the latest in cloud news – including FOCUS features in AWS Billing, Magic Quadrants, and AWS Metis. Plus, we have an Andoid vs. Apple showdown in the Aftershow, so be sure to stay tuned for that!

• Tech reports show Gartner leads in the BS quadrant
• Oracle adds cloud and legal expenses to their FinOps hub
• AWS Metis: Great chatbot, or Greek tragedy waiting to happen?
• The cloud pod rocks Cargo Pants
• A sonnet is written for FOCUSing on spend

01:40 Finops X

• Recently Justin attended FinOps in beautiful and sunny San Diego – and if you weren’t there, you really should plan on attending next year. This year’s topics included:
  • Focus 1.0
  • State of Vendors
• Conference size – they will most likely outgrow this particular conference center, seeing as how they’re either selling out or pretty close to it.
• Coolest thing about the conference – on stage all the biggies – TOGETHER.
  • It’s great to see them all together talking about how they’re making Finops better, and introducing new things for Finops and not just saving them for their own conferences.
• Next Year – Is Oracle going to be on stage next year?

08:22 Justin – “The shift left of FinOps was a big topic. You know, how do we get visibility? How do we show people what things are going to cost? How do we make sure that, you know, people are aware of what they’re doing? And so I think, you know, it’s just a recognition that is important and just as important as security is your cost. And in some ways security is part of your cost story. Because if you bankrupt your company, that’s a pretty bad security situation.”

10:17 Introducing Managed OpenSearch: Gain Control of Your Cloud with Powerful Log Analysis

• Listen. We don’t really *care* about OpenSearch – but the reality is it’s taking over the world. Nobody is doing ElasticSearch anymore.
• Digital Ocean is launching Managed OpenSearch offering, a comprehensive solution designed for in depth log analysis, simplifying troubleshooting, and optimizing application performance.
• With Digital ocean you can Pinpoint and analyze log data with ease, customize log retention, enhance security and can scale with your business and receive forwarded logs from multiple sources including Digital Ocean droplets, managed databases, etc.
• Interested in pricing? You can find that here. Or, if you’d like to take a product tour, you can do that here.

12:11 Ryan – “It’s the important ones where everything revolves around it and so no on

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matthew are with you this week, and even though it’s a light news week, you’re definitely going to want to stick around. We’re looking forward to FinOps, talking about updates to Consul, WIF coming to Vault 1.17, and giving an intro to Databricks LakeFlow. Because we needed another lake product. Be sure to stick around for this week’s Cloud Journey series too.

• The CloudPod lets the DataLake flow
• Amazon attempts an international incident in Taiwan
• What’s your Vector Mysql?

01:40 Consul 1.19 improves Kubernetes workflows, snapshot support, and Nomad integration

• Consul 1.19 is now generally available, improving the user experience, providing flexibility and enhancing integration points.
• Consul 1.19 introduces a new registration custom resource definition (CRD) that simplifies the process of registering external services into the mesh.
• Consul service mesh already supports routing to services outside of the mesh through terminating gateways. However, there are advantages to using the new Registration CRD.
• Consul snapshots can now be stored in multiple destinations, previously, you could only snapshot to a local path or to a remote object store destination but not both.
• Now you can take a snapshot of NFS Mounts, San attached Storage, or Object storage.
• Consul API gateways can now be deployed on Nomad, combined with transparent proxy and enterprise features like admin partitions

01:37 Matthew- “What I was surprised about, which I did not know, was that console API gateway can now be deployed on Nomad. Was it not able to be deployed before? Just feels weird… you know, consoles should be able to be deployed on nomad compared to that. You know, it’s all the same company, but sometimes team A doesn’t always talk to team B.”

03:21 Vault 1.17 brings WIF, EST support for PKI, and more

• Vault 1.17 is now generally available with new secure workflows, better performance and improved secrets management scalability.
• Key new features:
  • Workload Identify Federation (WIF) allows you to eliminate concerns around providing security credentials to vault plugins.
  • Using the new support for WIF< a trust relationship can be established between an external system and vault’s identity token provider to access the external system.
  • This enables secretless configuration for plugins that integrate with external systems such as AWS, Azure and GCP.

Welcome to episode 264 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan (and eventually) Matthew are all on hand this week – and *announcement noise* this week it’s the return of the Cloud Journey Series! There’s also a lot of news from Re:inforce, a ground-breaking partnership between Oracle and Google Cloud, and updates to GKE. The guys also look ahead to Finops ‘24.

• First, AI came for Writers/Artists, then it came for Developers, and now it comes for Security… What’s Next?
• Amazon Reinforces my Lack of Interest in Attending – JPB rl
• Object Storage Malware protection, everyone, please copy it!
• Amazon is the last man out in Oracle next-gen partnerships
• Dear Google, A partnership with Oracle is not Groundbreaking when Azure already did it
• AWS Announces some “We finally got around to it feature updates”
• Protect your S3 buckets from themselves with Amazon Guard Duty
• The CloudPod and AI play Guess Who? with IAM Access Analyzer.

01:04 Simplify risk and compliance assessments with the new common control library in AWS Audit Manager

• AWS Audit Manager is introducing a common control library that provides common controls with predefined and pre-mapped AWS data sources.
• This makes it easy for the GRC teams to use the common control library to save time when mapping enterprise controls into Audit Manager for evidence collection, reducing their dependence on IT teams.
• You can view the compliance requirements for multiple frameworks such as PCI or HIPAA, associated with the same common control in one place, making it easier to understand your audit readiness across multiple frameworks simultaneously.
• Interested in pricing? You can find that info here.

01:37 Ryan – “It’s the dream! Automated evidence generation. And now with the context of known frameworks. Yeah; because that’s always the challenge, you know, are the last step of the translation – this is the control. Hey, we need all these controls to do this level of compliance.”

04:36 Centrally manage member account root email addresses across your AWS Organization

• 2017 Justin is really digging all these quality-of-life features coming out, and we like to think that AWS has just finally gotten to our pile of feature requests from back then.
• This week, it’s now easier for AWS Organizations customers to centrally manage the root email address of member accounts across their organization using the CLI, SDK and Organizations Console.
• They had previously made it possible to update primary and alternative contact information and enable AWS regions for their accounts. However you would still need to log in as the r