It was quite an eventful week for cloud users and Jonathan, Justin and Ryan can’t wait to talk about it in this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. Between the major AWS outage on Tuesday, December 7th, 2021, the critical defect in Apache Log4j, and Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT) release of its first Threat Horizons report, the year 2021 couldn’t come to an end soon enough. The only good news that seemed worthy of sharing this week is that Oracle had any news to share at all!
What better way to follow Up re:Invent than with a giant outage? On Tuesday, December 7th, 2021, AWS experienced a massive outage that left millions of users, from day traders to gamers to mothers just trying to use their Alexa devices, without services for the better part of the day. This outage has left some wondering if entirely cloud-based operations are reliable or if hybrid cloud environments would be a better play. Possibly not Amazon’s best advertising day. To offset this little snafu, AWS opened a new Asia Pacific Region in Indonesia to be used with a large number of AWS services. And last but not least, AWS released Managed Rules for its Network Firewall, allowing users to enable managed domain list rules to block HTTP and HTTPS traffic to suspicious domains — all at no additional cost.
Speaking of re:Invent, Google tried to rub it in that AWS didn’t have any highly anticipated serverless announcements by releasing the top five trends for serverless computing in 2022 and beyond. In its first Threat Horizons report, Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT) cites the biggest issues facing cloud users today: crypto mining, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats (APTs), oh my! But Google was not without a bit of good news for users this week as they extended the Pub/Sub data retention window from seven days to 31 days, as well as the opportunity to more easily manage the full lifecycle of Anthos clusters with the new Anthos Multi-Cloud API.
We can now welcome Azure to the space race with their new preview of Azure Orbital. This new feature includes capabilities like satellite communication, enhanced imagery with SpaceEye, and new geospatial and data analytics. Also in preview is Azure Load Testing, which is a fully managed service to help developers optimize and scale app performance. Azure has also added new features to Azure Virtual WAN, including two new partners — Fortinet and Versa — to expand SD-WAN capabilities, branch connectivity, custom traffic selectors, and more.
Is Oracle our new comeback kid? News surrounding this small cloud player has begun to surface and the Cloud Pod hosts are leery to give them too much credibility just yet. Oracle took the opportunity to swipe at AWS and cite a “major customer” of theirs saying “Oracle never ever goes down”, but the Cloud Pod guys have noted five incidents that have happened since December 8th. Sounds like The Cloud Pod won’t be welcoming Oracle into the fold with open arms right away.
Tune into Episode #146 of The Cloud Pod below and get the full details of this week’s news.
This week’s episode summary brought to you by a full Amazon shopping cart, music on my Alexa device and recovered stock shares… ahhhhh
