On The Cloud Pod this week, Matthew Kohn joins the team as a substitute for Jonathan and Peter, who have gone AWOL. Also, Google demonstrates again why its network is superior to the other cloud providers.

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.

• JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights * 🚨 AWS now allows crash-consistent AMIs without requiring a reboot. No more manual processes needed. * 🚨 Google is building a subsea cable named Firmina. The cable, to be comprised of 12 fiber pairs, will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America. * 🚨 Oracle announces improvements to its block volumes. Its Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume comes with up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/s throughput per volume and is generally available across all OCI commercial regions and on all interfaces.

General News: Not Dead Yet * 💀 Hashicorp Vagrant 3.0 will maintain its Ruby-based features while being ported to Go. We thought this was on a path to death but apparently not.

Amazon Web Services: Proceed With Caution * 👏 AWS announces a new region in Tel Aviv, Israel. AWS clearly realized it was behind the other cloud providers on building new regions. * 😎 Amazon launches AWS Proton in general availability. There are some super cool improvements that have been done to this. * ✔️ Amazon EC2 now allows you to create crash-consistent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This is one of our EC2 wish list items — it’s great to tick it off the list. * 🤗 AWS announces per second billing for EC2 Windows Server and SQL Server Instances. It’s nice to only be billed for what you actually use. * 🎉 AWS removes NAT Gateway’s dependence on Internet Gateway for private communications. This has been a big annoyance for a while so nice to see it sorted!

Google Cloud Platform: Just Figure It Out * 🤷‍♀️ Google is announcing the general availability of Ubuntu Pro images on Google Cloud. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to embrace open source by purchasing an enterprise product. * 👍 PLAID guest posts