We crown the winner of the AWS Summit Draft Picks on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
This week’s highlights * 🚨 We crown the winner of this year’s AWS Summit Draft Picks! * 🚨 Amazon and Microsoft keep slinging blog posts over JEDI. * 🚨 We’re all just trying to stay sane, honestly.
AWS Summit: Draft Picks * 🏈 While it wasn’t a particularly accurate set of predictions this year (with no honorable mentions scoring and even the tiebreaker non-functional), Justin managed to squeak out a win by correctly predicting a price cut in EC2, S3, or Networking and the Covid Crazy Growth Numbers. Jonathan scored the only other point with his prediction of improved DLP Tools for S3. * 💰 Amazon Macie simplified its pricing plan and dramatically reduced costs. Is the 80% price cut the new way of announcing a product is generally available? * 💵 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud cut prices across all regions for Standard Reserved Instances and EC2 Instance Saving Plans. * 💸 Inter-Region Data Transfer prices have been reduced for data coming out of São Paulo, Bahrain, Cape Town and Sydney.
General News * 👩⚖️ Amazon filed a second, concurrent bid protest to the Department of Defense. Microsoft and Amazon continue to snip at each other in public blog posts.
COVID-19 * 🏘️ Amazon will allow non-warehouse employees to work from home for at least five months. Microsoft updated their WFH policy, and will give employees the option to work remotely through October.
AWS * 🧘 Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer has seen pricing changes. Now CodeGuru’s terrible payment model is much less terrible. * 🆕 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports Kubernetes version 1.16. It’s good to see they’re putting out these updates progressively faster. * 🧙♂️ A new wizard will allow for simplified creation and management of Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters. This should clean up some of the EKS console nicely. * 🔏 AWS Identity and Access Management introduced basic password strength requirements. Thank goodness. * 📠 AWS Internet of Things Device Management service’s Device Jobs feature now costs