On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the conspiracy theory surrounding media coverage of daylight savings and continues counting down to re:Invent. 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Amazon sells a whole bunch of stuff on its website. Google is nosy and wants people to know what files you’ve been looking at. Azure wants people to think more with its new knowledge center. Amazon Web Services: Getting Excited for re:Invent Jeff Barr shares how AWS helped to make Prime Day a reality for its customers. Congratulations to the Amazon Ops and Dev teams for this amazing feat. AWS Global Accelerator announces the ability to override destination ports used to route traffic to an application endpoint. Pretty neat! AWS is launching AWS Distro for Open Telemetry in preview. We’re excited to see what this builds out to become. AWS launches fully managed publishing/subscribing messaging service enabling message delivery to a large number of subscribers. This is great and we already have use cases for this. Amazon introduces the AWS Load Balancer Controller to simplify operations and save costs — a huge win for anyone using EKS today. AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas. Sounds good unless you’re trying to make smaller CloudFormation templates. Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Confused GCP is introducing new Scale-in controls for Compute Engine, to prevent the autoscaler from reducing a managed instance group size too far. We’re a bit confused by the term “Scale-in.” GCP improves security and governance in PostgreSQL with Cloud SQL. Great for companies that are highly audited. Google updates Firebase with new emulator and data analysis tools. Really great stuff! Azure: Busy Building Services It Promised For JEDI Microsoft announces multiple new features for Azure VPN Gateway in public preview. Some of these are amazing! Azure introduces the Knowledge center to simplify access to pre-loaded sample data. That electrical smell is the Team’s synapses firing on this one. Azure has announced that it will establish its first cloud datacenter region in Taiwan. It feels a bit like they’re trying to sell this as a good idea. TCP Lightning Round Jonathan was on his game and took this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (15 points), Jonathan (nine points) and Ryan (five points). Other headlines mentioned: Amazon Redshift announces support for Lambda UDFs and enables tokenizationAmazon AppFlow supports importing custom dimensions and metrics from Google Analytics to Amazon S3AWS Shield now provides global and per-account event summaries to all AWS customersAmazon SNS now supports selecting the origination number when sending SMS messagesAWS App Mesh supports cross account sharing of ACM Private Certificate AuthorityAmazon RDS for Oracle supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Oracle Data Guard physical standby databaseAWS Step Functions now supports Amazon Athena service integrationAmazon Kendra now supports custom data sourcesAnnouncing two new on-demand digital courses for Game TechNew digital course: Advanced Testing Practices using AWS DevOps Tools Pause and Resume Workloads on I3, M5ad, and R5ad Instances with Amazon EC2 HibernationNow customize your Session Manager shell environment with configurable shell profiles