On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter is spending the next 12 hours in a rejuvenation chamber like a regular villain straight out of a James Bond film.   

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.

This week’s highlights

• Amazon is on a mission to replace humans so we can go on holiday permanently. 
• Google is a bit early with the April Fools’ joke.
• Azure is, much to our surprise, ahead of everyone else for once.

Amazon Web Services: Battle Bots

• Amazon announces Alexa Conversations is now generally available for voice app development. We’re still a bit disappointed in her voice — it would be nice to hear something a bit more natural.   
• Amazon launches computer vision service to detect defects in manufactured products. Soon we’ll just be sitting around eating bon bons — we can’t wait!
• AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region now open to all, with three availability zones and more services. We think this is a reaction to the huge cloud growth in Japan. 
• AWS DeepRacer League’s 2021 season launches with new Open and Pro divisions. Apparently it’s gone virtual and is being dominated by experts.

Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Jealous

• Google introduces GKE Autopilot, a revolutionary mode of operations for managed Kubernetes. Autopilot makes it sound like an Oracle product. 
• Google announces the Risk Protection Program to enhance trust in cloud ecosystems. Google wants you to pay insurance in case its cloud goes down… 
• Google extends BigQuery BI engine for faster insights across popular BI tools. Pretty cool! 
• New enhancements for Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog including Terraform support. This is pretty good for internal teams managing private catalogs.  

Azure: Killing It

• Microsoft has announced a trio of