177: The Cloud Pod Hopes That Amazon Knows the Three Laws of iRobots

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets judicial on the Microsoft-Unity partnership. Plus: Amazon acquires iRobot, BigQuery boasts Zero-ETL for Bigtable data, and Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is in public preview.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, 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 iRobot signs an agreement with Amazon for its acquisition. To what end remains known to Amazon and Amazon alone. Google offers a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery. Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now in public preview. Top Quotes   “Almost all of Amazon’s big acquisitions have always been about something indirect. The Whole Foods acquisition was really about the logistics supply chain behind the scenes of moving that around — they kept the brand … and they have the same footprint for stores … but now they have a lot more infrastructure for AmazonFresh. And I suspect for iRobot it’s the same thing.” “This is super handy for huge datasets where you want to track trends over a long time. It’s always really difficult and you always end up compromising somewhere — by not loading or querying your full dataset, because you can’t get it from A to B, or trying to run the query against two separate data sets and combining the results. So this is a nice thing to have for those users who have data across these multiple places.” AWS: We, Robots Those who hate working in Amazon warehouses might not have to have anything to complain about anymore, as Amazon agrees to acquire iRobot. If you need to get up to speed with Graviton, you’ve now got Graviton Fast Start, which helps move workloads over to AWS. ️ VMware’s interesting cloud workload protection feels like a continued diversification away from virtualization as your main revenue stream. ☁️ CloudWatch Evidently, Amazon’s second product to help with feature flagging, adds support for creating target customer segments for feature launches and experiments. Neat!