Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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New region, new Compute Engine machine types based on AMD CPUs and more big and small announcements and releases.   

News

Here to serve Korea’s businesses with a new GCP region in Seoul - New GCP region in Seoul is officially open for business.

New Application Manager brings GitOps to Google Kubernetes Engine - Learn how the Application Manager add-on for GKE can help you simplify the lifecycle of your Kubernetes applications.

New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta - N2D VMs are the first AMD-based instances on Google Cloud.

Your ML workloads cheaper and faster with the latest GPUs - NVIDIA T4s, P100s, V100s can reduce costs and increase throughput compared to K80s.

Now generally available: Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AD) - Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is now generally available.

Google Cloud acquires Cornerstone Technology to help you migrate your mainframe - Through the use of automated processes, Cornerstone’s tools can break down your Cobol, PL/1, or Assembler programs into services and then make them cloud native, such as within a managed, containerized environment.

Introducing the Stackdriver Cloud Monitoring dashboards API - Stackdriver Cloud Monitoring from Google offers easy-to-use dashboards for tracking metrics over time. The new API lets you reuse dashboards across workspaces.

Your cloud, your infrastructure: Announcing Anthos Ready Storage - "Anthos Ready" qualification recognizes partner solutions that have met a core set of requirements to run optimally with Anthos running on-premises.

New Dialogflow Mega Agent for Contact Center AI increases intents by 10 times to 20,000 - Updates to Contact Center AI (CCAI) include increasing intents 15 times to 30,000.

Announcing the Firebase Crashlytics SDK Beta! - With the Firebase Crashlytics SDK, you can remove all Fabric dependencies, such as references to Fabric’s APIs in your code, giving you a much cleaner codebase.

Snowflake announces general availability on Google Cloud - Snowflake is now available in the us-central1 (Iowa) and europe-west4 (Netherlands) regions with additional regions coming later this year.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Making your monolith more reliable - As microservices grow, monoliths still exist for enterprises. Here’s how to apply SRE principles to those single-tiered software apps.

Securely Access AWS from GKE - Using Workload Identity on Google Kubernetes Engine to allow access from AWS.

Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — Migration Process - Miniseries about migrating a Monolith application to Google Kubernetes Engine.

New ground — What about optimizing the size of machines? - Using Recommender API to get information about resizing Compute Engine instances.

The Truth about VPC Security Controls - Overview of VPC Security Controls

Accessing Secret Manager from Terraform - This post explores how to access Secret Manager secrets from Terraform.

Managing Secret Manager with Terraform - This post explores how to manage Secret Manager secrets with Terraform.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

MySQL Adventures: CPU Cores and IOPS on GCE - How the number of cores on Google Compute Engine affects database performance.

Easy GSuites Domain-Wide Delegation (DwD) in Java - Simple wrapper in Java to Perform G Suite Domain-Wide Delegation of Authority.

Importing SHA hashed password into Firebase and Identity Platform - Troubles with hashed passwords and salts when migrating to the Cloud Identity Platform.

Deploying WSO2 API Microgateway in Serverless Mode Using Knative - The article describes the deploying of WSO2 API Microgateway (open-source lightweight message processor for APIs) using Knative.

Knative cli with Cloud Run (managed) - A very limited hack to use Knative CLI cli to do basic operations on Cloud Run (managed)

Pre-Installed Daemons on Google Compute Engine - A brief article explaining which Google's daemons are running on Google Compute Engine instances.

Stackdriver Push to Splunk - How to configure Stackdriver to push messages to Splunk via PubSub push. 100% serverless managed services configuration.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Reddit AmItheAsshole is nicer to women than to men — a SQL proof? - Analyzing Reddit posts with BigQuery and visualizing in Data Studio.

Bring us to red alert! - Stackdriver Alerting on policy changes to BigQuery Datasets

Firebase Retention Cohort Query on BigQuery - How to analyze the retention cohort of Firebase users in BigQuery.

BigQuery - BigQuery in a nutshell

BigQuery Cost Separation Across Business Units - The article describes how to use BigQuery in one organization but in different GCP projects.

Jupyter Notebook on Google Compute Engine with HTTPS - Setting up Jupyter to run on Google Compute Engine and be accessed via HTTPS.

Apache Druid Production Setup in Google Cloud Platform with Dataproc cluster — Part 1 - Setting up Apache Druid (a real-time analytics database designed for fast slice-and-dice analytics (“OLAP” queries) on large data sets).

How Spotify ran the largest Google Dataflow job ever for Wrapped 2019 - Spotify used Cloud Bigtable with Cloud Dataflow to lower costs of running one of its' biggest jobs.

Explaining model predictions on structured data - A conceptual overview and technical deep dive into how XAI works on tabular data.

Document Understanding AI — Google Cloud Explained - Using Cloud Vision API and AutoML to extract desired entities from PDF files.

Serving GPT-2 in Google Cloud Platform - Migrating Machine Learning workloads to GCP.

What I learned about deploying Machine Learning application - A tutorial on building custom ML training workflow using Google Cloud Platform.

Various

Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Certification — My personal road map and thoughts in 2020 - Sharing experience, preparation tips and thoughts about Data Engineer certification.

SaaS Cloud Migration: Sticker Price - Description of migration experience from AWS to GCP.

Refinitiv uses Google Cloud to revolutionise delivery of huge datasets - Financial data giant Refinitiv is using Cloud Platform to store historical data and allows its' customers to access data there ( rather than having it shipped to them on hard disks).

Thomas Kurian in his first year as CEO of Google Cloud - Thoughts from Google Cloud CEO.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #208 Python with Katie McLaughlin

Kubernetes Podcast - #91 eBPF and Falco, with Leonardo Di Donato

Fuel Insights with a GCP Enterprise Data Warehouse - Marc Firth, Jellyfish

Our Journey into Google Cloud Platform and Data Science - Ben Powis, MandM Direct

Releases

BI Engine - BigQuery BI Engine is now GA. Added support for custom queries and views from Data Studio. Increased reservation size to 100 GB.

BigQuery - Support for tables partitioned on an integer column is now GA.

BigQuery Transfer - Support for Amazon Redshift data warehouse migrations to BigQuery is now generally available.

Config Connector - Added support for ComputeNetworkEndpointGroup resource. Added support for DNSPolicy resource.

Dialogflow - GA (general availability) launch of versions and environments. GA (general availability) launch of agent validation. You can now update fulfillment settings with the API.

GKE on Prem - GKE on-prem version 1.2.2-gke.2 is now available. Improved gkectl check-config to validate any valid Google Cloud service accounts regardless of whether an IAM role is set. You need to use vSphere provider version 1.15 when using Terraform to create the admin workstation. Skip the preflight check when resuming cluster creation/upgrade. Resolved a known issue of cluster upgrade when using a vSAN datastore associated with a GKE on-prem version before 1.2. Resolved the following warning when uploading an OS image with the enableMPTSupport configuration flag set. Fixed the BigQuery API service name for the preflight check service requirements validation. Fixed the preflight check to correctly validate the default resource pool in the case where the resourcepool field in the GKE on-prem configuration file is empty. Fixed a comment about the workernode.replicas field in the GKE on-prem configuration file to say that the minimum number of worker nodes is three. Fixed gktctl prepare to skip checking the data disk. Fixed gktctl check-config so that it cleans up F5 BIG-IP resources on exit.

IAM - A version 1 Cloud IAM policy can now include conditional role bindings. You can now learn about Cloud IAM audit logging for service accounts and see examples of audit logs for service accounts.

KMS - You can now import key material into Cloud KMS software keys.

Google Kubernetes Engine - Starting February 24, 2020, GKE will gradually enable Node Auto Upgrade on all nodepools running on version 1.10.x and older to ensure reliability and supportability of these clusters. GKE cluster versions have been updated as detailed in the following sections. Rollouts are phased across multiple weeks, to ensure cluster and fleet stability. No channelv.1.13.x 1.13.12-gke.30 v.1.14.x 1.14.10-gke.24 v.1.15.x 1.15.9-gke.9 Node image for Container-Optimized OS updated to cos-77-12371-141-0. The --node-locations flag is now generally available.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - 1.16.5-gke.2 is now available in the Rapid release channel. Node image for Container-Optimized OS updated to cos-77-12371-141-0.

Load Balancing - For Internal TCP/UDP Load Balancing, load balancing to multiple NICs on a single backend VM instance is now available in General Availability. Global access for Internal TCP/UDP Load Balancing is now available in General Availability.

Stackdriver Logging - BETA: You can now configure the retention periods of your logs data.

Managed Microsoft AD - Managed Service for Microsoft AD General Availability Added support for deploying domain controllers from the following regions: asia-east2 asia-northeast1 asia-northeast2 asia-south1 australia-southeast1 europe-west2 europe-west3 europe-west6 northamerica-northeast1 southamerica-east1 Learn about the full list of supported regions. Trust status is stale When the trust between a Managed Microsoft AD domain and an on-premises Active Directory domain is broken, the status in the Cloud Console may not be correctly updated.

Stackdriver Monitoring - Starting in version 6.0.0, the Stackdriver Monitoring agent is available for the Ubuntu 19.10 ("Eoan Ermine") distribution. Stackdriver Monitoring agent version 6.0.0 is now available for the Debian 9 distribution.

Cloud SQL SQL Server - Cloud SQL for SQL Server now is generally available.

Stackdriver - Stackdriver Monitoring agent version 6.0.0 is now available for all Debian distributions. BETA: You can now configure the retention periods of your logs data.

Stackdriver Trace - Integration of Stackdriver Trace with Virtual Private Cloud Service Controls is now generally available. Beta release: Export of Stackdriver Trace data to BigQuery.

Anthos - Anthos 1.2.2 is now available.

Anthos - Multicluster Management - Connect is Generally Available. Promoted gcloud container hub memberships command group to GA. Deprecated gcloud {alpha, beta} container memberships command group.