Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Google Cloud named a leader in the Forrester Wave for Public Cloud Development and Infrastructure Platforms - The report evaluated cloud providers’ infrastructure and application development capabilities—important considerations for enterprises turning to the cloud to support their business growth and drive innovation.

Postponing Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect - Google Cloud has decided to postpone Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect out of concern for the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and local communities.

Protect users in your apps with multi-factor authentication - Identity Platform now supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) with SMS in beta.

Not just for HTTP anymore: gRPC comes to Cloud Run - Cloud Run developers can use gRPC to serve requests.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Deploy Your Kubernetes Cluster Application Directly From GitLab CI to Google Kubernetes Engine - Setting GitLab CI/CD pipeline that uses a GitLab CI Runner to automate the deployment and configuration of GKE cluster.

Building Cloud-Native #GitOps on Google Cloud Platform - Description of what Gitops is all about and how to implement it on GKE with Cloud Build.

Configuring Google Cloud CDN with Terraform - Setting up Cloud CDN through Terraform.

Simplify routing with VPC Peering - VPC Peering can save you from VPN hell and let your networks privately communicate without sacrificing network isolation.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

GCP Cloud Run — Serverless Stateless Containers - Google cloud platform’s fully managed compute platform for stateless containers.

Cloud Run: Google Cloud Text to Speech API - Serving Intelligent APIs with Google Cloud Run.

Automating Cloud Storage Data Classification: DLP API and Cloud Function - Serverless system for detecting sensitive user data.

spannerz, a tool for Cloud Spanner - spannerz adds an HTTP handler to your binary to report query plans from Google Cloud Spanner clients. You can use spannerz as a standalone binary too.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Modernizing Twitter's ad engagement analytics platform - See how Twitter has modernized its ad engagement platform using Google Cloud to build data transformation pipelines to scale.

CI/CD and Change Management for Pipelines — Part 2 - Examples for extracting pipelines from CDF/CDAP and using GitHub as a repository for storing pipelines and related artifacts.

How to backup a BigQuery table (or dataset) to Google Cloud Storage and restore from it - Python scripts to backup data or restore from BigQuery table to Cloud Storage in AVRO format.

BigQuery from the command line - Basic commands for BigQuery CLI.

Advanced BigQuery queries with JavaScript and JSON - Some examples of how to parse JSON data in BigQuery.

Using BigQuery Execution Plans to Improve Query Performance - Explanation of BigQuery's execution plan.

How to Accurately Calculate Age in BigQuery - Queries to calculate age in BigQuery.

A Fast Approach to Building Pivot Table / Transpose Functionality into BigQuery - Overview of approaches to do pivoting/transposing table in BigQuery.

Processing 10TB of Wikipedia Page Views — Part 2 - Query samples for Wikipedia dataset.

Visualizing COVID-19 data with BigQuery and Data Studio - Exploring data about coronavirus and visualizing in Data Studio.

MLFlow on Google Cloud Platform - Deploying and running MLflow on Google Compute Engine and logging artifacts on Google Storage Bucket.

Various

Book: Hands-On Serverless Computing with Google Cloud: Build, deploy, and containerize apps using Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and cloud-native technologies

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #212 Data Management with Amy Krishnamohan.

Kubernetes Podcast - #95 etcd, with Xiang Li.

Google for Games Developer Summit - Online stream on March 23rd, 2020, there is Cloud track with several sessions.

Provision Google Cloud Platform GCP resources with Terraform

Releases

AppEngine Standard Java - Updated Java SDK to version 1.9.79.

Google Cloud Armor - Custom rules language, pre-configured WAF rules, and geography-based access controls are now in General Availability.

BigTable - You can now create a production Cloud Bigtable instance that has one or two nodes per cluster. The Cloud Bigtable Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been updated.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.10.0-airflow-1.10.1, composer-1.10.0-airflow-1.10.2, composer-1.10.0-airflow-1.10.3 and composer-1.10.0-airflow-1.10.6. Detailed logging has been added to the Composer Agent, indicating the current stage of environment creation and giving specific error messages if the operation fails. Fixed an issue where Airflow database connection errors did not propagate correctly.

Config Connector - miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements.

Container Registry - Artifact Registry, the evolution of Container Registry, is now available in beta.

Dataproc - Added the following flag to the gcloud dataproc clusters update command: --num-secondary-workers. The following flag to gcloud dataproc clusters update has been deprecated: --num-preemptible-workers See the related change, above, for the new flag to use in place of this deprecated flag. Added a dataproc:job.history.to-gcs.enabled cluster property that allows persisting MapReduce and Spark history files to the Dataproc temp bucket (default: true for image versions 1.5+). Added support for n2-, c2-, e2-, n2d-, and m2- machine types when using Auto Zone Placement. Added a mapreduce.jobhistory.always-scan-user-dir cluster property that enables the MapReduce job history server to read the history files (recommended when writing history files to Cloud Storage). Customers can now enable the Cloud Profiler when submitting a Dataproc job by setting the cloud.profiler.enable property. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.2.93-debian9, 1.3.53-debian9, 1.4.24-debian9, 1.5.0-RC9-debian10, 1.3.53-ubuntu18, 1.4.24-ubuntu18, and 1.5.0-RC9-ubuntu18. Image 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 Upgraded HBase to 1.3.6. Image 1.4, 1.5 preview Added ARROW_PRE_0_15_IPC_FORMAT=1 for spark-env for pyarrow upgrade from 0.13 to 0.15. Image 1.5 preview Preinstalled additional Python packages and Jupyter[Lab] extensions to align Jupyter notebook environment with AI Platforms Notebooks when Jupyter optional component is enabled. Normalized custom image URLs to a full URL, for example: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/foo-project/global/images/foo-image. Cluster list methods now return results in lexical order. Image 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 preview Fixed YARN container log links in Component Gateway. Announcing the General Availability (GA) release of Dataproc minimum CPU platform.

Cloud Data Loss Prevention - Added support for streaming data from external sources for inspection using hybrid jobs and job triggers.

IAM - Forwarding rule attributes for Cloud IAM Conditions are now generally available.

KMS - Importing keys into Cloud KMS software keys is generally available (GA).

Google Kubernetes Engine - GKE cluster versions have been updated as detailed in the following sections. Masters and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded: Rollouts are phased across multiple weeks, to ensure cluster and fleet stability. The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in master upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. No channel 1.14.10-gke.32 is now available. 1.15.9-gke.8. 1.15.9-gke.9. Workload Identity is now generally available in versions 1.14.10-gke.27 and above, 1.15.9-gke.22 and above, and 1.16.6-gke.12 and above. You can now use node auto-provisioning to create node pools with preemptible VMs from clusters running in the Regular release channel. Enabling TPUs on existing clusters is now in Beta. GKE cluster versions have been updated as detailed in the following sections. The default version for new clusters is now 1.14.10-gke.24. Masters and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded: Rollouts are phased across multiple weeks, to ensure cluster and fleet stability. The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in master upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. No channel 1.14.10-gke.30 is now available. The following version is no longer available to create a new cluster: 1.13.12-gke.30. The issue reported February 14 with private clusters with VPC peering reuse enabled has been resolved.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - 1.16.6-gke.18 is now available in the Rapid release channel. 1.16.6-gke.13 is now available in the Rapid release channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - 1.15.9-gke.22 is now available in the Regular release channel. You can now use node auto-provisioning to create node pools with preemptible VMs from clusters running in the Regular release channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - 1.14.10-gke.24 is now available in the Stable release channel.

Load Balancing - To help you get started quickly, added two new examples for external HTTP(S) Load Balancing: Setting up a simple external HTTP load balancer Setting up a simple external HTTPS load balancer. Health check logging is now available in Beta. Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing now supports configurable idle timeouts. Cloud IAM Conditions now supports forwarding rule attributes.

Cloud Logging - Incoming log entries must have timestamps that don't exceed the logs retention periods in the past, and that don't exceed 24 hours in the future.

Cloud Memorystore - Added new Memorystore for Redis region: Salt Lake City (us-west3).

AutoML Natural Language - AutoML Natural Language now supports TIFF files as training data and input for predictions. AutoML Natural Language now supports classification and sentiment analysis in 20 languages.

Cloud Natural Language API - The Natural Language API now supports additional languages for sentiment analysis.

Cloud Spanner - The open-source C++ client library for Cloud Spanner is now available.

Cloud SQL - Cloud SQL now supports read replicas in a different region than that of the primary instance, providing additional protection against regional outages and improving read performance by making replicas available closer to your application.

VPC Service Controls - Beta stage support for the following integrations: AutoML Natural Language AutoML Tables AutoML Translation AutoML Video Intelligence AutoML Vision Artifact Registry.

Network Intelligence Center - Connectivity Tests and the Network Management API are now Generally Available.

AI Platform Training - Runtime versions 1.2 through 1.9 are no longer available for training.