Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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As COVID-19 is affecting the whole world, life in the Cloud doesn't stop. New Game Servers, Memcached on Cloud Memorystore as well as many releases. 

News

Simplified global game management: Introducing Game Servers - Google Cloud Game Servers is a managed service offering of the open-source Agones that simplifies managing global multi-cluster game server fleets.

A note to our customers: How we’re supporting you through COVID-19 - As COVID-19 progresses, many customers face mounting pressure to keep their organizations up and running, and rely on us to help them stay connected and productive. This post shares our business continuity plans from both a technical and customer support perspective.

Everything we announced at the Google for Games Developer Summit this year - List of announcements Google Game Developer Summit related to Firebase.

Loading geospatial data into BigQuery just got easier with FME - Load geospatial data into BigQuery using FME to load, transform, and ingest GIS file types for data analytics.

Cloud Memorystore for Memcached - Memorystore for Memcached is a fully managed Memcached service for Google Cloud. Applications running on Google Cloud can achieve extreme performance by leveraging the highly scalable, available, secure Memcached service without the burden of managing complex Memcached deployments.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Firewalling your Managed Services on Google Cloud - Security deep dive - Using VPC Service Controls to create perimeter for GCP projects and services.

Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — Customer Story - Real-world use case of migrating from a monolith to microservices, based on Google Kubernetes Engine.

Minimize your VPN usage — Zero trust security - Explanation of how zero trust security can reduce the load on your VPN using Google Beyondcorp, Identity Aware Proxy and VPC Service Controls.

Google recommended security IAM practice on GKE - Setting up and getting started using Workload Identity on Google Kubernetes Engine.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Secret Manager: Improve Cloud Run security without changing the code - Using Secret Manager with Cloud Run environmental variables.

How to use GitHub Actions to deploy your Quarkus app to GCP - Deploying Cloud Run application via GitHub Actions.

How to Debug an Unresponsive app on GCP - The article explains how to investigate problems in a web app deployed on Google App Engine.

CLI utility: gcplogs

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Input source reading patterns in Google Cloud Dataflow (part 2) - Not so frequent source reading patters for Cloud Dataflow pipelines.

BigQuery + Cloud Functions: how to run your queries as soon as a new Google Analytics table is available - A step-by-step guide on how to make sure your tables, dashboards and data transfers are always up-to-date.

How to copy a BigQuery dataset from one region to another - CLI command to set up BigQuery Transfer Service to copy dataset from one region to another.

10 tips for self-service analytics with Google BigQuery and Tableau - Tips and tricks when visualizing data from BigQuery in Tableau.

Google Cloud Data Catalog Filesets: unlock it’s full potential - Enrich your Google Cloud Storage Filesets with useful statistics about your files.

How to Deploy your AutoML Model in a Cost-effective Way - Training Cloud AutoML Vision model and deploying it on Cloud Run.

Building a scalable online product recommender with Keras, Docker, GCP, and GKE - Process description when creating and deploying an online recommendation system on Google Cloud.

BigQuery Public Datasets: NYTimes COVID-19 dataset for USA

BigQuery Public Datasets: JHU Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases

Various

Google Professional Cloud Developer Certification preparation strategy - Overview of preparation for Cloud Developer certification with a list of topics to focus on.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #213 The Art of SLOs with Alex Bramley.

Kubernetes Podcast - #96 Kubernetes 1.18, with Jorge Alarcon.

Releases

Anthos Config Management - 1.3.0. Anthos Policy Controller is now Generally Available. Anthos Config Management now includes the generally-available version of Config Connector. Anthos Config Management now supports the use of a Personal Access Tokens for authentication against supported Git providers. Anthos Config Management now supports the use of an HTTP or HTTPS proxy to connect with your Git host.

Anthos - Anthos 1.3.0 is now available.

AppEngine Standard Python - Updated Python SDK to version 1.9.89.

BigQuery - BigQuery Column-level security is now available as a beta release.

BigQuery Transfer - BigQuery Data Transfer Service is now available in the Northern Virginia (us-east4) region and the Salt Lake City (us-west3) region. BigQuery Data Transfer Service now supports Google Merchant Center data transfers for pricing competitiveness.

CDN - Cloud CDN custom origins is available in General Availability.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer is now available in Sao Paulo (southamerica-east1).

Config Connector - Add "Deletion Defender" workload -- a pod whose job is to ensure that only resources meant to trigger a delete on the underlying API do so. Add support for structured metadata list for ComputeInstance and ComputeInstanceTemplate in the form of a spec.metadata field. Fixed label update issue on ContainerCluster (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/k8s-config-connector/issues/110). Bumped memory request and limit for the manager pod as resource usage has gone up and the original limit of 256 Mi was found to not be sufficient for large customers. Changed admission webhooks to return non-200 error codes when denying admission.

Dataproc - Added pagination support to Clusters List methods to provide functionality to the pageSize parameter, which is a part of the API. Added alphabetical sort order to Workflow Templates List methods. Dataproc clusters can now be created on the GKE platform by setting the GkeClusterConfig instead of the GceClusterConfig via the Beta API. Announcing the Beta release of Dataproc - Ranger Top-Level Component and Dataproc - Solr Top-Level Component. Announcing the General Availability (GA) release of Dataproc - Presto Top-Level Component. Announcing the General Availability (GA) release of Dataproc 1.5 images. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.2.94-debian9, 1.3.54-debian9, 1.4.25-debian9, 1.5.0-debian10, 1.3.54-ubuntu18, 1.4.25-ubuntu18, and 1.5.0-ubuntu18. Image 1.5 Upgraded the Cloud Storage connector to version 2.1.1. Images 1.2 and 1.4 Dataproc 1.4 will be the default image version after April 31, 2020. Images 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 Fixed HDFS UI in the Component Gateway on HA clusters. Fixed issue where Jupyter hangs when loading a directory containing many large files.

Dialogflow - The shutdown of the V1 API announced in November has been extended to May 31st, 2020,. The shutdown of 7 integrations announced in January is now extended to May 6th, 2020.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions now supports network settings at the General Availability release level. Cloud Functions now supports VPC Service Controls at the General Availability release level.

GKE on Prem - Anthos GKE on-prem 1.3.0-gke.16 is now available. A new installer helps you create and prepare the admin workstation. Support for vSAN datastore on your admin and user clusters. In bundled load balancing mode, GKE on-prem provides and manages the Seesaw load balancer. The Authentication Plugin for Anthos has been integrated into and replaced with the Google Cloud command-line interface, which improves the authentication process and provides the user consent flow through gcloud commands. The Cluster CA now signs the TLS certificates that the Kubelet API serves, and the TLS certificates are auto-rotated. vSphere credential rotation is enabled. gkectl automatically uses the proxy URL from config.yaml to configure the proxy on the admin workstation. Preview Feature: Introducing User cluster Nodepools. The metric kubelet_containers_per_pod_count is changed to a histogram metric. Fixed an issue in the vSphere storage plugin that prevented vSphere storage policies from working. Prometheus + Grafana: two graphs on the Machine dashboard don't work because of missing metrics: Disk Usage and Disk Available. All OOM events for containers trigger a SystemOOM event, even if they are container/pod OOM events. Affected versions: 1.3.0-gke.16 If you configured a proxy in the config.yaml and also used a bundle other than the full bundle (static IP | DHCP), you must append the --fast flag to run gkectl check-config. Running the 1.3 version of the gkectl diagnose command might fail if your clusters: Are older than Anthos GKE on-prem version 1.3.

Google Kubernetes Engine - GKE cluster versions have been updated as detailed in the following sections. The default version for new clusters is now 1.14.10-gke.27. 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 1.15.11-gke.1 is now available. 1.14.10-gke.17. 1.14.10-gke.21. 1.14.10-gke.22. 1.14.10-gke.24. 1.15.8-gke.3. 1.15.9-gke.12. You can no longer apply the labels of kubernetes.io or k8s.io to node pools.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - 1.16.8-gke.3 is now available in the Rapid release channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - 1.14.10-gke.27 is now available in the Stable release channel.

Cloud Life Sciences - Cloud Life Sciences is available in the following locations: us-west2 (Los Angeles, USA) (Single-region) northamerica-northeast1 (Montréal, Canada) (Single-region) europe-west4 (Netherlands) (Single-region) asia-southeast1 (Singapore) (Single-region) asia-northeast1 (Tokyo, Japan) (Single-region) us (United States) (Multi-region).

Managed Microsoft AD - GA pricing now in effect New pricing for Managed Microsoft AD is now in effect.

Cloud Memorystore - Released support for Redis version 5.0 (beta) on Memorystore for Redis.

Cloud Profiler - Integration of Stackdriver Profiler with Virtual Private Cloud Service Controls is now Generally Available.

Cloud Run - You can now restrict which regions are available to deploy Cloud Run (fully managed) services using an organization policy with a resource locations constraint.

Security Command Center - The Notifications API is now in general availability. The eventType field was removed from organizations.notificationConfigs.create in the v1 API.

Cloud SQL Postgres - PostgreSQL version 12 is now Beta. PostgreSQL version 10 is now generally available. Cloud SQL now supports 96-core machine types for MySQL, Postgres, and SQL Server instances.

Cloud Storage Transfer - Transfer Service for on-premises data is now generally available. Storage Transfer Service now offers Beta support for transfers from Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.

Cloud Talent Solution - As of March 27, 2020, Cloud Talent Solution Job Search v2 is no longer available.

Cloud Translation - The Cloud Translation Advanced API is migrating to a new quota system that eliminates the distinction between default and maximum limits.

AI Platform Prediction - AI Explanations now supports XRAI, a new feature attribution method for image data. AI Explanations provides an approximation error with your explanations results. AI Platform Prediction now supports the following regions for batch prediction, in addition to those that were already supported: us-west3 (Salt Lake City) europe-west2 (London) europe-west3 (Frankfurt) europe-west6 (Zurich) asia-south1 (Mumbai) asia-east2 (Hong Kong) asia-northeast1 (Tokyo) asia-northeast2 (Osaka) asia-northeast3 (Seoul) Note that asia-northeast1 was already available for online prediction.

Anthos GKE deployed on-prem - Anthos GKE on-prem 1.3.0-gke.16 is now available.

Dialogflow Enterprise - The shutdown of the V1 API announced in November has been extended to May 31st, 2020,. The shutdown of 7 integrations announced in January is now extended to May 6th, 2020.

AI Platform Training - AI Platform Training now supports the following regions, in addition to those that were already supported: us-west3 (Salt Lake City) europe-west2 (London) europe-west3 (Frankfurt) europe-west6 (Zurich) asia-south1 (Mumbai) asia-east2 (Hong Kong) asia-northeast1 (Tokyo) asia-northeast2 (Osaka) asia-northeast3 (Seoul) Out of these regions, the following support training with NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs: europe-west2 asia-south1 aisa-northeast1 asia-northeast3 See the full list of available regions and read about pricing for each region.