Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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Just a reminder that Google Cloud Next is around the corner and starts on July 14th.

News

New Compute Engine A2 VMs—first NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPUs in the cloud - Google Cloud’s new Accelerator-Optimized (A2) VM family is based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU, and designed for demanding HPC and ML workloads.

Enabling hybrid deployments with Cloud CDN and Load Balancing - Cloud CDN and HTTP(S) Load Balancing now let you pull content and reach services that are on-prem or in another cloud over Google’s network.

Ask questions to BigQuery and get instant answers through Data QnA - Data QnA, now in alpha availability, lets anyone ask questions of BigQuery data to get answers faster.

Introducing Active Assist: Reduce complexity, maximize your cloud ROI - Introducing Active Assist, a family of tools to help you easily optimize your Google Cloud environment.

Build your cloud skills at Next ‘20 OnAir: No-cost training opportunities - Every week of Next ‘20 OnAir we’re offering hands-on labs, talks by Google Cloud’s technical experts, and competitions to help you grow your cloud skills.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake for Anthos now generally available - HPE GreenLake for Anthos enables you to seamlessly build, run, and manage services on premises and in the cloud with our hybrid and multi-cloud platform.

Enhancing multi-cloud data governance on Google Cloud - Good data governance practices are essential for cloud computing. See how Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Collibra work for multi-cloud data governance.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Setting SLOs: observability using custom metrics - See how you can set service-level objectives (SLOs) for complex services for better cloud monitoring. Part of SRE tips series.

Setting SLOs: a step-by-step guide - See how to use SRE principles to keep customers happy with your service, using the right service-level objectives (SLOs).

Compute Engine explained: Choosing the right machine family and type - An overview of Google Compute Engine machine families and machine types.

View GCP User Role Assignments - A script to quickly and cleanly get the roles assigned to a user.

Using Cloud Asset Inventory feeds for dynamic configuration and policy enforcement - Using Pub/Sub notifications to monitor realtime changes in resource and policy changes in Cloud Asset inventory.

Mitigating Data Exfiltration Risks in GCP using VPC Service Controls ( Part-1 ) - The article covers the basics of VPC Service Controls and how it can be used to mitigate data exfiltration risks in the Google Cloud Platform.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Getting Started with Bigtable on GCP - An overview of Bigtable.

Google Cloud Platform Case Study: Automate COVID19 Monitoring - Using Cloud Functions and Cloud Scheduler to periodically retrieve data about COVID-19.

Quickly Deploy Your React App On Google’s App Engine - A quick guide to deploy your React.js app to Google’s App Engine.

Shell exec with Cloud Run - Executing shell commands in Cloud Run applications.

GCP Filestore — Almost all you need to know - An overview of Cloud Filestore.

Migrating from GKE to CloudRun - Migrating from GKE to Cloud Run to save costs.

Cloud-Native Microservices with Micronaut - Deploying Micronaut web application on Cloud Run.

Your gcloud command-line questions answered in printable cheat sheet - The new gcloud command-line cheat sheet lists common commands, workflows and functionality into a double-sided, downloadable PDF.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Apache Beam Pipeline for Cleaning Batch Data Using Cloud Dataflow and BigQuery - An overview of basic Beam concepts with an example of a simple pipeline.

A Data Engineering Perspective on Go vs. Python (Part 2 — Dataflow) - A comparison of Python and Go Beam SDK with benchmarks.

Standardize Salesforce Phone Data using Cloud Dataprep by Trifacta - Cleaning and updating data in Saleforce using Cloud Dataprep.

Breaking up very large BigQuery jobs - Using integer range partitions with BigQuery scripting when joining large number of rows.

Loops in BigQuery - Learn how to use BigQuery scripting to calculate Fibonacci numbers.

Trying out Data QnA on BigQuery and Google Sheets - Examples of BigQuery natural language queries get translated into SQL.

Connecting to the Google Public Covid-19 Datasets with BigQuery and DBeaver - How to use the Google BigQuery Public DataSet with BigQuery and Connecting it to DBeaver.

Creating a Covid-19 Dashboard with Google Open Dataset, BigQuery and DataStudio - A tutorial on how to create a dashboard in Data Studio for COVID-19 stats based on BigQuery public datasets.

Terraform support for AI Platform Notebooks - Notebooks API supports deployments through Terraform.

Stack Overflow in 2023: Predicting with ARIMA and BigQuery - Predicting the top Stack Overflow tags with ARIMA model in BigQuery.

AutoML Tables: end-to-end workflows on AI Platform Pipelines - New AutoML Tables features: improved Python SDK, support for explanations of online predictions, export models and serve from a container anywhere, and track model search progress and final model hyperparameters in Cloud Logging.

AI in practice: Identify defective components with AutoML in GCP - Implementing an AI system using GCP products.

Building Image Detection with Google Cloud AutoML - Building "snack classifier" with AutoML Vision.

Google AutoML Vision for Image Classification - Train a Custom Machine Learning Model to Classify Images, then Deploy it to the Cloud or on the Edge.

Various

Including everyone at Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir - Check out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) sessions at Google Cloud Next OnAir starting July 14. Learn about equity engineering, product inclusion, and more.

Building Bookshop: Stocking over 10M Books with Ingram - HFC worked with Bookshop.org and book distributor Ingram to launch a new destination for online book shopping that supports indie stores.

New research on how Google Cloud certifications are transforming careers and businesses - Third-party research we commissioned validates how certifications help individuals demonstrate cloud expertise and elevate their careers, and businesses transform in the cloud.

Introducing Qwiklabs Courses! - Qwiklabs is introducing Qwiklabs courses that combine educational videos, quizzes, and the hands-on labs.

The exam experience: Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect - Sharing exam experience and preparation tips for Cloud Architect Exam.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #226 Documentation in Developer Practices with Riona Macnamara.

Kubernetes Podcast - #111 Scalability, with Wojciech Tyczynski.

Hangout with Dan Sullivan, Google Cloud Study Guides Author, on July 9, 2020

Releases

AppEngine Flexible - Custom Runtimes - External HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now supported for App Engine via Serverless network endpoint groups.

AppEngine Standard - External HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now supported for App Engine via Serverless network endpoint groups. The Python 3.8 runtime for the App Engine standard environment is now generally available.

BigQuery - Updated version of Magnitude Simba ODBC driver.

Billing - The Cost Table report functionality has been updated to add a Table configuration interface that replaces the previous Group by and Label selectors.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.10.6-airflow-1.10.2, composer-1.10.6-airflow-1.10.3 and composer-1.10.6-airflow-1.10.6. Fixed an issue with Airflow 1.10.6 environments where task logs were not visible in the UI when DAG serialization was enabled.

Compute Engine - E2 machine types now offer up to 32 vCPUs.

Config Connector - Added support for SecretManagerSecret.

Dataproc - Added --temp-bucket flag to gcloud dataproc clusters create and gcloud dataproc workflow-templates set-managed-cluster to allow users to configure a Cloud Storage bucket that stores ephemeral cluster and jobs data, such as Spark and MapReduce history files. Extended Jupyter to support notebooks stored on VM persistent disk. Dataproc images now include the oauth2l command line tool. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.2.102-debian9, 1.3.62-debian9, 1.4.33-debian9, 1.3.62-debian10, 1.4.33-debian10, 1.5.8-debian10, 1.3.62-ubuntu18, 1.4.33-ubuntu18, 1.5.8-ubuntu18, 2.0.0-RC4-debian10, 2.0.0-RC4-ubuntu18. Images 1.3 - 1.5: Fixed HIVE-11920: ADD JAR failing with URL schemes other than file/ivy/hdfs. Fixed a race condition that could nondeterministically cause Hive-WebHCat to fail at startup when HBase is not enabled. Announcing the General Availability (GA) release of Dataproc Component Gateway, which provides secure access to web endpoints for Dataproc default and optional components.

Dialogflow - The Dialogflow Console has been upgraded with an improved Analytics page (Beta) that provides new metrics and data views.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions is now available in the following regions: us-west2 (Los Angeles) us-west4 southamerica-east1 (Sao Paulo) asia-northeast2 (Osaka) See Cloud Functions Locations for details. External HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now supported for Google Cloud Functions via Serverless network endpoint groups.

Load Balancing - External HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now supported for App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run services.

Managed Microsoft AD - The Managed Microsoft AD SLA has been published.

Cloud Monitoring - SLO monitoring for microservices is now Generally Available in the Cloud Console. Monitoring Query Language (MQL) is now Generally Available.

Cloud Run - External HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now supported for Cloud Run services via Serverless network endpoint groups.

Cloud SQL Postgres - Cloud SQL now supports point-in-time recovery (PITR) for PostgreSQL.

Traffic Director - Traffic Director now provides the option of automated Envoy deployment. Traffic Director now supports automated Envoy deployments for Google Compute Engine VMs in Beta.

Dialogflow Enterprise - The Dialogflow Console has been upgraded with an improved Analytics page (Beta) that provides new metrics and data views.

Service Mesh - 1.6.5-asm.1, 1.5.8-asm.0, and 1.4.10-asm.4 Fixes the security issue, ISTIO-SECURITY-2020-008, with the same fixes as Istio 1.6.5 and Istio 1.5.8.