Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Announcing Vertex Pipelines general availability - Scalably run ML pipelines built with Kubeflow Pipelines or TFX without worrying about spinning up infrastructure.

Announcing Spot Pods for GKE Autopilot—save on fault tolerant workloads - You can save on GKE Autopilot workloads that tolerate interruptions with new Spot Pods.

Enabling SRE best practices: new contextual traces in Cloud Logging - Developers can now view trace information for applications directly in Google Cloud Logging for faster debugging.

JOIN 2021: Sharing our product vision with the Looker community - JOIN is Looker’s annual user conference, and this blog welcomes everyone to the event and gives a sneak peak into the product capabilities and features we will be announcing during the product keynote.

Going beyond the dashboard paradigm with Looker Components - With Looker Components, we hope to introduce a third way to embed data that’s easier to build than a fully-custom front-end on Looker’s API, but offers more flexibility than a monolithic iframe embedded dashboard. And the way we plan to do this is by identifying and exposing reusable patterns in our dashboards themselves.

What’s new at Firebase Summit 2021 - News from Firebase summit.

Announcing a Firestore Connector for Apache Beam and Cloud Dataflow - Google Cloud announces a Firestore connector for Apache Beam, making data processing easier than ever for Firestore users.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Modernizing compliance: Introducing Risk and Compliance as Code - The RCaC solution stack enables compliance and security control automation through a combination of Google Cloud Products, Blueprints, Partner Integrations, workshops and services to simplify and accelerate time to value.

Gitlab CI/CD to deploy applications on GKE using shared runner - A demonstration on how to create a Gitlab CI/CD pipeline that uses a Gitlab Runner to build and push images to GCR and deploy applications on GKE.

Deploy applications to GKE using Google Cloud Deploy - An example of using Google Cloud Deploy.

Google Cloud Network Service Tiers: An overview - With Network Service Tiers, Google Cloud is the first major public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network. Two tiers are available: Premium Tier and Standard Tier. It's important to choose the tier that best meets your needs, and this decision tree can help you decide which tier is right for you.

Secure Software Supply Chain (S3C) in Serverless world - Binary Authorization with Cloud Run.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Automate your pre-release testing with the App Distribution REST API - WIth Firebase App Distribution REST API you can build custom logic into your team's tools and services to add and remove testers, upload new app binaries, distribute your releases, update release notes, deleting releases, and more.

Avoiding GCF anti-patterns part 4: How to handle Promises correctly in your Node.js Cloud Function - Fourth post in a series on how to avoid anti-patterns in Google Cloud Functions as seen by the Support team. This post explores how to verify you are handling promises correctly in Nodejs to avoid saving undefined or cached data in your database.

How StretchMinder uses Firebase - An overview of building a mobile app on Firebase.

How 500.000 people got a COVID-19 vaccine appointment - A story of how a platform for Covid 19 testing in Germany was developed.

Serverless on GCP with Cloud Run - An overview of Cloud Run, a platform built on top of Knative, ideal for both serving and eventing architectures.

Segment analytics with Firebase AB testing - Using non-documented user properties ot segment events in Firebase AB test variants you can compare AB test data in more detail.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Using Firestore and Apache Beam for data processing - Google Cloud announced a Firestore connector for Apache Beam. What is it, and how can you use it with your data pipelines?

Using Google Cloud Vision API from within a Data Fusion Pipeline - This blogs shows how to connect Data Fusion Pipelines to the Vision Rest API using OAuth.

Going beyond BI with the Looker Marketplace - This post explores how the Looker marketplace acts as an inspiration for developers to build content for the Looker marketplace.

Bring governance and trust to everyone with Looker’s universal semantic model - Looker’s semantic modeling layer works across all experiences and standardizes common metrics and definitions for business users.

How Google Cloud BigQuery enables big DevOps at JFrog - Learn how BigQuery and Data Studio powers operational analytics on the JFrog DevOps Platform.

Building a Data Warehouse on Google Cloud Platform That Scales With the Business - A story of how Policygenius built their Data Warehouse in Google Cloud.

Solving business problems with data - Learn how to understand your customer journey, unlock value from first-party data, and optimize existing cloud infrastructure with Looker solutions.

Getting Started with BigQuery Scripting - Demystifying this powerful but potentially difficult to grasp aspect of BigQuery functionality, one simple step at a time.

Scale your data science workflows with the Vertex AI Workbench notebook executor - Learn how to configure and launch notebook executions with Vertex AI Workbench.

Creating a Machine Learning Model with SQL - Build an ML model using SQL on Google Big Query.

Predict hospital readmission rates with Google Cloud Platform - Examine real-world use cases for predicting 7-day hospital readmission rates utilizing FHIR data stored in BigQuery, along with BigQuery ML, Looker, and Cloud Functions.

Developing and Deploying a Machine Learning Model on Vertex AI using Python - Write training pipelines that will make your MLOps team happy.

How to build an MLOps pipeline for hyperparameter tuning in Vertex AI - Best practices to set up your model and orchestrator for hyperparameter tuning.

Various

Update on Google Cloud’s work with the U.S. Government - A post from Google Cloud CEO.

Surfboard payment app delivers next-generation checkout experiences for merchants of any size - Surfboard Payments provides micro merchants everywhere an accessible, secure solution to start selling in minutes.

A learning journey for members transitioning out of the military - This August, Google Cloud sponsored 50 service members on a journey toward achieving the Associate Cloud Engineer certification.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #284 State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith.

Security Podcast - #42 EP42 Missing Diversity Hurts Your Security.

Releases

Access Approval - v1. Access Approval supports Organization Policy Service in Preview stage.

AppEngine Standard - Builds are now handled by regional Cloud Build pools within the selected App Engine region.

Cloud Asset Inventory - The following resource types are now publicly available through the Export APIs (ExportAssets and BatchGetAssetsHistory) and the Feed API: Cloud Resource Manager Tags cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com/TagKey cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com/TagValue Cloud OS Config osconfig.googleapis.com/VulnerabilityReport. The following resource types are now publicly available through the resource search API (SearchAllResources) and policy search API (SearchAllIamPolicies): Metastore metastore.googleapis.com/Service metastore.googleapis.com/MetadataImport metastore.googleapis.com/Backup. The following resource types are now publicly available through the Export APIs (ExportAssets and BatchGetAssetsHistory) and the Feed API: Metastore metastore.googleapis.com/Service metastore.googleapis.com/MetadataImport metastore.googleapis.com/Backup. The following resource types are now publicly available through the resource search API (SearchAllResources) and policy search API (SearchAllIamPolicies): Monitoring monitoring.googleapis.com/AlertPolicy. The following resource types are now publicly available through the resource search API (SearchAllResources) and policy search API (SearchAllIamPolicies): Service Management servicemanagement.googleapis.com/ManagedService Certificate Authority Service privateca.googleapis.com/CaPool privateca.googleapis.com/CertificateAuthority privateca.googleapis.com/CertificateRevocationList privateca.googleapis.com/CertificateTemplate.

BigQuery - BigQuery now supports authorized datasets (General Availability). The following scripting statements have been added to Google Standard SQL for BigQuery: CASE, LABELS, REPEAT, FOR...IN . The following INFORMATION_SCHEMA views now support a DDL column: ROUTINES, SCHEMATA, TABLES.

Billing - Starting in November 2021, if you have committed use discounts (CUDs), Google Cloud Billing calculates the attribution for your fees and credits every hour, to help you track costs faster and more accurately.

Compute Engine - You can now access vulnerability report data, available through the OS Config API service, from Cloud Asset Inventory. Generally available: You can now use the gcloud command-line and the OS Config API to get inventory and vulnerability report data for your VMs in a specific zone. If you use local SSDs with sync-heavy workloads, you will now more consistently reach write IOPS limits and experience lower latency, without having to disable cache flushing. You can now save a copy of a chart from the Observability tab on Compute Engine's VM instance details page to one of your custom dashboards.

Config Connector - Config Connector 1.67.0 is now available. Added support for PrivateCACertificateTemplate resource. Added support for ConfigControllerInstance (Alpha) resource. Added fields spec.nodeConfig.guestAccelerator[].gpuPartitionSize and spec.workloadIdentityConfig.workloadPool to ContainerCluster resource. Added field spec.nodeConfig.guestAccelerator[].gpuPartitionSize to ContainerNodePool resource. Deprecated spec.workloadIdentityConfig.identityNamespace (field is also no longer required), spec.masterAuth and status.instanceGroupUrls in ContainerCluster resource. Fixed the issue that DataflowJob was repeatedly updating if spec.enableStreamingEngine was set to true. Fixed the issues in config-connector bulk-export and the exported IAMCustomRole resources can now be imported into Config Connector.

Deep Learning Containers - M85 Release Regular package refreshment and bug fixes.

Deep Learning VM - M85 Release CUDA 11.3 Debian-10 image is available.

Cloud Networking Products - The type of the vmInstanceId field in Cloud DNS's Stackdriver Logs has been changed from a number to a string.

Document AI - We have lowered the price for many processors.

Cloud Firestore - Firebase App Check now supports the Firestore iOS and Android SDKs. The Firestore Unity and C++ SDKs are now supported at the General Availability release level. Dartpad, Flutter's online editor, now supports Firestore.

Google Kubernetes Engine - The release on September 17, 2021 (2021-R29) fixed CVEs in the Compute Engine PD CSI driver for the cluster minor version 1.18. Legacy networks that contain GKE clusters can be converted to VPC networks, if the required control plane and node pool upgrades are performed. For GKE Autopilot clusters, Spot Pods are now available in Preview.

Cloud Memorystore - Released the Read Replicas (Preview) feature for Memorystore for Redis.

Cloud Monitoring - You can now view the project-scoped log entries for all projects in a metrics scope on a custom dashboard. The API to manage the metrics scope of a Google Cloud project is now Generally Available. You can now save a copy of a chart from the Observability tab on Compute Engine's VM instance details page to one of your custom dashboards.

Cloud Run - Cloud Run support for referencing Secret Manager Secrets is now at general availability (GA).

SAP Solutions - Backint agent for SAP HANA StorageException issue fixed Google Cloud released version 1.0.13 of the Backint agent for SAP HANA, which fixes an issue that could cause a backup that is stored in Cloud Storage to be unusable if a StorageException error occurred during the backup process. Backint agent for SAP HANA version 1.0.13 Version 1.0.13 of the Google Cloud Backint agent for SAP HANA is now available.

Cloud Speech-to-Text - Speech-to-Text has launched two new medical speech models, which are tailored for recognition of words that are common in medical settings.

Vertex AI - Vertex AI Pipelines is generally available (GA).

VMware Engine - VMware Engine nodes are now available in the following additional zone: Frankfurt, Germany: europe-west3-2.

Virtual Private Cloud - Private Service Connect endpoints used to access a managed service are now automatically registered with Service Directory. Converting a single-region legacy network to a custom mode VPC network is now available in Preview.