Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Reimagining telecommunications at MWC 2023 - Google Cloud was busy at Mobile World Congress 2023, announcing new products, features and partnerships to help CSPs transform their networks.

Reimagining Radio Access Networks with Google Cloud - Running the RAN as software on Google Distributed Cloud Edge provides CSPs with a common and agile operating model from the network core to the edge.

Introducing Telecom Network Automation: Unlock 5G cloud-native automation with Google Cloud - Telecom Network Automation is a Google-managed, cloud version of Nephio, delivering carrier-grade intent automation via common automation templates.

Introducing Telecom Data Fabric: Unlock the value of your data

Introducing Telecom Subscriber Insights: Helping CSPs grow business with AI-driven digitization and personalization - Telecom Subscriber Insights helps CSPs accelerate subscriber growth with insights from a variety of data sources, in order to better engage customers.

Simplifying cloud-native network functions deployments with native Kubernetes networking and Network Function Optimizer - Network Function Optimizer provides multi-network support and a high-performance Kubernetes-native dataplane in GDC Edge and GKE environments.

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL goes global with sixteen new regions - AlloyDB for PostgreSQL is now available in 16 new regions across the globe, bringing the total to 22.

Snap partners with Google Cloud to upskill teams around the globe - Google Cloud training and certification, and business support services to enable Snap to scale global business strategy.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

How to improve your Kubernetes security posture with GKE Dataplane V2 network policies - Use GKE Dataplane V2, on Google Cloud, to improve the network security for your Kubernetes clusters.

Why you should migrate to network firewall policies from VPC Firewall rules - Google Cloud has released a guide on best practices to help you migrate firewall rules from VPC firewall rules to network firewall policies.

Cloud CISO Perspectives: February 2023 - This month, Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables looks at one of the most important issues facing the software industry: securing the software supply chain.

Learning more about FinOps on Google Cloud - A collection of useful resources to learn more about FinOps on Google Cloud and how to get started.

GKE Autopilot cost efficiency - This blog post tries to answer the question: Is GKE Autopilot more cost-effective than GKE Standard?

A gentle introduction to GKE private cluster deployment - Deploying GKE private cluster using Terraform and exposing an echo server.

Six practices for implementing Kubernetes on GCP - Recommendations for implementing and managing Kubernetes on GCP with GKE.

Okta Integration with Cloud Identity - This blog post explains setting up Octa as an Identity Provider for Cloud Identity.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

A developer’s guide to understanding carbon - Learn about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with your Google Cloud workloads, and how to measure and reduce this number.

Spring Cloud GCP 4.0 is out! Let’s upgrade the sample Bank of Anthos app. - Spring Cloud GCP 4.0 is now generally available. Read on to learn what it offers and experience a walkthrough of upgrading a project from 3.x to 4.x.

Developer research deep dive: Let’s build faster together - User Research International conducted research about how fast developers can perform common tasks in Google Cloud compared to the competition.

Node hosting on Google Cloud: a pillar of Web3 infrastructure - Organizations can avoid the challenges of deploying and managing Web3 infrastructure with Google Cloud’s fully managed Blockchain Node Engine.

Track your Cloud Monitoring uptime checks in the Google Cloud mobile app - Check your Google Cloud uptime on your mobile device.

Automated app deployment to Cloud Run using Google Cloud Deploy - This blog post explains how to create Delivery Pipeline to Cloud Run using Cloud Deploy.

How geospatial services can help improve financial outcomes, customer experiences, and operational efficiency - Impact calculator offers possibility to calculate the impact geospatial services can have on your business.

Centralised audit logs in Google Cloud, the new way: Log Analytics - Log Analytics just went GA! Let see how to use it to analyse, aggregate and transform data in your logs.

Kill Switch For Google Cloud Platform - Out-of-control cloud computing becomes very expensive very quickly . Here Kill Switch Comes in handy.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Built with BigQuery and Google AI: How Glean enhances enterprise search quality and relevance for teams - Elements of the Google Data Cloud including BigQuery, DataFlow, and Vertex AI are behind Glean’s personalized enterprise search platform.

Unlocking Retail Location Data with CARTO and BigQuery - Retail companies can easily visualize and analyze their geospatial data in BigQuery using the CARTO platform.

Shorten the path to insights with Aiven for Apache Kafka and Google BigQuery - Unify data from diverse sources and formats using Aiven Kafka's open source streaming. Analyze with BigQuery for swift, accurate insights.

Creating Parameterized Spark Jobs on Ephemeral DataProc Clusters - This guide aims to show you how to easily parameterize a Spark job on GCP DataProc and then run it on an ephemeral cluster.

Deploying Airbyte with Terraform on GCP - Create a reproducible codebase to deploy Airbyte in any GCP project with a single command.

Best Practices for Data Sharing On Analytics Hub - This blog post discusses a few considerations to have in mind when architecting data sharing on Analytics Huv,.

The Life Changing Magic of T̶i̶d̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶U̶p̶ Understanding BigQuery Table Usage: A J̶a̶p̶a̶n̶e̶s̶e̶ loveholidays Art of Decluttering and Organizing Data - Story about optimizing BigQuery resources.

Advanced Strategies for Partitioning and Clustering in BigQuery - BigQuery Partitioning vs Clustering: Which is Right for Your Data?

Practical BigQuery: Filling in missing data - Data comes in a vast range of shapes and sizes for Data Engineers, with common categories being structured data (such as a database table)….

Finetuning Flan-T5-Base and online deployment in Vertex AI - Learn how to finetune and deploy a Flan-T5-Base model using the SAMSum dataset (summary of conversations in English) in Vertex AI.

Your Turn PyTorch! - Using Vertex AI to train PyTorch model.

Various

Women’s History Month: Celebrating the success of women founders — STEM Minds - Learn how STEM Minds uses Google Cloud to help students improve math and science proficiency while unlocking next-level engineering and social skills.

Salk Institute leverages Google Cloud for brain research—and launches their transformation to the cloud - The Salk Institute launched a pilot program with Google Cloud to optimize the large-scale processing of single-cell epigenomics sequencing data.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #197 Cloud Native Security Con with Emily Fox.

Security Podcast - #110 Detection and Response in a High Velocity and High Complexity Environment.

Releases

AlloyDB - AlloyDB for PostgreSQL is available in the following regions: asia-east1 (Taiwan) asia-east2 (Hong Kong) asia-northeast2 (Osaka) asia-northeast3 (Seoul) asia-south1 (Mumbai) asia-southeast2 (Jakarta) australia-southeast1 (Sydney) australia-southeast2 (Melbourne) europe-central2 (Warsaw) europe-north1 (Finland) europe-west2 (London) europe-west6 (Zurich) us-east1 (South Carolina) us-east4 (Northern Virginia) us-west1 (Oregon) us-west3 (Salt Lake City) For more information, see AlloyDB Locations.

Anthos clusters on bare metal - 1.12. Release 1.12.8 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.12.8 is now available for download. Fixes: Updated Anthos Identity Service to better handle concurrent authentication webhook requests. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos clusters on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section. 1.14. Release 1.14.2 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.14.2 is now available for download. Fixes: Updated Anthos Identity Service to better handle concurrent authentication webhook requests. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos clusters on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

Anthos clusters on VMware - A new vulnerability (CVE-2022-4696) has been discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to a privilege escalation on the node.

AppEngine Flexible Java - The Java runtime versions 11 and 17 are now available in preview, and are built on modern and secure operating systems (Ubuntu 18 and 22).

AppEngine Flexible NodeJS - The Node.js 18 runtime is now available in preview, and is built on a modern and secure operating system (Ubuntu 22).

AppEngine Standard Python3 - The Python 3.11 runtime for App Engine standard environment is now generally available.

BigQuery ML - The multivariate time-series forecasting model ARIMA_PLUS_XREG is now available to on-demand users.

BigQuery - The WITH RECURSIVE clause is now generally available (GA). You can set default values on columns in your BigQuery tables.

Chronicle - Schedule Chronicle dashboard reports You can schedule the delivery of Chronicle dashboard reports over email for both the default dashboards and custom dashboards. Chronicle Feed Management enhanced the support for the Qualys VM log type to include Qualys VM Detections API. The following supported default parsers have changed.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer 2.1.8 and 1.20.8 release started on March 2, 2023. Cloud Composer 2.1.8 and 1.20.8 images are available: composer-2.1.8-airflow-2.4.3 (default) composer-2.1.8-airflow-2.3.4 composer-2.1.8-airflow-2.2.5 composer-1.20.8-airflow-1.10.15 composer-1.20.8-airflow-2.4.3 composer-1.20.8-airflow-2.3.4 composer-1.20.8-airflow-2.2.5.

Confidential VM - The service account attached to a Confidential Space workload VM now requires the confidentialcomputing.workloadUser role to generate an attestation token.

Compute Engine - Generally available: When creating a reservation, you can now include a compact placement policy to specify that VMs should be located as close to each other as possible to reduce network latency.

Data Fusion - Cloud Data Fusion version 6.8.1 is generally available (GA). Changes in Cloud Data Fusion 6.8.1: Cloud Data Fusion supports upgrades for real-time pipelines that have a Kafka Consumer Streaming source from version 6.8.0 to 6.8.1 after you upgrade your environment. Fixed in 6.8.1: Fixed an issue in instances with role-based access control where deployment and validations failed with read time out error after a short time. Cloud Data Fusion version 6.7.3 is generally available (GA). Fixed in 6.7.3: Fixed an issue that allowed reading secure keys in the system namespace with only the Data Fusion Viewer role (datafusion.viewer) or Instance Accessor role (datafusion.accessor).

Datastream - Terraform now supports Datastream private connectivity, connection profile, and stream resources.

Cloud Deploy - The ability to verify your deployment is now generally available.

Dialogflow - Dialogflow CX now provides a setting for choosing the voice for speech synthesis. The Dialogflow CX maximum number of flows per agent has been increased from 20 to 50. The Dialogflow CX audio input duration limit has been increased from one minute to two minutes.

Cloud Filestore - High Scale and Enterprise tier instances now support overlapping permissions (GA).

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions now supports the Python 3.11 runtime at the General Availability release level. Cloud Functions has added support for a new runtime, Ruby 3.2, at the Preview release level. New performance recommendations are supported for Cloud Functions, which analyze cold starts and suggest setting up minimum instances to improve function performance.

IAM - The IAM documentation has been reorganized.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2023-R06) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. A new vulnerability (CVE-2022-4696) has been discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to a privilege escalation on the node.

GKE - (2023-R06) Version updates The following control plane and node versions are now available: 1.21.14-gke.18100 1.22.17-gke.5400 1.23.16-gke.2500 1.24.10-gke.2300 The following control plane versions are no longer available: 1.23.13-gke.900 1.23.14-gke.401 1.24.8-gke.2000 1.24.9-gke.1500 Control planes and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded from version 1.24 to version 1.24.9-gke.3200 with this release.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2023-R06) Version updates Version 1.26.1-gke.1500 is now the default version in the Rapid channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2023-R06) Version updates The following versions are now available in the Regular channel: 1.22.17-gke.4000 1.23.16-gke.1100 1.25.6-gke.1000 The following versions are no longer available in the Regular channel: 1.22.17-gke.3100 1.23.16-gke.200 1.25.6-gke.200 Control planes and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled in the Regular channel will be upgraded from version 1.21 to version 1.22.17-gke.4000 with this release.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2023-R06) Version updates Version 1.24.9-gke.3200 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Cloud Logging - You can now use the gcloud CLI to do the following: Create a log bucket and upgrade that bucket to use Log Analytics. Log buckets in the following regions can now be upgraded to use Log Analytics: us-central1 us-west1 asia-south1 For more information, see Supported regions for Log Analytics.

Security Command Center - The legacy version of the Findings tab in the Security Command Center dashboard in the Cloud console is now deprecated.

Anthos Service Mesh - 1.14.x. 1.14.6-asm.9 is now available for in-cluster Anthos Service Mesh.

Cloud Spanner - Added support for the JSONB array data type in the PostgreSQL dialect. The new System insights dashboard displays metrics and scorecards for the resources that your instance or database uses and helps you get a high-level view of your system's performance.

Cloud SQL Postgres - Cloud SQL now supports the ability to get details for a Cloud SQL user for a database instance using the API or gcloud.

Transcoder API - v1. You can now set the language code and display name for text and audio streams.

Vertex AI - Pre-built containers to perform custom training with TensorFlow 2.11, PyTorch 1.12, or PyTorch 1.13 are now generally available (GA). A new custom training overview page is available.

Workflows - Workflows is available in the following additional regions: asia-northeast3 (Seoul, South Korea) asia-southeast2 (Jakarta, Indonesia) me-west1 (Tel Aviv, Israel) southamerica-west1 (Santiago, Chile). Support for limiting the maximum number of concurrent branches or iterations within a parallel step is generally available (GA).