Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

It's a wrap: Key announcements from Next ‘19 UK - From modernizing in the cloud, to explainable AI, to increased data control and visibility, here's a look at news from this week at Next '19 UK.

Bare Metal Solution: Enabling specialized workloads in Google Cloud - Bare Metal Solution lets you run legacy workloads close to Google Cloud

Advancing control and visibility in the cloud - At Next UK, Google Cloud announced new security tools to enhance control and visibility.

Key Access Justifications: a new level of control and visibility - How Key Access Justifications lets you be the ultimate arbiter of access to their data on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Achieve peace of mind with BigQuery pricing and control - Flexibility and easier planning for data warehousing costs arrive with BigQuery Reservations.

Streaming analytics now simpler, more cost-effective in Cloud Dataflow - Cloud streaming data analytics is now easier and more cost-effective with Streaming SQL and FlexRS in Cloud Dataflow.

NetApp and Google Cloud Drive Innovation in the Cloud - General availability of Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) and Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for Google Cloud from NetApp company.

Firebase expands support for web with Google Analytics - Firebase support for web apps in Google Analytics, Cloud Messaging and Remote Config.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Understanding your options for data residency, operational transparency, and privacy controls on Google Cloud Platform - Google Cloud’s technical controls to help you achieve data residency, security and sovereignty requirements

Secured NiFi cluster with Terraform on the Google Cloud Platform - How to deploy a secured NiFi cluster configured with OIDC, an external ZooKeeper and an HTTPS Load Balancer using Terraform on Google Cloud

Kubernetes RBAC with Google Cloud Identity Platform Custom Tokens - Simple tutorial on how to setup Kubernetes RBAC with Google Cloud Identity Platform.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Google Kubernetes Engine or Cloud Run: which should you use? - Google Cloud Run is an alternative managed compute platform for Google Kubernetes Engine.

What does it mean that “Firestore security rules are not filters”? - Explaining what "security rules are not filters" means for Firebase Realtime Database and Cloud FIrestore

It's not me, it's your Google Cloud Pub/Sub project id! - The article describes approaches on how to bypass the invocation of Cloud Functions from PubSub which belong to other GCP projects.

Knative — Let’s go serverless! - A brief information about Knative.

Machine Learning from IoT Core with the Cloud Vision API - Analyzing images from Arduino with Cloud Vision API.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Clustering air quality data by using Kotlin, DataFlow and BigQuery Machine Learning - The article describes an implementation of a serverless ETL pipeline, which loads data from CSV files into a BigQuery dataset and runs K-means clustering on loaded data

Simplify BigQuery ETL jobs using SQLAlchemy - Extract and move data between BigQuery and relational databases using a plugin for SQLAlchemy.

Querying External Data with BigQuery - Demonstration of BigQuery querying Parquet files from Google Cloud Storage.

A Journey into BigQuery Fuzzy Matching — 4 of [1, ∞) — A Tribute to FuzzyWuzzy - Implementing and using Fuzzy matching in BigQuery.

Optimizing Google BigQuery with Data Studio reports - Automating Google Data Studio reports with Google BigQuery in cost and queries time-effective manner.

Predicting Taxi fares in NYC using Google Cloud AI Platform (Billion + rows) Part 3 - The objective of this series of articles is to create a Machine Learning model that is able to estimate taxi fares in NYC before the ride commences.

Various

Increasing transparency with Google Cloud Explainable AI - We’re working to build AI that’s fair, responsible and trustworthy, and we’re excited to introduce the latest developments.

Deepening our commitment to European businesses - Our cloud is designed to fully empower European organizations’ strict data, security and privacy requirements and preferences.

Don’t just move to the cloud, modernize with Google Cloud - Announcing Anthos momentum, and the GAs of Migrate for Anthos, Apigee hybird and Cloud Code.

Inside your cloud bill: where is the money going? - Getting billing info for GCP project.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #204 End to End Java on Google Cloud with Ray Tsang

Kubernetes Podcast - #80 Lyft and KubeCon NA 2019, with Vicki Cheung

Keynotes from UK Next '19

Releases

Stackdriver - Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for the Logs Router are now available in Beta.

Cloud Storage - Uniform bucket-level access is now in GA.

Cloud Tasks - HTTP Targets GA release.

Cloud AutoML Vision - Image Classification General Availability (GA) release Some notes about the GA release: Cloud AutoML Vision and AutoML Vision Edge are now in General Availability (GA).

Cloud AutoML Vision Object Detection - Object Detection General Availability (GA) release Some notes about the GA release: Cloud AutoML Vision and AutoML Vision Edge are now in General Availability (GA).

Virtual Private Cloud - Virtual machines with 2 or 4 vCPUs now have a maximum egress rate of 10 Gbps. The private.googleapis.com virtual IP address range for Private Google Access for on-premises hosts is Generally Available.

Anthos - Anthos 1.1.2 is now available. Google Kubernetes Engine release notes. GKE On-Prem release notes. Anthos Config Management release notes. Migrate for Anthos release notes. Anthos Service Mesh release notes. Istio on Google Kubernetes Engine release notes. Istio release notes. Cloud Run release notes. Stackdriver release notes. Google Cloud Marketplace release notes.

Google Cloud Armor - Custom rules language, pre-configured WAF rules, and geography-based access controls are in public Beta.

AutoML Tables - As part of AI Explanations, AutoML Tables now provides the option to show how each feature impacted an online prediction. Support for the European Union region, including the ability to configure AutoML Tables to store your data at rest and perform machine learning processing only in the European Union. Support for exporting AutoML Tables models to Cloud Storage, and then use Docker to make the model available for predictions. Support for using Stackdriver Logging to see final model hyperparameters as well as hyperparameters used during training trials.

BigQuery - Support for persistent standard SQL UDFs is now Generally Available (GA). You can now use INFORMATION_SCHEMA views to get routine metadata in BigQuery. BigQuery now supports using service account credentials with scheduled queries. BigQuery is now available in the South Carolina (us-east1) region.

BigQuery ML - BigQuery ML data preprocessing is now in beta. BigQuery ML now supports customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). BigQuery ML is now available in the South Carolina (us-east1) region.

Cloud Billing - The Cloud Billing Committed Use Discounts (CUD) Analysis report is now available in GA.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.8.1-airflow-1.9.0, composer-1.8.1-airflow-1.10.1, composer-1.8.1-airflow-1.10.2, and composer-1.8.1-airflow-1.10.3. Fixed an issue that prevented upgrades from Airflow 1.10.2 to 1.10.3.

Config Connector - Added support for ComputeInterconnectAttachment, ComputeSSLProxy, ComputeTargetSSLProxy, (Regional)ComputeDisk.

Cloud Dataflow - Flexible Resource Scheduling (FlexRS) in Cloud Dataflow is generally available. You can now do the following in Cloud Dataflow SQL: Use Cloud Storage filesets as a data source Assign schemas to data sources in the Cloud Dataflow SQL UI Preview the content of Cloud Pub/Sub messages from the Cloud Dataflow SQL UI.

Cloud Data Fusion - Cloud Data Fusion is now generally available. Added support for creating Cloud Data Fusion instances that use private IP addresses. Added support for creating private Cloud Data Fusion instances and executing data pipelines in a VPC-SC environment. Added support to encrypt resources created in Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub using Cloud Data Fusion with Customer Managed Encryption Keys. Added reference documentation for creating and managing pipelines and datasets. The Cloud Data Fusion UI is now available at a different URL in the format:--dot-.datafusion.googleusercontent.com.

Cloud Datastore - You can now start managed export and import operations from the Google Cloud Console.

Cloud DNS - DNS forwarding to a non-RFC 1918 address is available in Beta.

Running Anthos on-premises - GKE On-Prem version 1.1.2-gke.0 is now available. This patch version includes the following changes: Published Hardening your cluster. Published Managing clusters. Fixed the known issue from November 5. Fixed the known issue from November 8. If you are running multiple data centers in vSphere, running gkectl diagnose cluster might return the following error, which you can safely ignore: Checking storage...FAIL path '*' resolves to multiple datacenters. If you are running a vSAN datastore, running gkectl diagnose cluster might return the following error, which you can safely ignore: PersistentVolume [NAME]: virtual disk "[[DATASTORE_NAME]] [PVC]" IS NOT attached to machine "[MACHINE_NAME]" but IS listed in the Node.Status.

Kubernetes Engine - The known issue in the COS kernel that may cause kernel panic, previously reported on November 5th, 2019, is resolved. GKE cluster versions have been updated as detailed in the following sections. Masters and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded: The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in master upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. v1.12.x1.12.10-gke.20 This version uses cos-69-10895-348-0 which fixes the known issue that may cause kernel panics, previously reported on November 5th, 2019. The following versions are no longer available for new clusters or upgrades. 1.12.10-gke.15. 1.13.11-gke.5. 1.13.11-gke.9. 1.13.11-gke.11. 1.13.12-gke.2. 1.14.7-gke.10. 1.14.7-gke.14. 1.14.7-gke.17. 1.14.8-gke.2. The known issue in the COS kernel that may cause nodes to crash, previously reported on November 5th, 2019, is resolved. Masters and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded: The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in master upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. v1.12.x1.12.10-gke.17 No new v1.12.x versions this week.

Kubernetes Engine - v1.14.8-gke.12 is now available in the Regular release channel. This version includes a fix for a known issue in the COS kernel that may have caused nodes to crash.

Kubernetes Engine - v1.13.11-gke.14 is now available in the Stable release channel. This version includes a fix for a known issue in the COS kernel that may have caused nodes to crash.

Load Balancing - For Internal TCP/UDP Load Balancing, load balancing to multiple NICs on a single backend VM instance is now available in Beta.

Stackdriver - Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for the Logs Router are now available in Beta.

AI Platform - AI Platform Training now offers a built-in distributed XGBoost algorithm to train a machine learning model without writing your own training code. AI Explanations now offers feature attributions through AI Platform Prediction.

Cloud SQL - Cloud SQL now supports customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK).