Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Google named a Leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services - Gartner recently named Google Cloud as a leader in its Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services

Hitting the Silicon Slopes with a new Salt Lake City region, now open - The Salt Lake City region is now open for GCP customers.

Introducing BigQuery Flex Slots for unparalleled flexibility and control - Cloud data warehouse BigQuery now offers Flex Slots, so you can buy analytics resources for short amounts of time to scale up and down quickly.

BigQuery leads the way toward modern data analytics - BigQuery’s customer, partner, and analyst momentum is strong. The cloud data warehouse makes migration easy and brings data analytics to enterprises.

Now, you can explore Google Cloud APIs with Cloud Code - Learn how Cloud Code can improve your developer experience on Google Cloud.

All together now: our operations products in one place - Check out cloud operations tools to manage your environment, including logging, monitoring, trace and more capabilities.

Migrate your Microsoft SQL Server workloads to Google Cloud - Cloud SQL for SQL Server is now available, so it’s easy to migrate your Microsoft SQL Server 2008 instances for a managed, compatible database experience.

Google Cloud Security: continuing to give good the advantage - New capabilities in Chronicle and Demisto offer security wherever your system runs.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Best practices for enterprise multi-tenancy - A guide for sharing clusters on GKE

Install Velero with HELM in GCP - The backup for Kubernetes.

Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — Migrate in stages - Going through a journey of migrating a monolith application to microservices.

Encryption in the Cloud Pt. 2: Encryption for GCS - A multipart exploration into Cloud Encryption. Part 2: Encryption in GCP’s Google Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Organisation Policies — Get the “Restrict VPC Peering Usage” Organisation Policy Right - Using Organisation Policy Service which gives you centralized and programmatic control over your organization’s cloud resources on Google Cloud

Create a GKE Cluster (Workload Identity enabled) using Terraform - Creating a Google Kubernetes Engine Cluster which has Workload Identity feature enabled using Terraform.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

App Engine under heavy load - Example of App Engine scaling.

Single Sign On (SSO) for your Firebase app with SAML - A tutorial to set up SAML authentication with Firebase for a web application.

4 tips for logging on GCP using Golang and Logrus - Tips on logging in Go apps when deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine.

Deploying an Angular App Using Google Cloud Run - Learn how to create, Dockerize, and deploy your containerized Angular application using Google Cloud Run.

Continuous Integration for Serverless ReactJS Application in GCP with Cloud Build - Setting up CI/CD process for client-side Javascript applications that are deployed serverless in a Cloud Storage bucket using Cloud Build.

Deploy Firebase to Different Environments - Use different configs for each of your Firebase environments.

First Knative Attempt: A Quick Guide to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery - This article serves as a beginner’s guide to using Knative, describing the core concepts of Tekton and demonstrating the CI/CD process.

Knative journey EP5: install and uninstall Knative with Operators - Using Knative operators to install, configure and manage Knative.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Approximatish Separation of Storage and Compute in Data Warehouses - In-depth analysis of differences for BigQuery and other similar solutions when it comes to separation of storage and compute.

BigQuery Best Practices - Practical tips for query performance optimization and workflow automation in BigQuery.

What do party schools and energy efficiency have in common? - Using BigQuery to analyze public data on building energy use.

Coronavirus in Wikipedia by language — visualized - Analyzing Wikipedia pageviews for different languages to get deeper look into how the news spread and trended around the world.

Google Pub/Sub: Putting a number on the lack of order - Pub/Sub message order delivery analysis.

Introducing Serverless Orchestration with Houston - Serverless workflow control on Google Cloud Platform.

How to deploy interpretable models on Google Cloud Platform - The article describes how to use Google Cloud's Explainable AI to deploy interpretable and inclusive machine learning models.

Serverless machine learning using Docker - Running containers in Google AI Platform.

How to deploy your own ML model to GCP in 5 simple steps. - Deploying non "Google-native" ML models built with sklearn or xboost on Google Cloud Platform.

ML based Network Anomaly Detection solution to identify Cyber Security Threat - A reference implementation of an ML-based Network Anomaly Detection solution by using Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery ML & Cloud DLP.

Various

My journey to Google Cloud Certifications - Training materials and tips for GCP Certification exams.

4 Ways to Get Google Cloud Credits - Learn how to get started on Google’s Cloud Platform for free.

Data centers are more energy efficient than ever - Using artificial intelligence to improve energy efficiency in Google's data centers.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #209 Humanitec with Domile Janenaite and Chris Stephenson

Kubernetes Podcast - #92 Accelerators and GPUs at NVIDIA, with Pramod Ramarao

Releases

Access Context Manager - Access Context Manager support for mobile devices has entered Beta.

Cloud Asset Inventory - Resource and policy search beta release You can now search resource metadata and Cloud IAM policies in your project, folder or organization.

BI Engine - BI Engine is now available in the Salt Lake City (us-west3) region.

BigQuery - BigQuery Flex slots are now available in beta in all BigQuery Reservations regions. BigQuery DML statements no longer have quota limits. BigQuery is now available in the Salt Lake City (us-west3) region.

BigQuery ML - BigQuery ML is now available in the Salt Lake City (us-west3) region.

BigQuery Transfer - Cloud Storage transfers to BigQuery now have the option of appending data or refreshing (overwriting) data. Support for data transfers from Amazon S3 to BigQuery is now generally available.

BigTable - Cloud Bigtable is now available in the us-west3 (Salt Lake City) region.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.9.1-airflow-1.10.1, composer-1.9.1-airflow-1.10.2, composer-1.9.1-airflow-1.10.3 and composer-1.9.1-airflow-1.10.6. Fixed an issue where updating environment variables cleared the stored Fernet key.

Config Connector - Added support for DataFlowJob resource.

Cloud Dataflow - Using Cloud Dataflow with Cloud Key Management Service to create a customer-managed encryption key (CMEK) is generally available. Cloud Dataflow is now able to use workers in zones in the us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

Dataproc - Added support for attaching GPUs to preemptible workers. Component Gateway now supports VPC Service Controls. The Compute Engine API call from the Dataproc backend to check the API-specific quota limit is now enforced. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.2.91-debian9, 1.3.51-debian9, 1.4.22-debian9, 1.5.0-RC7-debian10, 1.3.51-ubuntu18, 1.4.22-ubuntu18, 1.5.0-RC7-ubuntu18. Add OS-family image version aliases: 1.0-debian, 1.1-debian, 1.2-debian, 1.3-debian, 1.3-ubuntu, 1.4-debian, 1.4-ubuntu, preview-debian, preview-ubuntu. Increase Dataproc agent buffer size for streaming driver output to Cloud Storage from 60KB to 8MB. Added support for parameterizing numInstances field in Workflow Templates. Images 1.3, 1.4, & 1.5: Backport HIVE-16958. Image 1.2, 1.3, & 1.4: Upgrade Oozie to 4.3.1 and backport OOZIE-3112. Image 1.3: Added BigQuery magics for Python2 and PySpark kernels to Dataproc Jupyter notebooks. Image 1.4 & 1.5: Added BigQuery magics for Python3 and PySpark kernels to Dataproc Jupyter notebooks. Images 1.4 & 1.5 : Upgrade Spark to 2.4.5 version. Fixed the bug that causing update cluster label operations failed on clusters using CMEK on PD. Image 1.3 & 1.4: ZEPPELIN-4168: fixed downloading of Maven dependencies in Zeppelin. Backport YARN-9011 to all 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 images. Fix "YARN available memory" metric when using YARN's FairScheduler. Dataproc is now available in the us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

IAM - Cloud IAM Conditions are now generally available. For Cloud IAM Conditions, you can now use the extract() function to extract a value from a resource name.

KMS - Cloud KMS resources can now be created in the us-west3 region.

Google Kubernetes Engine - Container-native load balancing with standalone network endpoint groups (NEGs) is generally available. Ingress for Anthos is now Beta for GKE versions 1.14.x+ and in the Rapid and Regular release channels. GKE cluster versions have been updated as detailed in the following sections. Masters and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded: Rollouts are phased across multiple weeks, to ensure cluster and fleet stability. No channelv.1.13.x There are no new 1.13 versions this week. The following versions are no longer available for new clusters or upgrades. 1.13.12-gke.25. 1.14.8-gke.33. 1.16 will be moving to the regular channel. The v1.16 release stops serving the following API versions in favor of newer and more stable API versions: NetworkPolicy in the extensions/v1beta1 API version, deprecated since v1.9, is no longer served. The region us-west3 in Salt Lake City is now available. The ability to use the Google Cloud Compute Engine Persistent Disk CSI driver in GKE is now in Beta. Ingress for Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now available in Beta in the Rapid release channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - Ingress for Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing is now available in Beta.

Load Balancing - Updated and reorganized documentation for SSL certificates. Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing now supports accessing your load balancer from a connected network through VPC Peering, Cloud VPN, and Cloud Interconnect.

Stackdriver Logging - Beta release: You can now use the new Logs Viewer (Preview) to view, parse and analyze log data, and refine your query parameters.

Marketplace - You can deploy security software agents, which are typically part of larger security solutions, from Google Cloud Marketplace to the VM instances in your projects.

Cloud Memorystore - Released support for private services access, which enables Shared VPC networks and centralized IP address management for Memorystore.

Stackdriver Monitoring - Stackdriver Monitoring is available exclusively in the Cloud Console. Stackdriver Monitoring agent version 6.0.0 is now available for the following distributions: CentOS 7 Ubuntu LTS 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu LTS 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) Ubuntu Minimal LTS 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu Minimal LTS 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) Amazon Linux AMI (except Amazon Linux 2.0 AMI).

Cloud NAT - Cloud NAT monitoring is available in Beta.

Cloud PubSub - Cloud Pub/Sub is now available in the us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

Recommendations AI - Support for recommendation model creation and configuration using the Cloud Console.

Cloud Spanner - Cloud Spanner regional instances can now be created in Salt Lake City (us-west3).

Cloud SQL MySQL - MySQL 5.6.42 is now generally available in Cloud SQL. Support for us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

Cloud SQL Postgres - Support for us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

Cloud SQL - MySQL 5.6.42 is now generally available in Cloud SQL. Support for us-west3 region (Salt Lake City). Support for us-west3 region (Salt Lake City). Support for us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

Cloud SQL SQL Server - Support for us-west3 region (Salt Lake City).

Stackdriver - Beta release: You can now use the new Logs Viewer (Preview) to view, parse and analyze log data, and refine your query parameters. Stackdriver Monitoring is available exclusively in the Cloud Console. Stackdriver Monitoring agent version 6.0.0 is now available for the following distributions: CentOS 7 Ubuntu LTS 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu LTS 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) Ubuntu Minimal LTS 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu Minimal LTS 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) Amazon Linux AMI (except Amazon Linux 2.0 AMI).

Cloud Storage - Cloud IAM Conditions for Cloud Storage is now in GA. Salt Lake City region (us-west3) launched.

Cloud Vision API - SafeSearch Detection update The SafeSearch model has been upgraded to a newer version.

Virtual Private Cloud - For auto mode VPC networks, added a new subnet 10.180.0.0/20 for the Salt Lake City us-west3 region.

Cloud VPN - Cloud VPN is now available in region us-west3 (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA).