Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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Google Cloud Next '20 goes digital, 4 extra new GCP regions planned for 2020, articles and tutorials touching many GCP products and services. 

News

Expanding our footprint to support global customers in 2020 - Announcing new Google Cloud regions for 2020.

Transforming Next ‘20 into Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect on April 6-8, 2020 - Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect is a free, global, digital-first, multi-day event offering streamed keynotes, breakout sessions, interactive learning, and digital “ask an expert” sessions with Google teams. Join us April 6-8, 2020.

Create deployment pipelines for your GKE workloads in a few clicks - Automated deployment lets you create continuous delivery pipelines for Google Kubernetes Engine in a few clicks.

Enhanced models and features now available in new languages on Speech-to-Text - Enhanced models and features now available in new languages on Google Cloud Speech-to-Text

DML without limits, now in BigQuery - Cloud data warehouse BigQuery removes all quota limits to support unlimited DML statements and make working with BigQuery tables easier.

Google Cloud unveils strategy for telecommunications industry - Google Cloud unveils strategy for telecommunications industry.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Anthos: one multi-cloud management layer for all your applications - Anthos can be the foundation of current and future applications.

How to detect and prevent network outages—and stay compliant too - Learn how to use the Connectivity Test module Network Intelligence Center.

Use the Dashboard API to build your own monitoring dashboard - Build your own monitoring dashboard for your cloud infrastructure with the Dashboard API in Google’s Cloud Monitoring.

Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — What to migrate first? - The article goes through a list of stages to think about when migrating a monolith application to the Google Kubernetes Engine.

Deploying Apps to Google Kubernetes Engine using Cloud Marketplace, Kubectl CLI & Helm Charts. - Deploy applications to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster using the Google Cloud Marketplace, Kubectl CLI, Helm Charts and Garden.io.

GKE and Cloud SQL: A Complete Workflow with Garden and Terraform - Provisioning a GKE cluster and a Cloud SQL database for development and staging environments.

Kubernetes controller for Google Secrets Manager - Kubernetes controller for Google Secrets Manager.

Using Credential Access Boundary (DownScoped) Tokens - Credential Access Boundary is a policy language that you can use to downslope the accessing power of your GCP short-lived credentials. You can define a Credential Access Boundary that specifies which resources the short-lived credential can access, as well as an upper bound on the permissions that are available on each resource of Cloud Storage.

An online diagram editor for cloud architecture diagrams. - CloudSkew is an online diagram editor with support for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes icons, free for individual users.

Our migration journey from AWS to Google Cloud — Part 1 - Description of infrastructure migration from AWS to GCP, part 1.

Our migration journey from AWS to Google Cloud — Part 2 - Description of infrastructure migration from AWS to GCP, part 2.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Architecting multi-region database disaster recovery for MySQL - Check out how to use high availability and disaster recovery approaches to keep MySQL databases up and running.

Organize Cloud Functions for max cold start performance and readability with TypeScript and Firebase - This article explains how to use TypeScript async imports to move function code into other files, and isolate static imports to just those functions that need them to improve Cloud Functions cold start time.

Cloud Firestore: On data constraints and evolvability - Learn about the differences between schema-on-write vs schema-on-read databases.

Simple CI/CD for Java on GKE - Ever wanted a CI/CD pipeline that takes little effort and just works? This post explains how to do this for Java and GKE using Jib and Keel.

A Complete Guide to Deploying a Containerized Application Using Managed Instance Groups in Google Cloud with Continuous Integration — Part 3 - Setting up CI/CD pipeline for Dockerized web application.

Google Cloud KMS based Service Accounts for Authentication and SignedURLs - Tutorial on using a Google Cloud KMS key as a Service Account.

How to speed up Angular build times with caching - Improving building times in Cloud Build using caching for node modules.

Serverless Mysteries with Secret Manager Libraries on Google Cloud - Using Secret Manager in a NodeJS web app which is deployed on Cloud Run.

Minimize Dependency Pain in Java Libraries - A collection of Google Best Practices for Java Libraries.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Cross-Cloud HBase/Phoenix Data Migration - Using Cloud Dataproc to run Spark job which migrates data from AWS to GCP.

A gentle introduction to Data Workflows with Apache Airflow and Apache Spark - A tutorial on using Cloud Composer (Airflow) to launch Spark jobs on Cloud Dataproc.

Custom metrics in Dataflow pipelines with Prometheus and StatsD - Monitoring the number of bad input messages for streaming Dataflow pipeline and creating alerts.

Data ingestion Google Big Query without the headaches - Schema conversions on the fly without the headaches with Dataflow and BigQuery.

Discord's migration from Redshift to BigQuery: lessons learned - Gaming app creator Discord moved from Amazon Redshift to Google Cloud BigQuery to eliminate downtime and scale faster.

Loading and transforming data to BigQuery at large scale - Using serverless data loading to BigQuery to reduce daily costs $8K to $15 per day.

How dbt was used to convert from Google BigQuery Scheduled Queries - Using dbt (data build tool) with BigQuery.

How to query geographic raster data in BigQuery efficiently - Working with raster images for GIS data in BigQuery.

Microsoft SQL Server to Google BigQuery Migration. Converting the code ! - Using Roboquery tool to extract the schema of tables, views and SQL Queries from SQL Server and convert it into Bigquery.

Learning Custom TF-Hub Embeddings with Swivel and Kubeflow Pipeline - Learn how to implement an end-to-end KFP pipeline to train custom embeddings based on co-occurrence data

Better scalability with Cloud TPU pods and TensorFlow 2.1 - Cloud TPU Pods are now generally available, and include TensorFlow 2.1 support and other new features.

With Kubeflow 1.0, run ML workflows on Anthos across environments - Kubeflow on Google's Anthos platform lets teams run machine-learning workflows in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and take advantage of GKE’s security, autoscaling, logging, and identity features.

Reducing Startup Time For Notebooks With Custom Containers - Have you ever tried to use Cloud AI Platform Notebooks with huge containers?

Introduction to Natural Language Processing with the Google NLP API - Exploring Cloud Natural API

Various

Google Cloud Tips and Tricks: Understanding the Resource Hierarchy - Overview of Resources Hierarchy with tips and tricks to use more efficiently.

How I passed Google Cloud Certified — Associate Cloud Engineer Exam - A path to passing the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer exam.

Passing the Google Cloud Associate Engineer Certification - Passing GCP Associate Cloud Engineer exam.

AwesomeGCP Phase II: 2-Pass Solutioning and Raising Funds - Video series focused on GCP certificate exams preparation needs funding.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #210 Kubernetes Config Connector with Emily Cai

Kubernetes Podcast - #93 Kubeflow 1.0, with Jeremy Lewi

Releases

Cloud Spanner - Foreign keys is now generally available.

Cloud Speech-to-Text - Cloud Speech-to-Text now supports seven new languages: Burmese, Estonian, Uzbek, Punjabi, Albanian, Macedonian, and Mongolian. The speaker diarization, automatic punctuation, speech adaptation boost, and enhanced telephony model features are now available for new languages. Class tokens are now available for general use.

Virtual Private Cloud - Packet MIrroring is now available in General Availability.

AI Platform - AI Platform Pipelines is now available in beta.

Service Mesh - 1.4.6-asm.0 Fixes known security issues with the same fixes as OSS Istio 1.4.6: CVE-2020-8659, CVE-2020-8661, CVE-2020-8664, CVE-2020-8660: ISTIO-SECURITY-2020-003.

AI Platform Training - The built-in linear learner algorithm and the built-in wide and deep algorithm now use TensorFlow 1.14 for training.

BigQuery - The BigQuery Storage API is now generally available. Support for querying Cloud Storage data in ORC and Parquet format is now Generally Available. Support for loading and querying externally partitioned data that is stored on Cloud Storage using a default hive partitioning layout is now Generally Available. Personally identifiable information (PII) in audit log records for successful reads of resources with restricted access is no longer redacted.

Billing - The Cost Table report now includes a nested table view, providing a hierarchical, tree-structured view of your cost data which is helpful when analyzing your billing data online.

Binary Authorization - Support for the Binary Authorization Beta API was discontinued on September 16, 2019.

Cloud Dataflow - Cloud Dataflow SQL is now available in beta.

Dataproc - Added a dataproc:yarn.log-aggregation.enabled cluster property that allows turning on YARN log aggregation to a Dataproc temporary bucket (default: true for image versions 1.5+). New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.2.92-debian9, 1.3.52-debian9, 1.4.23-debian9, 1.5.0-RC8-debian10, 1.3.52-ubuntu18, 1.4.23-ubuntu18, 1.5.0-RC8-ubuntu18. 1.5 preview image: Upgraded the Cloud Storage connector to version 2.0.1. In addition to the staging bucket, Dataproc now creates a temporary bucket for storing feature-related data with a 90-day retention period per project per region. Changed the staging bucket naming scheme for new buckets from dataproc--to dataproc-staging---. 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 preview images: Fixed a bug where Component Gateway pages added an additional banner on each page load in some browsers.

IAM - For Cloud Storage buckets, you can now use Credential Access Boundaries, currently in beta, to restrict the permissions that a short-lived credential can use.

Google Kubernetes Engine - The user interface for creating clusters in Google Cloud Console has been redesigned. You can now configure automated deployment for your existing GKE workloads with Cloud Build. 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. 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.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - The user interface for creating clusters in Google Cloud Console has been redesigned. 1.16.6-gke.12 is now available in the Rapid release channel. Important: Existing clusters enrolled in the Rapid release channel will be auto-upgraded to this version.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - 1.15.9-gke.8 is now available in the Regular release channel. Important: Existing clusters enrolled in the Regular release channel will be auto-upgraded to this version.