Welcome to issue #303 July 18th, 2022

News

Expanding the Tau VM family with Arm-based processors - The Tau T2A is Google Cloud’s first VM family based on the Arm architecture and designed for organizations building cloud-native, scale-out workloads.

Run your Arm workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine with Tau T2A VMs - With Google Kubernetes Engine’s (GKE) support for the new Tau VM T2A, you can run your containerized workloads on the Arm architecture.

Introducing Batch, a new managed service for scheduling batch jobs at any scale - The new Batch managed service manages job queues, provisions and autoscales resources, runs jobs, executes subtasks, and deals with common errors.

Introducing Parallel Steps for Workflows: Speed up workflow executions by running steps concurrently - Workflows is a serverless orchestrator that connects Google Cloud and external services. Our Parallel Steps feature helps speed up workflow execution.

Moving off CentOS? Introducing Rocky Linux Optimized for Google Cloud - Rocky Linux Optimized for Google Cloud is an enterprise-grade alternative to CentOS, complete with support from CIQ and Google Cloud.

Introducing model co-hosting to enable resource sharing among multiple model deployments on Vertex AI - Learn about resource sharing among multiple model deployments on Vertex AI for improved utilization of memory and computational resources.

Track, compare, manage experiments with Vertex AI Experiments - General availability of Vertex AI Experiments, the managed experiment tracking service on Vertex AI.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Google Cloud’s innovation-first infrastructure - We’re investing in innovative cloud infrastructure that is optimized, transformative and easy to use.

Security Monitoring in Google Cloud - Moving to the cloud comes with the fundamental question of how to effectively manage security and risk posture. From a Security Operations (SecOps) perspective, there are few core requirements that you may need for effective security and risk management in the cloud. Here are four big ones that are essential for SecOps.

How to think about threat detection in the cloud - Detecting cybersecurity threats in the cloud is different from on-premises. Here’s why.

Your GCP IAM is valuable, take care of it! - What could happen if you don’t take enough care of your IAM? What can you do to prevent security issues / breaches?

Working with ARM64 Machines on Google Kubernetes Engine - This guide covers how to run CPU-specific workloads on mixed clusters, and provides an example of how to make workloads CPU-agnostic.

Shipping multi-platform Docker images for ARM on Google Cloud with GitHub Actions - Build multi-architecture Docker images using GitHub Actions to take advantage of the new ARM instance types announced by Google Cloud.

IP address management strategy — a crucial aspect of running GKE - Is your organisation spinning up new GKE instances for every application or asking for /18, /16 pod ranges? Then this article is for you.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Why I definitively switched from Cloud Functions to Cloud Run - Explanation of advantages of Cloud Run over Cloud Functions.

How to run SAP on Google Cloud when high availability is high priority - Implementing an SAP HA architecture is a critical step for any enterprise customer.

Cloud SQL - SQL Server Performance Analysis and Query Tuning - Cloud SQL - SQL Server Performance Analysis and Query Tuning.

A Guide to Databases on Google Cloud part 3 - Cloud Spanner! & CRUD it with Spring Boot on Cloud Run - In this “A Guide to Databases on Google Cloud part 3 - Cloud Spanner and CRUD it with Spring Boot on Cloud Run” blog we are going to experiment with CRUD on a Java Spring Boot application using Cloud Spanner’s DML API deployed on Cloud Run, without using a Dockerfile.

Debugging cloud spanner latency using OpenCensus and Go client library - This article describes a client side latency issue caused by session pool exhaustion and how users can diagnose the situation by using OpenCensus features and Cloud Spanner client library for Go.

Data here, data there, look, there’s data everywhere! Replicating your data from Cloud SQL for SQL Server - This blog walks you through how to set up Cloud SQL for SQL Server as a transactional replication publisher, which lets you create an ongoing copy of your Cloud SQL instance to another Cloud SQL instance or an external SQL Server instance.

A Guide for Cloud Run Deployment locally using Visual Studio Code - A hands-on guide about how a GCP serverless application can be deployed locally on Cloud Run using Visual Studio Code.

SFTPGo access to GCS via SFTP - SFTPGo is an SFTP server that is distributed as an open source project that has the built in ability to access Google Cloud Storage.

What a beautiful stream !! - This article provides step by step tutorial to create a stream in Datastream.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Moving data from the mainframe to the cloud made easy - The bigquery-zos-mainframe-connector makes migrating from mainframe to cloud easy by providing gsutil and bq equivalent utilities for the mainframe.

Cloud Data Loss Prevention (Cloud DLP) Overview - It’s important to take a holistic look at where your data resides and how it’s being used since you could be held liable for that data, and then create processes to ensure it’s being handled appropriately. That’s where Cloud Data Loss Prevention comes in.

Streaming JSON messages into BigQuery JSON-type column - An example of streaming and querying JSON data in BigQuery.

Processing data from Hive to BigQuery using PySpark and Dataproc Serverless - How to run a batch workload to process data from an Apache Hive table to a BigQuery table, using PySpark and Dataproc Serverless.

Multicloud reporting and analytics using Google Cloud SQL and Power BI - Multicloud reporting and analytics using Google Cloud SQL and Microsoft Power BI.

Performance considerations for loading data into BigQuery - Performance considerations for loading data into BigQuery for various file types.

Create control charts using BigQuery statistical aggregate functions and Looker - Yet another approach for monitoring KPI targets.

Making AI more accessible for every business - How Google Cloud creates artificial intelligence and machine learning services for all kinds of businesses and levels of technical expertise.

Vertex AI Tips and Tricks: Setting Up Alerts for Vertex Pipelines with Google Cloud Monitoring - Setting up email alerts to get notifications about failed Vertex Pipelines.

Various

Hear how this Google M&A Lead is helping to build a more diverse Cloud ecosystem - Principal for Google Cloud’s Mergers & Acquisitions business and founder of Google’s Black+TechAmplify, Wayne Kimball, Jr. shares how investing in people ultimately leads to stronger business.

Prepare for Google Cloud certification with top tips and no-cost learning - Prepare for Google Cloud Certification with no-cost access to Professional Certificates on Coursera and top tips from the Google Cloud Training team.

Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam - Security is important to every organization. If you’re a cloud security professional, certification might be the right challenge for you.

Why Google Cloud Bears AWS, Azure in Silicon Valley - One of Google Cloud’s fastest-growing partner startups, CloudWerx, explains to CRN why Google Cloud is besting AWS and Azure.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian: Cloud computing is on the brink of a new era - Kurian tapped his enterprise experience from 22 years at Oracle to reshape Google Cloud as an open, hybrid and multicloud player. What comes next?

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #311 Distributed Cloud Edge for Telcos with Krishna Garimella and DP Ayyadevara.

Kubernetes Podcast - #185 Writing, Learning and Tech, with Ian Miell.

Security Podcast - #74 Who Will Solve Cloud Security: A View from Google Investment Side.

GCP Life Podcast - #18 In this episode we discuss; Supply Chain Issues, GCP Certifications, Cheating GCP, GCP NZ, GCP Distributed Cloud Platform, Public Cloud Growth, New GCP Regions.

Recommendation Engine Pipeline with BigQuery ML and Vertex AI Pipelines using Matrix Factorization - Matrix factorizations are widely used for Recommendation Systems. They are a great and easy starting point if you want to build a quick and easy solution to deliver great recommendations to your customers.

Releases

Anthos clusters on Azure - You can now launch clusters with the following Kubernetes versions: 1.23.7-gke.1300 1.22.10-gke.1500 1.21.11-gke.1900. You can now launch Kubernetes 1.23 clusters. In Kubernetes 1.23 and higher, cluster Cloud Audit Logs is now available and is enabled by default. CIS benchmarks are now available for Kubernetes 1.23 clusters. This release fixes the following vulnerabilities: Fixed CVE-2022-1786. Added support for updating Azure control plane and node pool ssh config. Restrictions on IP ranges that can be used for a cluster's Pods and Services are now relaxed. You can no longer create clusters with the following versions: 1.21.11-gke.100 1.21.11-gke.1100 1.22.8-gke.200 1.22.8-gke.1300 These versions have a bug mentioned in a note from June 23, 2022.

Anthos - Anthos component releases for June, 2022 Anthos clusters on VMware: Jun 16, 2022: 1.10.5 patch release Jun 03, 2022: You can use the Cloud console to create, update, and delete Anthos on VMware user clusters.

BigQuery - Previously, the Storage Write API had a maximum concurrent connection limit of 100 connections for non-multi-regions such as Montreal (northamerica-northeast1). You can now select a job type when assigning a folder, organization, or project to a reservation in the Google Cloud console. The google.cloud.bigquery.reservation.v1beta1.api package is deprecated and will be removed on September 27, 2022.

BigTable - Cloud Bigtable is available in the us-south1 (Dallas) and europe-southwest1 (Madrid) regions.

Cloud Build - The gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker builder has been upgraded to Docker client version 20.10.14.

Cloud Composer - DAG UI is now generally available (GA). (Cloud Composer 2) Improved the reliability of web server proxy connectivity. Set memory and CPU limits for the Composer Agent pod. Environments no longer produce error log messages about the connection timeout when initializing the Airflow database during the environment creation. Source code for the apache-airflow-providers-google package versions 2022.6.22+composer and 2022.5.18+composer is available on GitHub: 2022.6.22+composer 2022.5.18+composer. Cloud Composer 1.19.3 and 2.0.20 images are available: composer-1.19.3-airflow-1.10.15 (default) composer-1.19.3-airflow-2.1.4 composer-1.19.3-airflow-2.2.5 composer-2.0.20-airflow-2.1.4 composer-2.0.20-airflow-2.2.5. Cloud Composer versions 1.16.8, 1.16.9, 1.17.0.preview.4, and 1.17.0.preview.5 have reached their end of full support period. Cloud Composer 1.19.2 and 2.0.19 are versions with an extended upgrade timeline.

Compute Engine - Generally available: You can use the Cloud console to configure autoscaling based on unacknowledged messages in a Pub/Sub subscription. Generally available: NVIDIA® T4 GPUs are now available in the following additional regions and zones: Ashburn, Virginia, North America : us-east4-c For more information about using GPUs on Compute Engine, see GPU platforms. Generally Available: A version of Rocky Linux is now available that is optimized for running on Compute Engine. Preview: Tau T2A, Google Cloud's first general purpose VM family to run on Arm architecture, is now available.

Dataflow - You can use the Apache Beam SDK for Go to create batch and streaming Dataflow pipelines.

Cloud Deploy - You can now permanently abandon a release using Google Cloud Deploy. You can now suspend a delivery pipeline using Google Cloud Deploy.

Eventarc - Eventarc support for Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) using the Cloud Console is available in Preview.

Google Kubernetes Engine - Clusters that are using custom or manually created EndpointSlices (EPS) can cause Ingresses and NEGs to stop syncing if missing the service label kubernetes.io/service-name:. Cluster autoscaler Location Policy is now generally available in GKE version 1.24.1-gke.800. You can now run Arm-based workloads in Preview in Standard clusters with GKE version 1.24 and later, and in Autopilot clusters with GKE version 1.24.1-gke.1400 and later. You can now select compute classes to run GKE Autopilot workloads that have specialized hardware requirements, such as Arm architecture.

Cloud Logging - You can now collect SAP HANA logs and metrics from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.18.1. You can now collect Vault logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.18.1. Log-based alerting is now generally available (GA).

Marketplace Partners - Manage your private offers, including approving an offer, by using the Private Offers page.

Cloud Monitoring - You can now collect Flink metrics from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.18.1. You can now collect SAP HANA logs and metrics from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.18.1. Log-based alerting is now generally available (GA).

Cloud VPN - You can now download third-party peer VPN configuration templates for Cloud VPN from the Google Cloud console.

Cloud Run - Cloud Run now writes Access Transparency logs, see Enabling Access Transparency.

SAP Solutions - Google Cloud monitoring agent for SAP NetWeaver version 2.5 Version 2.5 of the Google Cloud monitoring agent for SAP NetWeaver is now available.

Cloud Spanner - You can now view aggregated Cloud Spanner statistics related to transactions, reads, queries, and lock contentions in GA in Cloud Monitoring.

Cloud SQL MySQL - For enhanced security with built-in authentication, Cloud SQL now lets you set password policies at the instance and user levels. You can enable high availability for read replicas. You can create external server replicas with HA enabled.

Cloud SQL Postgres - You can enable high availability for read replicas. You can create external server replicas with HA enabled.

Cloud SQL SQL Server - The database major version upgrade feature of Cloud SQL for SQL Server is generally available.

Transfer Appliance - Transfer Appliance is now available in an additional size.

Vertex AI - The Pipeline Templates feature is available in Preview. You can now use a pre-built container to perform custom training with TensorFlow 2.9.

VMware Engine - VMware Engine nodes are now available in the following additional region: Zurich, Switzerland, Europe (europe-west6).

Virtual Private Cloud - Private Service Connect supports publishing a service that is hosted on the following load balancers: Internal TCP/UDP load balancer with global access enabled Internal protocol forwarding (target instances) These features are available in General Availability.

Cloud VPN - You can now download third-party peer VPN configuration templates for Cloud VPN from the Google Cloud console.

Workflows - Added support to deploy a workflow using a cross-project service account through the Google Cloud CLI.

If you have suggestion, feedback or link you want to share feel free to email me at zdenko@gcpweekly.com

Have a great week,

Zdenko