Welcome to issue #306 August 8th, 2022

News

Introducing Data Studio as our newest Google Cloud service - Data Studio, our self-service business intelligence and data visualization platform, is now a Google Cloud service.

Announcing support for on-premises Windows workloads with Certificate Authority Service - To mitigate the challenges in managing and migrating digital certificates, Google Cloud is debuting a new technology partnership with CA Service existing partners that auto-enrolls Windows device certificates.

Easily connect SaaS platforms to Google Cloud with Eventarc - Eventarc launches 3rd party sources (Preview). Developers can easily connect 3rd parties to Google Cloud using Eventarc’s fully managed platform.

Zero-ETL approach to analytics on Bigtable data using BigQuery - Query Bigtable directly from BigQuery and combine with other datasets for real-time analytical insights. Now Generally Available.

Productivity unlocked with new Cloud SDK reference docs - Learn about the new home for Cloud SDK reference docs. Experience more developer productivity through a better UI, discoverability, and search features.

Introducing Cloud Analytics by MITRE Engenuity Center in collaboration with Google Cloud - To better analyze the growing volumes of heterogeneous security data, Google has partnered with MITRE to create the Cloud Analytics project. Here’s why, and what it does to help improve cloud security.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Why automation and scalability are the most important traits of your Kubernetes platform - The recipe for long-term success with Kubernetes: automation that matters and scalability that saves money.

Sharing is caring: How NVIDIA GPU sharing on GKE saves you money - GPU time-sharing and A100 Multi-Instance GPU partitioning enabled higher GPU utilization and saved cost.

How we revamped our GCP environment @Strise - A story about moving away from one single GCP project hosting of all infrastructure into a scalable and secure GCP setup.

Creating a GKE cluster using Crossplane - Using Crossplane (cloud native control plane framework) to create GKE cluster.

Traffic Director as Service Mesh - Exploring Service Mesh through Traffic Director in GCP both in GKE and GCE with Envoy Proxy.

Take advantage of GCP Tau T2A instances during public preview - This article provides a better understanding of ARM and explains how switching over can potentially improve the performance of your workloads.

Network Policy in GCP Kubernetes not working? Enable it! - I wanted isolate separate namespaces in Kubernetes so that resources from one namespace cannot access resources from the another namespace….

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Scheduling a command in GCP using Cloud Run and Cloud Schedule - How to efficiently and quickly schedule commands like Gsutil using Cloud Run and Cloud Scheduler.

Analyze Pacemaker events using open source Log Parser - Part 4 - Introduction to an open source log parser, which will help consolidate Pacemaker logs and filter the log entries for critical events.

Five must-know security and compliance features in Cloud Logging - These Cloud Logging security and compliance features can help Google Cloud customers meet their regulatory obligations and keep their log data secure. Here’s how.

Creating Workflows that pause and wait for events - An example of using Workflow callbacks to pause a workflow execution and resume when a specific event is received instead of HTTP request.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Keeping track of shipments minute by minute: How Mercado Libre uses real-time analytics for on-time delivery - Using the continuous intelligence approach, the shipping operations team built a new solution that provides near real-time data monitoring and analytics for their transportation network to keep up with the demands of exponential order growth while still meeting the 48-hour delivery timelines that customers have come to expect.

PubSub streaming into BigQuery just got a whole lot easier . . . - An overview of the Pub/Sub streaming option to BigQuery.

Hidden gems of Google BigQuery - A few useful BigQuery tips and features.

Importing GIS Data into BigQuery - Have you been wondering how to import data that is geolocated into BigQuery? Well, wonder no more.

How to Build a Unique MD5 Row Hash Using SQL in BigQuery (Plus a Few Related Things) - Using native BigQuery functionality to generate a dynamic, unique row identifier in SQL.

Looking for Power User Journeys in E-commerce - Using BigQuery to understand user journey in an e-commerce website.

How Wayfair is reaching MLOps excellence with Vertex AI - Without a comprehensive AI platform and Feature Store, Wayfair data scientists had to build their own unique model productionization processes on legacy infrastructure components.

Running AlphaFold batch inference with Vertex AI Pipelines - Code samples and guidelines demonstrating how you can effectively implement the AlphaFold workflow on Vertex AI.

ML Engineers: Partners for Scaling AI in Enterprises - Practical tips from Google Cloud experts to nurture and scale your organization’s AI/ML practice via ML engineers.

Access larger dataset faster and easier to accelerate your ML models training in Vertex AI - Using NFS as a storage system in Vertex AI helps your jobs to access big data faster and accelerate your model training.

Train and Deploy Google Cloud’s Two Towers Recommender - Training/making predictions for Recommender system on Vertex AI.

Various

Founders and tech leaders share their experiences in “Startup Stories” podcast - Founders and tech leaders share their experiences in Google Cloud’s “Startup Stories” podcast.

From NASA to Google Cloud, Ivan Ramirez helps top gaming companies reach new levels - From NASA to Google Cloud, hear how Ivan continues to step outside his comfort zone and innovate with some of the world's biggest online gaming companies.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #314 Vertex Explainable AI with Irina Sigler and Ivan Nardini.

Security Podcast - #77 Operational Realities of SOAR: Automate and/or Enrich, Playbooks, Magic.

Videos from Apache Beam summit

Releases

Access Approval - Access Approval supports Secret Manager in Preview stage.

Anthos clusters on AWS - A new vulnerability (CVE-2022-2327) has been discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to local privilege escalation.

Anthos clusters on bare metal - 1.11. Release 1.11.4 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.11.4 is now available for download. Fixes: Fixed issue in which cluster restores failed when /var/lib/etcd is a mount point. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section. 1.12. Release 1.12.1 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.12.1 is now available for download. Functionality changes: Increased default memory limits for coredns, metallb-controller, metallb-speaker, metrics-server, anthos-cluster-operator, and cap-controller-manager. Fixes: Fixed issue in which nodes drained or cordoned by kubectl were mistakenly marked as schedulable. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section. 1.10. Release 1.10.7 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.10.7 is now available for download. Fixed a CrashLoopBackOff error generated by gke-metrics-agent when application metrics are enabled (that is, when enableStackdriverForApplications=true). Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

Anthos clusters on Azure - This release fixes the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2016-10228. You can now launch clusters with the following Kubernetes versions: 1.23.8-gke.1700 1.22.12-gke.200 1.21.14-gke.2100. A new vulnerability (CVE-2022-2327) has been discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to local privilege escalation.

BigQuery - The max_staleness materialized view option helps you achieve consistently high performance with controlled costs when processing large, frequently changing datasets. A weekly digest of client library updates from across the Cloud SDK. The trigonometric SQL function CBRT is now generally available (GA). The LOAD DATA statement is now available for Preview in Google Standard SQL for BigQuery.

BigTable - A weekly digest of client library updates from across the Cloud SDK.

Chronicle - The following supported default parsers have changed.

Compute Engine - Generally available: You can now use the os-config troubleshoot command to help verify the setup of VM Manager. Generally available: NVIDIA® T4 GPUs are now available in the following additional regions and zones: Ashburn, Virginia, North America: us-east4-a For more information about using GPUs on Compute Engine, see GPU platforms.

Config Connector - Config Connector version 1.91.0 is now available. Fixed issue where if ContainerCluster had the remove-default-node-pool directive set to true and there was a ContainerNodePool associated with it, after deleting the successfully reconciled ContainerNodePool, ContainerCluster would get stuck on the UpdateFailed state. Fixed issue where SQLInstance could not reference KMSCryptoKey. Added support for the IAMWorkforcePool resource. Added spec.configmanagement.policyController.monitoring and spec.configmanagement.policyController.mutationEnabled fields to GKEHubFeatureMembership. Added support for state-into-spec to StorageBucket. Fixed all reference docs so that code samples now work when they're copy/pasted.

Dataproc - New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.5.72-debian10, 1.5.72-rocky8, 1.5.72-ubuntu18 2.0.46-debian10, 2.0.46-rocky8, 2.0.46-ubuntu18. Upgraded Hadoop to version 3.2.3 in 2.0 images. Upgraded Hadoop to version 2.10.2 version 2.10.2 in 1.5 images. Default MySQL instance root password changed to a random value in 1.5 and 2.0 images. Backported the patch for KNOX-1997 in 2.0 images. Backported the patch for HIVE-19048 in 2.0 images. Backported the patches for HIVE-19047 and HIVE-19048 in 1.5 images.

Cloud Data Loss Prevention - Cloud DLP can de-identify sensitive data stored in Cloud Storage.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions has released Cloud Functions (2nd gen), available at the General Availability release level.

Networking Interconnect - Dedicated Interconnect support is available in the following colocation facilities: NXDATA-1 Bucharest Romania (BU1), Bucharest TIS Lammed, Tel Aviv Bitech SDS, Tel Aviv For more information, see the Locations table.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2022-R19) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. GKE total size control is now available in GKE version 1.24 clusters. The maximum number of Pods that can run on each node has increased from 110 to 256 with GKE version 1.23.5-gke.1300 or later.

GKE - (2022-R19) Version updates The following control plane and node versions are now available: 1.20.15-gke.13400 1.21.14-gke.2700 1.22.12-gke.500 1.24.3-gke.200 The following control plane versions are no longer available: 1.21.12-gke.1500 1.24.2-gke.300 Control planes and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded from version 1.20 to version 1.21.12-gke.2200 with this release.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2022-R19) Version updates The following versions are now available in the Rapid channel: 1.20.15-gke.13400 1.21.14-gke.2700 1.22.12-gke.500 1.24.3-gke.200 Version 1.23.8-gke.1900 is now the default version in the Rapid channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2022-R19) Version updates The following versions are now available in the Regular channel: 1.20.15-gke.11400 1.21.14-gke.700 1.22.11-gke.400 The following versions are no longer available in the Regular channel: 1.20.15-gke.9900 1.21.12-gke.2200 1.22.8-gke.202 1.23.5-gke.1503 Control planes and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled in the Regular channel will be upgraded from version 1.19 to version 1.20.15-gke.11400 with this release.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2022-R19) Version updates The following versions are now available in the Stable channel: 1.21.14-gke.700 Version 1.21.12-gke.2200 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Load Balancing - Network Load Balancing logging and Internal TCP/UDP Load Balancing logging are now available in Preview.

Cloud Memorystore - RDB Snapshots are now Generally Available on Memorystore for Redis.

Migrate for Compute Engine 4.8 - 5.0. Several updates to Migrate to Virtual Machines: Migrate to Virtual Machines now available in regions europe-west8, europe-west9, and europe-southwest9.

Cloud Interconnect - Dedicated Interconnect support is available in the following colocation facilities: NXDATA-1 Bucharest Romania (BU1), Bucharest TIS Lammed, Tel Aviv Bitech SDS, Tel Aviv For more information, see the Locations table.

Network Intelligence Center - You can now schedule a custom cycle to refresh shadowed rule insights in Firewall Insights. Firewall Insights now identifies firewall misconfigurations for firewall rules which contain IPv6 IP address ranges.

Retail Recommendations AI - Serving controls can now be imported from and exported to files.

Service Directory - Configuring an internal TCP/UDP load balancer and network load balancer in Service Directory is available in GA.

Service Mesh - 1.12.x & 1.13.x & 1.14.x. The Mesh Config API (meshconfig.googleapis.com) now enables the Connect Gateway API (connectgateway.googleapis.com) and the GKE Hub API (gkehub.googleapis.com).

Cloud SQL Postgres - The new Cloud SQL System insights dashboard helps you detect and analyze system performance problems.

Cloud Storage - Customer-managed encryption key (CMEK) organization policy constraints are now generally available (GA). New commands are now available gcloud alpha storage. Bucket tags are now available in Preview.

Cloud Text-to-Speech - Text-to-Speech now offers new voices: cloud-pt-BR-Standard-C, cloud-pt-BR-Wavenet-C.

Vertex AI - TensorFlow Profiler integration: Debug model training performance for your custom training jobs.

VPC Service Controls - Beta stage support for the following integration: Integration Platform.

Virtual Private Cloud - Network firewall policies and regional firewall policies are now available in General Availability.

Workflows - Added skip_polling so that connectors can execute asynchronously without waiting for the operation to complete. v1. Workflows is available in the following additional regions: asia-northeast2 (Osaka, Japan) asia-south2 (Delhi, India) australia-southeast2 (Melbourne, Australia) europe-north1 (Hamina, Finland) europe-west2 (London, England) europe-west3 (Frankfurt, Germany) southamerica-east1 (Osasco, São Paulo, Brazil) us-east4 (Ashburn, Virginia, United States) us-west4 (Las Vegas, Nevada, United States). The following functions have been added: text.url_encode returns a string with percent-encoded reserved characters, including spaces text.url_encode_plus returns a string with percent-encoded reserved characters, and spaces replaced by pluses text.url_decode returns a string with pluses and percent-escaped characters converted to UTF-8.

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