Welcome to issue #338 March 20th, 2023

News

Google Cloud brings generative AI to developers, businesses, and governments - Google Cloud announces Generative AI support in Vertex AI and Generative AI App Builder, helping businesses and governments build gen apps.

Announcing higher VM- to-internet throughput for several Compute Engine families - Workloads such as multi-session WebRTC and firewall appliances can now take advantage of higher VM-to-internet egress bandwidth.

Verify POST endpoint availability with Uptime Checks - Google Cloud Monitoring can now handle any kind of request bodies for POST requests, giving you better REST resource tracking.

Introducing time-bound Session Length defaults to improve your security posture - Session length is foundational to security and it ensures access to the Google Cloud services is time bound after a successful authentication.

Extending Cloud Code with custom templates - IDE plugins for popular development environments let you integrate with Google Cloud's code tooling.

Google Cloud and FS-ISAC team up to advance financial services security - A new partnership between Google Cloud and FS-ISAC will help improve security for financial services organizations. Here’s how.

Google Cloud and Nokia accelerate Cloud RAN vision with first end-to-end L3 data call - Nokia and Google Cloud have integrated Nokia AirScale Cloud RAN on GDC Edge, powered with a Nokia Cloud RAN SmartNIC L1 inline accelerator.

Early-bird registration for Google Cloud Next ‘23 is open now - Register now for Google Cloud Next ‘23 in San Francisco, August 29-31, and learn about trends in generative AI, cybersecurity, app dev, and more.

Be threat ready for 2023: Join us for Google Cloud Security Talks in March - The first Google Cloud Security Talks of 2023 is coming up on March 22. Here’s what you can expect to learn.

Join us at RSA Conference to transform cybersecurity with frontline intelligence and cloud innovation - Join Mandiant and Google Cloud at RSA Conference 2023. We’re excited to bring our joint capabilities, products, and expertise together, to help you better defend your organization against today’s threats.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Mitigate mainframe migration risks with Dual Run - Google's Dual Run is packaged with several automation components to make your mainframe migration journey predictable and low risk.

Mastering the Mute Feature in Google Cloud Security Command Center: Reduce Noise and Stay Focused… - Controlling a notification level of alerts by muting findings in Security Command Center.

Six benefits of using Service Directory in your environment - Strong integrations, and a single view for all your services, so you can get your work done with Service Directory.

Preventing PROD access with IAM Conditions - How to prevent production from inheriting Google Cloud organization roles.

Managing Security in Google Cloud - An overview of implementing security at different levels in a company.

Assured Workloads and the Organizational Policy Service - Adjusting Organization Policy Constraints for Assured Workloads.

GCP-Cloud VPC Firewall With Service Accounts - An example of using VPC firewalls with a service account.

What is Workload Identity? - A keyless way to invoke Google Cloud Services.

Reducing GKE Log Ingestion - Controlling types of logs with filters, in the context of GKE.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Accelerating Ulta Beauty’s modernization with managed containerized microservices - With Anthos and GKE, the Ulta Beauty IT team can now create, manage, optimize, and secure its container platforms in record time.

Store secrets used by Firebase Cloud Functions - Using secrets from Secret Manger in Firebase (Cloud) Funtions.

AlloyDB’s Columnar Store : How to Preserve it During Failovers and Restarts. - Adopting Columnar Store involves identifying columns to be added, refreshing them and preserving them during restarts, failover or promote.

Google Translate API — Should you use V2 or V3? And what cool stuff are there in V3? - Have you heard about “Glossary” in translations? Or looking to use batch translations with Google translate? We’ll discuss these topics here.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

CI CD for Dataflow Java with Flex Templates and Cloud Build - This article shows a complete use case using CI/CD pipeline to build, deploy and run Apache Beam/Dataflow job.

Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine: A Comprehensive Guide to Healthcare Data Analytics - Healthcare Data Analytics Made Easy with Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine.

Understand and trust data with Dataplex data lineage - Track data movement across your organization using Dataplex data lineage, which is now generally available.

BigQuery under the hood: Behind the serverless storage and query optimizations that supercharge performance - BigQuery’s serverless architecture features storage and query optimizations that deliver transformational data analytics performance.

A data engineering project with Prefect, Docker, Terraform, Google CloudRun, BigQuery and Streamlit - Orchestrate data pipelines to find late buses in real-time — from raw data to live data visualisation.

Built with BigQuery: How Sift delivers fraud detection workflow backtesting at scale - How Sift Delivers Fraud Detection Workflow Backtesting at Scale powered by BigQuery.

Sumitovant more than doubles its research output in its quest to save lives - Sumitovant chose Looker to quickly build and scale flexible queries on massive data sets and integrate with more data sources via API.

Advanced Assert Queries for BigQuery Data Alerts - The article continues the BigQuery data alert development subject with more informative messages.

Building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem

Coop reduces food waste by forecasting with Google’s AI and Data Cloud - Coop ingested data from SAP systems to BigQuery, and used Vertex AI Forecast to train ML forecasting models to optimize its fresh produce stock.

Optimize PyTorch training performance with Reduction Server on Vertex AI - Data parallelism can improve your PyTorch training time and help with performance.

How Osmo is digitizing smell with Google Cloud AI technology - Osmo is cataloging the vast world of scents with Google Cloud AI, unlocking new use cases ranging from next-generation perfumes to disease mitigation.

Streaming with Change Data Capture into BigQuery - Using Streamkap to stream and replicate data into BigQuery.

Orchestrate ML Pipeline with Dataform and BigQuery - By combining Dataform (Preview as of March 2023) and ML Models in BigQuery (BQ ML), you can easily define and schedule your ML Pipelines.

Running a Stable Diffusion cluster on GCP with tensorflow-serving (Part 2) - Creating the artifacts and deploying the model on the cluster.

From pixels to information with Document AI - An overview of Document AI with practical and visual examples.

Various

Meet the inaugural class of the Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change in Europe - As part of the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change in Europe program, sustainability companies gain access to Google resources.

ChatGPT-4 passes Google Associate Cloud Engineer Sample Exam - ChatGPT answers sample questions from the Google Associate Cloud Engineer exam.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #112 Threat Horizons - How Google Does Threat Intelligence.

Releases

Anthos clusters on VMware - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.13.6-gke.32 is now available. Fixed an issue with Anthos Identity Service to better scale and handle concurrent authentication requests. Fixed the following vulnerabilities: Critical container vulnerabilities: CVE-2021-46848 CVE-2022-32221 High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-23946 CVE-2022-3094 CVE-2022-3970 Container-optimized OS vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-0286 Ubuntu vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-4203 CVE-2022-4304 CVE-2022-4450 CVE-2023-0215 CVE-2023-0216.

API Gateway - Fixed issue where API Gateway used the IP address of the Google Cloud Load Balancer (GCLB) (specifically the address of the forwarding rule) to validate IP-restricted API keys in requests proxied by a GCLB.

AppEngine Flexible Python - Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11 are now generally available.

Bare Metal Solution - You can now use the interactive serial console to access your Bare Metal Solution servers.

Batch - In the Google Cloud console, the Job details page has been updated to include an Events tab, which lists the job's status events and contains a link to the job's logs.

BigQuery - The Lineage tab in the table properties page lets you track how your data moves and transforms through BigQuery. You can now specify translation configurations in the BigQuery Interactive SQL Translator and use it to debug Batch SQL translator jobs.

BigTable - When you restore a backup, if the destination cluster doesn't have enough nodes to store the new table, Cloud Bigtable returns a FAILED_PRECONDITON error message.

Channel Services - All public SKU groups, including 8 Google Cloud Marketplace SKU groups are now available for repricing in the Partner Sales Console (PSC).

Chronicle - The following supported default parsers have changed. Each is listed by product name and ingestion label, if applicable. More details on the Release page.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer 2.1.10 and 1.20.10 release started on March 18, 2023. The Google Ads Python library (google-ads) package is updated to version 20.0.0. (Airflow 2.3.4 and 2.4.3 only) The apache-airflow-providers-google package was upgraded to version 2023.3.14+composer. 5 new Airflow metrics are now available in Cloud Monitoring. Cloud Composer 2 environments no longer create airflow.cfg and env_var.jsonfiles in the environment's bucket. Cloud Composer 2.1.10 and 1.20.10 images are available: composer-2.1.10-airflow-2.4.3 (default) composer-2.1.10-airflow-2.3.4 composer-1.20.10-airflow-1.10.15 composer-1.20.10-airflow-2.4.3 composer-1.20.10-airflow-2.3.4. Airflow 2.2.5 is no longer included in Cloud Composer images. Cloud Composer versions 2.0.7 and 1.18.3 have reached their end of full support period. PyPI package installation is now possible in network setups with maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 1280 bytes or more. Fixed the issue where BigQuery tasks in the deferrable mode failed when data lineage was enabled. Cloud Composer 2.1.9 and 1.20.9 images are available: composer-2.1.9-airflow-2.4.3 (default) composer-2.1.9-airflow-2.3.4 composer-2.1.9-airflow-2.2.5 composer-1.20.9-airflow-1.10.15 composer-1.20.9-airflow-2.4.3 composer-1.20.9-airflow-2.3.4 composer-1.20.9-airflow-2.2.5. Cloud Composer versions 2.0.6 and 1.18.2 have reached their end of full support period.

Compute Engine - End of life: On May 31, 2023, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) will reach end of life and the images deprecated on Google Cloud. Generally available: Hyperdisk provides the fastest block storage for Compute Engine for your high-end, memory intensive workloads.

Dataproc - New Dataproc Serverless for Spark runtime versions: 1.1.7 2.0.15 2.1.0-RC3.

Datastore - Support for the europe-west4 (Netherlands) region.

Deep Learning Containers - M104 Release Added the following packages: google-cloud-artifact-registry google-cloud-bigquery-storage google-cloud-language keyring keyrings.google-artifactregistry-auth Fixed a bug in which curl could not find the right SSL certificate path by default. TensorFlow Enterprise 2.1 has reached the end of its support period.

Cloud Filestore - Filestore instance support for non-RFC 1918 IP addresses is now generally available.

Cloud Firestore - Support for the europe-west4 (Netherlands) region.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions has added support for customer-managed encryption keys for 2nd gen functions at the Preview release level.

IAM - Workforce identity federation now supports browser-based sign-in.

Identity Platform - Identity Platform has updated several quotas.

Cloud Logging - The Logging Query Language now supports a built-in SEARCH function that you can use to find strings in your log data.

Cloud PubSub - General availability: You can now update the schemas that you create in Pub/Sub.

Secret Manager - Support for aliases in Secret Manager is now generally available.

Security Command Center - Virtual Machine Threat Detection, a built-in service of Security Command Center, launched the following detectors to Preview. The following attributes were added to the Finding object of the Security Command Center API.

SAP Solutions - New SAP HANA certification: Hyperdisk Extreme For use with SAP HANA, SAP has now certified the Compute Engine disk — Hyperdisk Extreme. SAP HANA: minimum sizes for persistent disks reduced Baseline performance improvements for PD-SSD and PD-Balanced have allowed us to reduce the minimum PD size required for most Compute Engine VM types running SAP HANA. Disk related enhancements for automating SAP HANA deployments with Terraform The Terraform configurations that Google Cloud provides for automating SAP HANA deployments, now support the following disk related enhancements: Using the argument disk_type, you can now specify the default disk type that you want to deploy for your SAP volumes. Google Cloud's Agent for SAP version 1.1 Version 1.1 of the Google Cloud's agent for SAP is now available.

Cloud Spanner - Support for the GoogleSQL-dialect THEN RETURN clause and the PostgreSQL-dialect RETURNING clause is now generally available. The following functions have been added to the GoogleSQL dialect: ARRAY_INCLUDES_ALL function ARRAY_INCLUDES_ANY function ARRAY_MIN function ARRAY_MAX function.

Cloud SQL MySQL - Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports 106 new database flags.

Cloud Storage - Expanded Cloud Storage monitoring dashboards are now generally available (GA).

Cloud Text-to-Speech - Cloud Text-to-Speech now offers Long Audio Synthesis.

Vertex AI - The M104 release of Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks includes the following: Fixed a regression in which jupyter-user metadata was ignored. TensorFlow Enterprise 2.1 has reached the end of its support period.

VMware Engine - Resource name translation will be required after April 2023.

VPC Service Controls - Preview stage support for the following integration: On-Demand Scanning API.

Virtual Private Cloud - Hybrid subnets are available in Preview.

Workflows - Support for a Transcoder API connector is available in Preview.