Welcome to issue #407 July 15th, 2024

News

Announcing AlloyDB free trial clusters: your playground for PostgreSQL innovation - AlloyDB free trial clusters provide you with the time and resources you need to perform a full-blown trial of AlloyDB, with a powerful 8 vCPU and 64 GB RAM primary instance and 1 TB of regional storage. sz.

New Cloud SQL upgrade tool for MySQL & PostgreSQL major versions and Enterprise Plus - Google Cloud has introduced a new automated Cloud SQL upgrade tool for major versions and Enterprise Plus. This tool simplifies the process of upgrading MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, reducing complexity, time, and errors.

Share your streaming data with Pub/Sub topics in Analytics Hub - Analytics Hub now supports sharing Pub/Sub topics, enabling organizations to curate, share, and monetize their streaming data assets. By leveraging Analytics Hub Exchanges and Listings, businesses can logically categorize and group sets of Pub/Sub topics and provision access at scale.

Safeguard your SAP environments with Workload Manager’s evaluation service - Google Cloud's Workload Manager provides an evaluation service for SAP systems, helping organizations safeguard their SAP environments by identifying potential misconfigurations and deviations from best practices. The service offers automated, rule-based analysis against an extensive set of best practices from Google Cloud, SAP, and operating system vendors. It includes rules for SAP General, High Availability, Netweaver & HANA, HANA Insights, and HANA Security Best Practices.

Unlocking Medical Insights: Secure AI Analyzes Data - Google Cloud Research Innovators, Chung and van Buchem, are using AI and cloud computing to make advanced cancer research tools more accessible and improve diagnoses for patients. Chung uses AI to study cancer images and has developed an AI tool that can accurately classify tumors and explain its decision-making process. Van Buchem applies Natural Language Processing tools to analyze patient communications and identify at-risk populations. Both researchers envision a future where cloud computing and AI can transform healthcare research and clinical practices.

Faster API development with the Cloud Code plugin for API management - The Cloud Code plugin for API management simplifies and accelerates API development within the Google Cloud console and commonly used IDEs. Developers can create workspaces, build proxies, and leverage Gemini Code Assist to streamline API delivery.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

IAM so lost: A guide to identity in Google Cloud - Identity and access management (IAM) can be challenging, especially as organizations grow and access control requirements increase. To simplify IAM management and achieve least privilege and separation of duties, persona mapping can be used to create groups based on job functions and assign roles to those groups. This approach streamlines onboarding, reduces administrative overhead, enhances security, and simplifies auditing.

Emboldened and Evolving: A Snapshot of Cyber Threats Facing NATO - NATO faces a barrage of malicious cyber activity from state-sponsored actors, hacktivists, and criminals. These threats include cyber espionage, disruptive and destructive cyberattacks, disinformation and information operations. The war in Ukraine has coincided with bolder and reckless cyber activity against NATO allies.

Manage Secrets Like a Pro: Leverage the Secret Manager add-on for GKE - The Secret Manager add-on for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) simplifies how you access and manage secrets in your pods. It provides easy access to secrets stored in Secret Manager, centralized management, enhanced security, and broad compatibility. With the Secret Manager add-on, you can mount secrets from Secret Manager directly as volumes in your pods, eliminating the need for custom code or additional credentials.

GKE Security Posture: Proactive Monitoring for Secure Clusters - GKE Security Posture provides a centralized view of potential security vulnerabilities within your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, enabling proactive threat detection and mitigation. Key features include workload security checks, vulnerability scanning, security bulletin surfacing, supply chain insights, and integration with Security Command Center. By leveraging GKE Security Posture, you can secure your containerized applications and maintain a healthy cloud-native environment.

Best Practices for Continuous Security and Compliance for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE — Standard Deployment) - Best practices for continuous security and compliance in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) include enabling auto-repair and auto-upgrade for cluster nodes, encrypting application-layer secrets and cluster nodes with customer-managed keys, enabling integrity monitoring and secure boot for cluster nodes, restricting network access to clusters, and using shielded GKE cluster nodes.

Simplifying VPC Service Control - VPC Service Control (VPC-SC) helps protect data in Google Cloud by creating perimeters that control access to resources. It provides an extra layer of security beyond IAM, allowing organizations to define fine-grained access controls based on network origin, identity, and other attributes.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Boost performance of Go applications with profile-guided optimization - Profile-guided optimization (PGO) is a technique that allows you to provide the Go compiler with a profile of your application at runtime, which it then uses to make smarter decisions about how to optimize your code. PGO can significantly improve the performance of your Go applications, especially for compute-intensive tasks.

How AlloyDB transformed Bayer’s data operations - Bayer Crop Science migrated to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL to handle a dramatic increase in traffic to its Field Answers data solution. AlloyDB's architecture significantly reduced the impact of scaling read traffic, improving performance and ensuring low replication delay. The migration allowed Bayer to meet growing demands and focus on innovation without being hindered by database limitations.

Digital Manager Guru processes over 24M transactions with Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus - Digital Manager Guru, an online sales platform provider, processes over 24 million transactions using Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus. Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise Plus powers transactions, ensuring high performance and reduced latency.

Your guide to CCAI Platform: The CCaaS that empowers agents and delights customers - The Contact Center AI Platform (CCAI Platform) is a comprehensive, unified solution that brings together Virtual Agent, Agent Assist, and Insights under one umbrella, providing a seamless, integrated experience for both agents and customers. It offers a range of features including unified communication, mobile-first design, AI-powered insights, enhanced agent experience, streamlined workflows, scalability, and robust security.

Transforming the Developer Experience for Every Engineering Role - Generative AI is revolutionizing software development by boosting productivity across various engineering disciplines, including application development, DevOps, site reliability, machine learning, data, security, QA, and software architecture. AI-powered tools assist in bug detection, prevention, fixes, and automated testing, accelerating innovation.

2X price-performance and 10X throughput: Isima’s ecommerce experiment with Z3 VMs - Isima, an ecommerce analytics cloud, tested Google's new Z3 virtual machine series and found that it delivered 2X better price-performance and 10X more throughput compared to general-purpose N2 VMs.

SPEC CPU® 2017 and GCP — mid-2024 refresh - The results show that the latest generation of Intel and AMD CPUs, paired with Google's third-generation machines, deliver significant performance improvements over previous generations. Intel Emerald Rapids (C4) emerges as the top performer, offering excellent single-thread and multi-thread performance. AMD Genoa (C3D) shows strong single-thread performance but inconsistent multi-thread results.

Cloud Logging events: Add rate limiting to preserve resources - Discover 2 serverless approaches to apply rate-limit event delivery to Cloud Run using Cloud Tasks. Custom code or service configuration?

Deploy Your Google Cloud Functions The Right Way (Step-by-Step Guide) - Covering GitHub versioning, CI/CD pipeline development and scheduling jobs within Google Cloud Platform.

Learning to Build a Gemini-Powered Serverless App, from the perspective of an application developer - Can you be an application developer while surviving in this new world around AI? Yes you can, by honing your abilities to Build With AI!

Turning an Idea into Reality: Finding Water Fountains in SF with Google Cloud - Here’s a technical step-by-step guide to create a website and deploy it on GCP.

Scaling a GPU app using custom metrics on GCP: Istio, HPA, and Cloud Tasks - This article describes how to scale a GPU application on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using custom metrics. It covers integrating Istio for traffic management and rate limiting, using Cloud Tasks for efficient request management, and enabling auto-scaling with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). The solution ensures that each pod serves only one request at a time, handling varying traffic loads efficiently.

Rust: Google Maps Platform Routes API - Slowly adding more to the unofficial Google API client for Rust.

Groogle 4.0.0 (Google DSL) - Groogle is a DSL (Domain Specific Language) oriented to interact with Google Cloud services in an easy way. It provides a concise language so you can create scripts or integrate them into your application and consume Google Cloud services such as Drive, Sheet, or Gmail.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Deployment patterns for Dataproc Metastore on Google Cloud - This blog post explores four DPMS deployment patterns: a single centralized multi-regional DPMS, centralized metadata federation with per-domain DPMS, decentralized metadata federation with per-domain DPMS, and ephemeral metadata federation. Each pattern has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the best choice for an organization will depend on its specific needs and requirements.

Get your BigQuery production sample, all self-serving - Google's self-service production sample data from BigQuery allows data scientists to access fresh samples of production data without manual intervention. It ensures data safety through policies and avoids accidental data exfiltration. The solution utilizes Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Secret Manager, and Cloud Monitoring.

BigQuery QUALIFY Clause: Towards Cleaner SQL Queries - One step towards prettier SQL: The QUALIFY keyword. Is it a fancy expression, or a better way to write your next query?

From GenAI Demo to Production Scale — Handling high-throughput use cases. - Google Cloud offers options for handling high-throughput use cases with Generative AI (GenAI). Two key options are explored: Vertex AI BATCH API and BigQuery ML.GENERATE_TEXT. Both provide cost benefits compared to real-time interactions, with BATCH API being more suitable for very large datasets.

Caching Out with Gemini: Making AI Chat Less Taxing (on Your Wallet) - Context caching, a feature of Google's Gemini API, optimizes AI chat interactions by storing frequently used data and reducing repetitive requests. It saves computational costs and enhances efficiency, particularly for chatbots with extensive backstories, video analysis, large document processing, and code analysis. By caching content like PDFs and videos, users can ask questions based on the cached data, leading to more streamlined and cost-effective AI conversations.

How To Run Gemini Nano Locally Using Google Chrome? - On-device Gemini Nano is now available on Chrome Canary.

RAG API powered by LlamaIndex on Vertex AI - The RAG API powered by LlamaIndex on Vertex AI provides an easy and flexible way to ground LLMs with private data. It offers features like indexing, embedding, retrieval, and generation. Users can upload various file types, including PDFs, DOCX, and PPTX, and customize settings such as chunk size and similarity thresholds.

Distributed OpenSource LLM Fine-Tuning with LLaMA-Factory on GKE - This blog post explores distributed fine-tuning for LLMs using open-source tool LLaMA-Factory on Google Kubernetes Engine. LLaMA-Factory empowers researchers and developers to leverage pre-trained LLaMA models and efficiently fine-tune them on their own datasets.

Long Document Summarization Techniques with Java, Langchain4J and Gemini models - Explore AI-driven summarization techniques for large documents, using Java, Langchain4J and the power of Google Gemini.

Enhancing Vector Search with Gemini as Multimodal Re-Ranker - Why Vertex AI Vector Search and Gemini’s Multimodal Capabilities are a Perfect Match.

Text classification with Gemini and LangChain4j - Text classification with Gemini and LangChain4j explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for text classification tasks. The article demonstrates three approaches: zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and text classification with embedding models. Each approach is explained with code examples and practical scenarios, such as sentiment analysis and recipe classification. The article highlights the capabilities of LLMs in text classification and provides insights into choosing the appropriate approach based on the availability of labeled data and specific requirements.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #230 Observability & Engineering Management, with Charity Majors.

Security Podcast - #180 SOC Crossroads: Optimization vs Transformation - Two Paths for Security Operations Center.

Releases

Agent Assist - Agent Assist now offers a new version of summarization with custom sections in preview.

AlloyDB - The extension pgvector is updated to version 0.7.0. Performing a switchover with zero data loss in cross-region replication setups, to test disaster recovery (DR) or to perform workload migration, is now generally available (GA).

Google Distributed Cloud Bare Metal - 1.28. Release 1.28.700-gke.150 Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal 1.28.700-gke.150 is now available for download. Fixes: Fixed an issue where upgraded clusters didn't get label updates that match the labels applied for newly created clusters, for a given version. The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed in 1.28.700-gke.150: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-48655 CVE-2024-0985 Medium-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-26900 CVE-2024-28122 CVE-2024-36902 GHSA-6xv5-86q9-7xr8 Low-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2021-4440. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

GKE on AWS - You can now launch clusters with the following Kubernetes versions. The following vulnerabilities were discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to a privilege escalation on Container-Optimized OS and Ubuntu nodes: CVE-2023-52654 CVE-2023-52656 For more information, see the GCP-2024-041 security bulletin.

Anthos clusters on Azure - You can now launch clusters with the following Kubernetes versions. The following vulnerabilities were discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to a privilege escalation on Container-Optimized OS and Ubuntu nodes: CVE-2023-52654 CVE-2023-52656 For more information, see the GCP-2024-041 security bulletin.

GDCV for VMware - Google Distributed Cloud for VMware 1.29.200-gke.245 is now available for download. The following vulnerabilities are fixed In 1.29.200-gke.245: Container-optimized OS vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-6387 Ubuntu vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-6387. Google Distributed Cloud for VMware 1.28.700-gke.151 is now available for download. The following issues are fixed in 1.28.700-gke.151: Fixed the known issue where the Binary Authorization webhook blocked the CNI plugin, which caused user cluster creation to stall. Google Distributed Cloud for VMware 1.16.10-gke.36 is now available for download. The following vulnerabilities are fixed In 1.16.10-gke.36: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-28948 CVE-2024-0985 CVE-2024-2961 CVE-2024-33599 Container-optimized OS vulnerabilities: CVE-2021-3520 CVE-2024-6387 CVE-2024-27018 CVE-2024-32004 CVE-2024-32465. The following vulnerabilities were discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to a privilege escalation on Container-Optimized OS and Ubuntu nodes: CVE-2023-52654 CVE-2023-52656 For more information, see the GCP-2024-041 security bulletin.

Apigee X - On July 11, 2024, we released an updated version of Apigee (1-12-0-apigee-8). Bug ID Description 330175485 Security fix for apigee-ingress.This addresses the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-23326 CVE-2024-32974 CVE-2024-32975 CVE-2024-32976 CVE-2024-34362 CVE-2024-34363 CVE-2024-34364. Bug ID Description N/A Updated libraries and infrastructure. Updated: Limit on number of basepaths per environment Apigee is raising the temporary limit of 1000 basepaths per environment to avoid potential failures when deploying API proxy revisions.

AppEngine Flexible - .NET - .NET version 3 and earlier have reached end of support.

AppEngine Flexible Go - Go version 1.19 and earlier have reached end of support.

AppEngine Flexible NodeJS - Node.js version 16 and earlier have reached end of support.

AppEngine Flexible PHP - PHP version 7.4 and earlier have reached end of support.

AppEngine Flexible Python - Python version 3.7 and earlier have reached end of support.

AppEngine Flexible Ruby - Ruby version 3.1 and earlier have reached end of support.

Application Integration - The following Connector Event triggers are generally available: SAP ERP trigger SAP Gateway trigger.

Cloud Asset Inventory - The following resource types are now publicly available through the ExportAssets, ListAssets, BatchGetAssetsHistory, QueryAssets, Feed, and Search (SearchAllResources, SearchAllIamPolicies) APIs.

Billing - You can now view granular AlloyDB for PostgreSQL usage in the Cloud Billing Detailed export to BigQuery. You can now view granular AlloyDB for PostgreSQL cluster, instance, and backup data in the Google Cloud Billing detailed export. Tags data for AlloyDB for PostgreSQL cluster, instance, and backup usage is available in both the Standard usage cost export and the Detailed usage cost export.

Cloud Build - Cloud Build users can connect to Bitbucket Cloud and Bitbucket Data Center hosts and add repositories with the Terraform provider for Google Cloud.

Chronicle Security Operations - Python 2.7 is being deprecated and will be fully removed on October 13, 2024. Support for Python 3.11: Google SecOps now supports Python 3.11 in all the certified integrations. IDE Staging mode: A staging mode has been added to the IDE where you can test certified and custom integrations as well as custom items.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.3.10 is now in General Availability. Python 2.7 is being deprecated and will be fully removed on October 13, 2024. Release 6.3.11 is currently in Preview. Support for Python 3.11: Google SecOps now supports Python 3.11 in all the certified integrations. IDE Staging mode: A staging mode has been added to the IDE where you can test certified and custom integrations as well as custom items. Case tag filter pagination is not working in cases page (ID #339581969). Issues when testing SOAR Webhooks for ingestion (ID #51862016). Release 6.3.9 is now in General Availability.

Compute Engine - You can only create on-demand reservations of A3 VMs if you create specifically targeted reservations. Generally available: You can create GPU VMs in a managed instance group (MIG) by using resize requests. Generally available: Hyperdisk ML, block storage designed specifically for high-performance AI workloads.

Config Connector - Config Connector version 1.120.1 is now available. IAM configuration can now be applied to PrivateCACAPool. You can configure the ConfigConnector operator to roll back to install the v1.119.0 CRDs by specifying spec.version: 1.119.0 in the ConfigConnectorContext CR (namespaced mode). CloudBuildWorkerPool is promoted from alpha to beta. CloudIDSEndpoint is promoted from alpha to beta. ComputeMangedSSLCertificate is promoted from alpha to beta. AlloyDBInstance Added networkConfig field to support Public-IP feature. MonitoringAlertPolicy Added spec.severity field. MonitoringDashboard Added dashboardFilters support. StorageBucket Added spec.softDeletePolicy field.

Contact Center AI Platform - Version 3.18 is released: New custom data types for events The following custom data types for events are now available using the Web SDK: custom_data_secured custom_data_not_secured For more information, see Data for events. New session events for quality management The following session events are now available for quality management (QM) integration: Hold Mute Redaction Recording indication Queue information. Fixed an issue where agents were not receiving audio notifications for breakthrough calls. Fixed an issue where saving queue-level wrap-up settings to the global defaults was not behaving as expected. Fixed an issue where viewing agent assignments was not possible for agents with a custom role.

Data Fusion - You can configure maintenance windows for Cloud Data Fusion instances, in versions 6.8 and later, in Preview.

Database Migration Service - Database Migration Service for heterogeneous Oracle migrations can now migrate tables without primary or unique constraints that have more than 500 million rows.

Dataflow - You can now use the Dataflow job builder UI to create and run Dataflow pipelines in the Google Cloud console, without writing any code.

Dataplex - Dataplex Catalog is generally available (GA).

Dataproc - New Dataproc on Compute Engine subminor image versions: 2.0.110-debian10, 2.0.110-rocky8, 2.0.110-ubuntu18 2.1.58-debian11, 2.1.58-rocky8, 2.1.58-ubuntu20, 2.1.58-ubuntu20-arm 2.2.24-debian12, 2.2.24-rocky9, 2.2.24-ubuntu22.

Dialogflow - Vertex AI Agents: Agent apps now provide generative settings for input token limit, output token limit, and temperature.

Google Distributed Cloud Edge - Distributed Cloud connected 1.7.0. This is a minor release of Google Distributed Cloud connected (version 1.7.0). The following new functionality has been introduced in this release of Google Distributed Cloud connected: Customer-sourced hardware. The following changes to existing functionality have been introduced in this release of Google Distributed Cloud connected: Bastion host GA. The following functionality has been deprecated in this release of Google Distributed Cloud connected: Cloud control plane cluster support. The following issues have been resolved in this release of Google Distributed Cloud connected: Symcloud Storage volume clean-up now functions correctly. This release of Google Distributed Cloud connected contains the following known issues: Refreshed Google Distributed Cloud connected hardware requires Google Distributed Cloud connected software version 1.7.0 or later.

Anti Money Laundering AI - A new major engine version is now available for Retail and Commercial lines of business, within the v4 tuning version.

Cloud Functions - Starting in July 2024, Cloud Build has changed the default behavior for how Cloud Build uses service accounts in new projects.

Cloud Healthcare API - Using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) to encrypt Cloud Healthcare API datasets is generally available (GA) and available in Preview.

Integration Connectors - The following connectors support event subscription: SAP ERP SAP Gateway You can use the eventing feature in Application Integration through the SAP ERP trigger and SAP Gateway trigger respectively. Integration Connectors is now available in the following additional regions: Berlin (europe-west10) Turin (europe-west12) For the list of all the supported regions, see Locations. The Jira Cloud connector now supports OAuth 2.0 - Authorization code.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2024-R24) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. GKE Autopilot now supports opportunistic bursting and lower Pod minimums upon cluster creation or upgrade to 1.30.2-gke.1394000 or later, resolving a previous issue with containerd. The following vulnerabilities were discovered in the Linux kernel that can lead to a privilege escalation on Container-Optimized OS and Ubuntu nodes: CVE-2023-52654 CVE-2023-52656 For more information, see the GCP-2024-041 security bulletin. (2024-R23) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. Ray Operator on GKE is now generally available in the Rapid channel.

GKE new features - Ray Operator on GKE is now generally available in the Rapid channel. Ray Operator is a GKE add-on that allows you to manage and scale Ray applications.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - The following versions are now available in the Rapid channel: 1.27.15-gke.1125000, 1.27.15-gke.1154000, 1.28.11-gke.1170000, 1.28.11-gke.1172000, 1.29.6-gke.1137000, 1.29.6-gke.1254000, 1.30.2-gke.1394000, 1.30.2-gke.1447000.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - Version 1.29.5-gke.1091002 is now the default version in the Regular channel. The following versions are now available in the Regular channel: 1.27.14-gke.1059001, 1.27.14-gke.1059002, 1.28.11-gke.1019001, 1.29.6-gke.1038001.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - Version 1.28.9-gke.1289002 is now the default version in the Stable channel. The following versions are now available in the Stable channel: 1.27.14-gke.1042001, 1.28.10-gke.1058001, 1.28.10-gke.1075001, 1.29.5-gke.1091001, 1.29.5-gke.1091002.

Cloud Logging - Log buckets in all regions supported by Cloud Logging can now be upgraded to use Log Analytics.

Looker - Looker (Google Cloud core) and Looker (original) changes. Looker 24.12 includes the following changes, features, and fixes: Expected Looker (original) final deployment and download available: Thursday, July 25, 2024 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) deployment start: Monday, July 15, 2024 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) final deployment: Monday, July 29, 2024. A LookML validator error, which catches illegal sql_trigger values in models with parameterized connections, has been added. The Chart Config Editor now supports the following pie chart legend properties: align, verticalAlign, and layout. Admins can now edit groups and roles for users who only have API keys. When a file or folder is created, updated, or accessed in the Looker IDE, Looker now displays a loading indicator. The File Browser sidebar in the Looker IDE is now resizeable. A new Create button in the main navigation panel lets users create dashboards, boards, LookML models, and database connections. A new Explore from Here icon now appears on dashboard tiles and lets dashboard viewers explore a tile's data in one click. Looker now supports Databricks Unity Catalog. An issue has been fixed where filter values with a special character and a trailing space would filter out valid results. An issue has been fixed where Aurora MySQL connections that do not provide the lookerFailover parameter in the Additional JDBC parameters setting would fail to connect. The LookML validator will now return an error if a sql_distinct_key is used in a field type that does not support it. An issue where PDT overrides could not be toggled off in some situations has been fixed. An issue was causing tooltips on timeline visualizations to not respect timezone conversion settings. Rendering for dashboards that include special characters in their titles has been fixed. Query results that contained characters that aren't in the UTF-8 character set could cause queries to fail. Previously, extra filter suggestions queries would run when a filter was removed in an Explore. An issue was causing the LookML validator to return an incorrect error for an improperly formed value format string. An issue was causing visualization formats to round incorrectly. Previously, some Looks had a null Look ID in System Activity Explores. An issue was causing Looker to sometimes incorrectly generate date literals for Postgres queries. Previously, queries could not be sorted on date fields in specific situations. Previously, user attribute values that contained certain special characters could not be saved. An issue was causing Looker to generate incorrect join SQL for circular join references. Previously, drill-downs didn't work properly in some map visualizations. An issue with the Closed System option allowed the name of the user who created or updated a dashboard last to be viewed by users who weren't in the same group. Looker (original) only changes. OpenJDK 8 is no longer supported. A new Labs feature, Delegate Schedule Management, introduces the manage_schedules permission. Looker (Google Cloud core) only changes. If a Looker instance does not yet have any Looks or dashboards, the Looker homepage now shows sample dashboards. Looker (Google Cloud core) now supports connections to Teradata databases.

Marketplace Partners - We've made the following changes to Cloud Marketplace partner reports: We've added a new field, extraordinary_payment_note, to the detailed disbursement report.

Memorystore for Redis Cluster - Single-zone instances are now Generally Available on Memorystore for Redis Cluster.

Migrate to Virtual Machines - The Migrate Connector, the virtual appliance used to connect VMware sources to Migrate to Virtual Machines, is exposed to a security vulnerability on SSHD (CVE-2024-6387).

Cloud Monitoring - Starting no sooner than January 7, 2025, Cloud Monitoring will begin charging for alerting. Your dashboards will now recommend event types for display.

Network Intelligence Center - The GKE Enterprise view of Network Topology is generally available.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise - reCAPTCHA for WAF integration with Akamai is now available in Preview.

Cloud Run - Starting July 2024, Cloud Build changed the default behavior for how Cloud Build uses service accounts in new projects.

Service Mesh - 1.21.x. 1.21.4-asm.5 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh. 1.20.x. 1.20.8-asm.1 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh. 1.19.x. 1.19.10-asm.9 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh.

SAP Solutions - New SAP HANA certification: 16 TB X4 bare metal machine type for OLAP workloads SAP has certified the Compute Engine 16 TB x4-megamem-960-metal machine type for use with SAP HANA OLAP workloads in scale-out configurations with up to 4 nodes.

Cloud Spanner - Spanner now supports dual-region instance configurations in Australia, Germany, India, and Japan. Spanner now supports the approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) distance functions (APPROX_COSINE_DISTANCE(), APPROX_EUCLIDEAN_DISTANCE(), and APPROX_DOT_PRODUCT()) in the GoogleSQL dialect (in Preview).

Cloud Storage - You can now specify Frankfurt (europe-west3) and Zürich (europe-west6) as a predefined dual-region pairing.

Traffic Director - 1.21.x. 1.21.4-asm.5 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh. 1.20.x. 1.20.8-asm.1 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh. 1.19.x. 1.19.10-asm.9 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh.

VMware Engine - Added missing release notes for ve2-standard-128 availability in australia-southeast1 region.