Welcome to issue #431 December 30th, 2024

With the last issue for 2024, I want to thank you for your support and wish you all the best in New Year.

News

Google is a Leader, positioned furthest in vision in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems - Google has been recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems for the fifth consecutive year.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Cloud CISO Perspectives: From gen AI to threat intelligence: 2024 in review - Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares the top security updates from 2024, including advancements in AI, threat intelligence, and security operations.

Open Policy Agent (OPA) on Terraform - Open Policy Agent (OPA) can be used to validate Terraform code and enforce pre-defined rules. OPA policies can be used to ensure compliance with business requirements, such as forcing subnetworks to use private access or VMs to use a specific machine type. Using OPA can help prevent undesired changes in the cloud and save time and money in large infrastructure environments.

Exposing GKE Apps Using GCP HTTP Load Balancer, Cloud Armor, Cloud CDN, and Istio — part 1 - This two-part series will guide you through the process of exposing a GKE-hosted application using GCP’s HTTP Load Balancer.

‘Hardware Refresh’ on Google Cloud - When performance and/or cost matter.

Building a CI/CD System for Private GKE Clusters with Google Cloud Deploy - This article discusses the creation of a robust Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) workloads.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Technical Notes On Troubleshooting A Google Cloud Run Deployment: Fixing Scaling, Memory, and Authentication Issues While Optimizing Cost - Troubleshooting and Optimizing a Google Cloud Run Deployment for Cost and Reliability.

Let’s run Go WebRTC server on the Google Cloud Platform - This article guides you through setting up a basic WebRTC server on the Google Cloud Platform using Go.

Docker in Google Cloud: Running Containers with GKE, Cloud Run, and GCE

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Google Ads Data Manager: Severely Unfinished Business - The new Conversion Import via BigQuery, Google Sheets, and other sources is still in Alpha.

Gemini 2.0 : The most important advancement in Google’s new AI Model… that everyone missed! - Google’s Responsible AI Efforts in Gemini 2.0. Why not many are talking about this, and why we should?

Multimodal Yoga Pose Recommender with Firestore Vector Search, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental! - This blog post presents a multimodal Yoga pose recommender system built using Google Cloud's Firestore, Vector Search Extension, and Gemini 2.0 Flash (Experimental).

Parallel Model Training with Kubeflow Pipelines on Vertex AI - This article discusses parallel processing in machine learning pipelines, particularly for training multiple models concurrently. By leveraging dsl.ParallelFor from Kubeflow Pipelines on Vertex AI, we can distribute tasks across multiple processors, significantly reducing runtime and cloud expenses.

Step-by-Step Implementation for a Customer Data Platform with GCP Dataplex Using Data Mesh Architecture (part 2/4) - In Part 2, we will implement two next steps: Step 3: Organize Data Zones for Each Domain, and Step 4: Enable Cross-Domain Access.

Step-by-Step Implementation for a Customer Data Platform with GCP Dataplex Using Data Mesh Architecture (part 3/4) - In Part 3, we will implement two next steps : Step 5: Build Unified Datasets, and Step 6: Monitor Data Quality.

Step-by-Step Implementation for a Customer Data Platform with GCP Dataplex Using Data Mesh Architecture (part 4/4) - In Part 4, we will implement the last one: Step 7: Enable Analytics.

Various

How to Pass the Google Cloud Professional Network Engineer Certification in 2025

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #204 Beyond PCAST: Phil Venables on the Future of Resilience and Leading Indicators.

Releases

BigQuery - BigQuery is available in the Mexico (northamerica-south1) region.

Chronicle - Check the release page to see a list of available parsers.

Contact Center AI Insights - Conversational Insights offers LLM-powered topic inference as a GA feature. Topic inference allows you to use your topic model to analyze new conversations and identify topics in real time. This feature is only available for English.

Database Migration Service - Database Migration Service for homogeneous PostgreSQL migrations to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL version 17. For more information, see Supported source and destination databases in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL migrations.

Google Kubernetes Engine - GKE cluster versions have been updated.

New versions available for upgrades and new clusters.

The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in control plane upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. For more information on versioning and upgrades, see GKE versioning and support and Upgrades.

Cloud SQL Postgres - The rollout of the following minor versions, extension versions, and plugin versions is complete:

Minor versions

• 12.20 is upgraded to 12.21. This version restores functionality of the ALTER {ROLE|DATABASE} SET role command that's present in PostgreSQL version 12.22. For more information, see the PostgreSQL 12.22 release notes.
• 13.16 is upgraded to 13.18.
• 14.13 is upgraded to 14.15.
• 15.8 is upgraded to 15.10.
• 16.4 is upgraded to 16.6.
• 17.0 is upgraded to 17.2.

Extension and plugin versions

• orafce is upgraded from 4.7 to 4.73 (for PostgreSQL instances, versions 11-16).
• pgAudit is upgraded from 17beta to 17.1 (for PostgreSQL instances, version 17).

To use these versions of the extensions, update your instance to one of the following:

• POSTGRES_17_0.R20241011.00_11 (for PostgreSQL instances, version 17)
• [PostgreSQL version].R20240910.01_31 (for PostgreSQL instances, versions 12 to 16)

If you use a maintenance window, then the updates to the minor, extension, and plugin versions happen according to the timeframe that you set in the window. Otherwise, the updates occur within the next few weeks.

For more information on checking your maintenance version, see Self-service maintenance. To find your maintenance window or to manage maintenance updates, see Find and set maintenance windows.