Welcome to issue #214 November 2nd, 2020

News

Cybersecurity Awareness Month—New security announcements for Google Cloud - Today’s announcements include new security features, whitepapers that explore our encryption capabilities, and use-case demos to help deploy products optimally.

New Cloud Shell Editor: Get your first cloud-native app running in minutes - The new Cloud Shell Editor is a fully functional development environment for Google Cloud that you can access directly from your browser.

Trigger Cloud Run with events from more than 60 Google Cloud sources - Now, you can invoke applications running on Cloud Run with events generated by over 60 Google Cloud services.

Cloud Storage object lifecycle management gets new controls - Two new Cloud Storage Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) rules can help you protect your data and lower your TCO.

What you can learn in our Q4 2020 Google Cloud Security Talks - Google Cloud Security Talks, a live online event on November 18th, will help you navigate the latest thinking in cloud security.

Helpful product updates from Firebase Summit 2020 - News from 2020 Firebase summit.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Boo! Fight off your scariest cloud monsters with Active Assist - Learn how Active Assist can help you fix underused or misconfigured Google Cloud resources.

Password sign-in best practices - Best practices for authentication on Firebase and Cloud Identity Platform.

Preparing Google Cloud deployments for Docker Hub pull request limits - Changes to Docker Hub rate limits on pull requests may impact container-based applications on Google Cloud, but there are mitigation strategies.

Upgrading Google Kubernetes Engine - Article describes how to avoid common issues when upgrading GKE.

Setting up Cloud Operations for GKE - A review of Cloud Ops for GKE.

Understanding Data Encryption in Google Cloud - GCP Comics #4: Encryption to secure your data in cloud.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Comparing containerization methods: Buildpacks, Jib, and Dockerfile - Container Images can be created using a variety of methods including Buildpacks, Jib, and Dockerfiles. Let's compare them.

Modernize your Java apps with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud GCP - Spring Cloud GCP provides a wealth of capabilities for creating modern Java applications and microservices.

Stateful serverless on Google Cloud with Cloudstate and Akka Serverless - Lightbend’s Akka Serverless running on Google Cloud provides an alternative to running a stateless middle-tier.

Save Costs by Scheduling your Google App Engine Flex Instance to Switch Off and On - Scripts to use with Cloud Scheduler to turn on and off App Engine Flex instance in the context of data processing.

Making Scalable API Calls to a Salesforce server using a Static IP from a serverless environment… - This article illustrates how we set-up a GCP infrastructure that enables application deployed on App Engine to make API calls to a server that requested a Static IP for whitelisting at scale.

Deploying serverless GCP Cloud Function via Bitbucket Pipelines - Setting CI/CD pipeline in Bitbucket to deploy Cloud Function.

Hands-On With Agones and Google Cloud Game Servers - I recently had the pleasure of exploring Agones and Google Cloud Game Servers (GCGS), and I wanted to share my experience.

Neo4j Aura & PubSub on Google Cloud: Image Annotation - Neo4j Aura + Google Cloud integration example that does automatic image annotation to graphs.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

How to Deploy Your Apache Beam Pipeline in Google Cloud Dataflow - Deployments of Beam pipelines on Cloud Dataflow.

How To Read a PubSub Messages on GCP Dataflow - Example of the Beam pipeline which reads PubSub messages.

Just Released: BigQuery User friendly SQL Functions - A closer look at the newest "user-friendly SQL capabilities" released for BigQuery.

Conditionally unmask columns in BigQuery using Authorized UDFs - This tutorial explains how to embed BigQuery’s AEAD encryption functions into Authorized UDFs, to conditionally manipulate decrypted values without exposing the encryption key to the end user.

10 FREE BigQuery operations every data-pro should know - A list of free operations in BigQuery.

Getting Daily Mean Temperature from Historical Weather Data - Using BigQuery NOAA Public weather dataset to get information about temperatures.

Post BigQuery data on Facebook Marketing API - How to easily post data from a BigQuery table on Facebook Marketing API, using Python and the Google Cloud Platform.

Data Transfer from AWS Redshift to BigQuery - A process to copy data from AWS Redshift to BigQuery using only SQL and command-line tools.

A Quick Experiment with the CARTO BigQuery Tiler! - Using CARTO’s new BigQuery Tiler to visualize GIS data.

Using remote and event-triggered AI Platform Pipelines - Setting up remote and event-triggered ML pipeline jobs on Google Cloud.

All treats, no tricks with product recommendation reference patterns - Get started with predictive analytics for retail using product recommendation design patterns. Try other cloud reference patterns with sample code for analytics use cases.

Serving Machine Learning models in Google Cloud - This multi-part blog discusses common options for high-performance ML model inference in Google Cloud, when to use which, and introduces the new member of the AI Platform family: Custom Container Prediction.

Various

These inspiring small and medium businesses are helping the world navigate COVID-19 together - Google Cloud Platform has helped numerous companies and organizations adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.

From McDonald’s to Google: How Kelsey Hightower became one of the most respected people in cloud computing - An inspiring story about Kelsey Hightower, GCP Developer Advocate.

Tips to pass the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Certification exam - Some tips on how to prepare for the Data Engineer Certification exam and pass it successfully.

How to Crack the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Exam in 1 Month (October 2020) - A dummies guide to ace the GCP Data Engineer Certification.

How to ace the ACE- GCP - I recently sat for (and passed) Google’s Associate Cloud Engineer exam. I wanted to write a brief blog and share my experience; and maybe….

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #242 NASA and FDL with James Parr and Madhulika Guhathakurta.

Kubernetes Podcast - #127 Pop Punk to Pods, with David Pait.

Releases

Document AI - v1beta3. Document AI Preview released The following beta and preview features are available in API version v1beta3: Procure-to-pay processors: Invoice parser and receipt parser.

AI Platform - Deep Learning Containers - Added PyTorch 1.6 CUDA 11 environments that support A100 GPU accelerators.

AI Platform - Deep Learning VMs - M58 release Added PyTorch 1.6 CUDA 11 images that support A100 GPU accelerators. TensorFlow Enterprise updated to 2.3.1 from 2.3.0.

Anthos Config Management - 1.5.1. Anthos Config Management now includes the ability to sync from multiple Git repositories. The installed product version was being misreported as "anthos-config-management" in ACM 1.5.0. Note: this issue applies only to ACM in multi-repo mode. The nomos status output has been modified significantly to provide a consistent experience for both mono-repo and multi-repo clusters. (Fixed on October 30, 2020) The version of Anthos Configuration Management included in the Anthos On-Prem release 1.5.1-gke.8 had initially referenced a version of the nomos image that had not be moved into the gcr.io/gke-on-prem-release repository, thus preventing a successful installation and/or upgrade of Anthos Configuration Management.

AppEngine Standard Java - Updated Java SDK to version 1.9.83.

BigQuery - BigQuery standard SQL now supports the SUBSTRING function.

Billing - Updated the schema for the Cloud Billing data tables in the Billing BigQuery usage export to provide more clarity and data to customers.

CDN - Added a new tutorial: Setting up an HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect. Cloud CDN can now cache more response codes, including common error codes such as 404 (Not Found), 301 (Permanent Redirect), 302 (Temporary Redirect), and many others.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.12.5-airflow-1.10.6, composer-1.12.5-airflow-1.10.9, and composer-1.12.5-airflow-1.10.10. More detailed error messages are now provided for errors during Python package installation. Fixed an issue where DAG definition files that exceeded 64kb were not working with [core] store_dag_code mode enabled.

Compute Engine - NVIDIA® V100 GPUs are now available in the following additional regions and zones: South Carolina, North America: us-east1-c For information about using V100 GPUs on Compute Engine, see GPUs on Compute Engine. You can use VM Manager in VPC Service Controls. N2D Machine types are now available in London, europe-west2-a,b. N2D Machine types are now available in Eemshaven, Netherlands, europe-west4-a.

Data Fusion - You can now specify which Cloud Data Fusion version to use when you create an instance. You can now specify the service account to use for running your Cloud Data Fusion pipeline on Dataproc: You specify the service account when you create an instance.

Dataproc - Added a dataproc:dataproc.cooperative.multi-tenancy.user.mapping cluster property which takes a list of comma-separated user-to-service account mappings. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.3.75-debian10, 1.3.75-ubuntu18, 1.4.46-debian10, 1.4.46-ubuntu18, 1.5.21-debian10, 1.5.21-ubuntu18, 2.0.0-RC17-debian10, and 2.0.0-RC17-ubuntu18. Fixed a bug in HBASE optional component on HA clusters in which hbase.rootdir was always configured to be hdfs://${CLUSTER_NAME}-m-0:8020/hbase, which assumes that master 0 is the active namenode. Image 1.3 to 2.0 preview: Fixed HIVE-19202: CBO failed due to NullPointerException in HiveAggregate.isBucketedInput(). Image 2.0 preview: Fixed HADOOP-15124: Slow FileSystem.Statistics counters implementation.

Cloud Data Loss Prevention - DATE and TIME infoType detectors are now available in all regions.

Cloud Firestore - You can now start import and export operations from the Google Cloud Console.

Cloud Healthcare API - v1alpha2. A new configuration field enable_full_index, has been added for HL7v2 stores.

Networking Interconnect - Organization policy constraints for Cloud Interconnect is now available in General Availability.

Cloud Logging - You can now create sinks from within the Logs Explorer and Logs Router pages. To help you understand your logs volume and usage within the context of your Logs Buckets, the Resource Usage page has been moved to the Logs Storage page, which now contains your resource usage information.

Cloud Monitoring - Enhancements to the pre-configured Compute Engine VM Instances dashboard.

Cloud NAT - Organization policy constraints for Cloud NAT is available in General Availability.

Cloud Spanner - The following updates for Cloud Spanner SQL are now available: Ability to convert between BYTES and base32-encoded strings using FROM_BASE32 and TO_BASE32 functions.

Cloud SQL MySQL - In Cloud SQL for MySQL, 80 supported flags that previously were in beta are now generally available.

AI Platform Prediction - You can now use use a custom container to customize how you serve predictions. Console logging (formerly also referred to as "stream logging") is now available in preview for Compute Engine (N1) machine types and in GA for legacy (MLS1) machine types. Read a new document about using custom service accounts with custom containers or custom prediction routines.

Tensorflow Enterprise - TensorFlow Enterprise 2.3 has been updated to 2.3.1 from 2.3.0.

Deep Learning VM - M58 release Added PyTorch 1.6 CUDA 11 images that support A100 GPU accelerators. TensorFlow Enterprise updated to 2.3.1 from 2.3.0.

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