Welcome to issue #216 November 16th, 2020

News

Introducing the Anthos Developer Sandbox—free with a Google account - The new Anthos Developer Sandbox spins up all the tools you need to learn how to develop for the Anthos platform.

Accelerating cloud migrations with the new Database Migration Service - The new Database Migration Service lets you perform a homogeneous migration to managed cloud databases like Cloud SQL for MySQL.

Announcing our new Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification - Learn about the Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification.

Healthcare gets more productive with new industry-specific AI tools - We’re launching in public preview a suite of fully-managed AI tools to help healthcare professionals with the review and analysis of medical documents in a repeatable, scalable way.

Enhancing our privacy commitments to customers - We’re expanding on our commitments to provide industry-leading security and product capabilities, along with transparency and visibility into when and how your data is accessed.

A New Region and API for the Realtime Database - Firebase Realtime database is launched in Belgium region.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

It’s not DNS: Ensuring high availability in a hybrid cloud environment - Learn how to configure your environment to ensure that your Cloud DNS environment is highly available in a hybrid environment.

Health checking your gRPC servers on GKE - Kubernetes does not have built-in support for health checking using the gRPC protocol, however, you can work around this by using a standard command-line tool built for this purpose.

How To Provision Infrastructure on GCP With Terraform - A Beginner’s Guide with an example project.

Automated Deployments with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and IaC with Terraform - Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system for running Docker containers, while Terraform is a….

Automating Terraform Deployment to Google Cloud with GitHub Actions - CI/CD using GitHub Actions.

Top Seven Google Cloud Security Capabilities to Implement in your GCP Cloud Deployment - An overview of Google Cloud security products.

Google Cloud Platform and the spurious 502 Bad Gateway - Fixing 502 Bad Gateway responses from Google Cloud LoadBalancers.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Database Migration Service Connectivity—A technical introspective - Migrating your database is hard. So is network connectivity. See how Google’s Database Migration Service can make migration reliable, easy and secure.

Best practices for homogeneous database migrations - Homogeneous database migrations—across compatible database engines—helps improve app performance. See how to migrate databases to Google Cloud.

Getting Started with Flamelink, a CMS for Firebase - Flamelink is a headless Content Management System (CMS) built specifically for Firebase which supports both Cloud Firestore and the Realtime Database.

Understanding Resumable Upload in Google Cloud Storage and cURL example. - Explanation and demonstration of how resumable upload works in Cloud Storage.

Implementing Asynchronous Processing with Google Cloud Tasks and Cloud Functions for Firebase - Demonstration of using transactions in Firestore and Cloud Tasks.

3 solutions to mitigate the cold-starts on Cloud Run. - Cold starts are the weakness of serverless and scale to 0 services. But there is solutions to prevent them!

Connecting Securely to Google Compute Engine VMs without a Public IP or VPN - How to establish secure RDP, ssh, and VNC connections to VMs on GCE that don’t have a public IP or VPN connectivity.

Introducing “GCP Project Switcher” Extension for VS Code — My Weekend Project - GCP Project Switcher is a Visual Studio Code extension which allows switching between GCP projects.

Deploying a Python Dash app on App Engine with a Flask/Cloud Run backend and Firebase auth - Learn how to deploy a beautiful dashboard using Python and Dash on GCP. Then add user authentication with Firebase.

Deploying FastAPI application in Google App Engine in Standard Environment - Deploying FastAPI (a modern, fast/high-performance web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ on App Engine.

From Memcache to Cloud MemoryStore - Using memcache for Cloud Memorystore.

Just Released: Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 13 - Looking at PostregSQL 13 functionalities which are supported in Cloud SQL.

Deploying a React app to Google Cloud Run with GitHub Actions - Google’s Cloud Run product allows for scalable containerized applications in a fully managed serverless environment.

Realtime Database Triggers with Firebase Functions - Cloud Functions for Firebase is truly a great way add quick database triggered events to your project with minimal effort and deploy time….

Cloud Run Docker Mirror - Cloud Run Docker Mirror copies images from one Docker v2 Registry to another, as a service.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

BigQuery Authorised View verification workflow - Verify your Views in a BigQuery dataset, to make sure the Authorised Views are going to work without disrupting your ETL.

BigQuery Explained: Data Manipulation (DML) - Dive into data manipulation in BigQuery, use cases and syntax of DML, considerations when using DML, and best practices for using DML.

Dataproc cooperative multi-tenancy - How you can use Dataproc Cooperative Multi-Tenancy to share Dataproc clusters across multiple users.

Validating successful execution of BigQuery scripts using ASSERT - Use ASSERT to verify pre- and post- conditions in BigQuery.

Time series analytics with BigQuery - Techniques for tumbles, fills, and interpolation.

Dasymetric Spatial Interpolation in BigQuery - Achieving spatial interpolation using BigQueries geospatial functions.

BigTips: INFORMATION_SCHEMA Views in BigQuery - Working with INFORMATION SCHEMA views in BigQuery.

Business Glossary support in Google Data Catalog - Using Open Connector Framework to connect Egeria (an Open Metadata and Governance project which promotes metadata exchange between tools and platforms) and Data Catalog.

Running BERT on Google Cloud Platform With TPU - Use Google Cloud and TPU to Build a Deep Learning Environment.

Multi-worker distributed Tensorflow training on Google Cloud AI Platform - An introduction on leveraging the ease and power of Tensorflow and Google Cloud.

Various

DORA and the shared pursuit of digital operational resilience in finance - Google Cloud is following the proposed DORA regulation and is contributing to the collaborative dialogue to help it achieve the European Commission’s priorities.

Forbes embraces MongoDB on Google Cloud as part of digital-first strategy - Forbes demonstrates what's possible when a tech organization executes a growth strategy that integrates a DBaaS solution with a cloud-native application architecture.

Google Cloud’s Big Win: the Remarkable 2-Year Journey of CEO Thomas Kurian

DevRel Content Creation with Stephanie Wong from Google Cloud - In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, Stephanie Wong, Developer Advocate at Google Cloud talks about her work of creating remarkable online developer content.

GCP Professional Cloud Architect Certification - Everything you need to know - There is a high probability that you came here looking for an answer to the question of how to pass the GCP Professional Cloud Architect….

Taking the Google Cloud Certification Online Exam - Notes on the remote/online certification exam.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #129 Linkerd, with Thomas Rampelberg.

Releases

AI Platform Prediction - The following regional endpoints are now generally available for online prediction, in addition to the regional endpoints that were already available: us-east1-ml.googleapis.com us-east4-ml.googleapis.com us-west1-ml.googleapis.com northamerica-northeast1-ml.googleapis.com europe-west1-ml.googleapis.com europe-west2-ml.googleapis.com europe-west3-ml.googleapis.com asia-northeast1-ml.googleapis.com asia-southeast1-ml.googleapis.com australia-southeast1-ml.googleapis.com On some of these regional endpoints, you can use GPUs to accelerate prediction.

Deep Learning VM - M59 release Miscellaneous bug fixes. tensorflow_enterprise_addon package is renamed to tensorflow-cloud.

Service Mesh - 1.6.x & 1.7.x. Anthos Service Mesh, Mesh CA and the Anthos Service Mesh dashboards in Google Cloud Console are now available for any GKE customer and do not require the purchase of Anthos. There are slight changes to the behavior of Google Cloud Console for customers who use Anthos Service Mesh without an Anthos subscription. Added a shell script to automate Anthos Service Mesh installation and migration from Istio and the Istio on GKE add-on.

AI Platform - Deep Learning VMs - M59 release Miscellaneous bug fixes. tensorflow_enterprise_addon package is renamed to tensorflow-cloud.

AppEngine Standard Python - You can use network ingress controls so your app only receives requests that are sent from your project's VPC or that are routed through the Cloud Load Balancing load balancer.

Billing - Cost table report now includes invoice header information and project-level taxes. The Cloud Billing Budgets API v1 is now available.

Cloud Build - Cloud Build now enables you to create triggers that you can invoke manually through the Cloud Console. Cloud Build allows you to specify git operations in your build configuration file and run your file using the git repository cloned onto your workspace.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.13.0-airflow-1.10.6, composer-1.13.0-airflow-1.10.9, composer-1.13.0-airflow-1.10.10, and composer-1.13.0-airflow-1.10.12. Airflow 1.10.12 is now available for Cloud Composer. The following Cloud Composer versions have been deprecated: Composer-1.7.2 Composer-1.7.3 Composer-1.7.4 Composer-1.7.5 Composer-1.7.6 Composer-1.7.7 Composer-1.8.0.

Compute Engine - The VM instance details page for Compute Engine now displays Memory Utilization and Disk Space Utilization charts. Compute-optimized (C2) machine types are now available in Hong Kong, asia-east2, in all three zones. Identify resources like persistent disks, IP addresses, and custom disk images that aren't in use. Compute-optimized (C2) machine types are now available in Sydney, Australia, australia-southeast1-c.

Config Connector - Config Connector version 1.30.0 is now available. Added support for the MonitoringAlertPolicy resource. Added maintenancePolicy field to ComputeNodeGroup. Added exclusions field to LoggingLogSink. Added authEnabled field to RedisInstance. Added interface field to ComputeDisk. Added mtu field to ComputeNetwork. Added privateIpv6GoogleAccess field to ComputeSubnetwork. Added confidentialNodes field to ContainerCluster. Added skipInitialVersionCreation field to KMSCryptoKey. Added "Immutable." to CRD descriptions for immutable fields in IAMPolicy, IAMPolicyMember, IAMAuditConfig. Added more field descriptions. Fixed bug where DataflowJob would fail to create if zone is unspecified even if region is specified. Fixed bug in operator where ConfigConnector was not being re-enqueued for reconciliation when there is an error during reconciliation.

Data Catalog - v1. Data Catalog is now available in Singapore (asia-southeast1).

Cloud Dataflow - Dataflow now supports Interactive Notebooks in GA.

Dataproc - Clusters that use Dataproc Metastore must be created in the same region as the Dataproc Metastore service that they will use. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.3.76-debian10, 1.3.76-ubuntu18, 1.4.47-debian10, 1.4.47-ubuntu18, 1.5.22-debian10, 1.5.22-ubuntu18, 2.0.0-RC18-debian10, and 2.0.0-RC18-ubuntu18. Image 2.0 preview Upgraded Miniconda to version 4.9.0 Upgraded Druid to version 0.20.0 Upgraded Upgrade FasterXML Jackson to version 2.10.5 Upgraded Apache ORC to version 1.5.12 Upgraded Apache Parquet to version 1.11.1. Fixed a bug where the Jupyter optional component depended on the availability of GitHub at cluster creation time.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions now supports Python 3.8 at the General Availability release level.

Cloud Healthcare API - v1alpha2. The following methods have been added to update or view the storage information for your DICOM data: * projects.locations.datasets.storageOptions.setBlobStorageSettings sets the storage class for all instances in a study.

IAM - IAM Conditions now provides resource attributes for Pub/Sub Lite.

Istio on GKE - 1.6.x. Migrations from the 1.6 version of the add-on to Anthos Service Mesh 1.7 or 1.6 using a Google-provided script is available.

Google Kubernetes Engine - The following GKE features are now available. SSL policies for GKE external Ingress for 1.17.6-gke.11+ are now generally available. Custom health checks across all Ingress types for 1.17.12-gke.500+ are now generally available. You can now specify custom network endpoint group (NEG) names. HTTPS redirects for Ingress are now in beta. Static IP addressing for internal Ingress is now in beta. For internal Ingress on GKE versions earlier than 1.18.10-gke.600 there is a known issue concerning SSL Certificate Updates on internal Ingress resources. GKE cluster versions have been updated. The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in master upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. No channel Note: Your clusters might not have these versions available. New clusters created with the v1alpha1 and v1beta1 APIs install the Compute Engine persistent disk Container Storage Interface by default (CSI) Driver for the following cluster versions: 1.18.10-gke.2101 and higher 1.19.3-gke.2100 and higher.

Load Balancing - External TCP/UDP Network Load Balancing is now supported with backend services.

Cloud Logging - You can now use the Share link button in the Logs Explorer to create and share a shortened URL of your current query.

Cloud Monitoring - Monitoring Query Language (MQL) adds Preview support for macros.

Cloud Run for Anthos - Cloud Run for Anthos on Google Cloud version 0.18.0-gke.4 is now available for following GKE minor version: 1.18 1.19. Events for Cloud Run for Anthos version 0.17.0-gke.105 is now available for the following GKE minor version: 1.18 1.19.

Cloud Spanner - A new multi-region instance configuration is now available in North America - nam8 (Los Angeles/Oregon/Salt Lake City).

Cloud Storage Transfer - Storage Transfer Service support for specifying an end time to scheduling transfer jobs is in Preview.

Traffic Director - Traffic Director now supports multi-environment deployments.

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