Welcome to issue #222 December 28th, 2020

As 2020 is coming to the end, it's time to take a look back and see what's has been accomplished, few articles in this issue are focused on that. 

News

Introducing Monitoring Query Language, now GA in Cloud Monitoring - The new Monitoring Query Language, or MQL, is a powerful tool for manipulating metrics gathered in Cloud Monitoring.

You asked, we listened—more productivity features to close out Spanner’s year - From the official Google Cloud blog: see how cloud database Spanner helps developer productivity with new check constraints, generated columns, and NUMERIC data type.

Expanding our global footprint with new cloud regions - Google Cloud is expanding its global network with new regions in South America, Europe, and Asia.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Unlocking the mystery of stronger security key management - A common data security mistake involves encrypting data but failing to secure the encryption key. This post examines common risks and architectures and approaches in the cloud to mitigate them.

GCP Internal Network LBs , How magical? - If you ever decide to tcpdump on a node behind a GCP internal Loadbalancer you will be surprised to see that the packets aren’t destined to the interface ip on your VM.

Istio in GKE [Part 4] Distributed Tracing using Jaeger [Basic] - Distributed tracing with Jaeger and Istio in GKE.

Using log based metrics to send alerts in GCP - The article describes an alerting solution based on metrics.

Preserving Client IPs through Google Cloud’s global TCP and SSL Proxy Load Balancers - A step-by-step tutorial on how to configure Load Balancers with a configuration that preserves a client’s IP address in the TCP payload.

GKE Workload Identity with Istio - Setting Workload Identity for Istio on GKE.

Terraform plan in Pull Requests with GCP Cloud Build - Run terraform plan and submit comments to your Github Pull Requests via Google Cloud Build.

Scale your EDA flows: How Google Cloud enables faster verification - Google Cloud compute infrastructure can speed up HPC workloads such as EDA.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Tips for writing and deploying Node.js apps on Cloud Functions - Follow these tips for writing performant, observable, Node.js applications that run on Cloud Functions.

2020 review: How serverless solutions helped customers thrive in uncertainty - In a year like no other, Google Cloud’s serverless and application development services helped businesses innovate and respond to challenges.

2020: The year in databases at Google Cloud - Check out the top new features from Google Cloud managed databases in 2020 across open source and cloud-native.

Application rationalization: Why you need to take this first step in your migration journey - The application rationalization process is a critical starting point for cloud migration. In this post, we explore what it is, why it’s needed, and how to implement it.

Days #11 with Cloud Workflows: sleeping in a workflow - Using sleep functionality in Workflows.

Day #12 with Cloud Workflows: loops and iterations - Creating loops and iterations over the element of an array to call an API several times but with different arguments in Cloud Workflows.

Take Full Control of AI Notebook Instance on GCP via Putty - Access GCP VM instance via Putty for cloud computing.

State of Firebase (late 2020) - Official Firebase & Community Updates!

Managed cloud databases bring speed, scale and new features for ecobee customers - See how smart home company ecobee migrated database workloads to Bigtable to add performance and scale and save costs.

Google Cloud’s no-code year in review - How Google Cloud’s AppSheet continued to push the boundaries of no-code app development in 2020.

Geo queries with Firestore - This guide describes how to do Geo queries in Firestore.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

In case you missed it: here’s what happened in data analytics in 2020 - From the official Google Cloud blog: here’s what was new and exciting in cloud data analytics in 2020, including multicloud querying, BI, AI and ML, and more.

A revolution is coming for data and the cloud: 6 predictions for 2021 - Check out the 6 predictions on what to look for in data analytics in 2021 and beyond, including multicloud, data sovereignty, cloud data lakes, and more.

Some query samples to interpret Google Analytics data using Bigquery - Sample queries for Google Analytics data in BigQuery.

Julia with AI Platform notebooks - Setting up Julia in an already provisioned AI platform notebook.

How To Use Google AI Platform Notebooks For Your Data Science Team - Getting started with Google AI Platform Notebooks.

Machine Learning in Production - Serving Tensorflow model via Cloud Functions.

Scheduling Cloud Functions to Update BigQuery - The is a bare bones tutorial focused on quickly setting up Cloud Scheduler -> Cloud Function -> BigQuery.

AI Platform Notebooks “headless” training - This article focuses on two approaches to running your training in a headless manner.

Various

Top 9 posts from Google Cloud in 2020 - In 2020, Google Cloud launched Workspace, added new features to Meet, offered free learning resources, launched public datasets, and lots more. See what you missed.

How to pass the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification - Learn how to pass the Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification leveraging only free resources.

Releases

BigQuery - BigQuery standard SQL now supports the BigNumeric data type for high-precision computations.

Cloud Filestore - IP-based access control is now generally available.

Cloud SQL Postgres - IAM database authentication for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL is now generally available.

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