Welcome to issue #230 February 22nd, 2021

News

New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: improved reach, networking and scale - The latest version of Google Cloud VMware Engine is chock full of new features and integrations, including enhanced networking capabilities.

New framework expands Google Cloud access globally - As part of our commitment to supporting pioneering research globally, Google is proud to announce that Google Cloud services are now available to participants in the OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environment) framework, which was created to improve access to a range of cloud services for researchers and research institutions in 40 European countries.

New private cloud networking whitepaper for Google Cloud VMware Engine - Go deep on private cloud networking for Google Cloud VMware Engine with this whitepaper.

Introducing Cloud Domains: Easily register and manage custom domains - There’s a new domain registration and management portal that’s tightly integrated with Google Cloud.

Databricks on Google Cloud: an open integrated platform for data, analytics and machine learning - Databricks and Google Cloud partner to provide an open, integrated platform for data, analytics, and machine learning.

Introducing Django ORM support for Cloud Spanner - Today we're happy to announce beta support for Google Cloud Spanner in the Django ORM. The django-google-spanner package is a third-party database backend for Cloud Spanner, powered by the Cloud Spanner Python client library.

Discover and invoke services across clusters with GKE multi-cluster services - GKE’s new multi-cluster services let you use Kubernetes services across disparate clusters.

Service Directory is generally available: Simplify your service inventory - Service Directory is now generally available, and lets you automatically register your services without any additional orchestration code.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Benchmarking rendering software on Compute Engine - Benchmarking popular 3D rendering software on a variety of resources on Compute Engine helps us understand the relationship between cost and performance.

To the cloud and beyond! Planning a multi-year data center migration - When embarking on a large, multi-year data center migration to Google Cloud, it’s helpful to think of the project in phases.

New whitepaper: CISO’s guide to Cloud Security Transformation - Switching to the cloud presents a huge opportunity for CISOs to transform their company's approach to security. Here’s what you need to know.

Helping users keep their organization secure with their phone's built-in security key - The new “Account security” recommender will automatically detect when a user with elevated permissions, such as a Project Owner, is eligible to use their phone’s built-in security key to better protect their account, but has not yet turned on this important safeguard.

How to extract details on Google Cloud Service Account keys across all projects in an Org to a CSV file - Extracting the list of keys generated for all service accounts across all projects in an entire organizaiton.

What is Binary Authorization and how to improve Security in GCP - This article describes creating Kubernetes Engine Cluster with the Binary Authorization feature enabled and how to allow approved container registries and walks you through the process of creating and running a signed container.

How to assign Role-based Access in GCP Kubernetes Engine - Examples of different scenarios for RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) in Kubernetes Engine.

IDS for (PCI Compliance) Cloud Infrastructure - Design a cloud infrastructure for PCI Compliance solution together with Suricata IDS (Intrusion Detection System) for GKE.

Using Google Cloud Build for Kubeflow Pipelines CI/CD - How kubectl port-forward is used within Google Cloud Build to integrate with private K8S services.

Three ways to reduce your PCI scope in Google Cloud - Strategies to streamline your next PCI DSS assessment.

Google Cloud Machine Types Comparison - A list of machine types and comparison on offered by Google Cloud Platform.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Ship your Go applications faster to Cloud Run with ko - With "ko", you can build and push container images for your Go apps without Docker (and faster than Docker), then deploy to Cloud Run.

Three ways tight integration makes logging and monitoring easier - How is GCP is better than Azure with regard to ease of use? A major differentiator from a recent blog was how Logging and Monitoring “just work” with Google Cloud services. The buzz around this post presents us an opportunity to get a blog post out that takes a step back from the product-centric blog posts and focuses on our ease of use narrative.

{Serverless} CloudRun Deploy and Test through CloudShell with Firestore as Database. - {Serverless} CloudRun Deploy and Test through CloudShell with Firestore as Database.

Firestore Backups the easy way with Cloud Workflows - Backup nightly your Firestore collections to secure Cloud Storage the easy way with Cloud Workflows, don’t need to be a developer to setup.

Improve app stability with Firebase Crashlytics and Kotlin - This blog post explains how developing with Kotlin can lead to fewer crashes; and how you can monitor your app’s stability with Firebase Crashlytics once your app has been released.

How to count documents in Firestore - A list, categorization, and evaluation of the multiple ways to count documents in the NoSQL Firestore database.

Dropping a shell in Google’s Cloud SQL (the speckle-umbrella story) - Attempts to find security holes in database service.

Google Storage — How to export and zip a big amount of data with NodeJS - Moving 50K files inside the Google Storage, downloading, zipping, and uploading to another bucket.

Automate Podcast Translation with Google Cloud Platform - Like it or not, Podcasts are the new Netflix. Yes, I have said that.

Building images with Packer, Google Build, and Google Build Triggers - Creating Packer images in Cloud Build.

Use RSocket to Send Data from a Cloud Pub/Sub Subscription to a Recharts UI - Create an RSocket server with Spring Boot to stream data from a Pub/Sub subscription and to a Recharts (React) Frontend.

Pubsub2Inbox - Pubsub2Inbox is a generic tool to handle input from Pub/Sub messages and turn them into email, webhooks or GCS objects.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Architect your data lake on Google Cloud with Data Fusion and Composer - Designing a data lake on Google Cloud with Data Fusion and Composer.

The life-changing magic of making with ML - Personal projects created to learn Machine Learning.

Cloud Dataflow + Cloud Tasks = A Ravenous Beast - Enrich / Transform huge amounts of data in a serverless and distributed pipeline.

BigQuery repeated fields query optimization. - Optimization techniques for BigQuery queries when table contains repeated fields.

Use a Bigquery Stored Procedure to Extract Table DDL - A SQL script to obtain DDL statements for BigQuery tables.

Build a serverless BigQuery ingestion pipeline using Cloud Workflows - Loading CSV file to BigQuery using Workflows.

Loading API Data into Google BigQuery with Cloud Functions and Scheduler - Google BigQuery is a fantastic tool for SQL based analysis of data —here’s an easy way to load in API data and set up automated updates.

Google Cloud services for MLOps - Exploring MLOps options on the Google Cloud Platform.

Active Directory Setup with Kerberized Dataproc Cluster - A manual process of setting authentication from Active Directory to Dataproc.

GCP Document AI and Node-RED - Using GCP products in Node-RED environment to process.

Performing (surprisingly-easy!) Sentiment Analysis on Google Cloud Platform - How to train and deploy a serverless Sentiment Analysis API to Google Cloud.

Replacing Google-OCR With Tesseract and Saving Thousands in Monthly Billings - Using Tessaract for OCR instead of Cloud Vision API.

Various

Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam Guide - Software Architect’s library.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #247 Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat.

Kubernetes Podcast - #138 Multi-Cluster Services, with Jeremy Olmsted-Thompson.

Releases

AI Platform - Deep Learning Containers - M64 release Upgraded TensorFlow 2.4 to 2.4.1. Swift For TensorFlow The Swift For TensorFlow project is entering archive mode.

Google Cloud Armor - Google Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection is available in Public Preview.

BigQuery - BigQuery now supports exporting table data in Parquet format.

Cloud Composer - GA: Setting and updating machine types for CloudSQL/Web Server is now generally available. GA: Support for Domain restricted sharing is now generally available. Cloud Composer 1.14.3 release was rolled back.

Compute Engine - Preview: Predictive autoscaling for managed instance groups lets you improve the availability of your workloads by using Machine Learning to predict future demand and create virtual machines ahead of forecasted load.

Dataproc - New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.3.84-debian10, 1.3.84-ubuntu18, 1.4.55-debian10, 1.4.55-ubuntu18, 1.5.30-centos8, 1.5.30-debian10, 1.5.30-ubuntu18, 2.0.3-debian10, and 2.0.3-ubuntu18. Fixed a bug that prevented Dataproc on GKE cluster creation. Dataproc 2.0 image version will become a default Dataproc image version in 4 weeks on March 15, 2021.

Dialogflow - Dialogflow ES now supports the europe-west1 (Belgium) region.

Cloud Networking Products - Managing response policies and rules in Cloud DNS is available in Beta.

IAM - You can now use IAM conditions to set limits on the roles that a member can grant and revoke.

Load Balancing - Zonal NEGs (with GCE_VM_IP network endpoints) can now be used as backends for internal TCP/UDP load balancers.

Cloud Logging - Cloud Logging agent for Windows version 1-14 is now available.

VPC Service Controls - Preview release of Ingress and egress rules for VPC Service Controls.

Dialogflow Enterprise - Dialogflow ES now supports the europe-west1 (Belgium) region.

AI Platform Training - The default boot disk type for virtual machine instances used for training jobs has changed from pd-standard to pd-ssd.

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