Welcome to issue #232 March 8th, 2021

News

Introducing Apache Spark Structured Streaming connector for Pub/Sub Lite - Introducing Pub/Sub Lite connector for Apache Spark for cost-effective streaming data analytics.

Save the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12-14, 2021 - Join us and learn how the most successful companies have transformed their businesses with Google Cloud. Sign-up at g.co/cloudnext for updates.

Announcing the Risk Protection Program: Moving from shared responsibility to shared fate - The Risk Protection Program offers customers peace of mind through the technology to secure their data, the tools to monitor the security of that data, and an industry-first cyber policy offered by leading insurers.

Managing cloud firewalls at scale with new Hierarchical Firewall Policies - New Google Cloud firewall features provide more flexibility, control, and optimization.

All together now: Bringing your GKE logs to the Cloud Console - Your Kubernetes logs are now in the Google Cloud Console’s GKE resource details pages, ready to explore with Cloud Logging.

Go faster and cheaper with Memorystore for Memcached, now GA - Learn about fully managed Memorystore for Memcached, which is compatible with open-source Memcached protocol and can save database costs and add speed.

Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit: Inspiring the next generation of technology leaders - Join our half day event and get practical guidance for building applications in the cloud and bringing them to market faster.

Gartner names Google a leader in 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services report - Gartner has named Google a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Stepping up business transformation with SAP RISE and Google Cloud - With RISE, SAP is recognizing that enterprises need both an easy path to the cloud, plus cloud providers and consulting partners who will help them achieve business objectives.

Delivering the industry’s most Trusted Cloud - At Google Cloud, we defend your data against threats and fraudulent activity using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, empowering you with advanced capabilities that would be unavailable to all but the most-well resourced global organizations.

How to use Packet Mirroring for IDS in different VPC designs - Learn how to combine Google Cloud’s Packet Mirroring with an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to gain visibility into higher-level networking anomalies.

Private Service Connect - Using Private Service Connect to exclusively access Google managed services.

Google Cloud: Establishing VPN Tunnels between Two Networks - Google Compute Engine Virtual Private Network (VPN) lets you connect your existing network to your Compute Engine network via an IPsec….

Autopilot in Google Kubernetes Engine - There is no doubt that Google is one of the best managed Kubernetes service provider.

GKE Autopilot is here, but not for everyone, for now… - When GKE Autopilot is suitable to use and when not.

Quickly Deploy Applications Using Terraform With Kubernetes on GCP - Creating and deploying applications on GKE with Terraform.

Use CircleCI to Drive CI/CD of Microservices into GKE - This article presents a journey of using CircleCI to drive CI/CD of microservices into GKE.

Hands on GCP Deployment Manager - Tutorial to use Deployment Manager, and create reusable templates to build a modular infrastructure.

Costs meet code with programmatic budget notifications - TL;DR - More than just alerts, budgets can also send notifications to Pub/Sub. Once they're in Pub/Sub, you can hook up all kinds of services to react to them. You can use the information about the budget along with some code to do just about anything.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

How Memorystore cut costs in half for Quizlet’s Memcached workloads - See how online learning platform Quizlet uses managed database service Memorystore for Memcached to cut costs, improve reliability for SRE.

Fast, cheap and globally accessible Bazel remote cache on Google Cloud Run & Storage - bazel-cache is a minimal cloud-oriented Bazel remote cache that is meant to be deployed serverless-ly (currently on Cloud Run) and backed by object storage (currently Google Cloud Storage).

Inventory management with BigQuery and Cloud Run - Building a simple inventory management system with Cloud Run and BigQuery.

Demystifying event filters in Eventarc - Learn how to create triggers with the right filters in Eventarc.

Production-Scale IoT Best Practices: Implementation with Google Cloud (Part 3/3) - Using raw temperature data from IoT sensors to predict when to close a window in a house (and which window!).

How to set up MongoDB Atlas with Spring Boot, Docker, and Google Cloud Run - Connecting Cloud Run app with MongoDB Atlas.

5-ish ways to get your data into Cloud Storage - With a can-do attitude and the details of this post, you’ll learn how to get your data into Cloud Storage with a variety of upload methods.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Reducing risk through credit card fraud detection - Google Cloud data analytics plus Quantiphi provide a solution to credit card fraud detection.

Monitoring and Retraining your Machine Learning Models - With Google Data Studio, lakeFS and Great Expectations.

Analysing News Article Content with Google Cloud Natural Language API - This article explains how to do named entity recognition and sentiment analysis using Google Cloud Natural Language and AI Platform Notebooks.

Securing Presto on GCP DataProc with username and password over HTTPS - A walk through the steps of securing a Presto cluster deployed on GCP DataProc with a username and password authentication over HTTPS.

Never struggle again to share data between your Kubeflow Pipelines components - Learn how to implement a cost-efficient and automated model retraining solution with Kubeflow Pipelines — Part 2.

Automating the data movement from GCS using Data Transfer Service - Getting started with BigQuery Data Transfer Service.

Google BigQuery Date & Time Quick Reference Guide - Common date and time operations in BigQuery.

How to build a serverless real-time credit card fraud detection solution - A smart analytics design pattern that enables you to build a scalable real-time fraud detection solution in one hour using serverless, no-ops products on Google Cloud.

Various

Helping small business customers think big with help from cloud technology - See how CRM provider Keap moved its on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud to save costs, ensure redundancy and scalability for customers, and free up time for DevOps work.

Supporting Healthcare Data Standards at Google Cloud - Recent advances of healthcare standards support on Google Cloud.

Back by popular demand: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2021 edition) - If you are just getting started, the 4 words or less developer's cheat sheet is a great resource that gives you a quick overview of all that is available to you on Google Cloud.

A timely new approach to certifying clean energy - Google is piloting a new approach called T-EACs that incentivizes the production of carbon-free energy when it’s at its most scarce on power grids.

Data champions: How the Golden State Warriors are turning on-court data into a competitive advantage - Learn how the Warriors are using intelligent technologies with Google’s Data Cloud to better serve the needs of coaches, front office, staff, players and fans.

Serving millions of users on a budget - Learn how we built a scalable, highly-available microservices platform which serves millions of customers in < $1000 budget.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #249 ML Lifecycle with Dale Markowitz and Craig Wiley.

Kubernetes Podcast - #140 Security and Snyk, with Kamil Potrec.

Releases

AI Platform - Deep Learning VMs - M65 release Added support for DooD (Docker outside of Docker) in Dataflow notebooks container images.

AI Platform - Notebooks - v1. New Notebooks instances add labels for VM image (goog-caip-notebook) and volume (goog-caip-notebook-volume).

Google Cloud Armor - Google Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus Tier is in General Availability.

BigQuery - Updated version of Magnitude Simba ODBC driver includes bug fixes, performance improvements, and enhancements such as support for dynamic SQL and additional DDL and DML keywords. Updated version of Magnitude Simba JDBC driver includes bug fixes and performance improvements.

CDN - Support for item request coalescing is now Generally Available.

Cloud Composer - New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.14.5-airflow-1.10.14 composer-1.14.5-airflow-1.10.12 (default) composer-1.14.5-airflow-1.10.10. Improved the logging of Airflow exceptions. Fixed a potential infinite loop in the airflow-monitoring pod. Fixed the cause of failures when creating Qwiklabs environments. When creating environments, unmet network requirements for pods and services cause the operation to fail immediately. Cloud Composer acquires existing environment resources if they are available during an upgrade operation. Added a precondition check for upgrade operations. Fixed a problem with airflow-monitoring not having logs after changing the machine type for GKE Cluster in a Cloud Composer environment. PyPI packages can now be installed in Cloud Composer versions 1.11.0 and 1.11.1. GA: Support for the Airflow Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) UI is now generally available. GA: Support for Resource location restrictions is now generally available.

Compute Engine - The VM instance details page for Compute Engine now offers a guided installation path for Monitoring agents when they are not detected.

Dataproc - New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.3.86-debian10, 1.3.86-ubuntu18, 1.4.57-debian10, 1.4.57-ubuntu18, 1.5.32-centos8, 1.5.32-debian10, 1.5.32-ubuntu18, 2.0.5-debian10, and 2.0.5-ubuntu18. Image 2.0 preview: Upgraded Delta Lake to 0.8.0 version. Fixed a bug where YARN applications launched by Hive jobs were not correctly tagged, leading to missing YARN application status from job state. Fixed the permission for mounted SSD Hadoop directories. Added the --cluster-labels flag to gcloud dataproc jobs submit to allow submitting jobs to a cluster that matches specified cluster labels. Dataproc 2.0 image version will become a default Dataproc image version in 2 weeks on March 15, 2021.

Dialogflow - Dialogflow now supports VPC Service Controls for both CX and ES agents.

Error Reporting - Error Reporting has been updated to only analyze logs that are stored in global buckets in the same project where they are ingested.

IAM - For workload identity federation, available in beta, you can now use updated client libraries for C++, Go, Java, Node.js, and Python to automatically obtain Google credentials.

Cloud Memorystore - Support for In-transit encryption on Memorystore for Redis is now Generally Available.

Cloud PubSub - Pub/Sub message schemas are now available in the Preview launch stage.

Cloud Run for Anthos - Cloud Run for Anthos on Google Cloud version 0.20.0-gke.6 is now available for the following GKE minor versions: 1.19 1.20 Events for Cloud Run for Anthos version 0.18.1-gke.108 is now available for the following GKE minor versions: 1.19 1.20.

Cloud Run - Cloud Run reports a new Cloud Monitoring metric: Instance count, which counts the number of container instances that exist, broken down by state (active or idle). Cloud Run is now available in the following regions: us-west2 (Los Angeles) us-west3 (Salt Lake city) us-west4 (Las Vegas).

Cloud Scheduler - The maximum job size (payload) is now 1 MB total, including ~1KB request overhead.

Cloud Spanner - Cloud Spanner now supports point-in-time recovery (PITR), which lets you recover data from a specific point in time in the past. You can now optionally receive the mutation count for a transaction in the commit response to optimize the transactions while staying within the mutation count limit.

Cloud SQL MySQL - The following MySQL minor versions have been upgraded: MySQL 5.6.47 is upgraded to 5.6.50 MySQL 5.7.25 is upgraded to 5.7.32. Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports flexible instance configurations.

Cloud SQL Postgres - PostgreSQL 13.0 is now the default version when creating a new database.

Cloud Text-to-Speech - Text-to-Speech has launched Beta support of new SSML tags: <phoneme>, <mark>, <lang>, <voice>, and <say-as interpret-as="duration">< to specify durations. Support for the <prosody> SSML tag has been enhanced to produce continuous TTS when possible. Text-to-Speech has improved the continuity of mixed-media results. Text-to-Speech has improved its handling of speech synthesis requests sent using SSML markup. Text-to-Speech has improved the verbalization and pacing of phone numbers.

Deep Learning VM - M65 release Added support for DooD (Docker outside of Docker) in Dataflow notebooks container images.

Dialogflow Enterprise - Dialogflow now supports VPC Service Controls for both CX and ES agents.

Service Mesh - 1.9.x. 1.9.1-asm.1 is now available. Google-managed control plane is now available as a public preview feature. Anthos Service Mesh for Compute Engine VMs is now available as a public preview feature. 1.5.x. Anthos Service Mesh 1.5 is no longer supported.

AI Platform Training - AI Platform Training now provides pre-built PyTorch containers for PyTorch 1.7.

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