Welcome to issue #234 March 22nd, 2021

News

A2 VMs now GA—the largest GPU cloud instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs - A2 VMs with NVIDIA A100 GPUs are now generally available for your most demanding workloads including machine learning and HPC.

Turbo boost your Compute Engine workloads with new 100 Gbps networking - Updates to Google Cloud’s Andromeda host networking stack bring higher bandwidth connectivity to Compute Engine C2 and N2 VM families.

Cloud Spanner launches point-in-time-recovery capability - Check out Cloud Spanner’s new point-in-time recovery (PITR) capability, offering continuous data protection when you configure the database version retention period.

Introducing the latest Slurm on GCP scripts - The latest version of Slurm for Google Cloud includes support for Terraform, the HPC VM Image, placement policies, Bulk API and instance templates.

Earn the new Google Kubernetes Engine skill badge for free - The new Optimize Costs for Google Kubernetes Engine skills badge helps you demonstrate to employers you know how to manage workloads and clusters at scale to optimize time and cost.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Multi-layer API security with Apigee and Google Cloud Armor - How Apigee X with Google Cloud Armor provides robust API management and multi-layer security.

How to preserve your innovation speed and your budget with quotas APIs - Cloud billing is a “day-2” priority to limit cost. With quotas API, you can automate limits and preserve your budget.

Running QuestDB on GKE Autopilot - Extending the QuestDB Helm chart with monitoring and automated backups for a production-ready setup on GKE Autopilot.

Security keys and zero trust - GCP Comics #6 Identity and Zero Trust Model.

Want secure access to (cloud) services from your Kubernetes-based app? GKE Workload Identity is the answer. - An introduction to GKE Workload Identity.

Intro to Google Cloud VMware Engine – Network and Connectivity Overview - An overview of the networking configuration and capabilities in Google Cloud VMware Engine.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

VM Manager 101: Create a disk clone before patching VMs - Learn how to use VM Manager’s OS patch management feature to create a crash consistent disk clone of a VM’s attached persistent disks of a VM.

You make the rules with authentication controls for Cloud Storage - Once you’ve got your data into Cloud Storage, it’s time for an important conversation about authentication. In this post, we’ll review some critical components for determining who has access to that data.

Building real-time market data front-ends with websockets and Google Cloud - Check out this cloud-first architectural pattern for building real-time streaming data pipelines for financial services and market data.

The bots are here: Use RPA and AI to automate digital tasks - The bots are coming! But don't worry, they're here for the boring stuff. Robotic Process Automation is all about AI-powered digital critters that take over repetitive and manual tasks, like receiving an invoice, extracting the data, and then entering that data into a bookkeeping system.

Google Cloud Workflows polling: Backoff ! don’t sleep :) - How to use exponential backoff for retrying / polling long-running operation in Cloud Workflows.

CloudRun with Serverless VPC access + CloudSQL with Private Service Connect. - CloudRun with Serverless VPC access + CloudSQL with Private Service Connect.

Composer CI/CD pipeline with Cloud Build and Python script - The objective of this article is to show one way of implementing CI/CD on Composer using only GCP tools and Python.

Firebase Auth to Authenticate requests to Cloud Run through Cloud Endpoints - Deploy Extensible service proxy in Cloud Run to intercept requests to your backend cloud run and authenticate with Firebase user JWT.

Google Cloud Run vs Cloud Functions - Key differences between Cloud Run and Cloud Functions.

JWT (JSON Web Tokens) Errors | Invalid JWT Signature - Fixing expired JWT token for service account.

TransparentPath : A python package to manage paths on Google Cloud Storage - Are you used to pathlib’s Path objects and frustrated when using GCSFileSystem objects ? The TransparentPath package is made for you.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Analyzing Python package downloads in BigQuery - Dig into trends in Python package downloads with BigQuery’s new public dataset.

Using BigQuery and AppScript to Send Firebase Crashlytics Data To Chat Platform - This article talks about how to create an automated bot to send Crashlytics data to a chat platform daily, weekly, monthly.

Building an ETL data pipeline: GCS-BigQuery-Dataprep - An example of using Cloud Dataprep to load files from Cloud Storage to BigQuery.

Saving money with BigQuery and Dataform - An easy way to reduce cost and increase performance in Data Warehouses — find out how to implement partitioning using Dataform!

Workload Management using Bigquery Reservation Slots. - Scheduling BigQuery Flex slots using Airflow.

Event-triggered detection of data drift in ML workflows - How to set up event-triggered Kubeflow Pipeline runs using GCF, and how to use the TFDV library to determine whether a model should be retrained on new data.

Various

How carbon-free is your cloud? New data lets you know - A Google Cloud region’s Carbon-Free Energy percentage (CFE%) lets you choose where best to run your workloads to meet your sustainability goals.

Meet the Authors: Data Governance–The Definitive Guide - Hear from the authors of a new book, Data Governance: The Definitive Guide, about the people, processes, and tools to operationalize data trustworthiness. O'Reilly © 2021.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #251 BeyondCorp with Kiran Nair and Ameet Jani.

Kubernetes Podcast - #142 Tinkerbell, with Gianluca Arbezzano.

Releases

Access Approval - v1. Cloud Logging and Cloud Spanner are supported by Access Approval in Preview stage.

Billing - Cost table report: CSV download updated to download all columns On the cost table report, the CSV download now includes all columns and data applicable to the Cloud Billing account.

Compute Engine - N2D machine types are available in the following regions and zones: Frankfurt, europe-west3-a,b Hong Kong, asia-east2-b,c See VM instance pricing for pricing details. Preview: You can now configure N2 and C2 VMs with up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth. M2 machine types are now available in the following regions and zones: Sydney — australia-southeast1-b,c London — europe-west2-b,c Montréal — northamerica-northeast1-b,c See VM instance pricing for details. Generally Available: Use the bulk instance API to create multiple, homogeneous VMs that are independent from each other. Generally Available: NVIDIA® A100 GPUs are now available in the following three regions: Iowa, North America: us-central1-a,b,c Netherlands, Europe: europe-west4-a,b Singapore, APAC: asia-southeast1-c For more information, see GPUs on Compute Engine. Generally Available: Accelerator-optimized (A2) machine types are now available in the following three regions: Iowa, North America: us-central1-a,b,c Netherlands, Europe: europe-west4-a,b Singapore, APAC: asia-southeast1-c. N2D machine types are now available in Frankfurt, europe-west3-c and Hong Kong, asia-east2-a. N2 machine types are now available in Zurich, europe-west6 in all three zones. C2 machine types are now available in Zürich, europe-west6 in all three zones.

Cloud Dataflow - Execution details are now available in Preview.

Data Fusion - Preview: Cloud Data Fusion now supports Access Transparency.

Dataproc - Announcing the General availability (GA) release of CentOS 8 based 2.0 images. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.3.87-debian10, 1.3.87-ubuntu18, 1.4.58-debian10, 1.4.58-ubuntu18, 1.5.33-centos8, 1.5.33-debian10, 1.5.33-ubuntu18, 2.0.6-centos8, 2.0.6-debian10, and 2.0.6-ubuntu18. Image 2.0: Upgraded Spark to version 3.1.1.

IAM - Tags are now generally available.

Networking Interconnect - Cloud Interconnect support for GRE traffic is available in Preview.

Istio on GKE - 1.4.x. 1.4.10-gke.8 is available.

Cloud Logging - Cloud Logging now shows the breakdown of log severity levels in the Histogram pane.

Resource Manager - The Organization Policy Service v2 API has launched into general availability. Tags have been launched into general availability.

Cloud Run - Shared VPC on Cloud Run is now at general availability (GA).

Cloud Spanner - The Cloud Console query page has been updated with a revamped query editor, which now offers improved autocomplete, prevalidation of your query, formatting options, and the ability to run a selection from your query.

Cloud Speech-to-Text - Speech-to-Text has launched the Model Adaptation feature.

Cloud SQL Postgres - The following extensions in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL are generally available: pg_partman.

Cloud VPN - Cloud VPN support for GRE traffic is available in Preview.

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