Welcome to issue #238 April 19th, 2021

News

The new Google Cloud region in Warsaw is open - The Google Cloud region in Warsaw is now ready for business, opening doors for organizations in Central and Eastern Europe.

Introducing SAP Integration with Cloud Data Fusion - Google Cloud native data integration platform Cloud Data Fusion now offers the capability to seamlessly get data out of SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and S/4HANA.

Reclaim time and talent with AppSheet Automation - AppSheet Automation, a significant addition to AppSheet no-code development platform, leverages Google AI to empower even those without coding skills to automate business processes and reshape their own work.

Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] - Google Cloud Summit digital event series to support industries ranging from Financial Services to Manufacturing & Supply Chain to Retail & Consumer Goods.

Load Data Faster and Lower Your Costs with Firestore Data Bundles! - With the latest version of the client SDKs, you are able to use Firestore data bundles in your mobile and web applications! Data bundles can make certain types of Firestore applications much faster or less expensive.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Introducing Cloud CISO perspectives - Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares his perspective on industry news from spring 2021 and updates from Google’s security team.

Extending GCP Cloud DNS to On-prem with Multiple VPCs - Connecting environments in GCP with those on-prem in a secure way.

Google Cloud Diagrams - hava.io allows creating cloud diagrams displaying your GCP network, the underlying availability zones, and subnets.

Exploiting weak configurations in Google Identity Platform - Analyzing Identity Platform and Firebase Auth.

How to prevent Kubernetes Cron Jobs with Sidecar containers from getting stuck - Connecting to Cloud SQL from GKE.

Integrate GitLab with Google Kubernetes Engine in 5 steps - Example of GitLab integration with Google Kubernetes Engine Cluster.

Heading Towards Cloud-Native Developer Environments [Part 2 — How] - How to turn the cloud into your personal developer environment.

Kubectl and gcloud client with Google Cloud and Docker - How to save money and avoid paying for the VPN connectivity to forward few ports between clusters.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Predictable serverless deployments with Terraform - In this double feature edition of Serverless Expeditions, Katie and Martin discuss deploying Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, and walkthrough a complex deployment demo app.

Tracking index backfill operation progress in Cloud Spanner - Cloud Spanner now provides an ability to track the progress of index backfill. Let us dive deep to understand how you can use the index backfill progress reporting feature.

Benchmark Spanner Change Watcher - Google Cloud Spanner Change Watcher is an open-source library for Google Cloud Spanner for watching and publishing changes from a Cloud Spanner database.

Understanding the value of managed database services - Fully managed, relational cloud database services like Cloud SQL offload common database administration tasks for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server.

Continuous migration to Cloud SQL for terabyte-scale databases with minimal downtime - See how Broadcom migrated 10 TB of data of its Symantec endpoint security tool from multiple databases to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime.

A Google Cloud block storage options cheat sheet - “Where do Virtual Machines store data?” Block store! Google Cloud offers two block storage options: Persistent Disks and Local SSD. This is your cheat sheet for block storage in Google Cloud.

Optimizing object storage costs in Google Cloud: location and classes - Saving on Cloud Storage starts with picking the right storage for your use case, and making sure you follow best practices.

Improving Cloud Build pipeline with dependencies cache on Cloud Storage - We focus on optimizing a Cloud Build pipeline by reducing the build time by adding a dependency cache stored on a Cloud Storage bucket.

A working guide to understanding Google Compute Engine Pricing Options — Part 1 - Explaining Compute Engine pricing with Cloud Cost Calculator.

A working guide to understanding Google Compute Engine Pricing Options — Part 2 - Explaining Compute Engine Custom Virtual Machine Types.

A working guide to understanding Google Compute Engine Pricing Options — Part 3 - Understanding Preemtimple Virtual Machines.

Hands-on Guide to Scheduling VM Instances to Start and Stop - Scheduling Compute Engine instances.

How to Setup Gitlab CI Pipeline For Google Cloud App Engine? - Process of setting CI/CD pipeline in Gitlab to deploy App Engine application.

Dockerizing and deploying a Shiny dashboard on Google Cloud - A step-by-step guide to bringing Shiny to the cloud.

Google Cloud Platform: Redirect 301 HTTPS on App Engine with nginx - Setting redirect from HTTP to HTTPS for App Engine Flexible.

Exploring a fast inner dev loop for Spring Boot apps targeting Google Cloud Run - Developing and deploying REST API in Java Spring Boot and deploying to Cloud Run.

Introducing runsd: Service discovery for Cloud Run - DNS service discovery and authentication layer for Cloud Run.

Eventarc Samples - GitHub repo with Eventarc samples.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Real-time Crypto Price Anomaly Detection with Deep Learning and Band Protocol - Price discovery is at the heart of capital markets. Learn how to do it with Deep Learning and Band Protocol on Google Cloud.

Data Patterns in a Multi-cloud Future - Different data patterns that you can adopt for your data science, data engineering, and BI tasks with data spread across multiple clouds.

Please BigQuery, can you accelerate my answers (and be cheaper)? - Discover how to leverage Google Cloud Analytics features to reduce the cost and the time to answer for you data.

Broadcom improves customer threat protection with flexible data management - Broadcom uses decentralized data lake infrastructure to speed development of security analytics.

Organizing data in BigQuery - How to organize data in BigQuery for effective and compliant management across multiple teams in your organization.

Complex Deduplication in BigQuery - Doing data deduplication in BigQuery.

Complex Survivorship in BigQuery - Survivorship is the process of choosing canonical values from deduplicated data. The results are often called master data or golden records.

Churn prediction for game developers using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and BigQuery ML - To retain a larger percentage of users after their first use of an app, developers can take steps to motivate and incentivize certain users to return. But to do so, developers need to identify the propensity of any specific user returning after the first 24 hours.

How to Train a Model to Predict Next-Day Rain with Google BigQuery ML - Demonstrating BigQuery ML with predicting rain based on 10-year weather observations.

Empowering Google Cloud AI Platform Notebooks by powerful AutoML - With the AI Platform’s powerful ecosystem, almost all modeling workflows can be completed on Google Cloud.

Logica: organizing your data queries, making them universally reusable and fun - Logica is a novel open source Logic Programming language that compiles to SQL and runs on Google BigQuery (with experimental support for PostgreSQL and SQLite), but it is much more concise and supports the clean and reusable abstraction mechanisms that SQL lacks.

Various

Google Cloud blog 101: Full list of topics, links, and resources - Find quick links to all the topic areas covered on the Google Cloud blog in one convenient location.

In case you missed it: All our free Google Cloud training opportunities from Q1 - Since January, we’ve introduced a number of no-cost training opportunities to help you grow your cloud skills, and we're bringing them together into one handy resource so you don’t miss out.

5 cheat sheets to help you get started on your Google Cloud journey - Whether you need to determine the best way to move to the cloud, or decide on the best storage option, there are a number of cheat sheets to help.

How Google Cloud is enabling vaccine equity - Google Cloud is working with numerous US state governments to help produce equitable vaccination strategies at scale.

Get up to speed with your ACE Prep - This week, prepare for your ACE certification exam with Qwiklabs. Get free access to hands-on training resources (over $100 US value). Complete the training and you'll a 20% discount voucher to help you take the exam.

Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer Study Guide - Resources to help with preparation for Machine Learning certification.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #255 AppSheet Automation with Jennifer Cadence and Prithpal Bhogill.

Kubernetes Podcast - #146 Kubernetes 1.21, with Nabarun Pal.

Releases

Anthos Config Management - 1.7.0. Anthos Config Management v1.7.0 included several Kubernetes library updates, one of these updates made checks for Resource types more strict.

AppEngine - Serverless VPC Access support for Shared VPC is now generally available. App Engine is now available in the europe-central2 region (Warsaw).

Google Cloud Armor - Managed Protection Plus subscribers are also eligible to receive reactive or proactive DDoS response support from Google's DDoS mitigation experts to help triage and mitigate ongoing attacks, as well as DDoS bill protection to provide credits for some bill spikes caused by increased GCP usage as a result being target by a DDoS attack.

Cloud Asset Inventory - New resource types are now available.

BigQuery - The BigQuery Admin Resource Charts Preview is now available for Reservation users, enabling administrators to more easily monitor and troubleshoot their BigQuery environment.

Compute Engine - N2D machines are available in the following regions and zones: Montréal northamerica-northeast1-b Osaka asia-northeast2-a,b See VM instance pricing for pricing details. You can now see additional metrics for your managed instance groups from the Instance Groups Monitoring tab. Generally available: VM Manager integration with VPC Service Control. Generally available: You can now configure schedule-based autoscaling for your managed instance groups.

Dataproc - Added the ability to stop and start high-availability clusters. Fixed a bug where scale-down update cluster requests failed due to quota validation if the user project was over a quota limit.

Datastore - Support for the europe-central2 (Warsaw) region.

Dialogflow - Preview launch of the Dialogflow CX Phone Gateway integration. The "Auto-preview changes" option was removed from the Dialogflow ES Google Assistant integration. Preview launch of the Voximplant integration for Dialogflow CX. Preview launch of the Facebook Messenger integration for Dialogflow CX. Preview launch of the LINE integration for Dialogflow CX.

Cloud Firestore - Support for the europe-central2 (Warsaw) region.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions is now available in the following region: europe-central2 (Warsaw) See Cloud Functions Locations for details.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2021-R12) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. 1.19 GA GKE version 1.19 is now generally available (GA). The basic authentication method is no longer available starting with Kubernetes version 1.19. Admission webhooks and custom resource conversion webhooks must use serving certificates that contain the server name in a subjectAltName extension. kube-proxy now uses EndpointSlices by default. With the release of GKE node version 1.19, the Container-Optimized OS with Docker (cos) variant is deprecated. Seccomp General Availability (GA) Seccomp (secure computing mode) support for Kubernetes has graduated to General Availability (GA). The widely used Ingress API has graduated to general availability in Kubernetes 1.19. CertificateSigningRequest v1 API The CertificateSigningRequest API has graduated to certificates.k8s.io/v1 in Kubernetes 1.19. Admission webhooks and custom resource conversion webhooks using invalid serving certificates that do not contain the server name in a subjectAltName extension cannot be contacted by the Kubernetes API server in 1.19 prior to version 1.19.9-gke.400. Service API objects with more than 100 ports do not work correctly with EndpointSlices (https://issue.k8s.io/99382).

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2021-R12) Version updates Version 1.19.9-gke.100 is now the default version in the Rapid channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2021-R12) Version updates Version 1.19.8-gke.1600 is now available in the Regular channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2021-R12) Version updates Version 1.17.17-gke.3000 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Cloud Logging - Shared queries are now generally available (GA).

Cloud Memorystore - Added new Memorystore for Redis region: Warsaw (europe-central2).

Cloud Monitoring - The Cloud Operations for GKE monitoring dashboard now allows you to manage and display service-level objectives (SLOs) that you define for your applications. Compute Engine's Instance Groups Monitoring tab now includes charts for your managed instance groups. The Cloud Operations for GKE monitoring dashboard now includes a column called Error logs that displays the number of error logs associated with an entity based on the selected time range. The Cloud Operations for GKE monitoring dashboard now provides a Metrics tab in the resource details panel. The dashboard save feature now displays the date and time of the last save operation. The Cloud Operations for GKE monitoring dashboard now provides an Alerts tab in the resource details panel.

Cloud Run - Cloud Run is now available in europe-central2 (Warsaw).

Cloud Spanner - Transaction statistics now includes information about commit retries to help users debug performance issues caused by transaction aborts.

Traffic Director - Traffic Director now supports the Client Status Discovery Service (CSDS) API, enabling you to see which clients are connected to Traffic Director and to inspect the configuration that Traffic Director generates for its clients. Traffic Director now supports TCP-based services in GA.

Virtual Private Cloud - Access to Google APIs and services using Private Service Connect is now available in General Availability. Using non-RFC 1918 addresses for Private Service Connect endpoints results in unexpected costs due to a billing issue.

VPC Service Controls - General availability for the following integration: VM Manager.

Migrate for Compute Engine 4.8 - 5.0. Google Cloud Console UI End-to-end migration experience in Google Cloud Console including: Dashboard, Source inventory, Migrations managements, VM groups, and Targets. Migration primitives Migration primitives controlling VM migration journey, which includes: Replication - Initiate replication based migration, control periodical replication cycle schedule. VM groups Group migration operations to enable you to manage and execute mass migration sprints. Seamless OS adaptation Seamless OS adaptation of migrating VMs to prepare OS to run in Compute Engine (such as network settings) and deploy Compute Engine agents for seamless day 2 integrations with Compute Engine services. Compute Engine Targets Migration to n Google Cloud target projects and flexible configuration of migrating VM target details (such as instance type, disk type, and network settings). vSphere Source Agentless migration of vSphere source environment utilizing Migrate Connector appliance deployed in source. VM utilization reports To help you determine the optimal settings for the Compute Engine target, Migrate for Compute Engine lets you create a source VM utilization report.

AI Platform Prediction - Runtime version 2.4 is now available.

Dialogflow Enterprise - Preview launch of the Dialogflow CX Phone Gateway integration. The "Auto-preview changes" option was removed from the Dialogflow ES Google Assistant integration. Preview launch of the Voximplant integration for Dialogflow CX. Preview launch of the Facebook Messenger integration for Dialogflow CX. Preview launch of the LINE integration for Dialogflow CX.

AI Platform Unified - The Python client library for AI Platform (Unified) is now called the AI Platform (Unified) SDK.

SAP Solutions - SAP HANA high-availability configurations on Red Hat: If you configured a RHEL HA cluster for SAP HANA before April 15, 2021 by following the Google Cloud documentation, you need to modify the location constraints of your cluster fencing devices to avoid possible race conditions during failovers.

GKE - (2021-R12) Version updates Version 1.17.17-gke.3000 is now the default version.

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