Welcome to issue #243 May 24th, 2021

News

Google Cloud unveils Vertex AI, one platform, every ML tool you need - Google Cloud launches Vertex AI, a managed platform for experimentation, versioning and deploying ML models into production.

Google Maps Platform Announcements from Google I/O 2021 - A recap the latest news about Google Maps Platform, fresh from the developer keynote.

What’s new from Firebase at Google I/O 2021 - A list of Firebase updates.

Forrester names Google Cloud a Leader in Unstructured Data Security Platforms - Google Cloud received the highest possible score in many categories and led the field in the Forrester Wave for Unstructured Data Security Platforms.

Take control of your firewall rules with Firewall Insights - Firewall Insights creates visibility into your firewall rule set so you can organize the chaos and end the headache of managing them.

With new geothermal project, it’s full steam ahead for 24/7 carbon-free energy - Google and Fervo are developing a next-generation geothermal power project, which will provide an “always-on” carbon-free resource for our data centers.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Keep your budgets flexible with configurable budget periods - Automation makes managing budgets easier and the Budget API now supports configurable budget time periods for even more flexibility!

Billing Alert with Cloud Monitoring Notification Channel - Setting up Budgets alerts and Notification channels to send notifications to custom recipients.

Anthos in depth: All the posts in our hybrid and multicloud development series - Anthos In Depth blog series put together in one place so you can get the most from our modern application platform.

Best practices to protect your organization against ransomware threats - Ransomware attacks are growing in frequency and sophistication. Create a foundation to protect yourself from them with these five strategic pillars.

How to do network traffic analysis with VPC Flow Logs on Google Cloud - Scripts and tutorials to help with network traffic analysis using Google Cloud’s VPC Flow Logs.

The Key Wars Story - Implementing security best practices for Service Account keys.

Real-time Monitoring and Log Streaming in Google Cloud Platform - Setting up Cloud Monitoring & Logging Agents to ingest logs from servers and applications.

Terraform your chef-workstation on GCP - Setting up Chef workstation on GCP using Terraform.

Multi-Cloud Architecture using VPN between GCP and AWS - Here is a step-by-step guide to build a Multi-cloud architecture using GCP Cloud VPN and BGP dynamic routing.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Follow your org’s app dev best practices with Cloud Code custom samples - By creating a Cloud Code custom samples repository for your developers, they can easily find recommended application samples on which to base their apps.

Lower development costs: schedule Cloud SQL instances to start and stop - Learn the steps to configure your Cloud SQL instance to start and stop each workday using Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud Scheduler.

Organizing the migration of a hundred databases to the cloud - A story of a migration process of various on-premise databases to the Google Cloud.

Cloud Workflows Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions! - Deploying Workflow config file from GitHub.

Limiting Access to Google Cloud Storage by IP address - A workaround to restrict access to Cloud Storage bucket by IP address.

How to Generate and Store a PDF With Firebase - Node.js tutorial on how to generate PDF documents with Firebase Cloud Functions and upload them to Firebase Cloud Storage.

Creating multiple applications and domains in App Engine - An example of how to configure and deploy multiple services to subdomains on App Engine.

GCP Cloud SQL — Recovering an accidentally deleted database/Cloud SQL Instance - Restore Cloud SQL database from a backups in case it was deleted (accidentally).

Deploying Wordpress on Cloud Run in 2021 - A step by step tutorial to deploy Wordpress on Cloud Run.

Writing efficient queries for Cloud Spanner interleaved tables - A discussion on how to write efficient queries for Cloud Spanner interleaved tables.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Discover datasets to enrich your analytics and AI initiatives - Discover and access datasets and pre-built dataset solutions from Google, or public and commercial data providers.

Transforming your business with the data cloud - Accelerate your business transformation with the data cloud.

Datasets for Google Cloud: Introducing our new reference architecture - Get a deep dive on the new reference architecture we built that offers a more streamlined data onboarding process for the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program.

Improving NCCL performance for cloud ML applications - How to optimize Google Cloud infrastructure to minimize deep learning training times with distributed/multi-node synchronous training using NCCL.

How to Build, Deploy & Share Custom Google Data Studio Community Connectors - Steps to build community connector for Data Studio.

Serverless Machine Learning Pipelines with Vertex AI: An Introduction - Vertex AI in the context of MLOps.

How to deploy TensorFlow Extended pipeline to Kubeflow - Creating TensorFlow Extended pipeline and deploying to Kubeflow pipelines.

Analyzing Disneyland Paris visitors reviews for parks and hotels — Part 1 - Exploratory Data Analysis and Topic Modeling on more than 120k TripAdvisor reviews using BigQuery.

Automate the execution of BigQuery queries with Cloud Workflows - Resolve repetitive queries with scheduled invocations, combine simple queries to complex DML statements by using Cloud Workflows instead of BigQuery Scripting.

Data Journal: Cyclistic Case Study - Bike-share company marketing analysis.

Using Census Data For Advertising Campaign Funnel Analysis - StarThinker is a simple and intuitive web UI that allows users to create, edit, run, and schedule data pipelines consisting of data transfer and data processing jobs. StarThinker deploys on Google Cloud in minutes without engineering or coding required.

Working with Data in BigQuery using Node.js - This article will get into the actual usage of BigQuery and show how to read and write data using Node.js.

Learnings from Streaming 25 Billion Events to Google BigQuery - Experience of using BigQuery in PayPal.

How To: Group By Geography column - Aggregating data by a geography column in BigQuery.

BigQuery Observability: New Capability and Consulting Mindset - Getting BigQUery observability data from BigQuery INFROMATION_SCHEMA.

Giving Vertex AI, the New Unified ML Platform on Google Cloud, a Spin - An overview of Vertex AI platform.

Why Google just released Vertex AI and what it means for you - Google announced the release of Vertex AI at Google I/O and it’s a big one! Read why ML6’s machine learning engineers are so excited.

AI Platform Notebooks with Voila - Adding and using Jupyter Notebooks extensions in AI Platform notebooks.

Various

Google Cloud Research Innovators drive scientific advances on the cloud - Announcement of inaugural cohort of 31 Google Cloud Research Innovators, spanning 30 institutions and 8 countries across both industry and academia.

Google Cloud’s contribution to an environment of trust and transparency in Europe - The Belgian Data Protection Authority has approved a new Cloud Code of Conduct, and Google Cloud is among the first cloud providers to adopt it.

Book - Implementing DevOps on Google Cloud - Achieving Google’s Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification.

How insurers can use severe storm data for dynamic pricing - Check out how insurance companies can use public datasets, like those from NOAA with storm data, to do predictive analytics and create better risk assessments.

Google Cloud: the fuel of digital transformation - Carrefour has been on an ambitious cloud journey with its strategic partner Google. Discover more on the benefits of the alliance.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #260 Responsible AI with Craig Wiley and Tracy Frey.

Releases

Anthos Config Management - 1.7.0. If Syncing from multiple repositories is enabled on a private GKE cluster, it's required to add a firewall rule to allow port 8676.

AppEngine Standard Java - Updated Java SDK to version 1.9.89.

BigQuery - BigQuery GIS now supports loading geography data from newline-delimited GeoJSON files. BigQuery GIS now supports the following functions. ST_STARTPOINT, ST_ENDPOINT, ST_POINTN. BigQuery now supports the ability to rename tables using SQL.

BigQuery ML - The CREATE MODEL statement for training AutoML Tables models is now generally available (GA).

Compute Engine - Generally Available: You can now create VM instances with V100, A100, and T4 GPUs that support network bandwidths of up to 100 Gbps.

Config Connector - Config Connector version 1.50.0 is now available. Resource CRDs are now using apiextensions.k8s.io/v1. Fixed the issue that Project creation failed if spec.resourceID was set. Fixed the issue that Storage resources couldn't be deleted if the referenced StorageBucket was deleted first. Fixed the IAM resource references in go-client.

Dataproc - You can customize the Conda environment during cluster creation using new Conda-related cluster properties. Added validation for clusters created with Dataproc Metastore services to determine compatibility between the Dataproc image's Hive version and the DPMS service's hive version.

Cloud Networking Products - Cloud DNS monitoring dashboard is available in GA.

KMS - The Cloud KMS and Cloud HSM SLA has been updated.

Google Kubernetes Engine - Network Policy Logging is generally available (GA). In GKE version 1.20 and later, audit logging does not occur for Binary Authorization fail open events. (2021-R17) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. For GKE clusters running 1.18.18-gke.1200 or later, Ingress Controller only syncs NEGs that were created by the controller. The UpgradeAvailableEvent notification is now generally available.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - In GKE version 1.20 and later, audit logging does not occur for Binary Authorization fail open events. (2021-R17) Version updates Version 1.20.6-gke.1000 is now the default version in the Rapid channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2021-R17) Version updates Version 1.19.9-gke.1900 is now available in the Regular channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2021-R17) Version updates Version 1.18.17-gke.700 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Anthos Migrate - On May 19, 2021, we released Migrate for Anthos 1.7.5. New rule added to the Linux discovery tool to display information when multiple NICs are detected because multiple NICs can increase the effort required to migrate the workload. A generated migration plan now contains entries for Service endpoints and NFS mounts discovered on the source VM. Following the Microsoft decision to end support for the Windows 10, version 1909 architecture, the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) team removed support for this architecture on its GKE and Anthos clusters. Removed from the legacy PV-based Migrate for Anthos versions a Webhook that was simplifying the definition of Migrate for Anthos pods. 186512095: When building a Windows container, you no longer have to edit the generated Dockerfile to change the image tag to latest. 185975192: Webhook certificates no longer expire after one month. 162275866: When generating migration artifacts, you no longer see the following error: Error: failed to update vgenerateartifactsflow.kb.io.

Traffic Director - Traffic Director security service with GKE is now available in Public Preview.

Service Mesh - 1.6.x. Anthos Service Mesh 1.6 is no longer supported. 1.7.x & 1.8.x & 1.9.x. 1.9.5-asm.2, 1.8.6-asm.3, and 1.7.8-asm.8 are now available.

Anthos clusters on bare metal - 1.6. Release 1.6.3 Anthos clusters on bare metal release 1.6.3 is now available. Fixed: Fixed CVE-2021-25735 that could allow node updates to bypass a Validating Admission Webhook. Known issues: When you upgrade Anthos clusters on bare metal from a version with a security patch to the next minor release, we recommend you upgrade to the highest patch version to ensure you have the latest security fixes.

Anthos Service Mesh 1.5 - 1.6.x. Anthos Service Mesh 1.6 is no longer supported. 1.7.x & 1.8.x & 1.9.x. 1.9.5-asm.2, 1.8.6-asm.3, and 1.7.8-asm.8 are now available.

AI Platform Unified - AI Platform (Unified) is now Vertex AI. Vertex AI has added support for custom model training, custom model batch prediction, custom model online prediction, and a limited number of other services in the following regions: us-west1 us-east1 us-east4 northamerica-northeast1 europe-west2 europe-west1 asia-southeast1 asia-northeast1 australia-southeast1 asia-northeast3. Vertex AI now supports forecasting with time series data for AutoML tabular models, in Preview. Vertex Pipelines is now available in Preview. Vertex Model Monitoring is now available in Preview. Vertex Feature Store is now available in Preview. Vertex ML Metadata is now available in Preview. Vertex Matching Engine is now available in Preview. Vertex TensorBoard is now available in Preview.

GKE on-prem 1.5 - In version 1.7.1, the stackdriver-log-forwarder starts to consume significantly increasing memory after a period of time, and the logs show an excessive number of OAuth 2.0 token requests.

VMware Engine - VMware Engine nodes are now available in the following additional region: Mumbai, India, APAC (asia-south1).

Anthos Service Mesh - 1.6.x. Anthos Service Mesh 1.6 is no longer supported. 1.7.x & 1.8.x & 1.9.x. 1.9.5-asm.2, 1.8.6-asm.3, and 1.7.8-asm.8 are now available.

Cloud Build - Upgraded to Docker server version 20.10.6.

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7 - In version 1.7.1, the stackdriver-log-forwarder starts to consume significantly increasing memory after a period of time, and the logs show an excessive number of OAuth 2.0 token requests.

Anthos Service Mesh - 1.6.x. Anthos Service Mesh 1.6 is no longer supported. 1.7.x & 1.8.x & 1.9.x. 1.9.5-asm.2, 1.8.6-asm.3, and 1.7.8-asm.8 are now available.

Cloud Run for Anthos - Events for Cloud Run for Anthos version 0.21.0-gke.108 is now available for the following GKE minor versions: 1.19 1.20 1.21.

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.6 - In version 1.7.1, the stackdriver-log-forwarder starts to consume significantly increasing memory after a period of time, and the logs show an excessive number of OAuth 2.0 token requests.

GKE - (2021-R17) Version updates Version 1.17.17-gke.8200 is now 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