Welcome to issue #244 May 31st, 2021

News

Unlock the power of change data capture and replication with new, serverless Datastream - Introducing a new change data capture (CDC) and replication service that works across heterogeneous databases, cloud and on-premises, for real-time analytics.

Introducing Datashare solution for financial services for licensed market data discovery, access and analytics on Google Cloud - Datashare brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers, aggregators, and consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily.

Introducing Dataplex—an intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale - Dataplex unifies distributed data to help automate data management and power analytics at scale.

Network Connectivity Center: Expanding SD-WAN’s reach with new partners - With Network Connectivity Center, you can connect your virtual appliances to a VPC using a native BGP.

Dataflow Prime: bring unparalleled efficiency and radical simplicity to big data processing - Create even better data pipelines with Dataflow Prime, coming to Preview in Q3 2021.

Introducing Analytics Hub: secure and scalable sharing for data and analytics - Analytics Hub makes data sharing across organizations secure and easy.

Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA to 99.999% and adds new security features for regulated industries - 99.999% availability enables always-on apps and Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) give customers greater control over how their data is secured.

Faster Cloud Spanner migrations with HarbourBridge's Schema Assistant - Today we’re announcing the HarbourBridge Schema Assistant, which provides a guided schema-design workflow for migrating from MySQL or PostgreSQL to Spanner. HarbourBridge imports dump files (from mysqldump or pg_dump) or directly connects to your source database, and converts the source database schema to an equivalent Spanner schema.

Cloud Spanner trims entry cost by 90%, offers sharper observability and easier querying - New instance sizing and pricing features mean Spanner can support new tasks like development, testing, and small production workloads.

Using New WebGL-powered Maps Features - Today, we’re going to give you a quick overview of the new WebGL-powered features of the Maps JavaScript API, so that you have all the knowledge you need to get started creating next generation mapping experiences.

VM Manager simplifies compliance with OS configuration management Preview - A new version of OS configuration management within VM Manager makes it easier to manage large fleets of Compute Engine virtual machines.

Google Cloud launches from Google I/O 2021 - Learn about the key Google Cloud launches from Google I/O 2021.

Simplifying API operations with AI as you scale your API programs - Apigee X seamlessly weaves together Google Cloud’s expertise in AI, security and networking to help you efficiently build and manage APIs at scale.

How to leverage global address resolution using Cloud DNS in Google Cloud VMware Engine - Google Cloud VMware Engine now supports global name resolution VMware management components including vCenter, NSX Manager and HCX Manager.

Have a cool summer with BigQuery user-friendly SQL - We are pleased to announce three categories of BigQuery user-friendly SQL launches: Powerful Analytics Features, Flexible Schema Handling, and New Geospatial Tools.

Understanding Cloud Spanner performance metrics at scale with Key Visualizer - We are happy to announce the launch of Key Visualizer, a new interactive monitoring tool to analyze usage patterns in Spanner. It reveals trends and outliers in important performance and resource metrics for any size database.

New Google Cloud innovations to unify your data cloud - Google Cloud unveils news data analytics products and services to support open data cloud.

Missed Google I/O? Here’s the Latest from Google Maps Platform - This year marked the first ever virtual Google I/O, and even though we couldn’t be together in person, we appreciated getting the chance to still connect with our developer community around the world. Whether you spent hours in our virtual dome in Google I/O Adventure, or could only make it to a few sessions, not to worry. We’re here with a quick recap of everything Google Maps Platform from Google I/O 2021.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Anthos 101 learning series: All the videos in one place - In under an hour, you’ll learn how Anthos lets you develop, run and secure applications across your hybrid and multicloud environments.

Four steps to jumpstarting your SRE practice - Once you have leadership buy-in, there are some things you can do to get the SRE ball rolling, fast.

5 tips to maximize the Kubernetes developer experience with Cloud Code - GCP development can be very difficult, especially when trying to mangage complicated kubernetes infrastructure when you should be focused on ways to make coding easier. Cloud Code is the key to streamlining Kubernetes development.

Google Cloud Platform Architecture Diagrams - Use cases of GCP Diagrams.

My List of GCP Security Review Tools - A list of security tools that can be used for Google Cloud security analysis.

Securing Kubernetes and Google Cloud with Workload Identity - Using Workload Identity on GKE.

Never miss a tapeout: Faster chip design with Google Cloud - Augmenting on-premises chip design workflows with cloud-based capacity is a great way to speed up silicon workflows.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Migrate from Oracle to PostgreSQL with minimal downtime with Datastream - This Oracle to PostgreSQL toolkit makes migration easier and minimizes downtime thanks to Datastream.

Integrating Eventarc and Workflows - Learn to implement hybrid architectures that combine choreography and orchestration through Eventarc and Workflows integration.

Analyze your logs easier with log field analytics - When you’re troubleshooting, finding all the values in a specific field can help find deviations from the expected values and help refine your queries.

What is Compute Engine? Use cases, security, pricing and more - Virtual Machines power most of our apps, but how do they work? Learn more about Compute Engine and how it can fit your needs.

Giving a spin to Cloud Datastream, The new serverless CDC offering on Google cloud - Trying out Datastream.

Develop and test Google Cloud Functions locally and deploy - A sample setup and template to manage, develop and deploy your Cloud Functions.

Developer tools for Cloud Run - Developer tools to enhance Cloud Run development.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

3x Dataflow Throughput with Auto Sharding for BigQuery - Google is launching Dataflow Auto Sharding - a new capability that enables users to get increased performance when writing to Big Query in Dataflow. With Auto sharding, Dataflow automatically sets the number of shards for Big Query sink without manual user work.

Using Datastream to unify data for machine learning and analytics - Datastream is a serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service that is easy to use and addresses these challenges.

Persistent Spark History Server with Transient Dataproc clusters - The article explains how to set up a Persistent Spark History Server which can collect event logs from multiple Spark applications running on multiple transient clusters and can show the Spark UI when the application finishes.

Testing Dataflow pipelines with the Cloud Spanner emulator - Existing Dataflow pipelines that are configured to work with Cloud Spanner can be tested with the emulator. This allows for easy offline testing of existing pipelines without connecting to the actual Spanner backend.

Real-time Change Data Capture for data replication into BigQuery - Examples of using various integrations to BigQuery.

Quickly create BigQuery demo/dev environments using SQL - A neat trick that uses Stored Procedure with a BigQuery script.

PayPal’s Data Warehouse Migration to Google BigQuery - The first in a multi-step Google Cloud Platform journey.

BigQuery Cost Efficiency - Best practices to avoid costly behaviour for BigQuery.

Transforming GeoJSON’s Geometric Features into BigQuery’s Polygon Format with Simple Python Script - Bridging the geometric data available in GeoJson.io into analytics use cases.

Cloud AI in the developer community - Cloud AI has been empowering not only enterprises, but also developer communities. See demos, tutorials and videos created by Google Developers Experts (GDEs) for learning Cloud AI.

Various

Roostify simplifies mortgage processing with Lending DocAI - Mortgage software provider Roostify reduces loan processing times with Google Cloud Lending DocAI.

Google Cloud Certified Cloud Digital Leader — Learning Resources - Resources for Cluod Digital Leader certification exam.

7 Free Courses to learn Google Cloud Platform for Beginners - Cloud computing courses to learn Google Cloud Platform online for FREE from Udemy, Coursera, and Youtube.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #261 Full Stack Dart with Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore.

Releases

Security Command Center - Security Command Center Premium has launched project- and folder-level roles in general availability. Security Command Center now supports two versions of CIS Benchmarks for Google Cloud Platform Foundation: CIS Google Cloud Computing Foundations Benchmark v1.1.0 (CIS Google Cloud Foundation 1.1) CIS Google Cloud Computing Foundations Benchmark v1.0.0 (CIS Google Cloud Foundation 1.0) For more information about supported compliance standards, see Detectors and compliance. Security Health Analytics, a built-in service of Security Command Center, has expanded the number of detectors in the Standard tier.

SAP Solutions - GA: Google Cloud monitoring agent for SAP HANA, version 2 Version 2.0 of the monitoring agent for SAP HANA is now generally available.

Cloud Spanner - We've enhanced the experience for creating, updating, and deleting schemas in the Cloud Console.

VMware Engine - Added security bulletin for the VMware Engine response to VMware security advisory VMSA-2021-0010.

Anthos Config Management - 1.7.2. Hierarchy Controller has been updated to use HNC v0.8.0. Increased reconciler memory limit to 300Mi. The output of the nomos hydrate command does not pass nomos vet and cannot be synced using Config Sync without modifying the output. The nomos hydrate command attempts to connect to the API Server even if --no-api-server-check is passed.

GKE on-prem 1.5 - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7.2-gke.2 is now available. The Ubuntu node image shipped in version 1.7.2 is qualified with the CIS (Center for Internet Security) L1 Server Benchmark. Fixes: These security vulnerabilities have been fixed: CVE-2021-25735, which is mentioned in the GCP-2021-001 security bulletin. An admin cluster upgrade may fail due to an expired front-proxy-client certificate on the admin control plane node.

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7 - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7.2-gke.2 is now available. The Ubuntu node image shipped in version 1.7.2 is qualified with the CIS (Center for Internet Security) L1 Server Benchmark. Fixes: These security vulnerabilities have been fixed: CVE-2021-25735, which is mentioned in the GCP-2021-001 security bulletin. An admin cluster upgrade may fail due to an expired front-proxy-client certificate on the admin control plane node.

Cloud Asset Inventory - New resource types are now available. The following resource types are now publicly available through the Export APIs (ExportAssets and BatchGetAssetsHistory) and the Feed API: Artifact Registry (artifactregistry.googleapis.com/Repository).

BI Engine - The free trial period for BigQuery BI Engine's SQL interface has been extended to July 15th, 2021.

BigTable - The Cloud Bigtable Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been updated.

Compute Engine - Preview: Disable simultaneous multithreading (SMT) on VMs. Generally Available: Enable nested virtualization directly when creating a VM.

Config Connector - Config Connector 1.51.0 is now available. Miscellaneous bug fixes. Config Connector 1.51.0 is now available. Added field spec.basic.conditions[].devicePolicy.osConstraints[].requireVerifiedChromeOs to AccessContextManagerAccessLevel. Added field spec.externalDataConfiguration.hivePartitioningOptions.requirePartitionFilter to BigQueryTable. Added field spec.initialGroupConfig to CloudIdentityGroup. Added field spec.initialSize to ComputeNodeGroup. Added field spec.maintenanceWindow to ComputeNodeGroup. Added field spec.replication.userManaged.replicas[].customerManagedEncryption to SecretManagerSecret. Added field spec.encryptionConfig to SpannerDatabase.

Data Fusion - Cloud Data Fusion version 6.4.1 is now available. In Cloud Data Fusion version 6.4.1, Replication supports the Datetime data type in BigQuery targets. Fixed in 6.4.1 (for more information, see the CDAP release note): Fixed an issue that caused pipelines with aggregations and Decimal fields to fail with an exception.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2021-R18) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. 1.21 available in the Rapid channel Kubernetes version 1.21 is now available in the Rapid channel. 1.21 Features The following features are introduced in version 1.21: CronJob (GA) The CronJob API has graduated to General Availability (GA), bringing performance improvements and allowing scheduled jobs to be run using a stable API. In Kubernetes 1.21, newly provisioned PersistentVolumes by gce-pd will use the topology.kubernetes.io/zone GA label instead of the failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone beta label. 1.21 New Beta and Stable APIs The following Stable APIs are new in 1.21: batch/v1 CronJob policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget discovery.k8s.io/v1 EndpointSlice The following Beta APIs are new in 1.21: storage.k8s.io/v1beta1 CSIStorageCapacity. 1.21 Deprecated APIs The following APIs are deprecated in the 1.21 release: PodSecurityPolicy policy/v1beta1 PodSecurityPolicy Deprecated in 1.21 with removal targeted for version 1.25. GKE clusters running version 1.18 or later now support container native Cloud DNS (available in Preview).

GKE - (2021-R18) Version updates Version 1.19.9-gke.1900 is now the default version.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2021-R18) Version updates Version 1.20.6-gke.1400 is now available in the Rapid channel. 1.21 available in the Rapid channel Kubernetes version 1.21 is now available in the Rapid channel. 1.21 Features The following features are introduced in version 1.21: CronJob (GA) The CronJob API has graduated to General Availability (GA), bringing performance improvements and allowing scheduled jobs to be run using a stable API. In Kubernetes 1.21, newly provisioned PersistentVolumes by gce-pd will use the topology.kubernetes.io/zone GA label instead of the failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone beta label. 1.21 New Beta and Stable APIs The following Stable APIs are new in 1.21: batch/v1 CronJob policy/v1 PodDisruptionBudget discovery.k8s.io/v1 EndpointSlice The following Beta APIs are new in 1.21: storage.k8s.io/v1beta1 CSIStorageCapacity. 1.21 Deprecated APIs The following APIs are deprecated in the 1.21 release: PodSecurityPolicy policy/v1beta1 PodSecurityPolicy Deprecated in 1.21 with removal targeted for version 1.25.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2021-R18) Version updates Version 1.19.9-gke.1900 is now the default version in the Regular channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2021-R18) Version updates Version 1.18.17-gke.1200 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Load Balancing - Starting May 15, 2021, a newly-created custom static route using a next hop forwarding rule of an internal TCP/UDP load balancer will forward all protocol traffic, not just TCP and UDP traffic.

Memorystore for Memcached - v1. Added support for the Reserved Memory configuration for Memorystore for Memcached.

Cloud Memorystore - Added support for specifying an IP address range for the private service access connection mode.

Network Connectivity Center - The Cloud documentation now includes a list of partners whose solutions are integrated with Network Connectivity Center. You can now use the Cloud Console to create hubs and spokes in Network Connectivity Center.

Resource Manager - The process for migrating a project from one organization to another has released into general availability.

Secret Manager - The Secret Manager SLA has been updated.

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