Welcome to issue #254 August 9th, 2021

News

Try a tutorial in the Google Cloud Console - You can follow tutorials and walkthroughs in the Google Cloud Console, allowing you to view the instructions and the console at the same time. The tutorials include links and highlights, making it easy to find the screens and buttons you're looking for.

Introducing Unattended Project Recommender: discover, reclaim, or deprecate abandoned projects under your organization - Save money and improve security by automating the discovery, management and reclamation of old projects with Unattended Project Recommender.

New This Month in Data Analytics: Taking Home the Gold in Data - Highlights from the July blogs for Data Analytics.

MySQL major version upgrade using Database Migration Service - Google’s Database Migration Service gives us the tool we need to perform Major Version upgrades for MySQL.

Integrating Service Directory with GKE: one registry for all your services - You can now register Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) services in Service Directory, Google Cloud’s managed service registry.

Deploy optimized HPC clusters in the cloud with Intel Select Solutions - Intel Select Solutions for Simulation and Modeling on Google Cloud make it easy to create optimized HPC environments quickly.

Google named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services again - Gartner named Google Cloud a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, formerly Infrastructure as a Service.

New histogram features in Cloud Logging to troubleshoot faster - Finding the right logs is critical to troubleshooting which is why we designed and built the histogram in the Logs Explorer. We recently added features to the histogram which make it easier to find the logs you need quickly.

Consume services faster, privately and securely - Private Service Connect now in GA - Private Service Connect lets you create private and secure connections to Google Cloud and third-party services with service endpoints in your VPCs.

New Cloud-based maps styling features provide more options, control, and flexibility to enhance your user experience - This year at Google I/O, we announced the general availability of Cloud-based maps styling for the Maps JavaScript API. In an effort to provide you with more options and more control to help create the best experience for your users, today we’re releasing new features to Cloud-based maps styling.

Get in sync: Consistent Kubernetes with new Anthos Config Management features - Anthos Config Management and Config Controller bring Kubernetes-style declarative policy and config management to GKE environments.

Elevate your security with new Secret Manager features and integrations - Increased SLA, geo-expansion, new certifications, Customer-Managed Encryption Keys and more come to Google Cloud Secret Manager.

ScyllaDB Brings Scylla Cloud to Google Cloud - General availability of Scylla Cloud on Google Cloud.

Unlocking your app’s best experience with Firebase Performance Monitoring - Firebase Performance Monitoring processes your app performance data in real-time so you can monitor new releases during development and post-launch.

New features in App Check beta - Three new features are added to the App Check beta: support for App Attest on iOS, configurable time-to-live values (TTLs) for tokens, and support for protecting non-Firebase backends with App Check.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Secure CI/CD on Cloudbuild using “private worker pools” - This blog demonstrates how we can use the GCP Compute Engine (Virtual Machines) as worker pools for running the cloud build jobs.

Extract Committed use discount details from Recommendation Hub - This post discusses on how to retrieve committed use discount details from the Google Cloud Recommender across all GCP Projects in an Organization.

Beyond mainframe modernization: The art of possibilities - Mainframe modernization has been a hot topic over the past decade or so. Over time, the term "modernization" itself is manifested in many ways. So to even begin the modernization conversation, we need to define what modernization is.

8 ways Google Cloud elevates agility and security for financial services - A new white paper by IDG highlights an alternative to replatforming your financial services apps, and how to do it with Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Multiple projects log monitoring in a single place - Setting alerts on log based metrics over several projects is not possible. But you can aggregate your logs in one place to solve this!

30 ways to leave your data center: key migration guides, in one place - Essential guides for all the workloads your business is considering migrating to the public cloud.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

What is Cloud IoT Core? - Cloud IoT Core is a managed service to securely connect, manage, and ingest data from global device fleets.

Image search with natural language queries - This post shows how to build an image search utility using natural language queries. Our aim is to use different GCP services to demonstrate this.

GCP Inspector | Auditing Publicly Exposed GCP Bucket - Installation of GCP Inspector and basics about enumerating publicly exposed GCP buckets.

Securing App Engine Applications - This article will review the security controls available to administrators within Google Cloud Platform, specific to App Engine.

How to Query Collections in Firestore Under a Certain Path?

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

BigQuery Admin reference guide: Query optimization - Understand complex query execution and explore techniques to refine your SQL for faster, more efficient data processing.

Comparing BigQuery Processing and Spark Dataproc - Different approaches that were evaluated for migrating Paypal's processes from on-prem to GCP.

What does Vertex AI do? - This post covers the common tasks in a typical machine learning workflow, and how Vertex AI brings together all the tools you need to achieve them under one unified user interface.

Optimizing your BigQuery tables using partitioning: Time-unit column-partitioned tables - Especially when working with Big Data, costs can quickly explode, and performance can degrade fast when data starts to pile up.

Hedging Against Bad Weather with Cloud Datasets and Blockchain Oracles - In this article, we demonstrate how open weather data and blockchain technology, combined with capabilities from Google Cloud, can create economic efficiencies and through sustainable agriculture mitigate climate change.

Distributed training and Hyperparameter tuning with TensorFlow on Vertex AI - Learn how to configure and launch a distributed hyperparameter tuning job with Vertex Training using bayesian optimization.

Tableau Server on Google Cloud Platform - This whitepaper is a technical guide for deploying Tableau on the Google Cloud Platform.

Various

How Digitec Galaxus delivers personalized newsletters with reinforcement learning and Google Cloud - How Swiss online retailer Digitec Galaxus built a personalized newsletter for customers using Recommendations AI and Google Cloud.

How to prepare for Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (GCP) exam in 2021? - Preparation guidance, study material, and resources for Cloud DevOps certification exam.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #270 Traditional vs. Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl.

Kubernetes Podcast - #157 Kubernetes 1.22, with Savitha Raghunathan.

Firebase podcast - The state of Firebase and Flutter.

Releases

AI Platform Unified - Vertex Pipelines is available in the following regions: us-east1 (South Carolina) europe-west2 (London) asia-southeast1 (Singapore) See all the locations where Vertex Pipelines is available.

AI Platform - Deep Learning VMs - M76 Release Added the Vertex SDK for Python.

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7 - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.6.4-gke.7 is now available. Fixes: This security vulnerability has been fixed: CVE-2021-3520 Fixed the issue that admin cluster upgrade may fail due to an expired front-proxy-client certificate on the admin control plane node.

GKE on-prem 1.7 - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.6.4-gke.7 is now available. Fixes: This security vulnerability has been fixed: CVE-2021-3520 Fixed the issue that admin cluster upgrade may fail due to an expired front-proxy-client certificate on the admin control plane node.

BI Engine - BigQuery BI Engine is now available in the Toronto (northamerica-northeast2) region.

BigQuery ML - BigQuery ML is now available in the Toronto (northamerica-northeast2) region.

BigQuery Transfer - BigQuery Data Transfer Service is now available in the Toronto (northamerica-northeast2) region.

BigQuery - BigQuery now supports the ALTER COLUMN SET DATA TYPE data definition language (DDL) statement. BigQuery now supports the following data definition language (DDL) statement: CREATE TABLE LIKE CREATE TABLE COPY This feature is generally available (GA). BigQuery is now available in the Toronto (northamerica-northeast2) region. An updated version of JDBC driver for BigQuery is now available that includes Enhancements & New Features.

BigTable - Cloud Bigtable is now available in the northamerica-northeast2 (Toronto) region.

Cloud Build - Users can now configure triggers to use a particular service account.

Compute Engine - Generally available: The Observability tab on Compute Engine's VM instance details page includes a category for process metrics. Preview: You can now use the Slurm-GCP workload manager to create clusters that are based on the HPC virtual machine (VM) image and comply to the Intel Select Solution for Simulation and Modeling criteria. N2 VMs are now available in all three zones in Warsaw, Poland europe-central2-a,b,c. Toronto, Ontario, Canada northamerica-northeast2-a,b,c region has launched with E2, N2, N1 virtual machine (VM) instances in all three zones. Disks, snapshots, and images are available in Toronto, Ontario, Canada northamerica-northeast2 in all three zones. Generally available: You can update the descriptions of your managed instance groups by using the API or gcloud tool. Preview: You can now share reservations of Compute Engine zonal resources between multiple projects.

Config Connector - Config Connector 1.58.0 is now available. Added support for MonitoringMetricDescriptor resource. CloudBuildTrigger: added webhookConfig and pubsubConfig options for triggers. Added a list of resources which have service-generated resource IDs. Added limited support for the cnrm.cloud.google.com/state-into-spec annotation, which allows merge and absent values to merge GCP state into the spec field or not, respectively.

Cloud Dataflow - Dataflow is now able to use workers, Dataflow Shuffle, Streaming Engine, FlexRS, and regional endpoints in zones in Toronto (northamerica-northeast2).

Dataproc Metastore - v1. Hive version 3.1.2 will become the default Dataproc Metastore service creation version in 5 weeks on September 6, 2021.

Dataproc - Dataproc is now available in the northamerica-northeast2 region (Toronto). 1.3 images are no longer supported and will not receive new releases. New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.4.66-debian10, 1.4.66-ubuntu18, 1.5.41-centos8, 1.5.41-debian10, 1.5.41-ubuntu18, 2.0.15-centos8, 2.0.15-debian10, and 2.0.15-ubuntu18. In image 2.0, set the mapreduce.fileoutputcommitter.algorithm.version=2 property in Spark.

Cloud Filestore - Filestore is available in the northamerica-northeast2 (Toronto) region. Filestore now has a new Enterprise tier, which allows you to create 1-10 TiB regional instances that can scale up and down with your storage needs. Filestore now supports private services access, which allows you to create instances on a Shared VPC network in service projects.

IAM - You can now use Activity Analyzer to see when your service accounts and keys were last used to call a Google API.

Google Kubernetes Engine - GKE Multi Cluster Ingress is now available through standalone per-Pod pricing in addition to Anthos licensing for all GKE release channels. The northamerica-northeast2 region in Toronto is now available. (2021-R25) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated.

GKE - (2021-R25) Version updates The following control plane and node versions are now available: 1.18.20-gke.3000 1.19.13-gke.700 1.20.9-gke.700 The following control plane versions are no longer available: 1.18.17-gke.1901 1.18.19-gke.1701 1.18.19-gke.2101 Control planes and nodes with auto-upgrade enabled will be upgraded from version 1.18 to version 1.18.20-gke.501 with this release.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2021-R25) Version updates Version 1.20.8-gke.900 is now the default version in the Rapid channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2021-R25) Version updates There are no new releases in the Regular release channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2021-R25) Version updates Version 1.18.20-gke.900 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Cloud Logging - You can now use Puppet to install and manage the Google Cloud operations suite agents across your fleet of Linux and Windows VMs.

Memorystore for Memcached - v1. Added new Memorystore for Memcached region: Toronto (northamerica-northeast2).

Cloud Memorystore - Added new Memorystore for Redis region: Toronto (northamerica-northeast2). Enabled cross region access for Memorystore for Redis.

Cloud Monitoring - A new UI for creating alerting policies is available in Preview. The Processes tab in the VM instances page is now Generally Available. The API to manage the metrics scope of a Google Cloud project is now in Preview. You can now use Puppet to install and manage the Google Cloud operations suite agents across your fleet of Linux and Windows VMs.

Cloud NAT - Cloud NAT rules is available in Preview.

Cloud PubSub - Pub/Sub Lite is now available in northamerica-northeast2 (Toronto).

Cloud Run - The following new region is now available: northamerica-northeast2.

SAP Solutions - High-availability cluster configuration guidance has changed: To minimize the likelihood of timing errors during a restart after failover, the guidance for setting up Pacemaker clusters on Linux for SAP has changed to include setting a short delay in the startup of Corosync after a failover. Google Cloud Connector for SAP LaMa is generally available The Google Cloud Connector for SAP Landscape Management 3.0, enterprise edition, is now generally available (GA).

Cloud Spanner - Cloud Spanner now has an end-to-end latency guide. Cloud Spanner regional instances can now be created in Toronto (northamerica-northeast2). Added support for changing instance configuration (Preview).

Cloud SQL MySQL - Support for northamerica-northeast2-a,b,c (Toronto) region.

Cloud SQL Postgres - Support for northamerica-northeast2-a,b,c (Toronto) region.

Cloud SQL SQL Server - Support for northamerica-northeast2-a,b,c (Toronto) region.

Cloud Storage - Toronto region (northamerica-northeast2) launched.

Transcoder API - v1. Added new quotas in order to group requests into 3 buckets: mutation, get, and list.

Cloud Translation - Removed the Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) model.

Vertex AI - Vertex Pipelines is available in the following regions: us-east1 (South Carolina) europe-west2 (London) asia-southeast1 (Singapore) See all the locations where Vertex Pipelines is available.

Virtual Private Cloud - For auto mode VPC networks, added a new subnet 10.188.0.0/20 for the Toronto northamerica-northeast2 region.

Cloud VPN - Cloud VPN is now available in region northamerica-northeast2 (Toronto, Canada).

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