Welcome to issue #264 October 18th, 2021

News

What’s new at Next - Announcements from Google Cloud Next ‘21, covering security, multicloud, data analytics, and much more.

New PostgreSQL Interface makes Cloud Spanner’s scalability and availability more open and accessible - Customers in financial services, gaming, retail, and many other industries rely on Cloud Spanner today to power their most demanding relational database workloads that need to scale without downtime. At Google Cloud Next ’21 we announced a preview of the PostgreSQL interface for Cloud Spanner that further democratizes access to Spanner for millions of developers.

Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud - Google Distributed Cloud runs Anthos on dedicated hardware at the edge or hosted in your data center, enabling a new class of low-latency and/or regulated workloads.

Google Cloud expands CCAI and DocAI solutions to accelerate time to value - Google Cloud deepens customer understanding with Contact Center AI Insights and transforms contract management with Contract DocAI.

Richer data visualization on Google Maps Platform using deck.gl - The release of the newest open source data visualization library deck.gl version 8.6.

Introducing Intelligent Products Essentials: helping manufacturers build AI-powered smart products, faster - Introducing Intelligent Products Essentials: helping manufacturers build AI-powered smart products, faster.

Google Cloud showcases new integrations and solutions with Ecosystem Partners at Next ‘21 - This week at Google Cloud Next, we’re excited to highlight new partner integrations, services, and solutions that play a critical role in helping our customers succeed.

Build a more secure future with Google Cloud - How Google Cloud secures the world with our people, platforms and products, announcements for Next 21.

Announcing new tools to measure—and reduce—your environmental impact - Now you can evaluate and reduce the carbon footprint of your cloud workloads, and evaluate your environmental impact with Earth Engine.

Turn data into value with a unified and open data cloud - At Google Cloud Next we announced Google Earth Engine with Bigquery, Spark on Google Cloud and Vertex AI Workbench.

Extending the value of Google Workspace to 3 billion users and counting - Expanding the ways users, customers, and developers can expand the value of Google Workspace.

Accelerate SAP innovation with Google Cloud Cortex Framework - Google Cloud Cortex Framework is a foundation with endorsed reference architectures for customers to more quickly deploy technologies from Google.

Cloud-ready in Under 30 Days: accelerate safe and efficient Cloud onboarding with guardrails from Google Cloud - Chris Carty, Public Sector Customer Engineer, dives into how Google Cloud keeps data secure and inside Canada with the addition of our new Toronto region now online, making it available for all Government of Canada organizations.

Colab is now available on GCP Marketplace - This gives you the ability to connect Colab to a custom GCE VM that you can configure as you wish.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Google Cloud IAM Roles-Permissions Public Dataset - Track how IAM roles and permissions change over time with the help of BigQuery.

Identifying GCP’s Hidden Network Inter-Zone Egress Costs - Discover how to quickly identify your Inter-Zone Egress costs using a few easy steps and available methods.

Centralised audit logs in GCP in a secure environment with VPC Service Controls - In this article, you will learn how to set up aggregated logging in an organization that has VPC Service Controls using Terraform module.

what’s ‘Networking’ in GCP - An overview of Networking products on Goggle Cloud.

Choosing the Right Access Control on Google Cloud - Explanation of Where to use Firewall Rules, VPC Service Controls, and product-specific access controls.

Google Cloud Workload Identity Federation with Okta - Setting up Workload Identity with Okta as OIDC provider.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Protecting your backends with Firebase App Check - Use Firebase App Check to protected hosted APIs and own backend resources.

Google Cloud Storage SignedURL with Cloud Run, Cloud Functions and GCE VMs - Code snippet to create a GCS Signed URL in Cloud Run, Cloud Functions and GCE VMs.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

An Introduction to MinaExplorer's BigQuery Public Dataset - This article explains how to get started with Mina's blockchain dataset in BigQuery.

Pub/Sub: Send a million messages per second and save thousands of $ a month using Avro - Choosing proper data format for Pub/Sub messages.

Back Up your Valuable BigQuery Views and Scheduled Queries - This tutorial will show you how to back up all the BigQuery SQL code into a Git repository using Python.

Various

Professional Cloud Security Engineer BETA exam review - An overview of Google Cloud Professional Security Engineer BETA exam.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #280 Google Cloud Next '21 with Brian Hall and Forrest Brazeal.

Security Podcast - #38 NEXT Special - 6 Cloud Security PMs (and a Developer Advocate!) Walk into a Studio.

Releases

Cloud Asset Inventory - The following resource types are now publicly available through the Analyze Policy APIs (AnalyzeIamPolicy and AnalyzeIamPolicyLongrunning): App Engine Memcache memcache.googleapis.com/Instance Filestore file.googleapis.com/Instance file.googleapis.com/Backup.

BigQuery - The BigQuery Storage Write API is now generally available (GA).

Compute Engine - Preview: Spot VMs are now available! Spot VMs are the latest version of preemptible VM instances. Preview: Third generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (Ice Lake) N2 VMs are now available in select regions and zones. Preview: Tau T2D VMs are now available in select regions and zones.

Deep Learning VM - M81 release Upgraded R to 4.1. Fixed bug that prevented R kernels from working properly.

Dialogflow Enterprise - Dialogflow CX has a new feature for side-by-side flow version comparison. GA (general availability) launch of the following languages in Dialogflow CX: Arabic Bengali Filipino Finnish Malay Marathi Romanian Sinhala Tamil Telugu Vietnamese. GA (general availability) launch of the following languages in Dialogflow ES: Bengali Filipino Finnish Malay Marathi Romanian Sinhala Tamil Telugu Vietnamese.

Dialogflow - Dialogflow CX has a new feature for side-by-side flow version comparison. GA (general availability) launch of the following languages in Dialogflow CX: Arabic Bengali Filipino Finnish Malay Marathi Romanian Sinhala Tamil Telugu Vietnamese. GA (general availability) launch of the following languages in Dialogflow ES: Bengali Filipino Finnish Malay Marathi Romanian Sinhala Tamil Telugu Vietnamese.

Cloud Data Loss Prevention - The data profiler for BigQuery is available in Preview.

Document AI - v1beta3. Contract DocAI (Preview) released The Contract parser is now available.

IAM - You can now use workload identity federation with any SAML 2.0-compatible identity provider.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2021-R31) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. GKE Windows clusters using the persistent disk CSI driver ​might experience volume mount issues with existing PersistentVolumeClaim or PersistentVolume resources if upgraded to one the following versions. StatefulSet Pods in Calico Network Policy enabled GKE clusters might experience connectivity issues in a Terminating state in the following GKE versions: 1.18 1.19 1.20 to 1.20.11-gke.1299 1.21 to 1.21.4-gke.1499 To mitigate this issue, upgrade your GKE control plane to GKE version 1.21.4-gke.1500 or later. The following GKE versions fix containerd issue #5438. Spot VMs on GKE is now available in Preview. With GKE version 1.19 and later, the CPU and memory usage of gke-metrics-agent have been optimized.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2021-R31) Version updates Version 1.21.4-gke.2300 is now the default version in the Rapid channel. GKE Windows clusters using the persistent disk CSI driver ​might experience volume mount issues with existing PersistentVolumeClaim or PersistentVolume resources if upgraded to one the following versions.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2021-R31) Version updates Version 1.20.10-gke.1600 is now available in the Regular channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2021-R31) Version updates Version 1.19.13-gke.1900 is now the default version in the Stable channel.

Cloud Logging - Cloud Logging now supports the asia-south2, asia-southeast2, australia-southeast2, northamerica-northeast2, and us-west4 regions.

Migrate for Compute Engine - V.4.11.7 Security updates available.

Security Command Center - Event Threat Detection, a built-in service of Security Command Center Premium, launched an integration with Chronicle that lets you perform advanced analysis of threat findings.

SAP Solutions - Storage Manager for SAP HANA Standby Nodes version 2.2 Version 2.2 of the Google Cloud storage manager for SAP HANA standby nodes is now available. Backint agent for SAP HANA version 1.0.12 Version 1.0.12 of the Google Cloud Backint agent for SAP HANA is now available.

Cloud Spanner - You can now assign request tags and transaction tags in your application code to easily troubleshoot query performance, transaction latency, and lock contentions by correlating introspection statistics to application code. The PostgreSQL interface is available in Preview, making the capabilities of Spanner accessible from the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Cloud Storage - Cloud EKM keys can now be used to encrypt Cloud Storage data. Objects uploaded using XML API multipart uploads cannot be rewritten or copied within Cloud Storage.

VMware Engine - All new VMware Engine private clouds now deploy with VMware vSphere version 7.0 Update 2 and NSX-T version 3.1.2. Generally available: vSAN data encryption for data at rest now uses keys generated by Cloud Key Management Service for all new private clouds.

Virtual Private Cloud - Using Private Service Connect to publish services that are hosted on the backends of an internal HTTP(S) load balancer is now Generally Available. Accessing published services using a Private Service Connect endpoint is now available from on-premises hosts that are connected to a VPC network using Cloud VPN. Connectivity from on-premises hosts to a Private Service Connect endpoint that is used to access published services might not establish for some existing Cloud VPN connections. Connectivity from on-premises hosts to a Private Service Connect endpoint that is used to access published services does not establish if the service is published with explicit project approval.

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