Welcome to issue #271 December 6th, 2021

News

Expanding our infrastructure with cloud regions around the world - A Google Cloud region is coming to Santiago, Chile, and additional regions are coming to Germany, Israel, KSA and the United States.

Anthos makes multi-cloud easier with new API, support for Azure - The Google Cloud Multi-Cloud API can orchestrate Anthos GKE cluster lifecycles across AWS, Azure, and GCP via a unified management experience.

Easier administration and management of BigQuery with Resource Charts and Slot Estimator - With BigQuery Administrator Hub, customers can now better manage BigQuery at scale. Two key features, Resource Charts and Slot Estimator help administrators understand their BQ environments like never before.

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

Cloud CISO Perspectives: November 2021 - Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares his thoughts on the latest security updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team.

Announcing version 6.0 of the Maps and Places SDKs for iOS

Knative Has Applied to Become a CNCF Incubating Project - Google intents to donate Knative project to Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Join Cloud Learn to build your Google Cloud skills at no cost, regardless of experience level - Join Cloud Learn for live demos, Q&As, career development workshops, and more covering everything from Google Cloud fundamentals to certification prep.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Shopify engineers deliver on peak performance during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021 - Shopify just experienced a record-breaking Black Friday Cyber Monday. Learn how Shopify works with Google Cloud to handle unprecedented peak moments with ease.

Google Cloud’s 5 ways to create differentiated value in post-merger integrations - The post-merger integration of the new IT estate is likely an important element to delivering added-value. Google Cloud can help with its success.

Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Reducing toil - As organizations go through digital transformation, the importance of building a highly effective threat management function rises to be one of their top priorities. In our paper, “Autonomic Security Operations — 10X Transformation of the Security Operations Center”, we’ve outlined our approach to modernizing Security Operations.

Introduction to Google Cloud's operations suite - You know the time when you want to see how your cloud deployment is behaving or if something is broken in production and your users might be impacted. You are scrambling because there are too many tools to look through to find and resolve the issue. That’s where Google Cloud’s operations suite comes in.

Getting started with the Security Foundations Blueprint automation repo - The security foundations blueprint automation repo contains Terraform code that implements the best practices discussed in the security foundations guide.

Want to supercharge your DevOps practice? Research says try SRE - The 2021 DORA State of DevOps Report found interesting trends in DevOps shops that use SRE best practices.

Part-5: Google DevOps-Observability with SRE principles

It’s time for you to save money on your GCP spending, don’t you think? - The sooner, the better.

Using Google Cloud Service Account impersonation in your Terraform code - This blog details different ways to authenticate as a service account in Terraform code using short-lived credentials.

Best practices for using workload identity federation - The best practices for deciding when to use Workload Identity Federation, and how to configure it in a way that helps minimize security risks.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

How to manage your GraphQL APIs with Apigee - Apigee partners with StepZen to deliver GraphQL capabilities.

API management on Google Cloud - APIs are the de facto standard for building and sharing the modern applications that power today’s enterprises. But securely delivering, managing, and analyzing APIs, data, and services is complex and critical—and it’s getting more challenging as enterprise ecosystems expand beyond on-premises data centers to include private and public clouds, SaaS, and other IT endpoints. To navigate this complexity, businesses need API management.

The next big evolution in serverless computing - Not all serverless platforms are created equal. When evaluating your options, consider these five trends.

Migrating Amazon Linux instances using Migrate for Compute Engine - Step-by-step instructions, to prepare Amazon Linux instances for migration to Compute Engine.

Who said you can’t code on a Chromebook? Local development with Cloud Functions. - This blog post describes the process of setting up Linux on a Chromebook and writing a simple HTTP Cloud Function using the Node.js runtime, Visual Studio Code, and Google Cloud Functions Framework for Node.js.

Run your app locally as if you were on Google Cloud - Service account impersonation helps to keep your service secure when you test it locally. But you mustn’t update your code for. Here how!

Your first steps with App Engine - Take your first steps in App Engine with Golang web app.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Unlocking opportunities with data transformation - Data-driven transformations provide businesses with real-time insights and competitive advantage. Learn how to gear up for the future of data.

Learn Beam patterns with Clickstream processing of Google Tag Manager data - Technical blog to show how to build out common patterns for an application built on Apache Beam SDK for the Dataflow runner. E-commerce is simply used as an exemplar for the techniques.

Using BigQuery with data sources in Google Cloud VMware Engine - How to visualize your data with Big Query and Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Incremental Data Ingestion in BigQuery using MERGE - Example of incremental pipeline in BigQuery.

Supercharge your BigQuery Data Warehouse with Dataform - An overview of Dataform.

Creating a prediction market on Google Cloud - Learn the key design patterns and technologies behind running a prediction market on Google Cloud.

Bazaarvoice uses Recommendations AI to improve CTR by 60% - Bazaarvoice chose Google Cloud’s Recommendations AI because of its transparent billing, ease of integration and setup, and naturally, its proven results.

Learn how Notified accelerated discovery and classification of journalists at scale with Google Cloud AI - Learn how Notified accelerated adoption of AI at scale to extract journalist insights using Google Cloud Natural Language AI.

Search Abandonment Costs Retailers. Here’s How AI Can Help. - Brands like Macy’s and IKEA Retail are leveraging Retail Search and Recommendations AI to help consumers find what they want first and fast.

Google showcases Cloud TPU v4 Pods for large model training - Google’s MLPerf v1.1 Training submission showcased two large (480B & 200B parameter) language models using publicly available Cloud TPU v4 Pod slices.

Vertex AI NAS: higher accuracy and lower latency for complex ML models - How Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Neural Architecture Search (NAS) accelerates time-to-value for sophisticated ML workloads.

Hands-Off Machine Learning with Google AutoML - A short introduction to Google’s AutoML for Tabular Data.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #286 Serverless, Redefined with Jason Polites.

Security Podcast - #45 EP45 VirusTotal Insights on Ransomware Business and Technology.

Releases

Anthos clusters on AWS - If your cluster uses both a proxy and OIDC authentication, do not upgrade to version 1.21.4 or 1.21.5.

Anthos clusters on bare metal - 1.8. Release 1.8.6 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.8.6 is now available for download. Fixes: The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed: CVE-2021-30465 CVE-2021-37750 CVE-2021-41103. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

Anthos clusters on Azure - Anthos on Azure is now generally available through the Multi-Cloud API. You can now create, update, and delete clusters on Azure with the gcloud tool. Automatic Container monitoring and system logging with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring. Built-in Connect Gateway Support. You can now use an Azure Key Vault Hardware Security module to bring your own key.

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7 - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7.6-gke.6 is now available. Fixed issue where special characters in the vSphere username are not properly escaped. Anthos clusters on VMware 1.8.5-gke.3 is now available. Fixed issue where special characters in the vSphere username are not properly escaped.

Anthos GKE on AWS - If your cluster uses both a proxy and OIDC authentication, do not upgrade to version 1.21.4 or 1.21.5.

AppEngine Standard Go - The Go 1.16 runtime for App Engine standard environment is now generally available.

AppEngine Standard Java - Updated Java SDK to version 1.9.93.

AppEngine Standard NodeJS - The NodeJS 16 runtime for App Engine standard environment is now generally available.

Cloud Asset Inventory - The following resource types are now publicly available through the Export APIs (ExportAssets and BatchGetAssetsHistory) and the Feed API: Data Loss Prevention dlp.googleapis.com/DlpJob dlp.googleapis.com/DeidentifyTemplate dlp.googleapis.com/InspectTemplate dlp.googleapis.com/JobTrigger dlp.googleapis.com/StoredInfoType.

BigQuery ML - The principal component analysis (PCA) model and the autoencoder model are now generally available (GA).

BigQuery Transfer - BigQuery Data Transfer Service now supports Audit Logging, Cloud Logging, and Cloud Monitoring.

BigTable - A new tutorial is available that uses open-source benchmarking tools to evaluate Cloud Bigtable performance.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer 1.17.6 release started on December 1, 2021. (Available without upgrading) Web server network access control settings can now be configured in Cloud Composer 2 environments. (Cloud Composer 2) The /dags directory from the environment's bucket is no longer synced to the web server. (Cloud Composer 2) The performance of syncing files to schedulers and workers was improved. (Cloud Composer 2) Clusters that remain after failed environment creation operations are now deleted. (Airflow 2.1.4) Backported the fix for the SerializedDagNotFound: DAG not found in serialized_dag table Airflow bug. (Airflow 2.1.4) Users with the Admin role can now create users in the Airflow UI. (Airflow 1.10.15) The apache-airflow-backport-providers-google package is updated: Wait mechanism for DataprocJobSensor was implemented to handle transient issues when a Job status is not available after creation. New versions of Cloud Composer images: composer-1.17.6-airflow-1.10.15 (default) composer-1.17.6-airflow-2.0.2 composer-1.17.6-airflow-2.1.4 composer-2.0.0-preview.6-airflow-2.0.2 composer-2.0.0-preview.6-airflow-2.1.4. Airflow versions 2.1.2, 1.10.14, and 1.10.12 are no longer included in Cloud Composer images. Cloud Composer 1.13.1 has reached its end of full support period.

Compute Engine - Generally available: Use OS configuration management to deploy and automate software configurations on your virtual machine (VM) instances using the Google Cloud console, gcloud command-line, and OS Config API. Generally available: NVIDIA® A100 GPUs are now available in the following additional regions and zones: Moncks Corner, South Carolina : us-east1-b The Dalles, Oregon : us-west1-b Council Bluffs, Iowa : us-central1-f Jurong West, Singapore : asia-southeast1-b For more information about using GPUs on Compute Engine, see GPUs on Compute Engine.

Config Connector - Config Connector 1.68.0 is now available. Added support for MonitoringService resource. Added support for MonitoringServiceLevelObjective resource. Added support for NetworkConnectivityHub resource. Added support for OSConfigOSPolicyAssignment resource. Added support for RecaptchaEnterpriseKey resource. Added support for regional ComputeSSLCertificate resource. Added support for resourceID field for SecretManagerSecretVersion resource.

Datastream - Datastream is now generally available (GA) in all Google Cloud regions.

IAM - The IAM documentation now explains how to choose the most appropriate predefined roles.

Google Kubernetes Engine - The 2021-R32 release notes from October 29, 2021 were updated on December 03, 2021 with revisions to the upgrade versions for control plane and nodes in Rapid, Regular, Stable, and No Channel. The following GKE versions contain an issue that might affect workloads that use GKE Sandbox: 1.19.14-gke.301, 1.19.14-gke.1900, 1.19.14-gke.2300, 1.19.15-gke.500, 1.19.15-gke.1300, 1.19.15-gke.1801 1.20.10-gke.301, 1.20.10-gke.1600, 1.20.10-gke.2100, 1.20.11-gke.1300, 1.20.11-gke.1801 1.21.4-gke.2300, 1.21.4-gke.2302, 1.21.5-gke.1300, 1.21.5-gke.1302, 1.21.5-gke.1802 1.22.2-gke.1901 What do I need to know? Applications that use the xmm15 register and receive a signal or hit a page fault while the register is in use might have the register corrupted, leading to unpredictable application behavior.

SAP Solutions - Google Cloud Connector for SAP Landscape Management version 2.2.16 Version 2.2.16 of the Google Cloud Connector for SAP Landscape Management is now available.

Cloud Storage Transfer - Support for transferring data from Azure ADLS Gen 2 to Cloud Storage with Storage Transfer Service is now generally available (GA). The Storage Transfer Service API for managing on-premises transfers is now generally available (GA). Storage Transfer Service now offers preview support for Manifest.

Cloud TPU - Cloud TPU team just released TF-2.4.4, TF-2.5.2 and TF-2.6.2 on Cloud TPUs.

Traffic Director - Traffic Director support for Client Status Discovery Service (CSDS) API is now in General Availability.

Vertex AI - You can now use a pre-built container to perform custom training with TensorFlow 2.7. Vertex AI TensorBoard is generally available (GA).

VMware Engine - The process of allocating an external IP address for an internal workload VM now includes the private cloud field. Added ability to create private clouds that contain a single node for testing and proofs of concept with VMware Engine.

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