Welcome to issue #277 January 17th, 2022

News

Introducing the new Eventarc UI, Cloud Run for Anthos destinations - Introducing the new Eventarc UI, Cloud Run for Anthos destinations.

The Google Cloud DevOps Awards: Final call for submissions! - The 2021 State of DevOps Report is live and we want to hear from you about your awards winning DevOps practices!

2022 Resolution: Learn Google Cloud, free of charge - Technical practitioners and developers can start 2022 with free introductory training on how to use Google Cloud.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all - These 8 megatrends fuel cloud adoption and also improve security for all. Here’s why they matter, and how to take advantage of them.

New Paper: “Future Of The SOC: Process Consistency and Creativity: a Delicate Balance” (Paper 3 of 4) - Deloitte/Google collaboration on Security Operations Center.

10 questions to help boards safely maximize cloud opportunities - These 10 questions from a new Google Cloud whitepaper will help boards of directors safely guide their organizations through cloud migrations.

Want multi-cluster Kubernetes without all the cost and overhead? Here’s how - Using Google Kubernetes Engine’s multi-cluster services is an elegant way to run in multiple regions without sacrificing performance and security.

Anthos Config Management: Enforcing the CIS Benchmark with Policy Controller - Google provides a CIS policy bundle based on the Kubernetes CIS benchmark to help enforce policies using Policy Controller.

Exposing GKE services through Anthos Service Mesh with a managed HTTPS load balancer - Using a microservices architecture comes with great benefits such as improved scalability, faster time to market, isolation of different….

How to deploy the Google Cloud Ops Agent with Ansible - The Cloud Ops Agent has support for many different automation tools. This blog post outlines how to use Ansible to deploy the Ops Agent to monitor Nginx workloads.

Understanding Google Cloud IAM concepts with stick figures - Using analogies, stick figures and doodles to describe IAM concepts.

A trip with Google Global Load Balancers — advanced but easy - An in-depth overview of Cloud Load Balancing.

Why you should NOT use Service Mesh

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

A migration story: How NCR & Opus delivered Card Management to Google Cloud - Migrating a leading card management solution to Google Cloud to drive agility and scalability.

How Macy’s enhances the customer experience with Google Cloud services - Learn about Macy’s strategy regarding choosing cloud databases and how Macy’s pricing services leverage Cloud Bigtable under the hood.

Where is your Cloud Bigtable cluster spending its CPU? - Understanding the CPU usage of your Cloud Bigtable instance is paramount to optimizing performance and cost. We now allow you to visualize your Cloud Bigtable cluster’s CPU utilization and break it up by dimensions like app profile, table and method.

Carrefour Belgium: Driving a seamless digital experience with SAP on Google Cloud - Carrefour Belgium runs SAP on Google Cloud to reduce enterprise risk, increase security and availability and to drive data analytics.

How to Visualize Google Logs with Grafana - Writing logs in Python application and visualizing them in Grafana.

Deploy to Cloud Run from Cloud Deploy - Google Cloud Deploy, is Googles new fully managed continuous delivery service for easy scaling. It allows you to define your Continuous….

How to use Google Pub/Sub to build an asynchronous messaging system in Python - Basic concepts of Pub/Sub and give step-by-step instructions for how to use it in Python.

Keep an eye on the uptime checks using Google Monitoring service - A quick and easy way to instantly know that our service is experiencing problems.

A way to setup a GCP driven application with App Engine, Cloud Firestore and React/GraphQL - Example of using how you can connect Cloud Firestore with Apollo/GraphQL.

How to test your secured GCP cloud functions - How to test cloud functions that only accept authenticated Firebase users from the comfort of your VS Code.

Using a Subflow in Dialogflow CX - Subflows in Dialogflow CX allows for reuse and modularity while designing your Agents. This blog post explains how to use a subflow while designing your Dialogflow CX Agent.

Using Google Maps Places API to “validate” locations in a conversation with a virtual agent - Since entities like @sys.geo-city and @sys.location are not yet available in non-US regions, Places APIs can be used.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Quantum Metric explores retail big data use cases on BigQuery - Explore three ways enterprises are leveraging Quantum Metric data in BigQuery to enhance the customer experience.

How Bayer Crop Science uses BigQuery and geobeam to improve soil health - Understand how to use Google Cloud’s geospatial capabilities to modernize GIS workloads and build geospatial analytics at scale.

Data governance in the cloud - part 1 - People and processes - The role of data governance, why it's important, and processes that need to be implemented to run an effective data governance program.

Top 10 takeaways from Looker’s 2021 JOIN@Home conference - Get motivated to up your data game with the 10 most important takeaways from Looker’s 2021 user conference.

Cloud Data Fusion: Using HTTP Plugin to batch API Calls - The Data Fusion HTTP plugin enables access to web based data sources and can move the data to a variety of downstream data consumers.

Brace yourself: Using BigQuery as an operational backend - Using BigQuery as a backend database.

PostgreSQL Syntax in Comparison to Google Big Query - Switching between the two made easy.

A way to generate sample dataset in BigQuery - Do you need to fill a BigQuery table with random set of numbers,dates…?

How to time-travel with BigQuery and undelete tab - Recover or revert data in BigQuery.

How to Restore Deleted BigQuery Tables - How to leverage BigQuery snapshots for data restoration using Python client library.

A Simple Way to Segment Customers Using Google BigQuery and Data Studio - A guide to RFM Segmentation and visualization of the resulting segments.

An Agile Architecture for Analytics and AI on Google Cloud - Bet on low-code/no-code and serverless.

How to Use ECMWF Weather Forecasts in Machine Learning Models - Loading the data, querying historical weather, training ML model.

Use graphs for smarter AI with Neo4j and Google Cloud Vertex AI - Solve many business analysis problems by representing them as graphs. Neo4j and Google Cloud Vertex AI make it easy to use AI with these data.

PyTorch/XLA: Performance debugging on Cloud TPU VM: Part II - In this blog post, we build upon the concepts introduced in part-1 and apply these to analyze and improve performance for a case study involving a model graph with dynamic shapes.

Various

Technical Training Made Easy and Accessible, the Google Cloud way - Cloud engineers face a constant barrage of new cloud services, products, and innovations. By late 2021, Google alone had released thousands of new features across hundreds of services. Couple this with other technologies and service releases from other cloud service providers (CSPs), and it quickly becomes a Herculean task for engineers to navigate, consume and keep current on the ever changing technology landscape. This often leads to anxiety and frustration as engineers struggle to keep up. They are faced with a plethora of training options but often lack the time and funding to take advantage of them.

How to prepare for the GCP Professional Machine Learning Engineer exam - Courses review, study tips.

Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam Guide - Solutions to sample case studies as well as resources to prepare for Cloud Architect exam.

Not So BigQuery - 1 year anniversary of BigQuery newsletter. Congratulations.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #47 Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security.

Releases

Cloud Asset Inventory - The following resource types are now publicly available through the Export APIs (ExportAssets and BatchGetAssetsHistory) and the Feed API: Cloud SQL sqladmin.googleapis.com/BackupRun. The following resource types are now publicly available through the resource search API (SearchAllResources) and policy search API (SearchAllIamPolicies): Cloud OS Config osconfig.googleapis.com/VulnerabilityReport Cloud Dataplex dataplex.googleapis.com/Asset dataplex.googleapis.com/Zone dataplex.googleapis.com/Task dataplex.googleapis.com/Lake.

Access Transparency - For the Access Transparency logs for Cloud SQL, the prefix of the value for the accesses:resourceName field is changed from //googleapis.com/sql/ to //sqladmin.googleapis.com/.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer 1.17.8 and 2.0.1 release started on January 10, 2022. (Available without upgrading) Programmatic calls to Airflow API and Airflow UI in Cloud Composer 2 must now contain OAuth tokens with the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform scope. Fixed a problem with rollback of Cloud Composer system workloads after a failed environment upgrade attempt. Fixed the "First DAG run for an uploaded DAG file has several failed tasks" known issue for Airflow 2 environments. Fixed levels of Airflow log messages in Cloud Composer 2 environments. Logs from SQL proxy are now correctly passed to the customer project in environments with enabled Private Service Connect support. Improved error handling when configuring workload identity in Cloud Composer 2 environments. Cloud Composer 1.17.8 and 2.0.1 images are available: composer-2.0.1-airflow-2.1.4 composer-2.0.1-airflow-2.0.2 composer-1.17.8-airflow-2.1.4 composer-1.17.8-airflow-2.0.2 composer-1.17.8-airflow-1.10.15 (default). Cloud Composer 1.13.3 has reached its end of full support period.

Compute Engine - Generally available: Access the Compute Engine API using Cloud Client Libraries built on our latest client library model. Generally available: Compute Engine now supports machine images in General Availability.

Datastore - Support for VPC Service Controls is now available in Preview.

Cloud Networking Products - Managing routing policies in Cloud DNS is available in GA.

Cloud Firestore - Support for VPC Service Controls is now available in Preview.

Cloud Memorystore - Memorystore for Redis now supports non-RFC 1918 IP addresses networks, with the exception of privately used public IP addresses (PUPI).

Cloud Monitoring - Cloud Monitoring now supports configuring HTTP POST uptime checks in the UI.

Security Command Center - Web Security Scanner, a built-in service of Security Command Center, released the INSECURE_ALLOW_ORIGIN_ENDS_WITH_VALIDATION, INSECURE_ALLOW_ORIGIN_STARTS_WITH_VALIDATION, and XXE_REFLECTED_FILE_LEAKAGE finding types to General Availability.

VPC Service Controls - Preview stage support for the following integrations: Firestore Datastore.

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