Welcome to issue #279 January 31st, 2022

News

Google Cloud launches new dedicated Digital Assets Team - Google Cloud launches a new, dedicated Digital Assets Team to help underpin the blockchain ecosystems of the future. Whether you're implementing blockchain strategies or blockchain-native, you can rely on Google Cloud’s scalable, secure, and sustainable infrastructure.

Announcing Quick Builder, a new low-code tool for you to build location-based experiences - Quick Builder is an intuitive tool to discover, explore, and deploy recommended APIs for your mapping needs.

Cloud Bigtable launches Autoscaling plus new features for optimizing costs and improved manageability - Cloud Bigtable launches autoscaling that automatically adds or removes capacity in response to the changing demand for your applications.

Google Cloud Deploy, now GA, makes it easier to do continuous delivery to GKE - Google Cloud Deploy managed service, now GA, makes it easier to do continuous delivery to Google Kubernetes Engine.

Open sourcing the App Engine Standard Java runtime - The Google App Engine Standard Java runtime has been released as open source.

Google Cloud now the most favored platform for research globally, according to Ipsos - Google Cloud is now the most favored platform for researchers globally, according to Ipsos.

Google Cloud expands higher education credits to 8 countries in Africa - Google Cloud provides research credits as well as teaching and learning credits to eight African countries.

Applications are now open for the second Google Cloud Accelerator Canada Cohort - We’re inviting Canadian cloud-native technology startups to apply for the second Google Cloud Accelerator Canada cohort.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Optimize the cost of your Google Cloud VMware Engine deployments - Learn how to optimize the cost of your Google Cloud VMware Engine deployments.

Google Tau VMs deliver over 40% price-performance advantage to customers - When used with GKE, Tau VM customers reported strong price/performance and full x86 compatibility from this general-purpose VM.

Is a cloud migration on your to do list? Our top stories from 2021 can help - Thinking about migrating to Google Cloud in 2022? Here’s what to catch up on from 2021!

CI/CD for GKE using Cloud Deploy - This tutorial will guide you through creating a CI/CD Pipeline using Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy.

Google Cloud Anthos Series - Part2 - Anthos Platform Technical Details.

Managing GCP projects at scale - Why does Decathlon need a GCP Project Factory?

Google Cloud VPC Service Controls: Lessons Learned - Lessons learned while applying the VPC-Service Controls complex network infrastructure.

Docker Swarm services in GCP - How to expose services from a Docker Swarm cluster in GCP. Analysis of some differences between Docker Swarm and GKE.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Consensual Embedded Finance is safer and more fun - Consent management is a key component of an Embedded Finance solution. The article explains the building blocks required for such a solution and how they work together in Google Cloud Platform.

Sabre chose Bigtable and Cloud Spanner to serve more than 1 billion travelers annually - As a company that makes software for the travel industry, Sabre uses Google Cloud database services to fly higher.

Bigtable Autoscaling: Deep dive and cost saving analysis - Bigtable now supports autoscaling. In this post we'll look at when and how to use it, analyze autoscaling in action, and see its impact on database costs.

Everything you need to know about Remote Config’s latest personalization feature - A closer look at Remote Config, how it differs from A/B testing, and how you can use it today to grow your business.

Google CloudSQL Auth Proxy — A resilient approach - Let’s clear the fog around CloudSQL Auth Proxy.

From “hidden secret” to open secret: The year ahead for AppSheet - How AppSheet, Google’s no-code platform, continues to innovate in 2022.

Test Cases in Dialogflow CX - This blog post explains how to setup Test Cases for your Dialogflow CX Agent.

Logging in PHP Cloud Functions - Setting Cloud Logging in PHP Cloud Function.

13 features I wish Firebase had - The features that Firebase could have.

How to Import Data into Google Firestore - A process of how to upload data to Cloud Firestore.

AI-Driven Photo Editing Platform of Batch.ai - This blog describes the architecture of Batch.ai - SaaS platform for professional photographers.

Auto-completion for Workflows JSON and YAML on Visual Studio Code - A partial auto-completion setup for Workflows in VS Code.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Journey of Transforming and Architecting Data Platforms using Lambda Architecture - An outline of architecting Data Platforms using Lambda architecture on Google Cloud.

Cloud Data Fusion: Building Config Driven Pipelines - Cloud Data Fusion uses macros to enable developers to build configuration driven data pipelines.

Error handling with Apache Beam : presentation of Asgarde - A library for error handling with Apache Beam.

Cross region Data transfer with BigQuery. Part 2 - Schema drift with the Google Analytics use case - Handling schema drift in BigQuery coming from changes in Google Analytics.

Working with JSON data in BigQuery - Using the new JSON data type in BigQuery.

An introduction to Dynamic SQL in BigQuery - Example of creating stored procedures in BigQuery.

Forget Luck: Optimized Wordle Strategy - Using Google BigQuery to find the three words that will let you dominate Wordle.

Automated emails and data quality checks for your data - Formatting error messages in BigQuery email notifications.

Process Images With Google Cloud AI - Example of the image analysis process on Google Cloud.

Optimize your applications using Google Vertex AI Vizier - Software performance Optimization using novel Bayesian Optimization and Evolutionary Search algos with Google Vizier instead of traditional Operational Research methods.

Explaining machine learning models to business users using BigQueryML and Looker - Explainable AI can help business users understand why a machine learning model makes a prediction. In this post, we show how BigQuery and Looker make it easier to build interpretable AI models.

Using Explainable AI in BigQuery ML - Google BigQuery now supports Explainable Artificial Intelligence for your Models.

Various

This year, resolve to become a certified Professional Cloud Developer – here’s how - Follow this Google Cloud Skills Boost learning path to help you earn your Google Cloud Professional Developer certification.

Expanding support for early-stage startups on Google Cloud - Google for Startups and Google Cloud have joined forces to expand support for investor-backed startups including a dedicated startup success team, cloud credits for two years, technical guidance and more.

New Google Cloud Team 'Voice Of The Partner' In Direct Sales Org - Tech industry vet Jim Anderson is leading the newly assembled North American team.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #290 Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson.

Security Podcast - #49 EP49 Lifesaving Tradeoffs: CISO Considerations in Moving Healthcare to Cloud.

GCP Life Podcast - #6 - The Acquisition.

Releases

Anthos Config Management - 1.10.1. Eliminated duplicate metrics and reduced nonessential tags. Policy Controller has been updated to include a more recent build of OPA Gatekeeper (hash: a478ae6). The constraint template library includes two new templates: K8sPSPAutomountServiceAccountTokenPod and RestrictNetworkExclusions. The template library's K8sContainerRatios template supports a new field: cpuRatio. This release note was updated on January 28, 2022. Fixed the issue in legacy mode (not using RootSync and RepoSync APIs) where unmanaged namespaces (with the configmanagement.gke.io/managed:disabled annotation) were deleted in the cluster when they were deleted from the repository. Fixed the issue where nomos bugreport could leak Git proxy credentials if present in the git-sync ConfigMap.

Anthos clusters on AWS - Anthos Clusters on AWS aws-1.10.1-gke.0 (previous generation) is now available. This release includes fixes for the following CVEs: CVE-2018-20482 CVE-2018-20673 CVE-2019-20838 CVE-2019-17594 CVE-2019-17595 CVE-2020-14155 CVE-2021-20266 CVE-2021-23840 CVE-2021-23841 CVE-2021-27645 CVE-2021-33574 CVE-2021-35942 CVE-2021-42574 CVE-2021-43618 CVE-2022-0185. The release note from December 14 has been updated to clarify which service account no longer needs the ServiceUsageViewer role.

Anthos clusters on bare metal - 1.9. Release 1.9.4 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.9.4 is now available for download. Fixes: The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed: CVE-2021-3733 CVE-2021-3737 CVE-2021-3997. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section. 1.10. Release 1.10.1 Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.10.1 is now available for download. Fixes: Fixed PreflightCheck to allow the preflightCheck.Spec.ConfigYAML field to be empty. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Anthos on bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.7 - Anthos clusters on VMware 1.9.3-gke.4 is now available. Fixes for version 1.9.3: Fixed issue where special characters in the vSphere username are not properly escaped. Changes in version 1.9.3: Upgraded the Connect Agent version to 20211210-01-00. Known issue in version 1.9.3: The Connect Agent restarts unexpectedly on an existing cluster that uses Anthos Identity Service to manage the Anthos Identity Service ClientConfig. Anthos clusters on VMware 1.8.6-gke.4 is now available. Fixes for version 1.8.6: Fixed issue where special characters in the vSphere username are not properly escaped.

AppEngine Standard - Builds are now handled by regional Cloud Build pools within the selected App Engine region.

Cloud Asset Inventory - The following resource types are now publicly available through the Analyze Policy APIs (AnalyzeIamPolicy and AnalyzeIamPolicyLongrunning): Cloud Dataplex dataplex.googleapis.com/Asset dataplex.googleapis.com/Zone dataplex.googleapis.com/Task dataplex.googleapis.com/Lake.

BigQuery ML - Explainable AI in BigQuery ML is now generally available (GA).

CDN - Cloud CDN support for custom named cookies and headers in the cache key are Generally Available.

Certificate Authority Service - Certificate Authority Service provides a public issue tracker that you can use for suggesting product features, providing product and documentation feedback, and reporting issues.

Cloud Composer - The DAG UI feature was rolled back.

Compute Engine - Generally available: Support for up to 48 vCPUs and 312 GB memory on virtual machine (VM) instances that have a single T4 GPU attached is now generally available.

Config Connector - Config Connector version 1.72.0 is now available. Added support for LoggingLogBucket resource. Added support for CloudFunctionsFunction resource. Added fields spec.alertStrategy and spec.conditions.conditionMatchedLog to MonitoringAlertPolicy resource.

Dataproc Metastore - Dataproc Metastore Auxiliary versions are available in Preview. Spanner database type is available in Preview.

Dataproc - Dataproc Serverless for Spark now uses runtime version 1.0.1, which includes improved error messaging for network connectivity issues.

Dialogflow - Dialogflow CX has a new agent design best practices guide.

Cloud Functions - Cloud Functions support for secrets is now at the General Availability release level.

Cloud Healthcare API - The Healthcare Natural Language API now uses Vertex AI to extract medical insights from medical text.

IAM - You can now set an expiry time for all newly created service account keys in your project, folder, or organization.

Google Kubernetes Engine - Starting with GKE version 1.23.0, if a Kubernetes event is created using k8s.io/api/core/v1, the LastTimestamp field is used as the timestamp of the corresponding event log if the field is non-empty.

Load Balancing - Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing now supports Shared VPC configurations where the load balancer's frontend and URL map can be created in a host or service project, while the backend services and backends can be distributed across multiple service projects in the Shared VPC environment.

Cloud Logging - You can now collect Apache Tomcat metrics and logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.9.0. You can now collect PostgreSQL metrics and logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.9.0. You can now collect Elasticsearch logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.9.0. Starting with Ops Agent version 2.9.0, you can use the exclude_logs logging processor to prevent the Ops Agent from ingesting specific logs.

Cloud Memorystore - Released the RDB Snapshots (Preview) feature for Memorystore for Redis.

KF - 2.7.1. Support for Anthos Service Mesh v1.12.

Cloud Monitoring - You can now collect Apache Tomcat metrics and logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.9.0. You can now collect PostgreSQL metrics and logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.9.0.

Cloud Router - The Cloud Router documentation now includes a page that describes the possible values for a BGP session's state.

Security Command Center - Security Command Center supports CIS Google Cloud Computing Foundations Benchmark v1.2.0 (CIS Google Cloud Foundation 1.2.0). Web Security Scanner, a built-in service of Security Command Center, released the SQL_INJECTION and STRUTS_INSECURE_DESERIALIZATION finding types.

Service Directory - Private network access in Service Directory is available in GA.

Anthos Service Mesh - 1.10.x & 1.11.x & 1.12.x. The Anthos Service Mesh dashboard in the Cloud Console now supports cross-project clusters, Anthos on GKE-on-vSphere (on-prem), and Anthos on Bare Metal.

Cloud Spanner - Starting no sooner than February 23, 2022, the data type of the COLUMN_DEFAULT column in the information schema's COLUMNS table will change from BYTES to STRING.

Cloud Storage Transfer - Storage Transfer Service now offers Preview support for moving data between two filesystems and keeping them in sync on a periodic schedule. Storage Transfer Service now offers Preview support for preserving POSIX attributes and symlinks when transferring to, from, and between POSIX filesystems.

Cloud Storage - The Storage Object Admin IAM role now correctly includes all storage.multipartUploads permissions.

Cloud Translation - Cloud Translation - Advanced (v3) support for a regional EU endpoint is now generally available (GA).

Virtual Private Cloud - Accessing supported regional service endpoints using Private Service Connect with consumer HTTP(S) controls is available in General Availability. Accessing managed services using Private Service Connect with consumer HTTP(S) controls is available in Preview.

Workflows - Workflows is now available in the following regions: europe-west1 (Belgium) europe-west6 (Zurich) us-east1 (South Carolina). v1. Callback endpoints are now generally available (GA).

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