Welcome to issue #285 March 14th, 2022

News

Maximize your Cloud Spanner savings with new committed use discounts - Get up to 40% discount on Spanner compute capacity with committed use discounts. Drive higher utilization by applying discounts across projects and regions.

Protect your users’ accounts with reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s account defender - Account defender, available today in public preview, is a feature in reCAPTCHA Enterprise that analyzes the patterns of behavior for an individual account.

Leveraging OpenTelemetry to democratize Cloud Spanner Observability - This blog discusses Cloud Spanner's new OpenTelemetery receiver, using which customers can now consume Spanner metrics in their choice of APM tooling.

HIMSS 2022: Improving health through data interoperability and natural language processing - At HIMSS 2022, Google Cloud showcases how data interoperability and natural language processing can help improve health outcomes.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Micro Focus Enterprise Server blueprint available for Google Cloud - Micro Focus Enterprise Server Google Cloud blueprint performs an automated deployment of Enterprise Server inside a new VPC or existing VPC.

Introducing Community Security Analytics - Introducing Community Security Analytics, an open-source repository of queries for self-service security analytics to help you get started analyzing your Google Cloud logs and detecting potential threats to your workloads & data.

Workload Identity Federation — Authenticate GitHub actions to Google Cloud - Using Workload Identity to access GCP from GitHub actions.

Google Cloud Anthos Series -Part6 - Part-6: Anthos Multi-cluster Ingress.

Integrate Gitlab with Google Cloud workload identity federation - Setting Workload Identity Federation on Gitlab.

Self-serve timed access to GCP resources using Cloud Identity and Slack - In this two-part series, we unpack how to grant and automate the timed access to the GCP resources so that users can have access on-demand vs. by default.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

To agility and beyond: How Lowe’s evolved app dev and deployment with Google Cloud services - Kyle Amboyer, Director of Information Security Architecture at Lowes, explains how Google Cloud services enabled the home improvement giant to create a platform for engineering that transformed not only ecommerce but how it deploys all its software.

How Spanner and BigQuery work together to handle transactional and analytical workloads - We’ll discuss how Cloud Spanner and BigQuery are a match made in heaven, and can be used together to process transactions at scale and generate real-time insights to deliver amazing customer experiences.

Evolving to a programmable cloud - In a programmable cloud, serverless products can help build applications that deliver data insights, fast.

What’s happening in your SAP systems? Find out with Pacemaker Alerts - The cluster alerting enables the system administrator to be notified about critical events of the enterprise workloads in GCP like the SAP solutions.

Get more insights from your Java applications logs - Wire your application logs with more information without adding a single line of code and get more insights with the new version of the Java library.

Tracing gives you great insights into certain bottlenecks within your application. - This article describes how to enable OpenTelemetry within a Fastify application on Cloud Run.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Learn how to stream JSON data into BigQuery using the new BigQuery Storage Write API - Walks through a code example that streams GitHub commit data to BigQuery for real-time analysis.

Google Cloud Cortex Framework: Connect SAP data via Cloud Data Fusion - Learn how Cloud Data Fusion provides scalable data integration pipelines to help consolidate a customer’s SAP and non-SAP datasets within BigQuery.

Data processing with Dataflow SQL (part 1/2) - Find about the technologies that are backing the Dataflow SQL and the comparison with typical Dataflow pipelines.

Data processing with Dataflow SQL (part 2/2) - Example of streaming pipelines using BigQuery and Dataflow SQL.

The L’Oréal Beauty Tech Data Platform - A data story of terabytes and serverless - Data warehousing at L’Oréal got a makeover when the company selected BigQuery and Cloud Run as the basis for its revamped data analytics platform.

Mapping carbon pollution globally with satellites - As we continue to explore climate solutions using machine learning in our People & Planet AI YouTube series, we have been blown away by an amazing project called Climate TRACE.

Building a Data Lake on Google Cloud Platform - Big Data is gaining a lot of popularity. Here we explain how to build a big data pipeline on Google Cloud Platform using Open Source.

Customer-hosted Looker installation on Google Cloud Platform VM - This article is about Looker's customer-hosted installation steps, a.k.a., on-prem or self-hosted installation.

BigQuery Omni is everywhere - Simlpe benchmarking of BigQuery Omni.

ArcGIS and BigQuery - a match made for geodata - Learn how to use power of BigQuery inside Esri ArcGIS to analyze geospatial or location data at scale.

Measuring and Improving Speech-to-Text Accuracy | Google Cloud Platform - Measuring and improving the accuracy of Speech-to-Text requirements using GCP’s Speech-to-Text service.

Various

How I passed the Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer exam (Vertex AI) - Passing ML Certification exam.

Slides, Videos, Audio

GCP Podcast - #295 Google Cloud Reader with Jenny Brown.

Kubernetes Podcast - #171 Parca, with Frederic Branczyk.

Security Podcast - #55 The Magic of Cloud Migration: Learn Security Lessons from the Field.

Releases

Anthos - Anthos component releases for February, 2022 Anthos clusters on VMware: February 07, 2022: Security bulletin February 10, 2022: 1.10.1 patch release February 11, 2022: Security bulletin February 14, 2022: Security bulletin February 17, 2022: 1.8.7 patch release February 23, 2022: 1.9.4 patch release February 24, 2022: Security bulletin Anthos clusters on bare metal: February 01, 2022: 1.8.8 patch release February 04, 2022: Security bulletin February 25, 2022: 1.10.2 patch release and security bulletin February 28, 2022: 1.9.5 patch release Anthos clusters on AWS: February 04, 2022: Security bulletin February 22, 2022: 1.21.6 patch release February 24, 2022: aws-1.10.2-gke.0 (previous generation) patch release Anthos clusters on Azure: February 04, 2022: Security bulletin February 11, 2022: Security bulletin February 14, 2022: Security bulletin February 22, 2022: 1.21.6 patch release Anthos Config Management: February 24, 2022: 1.10.2 patch release Anthos Service Mesh: February 04, 2022: Managed Anthos Service Mesh patch release February 22, 2022: 1.10.x, 1.11.x, and 1.12.x patch release Connect: February 18, 2020: General Availability (GA) release Cloud Run for Anthos: February 23, 2022: release updates Migrate for Anthos and GKE: N/A Cloud Logging: February, 2022: release updates Cloud Monitoring: February, 2022: release updates.

Billing - Report filters now support the display of IDs in addition to names in the filter panels.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer 1.18.2 and 2.0.6 release started on March 8, 2022. (Available without upgrading) New version aliases for Cloud Composer images. (Airflow 2) Added a new try-number label to Airflow task log entries. (Cloud Composer 1) Fixed a problem with web server metrics not being reported or being reported partially. (Available without upgrading) DAG UI now correctly handles invalid serialized DAG data. Improved the handling of errors generated during update and upgrade operations because of an invalid pip.conf configuration file. (Airflow 1) The apache-airflow-backport-providers-google package is updated to version 2022.2.22. Cloud Composer 1.18.2 and 2.0.6 images are available: composer-2.0.6-airflow-2.2.3 composer-2.0.6-airflow-2.1.4 composer-1.18.2-airflow-2.2.3 composer-1.18.2-airflow-2.1.4 composer-1.18.2-airflow-1.10.15 (default). Cloud Composer 1.14.5 has reached its end of full support period.

Compute Engine - Generally available: NVIDIA® T4 GPUs are now available in the following additional regions and zones: Council Bluffs, Iowa, North America : us-central1-c Eemshaven, Netherlands, Europe : europe-west4-a For more information about using GPUs on Compute Engine, see GPUs on Compute Engine.

Database Migration Service - Database Migration Service now supports adding dump flags for data dump customizations to migration jobs for Cloud SQL for MySQL instances.

Dataproc - New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.5.58-debian10, 1.5.58-ubuntu18, and 1.5.58-rocky8 2.0.32-debian10, 2.0.32-ubuntu18, and 2.0.32-rocky8. Dataproc Serverless for Spark now uses runtime version 1.0.5. Fixed bug where clusters created via Dataproc Hub failed with Unit file jupyter.service does not exist error. Fixed bug where clusters created with Kerberos failed with SSL Certificate string is too long error.

Eventarc - Support for Firebase Remote Config and Firebase Test Lab triggers is now in Preview.

Cloud Functions - Added Terraform support for Cloud Functions (2nd gen).

Cloud Healthcare API - v1. The _type and _since parameters are available for the fhirStores.export method.

Google Kubernetes Engine - In GKE version 1.23.2-gke.300 and later, you can now use network tags to dynamically apply firewall rules to nodes in your GKE Autopilot clusters and auto-provisioned GKE Standard node pools without disrupting running workloads. The following GKE versions fix a known issue in which the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE file capability was dropped from the metrics-server. Setting a minimum CPU platform for node pools created by node auto-provisioning using the autoscaling.autoprovisioning_node_pool_defaults.min_cpu_platform field is deprecated. (2022-R4) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. Identity Service for GKE is now generally available.

Google Kubernetes Engine Rapid - (2022-R4) Version updates Version 1.22.6-gke.1500 is now the default version in the Rapid channel.

Google Kubernetes Engine Regular - (2022-R4) Version updates The following versions are now available in the Regular channel: 1.20.15-gke.300.

Google Kubernetes Engine Stable - (2022-R4) Version updates The following versions are now available in the Stable channel: 1.19.16-gke.6100.

Cloud Memorystore - Basic Tier instances now preserve data during scaling and maintenance.

Cloud PubSub - Exactly once delivery gives you the ability to receive any successfully published message exactly once.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise - You can now enable and use reCAPTCHA Enterprise on Google Cloud without enabling billing for your Google Cloud project.

Security Command Center - To support a rich query experience on complex array elements, the contains() filter function was introduced.

Service Mesh - 1.10.x & 1.11.x & 1.12.x. The Istio project recently disclosed a CVE that can expose Anthos Service Mesh to remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. 1.12.x. 1.12.5-asm.0 is now available. 1.11.x. 1.11.8-asm.0 is now available. 1.10.x. 1.10.6-asm.2 is now available.

Cloud Spanner - Cloud Spanner now offers committed use discounts. You can now see and manage the views of your Cloud Spanner databases from the Google Cloud Console.

Cloud Storage Transfer - Storage Transfer Service now offers more control over preserving metadata when transferring between Cloud Storage buckets.

Vertex AI - Vertex AI Feature Store online store autoscaling is available in Preview. You can now mount Network File System (NFS) shares to access remote files when you run a custom training job. Google Cloud Pipeline Components SDK v1.0 is now generally available.

VPC Service Controls - General availability for the following integration: Assured Workloads.

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