Just like March, April was a pretty busy month. Enjoy exploring the latest and greatest updates from Google Cloud:

1. Security 1: Google is serious about security. That’s why the new blog series called “CISO Insights” provides great insights on security in general. Here’s the first post.

2. Data Integration: “Google Cloud native data integration platform Cloud Data Fusion now offers the capability to seamlessly get data out of SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and S/4HANA”. Do I have to explain more?;)

3. Certificate Authority Service: Private certificates play a crucial role in securing your apps and data. So do the Certificate Authorities (CA) that provide and manage them. Google makes it fairly easy to setup and maintain private CAs via the Google Cloud Certificate Authority Service (CAS). Read more in this article and the linked Whitepaper on how to deploy CAS for your needs.

4. SaaS security with BeyondCorp Enterprise: If you are a SaaS provider, you have to check out this article and the linked webinar on how to improve the security of your SaaS applications with Google Cloud’s zero trust approach BeyondCorp Enterprise.

5. Service account keys: Using service accounts is considered a best practice on GCP in many situations, but handling service account keys is always a critical task. Wouldn’t it be great, if you can access APIs with service-accounts without handling keys? Now you can – through workload identity federation.

6. Slack & GCP: With this new integration option, you can send budget notifications for your GCP-Projects (including Firebase) directly to many developers’ favorite communication channel.

7. Dashboards: Google Cloud makes it easy for you to stay up-to-date with preconfigured dashboards for various GCP products such as Kubernetes Engine, GKE Autopilot and BigQuery. In case you want more, check out Go from Database to Dashboard with BigQuery and Looker.

8. SQL: For those of you who always keep improving: Here’s the newest set of SQL-features for BigQuery.

9. Data Lakes: With the GA of Dataproc Metastore, “a fully managed, serverless technical metadata repository based on the Apache Hive metastore”, Google Cloud adds another powerful tool to get the most out of Data Lakes. Learn more about the new service fully integrated with other Google Cloud services (Dataproc, Data Catalog, Data Fusion etc.) here. If you want to refresh Data Lake fundamentals, I recommend reading this article of my colleagues Heiko Timmerkamp and Richard Forster.

10. Orchestration 1: Workflows is a rather new GCP service, orchestrating services such as Cloud Functions and Cloud Run. Check the new connectors for Workflows, which simplify calling Google Cloud services and APIs, out here.

11. Security 2: Following our “security and automation first-approach”, we at Wabion are looking forward to using the recently updated Google Cloud security foundations guide and corresponding Terraform blueprint scripts in your GCP Landing Zone.

12. PHP & Cloud Functions: PHP might be underrated or overseen from time to time. As a matter of fact, a lot of the big stuff out there on the internet uses it – because it does the job. So it’s great to see that it found its way to Cloud Functions. Here’s the “Welcome Message”.

13. Orchestration 2: We touched Workflows above. As GCP offers more orchestration options, you are likely to find this decision tree insightful.

14. BigTable vs. BigQuery: Have you been wondering about the difference between the Big Ones? This article answers the question.

15. Serverless: Does Serverless mean “fire and forget” to you? Read here, why it’s preferable to still use something like Terraform for predictable serverless deployments.

16. European Integration: “The new Google Cloud region in Warsaw is open”.

17. GKE 1: “Kubernetes 1.21: Power to the Community” is here and will hit GKE as always pretty soon in the rapid release channel.

18. GCP and Gaming: Open Saves, a new storage option for today’s rich and immersive games, is simple, fast, scalable and rock-solid as it’s built on top of GKE / Cloud Run leveraging Cloud Storage / Firestore. It’s also a nice blueprint for what you can achieve using the combination of various GCP services.

19. Cloud Monitoring: Monitoring is changing the way data related to your projects is organized. With the new data model, you can view a project’s metrics in isolation as well as in combination with metrics stored for other projects. You can now build a multi-layer monitoring solution which perfectly fits your governance model. You find more information here.

20. Customer Reliability Engineering: Check out the complete list of Google Cloud’s “CRE life lessons” here and keep on learning.

21. GKE 2: Last, but not least. Here are some cool tips and tricks on how to smoothly resolve problems in your GKE-based applications.

As always, I hope you had fun reading and finding new insights. Now let’s enjoy “Wonnemonat Mai”.

Stay safe and healthy,

Jörn