Sorry for running a bit late with the August update, but I was on vacation and needed some time to catch up. So without further due, here’s my list of important updates to GCP:

1. Cloud Next 21: Learn. Engage. Solve. Registration for Google Cloud Next 21 is open. Sign up to hear about the latest updates regarding AI / ML, App Development and Modernization, Cloud-Security and much more. You can put together your own schedule of sessions.

2. New Google Cloud region Berlin: Google recently announced 1 billion euros investments in Germany’s digital future, including a new Google Cloud region in Berlin/Brandenburg as well as an extension of the existing region in Frankfurt (Hanau), enabling customers to build DR-Solutions with 20km distance within one region. Helping Germany and the EU achieve its ambitious climate goals, Google has selected ENGIE Deutschland as its carbon-free energy supplier. Read the full announcement here.

3. Microservices archituectures: You’re running or building your applications as microservices (probably on top of Kubernetes) and facing challenges when it comes to networking? Then Traffic Director can help. Check out this blog post for an introduction to Google Cloud’s fully managed service mesh for distributed microservices applications.

4. GCP and SAP: Google and SAP take their partnership to the next level. This blog post provides a great introduction on how to configure your GCP network properly in order to streamline the setup of SAP workloads on GCP.

5. BigQuery Admin: Instead of looking up everything separately, check out the “BigQuery Admin reference guide: Recap” with the links to the comprehensive content Google Cloud published about “architecting and administering your BigQuery data warehouse” during the past few weeks. Great resources to get started with BigQuery.

6. BigQuery and Salesforce: Salesforce is a key application for many customers, containing customer-related data. This powerful data can create even more value, when used for advanced analytics in your central data-lake / data-warehouse – that’s where BigQuery comes into play. Read more in this blog post on how “to incrementally move Salesforce data into BigQuery”.

7. BigQuery datasets: I just stumbled upon this great resource of freely available BigQuery datasets. The latest addition to the existing collection includes all “Release Notes” of all Google Cloud Services available. Make sure to bookmark this blog post to stay up-to-date on all BigQuery datasets freely available.

8. Network Intelligence: Another great GCP Sketchnote from Priyanka Vergadia, Developer Advocate, Google. Whenever “you need visibility into your cloud platform in order to monitor and troubleshoot it”, Network Intelligence Center is your solution. In case you haven’t heard about it, here’s a great overview.

9. Cloud Function: Google Cloud introduces a new feature to Cloud Functions to help you deal with “the ‘startup tax’, a.k.a. cold starts: if your function has been scaled down to zero, it can take a few seconds for it to initialize and start serving requests”. You can now configure a minimum number of instances for Cloud Functions to “dramatically improve performance for your serverless applications and workflows, minimizing your cold starts”. Read more in this blog post.

10. App Engine: Just like for Cloud Functions, there are some nice improvements for App Engine as well. Read more on “Egress Controls for Serverless VPC Access” and “User-managed service accounts” here.

11. Cloud Security: The monthly must-read when it comes to cloud- and cyber-security – “Cloud CISO Perspectives: August 2021” by Phil Venables, CISO of Google Cloud.

12. BeyondCorp Enterprise: Check out the major update for Google’s zero trust offering to learn more about how to improve security by using certificate-based access via VPC Service Controls, by integrating http- / https-based on-premise-apps into your cloud-based zero trust approach and by a huge collection of access conditions available in Access Context Manager.

13. DR with Actifio GO: After acquiring Actifio in December 2020, the solution is now finally available via Google Cloud Marketplace for an easy deployment and with a consumption-based pricing model. Find out more here.

14. Live Network Forensics: As “before anything else, preparation is key to success” (Alexander Graham Bell), use this guide to conduct live network forensics in GCP in case you have to.

15. Cloud SQL Maintenance: Here’s the first part of a series providing insights on Cloud SQL Maintenance, a must-read for everyone relying on Cloud SQL.

16. GKE 1: “Google Cloud has offered uptime checks for different types of resources, but none of these provided a direct association with GKE. With our new integration, the GKE LoadBalancer uptime check directly associates a service load balancer with an uptime check, helping to ensure the uptime check is managed dynamically”.

17. GKE 2: Would you like to have a central location to register your (micro-)services running on Kubernetes / GKE or somewhere else? Google Cloud Service Directory has you covered. And with the latest update, GKE services can register and unregister in Service Directory without writing code.

18. Cloud Build 1: “Cloud Build enables you to configure triggers that do not immediately execute a build but instead mark a build as pending until approved”. Check the official documentation for further information.

19. Cloud Build 2: Private pools are private, dedicated pools of workers that offer more customization options for the build environment, including the ability to access resources in a private network.

20. Cloud Armor 1: Rate limiting, i.e. rate-based rules help you protect your applications from a large volume of requests that flood your instances and block access for legitimate users. Read more about it here.

21. Cloud Armor 2: Based on native integration with reCAPTCHA Enterprise, Google Cloud Armor’s bot management provides effective management of automated clients’ requests towards your backends. reCAPTCHA Enterprise uses advanced risk analysis techniques to distinguish between human users and automated clients. You find more details in the documentation.

22. Security Command Center: Security Command Center uses IAM roles to let you control who can do what with assets, findings, and security sources in your Security Command Center environment. You grant roles to individuals and applications, and each role provides specific permissions. Security Command Center Premium is now supporting granting IAM roles at the organization, folder, and project levels.

That’s it for August. Let’s see what’s happening in September before Google Cloud Next coming up in October. Enjoy the rest of the summer and stay safe & healthy.

All the best,

Jörn