We’re already three weeks into the new year, COVID-19 is still present, changing it’s ugly face multiple times. And America has a new president. A lot of things happened over the past weeks. So, I thought it’s a good time to take a look at what has been happening on Google Cloud and the surrounding ecosystem. 

1. Reliability: I want to kick off the new year by sharing with you the Post Mortem / issue summary of the global outage of various Google Cloud and other Google services that happened on December 14th. Simply, because it is very important in general and specifically in IT to learn from your failures. Furthermore, reliability is one of Google’s trademarks. I personally feel that it’s important to understand what, why and how this outage happened – and what we all can learn from it. Find the Post Mortem here.

2. Year of comeback: Every industry is hit by the pandemic, so is Financial services. Google Cloud recently published an interesting blog article. “How banks can build resilience into core systems and accelerate a return to innovation in 2021” is worth exploring. Please reserve enough time, as the article includes references to more information on the complex topic it covers. Learn more here.

3. Apigee: APIs are at the core of many Digital Transformation Initiatives. If you want to know what you might have missed in 2020, catch up on the highlights regarding Apigee. Google Cloud’s API Management Platform is still leading the pack in 2020. In case you are hungry for more information on APIs, check out “Set your 2021 API resolutions with these top 2020 posts”. I also recommend here that you take enough time for both comprehensive articles.

4. Logging: Here’s a straightforward and nice little gem for all the Log-Enthusiasts out there: “Find logs fast with new “tail -f” functionality in Cloud Logging”.

5. Cloud Monitoring: As Logging and Monitoring typically go together, Google Cloud Monitoring got its own Monitoring Query Language (MQL) now GA. “MQL represents a decade of learnings and improvements on Google’s internal metric query language. The same language that powers advanced querying for internal Google production users, is now available to Google Cloud users as well.” Additionally, new customizing features enable a better experience to create monitoring dashboards in Cloud Monitoring.

6. Data Security: One of the “classic” data security mistakes involving encryption is to encrypt the data without securing the encryption key. Making matters worse, a sadly common issue is leaving the key “close” to data, such as in the same database or on the same system as the encrypted files. If you want to learn how to avoid these failures, then check out this great blog article!

7. Kubernetes: Since I cannot miss Kubernetes out in this issue, I highly recommend reading this blog article on how to mitigate CVE-2020-8554 easily on GKE and Anthos. This vulnerability in Kubernetes “stems from default permissions allowing users to create objects that could act as a ‘Man in the Middle’ and therefore potentially intercept sensitive data.”

8. Cloud Run: You are a serverless-fan because you want to keep things simple? Check out how you can now use a “single command to build and deploy your code to Cloud Run”, GCP’s fully managed serverless platform built on knative.

9. Eventarc: Check out this blog article on Eventarc – “a new eventing functionality that enables you to send events to Cloud Run from more than 60 Google Cloud sources” and helps you achieve loosely coupled event-driven architectures better.

10. Cloud Storage: Last, but not least I want to share with you some best practices, today on how you can ensure “privacy and security of your data in Cloud Storage”.

Stay healthy and foolish,
Jörn