According to Paul Herbka, “Security in IT is like locking your house or car – it doesn’t stop the bad guys, but if it’s good enough they may move on to an easier target”. After the Google Cloud Security Summit in May, you’ll find a lot of security-related stuff this month. I hope it helps you understand how you can improve security with Google Cloud:

1. Infrastructure Security: Do you want to understand why Google Cloud is the most secure cloud in the market? If yes, check out this article on infrastructure security including a great overview.

2. OSS Security: Google recently announced a new product called “Assured Open Source Software service”, which is a huge step to improve the security of OSS Software Supply Chains. I also recommend reading this article if you’re dealing with Open Source Software.

3. Apigee & GKE: Here’s an interesting read about how to best integrate GKE-based backend-services with Apigee.

4. Migration Whitepaper: This article features a Whitepaper with lots of information about how to migrate with Google Cloud VMware Engine.

5. Cloud Security 1: The monthly must-read when it comes to cloud- and cyber security – “Cloud CISO Perspectives: May 2022” by Phil Venables, CISO of Google Cloud.

6. Supply Chains: We’re currently reading a lot about Supply Chains under pressure. Some even experience the problems personally, eg. when waiting to buy a new car or standing in front of empty shelves at a retailer. Here are two articles on how Google Cloud may help master the challenge: “No more normal?” and “Mitigate Supply Chain Disruptions”.

7. High Performance Computing: Harnessing the benefits from High Performance Computing (hpc) in the cloud is not that easy. That’s why it’s pretty exciting to see that Google Cloud doesn’t stop and continues to simplify running HPC-workloads. The new “Cloud HPC Toolkit is an open source tool that enables users to easily create repeatable, turnkey HPC clusters based on proven best practices.”

8. Networking 1: You can never know enough about GCP Networking. Check out this article for a great overview on “…solutions that help you reduce the complexity of assembling and managing distributed applications”.

9. European Advisory Board: Listening to people who are more experienced than you is always a good idea to improve your service. I consider the recently established European Advisory Board as a great initiative to improve the already outstanding Google Cloud services for customers in Europe.

10. Real-time Insights for Oracle: Oracle data bases often still host a lot of key data for business decisions that is not easily available for real-time analytics. The following article explains how you can tackle this challenge with GCP.

11. Cloud Security 2: Here’s a wrap (in case you don’t want to check out my previous articles;)) called “Security Roundup – stories and launches from first quarter 2022”.

12. Terraform: Google just announced “gcloud beta terraform vet, which is a client-side tool, available at no charge which enables policy validation for your infrastructure deployments and existing infrastructure pipelines”.

13. Workload Identification Federation: In addition to Open ID Connect (OIDC), Workload Identity Federation now also support SAML “to reduce their use of long-lived service account keys”.

14. Pricing updates to Managed Service for Prometheus: Although the Managed Service for Prometheus went GA just two months ago, there’s already a pricing update that is particularly interesting for customers with high usage.

15. Google I/O Updates: Everything you need to know about Google Cloud at Google I/O, Google’s annual developer conference.

16. BigQuery SQL: Do you want to extend BigQuery SQL with your own code? BigQuery Remote Functions enables exactly this use case.

17. AI/ML: New to AI/ML and don’t know how to get started? This article including a GCP sketchnote by Priyanka Vergadia has you covered.

18. DevOps: The Google Cloud DORA team has been hard at work releasing the yearly Accelerate State of DevOps report. The report is a powerful source of information for everyone trying to understand how he is doing DevOps, but it lacks information on how to improve things. This is now addressed with the DevOps Enterprise Guidebook.

19. Networking 2: I already mentioned that you can’t know enough about networking. Network Analyzer, Network Intelligence Center’s newest module, is a new service aiming to help you analyze issues in the network when they occur.

20. Confidential Computing Updates: Confidential Computing is Google Cloud’s answer to security / privacy concerns, as it keeps “data encrypted in memory and elsewhere outside the CPU, while it is being processed”. Great to see it’s now available for N2D and C2D VMs running on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors.

21. TPU VMs now GA: “Instead of accessing Cloud TPUs (Tensorflow Processing Units) remotely over the network, Cloud TPU VMs let you set up your own interactive development environment on each TPU host machine”. Now finally GA.

22. Cloud Run: There is a new way of triggering Cloud Run workloads. With Cloud Run jobs,  executing a job creates a job execution in which all tasks must run to completion successfully in order for the job execution to be successful. Have a first look on this preview feature.

So, again more than 20 items this month. I hope you have found it worth investing your time.

See you next month, 

Jörn