February is coming to an end. It’s time for a catch-up on the latest changes and updates on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and its ecosystem:

1. Site Reliability: Creating reliable services is something Google strives for not only internally. The company also lets customers benefit from its very own approach called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). One key topic in SRE is Observability, which may be hard to achieve, in particular for complex, distributed applications. Cloud Operations Sandbox, “an open-source tool that helps you learn SRE practices from Google and apply them on cloud services using Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)”, gets you started.

2. Security: Google broke big news recently announcing BeyondCorp Enterprise, “Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering, which extends and replaces BeyondCorp Remote Access”. BeyondCorp Enterprise is a set of technologies / services Google used internally for a very long time and which is now combined into an easy-to-use platform offering that provides much safer access to applications from anywhere.

3. Infrastructure 1: Google adds a new chapter to its continued investment and unparalleled commitment to global scalability providing the best service to its customers: “The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service“

4. Microsoft Windows and Google Cloud: If you think that Microsoft Windows is not a primary workload or concern to Google Cloud, this Blog-article and the linked whitepaper prove you wrong. Google has not only built a lot of tools and practices to make Windows management on a global scale as easy as possible, but also provides these tools free of charge and as open source.

5. Infrastructure 2: Google Cloud recently launched VM-Manager, “a suite of infrastructure management tools to simplify and automate the maintenance of large fleets of Compute Engine VMs”.

6. Application-centric database monitoring: “Diagnosing and troubleshooting performance issues in an application can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly when a database is involved. Cloud SQL Insights, currently available for CloudSQL for PostgreSQL, is a new feature that provides developers with a single UI for self-service, application-centric monitoring and diagnosis”. Of course, Cloud SQL Insights also helps you increase your query performance significantly.

7. GCP starter-package for developers: Are you a developer, Site Reliability Engineer, or just a hands-on person looking to get started with GCP? Then you should check out the recently launched “code samples search page”, where you can browse through 1200+ code sample “tiles”, each of which includes a list of programming languages that the code sample is available in, along with the relevant Google Cloud product.

8. Cloud Management: Quota-Management is an often overlooked / underrated discipline in Cloud-Management. If done right, it can provide significant value, eg. by protecting you from unforeseen cost spikes. That’s why, it’s great to see that the “Service Usage API now supports quota limits in Preview” and lets you manage your quotas programmatically.

9. Scalability and performance: Read how 9TB SSDs bring ultimate IOPS/$ to Compute Engine VMs and are now available at your fingertips with N2 VMs.

10. Kubernetes: Of course, there is GKE/ Kubernetes news this month again. In case you have a Kubernetes application that needs to span multiple clusters, Google Cloud has you covered with GKE Multi-Cluster-Services (MCS), “a Kubernetes-native cross-cluster service discovery and invocation mechanism”.

11. Resource Management: Tags is a new feature of Google Cloud Resource Manager to break out of the hierarchical approach organizing resources into a tree structure. Tags provide a way to conditionally allow or deny policies based on whether a resource has a specific tag. One huge plus is that you can control the usage of tags by restricting who can create, update, delete and attach tags to resources. We expect this feature to be combined with other services like Org Policies and Network Tags. Read here to learn more.

That’s it for this month. All the best and see you in March,

Jörn