1. Reference Architectures: Nothing gets you started faster than a good reference architecture. Check out this great example of an analytics platform showcasing the power of combining Firebase (App Development), BiqQuery (DataWarehouse) and Looker (BI) – not only for digital natives! Have a look at the Google Cloud Architecture Center for more Reference Architectures.

2. Cloud Monitoring: Google Cloud improved a lot of things during the last months in Cloud Monitoring. And they keep delivering. Learn more about how to create Monitoring Dashboards the easy way with preconfigured samples.

3. Predictive Autoscaling: Instead of scaling your Compute Engine workload based on some manually defined threshold or metric, you can have Google’s Machine Learning forecast your capacity needs and scale VMs to match upcoming demand. Read more in this article.

4. Terraform for GCP: Google Cloud Private Catalog, an important GCP service especially for large enterprise customers that want to share GCP-based solutions within their environment, gets a deeper terraform-integration.

5. Edge Security: Google Cloud is introducing Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection, “a machine learning-powered capability to protect your applications and services from Layer 7 DDoS attacks”.

6. API Stability: APIs are at the heart of Google Cloud and with that hence of Google Cloud customers. Although these APIs are already top-notch and rock-solid, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why Google is “taking it one step further by introducing designated Google Enterprise APIs, a label applied to the vast majority of APIs across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and Google Maps Platform (not inclusive of our consumer APIs)”. Sounds interesting? Read more here.

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

8. GKE: In terms of cost optimization, GKE can be challenging. This guide provides best practices for creating a cost-optimized GKE cluster.

9. Security Operations: Staying ahead of the curve with your Security Operations Center (SOC) is a huge effort. Long-time leader Splunk fell dramatically in this year’s Gartner Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) rankings, mainly because of its pricing and architecture. Google is relatively new to the game. But Google is very serious about security in general and tackling some of the challenges others are struggling with. Does Autonomic Security Operations sound like an awesome innovation in this space? Find it out here.

10. Data Visualization: Looker is much more than BI, as “more than ever before, it’s necessary to think beyond classic data visualization and dashboards”. Read more on Looker 21 and the new product features “to help organizations deliver data-driven experiences at scale — a critical capability for successful business transformation”.

11. Network-based Threat Detection: Cloud IDS, Google Cloud’s new networking security offering is now in preview. “Cloud IDS provides broad visibility into traffic coming into your cloud environment, between GCE workloads, between GKE workloads, or between GCE and GKE workloads. This helps you satisfy your security posture and compliance goals while detecting malware, spyware, command-and-control (C2) attacks, and other network-based threats”.

12. Alerting: As already mentioned in my introduction, alerting before something critical happens is key. That’s why I’m happy to see “the preview of log-based alerts, a new feature that opens alerts to all log types, adds new notification channels, and helps you make alerts more actionable within minutes”. Read more here.

13. Compliance: Google reaffirms the commitment to GDPR compliance after “the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published its final Recommendations on supplementary measures following the Court of Justice of the European Union’s ruling”. Read the full statement here.

14. Infrastructure Expansion: Please welcome the second Google Cloud Region in India.

15. DevOps: Here’s a nice little gem for all the DevOps people dealing with all the fancy DevOps tools out there. Check out the asdf Version Manager on github.

16. Cloud-native SAP: Here’s an interesting read on how Otto Group improved it’s SAP-Operations with cloud-native SAP.

17. Partial SSO: Manage individual SSO settings for OUs or groups in your Cloud Identity Instance, which enables you to configure Cloud Identity as the identity provider for a subset of users and a third-party identity provider for the rest of the users. Have a look at this Video to understand more about this upcoming feature.