1. Security 1: “Google Announces Intent to Acquire Mandiant, a leader in dynamic cyber defense and response. The acquisition of Mandiant will complement Google Cloud’s existing strengths in security.” That is another proof that Google is very serious about Security.

2. Web Application Architecture: Which components make up a web application running on Google Cloud Platform? Once again, Google Cloud Developer Advocate Priyanka Vergadia provides a great overview on the services available (and suitable) on GCP.

3. Cost Optimization: Suspend/Resume for VMs is GA and helps you save money on your VM runtime costs.

4. Security 2: The recap of the latest Google Cloud Security Talks is definitely worth a look. The article includes references to the full on-demand sessions as well.

5. Cloud Architecture: Get to know the new “Architecting with Google Cloud” page that was recently announced. It’s a great resource for everyone interested in GCP Architectures.

6. Go Update: The Go programming language has come a long way and becomes increasingly important in highly scalable and highly secure cloud applications. Here’s an update on the latest Release 1.18.

7. GCP Customer Care aka Support Updates: Google will introduce changes to its customer support portfolio on 31 May 2022. Be prepared and find out what it means for you.

8. Data Governance: Here are part 1 and part 2 of  an article series called “Data governance in the cloud”, providing a good overview and covering various aspects of the topic.

9. GCP Pricing changes / updates: Some things might be cheaper, some things might be more expensive. Read this important announcement on what’s changing in GCP Pricing, in particular with regard to Cloud Storage and Networking.

10. Security 3: Google CAT (Cybersecurity Action Team) announces the availability of Community Security Analytics,  “a set of open-sourced queries and rules designed for self-service security analytics designed to help detect common cloud-based threats”. Read the full announcement here. For more information on how to build autonomic security operations for your IT environment, don’t miss this article.

11. reCAPTCHA Enterprise update: Do you want better security for your applications user accounts without introducing additional security overhead to your applications? Then learn more about the latest reCAPTCHA Enterprise feature called account defender.

12. SAP & GCP: You might already know the Cortex Framework, which is a huge collection of “building blocks and templates for SAP environments”. But did you know that Cloud Data Fusion provides scalable data pipelines to consolidate your SAP and non-SAP data in BigQuery? You will find more information here.

13. Administration: By redesigning Cloud SDK + CLI, Google Cloud makes a developer’s life much easier.

14. GCP and IaC: The recent preview release of Declarative Export for Terraform “allows you to export the current state of your Google Cloud infrastructure into a descriptive file compatible with Terraform (HCL) or Google’s KRM declarative tooling”. This closes a common gap in IaC “how to actually create a HCL Terraform file describing all their Google Cloud resources and their states if one did not begin their cloud journey this way”.

15. Google Cloud’s support for Ukraine: By expanding the eligibility for Project Shield and other activities, Google Cloud has taken several measures to bolster humanitarian efforts in the region, counter disinformation, and protect local Ukrainian citizens. Just great!

16. Devops & SRE: Prometheus is the de-facto standard when it comes to monitoring your cloud-native applications / containerized workloads, that is now finally and fully available as a managed service.

17. Kubernetes: Knative, a serverless layer on top of Kubernetes, is now finally accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project.

18. Data Analytics: As “democratizing data insights and accelerating data-driven decision making is a top priority for most enterprises seeking to build a data cloud”, you should read on for more information on GCP DataPlex (now GA), “an intelligent data fabric that enables you to centrally manage, monitor, and govern data across data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools”.

19. Migration between GCP Organizations: Great Medium article on a process that you typically don’t have to go through often. When it happens, you’re likely to be more than happy to have the step-by-step guide “Migrating & Roll back GCP Projects between Organizations”.

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

That’s it for this time. All the best and stay tuned for the next update in May.

Jörn