What’s up in Google Cloud?
Ausbildung @ Wabion
14. Juni 2022
Faces of Google Cloud Partners
17. September 2022
By Jörn Steege, Summer Special 2022
What's up in google cloud?
Wabion’s Senior Cloud Architect keeps you up to date with the latest news from, about and around Google Cloud. Jörn’s update addresses both technology-focussed and business-oriented readers who want to stay in the know about the fastest-growing public cloud provider. Usually, it appears once a month and always gets to the point. Due to the summer break, this edition provides updates for June, July and August.
The holiday season is (at least for most people;)) over – and the tech event season with Google Cloud Next 22 in October is just around the corner. I hope you have had some time to recharge your batteries for what typically is the most important time of the year in tech. To get you well-prepared for the rest of 2022 and next-year-planning-rounds, here’s a summary of the most important updates that happened over this summer with regards to Google Cloud and its ecosystem:
Global Infrastructure, Services & Initiatives:
1. DDos-Protection: I consider this a must-read: “How Google Cloud blocked the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack at 46 million rps.”
2. New Cloud Regions: Google opened / announced new Cloud Regions in Mexico and France (Paris).
3. Support for multiple 3rd-Party IdPs: Google just significantly enhanced their “SSO capabilities by supporting multiple SAML-based identity providers instead of just one”.This is a huge improvement at no extra cost. OIDC-Support will follow later this year.
4. Rocky Linux: “As CentOS 7 reaches end of life, many enterprises are considering their options for an enterprise-grade, downstream Linux distribution on which to run their production applications. Rocky Linux has emerged as a strong alternative that, like CentOS, is 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” Read more here.
5. Arm-based VMs and workloads: Google Cloud now has Arm-based VMs / Services in addition to the existing Intel- and AMD-Architectures with GKE supporting it from the very beginning.
6. Cloud Batch: Finally a managed service to create and run Batch jobs on GCP.
7. Spot VM Use Cases: Have you ever wondered what Spot VMs are and when to use them? Here are some answers.
8. Discount for SLES: Committed use discounts (CUDs) for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) with 24/7 support are now GA. “SLES CUDs can save you as much as 79% on license costs compared to pay-as-you-go prices”.
Data & AI:
9. Dataflow: Google Cloud recently released three major updates to Dataflow: DataFlow Prime, Dataflow Go and Dataflow ML. Learn more about the new releases in this article. Furthermore, Dataflow Prime, “the next generation serverless, no-ops, autotuning platform for data processing” on GCP now comes with Vertical Autoscaling that “automatically determines the right worker configuration for your job”.
10. BigQuery: Are you using BigQuery but have not touched the AUTO Column, multi-statement transactions, clustering or indexes? Then, you should read this!
11. Data Studio: Data Studio has always been a bit special from a compliance perspective, as it has its own Terms & Conditions. Google Cloud recently added some changes making Data Studio a full Google Cloud Platform Service covered by the Google Cloud Terms that govern all other Google Cloud Services. Read what has changed and what has not changed here.
12. PubSub & BigQuery: You can now write your data directly from PubSub to Bigquery, avoiding Dataflow pipelines. Read more here.
13. BigLake: Google Cloud BigLake, “a storage engine that extends innovations in BigQuery storage to open file formats running on public cloud object stores” is now GA. Read the Welcome Message.
14. Data Management: Google Cloud bundles its Dataplex and Data Catalog services under a unified UI, making it a lot easier for customers to “search and discover their data, enrich it with relevant business information, organize it by logical data domains, and centrally govern and monitor their distributed data with built-in data intelligence and automation capabilities.”
15. Mainframe: In case you have thought about bringing your IBM Mainframe data to the cloud for advanced analytics? With the BigQuery-ZOS-Mainframe-Connector, it’s basically no effort.
16. Vertex AI Experiments: “Managing experiments is one of the main challenges for data science teams. Finding the best modeling approach that works for a particular problem requires both hypothesis testing and trial-and-error. To address these challenges, Google recently released Vertex AI Experiments to GA, a managed experiment tracking service”.
17. BigQuery BI Engine: Preferred tables is a great addition to BI Engine, Google Clouds “in-memory analysis service that helps customers get low latency performance for their queries across all BI tools that connect to BigQuery. With support for preferred tables, BigQuery customers now have the ability to prioritize specific tables for acceleration, achieving predictable performance and optimized use of their BI Engine resources”. In addition, here’s a great article on how BI Engine improves BigQuery performance.
18. Firehose (OSS) for large-scale Data Ingestion: Are you looking for a solution to ingest high volumes of data into BigQuery or Cloud Storage? If yes, Firehose might be a suitable solution for you. Check out this article to learn more and also have a look at the Open DataOps Foundation (ODPF) homepage.
Security, Compliance and Governance:
19. VM Security: Google Cloud recently made “Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD)” generally available to its customers via Cloud Security Command Center Premium. “For customers, enabling VMTD is as easy as checking a box in their Security Command Center Premium settings”.
20.Compliance: Here’s an interesting blog from Google Cloud’s Cybersecurity Action Team on how organizations can develop towards continuous compliance, keeping the gap between the actual and the desired state small.
21. Certificate Manager: Managing TLS certificates can be cumbersome. The Google Cloud Certificate Manager (now GA) makes it much easier.
22. Threat Detection: Google Cloud now offers “curated detections as part of their Chronicle SecOps Suite. These detections are built by the Google Cloud Threat Intelligence (GCTI) team, and are actively maintained to reduce manual toil in Security Operations”. This article provides a good overview with links to additional resources.
23. De-identification for Cloud Storage: To make data security easier, Google just announced the availability of an easier de-identification action for Cloud Storage inspection jobs within Cloud DLP. Now, you can de-identify Cloud Storage objects, folders, and buckets without needing to run your own pipeline or custom code directly from the console.
24. Sensitive Data Protection in BigQuery: BigQuery now has column-level encryption functions and dynamic data masking (in Preview). You find more information here.
25. Security and Compliance Features in Cloud Logging: Having an accurate picture of who did what in your cloud environment is important for security and compliance purposes. Here you can find some insights on security and compliance features that can help you create logs in Cloud Logging to best conduct security audits.
26. Cloud Security Operations: Read about Google Cloud’s latest cooperation with the renowned MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense called the Cloud Analytics Project which complements Community Security Analytics (CSA) launched earlier this year. The jointly developed security innovations come along with various benefits for Google Cloud Customers such as Cloud Security Command Center Premium.
27. CISO Perspectives: Here are the CISO perspectives from June, July and August. A must-read!
28. Post Quantum Cryptography: Interesting article on how Google is preparing for Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC).
29. Cloud Armor: Cloud Armor got significant updates like Rate-Limiting and Bot-Protection (with Recaptcha Enterprise) as well as new capabilities to help protect your network edges.
30. Confidential GKE Nodes: Read more about are the latest addition to GCP’s confidential computing portfolio.
Cloud Native Technologies & Platforms:
31. GKE Use Cases: Good introduction to Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and how it helps customers do amazing things. Did you know that GKE recently turned 7 years old?
32. GKE Networking: Great article on the GKE Networking basics. Must-read for all that are just getting started with GKE.
33. Cloud Functions: The second generation of Cloud Functions provides numerous improvements that can be used in parallel with its predecessors enabling easy migrations. Check out all improvements in this article.
34. GKE & Filestore Enterprise: Are you looking for a high-performance, highly-available container-native storage that supports your most demanding workloads in GKE in an optimized way? This article highlights the benefits from using GKE in combination with Filestore Enterprise.
35. Apigee: API Management with Apigee now has Pay-as-you-go pricing in addition to other options such as subscription and free trials.
36. Advanced API Security: Built on Apigee, Advanced API Security enables organizations to detect security threats across their APIs more easily.
37. GKE Autopilot: GKE Autopilot now has IP masquerading and an eBPF dataplane.
Operations:
38. Cost Control in BigQuery: Great overview on the options to control your costs in BigQuery.
39. Query-Library: Improving the productivity of your developers is always a great thing. Query Library lets developers make query logs in Cloud Logging much easier – without additional cost.
40. Cloud Deploy: The specific continuous delivery service for GKE-based environments got some nice updates.
41. External Load Balancer: Here’s a great deep dive article with lots of information on the Google Cloud External HTTPs Load Balancer.
42. PromQL (Prometheus Query Language): “As Prometheus becomes more of a standard, an increasing number of developers are becoming fluent in PromQL, Prometheus’ built-in query language. That’s why it’s great to see that you can now view / query all Cloud Monitoring Metrics (1000+) in the Managed Service for Prometheus using PromQL”.
43. Networking: Here’s a key resource called “The Networking 101 GCP Reference Sheet” for everyone dealing with GCP Networking.
44. Troubleshooting: You can now troubleshoot on GCP with a tool called gcpdiag (Open Source) via CloudShell.
I will be back in October to get you prepared for Google Cloud Next 2022. As always, stay safe and healthy.
Jörn