Google Cloud Technology Nuggets — February 16–28, 2023 Edition
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Welcome to the February 16–28, 2023 edition of Google Cloud Technology Nuggets.
Please do not hesitate to give feedback on this edition and to share the subscription form with your peers.
Events — Google Cloud Technical Series — 28 & 29 March, 2023, Google Cloud Data Summit — 29 & 30 March 2023
Cloud Technical Series, a 2-day event (28–29 March 2023) that will feature talks, customer discussions and expert discussions across 4 tracks: Google Cloud Fundamentals, Data Cloud and Analytics, Applied Machine Learning / AI and Application Modernization.
Check the schedule and register at the event site.
If you are in the EMEA Timezone, check out the Google Cloud Data Summit, to be held on March 29 and 30, 2023. Check the website for details.
Google Cloud Next ‘23
A gentle reminder if you have missed this news, that Google Cloud Next will be held on Aug 29–31, 2023 and is back as an in-person event in San Francisco. Sign up here for information on Next ‘23.
Storage, Databases and Data Analytics
Building streaming data pipelines to ingest, process and then store data for later analysis is a key use case for most customers. There are multiple ways to do that in Google Cloud. The blog post covers 3 ways (BigQuery Subscription, Cloud Run and Cloud Dataflow) that you can do that along with tradeoffs.
Any organization is interested in saving costs and driving new revenue streams? Through intelligent use of data and AI, it is possible to do just that. Check out the blog post that highlights eight strategies that help your organization move towards that. The post covers successful examples of how organizations (Carrefour) have done that along with a framework (Operate, Inform and Optimize Steps).
Containers and Kubernetes
Local SSD has been available as a Compute Engine product that provided ephemeral access to high-performance SSDs directly attached to the physical host. GKE is the first Kubernetes platform to provide local SSD support. This support comes in two options: ephemeral storage Local SSD and local NVME SSD Block options. Check out the blog post for more details.
Machine Learning
Document AI Workbench is Generally Available (GA) Document AI Workbench is covered by the Document AI SLA — online and batch document prediction is supported with >=99.9% uptime. Check out some early adopters of Document AI Workbench along with features available in the GA release.
A Knowledge Graph was first introduced in 2012 as part of Google Search feature. Across industries, Knowledge Graph can be employed across various use cases like Supply Chain, Lending and Know Your Customer.
You can build your own Knowledge Graph today via a couple of recently announced services:
- The Entity Reconciliation API lets customers build their own private Knowledge Graph with data stored in BigQuery.
- Google Knowledge Graph Search API lets customers search for more information about their entities from the Google Knowledge Graph.
Check out the blog post that highlights how to use the Entity Reconciliation API to build your own private Knowledge Graph.
Vertex AI now offers support for pre-built PyTorch serving containers, making it easier to bring your PyTorch models into production. Check out the blog post describing how to deploy your own PyTorch models on Vertex AI.
A Google Research Report along with IDC highlights the top 5 AI and Data trends for the year. One of the trends is to “Embrace the AI tipping point”. See the blog post for details and how to download the whitepaper.
DevOps and SRE
If you prefer to use Grafana to monitor and visualize your logs, you can now use the new data source plugin that brings Cloud Logging to Grafana. The plugin uses Cloud Logging API to enable you to use Grafana Explore to view your logs in Google Cloud. This ensures that the logs are securely saved in Google Cloud and yet you can use the power of Grafana to view them and also visualize them via Grafana Dashboards. Check out the blog post for more details.
Identity and Security
For any organization, defending the environment’s network security infrastructure remains a top priority. If you are looking for a modern, fully managed, cloud-based DDoS mitigation and Web Application Firewall (WAF) service, look no further than Google Cloud Armor. Check out how Google Cloud Armor helps Broadcom protect its environment and help meet compliance requirements.
What three actions can Enterprise IT leaders take today to improve Software Supply Chain Security? A whitepaper from Google suggests the following:
- Manage your Secrets well
- Manage your Dependencies
- Build and maintain end-to-end trust in your development process
Check out the blog post where you can download the whitepaper.
Networking
Google Cloud Network Firewall policies are recommended over the VPC Firewall rules. Network Firewall policies allow for granular controls, sharing of Firewall configurations across VPCs and more. There is a migration tool that allows you convert existing VPC firewall rules into the new policy. See the blog post for details.
Multi-network support and a high-performance Kubernetes-native dataplane is among key requirements of communication service providers to adopt Kubernetes to its optimum. Google Cloud debuted Network Function Optimizer in Private Preview for GKE. Check out the blog post for more details and how Telecom providers like Ericsson are looking to leverage it.
Developers and Practitioners
One of the best practices of IAM (Identity and Access Management) is the principle of least privilege. Take a look at an interesting blog post that covers how a solution that comprises multiple Cloud Run applications (public and internal facing), which interact with various other Google Services like Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, needs to think about Access permissions. The article covers the points at which to consider access and then puts in recommendations on how to go about doing that.
Partners
If you are a Google Cloud Partner, note that 3 new Partner Specializations have been added:
See the blog post for details.
What can you do with $500 in Cloud Credits
We covered the Innovators Plus subscription in the last edition. The subscription comes with $500 in Google Cloud credits. Often, it is challenging to plan for how you will use the $500 credits. While one practical option is to learn more about Google Cloud, some of our innovators have put this to interesting use. Check out multiple ideas on what you can build with $500 in Google Cloud Credits.
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