Google Cloud Technology Nuggets, January 1–15, 2023 Edition

Welcome to the January 1–15, 2023 edition of Google Cloud Technology Nuggets.

Happy New Year ! Welcome to the first edition of the Google Cloud Technology Nuggets Newsletter in 2023. Thank you for reading and wish you a fantastic 2023.

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Infrastructure Modernization

Reliability is a key feature of the application. But what does Reliability really mean? What is your role in designing a reliable solution on Google Cloud? Check out a guide that puts all this together to help you understand how to design reliable workloads on Google Cloud.

If you are working in a regulated industry, chances are that you cannot move all your use-cases completely to the cloud. Due to privacy, sovereignty and several other criteria, some of these use cases require an edge, on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud launched Google Distributed Cloud powered by Anthos to extend the power of Google Cloud infrastructure and services to the edge (or closer). Check out this blog post that helps you understand the Google Distributed Cloud Edge Appliance and the various use cases.

Kubernetes and GKE

If you are using GKE and Cloud SQL together, a key step is to connect the application to the database. The recommended way is via the language specific connector, which is available for Go, Python and Java. But if your application is in another language, then the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy is the way to go and there is an early release of the Kubernetes Operator that simplifies the process. Check out the blog post for more details.

Real-world customer implementations are great ways to understand how organizations are adopting cloud and then moving their applications to a more efficient runtime in terms of management and cost, as per their specific context and environmental needs. Check out this blog post that highlights how Opinary moved their architecture from GKE to Cloud Run.

DevOps and SRE

Research conducted by DORA has indicated that culture is foundational to an organization’s success and the well-being of its employees. The 2022 State of DevOps reports studied three main areas related to the impact of culture on DevOps:

• Shift in work arrangements
• Employee Churn
• Employee Burnout

Check out the blog post that provides details on how the above impacts the culture.

Storage, Databases and Data Analytics

If you are looking to migrate from Pub/Sub Lite to Pub/Sub, check out the new feature called Export Subscriptions that helps you to seamlessly write messages from a Lite topic directly to a destination Pub/Sub topic.

Multi-statement transactions support in BigQuery is now in General Availability. A multi-statement transaction lets you perform mutating operations, such as inserting or deleting rows on one or more tables, and either commit or roll back the changes atomically. Check out the blog post that highlights the benefits of this feature along with detailed examples.

Dataproc is a key service in Google Cloud and customers often take their initial journeys by migrating their Hadoop workloads to the fully-managed Dataproc service. Dataproc is often considered to be flexible and cost-effective. How about a detailed post that demonstrates this and shows you how to customize your Dataproc environment/processing for stability, cost effectiveness and performance.

Optimal Pricing in the Retail Industry is not an easy task. Customer preferences differ in terms of the experience in online v/s physical stores and retailers have to take into consideration various factors like promotions, customer loyalty, inventory management and more. How do you create a solution architecture to address this challenge of optimal pricing given the data, scale and experience needed. Check out the blog post that BigQuery, Looker and Analytics Hub, which discusses Revionics, a product solution built on Google Cloud platform.

Sparse Features support is now available in BigQuery. Check out this blog post that highlights this feature.

Machine Learning

Customers are facing three key challenges when it comes to customer contact centers:

• Run the contact centers efficiently due to changing macroeconomic conditions.
• Overhaul the Customer Experience
• Utilize AI

Contact Center AI has seen significant announcements and adoption by customers throughout 2022. Check out this blog post that highlights how customers have adopted the solution and specific features in Contact Center AI that helps to address those challenges.

Document AI has made available pre-trained models that help improve processing of W2 and payslips documents. Both these models have seen significant improvements in terms of additional fields, form variations and more. Additional pre-trained models available as release candidates include parsers for 1040, 1099R, 1120, and 1120S documents. Check out the post for more details.

Identity and Security

VPC Service Controls help administrators define a security perimeter around Google-managed services. Think of it as adding a logical security control around three paths that data can take:

• From the public internet to your resources
• Inside your VPC and the cloud service perimeter
• For service-to-service communication

Check out this blog post that gives a good overview of VPC Service Controls, how they are defined, how they differ from IAM Controls and more.

As a CISO, what are the questions that you should be asking as part of the Organization’s transformation. Check out this guide titled CISO Survival Guide: Vital questions to help guide transformation success.

To round up on security in this edition, check out a blog post that highlights Security blog posts that address the various releases in and around Security that were done in the second-half of 2022.

Developers and Practitioners

Storage Transfer Service has a couple of interesting blog posts published during this period:

• Check out a step by step guide to configuring transferring data from AWS S3 to Google’s Cloud Storage in a secure manner using identity federation.

• Launch of event-driven transfer for Cloud Storage, that provides an automated, real-time replication of data from AWS S3 to Cloud Storage.

Looking to secure intra-cloud access? Check out two patterns discussed here: Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) and Private Service Connect (PSC) that helps to provide separation of concerns, isolate vulnerabilities and create secure boundaries.

Which API Management Use cases are we seeing, growing in prominence? How many can you think of? Check out this post that highlights 7 use cases ranging from commercializing access to data products to digital twins and more.

Good Documentation is a key factor in platform adoption. Check out this list of tips that help you get the most out of Google Cloud documentation, along with ways in which you can search for interactive tutorials, saving favorite pages and more.

Making a career in the Cloud

Looking to make a career in the Cloud in 2023? If yes, the key questions on your mind would be where to start, what kind of experience would be necessary, projects to do, etc. Check out this guide that addresses each of these points in detail. The areas covered in this guide include:

• Experience
• Fill out your technical gaps
• Get hands-on with labs
• Build projects

Stay in Touch

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