Google Cloud Technology Nuggets — March 1–15, 2023 Edition

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

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Google Cloud Events

There are multiple events coming up that you should register for:

• 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.
• Google Cloud Data Summit : March 29 & 30, 2023. Check the website for details.
• Register for Google Cloud Next ’23: It will be held Aug 29–31, 2023 as an in-person event in San Francisco. Sign up here for information on Next ‘23.
• Google I/O 2023, May 10, 2023: Link.
• Google Cloud Security Talks, March 22, 2023: Link.

Infrastructure

Deploying and managing Blockchain nodes is not easy. Over the years, cloud has brought multiple benefits to managing and running the infrastructure for you and for Web3 developers looking to run different kinds of nodes, they should ideally be tapping into the power of the cloud. Check out the blog post on how Blockchain Node Engine, the fully managed offering from Google Cloud can help you with that.

Dataflow now supports regional placement of workers, giving a big boost to reliability.

Sustainability

As a developer, you typically do not think about your carbon footprint during application development. Actually, each Google Cloud datacenter in a specific location can measure carbon emissions associated with each workload. This information can be provided to you in terms of services you use in your projects and more. Check out this detailed guide titled “A developer’s guide to understanding carbon” and how you can lower your carbon footprint on Google Cloud.

Storage, Databases and Data Analytics

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL is now available in 16 new regions across the globe, bringing the total to 22 regions. If you have never tried out AlloyDB, check out the blog post that shows you how to get started and other introductory material.

There are new capabilities added to Spanner’s regional and multi-regional capabilities:

• You can have read-only replicas to any regional or multi-regional Spanner instance to deliver low latency reads to clients in any geography.
• You can move your production Spanner instances from any configuration to another on the fly, with zero downtime, whether it’s regional, multi-regional, or a custom configuration with configurable read-only replicas.
• Drop in list prices for nine-replica global multi-regional configurations nam-eur-asia1 and nam-eur-asia3.

See the blog post for details.

Containers and Kubernetes

GKE Dataplane V2 gives a boost to securing your microservices if you are running them in GKE and Anthos. It provides consistent network policy enforcement, logging, and monitoring without having to install any third-party software add-ons. A key thing here is that it integrates eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter , which allows applications to execute code in the Linux Kernel space without any changes to the kernel source code or loading a module. Check out the blog post for more details.

As your workloads scale in GKE, the discussions always come back to how you can optimize your cluster. See this excellent guide to optimizing your GKE cluster. It talks about 5 key things that you can do via specific dashboards, views that GKE provides.

If you are delivering live games experiences to your users, Google Cloud has learnt a thing or two over its work with game publishers and its experience in providing these experiences at scale. As per the blog post, Google Cloud believes that to bring the right experiences, it needs to help the game developers with 3 key things: Serve players everywhere, Collect and organize game data and Unlock player and game insights. See this interesting post for details and goo.gle/cloudforgames.

Machine Learning

Generative AI is all the rage these days and OpenAI got out of the starting blocks quickly. Google has responded with its own infusion of Generative AI into its products and a new offering. First up is the Vertex AI platform that gets a boost via Generative AI support i.e. practitioners will get access to foundational models within Vertex AI itself, allowing them to build and custom on top of these models. Next up is Generative AI App Builder, which allows developing new experiences including bots, chat interfaces, custom search engines, digital assistants, and more. What is more interesting that these should be having an API that lets developers create a variety of applications within minutes. These programs are currently available in closed preview and one of the suggested events to learn more about is the Data and AI summit scheduled for March 29.

See the blog post for details and the video here.

Would you like to build a weather forecasting model using Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud? What if you were provided with a Notebook containing the necessary details, an instructional blog post and video and the cost of building this out is less than $1? I’m sure you are interested now and this blog post has all the details including a video around the process.

DevOps and SRE

Defining Service Level Objectives for your application is a challenging task. The guidance is often to look at details like customer user journeys, interactions that the customer has with your system and focus on what the user really cares about. To make it easier for organizations going down that path, Google Cloud has made available a template, key points to consider and more via this post.

Identity and Security

Google Cloud recommends customers migrate from VPC firewall rules to the newly introduced network firewall policies. The rules are defined on a per-VPC network basis and can be used with IAM-governed tags that confirm the organizational hierarchy policies. It also comes with a migration tool. Check the blog for more details.

Networking

Service Directory is a managed service that gives you a single place to publish, discover, and connect services. Check out this detailed blog post that highlights 6 ways you can use Service Directory today.

Developers and Practitioners

Third-party research indicates that Google Cloud is making it easier for developers to create applications faster. Key products like Cloud Deploy, GKE Autopilot and Cloud Run Jobs were compared in detailed user sessions with equivalent products/services from other competitors. The results are interesting. Check it out.

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