Google Cloud Technology Nuggets — November 1–15, 2022 Edition

Welcome to the November 1–15, 2022 edition of Google Cloud Technology Nuggets.

Infrastructure

Cloud Workstations is now available in Public Preview. It provides fully managed and integrated development environments on Google Cloud.

If you are a developer, think of a remote IDE that has your specific environment setup for you, is customizable and supports familiar IDEs that you are conversant with. As an Administrator, it helps you provision developer environments in a fast, consistent and most importantly, secure manner.

Check out the blog post for more details. Some useful links for Cloud Workstations:

• Try Cloud Workstations today by visiting your console.
• Learn more via documentation.
• Watch the Cloud Workstations Cloud Next session.

Looking to save costs on your Compute Engine instances? In addition to Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), Google Cloud has now introduced Flexible CUDs are spend-based commitments that offer predictable and simple flat-rate discounts (28% off 1-year, and 46% off 3-years) that apply across multiple VM families and regions. Check out the blog post for more details.

Application Modernization

If you are an Administrator, who wants to control the applications that are installed in your Google Cloud project by your users, here is an interesting service that is available in Preview. Google Cloud Private Marketplace, as the blog post states “allows IT and cloud administrators to create a private, curated version of Google Cloud Marketplace that’s accessible to employees within their organization.” Using this service, you can curate products for your organization thereby avoiding redundant products that are setup across.

Google Kubernetes Engine

The GKE Team in their recent capacity planning exercise had these numbers to share:

• One in ten of clusters across the GKE fleet is idle at any given time.
• Among over-provisioned workloads, 40% of them have provisioned 30 times the resources they actually use.
• 11% of those workloads have provisioned over 100 times the needed resources.

This clearly calls out for customers to consider ways to save on costs. The team has highlighted 4 specific best-practices to do exactly that. Check out the post today.

Google Cloud has announced General Availability of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Gateway controller, Google Cloud’s implementation of the Gateway API, supporting single cluster deployments, in GKE 1.24+ clusters.

As the blog post states, “With the Gateway API, platform administrators can define policies and constraints on the networking infrastructure, and allow different teams or organizations to consume the shared networking services such as L4 and L7 load balancing while maintaining consistency and control.”

Storage, Databases and Data Analytics

Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is the integration backbone across Google Cloud services. Customers often ask what is the best way to monitor their GCS infrastructure, its performance, which metrics to look out for, etc. Keeping that in mind, the team has released a public preview of a new set of Cloud Storage Monitoring Dashboards for Cloud Storage, which are available at both the project level and bucket level. These are available from a Monitoring section right within the Cloud Storage service menu in the console. Check out the post for more details.

Online gaming continues to push the limits in terms of engagement, user experiences and more. Given the distributed nature of these services, the challenges are unique and need to be addressed at scale. Choosing the right database is critical to making this happen. This blog post highlights why Cloud Spanner is the right choice for gaming companies.

Identity and Security

Do you use Cloud Build and Artifact Registry to build and distribute artifacts? Are you using the principle of least privilege to make this happen? Check out this blog post that highlights best practices around this.

Cloud CISO Perspectives for October 2022 is out. Check out the blog post for details. If you wish to get them delivered regularly, do subscribe.

Machine Learning

We had covered in an earlier edition about Document AI and how subsequently, two services were announced at Cloud NEXT ’22 : Document AI Workbench and Document AI Warehouse. A blog post goes into highlighting what the two services have to offer. Check it out.

Do you struggle with multiple ML projects and pipelines at different stages of development? How do you manage this? Can we bring DevOps concepts and apply them to this ML-specific problem? Check out this blog post that highlights how you can help streamline your pipelines using best practices and the availability of Vertex AI Pipeline templates for your use.

Developers and Practitioners

If you work with Firestore, do check out this post that highlights the new features that have been added to the service. These features were announced at Cloud NEXT and the recently held Firestore Summit. Features include a COUNT function, integrated Query console, ability to scale the service beyond 10000 write operations per second, Time-To-Live (TTL) feature and more.

How do you determine if your API is functioning as per the SLA that you have promised your users? Now multiply this problem with 10s of APIs that you may need to monitor? Are traditional tools enough to do that or are you creating too much work for yourself? This blog post highlights Apigee API Monitoring that gives you key best practices to monitor your API. The focus is on prioritizing alerts that require attention, using dashboards to isolate problems and using distributed tracking.

Finally, the long running series on exploring various Database services in Google Cloud has just published its final part. This part goes into MongoDB Atlas service, Google Managed Prometheus service and more.

Learn about Google Cloud

Looking forward to using the rest of the year to gain some new skills on Google Cloud? Check out a list of courses being offered at no-cost by Google Cloud and Coursera. These courses range from certification courses to key areas in Google Cloud. Don’t miss out on this opportunity. Check out the blog post for more details and the specific Coursera page for the registration/sign up.

If you are working through the various serverless runtimes that are available on Google Cloud, you often face this question of whether you should use Cloud Run or Cloud Functions? Take a look at this blog post that highlights the key differences and when you would look at using one over the other.

Cloud Armor is enterprise-grade DDoS defense and web application firewall service that helps protect against broken access controls, security misconfigurations, cryptographic failures and more. It supports out of the box pre-defined OWASP based WAF rules and integration.

In which scenarios is Cloud Armor a good fit? The authors in the blog post go through 5 such scenarios in detail and help you understand the best fit for Cloud Armor.

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