Google Cloud Technology Nuggets — November 16–30, 2022 Edition

Welcome to the November 16–30, 2022 edition of Google Cloud Technology Nuggets.

Application Modernization

API Management is a key solution. As the blog post states, At Google Cloud we have three solutions for your API use cases: Apigee API Management, API Gateway, and Cloud Endpoints. How do you choose one over the other? Which features are key in your decision to go with one of the solutions. Check out the blog post to learn more.

Speaking of API Management, if you are using Apigee, check out this post that highlights ways to optimize your spend with Apigee.

Containers and GKE

If you have direct visibility of a container’s health from an external load balancer, it can have an impact on increased resiliency of containerized applications. Check out this detailed blog post that builds upon an earlier post on increasing an application’s Reliability.

SRE and DevOps

One of the key principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is that Reliability is the one of the most important features of any system. You often measure Reliability via one of the key signals like Availability and then using that SLI + SLO, you aspire to meet that goal. However, any system is usually dependent on multiple other services. These could be Google Cloud System services or even 3rd party services or your own services. There might be sequential dependency or in parallel. So how you do then determines the composite availability of such a system. This blog post provides the guidance and formulae to help you calculate that.

Storage, Databases and Data Analytics

Organizations are seeing their storage needs multiply. While Google Cloud provides multiple storage classes to help optimize your storage costs, it still is a challenge to understand these classes and set up the correct lifecycle policies to move the objects to the correct buckets with the appropriate storage classes.

Autoclass is an easy to use bucket-level setting that simplifies and automates lifecycle management of all your Cloud Storage data based on last access time. This is extremely useful for organizations to help optimize storage costs and more . Check out the blog post for more details.

Google Cloud offers a suite of managed database services that support open source, third-party, and cloud-first database engines. The process of migrating from databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server in a lift-and-shift fashion to Google Cloud or even choosing one of the other cloud-first database services on Google Cloud, is not easy. This specific 5-part Cloud Next ’22 playlist is a great way to understand the journey and specific services to help you do that. Check out the blog post for more details.

Spanner is a unique database from Google, that came back as a way to address its own challenges. The original Spanner paper has won the 2022 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, an honor bestowed on the most influential Operating Systems papers published by the organization. Check out the blog post from one of the original authors of the paper to get a glimpse into its history and more.

Identity and Security

IAM Deny Policies are now in General Availability (GA). This can be a simple mechanism to define broadly a set of policies to control access to resources at a coarse level. IAM Deny policies always supersede IAM Allow policies and override conflicting IAM Allow rules. Check out the blog post for more details.

The quarterly-held Cloud Security Talks will see its final edition on December 7th. This edition will focus on how you can use automation to advance your prevention, detection, and response capabilities through automation along with information around current threats and Zero Trust.

Sign up for the event here.

Cloud Armor, saw a couple of features announced at Cloud Next ’22 that helped more granular control over applying pre-configured Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules and an auto-deploy option for proposed mitigating rules generated by Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection, which is a machine learning-based attack detection and response capability. Check out this blog post that covers these features in detail.

Finally, Cloud CISO Perspectives for November 2022 are out.

Machine Learning

One of the biggest contributors to support tickets is users looking for knowledge base articles that could guide them through the issue/problem that they are looking to address with your product. The traditional approach to this has been via human agents that search through your knowledge base and respond to the ticket with the relevant knowledge based set of article(s). What if this task was handled by a Machine Learning model that helped surface the correct knowledge base articles and thereby saved the time of the agents and brought up greater and timely efficiency into the process.

That is exactly what a group of engineers in Google were tasked with. Check out their journey and findings in the blog post.

Developers and Practitioners

If you have attended Google Cloud I/O Online, you would know about the online Cloud I/O Adventure experience. An earlier blog post had covered the architecture.

How do you do load testing of such a system and with some of the Google Cloud serverless products. the blog post gives fantastic details on what went into use Cloud Run as a Trigger to simulate the load testing of the application.

A summary of the Load Testing is given below:

• 4000 triggers for 40 user stories each
• Max concurrency of 40 requests per Cloud Run instance
• Tests used just over 100 instances and successfully injected 160,000 simultaneous active attendees
• The load test script was run several times over a few days, for a total cost of about $100

The costs and the ease of using these tools should help you look at your load testing strategy on Google Cloud in a different light.

If you are working with Google Cloud Workflows, a new series on Workflows Patterns and Best Practices has started with two parts published (Part 1 and Part 2). The topics include Event Orchestration, Parallel tasks, Workflows Connectors, Designing for Resilience, Asynchronous notification on a long-running task and more.

How do you build the quintessential example of a Chat Server with Google Cloud Serverless technologies? Well, we have a reference blog post that shows you exactly how to use Google Cloud Run to achieve that with source code to go along with that. The blog post is also a good way to familiarize yourself with the Serverless build tools like Cloud Build and triggering it on a code change.

Do you have several Google Cloud Projects left unattended and not in use for a while? Would you like a way to determine this list and automate the process? Check out the blog post that introduces Remora, a serverless architecture to help you do that.

Learn about Google Cloud

A friendly reminder on the Google Cloud Skills Boost Annual subscription that was launched at Cloud Next ’22. The Annual subscription includes as per the blog post:

• Access to 700+ hands-on labs, skill badges, and courses
• $500 Google Cloud credits
• A Google Cloud certification exam voucher
• Bonus $500 Google Cloud credits after the first certification earned each year
• Live learning events led by Google Cloud experts
• Quarterly technical briefings hosted by Google Cloud executives

Need to understand the efficacy of your Marketing campaigns? Did you know Google Cloud has a set of services called Marketing Analytics that help you address that. Learn more about these solutions in this blog post.

Did you know Cloud Run has two types of health checks : Startup and Liveness. Check out this guide to learn more about them.

Stay in Touch

Have questions, comments, or other feedback on this newsletter? Please send Feedback.

Looking to keep a tab on new Google Cloud product announcements? We have a handy page that you should bookmark → What’s new with Google Cloud.