Oct 17, 2022
Google Cloud Technology Nuggets — October 1–15, 2022 Edition
Welcome to the October 1–15, 2022 edition of Google Cloud Technology Nuggets.
Google Cloud Next ’22 Updates
This edition is heavy with Cloud NEXT ’22, the flagship event of the year. All the sessions including keynotes are available on-demand and can be accessed from the main NEXT website.
In addition to that, if you are running short of time and would like to get an overview of the announcements, I suggest the following:
- Check out the GCP Podcast episode that highlights key announcements.
- Check out the blog post that gives a list of all 123 announcements made at Cloud NEXT ‘22.
Infrastructure
At Cloud NEXT ’22, there were 5 new Google Cloud regions announced in the following countries: Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.
Spot VMs, previously called Preemptible VMs have seen a new price reduction. The price cuts apply to standard and custom VMs and memory in 37 resource pools. Check out the pricing details. The post also covers 5 best practices for selecting a Spot VM.
At Cloud NEXT ’22 , there were ton of announcements around Infrastructure. The following post summarizes all of them and a few key ones to note include:
- Cloud TPU v4 Pods and A2 Ultra GPU VM instances are now in GA, to power ML workloads.
- New C3 machine type in preview with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processor.
- Media CDN supports the LiveStream API.
- Cloud Workstations, in preview, provides fully-managed development environments built to meet the needs of security-sensitive enterprises.
If you’d like to read up on the networking announcements at Cloud NEXT ’22, check out the following post.
Customers
100,000 SUVs booked in 30 minutes! Yes, that’s what Mahindra Group achieved in bookings for Scorpio-N, the newest version of their SUV line. Check out the blog post that details the various services used, the architecture, planning for the launch and much more.
Storage and Data Analytics
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is a key service to ingest and download data from Google Cloud. Speed is often a key requirement while transferring data to and fro, especially large data transfers. Google Cloud Storage is now available in the GCloud SDK CLI and is designed to function well for large data transfer through its default support for parallelism. You can get support for GCloud Storage by downloading the latest version of the CLI SDK. Check out the blog post for more details.
Looker is now the umbrella product name to unify all Business Intelligence Tools in Google Cloud. Data Studio is also to be known as Looker Studio. Check out the blog post that highlights some enhancements to the Looker portfolio and key customer stories.
BigQuery Migration service, is a suite of managed tools that enables users to reliably plan and execute migrations. It divides the journey into 4 steps: Assessment, SQL Translation, Data Transfer and Validation. Check out the blog post that highlights each of the steps in detail and how you can get started with it today.
At Cloud NEXT ’22, there were a series of announcements around Database Management Services. It is important to first understand the overlying theme and strategy that Google Cloud is taking and that is where this blog post sets the context and leads you into the various services and announcements.
Identity and Security
Cloud NEXT ’22 saw a significant focus on Security with 5 major announcements and several other announcements on specific services. Key announcements, some of which are covered in this newsletter include:
- Software Delivery Shield, a fully managed software supply chain solution.
- Updates on Digital Sovereignty for Cloud Services in Europe.
- Chronicle Security Operations, a new service help detect, investigate, and respond to cyberthreats with the speed, scale, and intelligence of Google
Check out the blog post for all the security related announcements.
Check out a curated playlist on select Security sessions at Cloud NEXT ‘22.
Machine Learning
CCAI Platform is now generally available across the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain — with more markets soon to come. CCAI consists of 3 key services:
- Dialogflow, a platform to build text and voice virtual assistants.
- Agent Assist, a real-time guidance and recommendations to the agent, based on historical conversations, knowledge bases, and best practices of experienced agents.
- CCAI Insights, provides real-time, actionable data points on customer queries, agent performance, sentiment trends, and opportunities for automation.
Check out the blog post for more details.
Continuing on the AI Agent portfolio, of which CCAI Platform is a part, there are several enhancements added to Document AI Platform and a brand new platform, Translation Hub. This service provides customers with self-service document translation and supports 135+ languages. The Document AI Platform sees two services : Document AI Workbench that presents a simple interface to labeling data and one-click model training. The other service is Document AI Warehouse that brings Google Search technologies to Document AI. Check out the blog post for more information.
Additionally, check out a Cloud NEXT ’22 Playlist that highlights some of the top AI / ML sessions
SRE and DevOps
Software Delivery Shield, a fully managed software supply chain security solution is now available on Google Cloud. The solution spans across various Google Cloud services ranging from GKE, Cloud Code, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Artifact Registry, Binary Authorization, and more. The solution provides services across 5 areas as shown below:
Check out the blog post for more details on the solution.
As Kubernetes has grown in popularity, PromQL is the de facto standard that developers have come to adopt when it comes to querying time series. PromQL throughout the Cloud Monitoring user interface, including in Metrics Explorer and Dashboard Builder. Check out the blog post for more details.
Did you know that In 2021, the top 10% of most popular OSS project versions are 29% more likely on average to contain known vulnerabilities? It is likely that your own software is at risk because you are dependent on software that may have known vulnerabilities. Artifact Registry and Container Scanning is now available for everyone to use. Artifact Registry can be used to host your software artifacts and by enabling Container scanning on them, the images are constantly analyzed for known vulnerabilities. This is a great step towards the whole move to shift left on security. Check out the blog post for more details.
Developers and Practitioners
If you are a MEAN stack developer, one of the key requirements that you have as a developer is to have a deployment environment that makes it easy for you to focus on developing your applications while leaving the heavy-lifting of running your application to the cloud provider. Take a look at the blog post that covers the use of MongoDB Atlas for your MongoDB Database, Cloud Run (on Google Cloud) to host your application and best of all, a Terraform script that can script the environment for you.
Google Cloud NEXT ’22 had several sessions for Application Developers but if there are a few sessions that are a must see, take a look at the following playlist that highlights interesting App Dev Sessions. Specifically if Serverless runtimes and Event Driven Architectures are of interest, check out a session that helps you build a full event-driven serverless app in a few minutes.
Lets learn about Google Cloud
Google Cloud Skills Boost program is now available under the yearly subscription fee of $299/year. The subscription provides several benefits that include (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
Networking is a key component of your Cloud Architecture. It is critical to a successful implementation that takes into consideration performance, security and more. What are the building blocks that make up Networking. Check out this detailed blog post on the same.
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