TWiGCP — “Special Cloud Next ’18 Announcements”

Whether or not you were one of the 25K attendees at Google Cloud Next ’18, it was probably tough to keep pace with all the announcements. So here’s a GCP and practitioner-focused recap of the conference.

From the “developer-focused announcements” department:

• Cloud Build, a fully-managed CI/CD platform that lets you build and test applications in the cloud.
• Cloud Build and GitHub integration. Add CI processes on top of your GitHub code repo.

From the “compute engine announcements” department:

• Three-way collaboration with Intel and SAP to run SAP HANA workloads on Compute Engine using Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory
• Google Compute Engine resource-based pricing model

From the “there has to be a GCP storage and database solution for you” department:

• Run Oracle workloads on GCP using dedicated hardware with Google Cloud Partner
• Cloud Firestore beta now in the GCP console and very soon with a Datastore Mode with strong consistency
• Regional replication across zones is now available for Cloud Bigtable
• Beta of Key Visualizer for Cloud Bigtable to debug performance issues by mapping key access patterns

From the “IoT is getting broader and smarter” department:

• Edge TPU, a tiny ASIC chip designed to run TensorFlow Lite ML models at the edge. NXP-based devkit coming in October
• New AIY Edge TPU Boards
• Cloud IoT Edge brings Google AI to gateways and connected devices. Runs on Android Things and Linux

From the “AI & ML announcements“ department:

• [Beta] Cloud AutoML is now available to all and is expanding to Natural Language and Translation (in addition to Vision)
• [Alpha] TPU v3 and Cloud TPU Pods and for Cloud ML Engine
• Google partnership with Iron Mountain
• Dialogflow-based Contact Center AI

From the “BigQuery gets its own announcement section” department:

• BigQuery recap blog
• [Beta] BigQuery ML, a new capability to build machine learning models directly from BigQuery with SQL
• [Beta] Sheets data connector for BigQuery
• [Alpha] BigQuery GIS
• [Alpha] BigQuery Clustered Tables — group rows by common keys for faster queries

From the “more GCP Big Data” department:

• [GA] Cloud Composer (based on Apache Airflow)
• [GA/Beta] Customer Managed Encryption Keys for Dataproc. GA for BigQuery and Beta GCE and GCS

From the “reason people use and trust GCP” department:

• Overall security recap blog post
• [Beta] Shielded VMs — untampered virtual machines
• Titan Security Key, a FIDO security key with firmware developed by Google
• [Alpha] Cloud HSM — host encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations in FIPS 140–2 Level 3 certified HSMs
• [GA] Access Transparency — audit trail of actions taken by Google Support

From the “Cloud Services Platform, Kontainers, and Istio” department:

• GKE On-Prem, a Google-configured version of Kubernetes with multi-cluster management
• Istio 1.0 coming soon and managed Istio on GCP
• New Stackdriver Service Monitoring for Istio and App Engine workloads

From the “Serverless all the things” department:

• Knative, build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads on Kubernetes (an Open Source project with SAP, IBM, Pivotal, RedHat, …)
• [GA] Cloud Functions now Generally Available, with new regions and SLA
• App Engine Standard new runtimes: [Beta] Node.js 8.11, [Soon] Python 3.7, and [Soon] PHP 7.2
• Serverless containers, deploy stateless containers, let Google manage and scale them
• GKE serverless add-on, serverless artifacts on your Kubernetes clusters (Knative inside)
• Group Product Manager Oren Teich’s tweet storm on Serverless announcements (twitter.com)

From the “Go Cloud, SRE, and more” department:

• “Transparent SLIs: See Google Cloud the way your application experiences it”
• Portable Cloud Programming with Go Cloud
• Site Reliability Engineering, the book — Second Edition

From the “if you’d like more recaps” department:

• 100+ announcements from Google Cloud Next ’18
• Building a better cloud with our partners at Next ’18

From the “Beta, GA, or what?” department :

• [GA] n1-megamem-96
• [GA] Cloud Vision API support for PDF and TIFF files
• [Beta] Cloud Vision API detecting handwriting
• [Beta] Cloud Vision API object localizer w/ bounding boxes
• [Beta] Dialogflow Enterprise Edition Telephony Gateway
• [Beta] Cloud Speech-to-Text API — Transcribing Audio with Multiple Channels
• [Beta] AutoML Vision Beta, AutoML Natural Language Beta, and AutoML Translation Beta

From the “all things multimedia” department :

• Kubernetes Podcast #013 — Google Cloud Services Platform, with Aparna Sinha
• GCP Podcast Next ’18 Day 1
• GCP Podcast Next ’18 Day 2
• GCP Podcast Next ’18 Day 3
• All three keynotes and almost all 500 sessions have been posted to YouTube

Save the date! Mark your calendar for Next ’19 — April 9–11 2019 !

That is all for this week!
Expect the next newsletter in a few weeks. #vacation