Hello, Cloud Gurus. I'm Tim Berry, and welcome to GCP this month,
where we round up all the latest news and most exciting announcements for Google
Cloud Platform. We're finally nearing the end of 2020,
but even a pandemic can't slow Google down as this month,
we have major announcements for Cloud SQL,
Anthos and some exciting new developments for developers.
So sit back and enjoy this episode of GCP This Month.
Okay folks, let's jump straight into our Quick Bites section,
with some amazing announcements.
If you're managing the continual deployment of software to the cloud,
chances are that you're handling multiple dependencies and you're responsible
for security and compliance best practices.
As an evolution of Container Registry, Artifact Registry, now in GA,
lets you manage not just container images, but Maven and NPM packages too.
And there's support for additional formats in the pipeline.
Artifact Registry also bundles VPC service controls,
granular access control, customer managed encryption,
and even built-in vulnerability scanning for containers so you can ensure only
verified images, make it into production. In compute news,
Google has added new scaling controls to the auto scaler in Compute Engine
managed instance groups. Up until now,
the autoscaler has been great for adding capacity when it's needed,
and deleting unused VMs to help you save money.
But it can sometimes work in quite an abrupt way that might not be a great fit
for every workload. With the new scaling controls,
you can limit the number of VMs that might otherwise be scaled out over a time
period that you define. For all you Cloud Run fans out there,
Google has now added server-side HTTP and GRPC streaming support
to their magical serverless containers platform.
This new feature removes the previous 32 megabytes size limit on responses
and allows you to do things like stream video files,
return partial or batched responses to a single request or send service center
events to a dynamic webpage. Next,
I've certainly got some bad news for those of us who love typing in hundreds of
lines of YAML from scratch. Oh wait. That's no one ever! Cloud Code,
Google's plugin for IntelliJ and VS code,
already provided out of the box snippets and linting for common Kubernetes
objects.
But that support has now been expanded to over 400 popular custom resource
definitions used to expand the range of objects that you can deploy to your K
ubernetes cluster. They include CRDs for the Agones game server,
Kubeflow for ML,
the Calico network model and cert manager for handling TLS certificates.
You can even add existing CRDs from your cluster or local machine on the
database side of things. Shortly after the community GA release,
Cloud SQL has announced Postgres 13 as a fully managed database option.
Postgres 13 introduces performance improvements across the board as well as
updates to vacuuming. Trust me, that's a thing in Postgres.
And new features like incremental sorting.
And finally GCPs new database migration service, or DMS,
now in preview,
is a managed service that provides minimal downtime migrations for MySQL and
Postgres databases running in self hosted environments, other GCP projects,
or even other clouds. It streams an initial snapshot of data,
and then uses log shipping to replicate new data using the native replication
capabilities of each database.
These sorts of migrations have been difficult to manage in the past. Trust me,
I've got the scars, but DMS takes away all of the hassle,
guides you through the process, and even right-sizes your destination DB.
Now let's talk about two announcements I'm really excited about in our GCP Gems
section.
The unique and super useful features of GCP has always been the Cloud Shell,
that little micro VM you get for free.
It gives you a terminal and a developer environment whenever you need it right
inside your GCP console. And for a long time now,
the console has had a built-in editor, which provided a very basic,
but still useful, code editing experience. Now,
Google has announced a major update to the experience with a preview of the new
standalone Cloud Shell Editor, based on the Eclipse Theia platform.
The new Cloud Shell Editor has much better language support than ever before for
Go, Java, .net, Python and node.JS,
with syntax highlighting code suggestions, linting and debugging support.
But the biggest upgrade is that the Cloud Shell Editor is now supported by Cloud
Code,
giving you a complete integrated cloud development environment with tools like
mini cube scaffold and build packs right there inside the editor.
The editor also inherits some other great features of Eclipse Theia like source
control and workspaces.
So you can work across multiple projects with different configurations for each
one.
You've now got all the tools you need to develop apps for platforms like Cloud
Run and Kubernetes right there in your browser with no setup or fuss required.
And of course it's still includes the cloud shell terminal.
Google are really trying to minimize the time and effort required to use their
stack and just get you developing as quickly as possible and, unbelievably,
even with this amazing upgrade, the cloud shell editor is still free to use.
Just head to ide.cloud.google.com. Okay,
my next GCP Gem is the Anthos developer sandbox.
This is more developer outreach from Google to try to get people to use the
Anthos platform.
Now Anthos is an amazing suite of products and services that makes hybrid and
multicloud infrastructure a breeze. But in my opinion,
it's been struggling a bit with adoption,
partly because of its complexity and partly because of its price.
When it was announced, the price was 'contact your sales representative'.
Then it was $10,000 a month. Now that might be fine if you're a big enterprise,
but it's not the sort of pocket change you'll have lying around if you just want
to try something out. Finally,
it came down to a per VCPU pay as you go model,
first on a monthly commitment and now finally on an hourly basis.
So you can actually try it out without breaking the bank.
But now Google have gone one step further and announced the Anthos developer
sandbox,
which allows you to experience the workflow of developing for Anthos completely
for free using the brand new cloud shell editor. We were just talking about.
The Anthos sandbox guides you through common day-to-day Anthos development
tasks, such as developing an application with Cloud Code,
using build packs with Cloud Build and deploying your app to the cloud.
Run emulator on the built-in local Minikube cluster.
Now my only criticism of this is that while these exercises are great,
they represent just a tiny slice of what the whole Anthos package can do,
but then you're never going to get to spin up multi-cloud infrastructure in a
free offering like this. Once you've worked your way through the sandbox,
there are further Anthos specific tutorials that are recommended to show you
some more of its powerful features like Service Mesh or Cloud Run on GKE.
You'll have to spend a bit of money to try these out,
but now it's a much more reasonable pay as you go model.
But sticking with the sandbox,
this is more of a developer tutorial for GCP as a whole.
And if you were a developer who's new to GCP or you're just looking to brush up
on some of these cool new features,
this is a great way to find out how powerful all of these tools really are.
And now it's time for my favorite part of the show, the Guru of the.
Month.
The winner for this month's GCP Guru of the Month is Johan!
Johan is a systems developer from Sweden. Congratulations, Johan,
we'll be sending you a swag pack containing a t-shirt,
some stickers and a hand signed disinfected card.
For all you other gurus who want a special prize pack,
try your luck by answering the question, which can be found at the link below.
Well that about does it for this month's GCP releases and announcements.
Which announcement do you think will have the most impact on you?
Is there a new release you've come across that you're particularly excited
about? Let us know in the comments below.
Be sure to tune into the next GCP This Month, where we'll wrap up 2020,
and never speak of it again. If you liked this episode,
don't forget to give this video a like,
subscribe to our channel for more cloud news,
and hit that notification button so you know when the next episode is ready.
Until then, stay safe, be excellent to each other,
and keep being awesome Cloud Guru's.