Hello Cloud Gurus and welcome to GCP this Month for March, 2020.
I'm your host Tim Berry and this month we'll look at updates for GKE, CI/CD,
AI and BQ.
That's BigQuery to those of you who choose not to use acronyms for absolutely
everything.
We've also got news on Google cloud next 20 plus some enterprise announcements
and a closer look at the new features of GCP's integrated SRE and operations
tools formerly known as Stackdriver, so let's get right to it.
Of course, the big news is the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Now I don't want you to start turning to GCP this month for health news,
but arrangements to delay the spread of the virus have led to the postponement
or cancellation of most major cloud industry events this year.
The physical Google cloud next 20 and Google IO 20 events have both been
canceled with Google originally announcing that cloud next would become Cloud
Next Digital Connect, a free online,
multi-day event featuring the usual keynotes, breakouts,
and sessions from Cloud Next.
Sadly Next Digital Connect has now also been postponed.
Google have said that they are committed to running the event,
but only when the time is right.
It's not something you can easily facilitate with most of your workforce at
home. Thankfully in our cloud connected world,
we are better equipped than ever to stay in touch with our friends, families,
and communities and for those of us lucky enough to carry on learning and
working from home through cloud technologies. So with that in mind,
let's dig into our GCP quick bites.
Google continues to extend their global data center footprint with recent
expansions in Jakarta, Las Vegas, Seoul, Warsaw, and salt Lake city.
Now they've added additional plan cloud regions in Delhi, Doha, Toronto,
and even in ACGs home of Melbourne, Australia.
So throw another crustacean on your outdoor grill. My friend.
These new regions will provide extra flexibility for in-country disaster
recovery and help support security and compliance requirements for data
locality. This month,
Google unveiled their strategy for the telecommunications industry.
This was an interesting announcement for a few reasons rather than a specific
product or service announcement.
This was a statement directly from Google cloud CEO Thomas Kurian about his
intention to monetize 5g edge computing in GCP with a new anthos for telecom
platform and partnerships with AT&T AMdocs and Netcracker.
Google is really pushing hard into the large enterprise space as it continues
its aggressive plan to catch up with the other major cloud providers and
speaking of enterprise changes,
Google are also reintroducing a management fee to GKE clusters starting in June
this year.
This has been a somewhat controversial announcement since GKE management fees
were initially scrapped around two ago.
Now there are two sides to this argument.
The 10 cents per hour fee per cluster is paying for Google's SREs to manage the
control plane of your Kubernetes cluster, which is no small undertaking.
If that additional cost is going to be a problem for you,
you can still run your own open source Kubernetes directly on compute engine and
only pay for the compute resources. On the other hand,
it's never going to be a popular decision to reintroduce a fee that's going to
impact quite a lot of customers monthly bills. Ultimately though,
this management fee just brings GKE in line with the management costs of running
EKS clusters in AWS, but in GKE,
you still get one zonal cluster per billing account,
free of management fees for development purposes.
Just one more blog post from mr Curion to mention.
Google have now completed their acquisition of business intelligence service
Looker.
This will add further options to the GCP big data tool sets for analytics and
visualization alongside existing tools like cloud data studio.
There are some great new updates for developers this month.
Starting with the addition of deployment pipelines to the GKE interface in the
GCP console built on top of cloud build automated deployment pipelines allow you
to add a source repository and build configuration to a deployment in GKE.
Git commits will then trigger the cloud build pipeline,
create an updated container image,
store it in container registry and update the application deployment in GKE with
the traceability of commit through build to deployment.
All available in the GKE user interface.
You can also enable preview deployments where pull requests,
your repo will trigger the same build, but on a temporary staging namespace.
These new features enable full continuous delivery on GKE without worrying about
any other third party software. Sorry, Jenkins, you're finally on your way out.
Speaking of pipelines, Google has now added AI pipelines to cloud AI platform.
The AI pipelines tech stack runs on its own GKE cluster using cube flow
components and the Argo workflow engine,
but they are completely managed by AI platform and built into the AI platform
user interface.
You can quickly correct complex machine learning workflows using kubeflow
pipelines and control access from your GKE stack to other GCP data and ML
services like data flow and big query and cube flow itself has just hit its
milestone 1.0 release.
Most of the core kubeflow components have been graduated to a stable 1.0 release
and kubeflow is now supported by Anthos for running Emma workloads across hybrid
and multicloud environments. Time for some quick big query news,
Redshift and S3 migration tools for big query are now generally available and
already being used by some big customers. Discord, for example,
has described the migration from Redshift to big query as game changing and
discord knows a thing or two about games, but there are more big query updates.
The big query business intelligence engine is also now GA.
BI engine integrates with data studio Looker sheets and more to provide a super
fast in memory data analysis service.
Also Google is pre announcing the beta availability of big query flex slots,
a more flexible way to purchase big career commitments in short durations,
as little as seconds at a time rather than choosing between the pay as you go
model or larger longterm commitments. And finally,
if you're using cloud code to build your applications but GCP,
you'll be pleased to learn that Google has added an API Explorer to your
favorite IDE which lets you browse details install Client libraries and access
documentation for Google's plethora of API based services.
Let's say you're developing an application that might benefit from something
like the cloud vision API without leaving the ID.
You can check to see if it provides the necessary functionality enabled it for
your project and add the client libraries to your code.
It's time for this month's GCP Gem - cloud monitoring dashboards.
Don't look away just yet. I promise it's not as boring as it sounds.
Since the announcement of the Stackdriver brand retirement,
Google has continued to improve the integration of the former Stackdriver tools
into the GCP console,
the newly named cloud logging cloud monitoring as well as cloud trace,
debugger and profiler all form the new operation suite in the GCP console.
This is great news for dev ops and SRE practitioners who need to monitor complex
systems,
visualizing real time metrics and dashboards can help you spot potential
problems and GCP has given us yet another suite of tools that means we no longer
have to rely on third party software or services to achieve this.
Think about the four golden signals of monitoring distributed systems from
Google's SRE book. These are latency,
how long it takes to fulfill a request traffic,
how many requests you're getting errors,
how many requests fail and saturation,
how utilized your infrastructure is.
Traditionally you could produce alerts and page an engineer in the middle of the
night if any one of those metrics goes over a certain threshold,
but preemptive monitoring through visualization can help you to stop these
incidents before they occur and can also allow you to spot trends that might
lead you to take proactive steps to improve your systems before they break down.
All GCP services have numerous metrics that cover these four goals and signals
and you can pick and choose the most relevant ones to create a single pane of
glass showing you the live state of your system.
It's much easier to do this now that all of the operations tools you need have
been merged into this new part of the GCP console and for programmatic
development of dashboards, Google have released a dashboard API,
which is now generally available.
This is a rest API that accepts Jason payloads to create, update,
or delete dashboards so you can now manage your dashboards in code,
deploy them using CICD systems and share them between projects and keep an eye
out for future updates to the operations suite.
Google is currently trialing an automated incident management system based on
their own internal practices that can respond to changes in metrics that you've
defined in Stackdriver, I mean cloud logging. Now,
I know these ops features aren't as shiny as some of the other new toys out
there in GCP land, but if you've ever had to hold onto a pager,
you'll know that improvements in SRE operations and incident management are
always welcomed.
Congratulations to our guru of the month. This month's winner is Karthik Solai,
a technical lead from Chennai, India. Congratulations.
Karthik will be sending you a swag pack, including a tee shirt, some stickers,
and a card.
And why don't you see if you've got what it takes to be guru of a month.
You could get your hands on all these ACG goodies and be guru famous.
Check out this month's new question at the link below.
And don't forget we pick the best answer, not the first.
So why not give it a go before we finish?
There's just time for me to plug two great GCP courses that recently went GA
right here on a cloud guru.
Now Google cloud certifications are some of the most valuable in the industry
and a great way to showcase your talents and level up your career.
So I'm pleased to tell you that you can now become a Google cloud certified
network engineer and a Google cloud certified data engineer by studying these
fantastic courses filled with all the information you need for the exams as well
as hands on labs and practice questions. Full disclosure,
one of these courses is taught by me,
but you'll just have to take my word for it regarding its awesomeness.
And that about wraps it up for this episode. Until next time, stay safe.
Stay community minded and we'll see you next month.
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.