Hello Cloud Gurus.
My name is Tim Berry and I'm pleased to welcome you to another GCP this month
for May, 2020 we're all adjusting to our new way of working,
but it hasn't stopped Google Cloud from releasing plenty of new products,
service updates and partner announcements.
The month of may has brought us new features for Compute Engine,
Kubernetes Engine and even something called VMware Engine.
There's lots of great stuff to talk about, so let's make it so,
so let's start with some breaking news.
Google has finally announced Google cloud next 20 on air after sadly
canceling the in person event in San Francisco.
Then postponing the original announcement of cloud next on air.
The event is finally confirmed as a nine week digital event series.
That's right, nine weeks, nine weeks of GCP talks and sessions online.
Get some sort of cert for watching all nine weeks.
Each week we'll focus on a specific topic and feature keynotes sessions and
interactive developer programs. And best of all,
everything is available for free. If you are already registered for cloud next,
then you're already signed up, but if not, you can register on the next,
on our website today. Okay, can I have gurus?
Let's jump into our GCP quick bites.
First up, some compute engine updates.
Compute engine instances are now shielded by default.
Shielded VMs have been available for just over a year and provide additional
security features like verifying the bootloader and kernel and then now the
default instance type for your peace of mind and you can combine this with the
OS patch management service announced by my good buddy Mattias last month for
additional peace of mind... Pieces of mind? Peace of minds?
Windows server containers on GKE also announced last month are now GA
with full ecosystem support.
So if you really want to run windows in a container,
I guess now you can and AMD Epyc-based N2D VM instances
are now available with up to 224 VCPUs. How Epic is that?
Next? We've got some big updates for big data, not medium data,
not small data. Don't even get me started with your tiny data.
I'm only interested in big data updates. Data catalog is now GA.
This is a new fully managed service for cataloging and managing business and
technical metadata. What does that actually mean?
Data catalog aggregates all of your metadata from bigquery,
pub/sub and cloud storage into a centralized catalog to provide a single place
for data discovery for organizations with a growing number of data assets.
Data catalog can provide a self service portal for finding the right data.
It can auto tag PII data using the cloud loss prevention API and even
support ingesting metadata from non Google sources using community connectors.
Big query now features materialized views in beta which improve performance and
reduce costs by periodically pre computing and caching query results.
There's also updates to bigquery scripting and store procedures with new
exception handling.
JDBC and ODBC support and federated ORC and parquet
queries from cloud storage are now supported. Oh,
and the video intelligence API now supports logo recognition in GA.
That's kind of big data, isn't it? Finally,
Google continues to expand its integrated partner services with a new managed
Apache Cassandra service from DataStax. Secret manager,
which I first mentioned back in January is now GA.
They're a new web application firewall or web capabilities and Cloud Armor for
both cloud and on-prem services and Google Meets is now free for everyone.
Meet is Google's business video conferencing system,
which allows up to 100 participants to awkwardly talk all over each other for up
to 60 minutes.
Although that time limit won't actually be enforced until the end of September.
Google are championing the safety and security peaches of Google Meets over its
rivals,
so it looks like you've got one more piece of software to explain to your
grandparents. Okay. Cloud gurus,
that's enough quick bites to form several large meals in my opinion.
So let's move on to our GCP gems.
There were some really interesting announcements I want to dig a bit deeper into
this month.
The first is the release of the Anthos sample deployment on the GCP marketplace.
It's fair to say that Anthos has been a bit tricky for the marketing department
at Google and lots of people are still a bit confused about what Anthos actually
is.
Google cloud earned itself a reputation of creating singular industry leading
products, but do what they say on the tin: cloud storage, cloud SQL,
cloud DNS.
Then suddenly we get this thing called Anthos and it's not even a product.
It's a bunch of products and services all rolled into a subscription fee.
So to help dispel some of this confusion,
Google have launched the Anthos sample deployment,
which you can launch straight from the Google cloud marketplace.
This will create a new GCP project containing demonstrations of key Anthos
components and a tutorial to follow along to help you understand them.
The deployment contains a certified Kubernetes cluster service mesh
dashboard tools such as SLO and performance monitoring and configuration
management tools set up with a Gitops workflow to keep the production state
stored under version control.
Anthos is getting some serious enterprise hybrid cloud love at the moment,
including from the US Department of Defense.
And right now Google are letting people explore the features of Anthos free of
charge for up to 100 VCPUs per month until the end of
June, 2020 just to be clear,
the free part of that is the Anthos service fee.
You still have to pay for any infrastructure costs like compute engine or
storage,
but if your organization needs a modern hybrid cloud container solution like
Anthos, it's a great time to check it out.
My next GCP gem this month is Google's newly announced architecture framework.
Now, it's not an exciting new service or cutting edge product.
It is basically a bunch of docs,
but sometimes a bunch of docs is exactly what you need.
Google's cloud architecture framework is an extensive set of documents that
contain Google's operational knowledge of running massively scaled distributed
systems securely, efficiently, and reliably.
And I mean it's extensive with sections on resource management,
identity and access management, networking, storage, databases,
analytics, you name it. Now,
you may already understand a lot of these principles from reading the individual
docs from GCP products,
but this framework brings them all together and combines them with guidance for
operational excellence. This includes strategies for release,
engineering automation, disaster recovery, and security.
If you're looking to use GCP for a new project,
you could use the framework to help you discover how the various pieces fit
together to build solutions.
Or maybe you need to evaluate and review existing infrastructure against these
best practices. There's no denying it's a huge tome of information,
but the best cloud architects out there will want to absorb all of it so they
can offer the best solutions to their clients.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some GCP partners offer reviews against this
framework as a service. So how's this for a GCP gem?
Google have just launched cloud VMware engine CEO Thomas Kurian continues
his ongoing mission to conquer the enterprise market by bringing the complete
VMware experience, including vSphere, vCenter, vSan,
and all those other VMware acronyms to an integrated first party offering inside
Google cloud for enterprise organizations with teams of VMware engineers.
This breaks down any learning barrier to using cloud infrastructure,
but of course the trick here is that once you've extended your multicloud
strategy to use Google's data centers,
it's going to get harder and harder to justify the spend to keep your own DC up
and running.
In addition to the cost savings running or workloads in GCP opens up access to
other integrated services like cloud storage, big query and AI platform.
Pretty soon you'll be migrating all the things to Google cloud and why wouldn't
you?
Okay. With the end of all the great announcements,
let's move on to my favorite section of the show guru of the month.
Congratulations to our GCP guru of the month Darsh Bakshi from Mumbai, India.
Congratulations Darsh. We'll be sending you a swag pack, including a tee shirt,
some stickers, and a hand sign card.
And why don't you see if you've got what it takes to be good at the month.
You could get your hands on all of those ACG goodies and be guru famous.
Check out this month's new question at the link below.
Why aren't you clicking right now? Who doesn't like swag? Well.
That about wraps it up for another episode of GCP this month from all of us here
at a cloud guru. I mean, not actually here in my house, that's just me,
but from every other girl out there all over the world,
we hope you're staying safe and we'll see you next time until then,
keep being awesome.