Hello, cloud gurus. I'm your friendly host Tim Berry,
and welcome to GCP this month for August 2020.
In a month that celebrated two of the most important things in life with world
friendship day and international beer day,
our friends at Google also spoiled us with a plethora of announcements,
talks and workshops at Google Next OnAir 2020.
Beer has been notably absent from the event so far,
but there's always Google next 2021 to look forward to.
As usual we've picked the biggest and best of the recent announcements to share
with you here on GCP this month.
August has brought us lots more goodies from Google next on air,
including security week,
data analytics week and data management and databases week.
There's some really exciting stuff to talk about.
So let's dig into this month's GCP quick bites.
Google has announced a change to the free program for Google cloud signups.
The previous 360 days of free credit must now be used within 90
days for new signups, the generous always free service allowance,
however remains unchanged. And if you've already signed up, no need to worry,
you'll still have your full 360 days to spend that trial credit.
Google owned Looker has had a big overhaul with updates and improvements to the
popular BI tool. This includes the introduction of Looker blocks,
a powerful way to build and share deep analysis insights fast,
and looker marketplace in GA,
which will allow you to share those custom Looker blocks within your business or
with the rest of the world. From the OnAir security week,
certificate authority service is now out in beta.
This is a highly scalable and fully managed service that automates the
management and deployment of a private certificate authority avoiding the nasty
headache of relying on an aging on-prem CA or trying to build your own one in
the cloud. Google have partnered with the California based cyber security firm,
Tanium to bring their proactive threat detection and automated response
technology to Google cloud.
And Google has launched a new security best practices hub,
including a ton of documents, white papers,
and even Terraform build scripts to deploy secure sample best practice
environments. From the database and analytics weeks.
SAP HANA fast restart has improved the restart time of GCE instances,
running SAP HANA from an estimated 40 minutes down to just one minute. Now,
even SAP admins can take advantage of the multi-tool of switching things off and
on again to fix them. And speaking of tools,
cloud spanner has added two more North American multi-region configurations for
three nines of availability. And speaking of availability,
big query now has an improved SLA from 99.9% to
99.99%.
Thanks to the resilience of Google's borg cluster management,
big query availability is now improved by one more nine,
taking that error budget from 43 minutes to less than five minutes per month.
Proving again that nothing can stop the borg quest for perfection. Finally,
in other news game server is now GA.
Game server uses the open source Agonis game server engine built on Kubernetes
to provide managed multiplayer game server clusters that automatically scale
ready for when your game goes viral CPU over-commit for compute engine is now
GA bringing cost savings from maximizing the use of host physical core
licensing. As Kubernetes approaches its 5th birthday,
Google has released beta support for GPU optimized Kubernetes workloads.
Using Anthos,
you can now automatically deploy the drivers and software into your containers
that leverage the power of Nvidia GPU to accelerate your machine learning.
It's just what every five year old wants for their birthday.
And Google cloud has been recognized by Forrester as a leader in API management
solutions with its popular Apigee framework,
Forrester found Apogee excelled in all of their assessment criteria,
obtaining the highest possible score in many of them.
If you're interested in API development using Apigee,
check out our Google cloud Apigee certified API engineer course. Well,
as you can see,
it's been quite a month and we still have one more month of announcements from
Google next on air.
If you haven't been able to tune into any of the fantastic webinars from next on
air this month,
or if you just feel overwhelmed by how much great Google news there is out
there, fear not. This month in our GCP gems,
we're taking a look at two standout talks from August.
Okay,
so our first gem of a talk from Google security week is this breakout talk by
Google minimizing permissions using IAM recommender.
Addressing a pain We all know too well,
especially when you find that your MVP built application has somehow ended up in
production.
This talk was presented by the Google product team and Sonal Desai who is a
senior cloud security engineer at Uber.
Uber faced challenges in letting business teams move quickly,
but also encouraging their developers to carefully tailor permissions within
their code. To help they turn to IAM recommender,
which as of this month went to general availability as part of Google clouds
active assistant suite of tools.
Sonal's team were able to come up with a solution using Google's IAM recommender
tool to raise manual tickets requesting permission cleanups,
or to automatically remediate any excessive permissions based on a custom
risk scoring. This talk was a fantastic case study of a huge company,
that's still able to move fast, making the most of cloud services,
but still working to minimize their attack surface and bring themselves closer
to that magical promised Land of least privilege. Do check it out.
It was an Uber interesting talk that I found really up-Lyfting.
Who's writing these jokes?
Our second standout talk from the data analytics week came from Robert Goretsky,
the vice president of engineering at major league baseball. In 2019,
MLB embarked upon a massive data warehouse modernization project to uplift their
existing data warehouse capabilities and realize the benefits of data
warehousing in the cloud. MLB funneled their game ticket data,
merchandise purchases,
and fan interactions online all into their data warehouse.
It was then heavily used to produce personalized experiences for their fans,
create leads, marketing and promotional campaigns,
and also to run machine learning on fan behaviors,
to share insights with their 30 member clubs across the US.
Robert explains in his talk,
Some of the issues faced by their data team on their legacy platform.
These included expensive queries taking down their access to data problematic
duplication,
siloing of data and pushing copies of transformed data out to S3
buckets in member club AWS accounts for them to query themselves using Athena.
After a successful proof of concept,
MLB took the plunge and began their migration process to Google cloud as
well as replicating the massive data store in Terradata across into big query,
their data team also rewrote over 350 ETL jobs running in
Apache airflow to work with big query. In just seven months,
MLB were able to complete that transition from Terradata to big query and train
their staff to use the new solution.
Not only did they achieve a 50% improvement on query speed,
but they were also able to centralize their data and remove the delay and
duplication caused by copying data out to club S3 buckets.
Major league baseball clubs around the US now have direct Looker access to get
real time reporting from the managed serverless backend of big query,
giving them resilience against individual expensive queries and allowing them to
use big query reservations to pay upfront for predictable fixed costs.
It's a really cool success story for big query.
So take some time to go take a look.
And if you're inspired to learn more about Bigquery,
check out the A Cloud Guru course library,
and you'll find a certain professional data engineer course taught by yours
truly.
We are one month away from the end of the Epic nine week Google next on air
program of events with three more themes to come.
App Modernization, cloud AI.
And then wrapping up with business application platform.
It's certainly a lot to take in,
but rest assured that we are keeping tabs for you. So if you can't tune in,
don't worry,
you can rely on us to bring you the best of what's new in the world of GCP in
next month's episode. Well, that about wraps it up for this episode cloud gurus.
We have another guru of the month question up for everyone to answer.
So make sure you follow the link below for your chance to win our new guru prize
pack, featuring stickers and an exclusively designed t-shirt. Until next time,
stay safe and keep being awesome.