MARK MIRCHANDANI: Building your infrastructure
or hosting your application in the Cloud can be tricky.
One misconfiguration and your costs
could quietly creep up or even skyrocket.
Your performance could slow to a crawl,
or you could have holes in your security big enough
to cause some serious trouble.
It can be difficult to stay on top of things,
but you don't have to do it alone.
Today, I'm going to tell you about Active Assist,
the intelligence baked into Google Cloud that
helps you troubleshoot, configure, and optimize
your infrastructure with ease.
So what is Active Assist?
Well, it's not just one thing.
It's a portfolio of tools and services
that span across Google Cloud.
Active Assist combines data, intelligence, and machine
learning to provide you with an array of tools specifically
tuned to your usage.
These tools are designed to reduce
the complexity of managing infrastructure in the Cloud.
The Active Assist portfolio includes
the recommendation hub, and an API,
as well as a collection of Recommenders.
Let's break down what Recommenders are
and how they work.
Recommenders offer personalized intelligent insights
and recommendations for various Google Cloud resources
and services based on your usage data.
These recommendations expose opportunities
to fine-tune and optimize your configuration in various areas.
For example, if you run virtual machines on Compute Engine,
you can reduce costs by shutting down or deleting
any virtual machines that aren't actively being used.
The Idle VM Recommender will let when a virtual machine
is idle or unused.
Recommendations are made on based on Cloud monitoring data
and are continuously being updated.
Another example is enforcing the best practice
of least privilege.
This includes making sure that users only
have the permissions that they actually need and use.
The IAM Recommender will spot any excess permissions granted
to any accounts and offer alternative roles
and permissions to grant instead.
To view or manage recommendations,
users will require the appropriate IAM roles
corresponding to the type of Recommender
that they need access to.
These permissions are also bundled in some roles,
like the Owner role.
That way, you can delegate the visibility and management
of recommendations to different users or teams.
Once you have access to recommendations,
there's a number of ways that you can view and manage them.
First, you might see them in context
on the pages for the services that they correspond to.
For example, you'll see IAM policy recommendations
at the top of the IAM and Admin page
and next to any accounts that might have excess permissions.
In the same way, the Compute Engine VM Instances page
will tell you when there are machine type recommendations,
at the top of the page and next to any machines
that the recommendations apply to.
This visibility ensures that administrators
for these services don't miss any
of the latest recommendations that could positively
impact the organization.
Recommenders can also be accessed from the Cloud Console
via the recommendation hub, where you can view, dismiss,
or apply recommendations with just a few clicks.
In the recommendation hub, each Recommender
will display with a card with its description
and a summary of the recommendations
that it's generated, along with the impact of actually applying
those changes.
You can click View All for any Recommender
to see more details about the individual recommendation.
Recommendations can also be accessed
from the gcloud command line interface
for more advanced and programmatic management.
Accessing recommendations through the CLI
reveals additional information and properties,
such as priority and primary impact category.
These properties are helpful in identifying recommendations
that could have the biggest effect on costs, performance,
and security.
By familiarizing yourself with some
of the features of Active Assist,
you can reduce the complexity of running the cloud.
A great place to start is getting
to know all the different Recommenders that Active
Assist has to offer.
Collectively, Recommenders will equip you
to do six things successfully--
manage your costs wisely, maximize the performance
of your systems, mitigate your security risk proactively,
deliver high availability and reliable services to your end
users, spend less time managing your cloud configuration,
and reducing the carbon footprint of your workloads.
In the next few videos, we're going to focus primarily
on three areas--
costs, performance, and security.
Then we'll take a look at how we can manage recommendations
across multiple projects inside of a single organization.
Stay tuned for the next video, where
we start by taking a look at what Recommenders
can do for cost optimization.
See you there.