Hello Cloud Gurus! This has been a big month for Google Cloud Platform including new Cloud
Deploy and Certificate Manager products, autoscaling for Bigtable, Assured Workloads for EU,
a new generation of Cloud Functions and more. I'm Mattias Andersson and you're
watching GCP This Month for February 2022. Let's jump into some quick bites.
If you're using Apache Spark to squeeze value from your data, I'm sure it's not because you just
really love managing those Spark clusters right? So then you'll be very happy to hear that Google
has just upgraded their Dataproc Serverless for Spark offering to generally available, so now you
can let Google manage the clusters and tune the infrastructure, and you can focus on coding instead.
And as a bonus there is now also a private preview of Spark through BigQuery making it even easier to
get all that sparky goodness right close to your data. Now speaking of managing clusters, Bigtable
has also gotten a boost here. Autoscaling for Bigtable is now generally available. There's no
point in paying for an over-provisioned Bigtable cluster when your system doesn't need all that
capacity so this is a welcome change to better match your costs to your actual usage. And although
Google's blog post does use the rather fun word 'diurnal' no less than six times, I'm sure you could
just as easily save the 40% they mentioned if your workload happens to be nocturnal instead.
Okay this announcement is about the new compute-optimized c2d instance family using 3rd gen amd
EPYC milan processors. Milan, darling, milan. You can beef these up with as many as 112 vCPUs and
896 gigabytes of memory. Of course even though these are compute optimized CPUs you can still
choose your most appropriate ratio of processors to memory as usual in compute engine. Now in case
you're unfamiliar with it, Assured Workloads is Google's response to Amazon's Govcloud but instead
of being a separate cloud region that meets compliance, Google has a system for workloads to
meet compliance in any GCP Region within that part of the world. Well Google's offering of Assured
Workloads for the European Union is now generally available and while this includes data residency,
data encryption, and google personnel, they're still in public preview with the sovereignty controls
integration with cloud external key manager that lets you keep your data encryption keys outside of
GCP. Now if you've been following this series for a while or hey maybe even if you haven't then you
probably know that i love all things serverless, right? And if you do too then you'll be happy to
hear that Google has just released into public preview their second generation of Cloud Functions.
Now since this new version is built on Cloud Run under the hood, this is really blurring the
lines between the serverless compute options. So we still have the same pay-for-use compute
as the first version of Cloud Functions but now we can also allow for simultaneous processing of
multiple requests or events just like Cloud Run. Of course make sure that your code can
handle concurrent requests before you turn this on but this could save you a bunch of
money if your event handling isn't always pegging the CPU. Also this second generation
lets you run your functions for longer on beefier instances pin instances to reduce cold starts and
split traffic between multiple versions. These new Cloud Functions, they're great!
[That was] so bad. Now it's no secret that all websites had better be using https these days. I mean not only
will normal http connections be marked as not secure in the Chrome address bar but insecure
sites also get buried pages deep in Google searches. So i'm very glad that Google now has
a new serverless Certificate Manager product in public preview to make it super easy for anyone
to get and use tls certificates on the external https load balancers that front their GCP-based
workloads. You can use a hundred certificates for free each month and it's pay per cert after
that. And because these get managed by Google's infrastructure your clients can super quickly
negotiate secure connections with Google's edge nodes. Super low latency. Oh and this does also
support wildcard certificates. Pretty wild eh? Okay i know that joke was terrible, I'm sorry.
Another new product is Cloud Deploy now generally available as Google notes in
their announcement. The operational cost of Kubernetes continuous delivery can be very
high. Well Cloud Deploy aims to take some of that pain away from you with this managed and
opinionated continuous delivery service for GKE. Now if you are using GKE then you might well find
this to be worth the extra 15 bucks per monthly delivery pipeline beyond the first free one.
Cloud Deploy is built on scaffold and includes both easy integrations to GCP management and also
many built-in best practices. Alright, finally in this segment I want to let you know about
some upcoming events coming up. On April 6th is the Data Cloud Summit this will be an online event all
about AI, machine learning, analytics, databases, and more. And even better we now have a date for Google
Cloud Next '22! Alright! Cloud Next is Google's annual conference packed with all the most
exciting GCP announcements so make sure to block off October 11th through the 13th. And if you're
hoping against hope like I am that this might wind up being an in-person event this year then
be sure to also reserve some extra time for travel to and from San Francisco. I hope to see you there!
All right now let's dig into this month's gem of an announcement - actually it's kind of a bunch of
related goodness. To start off with the Google Developer relations team has been hard at work
and they have made a massive update to the Google Cloud Developer cheat sheet.
Now i'm sure you're already familiar with this amazing tool if you've taken some of my courses
on google cloud but if you haven't then that's all right, you're one of today's lucky 10,000 or so,
because this thing is awesome. This is also known as Google Cloud Products in Four Words or
Less. Yeah and this is a part of its beauty. Four judiciously chosen words to give you
a good feel for what any particular GCP product does. Every product is included, it's comprehensive.
The printable poster version is still my favorite, but a key benefit of the new interactive version
is that every product card links you straight to the documentation so that you can dig into that
thing with a few more than just the four words. And the list view selectable at the top has the same
comfortable at-a-glance feel of the poster and not only have we gotten a massive update to this
immensely valuable tool, it looks like we're going to be getting a lot faster updates in the future
too. Priyanka Vergadia regularly puts out great content about Google Cloud and since she has now
taken over maintenance of this tool, its future is looking very bright. But wait there's more,
they've also just released a new diagramming tool for GCP architectures. And by itself this
might not seem so exciting but the coolness is in the integrations. First, the components for
your diagram are connected with the cheat sheet to help both with the picking and understanding
them. Next you can bootstrap your diagrams from a library of reference architectures, but not only
that, some of these architecture examples are set up so you can very easily deploy them into your
project to play around with them. Pretty nice eh? Well this month's announcements really were a big
deal but i'd be remiss if i didn't also tell you about the big deal we're currently running at A
Cloud Guru to help you learn cloud more deeply and efficiently. We're still offering our always
free and no credit card required plan as well but we're making our free trial even sweeter
by significantly dropping the price of the annual membership if you sign up before March 7th. I'd tell
you how much you can save but then i just make people jealous if they watch this video after
the deadline so check it out for yourself. But in any case I hope that you can have a really awesome
upcoming month. Stay safe take care of those around you and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
Milan, darling, milan. Milan, darling, milan. Milan, darling, milan.