Hello Cloud Gurus,
Mattias Andersson here bringing you another episode of GCP this month. Now,
I was expecting to be on location at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco earlier
this month. But of course that didn't happen.
As Tim said in the last month's episode,
they even canceled the online version of the event. So here I am at home,
but lots of Googlers have been working from home too.
So we do still have plenty of things to talk about.
Things like Game Servers and Service Directory,
which are both new GCP products and new features like fine grained access
control and BigQuery.
And they've released an awesome new SRE book on security too.
So let's get to it. Hey,
let's start things off with a look at a very time relevant announcement.
Google has made freely available in big query a number of health info datasets
related to COVID-19 but it's not just access to the data either.
Google is also bearing the costs of both queries and big query ML usage.
So researchers and data scientists can train advanced machine learning models on
the data right inside BigQuery and don't be concerned about any privacy issues
here. This data has all been through stringent patient privacy and data security
controls.
This is just one of the many things that Google has been doing to help respond
to the current crisis, so thank you Google and Googlers. We appreciate it.
Next up, we have Game Servers now. Love them or hate them.
Ubisoft has teamed up with Google to create the open source Agones project for
managing online game server infrastructure on Kubernetes.
It handles both predictable and unpredictable scaling and lets you
simultaneously run multiple versions of your game.
Google will now take on the burden of running Agones for you if you want.
That's what their new Game Servers product is.
It's currently in beta and offers you a fully managed solution for you to serve
your global players. Another brand new GCP product, Service Directory,
offers a Google managed way to publish, discover,
and connect to all of the services you run across your entire infrastructure.
Service Directory itself is serverless so you don't have to worry at all about
how it scales internally to meet your system's demand. Service directory.
Clients can resolve services via HTTP, GRPC and DNS,
including through a private zone in your VPC,
but it's not restricted to Google Cloud either.
You can just as well use this from your own data center or from other clouds if
you want. In my opinion, one of the most exciting announcements this month,
BigQuery now supports column level security for fine grained access control.
You could already control access per data container,
but this lets you keep related data together even if it is sensitive or
restricted in some way such as patient health information,
personally identifiable information or financials.
This is much better than having to separate such data out into other data
containers which would make it harder and therefore more expensive to use.
Google's memory store product now has a beta support for Memcached now,
just like memory store for Redis memory store for Memcached is fully managed and
compatible with the open source version that you could run yourself if you so
chose. But letting Google manage all of the overhead of running,
upgrading and scaling those servers in your cache layer frees you up to focus on
more value added work. If you're doing no SQL stuff on GCP,
you might be using cloud big table but if you're not,
it might be because you'd been turned off by its minimum size of three nodes or
$2 per hour.
But now cloud big table allows you to run production level clusters with as
little as one node.
A key use case for this is also replicating data to clusters in other GCP
regions and of course you can still scale clusters up to more nodes whenever you
need.
Google has a new service generally available to manage patching your compute
engine instances, both Linux and windows ones.
This includes both the patch deployment itself and detailed compliance reporting
for your fleet spanner now supports managed backup and restore.
Generally available terabytes of data can be restored from a backup within
minutes after a failure.
Spanner has also gone GA with query optimizer versioning and foreign key support
and the support for AWS has now hit the generally available level too.
So you can have Google take care of the work of managing your Kubernetes
clusters,
even in Amazon web services onto the part of our show where we get to dig deeper
into my favorite announcements. These are our GCP gems.
Google has released another open source project.
This one to enable you to use GRPC in Kotlin. Now,
unless you've already been using either of those,
you might not recognize the value here. So let me explain.
Kotlin is a much loved and super fast growing open source programming language.
It is the preferred programming language for Android apps and compiles down to
JBM or JavaScript.
Kotlin is taking over many of the situations where you would otherwise have used
Java or C plus plus adding GRPC support to Kotlin means that service to service
remote procedure calls can be much faster and more efficient than using slower
and heavier weight methods like soap and wisdom over XML or rest or open API
with JSON or YAML. And since Cloud Run now supports GRPC too.
As of just late last month,
you can now have Google fully manage all of the connections and scaling for your
Kotlin based GRPC services including scaling them down to zero when they're not
being used and way up high when the requests spike. That's pretty cool.
If you haven't ever had a chance to look into Google's two previous SRE books,
both published by O'Reilly and available free from Google,
then you've really missed out the site reliability engineering book and the site
reliability workbook are both hugely valuable resources. Now,
one of the real losses for me about Google cloud next 2020 being canceled is
that I won't have a chance this year to head over to the fifth nine lounge and
get myself a signed physical copy of the third SRE book that they've just
released. Building secure and reliable systems.
Of course the biggest loss is still missing out on the chance to meet so many of
you in person. In any case,
I take every chance I can in my courses to remind people that security is a
fundamental and intrinsic part of building and running every system,
not something that can be separated out or reduced to steps in a process.
Ever since my days back at Microsoft,
I've been using and referring back to this writing secure code book by Michael
Howard and David Leblanc. Now it is still a good book,
but that book's perspective is more on the application and the new security book
from the experts at Google looks at the broader and more complicated systems of
today. Things designed to leverage the power of the cloud.
They ask can assist them be considered truly reliable if it isn't fundamentally
secure or can it be considered secure if it's unreliable, they continue.
Security is crucial to the design and operation of scalable systems in
production as it plays an important part in product quality,
performance and availability. In this book,
experts from Google share best practices to help your organization design
scalable and reliable systems that are fundamentally secure. Now.
I wish I would have already had the time to read the whole thing,
but I can already see that it covers so many valuable things ranging from
security principles and fundamentals to balancing tradeoffs to mitigation
strategies and real world case studies and it even includes advice on building a
culture of security and reliability in your own organization regardless of where
you are in the hierarchy. Don't forget that this whole book,
all 557 pages of it is available for free. Now,
the reason I included this as one of my GCP gems is because I believe that
digging into it is very likely to have a super high return on your time
investment.
Absolutely for your GCP based systems but also for your organization and your
career. Well,
okay, now it's time to give a big shout out to our GCP guru of the month winner.
Congratulations. Suman Chakraborty because you are killing it.
Suman is a senior dev ops engineer from India and we're sending him another
awesome prize pack full of swag. Of course.
Now we have a question for all of you out there.
How could we make our regular guru competition more enticing to you?
For our own sakes,
we love to have our students engage with the material that we teach and get
excited about it with us.
But what can we do to make this more interesting to you? We're listening,
so please do let us know. Leave us a comment, tweeted us,
pass us a message through our awesome support people. Just let us know somehow.
Right now, we already have another question for you live to answer.
So head over there and us what you've got. I mean, right now,
like if you had other plans, you might want to cancel them.
Go and find the link attached to this episode. Okay. Well,
from all of us here at A Cloud Guru,
we really hope that you are all staying safe out there and until next time,
keep being awesome.