Hello, cloud gurus. It's that time again!
This is GCP this month for September, 2020.
I'm your host Mathias Andersson.
And I have all sorts of announcements for you from the final three weeks of
Google cloud next 20 on air,
which were all about making it easier than ever to build and modernize
applications and fill them with AI Goodness.
So (build)pack your bag and cloud run it to the API
gateway because you're going to CAMP. Alright.
I hope all these references will make more sense to you as we go through the
announcements. Tea - Earl gray, hot.
Now in our show, we normally run through all of our quick bites first,
but in this episode,
I want to dive into our deeper gems first because they keep coming up in the
other quick bites.
Let's start with CAMP.
Google CAMP is the Google cloud application modernization
platform. Google sure does love making platforms.
And this is based on six years of scientific research by Dora the
DevOps research and assessment group that puts out the well-respected state of
DevOps report each year.
Based on Dora's research elite teams deploy 200
times more often than the low performing ones and still with only one
seventh of the change failure rate.
Now they've also found that organizations will get the highest ROI from
investing in trunk based development with CICD and monitoring.
Sadly, I don't have time to dig more into those things in this video,
but I'll include some links below so that you can follow up.
But in any case that high level guidance is only an example because
Google CAMP starts by assessing your organization's baseline through a
tool that only takes a few minutes and to dig deeper and get better data than
that,
you can also use Dora's new four keys project to collect and display the four
key metrics associated with elite teams. I'll include another link. Anyway,
when Google CAMP has some data,
it then makes specific recommendations and offers best practices to
modernize your applications and processes.
And since those are all underpinned and supported by the products and services
in the Google cloud platform,
that of course means that Google has been investing in streamlining their CICD
products and services so that you can easily take advantage of them and quickly
move your organization forward. So let's get practical.
That context of Google CAMP leads us right into our next gem
Google cloud build packs. Now I'm sure you're just like me.
And when you sit down to write some code, any code,
the first thing you want to do is to make a build script and a Docker file for
it, right? Everyone loves Docker files. You love Docker files.
You love Docker files and you love D- wait. You don't.
Yeah,
it's pretty cool that we can build our code and package it up into a container
image and push it to a registry and deploy it.
And it's great that we can automate all that with scripts and Yaml files too,
but seriously, that's all useless and unfun, overhead.
Undifferentiated, heavy lifting to borrow a phrase.
It matters that it happens,
but I'm more than happy to hand that work off involved in making it happen to
someone else. Enter Google.
Build packs are a system that Google has used internally for years to power
things like app engine and cloud functions,
but they have now opened sourced it and hooked it into more things.
Things like cloud run and cloud build. You start by pointing this at your code,
just your repository, wherever it is.
And this system starts by figuring out which language it is.
There are tons of supported languages, including go, node JS, Python,
Java and .net core,
but it's not just about language detection because the next step is that it will
run your code through the proper build process for that language,
which includes things like running NPM installed to get any packages that you
use in your node app.
And then it takes the result of that build and packages it up into a container
again,
using language specific smarts about how to run your app and not every language
makes that as easy as NPM start right? Now,
there are a few restrictions here and there, but for the most part,
this just works and takes your straightforward code in whatever language you
choose and turns it into a runnable system.
Now collapsing all of that work into a single command that you hand off to cloud
build that has a lot of value,
a whole pack load of value if you will. But okay,
now let's dive into some more rapid fire quick bites that build on these gems.
Now an awesome result of the new build pack stuff can be seen in cloud run.
You can now set up a cloud run service to deploy continuously from a code
repository like GitHub, instead of just once from a container registry.
This is almost always what you want, arguably.
So it's reassuring to recognize this reduced redundancy and repetition to
arrange the regular and rapid rolling out of repositories to cloud run.
Really remarkable. Artful? Arrrr, I don't know,
maybe it's a pirate CAMP. All right. Speaking of ours,
rollouts and rollbacks with cloud run can now be gradual,
not just all at once. Now, this was technically released some months ago,
but Google is promoting it as another part of their CAMP oriented improvements
to embrace dev ops and SRE practices. In particular,
it's now super simple to specify the slice of server requests to send to the
old and new versions. I guess I'm feeling alliterative today. All right,
you can update the traffic split through both the console and command line.
And of course this means you can also easily roll back by swinging the split
back to the old version. All right. A very exciting announcement.
GCP finally has its very own serverless API
gateway. Woohoo.
Now based on the open source Envoy project,
this gives a high performance way to abstract serverless and serverful
backends behind a unified API and decouple them from their clients without
having to run a bunch of API servers, which kind of defeats the purpose, right,
or to use a competitor's cloud offering.
This can also offload a lot of the repetitive auth stuff and enable you to
offer a consistent presentation while you work behind the scenes to shift
various parts of your system around such as maybe from inefficient and higher
management servers like compute engine or GKE to serverless options instead.
Also on the theme of GCP now providing new products to enable
complete serverless architectures in GCP,
Google has now released their new workflows product in beta.
This state machine management is sometimes referred to as step functions,
and this can enable you to compose meaningful processing systems out of various
stateless compute services like cloud functions or cloud run.
Workflows manages things like retries for you and already connects to a ton of
different event triggers and processing targets.
Workflows is all about orchestration and integration and it handles things like
authentication to both incoming and outgoing and it even passes data
along the chain. Remember how monitoring is one of the key,
low hanging fruit to modernize applications and processes? Well,
Google has been rolling out new goodness in this space to cloud monitoring
metrics have just gotten a boost custom metrics and Prometheus metrics for
GKE will now be kept for 24 months,
two years up from the previous six weeks at no extra cost, by the way.
And these metrics, as well as cloud monitoring agent based ones,
I've also gotten an improvement to granularity,
which can now go down to 10 seconds down from 60 next. We have cloud logging,
which has just gotten new support for regular expressions in queries,
but maybe you're not yet a guru of regular expressions well fear not because
cloud logging can now also suggest useful queries to you.
These suggestions are based on other observability data in your GCP project,
such as recent error reporting groups and alerting incidents.
One more new cloud logging feature is logs buckets.
Now I find this name a bit confusing because it makes me think of cloud storage
buckets, but these are different.
Basically these let you split up cloud logging data into different groups so
that you can separately control their locations and lifetimes.
These are connected directly into the cloud logging router.
Another big part of Google CAMP is Anthos and Google has announced some
improvements with this too. Now,
Anthos could already create and manage new Kubernetes clusters for you in AWS
and Azure,
but the new Anthos attached clusters functionality lets you install an agent and
basically take over existing clusters from the inside,
including Amazon EKS and Azure AKS clusters.
This lets you extend the reach of things like Anthos config management and
Anthos service mesh.
I am an Anthos of Borg.
Resistance is futile. Your cluster,
as it has been is over.
From this time forward,
it will service us.
Ummm... Okay.
Following hot on the heels of July's big query Omni,
Google has now released speech to text on prem,
which gives you the ability to transcribe audio in any GKE or Anthos
cluster.
This can be a drop in replacement for GCP's normal speech to text API.
This is arguably just the first step towards broader hybrid AI on Anthos
and the eventual impact could be huge.
Imagine bringing all of Google's world-class AI processing right next to your
data instead of needing to warp the data around instead.
Very interesting indeed.
Assured workloads for government was brand new when I told you about that in
July as well, but it has already now gone GA.
This should bring GCP joy to those US organizations that are subject to
regulations like FedRAMP.
And now it's time for our guru of the month. The part of our show,
where we come out and celebrate the person who has best demonstrated their
guruness on the challenge that we've thrown down on the A Cloud Guru discussion
forum. Now there was a bit of a kerfuffle last month.
And so we didn't get a chance to recognize Supriya Badgujar as the guru
extraordinary that she is. So I wanted to give her a shout out now,
but we also have a brand new winner this month and it's Stacie Knox.
She is a senior developer at option care health in the USA. Congratulations,
Stacie and great job backing up your answers with explanations and reference to
the official documentation too.
You've also got a special swag pack on its way to you now. Well,
to all the rest of you,
if you think you've got what it takes to be a guru of the month and join the
likes of Supriya and Stacie,
then you need to follow the link below and see the brand new question we've
posted. You need to engage. That's all we have for this month,
but we'll be back next month with another episode on everything that happened in
GCP this month. Well, I mean then it'll be GCP that month, but no,
all alright. In any case beginning,
right about now when this episode is published,
Google is going to start running some cloud next on air,
this time for the EMEA region.
So I'm sure we'll have lots more goodies to tell you about,
but until then stay safe and keep being awesome.
Make it so cloud guru.