Hello, cloud gurus. GKE gets a feature with far reaching impact.
Apigee now has extra goodness and GCP expands its
domain. And to top level domain registration, I'm Mattias Andersson.
And this is GCP this month for February, 2021.
Let's start off with a very exciting announcement.
GKE support for multi cluster services is now generally available.
Now whether you might need multi cluster services for reasons of latency,
availability,
scale or something else it's now possible to run and use the same service
across a set of clusters,
not just a single one Apigee Google's premier API
management platform has just gotten a major boost with the release of
Apigee X.
The high level summary is that Apigee is now far more integrated into the rest
of GCP, especially with API related things like cloud armor,
web application firewall, and identity and access management.
If you want to learn more,
look for the excellent link to the announcement in the resources below.
Eventarc is now generally available Eventarc, centralizes,
and manages event routing in a serverless way,
making it easy to connect all manner of different events, including audit logs,
pubsub and cloud storage and process them in cloud run.
In addition to the events Eventarc also handles the security observability and
error handling. Also,
now that this is GA you can reuse existing cloud pubsub topics and fan out your
handling. This is some good serverless stuff right here.
Now speaking of serverless cloud run has some new goodies in preview,
support for web sockets end to end HTTP/2 and GRPC
two weight streaming. If your app doesn't yet support HTTP/2, no problem.
Cloud run will still handle downgrading to HTTP/1 for the last leg,
into your container.
This all removes even more of the potential blockers that people have in
opposition to serverless. So don't resist embrace it.
And cloud run is a smashing way to do that.
What since when does GCP have Russian fighter jets? I'm not that kind of MIG.
Gotcha. Now in preview,
you can set up your managed instance groups to use predictive auto scaling,
to meet demand at no extra charge.
This can be valuable if your machine takes a while to come online,
but your demand doesn't and you still can't use serverless architectures.
Of course, under the hood,
Google creates trains managers and uses a machine learning model for you based
on up to three weeks of load history for your MIG service directory is now
generally available and includes a new feature to automatically register certain
types of services.
Service directory pulls together all your organization's services into one
central registry.
And this new auto registration means that you won't even have to write any code
when you stand up a new service behind an internal load balancer, whether TCP,
UDP, HTTP, or HTTPS,
just pass in a flag when you create the forwarding rule and, Bob's your uncle.
And he's in the service directory Google's assured workloads can now get
premium support with 15 minute response times for P one cases in general
availability like Amazon's gov cloud Google's assured workloads
offers you the advantages of public cloud while still complying with regulations
like fedramp. But Google does not restrict you to only one particular region.
Isn't that reassuring?
Dialogflow CX a part of Google's contact center AI solution,
and a more advanced version of the dialogflow product is now generally
available.
This can help reduce the pain your customers feel when interacting with your
telephone voice tree, and it can magnify the effectiveness of your human agents.
Now available in preview cloud CDN adds support for request headers to control
serving stale content or bypassing the cash.
Cash bypass can be useful for testing, for example,
or you could have it trigger in the presence of an authorization header as for
accepting stale content.
That might be a valuable optional fallback for your client app.
Something it could potentially request via header while informing the user of
the degraded state. Now we've talked about beyond Corp,
a number of times in past episodes,
but this month we have a significant new release beyond Corp enterprise
is now generally available.
This includes an extends beyond corporate remote access to form a comprehensive
enterprise scale multi-cloud offering.
If you're still dealing with network-based security and realizing it's folly,
do yourself a favor and take a look into this. Okay, well,
those were the key new additions this month, but let's switch gears for a bit.
A topic that recently came up in conversation with other ACG training Architects
is Google's reputation for aggressively killing off products.
Right now they definitely have earned such a reputation with a lot of consumer
facing stuff. But according to Tim Berry,
the data for GCP tells a very different story.
So I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what noteworthy things in
GCP that Google is deprecating,
especially since you can't really expect something like this from Google's
marketing department, right? We serve you now first off,
if you've been holding on for dear life to Python 2 for the past decade,
or maybe just the past few years,
you will soon be forced to let go of Python 2 in deep learning containers and
deep learning VM images. What you already have may still work,
but you won't be able to get any support for it. Now to be fair,
The Python community also finally pulled off the last tiny bit of this band-aid
that was holding on last year.
So Google support actually lasted a bit longer.
Now the Swift TensorFlow project is also being deprecated.
So Swift containers and VM images in AI platform will no longer get any more
updates. I hope you didn't choose to work with TensorFlow in Swift,
but if you did,
it looks like you'll need to migrate what you've built to another still
supported programming language. IN it's two year run.
The GitHub project did pull together over a thousand commits from several dozen
contributors, plus hundreds of stars and forks.
All right, enough doom and gloom.
Let's take a look at this month's GCP Gem.
Google has just released into preview a new cloud domains product.
This is really interesting.
Now under the hood cloud domains uses the older Google domains.
So it inherits most of those features and limitations though.
Not yet that full list of supported top level domains,
but cloud domains is now completely wrapped into the Google cloud platform and
it's console instead of being its own separate thing.
So this means that you can use projects.
I am and GCP billing to organize secure, manage,
and pay for domains across your organization. Also,
this now has an API for programmatic control and to end domain
management within GCP. Whew.
Now an interesting quirk of cloud domains as compared to all of the other domain
registrars I've known is that cloud domains does not charge you per year of
registration upfront.
Instead they charge you one 12th of each year's registration cost per
month, but they obligate you to keep paying for the whole year.
Now I'm sure this will make someone out there very happy to split up the charges
like this, but I'm not sure how I personally feel about that quite yet,
but pricing aside,
I really love the project and security integration that this all offers.
Now, once you've registered under domain in cloud domains,
you can choose to handle DNS.
However you'd like the fully custom option is to point the domain to your own
custom name servers,
or you could choose to use Google domains for it's free basic DNS,
but the recommended approach by both Google and me, I mean is to pay the extra,
to use cloud DNS and take advantage of it's control and DNSsec support.
Now one caveat at least for now is that there's no way to import a domain into
cloud domains. Export is possible though. So don't be afraid of lock-in,
but you can only newly registered domains with this for now.
We'll all right. February may be a short month,
but there was still a lot to cover,
but we're always looking for ways to improve.
So please give us your feedback on what you like,
what you don't and what you'd like to see in the future.
Drop us a comment below. And if you get value from these,
then please don't forget to like and subscribe. All right,
until next time keep being awesome cloud gurus.