Hello cloud gurus.
This month of July 2020 has had a ton of huge news for
GCP.
We are currently three weeks into the nine week Google Cloud Next
'20 on-air event. So there's an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to cover.
For example, encryption of instance memory at runtime,
Google's top grade load balancing now handles serverless backends,
and the power of BigQuery will soon be coming to dozens of additional regions
around the world. Yes, I did say dozens more regions.
Don't believe me? Keep watching. Oh,
and all of these things that I just mentioned,
were actually only from week one of the event.
So this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Okay, it's time for our Quick Bites segment.
Now I have to say that in a normal month,
we could dive into a great many of these announcements in our GCP Gems segment,
but there are simply so many big things to tell you about that we just have to
cover most things at a higher level today. But of course,
Google offers more info on all of them,
so make some notes as you go today and then follow up afterwards on the things
that stand out to you. So let's jump in.
Let's start with a whole slew of announcements from one of my favorite sessions.
So far, the one about Cloud CDN,
which is Google's content delivery network product.
Cloud CDN both offloads work from your servers and gives your users around the
world super speedy access to your applications.
Now the biggest announcement here was that Cloud CDN will now support custom
origins, not just GCP based ones.
This is great to allow you to move pieces of your system around independently of
one another and leverage both multicloud and hybrid cloud setups.
But Google is not just bringing parody with other clouds, either. For example,
they will support HTTP/2 connections to the origins as well,
not just with the clients, so you can get the full benefits of that protocol.
And there's more because 2020 we'll also see Cloud CDN get all of the
following, the ability to set or override origin cache control, CORS,
or other headers; negative caching,
so requests resulting in error codes don't overwhelm your origin;
the ability to serve stale content when the origin becomes unavailable or
unresponsive,
allowing for some graceful degradation rather than always hard failing in such
situations; and resource coalescing,
so that many simultaneous requests can be joined together at the edge,
instead of all slamming your origin.
Servers.
Now,
one of my very favorite announcements so far is that you can now use serverless
offerings like Cloud Functions and Cloud Run as backend services for load
balancers.
This means that you can use global load balancing and Cloud CDN to front
serverless services running globally. Finally,
a straight forward way to set up multi-region serverless systems that
leverage Google's premium networking tier behave,
just how you'd want them to sending clients to whatever active regions closest
to them. It's a thing of beauty!
Cloud Armor now has a new managed protection service with a plus tier,
which includes DDoS protection, not only for GCP systems, but also on prem.
Plus does have a monthly subscription fee above its standard tier counterpart.
But that's because it includes many more features,
features like the new named IP lists that Google manages.
So you don't have to mess with the IP address ranges for your upstream
providers, and it also includes Cloud Armor web application firewall filtering,
which is now generally available by the way,
and has just gotten new pre-configured rules for file inclusion,
both remote and local file inclusion, and remote code execution vulnerabilities.
That's a bunch of good stuff.
GCP's new hierarchical firewall functionality lets you much
more easily manage network firewalls across your organization,
including setting rules on folders and projects,
not just on each individual VPC.
The Network Intelligence Center is also getting upgraded with new firewall
insights.
This can identify over granted or outdated firewall rules that you might have or
ones that are completely shadowed by some other one and therefore lying in wait
to cause a surprise problem. Someday,
you'll want to tighten things like those up so that you let exactly the right
data through. Not too much and not too little.
Firewall insights can also help a lot with observability, debugging,
and identifying abnormal activity.
Google's new Private Service Connect integrates with Service Directory to
provide private networking connectivity to services wherever they are,
whether in GCP or other clouds, or on-prem,
or some third party service offering.
It does this all while keeping your traffic on Google's private global network
and abstracting away unnecessary details like network peering so that you can
focus on your services. Instead,
confidential VMs are the first product in a new space that Google calls
confidential computing.
Confidential VMs will - get this - encrypt a VM instance's
runtime memory, not just it's stored data and network transmissions.
This extra security will be great for some compliance scenarios and it's
blazingly fast because it leverages the Secure Encrypted Virtualization,
or SEV, hardware extensions that are available on these AMD chips.
Google cloud VMware Engine is now generally available,
enabling you to very easily pop your VMware based stuff over to
GCP. You can use the same tools, processes and everything. So like I said,
there are now a number of new storage classes available in GCP,
including Balanced, Performance, and Extreme Persistent Disks,
and File Store High Scale.
So if you've ever found that the previous cost performance options didn't quite
fit usage scenarios, you should take a fresh look at the updated options.
Looker has now been integrated into the foundation of GCP's data
analytics platform.
And the result for you is easier access to more effective data,
visualization options, and business intelligence. But don't worry,
Looker does still support non GCP situations too,
like AWS or hybrid cloud, just like before.
BigQuery is getting new support for natural language querying so that even more
people with less technical expertise can now harness its power without the need
for SQL. Google Cloud's new Rapid Assessment and Migration Program,
RAMP,
can make it easier and cheaper for enterprises to get themselves past their
blockers and onto the cloud. It includes guidance, tools, rebates,
and more.
And this could combine beautifully with our A Cloud Guru training to fast track
your entire organization to cloud expertise.
Google's new assured workloads for government functionality allows you to get
the same compliance benefits in any US region that other public clouds
only offer in a separate Gov Cloud region.
So you can meet standards like FedRAMP and still have access to the very
latest GCP goodness.
This builds on Google's deep data access protections that we've covered in a
number of previous episodes.
Active Assist is a new tool to help you manage the complexity of managing
your GCP based systems.
Basically this is artificial intelligence for cloud administration.
It can identify problems, both existing and potential ones,
in areas like security costs, network compute, and data.
I thought we should end with something big.
So our GCP Gem this week is the BigQuery announcement I teased in the intro.
I'm sure you've been curious how BigQuery will become available in so many more
regions around the world, right?
Especially because GCP itself already has an impressive 24 current and five
more announced regions. So how are we going to get dozens more?
Well, it's because of BigQuery Omni.
Omni means all the things and BigQuery
Omni is where Google runs its amazing BigQuery service in its
competitors clouds.
So you can BigQuery your data that lives in AWS and Azure without any
network egress fees.
This gives much more flexibility for managing your data and could also be used
to, you know,
get your colleagues hooked on how amazing BigQuery is without having to migrate
that data to GCP.
As long as your data is in any supported format, those being Avro, CSV, JSON,
ORC, or Parquet, then you can BigQuery it right in place.
Now because this bypasses the other cloud providers' egress fees,
that must mean that Google is actually running this as a service in
those other clouds like on AWS EC2 instances, right? Isn't that awesome?
And yes, this is exactly how it works.
BigQuery Omni is built on top of anthesis,
which is Google's platform for abstracting all sorts of clouds and
infrastructure platforms.
It's now been a little over a year since I first reported on Google Cloud's
announcement of Anthos at Cloud Next 2019 in San Francisco. And since then,
Anthos has given us access to a number of Google's very best services
outside of Google's own cloud,
such as GKE Cloud Run and now BigQuery.
Doesn't it make you wonder what will be next, huh? Anyway,
go ahead and check out the blog post for more info on BigQuery Omni use cases
and how it works.
Now it's time to give a big shout out to our Guru of the Month, Dadasaheb Patil.
Hope I got that right? Who is a senior technology architect with Accenture.
Congratulations! You've got some awesome swag on the way to you now,
including a tee-shirt,
some stickers and a hand signed card that you can show off to everyone else in
the office. And um, well, okay. You're probably working remotely right now too.
So I guess you could show it off to your family. And anyway,
you will forever know that you were this month's best,
but for all the rest of you, who must be feeling pretty left out right now,
don't despair. We already put up our next question for all of you to answer.
And this month's question is very different from the ones we've asked before,
instead of a multiple choice thing with your explanation like we normally do,
we want you to show us your insight into, well maybe I shouldn't spoil it. Huh?
How about you head over to the link below and find out for yourself. That
was a ton of stuff. And I have to admit that we still couldn't cover everything.
But hey, if you wanted every single detail, you would have spent the many,
many hours going through the articles and videos yourself,
instead of letting me do it for you, right?
This way you can conserve your precious time.
So you can dive into just the key things that did interest you,
and hopefully you did make some notes, right? So have fun digging in.
We'll add some key links to this episode to get you started,
including Greg Wilson's cheat sheet that links out to everything about this
Google Cloud Next '20 on-air event. We'd love to hear back from you.
So please leave us a comment to let us know what things you found especially
interesting and how they could change the work that you are doing.
And until next time, stay safe, and keep being awesome.