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Title: Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets — March 1–15, 2024 Edition
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Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets — March 1–15, 2024 EditionWelcome to the March 1–15, 2024 edition of Google Cloud Technology Nuggets.Please feel free to give feedback on this issue and share the subscription form with your peers.Google Cloud NEXT ’24 UpdatesGoogle Cloud NEXT ’24 is just a few weeks away. If you are attending the event in-person, the full list of sessions is now available. You can also make use of the Agenda Builder to plan out attending the sessions that you don’t want to miss. Check out the blog post for more details and check out some of the anticipated sessions mention in the post.Containers and KubernetesThere are several updates in this space for this edition of the newsletter.Solution Architectures are all about tradeoffs isn’t it? Regional or a Zonal cluster for your GKE environments? You have to consider multiple points like availability, costs, maintenance, scalability and more. Check out this detailed article that breaks down each of these points vis-a-vis Regional and Zonal clusters.Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in Autopilot mode is seeing significant updates of late to make it ideally suited to running your AI workloads, not just from the manageability perspective but from the choice of compute options. There are two new compute classes in Autopilot that have been introduced: Accelerator and Performance. The Accelerator class improves GPU support with resource reservation capabilities. The Performance class enables high-performance workloads to run on Autopilot mode at scale. There are several pricing updates too, including a price cut for majority of GPU workloads running on GKE in Autopilot mode, along with the ability to keep your existing Reservations and committed use discounts, as you move your workloads between the Standard and Autopilot modes of GKE, as well as between Compute Engine VMs. Check out the post for more details.Have you heard about ECK? It is Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes and the official Elastic Operator for Kubernetes. If you are looking to run the Elastic Stack on a cloud-native Kubernetes environment, then this is the way to go. Combine that with running it on GKE in Autopilot mode, and the combination gets the best of both services. Check out the blog post for more details.Looking to create an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) for your teams, as part of Platform Engineering, you need to consider a foundation that can provide flexibility in terms of the requirements that your developers would have. Kubernetes is a solid foundation to do that due to the abstractions that it has available. But building one is a significant task and there is good help here in terms of the blog post and a detailed solution guide. Check it out.One more post that highlights the GKE Autopilot value proposition and this time it is about how it handles security for you. In summary, it helps you configure nodes, node pools, and in-cluster policy for you according to security best practices, allowing you to focus on workload-specific security. Check out this informative article to brush up on Kubernetes security aspects and what Autopilot mode does for you, as part of the shared fate operating model.CustomersYou are going through an application modernization journey at your organization and the initial applications that you have containerized and moved to Cloud Run have been a success. On top of that, you have achieved some of these numbers: 70% toil reduction, 90% cost savings, and unlocked new capabilities by integrating with some of the services available on Google Cloud? This is exactly what DZ Bank, the second largest bank in Germany in terms of assets, has published. Check out their story.Another customer success is from Glance, which provides innovative lock screen experiences across millions of mobile phones. Glance recently migrated their database from Azure Cosmos DB to Cloud Spanner. The move was needed due to the frequent need to optimize their application vis-a-vis the database requirements and operations management too. To select a database, they conducted a month-long proof of concept with various databases to ensure that their pipelines worked along with their performance requirements. Spanner emerged as the Database of choice. Check out the post that discusses their experience, reasons for moving, what Spanner provides them and more.Identity and SecuritySecurity Command Center Enterprise edition has been announced. It fuses cloud and enterprise security requirements into a single offering that you can use across your multi-cloud environments. The edition is integrated with various aspects of Mandiant solutions too. Check out the blog for more details.The first of Google Cloud Security Talks of 2024 have started. By the time, this newsletter reaches out, the first edition on March 13 would have completed. You can still visit the on-demand page and view the sessions. There are several interesting topics around Gen AI and its role in security along with regular updates on threat intelligence. Check out the post for more details.Machine LearningThe rate at which the Gen AI foundational models are being made available by various providers is astounding. Speaking of Anthropic’s Claude 3 models, they are soon going to be available on Vertex AI Model Garden, with one of the models (Sonnet), which is best combination of skills and speed is now available in private preview for customers. Check out the blog post on this announcement.It is generally accepted now that while foundational models are more than capable, the way forward is to have a specialized model for your domain. But which approach should you use to specialize it. Should you use Prompt Engineering, RAG or Fine tuning? Check out this post that gives you an overview of these approaches and a side-by-side comparison.DatabasesAs Organizations continue to grapple with how to maximize capabilities with Gen AI, the fundamental point remains that you will need to have ability to access, manage, and activate all types of data. What this means for Cloud Providers is to assess this development and see how their own services around Database products stands and adding native Gen AI capabilities within the products itself. In a key blog post that highlights how Google Cloud has expanded the GenAI capabilities across key products like BigQuery, AlloyDB, Spanner and more is noteworthy. With this capabilities, your usage of cross services goes up but then the data and governance can be better managed. Check out the blog post in details that highlights some of these developments.In a similar key post, read about announcements around general availability (GA) of AlloyDB AI, an integrated set of capabilities in AlloyDB to easily build Enterprise Gen AI apps and introduction of vector search capabilities across Spanner, MySQL, and Redis. There is also an increasing integration with LangChain across these features.Speaking of LangChain integrations, the key question is what are the LangChain packages that leverage these new Google Cloud database features. The blog post highlights the packages around Document Loaders, Vector Stores and Chat Messages Memory. If you are developer who is using the popular LangChain framework and wants to try out these Google Database integrations, this is a must read post to show you the path. The post has Getting Started guides too.Several blog posts have been specifically written on the various database services, their support for Gen AI, LangChain frameworks and how you can start building out applications with them. Here is a list:Build generative AI applications with similarity search in Cloud SQL for MySQLMemorystore for Redis vector search and LangChain integrations for Gen AIBuild generative AI and similarity search applications at virtually unlimited scale with SpannerFinally, if you are using Cloud SQL for SQL Server, you can now run build and run SSRS reports with databases hosted on Cloud SQL for SQL Server. Check out the blog post for more details.Data AnalyticsBigQuery and Vertex AI integration to help you with Generative AI features has taken the next step with:Gemini models are available in BigQuery MLVertex AI’s document processing and speech-to-text APIs can be used in BigQueryVector Search capabilities have come to BigQueryCheck out the blog post for more details on each of these features. If you prefer to see an example of how to use Gemini 1.0 Pro in BigQuery, check out the instructive blog post.Do you use Dataflow, have predictable processing volumes and looking to optimize costs? Check out the General Availability of Dataflow streaming committed use discounts (CUDs) that addressing a key cost component: streaming compute. The CUDs are available across the following Dataflow resources:Worker CPU and memory for streaming jobsStreaming engine usageData compute units (DCUs) for Dataflow Prime streaming jobsCheck out the blog post for more details, which also includes an example.Management ToolsLooking to integrate Spring and gRPC services together? How about addressing that via first class Spring annotations and then once this has been developed and deployed, getting the metrics from the application scraped by Prometheus and exposed as a Grafana dashboard. Check out the blog post for more details.A few months back, we covered Personalized Health which provides you information on disruptive events impacting Google Cloud products and services relevant to your projects. This service is now available in the Google Cloud Mobile app. This enhances the Monitoring capabilities of the Mobile application, which was earlier providing information on Incidents, Logs, Uptime Checks and more. Check out the post for more details.Learn Google CloudIf you are attending Cloud NEXT ’24, there are tons of learning opportunities for you. These range from picking up Skill Badges, to immersive workshops, breakout sessions and more in the Innovators Hive area. Check out the post for more details.Stay in TouchHave questions, comments, or other feedback on this newsletter? Please send Feedback.If any of your peers are interested in receiving this newsletter, send them the Subscribe link.Want to keep tabs on new Google Cloud product announcements? We have a handy page that you should bookmark → What’s new with Google Cloud.Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets — March 1–15, 2024 Edition was originally published in Google Cloud - Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Author: Romin Irani
PublishedDate: 2024-03-16
Category: Blogs
NewsPaper: Romin Irani - Medium
Tags: gcp-weekly, google-cloud-platform, tech-nuggets