Updates on GoogleCloud - Issue No. 4

It's only 13 days until Christmas-Eve, only one week until my holiday-break and already three weeks since the last "Updates on GoogleCloud Issue" here on LinkedIn. So let's jump right into what happened over the last weeks:

1. GoogleCloud is not only innovating from the inside but also has a long history adding external innovation to their portfolio of services when it makes sense. Google just recently announced that they're acquiring Actifio and Dataform. "Actifio is a leader in backup and disaster recovery (DR) - offering customers the opportunity to protect virtual copies of data in their native format, manage these copies throughout their entire lifecycle, and use these copies for scenarios like development and test." The acquisition is especially interesting for enterprise customers, as it shows the ongoing investment of Google in GCP to tackle specific Enterprise-IT requirements. "Dataform leverages BigQuery’s innovative architecture, allowing for practically unlimited scale, to enable analysts and engineers to manage all their data processes within BigQuery." It brings a software engineering approach to data modeling and pipelines making data transformations more accessible and reliable and it's free to use for all users of BigQuery. Read the linked Blogposts for more information.
2. Google keeps adding functionalities to their terraform modules taking off some work from your shoulders: Here's a new Terraform module for serverless load balancing.
3. Want to know how CloudRun, GCP's offering to make hosting of containerized applications even more serverless (based on knative), developed / improved since it's launch: Then check out a review video of the first year here . Very interesting to see, how far it has come in just one year.
4. Anthos is Google's suite of services that helps companies modernize their applications with a centrally managed, Kubernetes-based environment, which can now also be extended to bare-metal-servers. This erases the need to run Anthos on top of an existing virtualization stack and can further reduce management overhead. "Anthos on bare metal allows you to leverage existing investments in hardware, OS and networking infrastructure. It runs atop physical or virtual instances, and supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1/8.2, CentOS 8.1/8.2, or Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS."
5. As you might know from the previous posts, we (me and my team at Wabion) are big fans of Kubernetes, it's managed version called GKE in GoogleCloudPlatform and everything related to Cloud-Native-Solutions in general. So here are some updates on this topic condensed into a single entry: Videos on autoscaling with GKE (15 minutes well spent) > Part1 (Overview and Pods) and Part 2 (Clusters and Nodes) Kubernetes 1.20 is GA (Release-Blog) deprecating some Docker-functionalities and Kube-Linter (a tool from StackRox that analyzes Kubernetes YAML files and Helm charts and checks them against a variety of best practices with a focus on production readiness and security)

That's it for now and also for this year, i'm looking forward to 2021 where we hopefully have the chance to return to a normal work-life with pyhsical meetings and maybe talk and discuss in person about how GCP can help your business. I'm wishing everyone a nice and relaxing christmas time, stay safe and healthy. All the best,

Joern