Google Cloud Platform Blog: July 2016

Updated and expanded: Google Cloud Platform for AWS Professionals

Friday, July 29, 2016

Posted by Peter-Mark Verwoerd, Solutions Architect
guideGoogle Cloud PlatformGoogle Compute EngineGoogle Container Engine

Amazon ECS vs. Google Container Engine at a glance

How Amazon Elastic MapReduce compares to Google Cloud Dataproc and Cloud Dataflow

saidfree trial

Save money, improve performance with new VM Rightsizing Recommendations

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Posted by Pawel Siarkiewicz, Product Manager
Google Cloud PlatformdatacentersVM Rightsizing RecommendationsManaged Instance Group Autoscaler

The VM instances page shows instances where you can save money or increase performance as well as estimated savings per instance in total (click to enlarge)

here

What if you could run the same, everywhere?

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Posted by Miles Ward, Global Head of Solutions

So, how can you swing the power dynamic around so that you, as the consumer of infrastructure, get the most value out of your providers at the lowest cost? Open architectures started calling this approachthose for kubernetes

Links: AppScale, Kubernetes, Apache HBase, Druid, Apache Drill, Vitess, Apache Beam, TensorFlow, Minio.io, Spinnaker

Applications can run in containers on Kubernetes, the OSS container orchestrator that Google helped create, either managed and hosted by us via GKE, or on any provider, or both at the same time.

Kubernetes ensures that your containers aren’t locked in.

Web apps can run in a PaaS environment like AppScale, the OSS application management framework, either managed and hosted by us via Google AppEngine, or on any provider, or both at the same time. Importantly this includes the NoSQL transactional stores required by apps, either powered by AppScale, which uses Cassandra as a storage layer and vends the Google App Engine Datastore API to applications, or native in App Engine.

AppScale ensures that your apps aren’t locked in.

NoSQL k-v stores can run Apache HBase, the OSS NoSQL engine inspired by our Bigtable whitepaper, either managed and hosted by us via Cloud Bigtable, or on any other provider, or both at the same time.

HBase ensures that your NoSQL isn’t locked in.

OLAP systems can be run using Druid or Drill, two OSS OLAP engines inspired by Google’s Dremel system. These are very similar to BigQuery, and allow you to run on any infrastructure.

Druid and Drill ensure that your OLAP system isn’t locked in.

Advanced RDBMS can be built in Vitess, the OSS MySQL toolkit we helped create, either hosted by us inside Google Container Engine, or on any provider via Kubernetes, or both at the same time. You can also run MySQL fully managed on GCP via CloudSQL.

Vitess ensures that your relational database isn’t locked in.

Data orchestration can run in Apache Beam, the OSS ETL engine we helped create, either managed and hosted by us via Cloud Dataflow, or on any provider, or both at the same time.

Beam ensures that your data ETL isn’t locked in.

Machine Learning can be built in TensorFlow, the OSS ML toolkit we helped create, either managed and hosted by us via CloudML, or on any provider, or both at the same time.

TensorFlow ensures that your ML isn’t locked in.

Object storage can be built in Minio.io which vends the S3 API via OSS, either managed and hosted by us via GCS which also emulates the S3 API, or on any provider, or both at the same time.

Minio ensures that your object store isn’t locked in.

Continuous Deployment tooling can be delivered using Spinnaker, a project started by the Netflix|OSS team, either hosted by us via GKE, or on other providers, or both at the same time.

Spinnaker ensures that your CD tooling isn’t locked in.

What’s still proprietary, but probably OK? CDN, DNS, Load Balancing File SystemsGluster FS, Avere, ZFSTorus

If your data is in an object store, look no further than the Google Storage Transfer Service, an easy automated tool for moving your bits from A to G.

If you have data on tape or disk, take a look at the Offline Media Import/Export service. You might need to regularly move data to and from our cloud, so take a look at Google Cloud Interconnect for leveraging carriers or public peering points to connect reliably with us.

If you have VM images you’d like to move to cloud quickly we recommend Cloud Endure to move and transform your images for running on Google Compute Engine.

If you have a database you need replicated, take a look at Attunity CloudBeam. If you’re trying to migrate bulk data, try FDT from CERN.

If you’re doing data imports, perhaps Embulk.

Conclusionreach out

Regional Managed Instance Groups beta gives GCE users new performance safeguards

Monday, July 25, 2016

Posted by Filip Balejko, Software EngineerGoogle Cloud PlatformGoogle Compute Engineinstance templateauto-healautoscaleload-balanceCompute Engine regionsregional managed instance groups

From Google to the world: the Kubernetes origin story

Friday, July 22, 2016

Posted by Craig McLuckie, Co-founder of Kubernetes and Senior Product Manager at Google "So let me get this straight. You want to build an external version of the Borg task scheduler. One of our most important competitive advantages. The one we don’t even talk about externally. And, on top of that, you want to open source it?"BorgGoogle Cloud PlatformGoogle Compute EngineSeven of NineKubernetes logoBorg Kubernetes blog Boxhappy birthday to you

Google Container Enginefree trial herecheck out the Kubernetes Origins podcast on Software Engineering Daily

Say whaaat? This week on Google Cloud Platform

Friday, July 22, 2016

Posted by Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform Blogreleased the Cloud Natural Language APISpeech APICloud Machine LearningVision APITranslate APISara Robinson’sto analyze storiesGuillaume Laforge dives deeper into sentiments@googlecloud

Positive tweets are green, negative tweets are red and neutral tweets are yellow

Theresa May’s inaugural speech as British Prime MinisterJavier Ramirezuses the Speech APIthe conversationCloud Natural Language API

Introducing Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API open beta and our West Coast region expansion

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Posted by Apoorv Saxena, Cloud Natural Language and Translate API Product Manager, Dan Aharon, Cloud Speech API Product Manager and Dave Stiver, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform
Editor's Note: Cloud Speech API is now generally available. Learn more.Cloud Platform expansionmachine learning Cloud Machine Learning APIs enter open betaGoogle Cloud PlatformCloud Natural LanguageCloud Speechcomputer systemsreadto processintelligent waysParsey McParsefacebest accuracyGoogle Cloud Natural Language API

Sentiment Analysis: Understand the overall sentiment of a block of text

Entity Recognition: Identify the most relevant entities for a block of text and label them with types such as person, organization, location, events, products and media

Syntax Analysis: Identify parts of speech and create dependency parse trees for each sentence to reveal the structure and meaning of text

Ocado Technologydemo Google’s Cloud Natural Language API has shown it can accelerate our offering in the natural language understanding area and is a viable alter native to a custom model we had built for our initial use case. - Dan Nelson, Head of Data, Ocado TechnologyCloud Speech API

HyperConnect, a video chat app with over 50 million downloads in over 200 countries, uses a combination of our Cloud Speech and Translate API to automatically transcribe and translate conversations between people who speak different languages.

VoiceBase, a leader in speech analytics as a service, uses Speech API to let developers surface insights and predict outcomes from call recordings.

Word hints: custom words or phrases by context can be added to API calls to improve recognition. Useful for both command scenarios (e.g., a smart TV listening for “rewind” and “fast-forward” when watching a movie) and adding new words to the dictionary (e.g., recognizing names that may not be common in a specific language)

Asynchronous calling: the API has been substantially simplified with new asynchronous calls that make developing voice-enabled apps easier and faster

Cloud Natural LanguageCloud Speech Google Cloud Platform expands on the North American West CoastGoogle Compute EngineGoogle Cloud StorageGoogle Container EngineMultiplay Regional latency is a major factor in the gaming experience. Google Cloud Platform’s network is one of the best we’ve worked with, from a tech perspective but also in terms of the one-on-one support we’ve received from the team. - Paul Manuel, Director of Multiplay Game ServicesCloud Locations page

Stackdriver Error Reporting has your back on App Engine, no setup required

Monday, July 18, 2016

Posted by Steren Giannini, Product Manager, Google Cloud PlatformGoogle App EngineStackdriver Error Reporting—

See your top application errors on the App Engine dashboard (click to enlarge)

Stackdriver Error Reporting shows affected versions, stack traces and a link to the request log (click to enlarge)

We've been in search of a solution like this and were about to try wiring together various vendor solutions. Stackdriver Error Reporting really hits the mark and has immediately uncovered issues that had been unnoticed in production. I credit this tool with raising the quality and user experience of our product to a huge degree.
- John Koehl, CTO at Batteriihttp://console.cloud.google.com/errors

Cracking the GitHub code: this week on Google Cloud Platform

Friday, July 15, 2016

Posted by Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform Blogopen source library available on BigQueryGoogle Cloud PlatformFelipe HoffaGitHub on BigQuery: Analyze all the open source codeFransesc Campoyanalyzing GitHub Go packagesBigQuery User Defined FunctionsGuillaume Laforgethere are 743,070 Groovy files on GitHub with 16,464,376 lines of codeFilippo Valsordahow the Go ecosystem “does vendoringLak Lakshmananwhich popular Java projects need the most helpGoogle Cloud DataflowRobert Kozikowski’svisualizing relationships between python packages; top pandas, numpy and scipy functions, emacs packagesangular directivesChangelog podcast

Adventures in SRE-land: Welcome to Google Mission Control

Monday, July 11, 2016

Posted by Paul Newson, Mission Controller

Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control CenterGene Kranz1Kranz Dictum

talk at SREcon14talk at GCP Next 2016Site Reliability Engineeringuncomfortably excitingGoogle Compute Engine
1 http://genedorr.com/patches/Ground.html

Kubernetes moves onwards and upwards: this week on Google Cloud Platform

Friday, July 8, 2016

Posted by Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform Blog
—version 1.3—Google Container Enginemoving along with itCarter Morganin this deckget startedthe paperBrendan BurnsKelsey HightoweKubernetes to manage RedisKubernetes Ingress Controllerconversation on HackerNewswrite-up about WePayalmost entirely out of GKECole Mickens'Kubernetes 1.4 running on Microsoft AzureGKE usability study

Welcome Anvato to the Google Cloud Platform team

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Posted by Belwadi Srikanth, Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud PlatformGoogle Cloud Platformmany large media companiescustomers

Google Container Engine-powered mobile game hits 2 million downloads and counting

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Posted Shao-horng Yong, Google Cloud Platform, APAC Sales Engineer
award-winning gamesVOEZGoogle Container Engine (GKE)KubernetesstudyGoogle Cloud PlatformHTTPS Load BalancerContainer EngineDNS podssharding Redis

Take your time to produce quality software

Put together a strong developer team

Explore ways to handle load even if it means using relatively new technology

Think far, think big. Using open-source technology like containers ensures portability and helps avoid vendor lock-in

Perform large-scale testing. Your goal is for surprises to crop up as early as possible

Take advantage of on-site support and monitoring of the production infrastructure from Google partner and pre-sales teams

Kubernetes 1.3 on tap for Google Container Engine

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Posted by David Aronchick, Senior Product ManagerKubernetes 1.3Google Container EngineGoogle Cloud Platform

Integrated Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) roles, giving you full control and visibility to manage your clusters centrally

Native local SSD support with automatic provisioning, to quickly and easily deploy your high-throughput applications

The ability to run different machine types across multiple zones with NodePools, letting you customize your cluster in the way that makes sense for your specific application

Container-VM Image, an underlying OS for your nodes with advanced security and manageability features for container-based environments, ensuring Container Engine can support business critical applications

CCP Games adopted the Kubernetes workflow and has saved more than 300 person-hours/year in troubleshooting for EVE Online, allowing their developers to focus on creative work.

Rayark used Container Engine to launch its newest game, VOEZ, propelling it to the top of the charts in the App Store in Japan. Learn more here.

Partner integrations

CircleCI added support to Container Engine as an endpoint for CI pipeline

Shippable replatformed and added full native support for Container Engine clusters (auth, discovery, provisioning and deployment) from the Shippable cloud console

Citrix introduced its Netscaler CPX Load Balancer that can be configured and deployed to any Container Engine environment

Datastax released a Solution and Reference Architecture for deploying Datastax Enterprise on Container Engine Clusters (using Cloud Deployment Manager)

google-containers mailing listkubernetes-usersgoogle-containersfree trial here