Google Cloud Platform Blog: February 2017

Google Cloud CDN joins CDN Interconnect providers, delivering choice to users

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

By Prajakta Joshi, Product Manager, Cloud Networking
Google Cloud CDNGoogle Cloud Platform

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Google Cloud CDN is delivered on Google’s high performance global network and edge infrastructure. Google Cloud CDN uses Google's globally distributed 80+ locations of presence to accelerate content delivery for websites and applications served out of Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage, reducing latency and serving costs.

Google Cloud CDN does not charge extra for HTTPS (TLS) traffic.

Google Cloud CDN is integrated into GCP. Once you've set up HTTP(S) Load Balancing, you can enable Cloud CDN with a single checkbox as shown below:

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We'll be launching a new user interface (UI) for Google Cloud CDN at Google Cloud Next 17 with a separate navigation bar for CDN configuration and reporting, in addition to keeping the existing checkbox for enabling it via the Load Balancing UI. Here's a preview of the new CDN UI:

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Google Cloud CDN performanceCedexisdata on Google Cloud CDN performancewebsite
CDN Interconnect CDN InterconnectInterconnect pricingAkamai “As more and more enterprises come to rely on cloud-based computing and storage resources to drive their businesses, it’s critically important that performance is maximized and cost effectiveness is maintained. As the operator of the world’s largest distributed CDN platform, we’re collaborating with Google Cloud Platform to ensure that our joint customers can pass traffic directly from Google Cloud Platform to the Akamai CDN, empowering them to take full advantage of their cloud investments." — Bill Wheaton, executive vice president and general manager, Media Products Division, AkamaiCloudflare "We view our collaboration with Google Cloud Platform through their CDN Interconnect program as a crucial step in our mission to help build a better Internet. As a result of the high-speed interconnections between Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare’s CDN, our joint customers will benefit from amplified performance, increased security and significant savings on their monthly bandwidth bill, making for an altogether better user experience.”— Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & Head of User Experience at Cloudflare.Fastly "Fastly customers benefit from pairing our platform’s advanced edge compute, enforcement and application delivery solutions with Google Cloud Platform's origin services. Businesses like Vimeo leverage the power of Fastly’s edge features for live log streaming to Google BigQuery and deep analytics, as well as the ability to extend applications as close to the end user as possible for faster, more secure and more reliable global performance.” — Lee Chen, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Fastly.Level 3 “Our CDN is architected for high quality video delivery to support the growth in OTT video. Content creators can process their content in Google Cloud, then deploy seamlessly over our CDN to deliver the fast, high quality video experience end users demand." — Jon Alexander, Level 3 Senior Director of Product ManagementVerizon “Verizon Digital Media Services’ interconnections with Google Cloud Platform help customers delight their users with a lightning fast digital experience that can be scaled globally through our extensive presence and robust connectivity. Our industry-leading cache efficiency supports great user experience while minimizing transaction needs and egress volumes from cloud origins. Our cache efficiency has negated the need for us to charge our customers for origin storage transactions or egress, which makes us an ideal companion CDN to GCP.” — Kyle Okamoto, Chief Network Officer, Verizon.Limelight Networks “Using Google Cloud Platform in combination with the Limelight Orchestrate Platform helps our customers make the most of their cloud investments by extending their performance and capability with Limelight's content management, distribution and delivery services. Combining the flexibility of Google Cloud Platform with the workload efficiency and reach of Limelight's global infrastructure and experience, provides a unique platform to help deliver customer satisfaction,” — Steve Miller-Jones, Senior Director of Product Management at Limelight Networks.Google Cloud Next '17

Incident management at Google — adventures in SRE-land

Monday, February 27, 2017

By Paul Newson, Incident Commander

Prologue: preparationMission Control rotationGoogle Compute EngineWheel of MisfortuneEditor's Note: Chapter 28 “Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond” in Site Reliability Engineering goes into detail about how we prepare new SREs to be ready to be first responders.Going on-call1—Editor’s Note: Chapter 11 “Being On-Call” in Site Reliability Engineering has lots of advice on how to organize on-call duties in a way that allows people to be effective over the long term.It’s an incident!

summary page of the Google Cloud Status Dashboardincident command protocolsEditor’s Note: Chapters 12, 13 and 14 of Site Reliability Engineering discuss effective troubleshooting, emergency response and managing oncidents respectively.The rollback — an SRE’s fire extinguisher

—Editor’s Note: Chapter 36 “A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services” in Site Reliability Engineering talks more about these, and other, best practices.Epilogue: the postmortemperform analysis of overall trendsEditor's Note: Chapter 15, “Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure” in Site Reliability Engineering discusses postmortem culture in depth.
1 We don’t actually use pagers anymore of course, but we still call it “getting paged” no matter what device or communications channel is used.

Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

Friday, February 24, 2017

By Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Google Cloud InfrastructureGoogle Cloud Platform— "Google and Intel have had a long standing engineering partnership working on Data Center innovation. We're happy to see the latest Intel Xeon technology now available on Google Cloud Infrastructure. This technology delivers significant enhancements for compute-intensive workloads, efficiently accelerating data analytics that businesses depend on for operations and growth.” — Diane Bryant, Intel Executive Vice President and GM of the Data Center GrouphereGoogle Cloud NEXT ’17today

Three steps to help secure Elasticsearch on Google Cloud Platform

Thursday, February 23, 2017

By Ian Maddox, Solutions Architect
Elasticsearchopen sourceLuceneanalyticshigh-profile ransomware attacksGoogle Cloud Platform 1. Lock down your access policylock down the access policyIAM policiesfirewallsX-Pack 2. Don’t index sensitive data
3. Handle unfiltered content safelyproperly escapeddata validationXSS prevention

GPUs are now available for Google Compute Engine and Cloud Machine Learning

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

By John Barrus, Product Manager
Google Cloud PlatformGPUsgcloud

NVIDIA K80 GPU Accelerator Board

Google Compute Engine

Google Cloud supports as many as 8 GPUs attached to custom VMs, allowing you to optimize the performance of your applications.

Pricing

Supercharge machine learningGoogle Cloud Machine LearningTensorFlowGoogle Cloud DataflowGoogle BigQueryGoogle Cloud StorageGoogle Cloud DatalabQuickstart guidethis document Next stepsCloud NEXTCloudML BootcampSupercharge performance using GPUs in the cloud gcloud command-linewebsite

Developer Advocates offer up their favorite Google Cloud NEXT 17 sessions

Friday, February 17, 2017

By Sam Ramji, Vice President of Product Management, Compute and Developer ServicesGoogle Cloud Next '17

If you’re a developer working in Ruby, you know to turn to Aja Hammerly for all things Ruby/Google Cloud Platform (GCP)-related. Aja’s top pick for Rubyists at Next is Google Cloud Platform < 3 Ruby with Google Developer Program Engineer Remi Taylor, but there are other noteworthy mentions on her personal blog.

Mete Atamel is your go-to DA for all things Windows on GCP. Selfishly, his top Next session is his own about running ASP.NET apps on GCP, but he has plenty more suggestions for you to choose from.

Groovy nut Guillaume Laforge is going to be one busy guy at Next, jumping from between sessions about PaaS, serverless and containers, to name a few. Here’s his full list of his must-see sessions.

If you’re a game developer, let Mark Mandel be your guide. Besides co-presenting with Rob Whitehead, CTO of Improbable, Mark has bookmarked sessions about location-based gaming, using GPUs and game analytics. Mosy on over to his personal blog for the full list.

In the past year, Google Apps Script has opened the door to building amazing customizations for G Suite, our communication and collaboration platform. In this G Suite Developers blog post, Wesley Chun walks you through some of the cool Apps Script sessions, as well as sessions about App Maker and some nifty G Suite APIs.

Want to attend sessions that teach you about our machine learning services? That’s where you’ll find our hands-on ML expert Sara Robinson, who in addition to recommending her favorite Next sessions, also examines her talk from last year’s event using Cloud Natural Language API.

schedulereserve your spot

Guest post: Multi-Cloud continuous delivery using Spinnaker at Waze

Thursday, February 16, 2017

By Tom Feiner, Systems Operations Engineer, Katriel Traum, Systems Operations Engineer, Nir Tarcic, Site Reliability Engineer, Waze and Matt Duftler, Software Engineer, SpinnakerWazeoutsmarting traffic, together— Google Cloud Platform— — continuous deliverySpinnaker Spinnaker and continuous delivery FTWimmutable infrastructureJenkinsbakesblue/green

*Jenkins icon from Jenkins project.

Multi-Cloud blue/green deployment using Spinnaker

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Spinnaker

Waze: migrating a multi million user app to Google Cloud Platform

Best practices for Continuous Delivery on Google Cloud Platform

Why we migrated Orbitera to managed Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

By Eyal Manor, Vice President of Engineering, Google CloudOrbiteraGoogle Container Enginemost popularPokemon Go—Google Compute EngineGoogle App EngineGoogle Cloud PlatformCloud SQLGoogle StackdriverSlack channel

Introducing Cloud Spanner: a global database service for mission-critical applications

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

By Deepti Srivastava, Product Manager for Cloud SpannerEditor's Note: Cloud Spanner is now generally available. Learn more.Cloud SpannerACID “Cloud Spanner presents tremendous value for our customers who are retailers, manufacturers and wholesale distributors around the world. With its ease of provisioning and scalability, it will accelerate our ability to bring cloud-based omni-channel supply chain solutions to our users around the world,” — John Sarvari, Group Vice President of Technology, JDAGoogle Cloud Platform

Focus on your application logic instead of spending valuable time managing hardware and software

Scale out your RDBMS solutions without complex sharding or clustering

Gain horizontal scaling without migration from relational to NoSQL databases

Maintain high availability and protect against disaster without needing to engineer a complex replication and failover infrastructure

Gain integrated security with data-layer encryption, identity and access management and audit logging

pricing model More Cloud Spanner customers share feedback— “Based on our experience and performance testing, Cloud Spanner is the most compelling option we’ve seen to power a high-scale relational query workload. It has the performance and scalability of a NoSQL database, but can execute SQL so it’s a viable alternative to sharded MySQL. It’s an impressive technology and could dramatically simplify how we manage our databases.” — Peter Bakkum, Platform Lead, Quizlet The history of Spanner Spanner research paper

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CAP Theoremread this postAdWordsCloud Spanner

Inside Cloud Spanner and the CAP Theorem

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

By Eric Brewer, Vice President of Infrastructure, Google CloudCAP theorem

C: consistency, which implies a single value for shared data

A: 100% availability, for both reads and updates

P: tolerance to network partitions

Spanner joins Google CloudCloud SpannerGoogle Cloud Platform5Inside Spanner Google controls the entire network and thus can ensure redundancy of hardware and pathsNext stepswhite paper Google Cloud Next ‘17

Google Cloud Endpoints now generally available: a fast, scalable API gateway

Monday, February 13, 2017

By Dan Ciruli, Product ManagerExtensible Service ProxyGoogle Cloud Platform

FirebaseAuth0 —Google Cloud ConsoleStackdriver LoggingGoogle App Engine flexible environmentGoogle Container EngineApp Engine standard environment “When migrating our workloads to Google Cloud Platform, we needed to securely communicate between multiple data centres. Traditional methods like firewalls and ad hoc authentication were unsustainable, quickly leading to a jumbled mess of ACLs. Endpoints, on the other hand, gives us a standardised authentication system, backed by Google's security pedigree.” — Laurie Clark-Michalek, Infrastructure Engineer at Qubit FrameworksPython FlaskJava Jersey Pricingstandard rateread the documentationflexible environmentContainer EngineCompute EngineGoogle Cloud Endpoints Google GroupApigee EdgeGoogle Cloud Next '17

5 must-see security sessions at Google Cloud Next '17

Friday, February 10, 2017

By David B. Cross, Cloud Security Engineering DirectorGoogle Cloud Next '17Google Cloud Platform——Lessons learned from securing both Google and Google Cloud customersHow to create a secure, private environment in the cloud and on-prem with Google Cloud Virtual Private CloudsSecurity first for a mobile first strategyDesigning secure UX into your productsTrends in data security—security bootcampRegister

Fuzzing PCI express: security in plaintext

Thursday, February 9, 2017

By Julia Hansbrough, Software Engineer
GPUsGoogle Cloud PlatformhereFuzzing to the rescueactually quite common Let's check out those memory mappings tooGoogle Compute Engine Conclusionslikely the biggest source of major outages in production environments

Windows and .NET Codelabs: an overview

Monday, February 6, 2017

By Mete Atamel, Developer Advocate
Google Developers CodelabsGoogle Cloud Platformsectiondedicated page

Install and use Cloud Tools for Visual StudioDeploy Windows Server with ASP.NET Framework to Compute EngineBuild and launch an ASP.NET Core app from Google Cloud ShellDeploy an ASP.NET Core app to App EngineDeploy ASP.NET Core app to Kubernetes on Container EngineInstall and use Cloud Tools for PowerShellWindows and .NET

8 must-see sessions for application developers at Google Cloud Next '17

Thursday, February 2, 2017

By Chris Sells, Product Manager, Google CloudGoogle Cloud Next ‘17Google Cloud PlatformPower your Java workloads on Google Cloud PlatformAmir RouzrokhCloud Tools for IntelliJTake your ASP.NET apps to the next level with Google CloudGoogle Cloud StorageCloud Pub/SubRunning .NET and containers in Google Cloud PlatformGoogle App EngineKubernetesWindows on GCP bootcampYou can run that on App Engine?Using Apigee Edge to create and publish APIs that developers loveDeveloping made easy on Google Cloud PlatformGoogle Cloud FunctionsBuilding serverless applications with Google Cloud FunctionsGoogle Cloud Functions and Firebasefull session catalogregister

Delivering a better platform for your SQL Server Enterprise workloads

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

By Amruta Gulanikar, Product Manager, Google Cloud PlatformGoogle Cloud Platformbuilding an ASP.NET applicationVisual StudioPowerShelllatest version of Windows ServerGoogle Compute EngineSQL Server EnterpriseWindows Server Coreenabled SQL Server Enterprise Edition images on GCEpay by the minutebring their own licensespre-configured images

SQL Server Enterprise 2016

SQL Server Enterprise 2014

SQL Server Enterprise 2012

Supported SQL Server images available on Compute Engine (click to enlarge)

SQL Server Enterprise

In-memory tables and indexes

Row-level security and encryption for data at rest or in motion

Multiple read-only replicas for integrated HA/DR and read scale-out

Business intelligence and rich visualizations on all platforms, including mobile

In-database advanced analytics with R

price-to-performancecustomizable VM sizes automatic sustained use discountslearn how to create SQL Server instances easily on Google Compute Engine High-availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server VMsinstructions

A highly available SQL Server reference architecture using Windows Server Failover Clustering and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (click to enlarge)

Better backups with VSS-integrated persistent disk snapshots for Windows VMs— Snapshots

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instructions Looking aheadwe expanded our list of pre-configured images.NET developer solutions.NET client librarycloud.google.com/windowscloud.google.com/sql-serverGCP NEXT ‘17 Windows Bootcampcontact ushear your feedback