GCP This Month: S3 sync support, GPU Pods on GKE Autopilot & new Google Cloud region for Kuwait!

Hello and welcome to another month's worth of Google Cloud announcements. We've got another new region on the way, new good stuff around Kubernetes, plus two announcements that relate to Amazon S3. But yes, this is indeed still GCP This Month. I'm Mattias Andersson, and we're covering January, 2023. Google has just announced that they will be building a new Google Cloud region in Kuwait. Now, it's hard to say when this region might actually go live, especially since the expansion to nearby Doha, Qatar was announced almost three years ago, but Google is clearly signaling investment in the Middle East. And since Google is now up to a very impressive 35 regions live around the world, they are definitely continuing to expand. Our next announcement is the new Config Management Dashboard for monitoring and managing configuration syncing across multiple Anthos-managed Kubernetes clusters. Bit of a mouthful eh. If you're using the Anthos Config Sync service to take advantage of GitOps practices, then I'm sure you'll really appreciate this. Now, speaking of Kubernetes, GPU Pods are now generally available on Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot. This means that when your containers need to take advantage of graphics processing units, you can still take advantage of the GKEs Autopilot mode to manage most of the hassles for you. Also now generally available is Log Analytics in Cloud Logging, and there's no extra cost for Log Analytics, beyond the normal Cloud Logging charges I mean, even though it makes use a BigQuery under the hood to search, aggregate, and transform all your logs. And speaking of BigQuery, one more key thing going GA this month is multi-statement transactions in BigQuery. Now, even though BigQuery is not your traditional transactional database, lots of people often wanna be able to use it kind of like that. Whether it's because they're synchronizing BigQuery with another database, or just wanting to take advantage of its serverless-ness. Anyway, you can now make multiple statements within a transaction and have it commit or roll back atomically. Okay, let's move on to our gem for this month. This month's gem is a combination of two separate announcements where Google is adding support for Amazon Web Services S3 buckets. The first one is that we can now set up private authentication for S3 bucket origins in Cloud CDN. It's best practice to force requests to go through your content delivery network instead of allowing users to go around it. And this is a key part of ensuring that across all of your various origins. This new feature works with the global external HTTPS load balancers. Google's second announcement around S3 is that the Storage Transfer Service, STS, now supports serverless synchronization between Cloud Storage buckets and S3 buckets. They call this "Event-Driven Transfer, a serverless, real-time replication capability. " And actually this also supports synchronization between multiple cloud storage buckets as well. So you could, for example, keep multiple different environments in sync, or make sure that you have the same data across multiple regions, or whatever. But I particularly love how this opens things up so that your S3-based data in AWS can be automatically brought into GCP so that you can use all of Google's awesome data processing capabilities, including analytics and machine learning stuff. Now, under the hood, this uses PubSub on the Google side or on the AWS side, the Simple Queue Service SQS, the Storage Transfer Service subscribes to these queues and takes care of making sure that the data changes are replicated ASAP. Check out the blog posts we've linked from the video description to get more details on both what this can do and how you can set it up. Well, okay, that's all the GCP news this month, but I still have one last awesome thing to tell you about. I mean, we all love free stuff, so I think you'll be happy to hear that our free courses on the ACG platform this month include GCP Cost Optimization Deep Dive, and Google Kubernetes Engine Deep Dive. Did I mention they're free? Okay. Yeah, of course I did. And there's no credit card required to sign up either, so why not start learning right now? You can use the links in the video description. Alright, stay safe, take care of those around you, and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.