The overwhelmed person’s guide to Google Cloud: week of June 20
Richard Seroter
Chief Evangelist, Google Cloud
A weekly curation of the most helpful blogs, exciting new features, and useful events coming out of Google Cloud.
The content in this blog post was originally published last week as a members-only email to the Google Cloud Innovators community. To get this content directly in your inbox (not to mention lots of other benefits), sign up to be an Innovator today.
New and shiny
Three new things to know this week
- Vertex AI Workbench gets customized containers and federated identity support. Have you used Vertex AI Workbench before? It’s a Jupyter notebook-based dev environment where you can explore data, update models, and interact with Cloud services. Now you can create Workbench instances with your favorite tools thanks to custom containers. And you can create instances using third party credentials with the new Workforce Identity Federation capability.
- Cloud Workflows adds connectors for AI, Google Sheets, and more. Build long-running, stateful workflows using this service. Now, use our built-in connectors for easier access to AI Platform Training and Prediction, Batch jobs, BigQuery Data Transfer, Google Forms, and Google Sheets. See the full list of available connectors here.
- New pricing calculator and more granular billing? Sounds good! We put a fresh coat of paint on our Google Cloud pricing calculator and cleaned up a few things. Let me know what you think. We also introduced more granular cost data for Cloud services like Cloud Logging, Managed Active Directory, Dataproc, Cloud Deploy, and Cloud Data Fusion. Check out all the services offering granular billing data.
Watch this
Run those Next.js apps on Cloud Run. Martin and Luke take a look at the popular Next.js framework and how to deploy apps using this JavaScript framework to Cloud services.
Community cuts
Every week I round up some of my favorite links from builders around the Google Cloud-iverse. Want to see your blog or video in the next issue? Drop Richard a line!
- Let’s learn about the Vertex AI Agent Builder. Aryan has a good deep dive into building a contextual chatbot using the low-code tools in Vertex AI.
- Want to use dataframes to analyze Kubernetes risks? You’re in luck. GKE has some great built-in tools for security scanning, but I like seeing creative solutions like this. Imran looks at one way to extract data about running Kubernetes clusters and analyzing with Python and Pandas dataframes.
- There’s a smarter way to set up git repos for Cloud Functions. Store your serverless function code in a great source code repo, but set it up wisely. Charlotte offers up a suggestion for storing multiple functions in a single repo, but setting up unique Cloud Build triggers for each function.
Learn and grow
- Codelab: Build a Google Workspace Add-on with Node.js and Cloud Run. If you haven’t created a Workspace Add-on before, now’s a good time! This codelab offers step by step instructions for adding the backend code and using the add-on yourself.
- Which Firebase hosting option should you use? With the new Firebase App Hosting, it’s reasonable that you’d have questions about which service to use. I thought this was a clear set of guidance about when to use which.
- Time for some myth-busting about platform engineering. What is this practice all about? There’s a lot of noise out there, so I appreciated this take from Steve and Darren. Check out part one and part two for ten excellent perspectives.
- RAG on BigQuery has never been easier. LLMs do a lot of things well, but when you want up-to-date results, you might look to an external source for grounding. This is an excellent writeup that shows you how to use LangChain to do retrieval augmented generation with BigQuery.
One more thing
Happy birthday Kubernetes. The Kubernetes podcast has been celebrating Kubernetes, and this episode features Tim and Kelsey who share stories and insights into this project.
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