The overwhelmed person’s guide to Google Cloud: week of September 19
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
- Perform federated queries to AlloyDB from BigQuery. Don’t move data when you don’t need to! From within BigQuery, send a federated query to AlloyDB and access live data where it resides. Learn how to set up and use this new feature by reading the docs.
- Vector search is now available in BigQuery and Firestore. If you want to find semantically similar entities in a database, vector search will come in handy. Firestore now supports K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) vector indexes and search. With BigQuery, you can now execute the VECTOR_SEARCH function to search embeddings, and even apply vector indexes for more efficient searches.
- Start creating custom Gems with Gemini. Create personalized AI experiences with Gems. The tools to create these custom experts are available for Gemini Advanced and Enterprise users. Read this for use cases, and get some fresh ideas for how to get started.
- The Google Cloud Startup Summit is coming in October. Learn from Google and your peers about how to use the latest cloud and AI tech to improve outcomes at your startup. There are sessions for North America (Oct 8), EMEA (Oct 10), and APAC (Oct 16).
Watch this
What’s Cloud Dataflow all about? Jeff explains the idea of real-time data pipelines and looks at Dataflow as a key enabling technology.
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!
- Have you tried GPUs on Cloud Run? Check this out. Cloud Run recently got GPU support which opens up the door to many use cases with open LLMs. Guillaume has a helpful post that explains the why and how of this new feature.
- Deploy to Google Cloud from GitHub Actions using Workload Identity Federation. Most of you bring existing tools and services to your Google Cloud solutions. All good. What’s a secure way to interact with Google Cloud resources? Vishal shows off a great use case featuring GitHub Actions.
- Use Cloud Run jobs and DBT to transform data for BigQuery. Mazlum offers up an educational video that shows how to use a popular open source tool to transform data as part of an ELT pipeline.
Learn and grow
- Ship a generative AI app to Cloud Run. This new codelab teaches you how to use Firebase Genkit and automatically deploy a Node app from source control to Cloud Run.
- SSH into Cloud servers the right way. Is this the most thrilling topic? For a few of you, the answer may be “yes.” But for most of us, SSH-ing into servers doesn’t spark joy. But, getting this wrong has massive implications. Do it right! I like this new guide.
- Make code reviews more enjoyable with Gemini. There is a lot of waiting and waste in this stage of the software lifecycle. Can Gemini make it better? Daniel has a fascinating post that will give you ideas about how to improve the process.
- Which to choose, GKE Autopilot or Cloud Run? Both runtimes are outstanding. What criteria helps you decide the right service for your workload? This is an excellent guide that will help you make a good choice.
One more thing
Learn SRE from the experts. It’s season three of the Podcast where you learn about site reliability engineering from people who live it every day
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