Why Operators are essential for Kubernetes

As a solutions architect, I spend a lot of my time talking to my customers about Kubernetes. In every one of those conversations, it’s guaranteed that the topic of Kubernetes Operators will come up. Operators, and their relationship to Red Hat OpenShift, aren’t always clear to those who are just starting out on their container adoption journey.
Quelle: CloudForms

A Google Cloud block storage options cheat sheet

“Where do virtual machines store data so they can access it when they restart?”—We need storage that is persistent in nature. That’s where Persistent Disks come in. Persistent Disk is a high performance block storage service that uses solid state drive (SSD) or hard disk drive (HDD) disks. These disks store data in blocks and are attached to compute. In Google Cloud it means they are attached to Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine. You can attach multiple persistent disks to Compute Engine or GKE simultaneously and can configure quick, automatic, incremental backups or resize storage on the fly without disrupting your application. Types of Block StorageYou can choose the best Persistent Disk option for you based on your  cost and performance requirements. Standard PD is HDD and provides standard throughput. Because it is the most cost effective option, it is best used for cost-sensitive applications and scale out analytics with Hadoop and Kafka. Balanced PD is SSD and is the best price per GB option. This makes it a good fit for common workloads such as line of business apps, boot disks, and web serving. Performance PD is SSD and provides the best price per IOPS (input/output operations per second). It is best suited for performance sensitive applications such as databases, caches, and scale out analytics. Extreme PD is SSD optimized for applications with uncompromising performance requirements. These could include SAP HANA, Oracle, and the largest in-memory databases.Local SSD is recommended if your apps need really low latency. It is best for hot caches that offer best performance for analytics, media rendering, and other use cases that might require scratch space. How to pick block storage based on availability needsYou can also choose a Persistent Disk based on the availability needs of your app. Use Local SSD if you just need ephemeral storage for a stateless app that manages the replication at the application level or database layer. For most workloads you would be fine with Persistent Disk; it is durable and supports automated snapshots. But, if your app demands even higher availability and is mission critical then there is an option to use a regional persistent disk, which is replicated across zones for near zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) values. ConclusionWhatever your application use case maybe, if you are using a virtual machine or a Google Kubernetes Engine instance then you will be making a block storage choice. Use the pointers in this post to help you identify the option that works best for your use case. For a more in-depth look into Persistent Disk check out the documentation.  For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo. For similar cloud content follow me on Twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]

There are a lot of great things happening at Google Cloud, and we’re delighted to share new product announcements, customer perspectives, interactive demos, and more through Google Cloud Summit series, a collection of digital events taking place over the coming months.Join us to learn more about how Google Cloud is transforming businesses in various industries, including Financial Services, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, and Retail & Consumer Goods. We’ll also be highlighting the latest innovations in data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), security and more. The summits kick off in May with the Google Data Cloud Summit (May 26 | Global) and Financial Services Summit (May 27 | Global & EMEA), with more to follow. Content will be available for on-demand viewing immediately following the live broadcast of each event. Data Cloud Summit | May 26, 2021At this half-day event, you’ll learn how leading companies like PayPal, Workday, Equifax, Zebra Technologies, Commonwealth Care Alliance and many others are driving competitive differentiation using Google Cloud technologies to build their data clouds and transform data into value that drives innovation. Join our keynote with Google Cloud VP and General Manager for Databases, Data Analytics, and Looker, Gerrit Kazmaier and Zebra Technologies CEO Anders Gustafsson, as they discuss how to drive transformation with a unified data cloud strategy. Don’t miss the major product announcements across AI, ML, databases, and analytics. And learn how customers are using these technologies to build applications with BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Looker, AI Platform, and more.Get the latest on data-driven industry trends from technology experts and join our customer-led sessions. Dive deeper with live Q&As and interactive demos to explore how data can help you make smarter business decisions and solve your organization’s most complex challenges.Register nowFinancial Services Summit | May 27, 2021In this 2 hour event, you will learn how Google Cloud is helping financial institutions including PayPal, Global Payments, HSBC, Credit Suisse, and more unlock new possibilities and accelerate business through innovation and better customer experiences. Hear from CEO Thomas Kurian and VP of Financial Services Solutions Derek White as they share how Google Cloud for Financial Services helps companies on their transformation cloud journeys. Attend sessions focused on banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments—and hear from our customers as they share their experiences. Join us to explore compelling topics that are influencing financial services today, as our financial industry experts and thought leaders dive into trending topics including sustainability, the future of home buying, embedded finance, dynamic pricing for insurance, managing transaction surges in payments, the market data revolution, and more. Register now: Global & EMEAMore information to comeCheck back on this blog post, we’ll be adding more information on future events in the coming weeks, including the Google Cloud ML Practitioner Summit, Digital Manufacturer Summit and more. Bookmark this page to easily find updates as news develops, and don’t forget to register today at no cost by visiting the Summit series website.Related ArticleSave the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12-14, 2021Join us and learn how the most successful companies have transformed their businesses with Google Cloud. Sign-up at g.co/cloudnext for up…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Shifting gears: How mixi expanded from mobile games to bicycle racing with TIPSTAR

How do you reinvent entertainment for a completely new audience? For Japanese social network giant mixi, the challenge was to take the successes they’ve had with mobile games like Monster Strike, now with more than over 54 million worldwide users, and apply it to broadcasting Keirin bicycle races. As Koki Kimura, president of mixi, explains TIPSTAR’s vision: “We released the social sports betting app TIPSTAR to provide entertainment in a way that utilizes our IT and communication expertise. By providing an innovative and accessible way to enjoy Keirin, we were able to acquire a wider range of users across our user base. We plan to further expand this service with Google Cloud and expect it to grow even larger.”Since its launch, TIPSTAR’s original live streamed racing broadcasts—with commentators who offer predictions to inform users’ bets on the races—has successfully expanded interest in the sport to a whole new audience. While traditional Keirin races are typically watched by older men, TIPSTAR was able to reach a broader audience, including women and users in their 20s and 30s. Mixi’s insight into their customer base helped generate this new set of users. For the technology that underpins the platform they use to bring their app to users, as with Monster Strike, mixi turned to Google Cloud.Shifting gears from mobile gaming to live-streamed racingGoogle Kubernetes Engine (GKE) had been essential to the success of Monster Strike. So it was mixi’s first choice when it was time to start developing TIPSTAR. “I chose Google Cloud from among the many cloud platforms because I wanted to use GKE first and foremost,” says Product Development Group Manager Yoshiteru Kawamata at mixi. This time, their implementation included Cloud Storage, Cloud Logging for log storage and analysis, and BigQuery for data analytics. “One of the biggest changes I made,” says Kawamata, “was the adoption of Cloud Spanner. The main reason is that it is maintenance-free and eliminates the potential for downtime.” Spanner offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes. It is easy to scale with solutions like adding simple nodes as needed, and even ultimately a lower price point. This meant mixi could let TIPSTAR grow organically, scaling when needed rather than needing to start with a massive growth plan, all while minimizing downtime and other growing pains.”About six months later I made a big infrastructure update,” says Kawamata. “As a result, my engineers have been able to shift from operating infrastructure to developing new solutions using Spanner and GKE. This made me very happy.”Crossing the finish lineWhile smooth development and scalability for future growth were important, mixi had new concerns as part of their new app service, including handling monetary transactions. To ensure that this functionality was secure and user-friendly, mixi turned to Google Cloud’s Customer Experience Team and the Premium Support offering for guidance. “As a member of the team, our technical account manager was able to provide us in-depth support, from architecture review to helping us adjust resources from service design to release,” says Kawamata. A named TAM is an included feature of Premium Support and provides customers with relevant information and suggestions as needed.mixi also continues to take advantage of other Google Cloud resources such as the Advanced Solutions Lab, which teaches teams to apply AI and machine learning through classroom training by certified instructors and hands-on learning via Qwiklabs. With this training and support, mixi is set to continue to chart a path so that TIPSTAR and future mixi projects continue to grow.Related Articlemixi accelerates AI adoption with help from Google Cloud Advanced Solutions LabAdvice from a customer, mixi, on how Advanced Solutions Lab can help your businessRead Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Understanding the value of managed database services

Organizations are increasingly short on time, talent, and resources to manage and tune databases to suit their needs. For this reason, many businesses are turning to fully managed database services to help them build and scale their infrastructure to keep up with the data-driven demands of today’s always-on world.Cloud SQL offers industry-standard relational databases and manages common database administration tasks for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. Using Cloud SQL enables businesses to spend less time managing their database infrastructure, and more time focusing on their applications.Thousands of customers, large and small, trust Cloud SQL with their databases—and they have made it one of the fastest-growing services in Google Cloud. We often hear from customers that Cloud SQL helps free up time previously spent on database administration. Cloud SQL is one of our fully managed cloud services. Managed services can generally free up time and resources for your organization.What is a managed database?A managed database is an on-demand cloud computing service, which includes everything you need to run your databases. Below is a diagram of the typical technology stack needed to run a database deployment:Building, running, and maintaining infrastructure means less time working on creating value in your app. Every layer of the stack requires attention—hardware, OS, database. And don’t forget monitoring.With a managed database service, none of this is your responsibility. Instead, the cloud provider is responsible for looking after and maintaining infrastructure, patches, and other maintenance tasks that would normally consume a significant amount of your time and resources.Benefits of a managed database like Cloud SQLWhy are managed databases so popular? Here are just a few reasons:Self-service improves developer velocityManual database provisioning is a slow process, making it difficult to scale resources on the fly. With Cloud SQL, developers can easily automate the process to create, modify, clone, and replicate database servers. Powerful and intuitive interfaces make these tasks simple to use and automate.Google SRE teams have your back 24 x 365Google wrote the book (or should we say books) on Site Reliability Engineering, and Cloud SQL delivers round-the-clock SRE support and multiple layers of protection to ensure a reliable and secure service.  Automated tasks save time while keeping data secureMaintenance to deliver new feature updates and security is a part of everyday database management—but it’s also time-consuming. Cloud SQL automates tasks for HA, backup, disaster recovery, security patching and upgrades. Your deployments can run smoothly and securely. Organization policies provide safety guardrailsDevelopment always wants to run faster, but security and compliance teams can struggle to keep up. Cloud SQL organization policies provide centralized, programmatic control over your organization’s cloud resources without slowing innovation. More “yes,” less “no”With more scale, more user demands, and changing business needs, there’s always pressure to deliver more, faster. By moving to Google’s managed Cloud SQL services, teams can say yes to more, without increasing headcount. Flexible pay-as-you-go optionsProvision your databases based on your current usage patterns, with the ability to increase or decrease your footprint and costs on-demand. Advanced security and reliability The hardware is controlled, built, and hardened by Google. There are no trust assumptions between services. All identities, users, and services are strongly authenticated. Data stored on our infrastructure is automatically encrypted at rest. Communications over the Internet to our cloud services are encrypted. The scale of Google’s infrastructure allows it to absorb many Denial of Service attacks, and Google Cloud’s SRE teams are on-call 24 x 365, helping detect threats and respond to incidents. A super fast, high-performing global network Google’s network uniquely provides global connectivity with its system of high-capacity fiber optic cables that encircle the globe. This enables simple and robust cross-regional operations and redundancy, without the need to set up dedicated connections between Google Cloud regions. With this network, our database services can create resources in different regions, simplifying how applications provide great experiences to customers, no matter where they are on the globe.Optimal integrations with popular tools and Google Cloud services Databases need ecosystems. Google provides extensive support for dozens of Google Cloud services, the most popular ORMs, tools, libraries, and frameworks. This includes robust integrations with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), direct queries from BigQuery, and multiple data integration services, such as Cloud Dataflow, Data Fusion, Pub/Sub, and more.Economic advantages of managed databasesAccording to Research Vice President Carl Olofson, IDC has conducted a number of business value studies focused on the experience of enterprises moving databases from an environment they have configured and managed themselves to managed database cloud services. In these, we compared total hardware, software, and staff time costs for the self-managed database versus the total staff time and subscription cost of the managed cloud database service over five years. We have certain outcomes that are consistent, regardless of the database brand or cloud service provider: enterprises generally experience a ROI in excess of 400% over five years, the payback period is less than a year, users experienced better and more consistent database performance, unplanned downtime was drastically reduced, resulting in significant avoidance of costs due to data unavailability, and the greater security afforded by the cloud environment and the regular application of security patches to DBMS code resulted in substantial peace of mind, the benefit of which cannot be quantified.How does Cloud SQL work?With Cloud SQL, you can create an instance and configure it with the right combination of vCPU cores and RAM for your workload—and the rest is automated. Cloud SQL automatically ensures your databases are reliable, secure, and scalable so that your business continues to run without disruption. Flexible instance shapes allow you to optimize the balance of compute, storage, and memory for each deployment. The underlying Google Cloud infrastructure is highly optimized for predictable, high performance operations with edition-agnostic capabilities such as storage-based HA—and run according to our SRE principles. First, Cloud SQL manages installation and ensures the database is kept up-to-date with automated upgrades and patching. We also protect your data with automatic, regularly scheduled backups that are retained for up to a year. From there, we offer options, such as high availability (HA), including health checks and automatic failover, using synchronous replication for cross-region replication for disaster recovery.Cloud SQL wraps this technology stack in powerful and intuitive interfaces that make sense for developers and operations teams: API, CLI, and UI. Your teams can easily provision databases in minutes. The entire stack is also monitored so you can quickly find the root cause when a problem occurs. Managed databases can open up new possibilities for teams within an organization.Migrating to a managed databaseMaking the decision to migrate from on-premises to a managed database solution can be risky. While managed services can reduce the stress of deploying and maintaining a database, you also need to trust that your applications will continue to run and that you can continue to use the same tools and skill sets. Cloud SQL removes that risk, allowing you to get started fast with minimal-downtime migrations using our Database Migration Service. Here’s why:Keep running as usual. You get the familiar MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server engines you’re used to with no additional modifications and automatic access to the latest enhancements.Seamlessly integrate with your preferred tools. Connect to your Cloud SQL instances with common database administration and reporting tools, such as MySQL Workbench, Toad SQL, and SQuirrel SQL, and pgAdmin.No disruption or surprises. Easily migrate your databases and get started with a few clicks using the native Database Migration Service for zero-downtime migrations.If you’re interested in learning more about Cloud SQL (and the rest of our data storage, management, and analytics platform), join the upcoming Data Cloud Summit.Related ArticleMigrate your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases using Database Migration Service, now GACheck out how to migrate your on-premises databases to the cloud with Database Migration Service, now generally available for PostgreSQL …Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Released: Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon]

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon], continuing to support developers in our community with their choice of local development environments.  

First, we want to say a big thank you to our community. The excitement you have shown about being able to run Docker Desktop on the new M1 chip has been tremendous and hugely motivating to us. Your engagement on testing builds and reporting problems has been invaluable. As soon as Apple announced the new M1 chip, you let us know on our public roadmap that this was a high priority for you, and it quickly became by far our most upvoted roadmap item ever. You also responded very positively to our previous blog posts.

After the M1 machines were publicly available, those of you on our developer preview program tested some very early builds. And then as we moved into public tech previews and release candidates, many more of you joined in with testing your enormous variety of use cases, and reporting bugs. In total we have had 45,000 downloads of the various preview builds, and 140 tickets raised on our public bug tracker, not to mention countless messages on our community Slack.

We know that Docker Desktop is an essential part of the development process for so many of you. We are very grateful that we have such an active and supportive community, and that you have shared both your excitement and your feedback with us. We couldn’t have gotten here without you.

Thank you!

Where can you get it? 

Download it here!

Release notes can be found here!

Looking for support?

Did you know that you can get Premium Customer Support for Docker Desktop with a Pro or Team subscription?  With this GA release, we’re now ready to officially help support you if you’re thinking about using Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon], for Mac [Intel] or for Windows. Check out our pricing page to learn more about what’s included in a Pro or Team subscription, and if it’s right for you.

Have you tried multi-platform builds?

Many developers are going to experience multi-platform development for the first time with the Macs powered by the M1 chip. This is one of the key areas where Docker shines. Docker has had support for multi-platform images for a long time, meaning that you can build and run both amd64(Intel) and arm64 (Apple Silicon) images on Docker Desktop today. The new Docker Desktop for Apple Silicon is no exception; you can build and run images for both x86 and ARM architectures without having to set up a complex cross-compilation development environment.

Docker Hub also makes it easy to identify and share repositories that provide multi-platform images.

Using docker buildx you can also easily integrate multi-platform builds into your build pipeline.

Try it today.

Join Us for DockerCon LIVE 2021

Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who are building the next generation of modern applications. If you want to learn about how to go from code to cloud fast and how to solve your development challenges, DockerCon LIVE 2021 offers engaging live content to help you build, share and run your applications. Register today at https://dockr.ly/2PSJ7vn

The post Released: Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon] appeared first on Docker Blog.
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