Last month today: March in Google Cloud

While many of us had plans for March—including simply carrying out our normal routines—life as we know it has been upended by the global coronavirus pandemic. In a time of social distancing, technology has played a greater role in bringing us together. Here’s a look at stories from March that explored how cloud technology is helping and how it works under the hood to keep us connected.Technology in a time of uncertaintyThere are a lot of moving pieces, and a lot of dedicated technical people, who keep Google Cloud running every day, even when traffic spikes or unexpected events happen. Take a look at some of what’s involved with keeping systems running smoothly at Google, including SRE principles, longstanding disaster recovery testing, proprietary hardware, and built-in reserve capacity to ensure infrastructure performance. Plus, support agents are now provisioned for remote access, and an enhanced support structure is available for high-traffic industries during this time. You can dig deeper in this post on Google’s network infrastructure to learn how it is performing even under pressure. Google’s dedicated network is a global system of high-capacity fiber optic cables under both land and sea, and connects to last-mile providers to deliver data locally.Data plays a huge role in public health, and access to data sets and tools are essential for researchers, data scientists, and analysts responding to COVID-19. There’s now a hosted repository of related public datasets available to explore and analyze for free in BigQuery. These include the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, Global Health Data from the World Bank, and more.Working at home, together As work-from-home situations became a necessity globally in March, video conferencing and live streaming became even more essential for daily communication at work, school, and home. With that in mind, we announced free access to our advanced Meet capabilities to G Suite and G Suite for Education customers, including room for up to 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive. Plus, we added Meet improvements for remote learning, and use of Google Meet surged to 25 times what it was in January, with day-over-day growth surpassing 60%. Technology is an essential aspect of working from home, but so is finding ways to collaborate with teammates and stay focused and productive amid distractions. Check out these eight tips for working from home for ways you can be proactive, organized, and engaged with work.Supporting those at-home workersIn this time of added network load and many people getting acquainted with working from home for the first time, the G Suite Meet team shared some best practices for IT admins to support their teams. These include tips on managing device policies, communicating effectively at scale, and use analytics to improve or change employee experiences. Plus, find some best practices that developers using G Suite APIs can follow to stay ahead of new user demands and onboarding. That’s a wrap for March.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Improved database performance data: Key Visualizer now in Cloud Bigtable console

Cloud Bigtable is Google Cloud’s petabyte-scale NoSQL database service for demanding, data-driven workloads that need low latency, high throughput, and scale insurance. If you’ve been looking for more ways to monitor your Bigtable performance more easily, you’re in luck: Key Visualizer is now directly integrated into the Bigtable console. No need to switch to a Cloud Monitoring dashboard to see this data; you can now view your data usage patterns at scale in the same Bigtable experience. Best of all, we’re lowering the eligibility requirements for Key Visualizer usage, making it easier for customers to use this tool.If you aren’t yet familiar with Key Visualizer, it generates visual reports for your tables based on the row keys that you access. It’s especially helpful for iterating on the early designs of a schema before going to production. You can also troubleshoot performance issues, find hotspots, and get a holistic understanding of how you access the data that you store in Bigtable. Key Visualizer uses heatmaps to help you easily determine whether your reads or writes are creating hotspots on specific rows, find rows that contain too much data, or see whether your access patterns are balanced across all of the rows in a table. Here’s how the integration looks:Beyond bringing Key Visualizer into Bigtable, there are several other improvements to highlight: Fresher data. Where Key Visualizer used to serve data that was anywhere from seven to 70 minutes old, Key Visualizer in Bigtable can now show data that is approximately between four and 30 minutes old. To do that, Bigtable scans the data every quarter of the hour (10:00, 10:15, 10:30, 10:45), and then takes a few minutes to analyze and process that performance data.Better eligibility. We dropped the requirement on the number of reads or writes per second in order to make the eligibility criteria to scan data simpler: Now, you just need at least 30 GB of data in your table. This will lower the barrier for developers who want to fine-tune their data schema. Time range. It’s now easier to select the time range of interest with a sliding time range selector. Performance data will be retained for 14 days.The new version of Key Visualizer is available at no additional charge to Bigtable customers, and does not cause any additional stress on your application. If you’re ready to dig in, head over to Bigtable and choose “Key Visualizer” in the left navigation.For more ideas on how Key Visualizer can help you visualize and optimize your analytics data, read more about Key Visualizer in our user guide, or check out this brief overview video and this presentation on how Twitter uses Bigtable.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Same Cloud Bigtable database, now for smaller workloads

Cloud Bigtable is a fast, petabyte-scale NoSQL database service that has long supported massive workloads, both internally at Google and for Google Cloud customers. We are now announcing that Bigtable is expanding its support for smaller workloads.You can now create production instances with one or two nodes per cluster, down from the previous minimum of three nodes per cluster. We are also expanding our SLA to cover all Bigtable instances, regardless of type or size. This means that you can get started for as low as $0.65/hour to take advantage of Cloud Bigtable’s low-latency data access and seamless scalability. Cloud Bigtable performs exceptionally well for use cases like personalization, fraud detection, time series, and other workloads where performance and scalability are critical. Bigtable at any scaleYou don’t need a terabyte- or petabyte-scale workload to take advantage of Bigtable! We want Bigtable to be an excellent home for all of your key-value and wide-column use-cases, both large and small. That’s true whether you’re a developer just getting started, or an established enterprise looking for a landing place for your self-managed HBase or Cassandra clusters.Get started by creating a new Bigtable instance:Making replication more affordableWe’ve seen customers use replication to get better workload isolation, higher availability, and faster local access for global applications. By reducing our minimum cluster size, it’s now more affordable than ever to try replication. To enable replication, just add a new cluster to any existing instance.Easy management of development and staging environmentsFinally, we heard your feedback that development instances were missing features needed to more easily manage development and staging environments. We’re excited to offer one-node production instances at the same price point as development instances, but with the added ability to scale up and down to run tests. You can now upgrade your existing development instances to a one-node production instance at any time.Learn moreTo get started with Bigtable, create an instance or try it out with a Bigtable Qwiklab. Between now and April 30, 2020, Google Cloud is offering free access to training and certification, including access to Qwiklabs, for 30 days. Register before April 30, 2020 to get started for free.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform