Mozilla: Firefox 79 erweitert Webrender und Pocket
Der aktuelle Firefox-Browser bekommt eine Funktion zurück, die wegen Spectre vor mehr als zwei Jahren massiv beschränkt wurde. (Firefox, Browser)
Quelle: Golem
Virtual Reality: VR-Markt wächst stärker als erwartet
Half-Life Alyx, Iron Man VR und das Update für No Man’s Sky: Die Investitionen in Virtual Reality zahlen sich offenbar allmählich aus. (VR, Apple)
Quelle: Golem
Internet: Neue Vorwürfe an Google wegen Suchergebnis-Ranking
Eine Studie hat gezeigt, dass Google-Nutzer auf der ersten Suchergebnisseite oft weit scrollen müssen, um Nicht-Google-Ergebnisse zu sehen. (Google, Internet)
Quelle: Golem
Industry Experts and Pro Bloggers Come Together to Inspire, Teach, and Help You (and Your Site) Succeed
At the Official WordPress.com Growth Summit, the two-day virtual conference running twice from August 11-13, you’ll have access to about 50 speakers and presenters across 90+ breakout sessions and keynote conversations. The varied lineup will appeal to new and established bloggers; professionals in tech, media, and marketing; and anyone ready to build or expand their presence on the web.
Event highlights include a talk from Smitten Kitchen creator and cookbook author Deb Perelman; panels with Newspack founder Kinsey Wilson on the state of independent and local journalism amid a struggling media landscape and in the age of COVID-19; and sessions with founders and representatives from companies and organizations like Xbox, Google, Sandwich, African Queer Youth Initiative, Out in Tech, Looka, and more.
Wondering what to expect? Here are 10 entrepreneurs, founders, bloggers, and developers scheduled to speak at the summit.
Jason Snell
Jason is the founder and editor-in-chief of Six Colors, a site that covers Apple, technology, and the intersection of tech and culture. Previously, as the lead editor for Macworld, he covered every major Apple product release for more than a decade.
In a breakout session on content and community with web designer and A List Apart founder Jeffrey Zeldman, they’ll share blogging and podcasting tips, advice on growing your audience, and making money with paywalls, stores, advertising, and more. “Membership programs can build loyalty and provide the most enthusiastic portions of your audience with more of what they love,” says Jason. “I switched to WordPress in order to build a richer — and more marketable — membership program, and the results have been excellent.”
Tina Wells
“The 4Ps of marketing — product, place, promotion, and price — have changed dramatically,” says Tina Wells, the founder of Elevation Tribe, a community and lifestyle publication focused on helping women of color launch, grow, and lead their businesses. In her breakout session, Tina will talk about creating a marketing plan for beginners and small businesses. “We’ll go back to basics and discover how we can make the right changes to help your business not only survive, but thrive.”
A business strategist and passionate entrepreneur, Tina believes in the power of an effective online presence. “Your website is your first storefront, and it tells the story of your brand,” she says, noting that a strong visual identity and fresh design are critical. You can see both in action at Elevation Tribe and on Tina’s website.
Kristin Smith
“My authenticity is what allows me to share my brand with others. Being yourself — and transparent — is what people see and keeps them coming back. There’s only one of you, and that alone is enough,” says Kristin Smith, food blogger at Krisp X Kristin and podcast co-host of At the Bar.
In Kristin’s breakout session, you’ll find out how she turned her passion for cooking into a popular blog and podcast. She’ll share what she’s learned, giving you a set of actionable steps to inspire you to overcome your fears and get started on your website.
“Sometimes in the beginning it’s hard to see a finish line. But, keep your head down and keep working. Throw yourself into it, network with other likeminded people, and continue to learn,” says Kristin. “It all will pay off in the end.”
Paul Bakaus
“The web used to be the best platform for content creation, distribution, and consumption,” says Paul Bakaus, a senior staff development advocate at Google. “But today the walled garden — closed social apps and platforms — are drinking our milkshake. I say it’s time we stop letting them! We need to, as a community, work on making the web more visual, frictionless, and bite-sized. Web Stories are our approach to help with that, and we can’t wait for you to join us.”
In his breakout session, Telling Web Stories with WordPress, Paul will introduce you to Web Stories — a mobile-first tool that allows storytellers to create visual narratives with engaging animations and tappable interactions — and show how you can use them on your website with the Web Stories for WordPress plugin.
Anton Diaz
“We want to contribute to an awesome post-COVID-19 world,” says Anton Diaz, traveler, founder, and creator of Our Awesome Planet. “We’re helping food businesses to connect with foodies and travel destinations to engage with travelers.”
In his breakout session, Anton will share the principles that have guided his food and travel blog for 15 years. “There are core beliefs that have helped Our Awesome Planet stand out,” says Anton. “We make sure that all the food and travel experiences we feature are based on first-hand experience, grounded on our original vision: documenting the food and travel adventures of our family as our four sons — Aidan, Joshua, Raphael, and Yugi — have grown.”
Deb Perelman
Deb Perelman, the longtime food blogger at Smitten Kitchen, is a WordPress.com community favorite. What started as a food blog and side project in her tiny New York City kitchen has grown into one of the most popular food blogs on the internet, as well as a series of best-selling cookbooks.
“I just really, really enjoy blogging,” Deb said in an interview with WordPress.com several years ago. “I love having a place where I can share what I’m working on in an immediate way and have a conversation with people who are equally excited about it, and who encourage me to try more stuff that scares me in the kitchen.” At the conference, Deb will share her story and the journey of Smitten Kitchen, from start to present.
Kim Newton
Kim Newton, a global marketing executive with over 20 years of experience working with corporations and brands, is the creator of The Intentional Pause, a project that empowers women to follow their dreams using the power of pause. “I give every woman permission — yes permission — to just stop and think,” she writes on her website. “I want to help women to embrace pausing as a powerful way forward, with intention, to achieve their dreams.”
Kim has had many successes in consumer marketing, corporate strategy, and business development, and will share her insights on marketing and PR at the summit.
Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier, the co-founder of CodePen, is a front-end developer and designer. He’s also the creator of CSS-Tricks, a resource that’s all about building websites, mostly from a front-end perspective, and was built on WordPress since day one. “I’m a solo developer for the most part on CSS-Tricks. Just me over here. I don’t have the budget for a fancy development team. But I still want to feel powerful and productive. That’s one of the things that WordPress has given to me. I feel like I can build just about anything on WordPress, and do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a mountain of technical debt that I would struggle to maintain.”
In his breakout session — Putting WordPress to Work — Chris will take us behind the scenes at CSS-Tricks, sharing “just how powerful WordPress can be as a platform to run a publishing business on.”
Amy Chan
For Amy Chan, blogging provided the path to a publishing career. Amy is the founder of Renew Breakup Bootcamp, the world’s first breakup bootcamp, and the author of Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart. “Heartbreak is something that affects everyone, so people were able to connect quickly with the company’s offering,” says Amy.
In Amy’s breakout session — How I Accidentally Became a Thought Leader By Blogging — she shares her own story, and how you can transform your side gig into something bigger. To start, Amy says to just do it: “Stop hiding. Stop waiting. Stop perfecting. Perfection is procrastination in disguise,” she says. “Start the blog, launch the event, put your creation out in the world. Whatever it is, just get in a mindset of taking action. Create as a way of being. Launch it now and develop it later.”
Danica Kombol
Danica Kombol founded Everywhere Agency to help brands tell better stories through social media and influencer marketing. As CEO, she leads a team that works with brands to launch content-driven campaigns and to create meaningful conversations with followers in powerful, measurable ways.
Danica also launched Everywhere Society, a network of about 5,000 established influencers and bloggers, which powers the agency’s influencer campaigns and brand ambassadorships. Her session will cover blogging for purpose and profit.
Browse the agenda for all sessions, demos, and talks. Buy your ticket now for early bird pricing of $79, which expires after July 31!
Explore all speakers and sessions
Quelle: RedHat Stack
New Private Service Connect simplifies secure access to services
As the use of cloud services increases and matures, organizations want to streamline the process of securely connecting to services at scale. But for different domains to communicate, cloud and network architects have traditionally spent a lot of time exchanging infrastructure-level information like IP addresses and coordinating subnets with technologies such as VPC peering. They also have to manage complex routing topologies across different networks and organizations. This can be challenging for enterprises that want to keep services completely isolated to address security concerns or policy requirements.At Google Cloud, we want to help you fundamentally change how you consume and deliver applications in the cloud, with a service-centric approach to networking. We’re excited to announce Private Service Connect in alpha, which allows you to connect and consume first- and third-party as well as customer-owned services easily and privately. It creates service endpoints in consumer VPCs that provide private connectivity and policy enforcement, allowing you to easily connect services across different networks and organizations. Private Service Connect abstracts the underlying infrastructure for both the teams consuming and delivering services, making it easier for you to use value-added services. With Private Service Connect, traffic stays private and secure over Google’s global network. See the overview video.“In today’s data-driven world, organizations need to securely connect to increasingly large volumes of data spread across different networks and organizations. Google Cloud’s new Private Service Connect will allow our joint customers to consume Snowflake faster and more securely when they are connecting to Snowflake from Google’s network.” – Vikas Jain, Head of Security Product Management, SnowflakeIn short, Private Service Connect allows you to: Simplify connectivity to services: You can easily and privately connect to and access Google Cloud services (e.g., Cloud Storage, Bigtable), third-party partner services (e.g. Snowflake), and your company’s own applications. Services can be consumed directly in their virtual networks without requiring middleboxes, proxies, or other complex configurations, simplifying the management of cloud architectures.Protect your network traffic: When consuming services, you can prevent your network traffic from being exposed to the public internet, reducing exposure to potential security threats; traffic remains on Google’s backbone network, extending private transit to the “last mile.” Accelerate cloud migrations: Since the underlying infrastructure is not exposed, connecting to and managing services is much simpler, more secure and private. You can accelerate your cloud migrations by simply connecting from on-premises to new services in the cloud, while enforcing the security standard and best practice of leveraging a private IP space.Discover service-centric networkingIn March, we launched Service Directory, which helps customers simplify service management and operations. Together, Private Service Connect and Service Directory allow you to easily and securely connect to services and manage them at scale. While Private Service Connect lets you connect and privately access services, Service Directory helps principals (users and applications) discover and publish those services, so you can deliver services faster and more securely.Let’s connectOur goal is to give you the right networking solutions for connecting your business to Google Cloud. With Private Service Connect, you can access and connect to services faster, more easily protect your network traffic, and accelerate your migration to the cloud. To try the product, please contact your Google Cloud account team, and click here to learn more about Google Cloud’s networking portfolio. And be sure to tune in to Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir this week, where we’re highlighting enhancements to our infrastructure.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir—delivering infrastructure for all your apps
The applications you run on Google Cloud rely on extensive amounts of infrastructure, deployed around the world, in dozens of data centers, across hundreds of points of presence, and connected by a system of high-capacity fiber optic cables that encircle the globe. Inside our data centers, you’ll find the latest compute, storage and network systems and services on which to run a wide variety of workloads—from lightweight microservices to high performance computing to demanding enterprise applications. And that infrastructure is growing all the time, delivering more capacity and resilience, and better performance for your end users.At the same time, we’re always working to simplify that infrastructure complexity for you, so setting up and using Google Cloud infrastructure is easy and seamless. Today, we want to tell you about recent enhancements to Google Cloud’s global infrastructure, as well as new deployment options and functionality that you can take advantage of. A global presenceLet’s start with our worldwide footprint. At Next ‘19 in San Francisco, Google Cloud counted 19 regions around the world. Since then, we’ve opened five new regions in Jakarta, Las Vegas, Osaka, Salt Lake City and Seoul. We’ve also announced new forthcoming regions, including Toronto, Warsaw, Delhi, Doha, and Melbourne. Combined with 144 network edge locations and counting, these regions deliver the services, capacity and performance you need to ensure a terrific experience for your users.Those regions rely on robust networks to transport data between them, including private subsea cables. Today, we announced the new Grace Hopper cable that will run between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. When Grace Hopper is commissioned in 2022, it will be one of the first new transatlantic cables to go live since 2003, delivering 16 fibre pairs of capacity, powering a variety of Google services like Gmail, Meet and of course Google Cloud.A flexible, secure networkEnterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud to deliver the best experiences for their customers. The network is at the foundation of this transformation, but is getting exponentially more complex to manage, secure, and scale. To help enterprise customers with these challenges, we recently expanded our partnership with Cisco to bring the best of Cisco and Google Cloud technologies together, with a turnkey networking solution: Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud. This joint solution will help our customers simplify enterprise networking and advance security capabilities, while helping IT teams minimize operational costs and meet application service-level objectives.And today, we’re announcing a new secure, easy way to connect to Google Cloud, with Private Service Connect. By taking a service-centric approach to networking and abstracting the underlying infrastructure, Private Service Connect creates service endpoints in consumer VPCs that provide private connectivity and policy enforcement, so you can easily connect services across different networks and organizations. Further, with Private Service Connect, traffic is not exposed to the public internet; customers can access services directly and securely over Google’s global network. Read this blog to learn more. Private Service Connect complements Service Directory, which we launched in March to help customers simplify service management and operations. Together, Private Service Connect and Service Directory let you easily and securely connect to and manage services at scale. As enterprises use Private Service Connect to access more first- and third-party services, Service Directory helps engineering teams to publish and discover them.In addition, you can further manage your network with Network Intelligence Center, Google Cloud’s comprehensive network monitoring, verification and optimization platform. Centralized monitoring reduces troubleshooting time and effort, increases network security and improves overall user experience. We are excited to announce updates to two of the modules in the platform: Firewall Insights is now in beta and Performance Dashboard is generally available. Firewall Insights brings intelligence and proactive management to network security, while Performance Dashboard offers real-time visibility into packet loss and latency at a per-project level. Finally, for customers with hybrid or multi-cloud deployments, Cloud CDN now supports serving content from on-prem data centers, or even other clouds. See this infographic to learn more about Cloud CDN.Industry-leading computeOf course, one of the many reasons people choose Google Cloud is for access to the latest high-performance compute and storage services. On the compute side, Google Compute Engine can be configured with some of the most powerful, cost-effective hardware, like efficient VMs (E2), one of our newest families of general-purpose virtual machines. E2 features dynamic resource management that delivers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) on Google Cloud and is our fastest growing new virtual machine family on Compute Engine. It now offers machine types with up to 32 vCPUs and is available in all Google Cloud regions.We also recently announced the Accelerator-Optimized VM family (A2), the first public cloud offering to feature the NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPUs. The A2 was designed for demanding workloads such as machine learning and high performance computing, providing up to 16 A100 GPUs in a single instance.For customers running large VM fleets, we announced the general availability of OS patch management service, to keep your operating systems up-to-date and reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities.The service works on Compute Engine and enables you to apply OS patches across a set of VMs, receive patch compliance data across your Windows or Linux environments, and automate installation of OS patches—all from one centralized location. The current release of OS patch management is available at no cost through December 31, 2020. To learn more about the service, check out our NEXT session: Managing Large Fleets of Compute Engine VM Fleets.The right storage for all your workloadsFor many applications, the performance is only as good as the underlying storage. If you need to support workloads such as Electronic Design Automation (EDA), video processing, genomics, manufacturing and financial modeling, we recently launched Filestore High Scale, a high-performance, scale-out file system. Currently in beta, the new Filestore High Scale tier is a fully managed service and makes it easy to mount file shares on Compute Engine VMs. With High Scale, it’s simple to deploy a file system that can scale to hundreds of thousands of IOPS, 10s GB/s throughput, and 100s of TBs.And if you’re looking for reliable, high-performance block storage, there’s Persistent Disk, which delivers industry-leading price performance for both HDD and SSD to satisfy your needs. Today we’re excited to announce an expanded approach to our Persistent Disk product portfolio, giving you the ability to pick the performance that best fits your workload: Best suited for most enterprise applications, we will have Balanced PD, giving you the best price per GB. For customers seeking the best price per IOPS for performance sensitive workloads such as databases or persistent cache we will have Performance PD. We will also introduce our Extreme PD SKU, well-suited for the highest performance workloads such as SAP HANA or large in-memory databases. This strategy is all about tailoring your storage to your workload, so we can deliver on your price and performance needs. Support for all your workloadsAll this infrastructure is in service of running your workloads, however you see fit. In the early days of Google Cloud, we started with a cloud-native platform as a service (App Engine), but today, our infrastructure supports a broad range of your most demanding enterprise workloads. For example, you can now run your VMware workloads on Google Cloud, using our Google Cloud VMware Engine service, which recently became generally available. This first-party offering lets you run a fully managed VMware environment so you can easily lift and shift your existing on-premises VMware based workloads into Google Cloud with no changes to your apps, tools or processes. Or perhaps you need to run Microsoft and Windows workloads. Google Cloud offers a first-class experience for these, too. Customers cite reliability and performance advantages as reasons they initially chose Google Cloud for migrating these workloads. They can also leverage the platform’s unique features—sole-tenant nodes, CPU overcommit, containerization, and managed services—to reduce their overall license spend. Further, Google Cloud provides an opinionated path to modernization to further reduce licensing costs and move to open-source alternatives.As SAP customers continue to adopt Google Cloud, we are continuously innovating to improve ease of migration, performance and scalability as well as lower barriers to entry for analytics and machine learning. Recently, we updated our SAP HANA certifications to include Google Compute Engine’s N2 family of VM instances, based on 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. These N2 VMs improve performance and reduce waste with better alignment with SAP licensing increments. We also added SAP NetWeaver certifications for AMD-based N2D VM instances with improved performance compared to prior Google Cloud offerings based on our SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) benchmark testing, and at a lower-cost. Finally, in addition to running workloads on Google Cloud Platform, our Bare Metal Solution lets you run specialized workloads such as Oracle databases on dedicated hardware, close to Google Cloud. This can simplify your path of moving from on-premises to cloud, while reducing migration risks and helping you lower overall costs faster. We recently brought Bare Metal Solution to five additional regions, with four more regions on tap by the end of the year. Migrate and manage with easeTo make it easier to rapidly migrate to Google Cloud, today we’re announcing our Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP), publicly available today. Built on feedback from customers and partners, RAMP offers end-to-end migration guidance and training, as well as incentives to help you offset a significant portion of your migration cost. RAMP also brings together a full suite of tools for every phase of the migration journey to accelerate the process.And once your workloads are on Google Cloud, you don’t want to have to choose between performance and cost, or functionality and ease of use. Our goal is to create a platform that delivers terrific performance, that is easy to use, for a great price. That’s why we built Active Assist, a portfolio of intelligent tools and capabilities to help you manage complexity in your cloud operations. Active Assist leverages data, machine learning, automation, and intelligence to help customers focus on three key areas: making proactive improvements to your cloud with smart recommendations, preventing mistakes from happening in the first place with better analysis, and helping you figure out why something went wrong with intuitive troubleshooting tools. To learn more about Active Assist, be sure to check out our Next OnAir session, CMP100: Cloud is Complex. Managing it Shouldn’t Be. New security controlsWe want you to be able to operate your mission critical workloads securely, efficiently, and effectively, and we strive to simplify and reduce toil along the way. Today we’re simplifying the way you can use Google Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.We’re announcing the beta release of Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, a bundle of products and services that helps protect your internet-facing applications for a monthly subscription fee. We’re making curated Named IP Lists available in beta. We’re expanding our set of pre-configured WAF rules with beta rules for Remote File Inclusion (RFI), Local File Inclusion (LFI), and Remote Code Execution (RCE).You can learn more about our security announcements here. Infrastructure is hard; Google Cloud makes it easyBuilding and managing the right infrastructure to power your workloads can be hard—we know, we do it day in, day out, at a scale that few other providers can lay claim to. Thankfully, building and managing your cloud infrastructure doesn’t have to be difficult—simply build your environment on top of Google Cloud, and automatically gain from our global presence, robust network, industry-leading compute and storage hardware, and intelligent, automated management capabilities. To learn more about Google Cloud infrastructure, register for Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir, and check out over 50 infrastructure keynote, breakout and spotlight sessions that go live this week.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Armor: Introducing 3 key features to protect your websites and applications
With the seemingly never-ending list of threats, keeping your websites and applications secure is a constant challenge. At Google, we strive to help you operate your mission critical workloads securely and efficiently, while reducing toil along the way. Over the first half of this year we’ve made several critical features and capabilities generally available for Google Cloud Armor, includingWAF rules, geo-based access controls, a custom rules language, support for CDN Origins servers, and support for hybrid deployment scenarios. At Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir we’re simplifying the way you can use Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts as well as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.We’re announcing the beta release of Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, a bundle of products and services that helps protect your internet-facing applications for a predictable monthly subscription fee. We’re making Google-curated Named IP Lists available as a beta. We’re continuing to expand our set of pre-configured WAF rules by launching beta rules for Remote File Inclusion (RFI), Local File Inclusion (LFI), and Remote Code Execution (RCE).Cloud Armor: DDoS Prevention and WAF.Introducing Cloud Armor Managed Protection PlusCloud Armor Managed Protection Plus leverages the edge of Google’s network, as well as a set of products and services from across Google Cloud, to help protect your applications from DDoS attacks and targeted exploit attempts. With Managed Protection, you can now benefit from the same scale and expertise Google employs to protect your applications and mission critical services from malicious activity on the internet.Managed Protection tiers (visible to customers enrolled in beta)Managed Protection is available in two service tiers: Standard and Plus. All existing Cloud Armor users, as well as workloads behind any of our global load balancers, are automatically enrolled in Managed Protection Standard. At this level, you get Google-scale volumetric and protocol-based DDoS protection for any of your globally load balanced applications and services, as well as access to Cloud Armor WAF and layer 7 (L7) filtering capabilities, including the pre-configured WAF rules subject to usage based pricing based on rules, policies, and requests. Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, which is now in beta, is a subscription service with a predictable, enterprise-friendly monthly pricing model that mitigates cost risk from defending against a large L7 DDoS attack. Managed Protection Plus streamlines and bundles in DDoS protection, Cloud Armor WAF, and other future value added services. Customers that subscribe to Managed Protection Plus will get access to DDoS and WAF services, and curated rule sets for a predictable monthly price based on the size of a deployment. Since Cloud Armor WAF usage is included in Managed Protection Plus, subscribers no longer need to worry about the number of queries processed or the size of an L7 attack. Managed Protection Plus subscribers will also have access to a growing list of advanced capabilities, including Named IP Lists and future Google-curated rule sets and services. Sign up your projects for access to the beta.Managed Protection Plus subscription (visible to customers enrolled in the beta).Introducing Named IP Lists Named IP Lists, now in beta, are Google-curated rule sets containing a pre-configured list of IP addresses that can be referenced and reused across policies and projects. We’re starting with providing Named IP Lists that have source IP ranges for common upstream service providers that many of our users would want to allow through their Cloud Armor security policies.Named IP Lists.Customers often have to configure Cloud Armor security policies with a large set of IP ranges to allow traffic from an upstream provider. With Named IP Lists, customers no longer have to self-manage the list of their upstream providers’ IP addresses and instead can rely on Google to curate and keep up to date the list of IPs. We’re now working with a growing list of service providers to ensure that customers can seamlessly permit traffic from third-party services through a Cloud Armor security policy without having to keep track of the service providers’ changing lists of source IPs. You can now refer to these Named IP Lists while crafting custom rules. The underlying list of IPs is kept up to date by regular syncs with the third-party service providers’ APIs.New WAF rules: RFI, LFI, RCEAs part of our effort to expand the scope of the pre-configured WAF rules to all Cloud Armor customers, we are making RFI, LFI, and RCE rules available as a beta. Collectively, these rules contain industry standard signatures from the ModSecurity core Rule Set to help mitigate the Command Injection class vulnerabilities while enhancing the out-of-the-box coverage for OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities as well.Like the other pre-configured WAF rules, the new rules contain dozens of sub-signatures and are tunable on a per-application basis by end users. As usual, a rich set of telemetry including per-request logging, near real-time request volume metrics, and correlated security findings are sent to Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Security Command Center respectively. ConclusionGoogle Cloud Armor is helping protect a rapidly growing set of customers’ mission critical workloads while helping support their compliance requirements, like PCI DSS, for their Google Cloud deployments. With the capabilities and services we announced this week, you can simplify your deployments and reduce operational overhead when integrating with upstream partners and service providers.More resources:Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus beta sign-up formNamed IP Lists documentationWAF Rule Tuning GuideCloud Armor product page
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
RAMP up your cloud adoption with new assessment and migration program
Today’s enterprises are under increased pressure to migrate to the cloud. Maybe an enterprise has an upcoming data center contract or hardware refresh cycle that they want to avoid. Perhaps developers are hitting performance thresholds because they don’t have enough capacity, or because procuring hardware takes too long. Or a migration might be triggered by an acquisition, licensing and support issues, or compliance and security concerns. And of course, businesses around the world have been impacted by the global pandemic, causing massive demand to innovate and modernize right now.Helping solve your unique challenges is our top priority. Migrating to the cloud must be simple and provide clear advantages. To help ease the complex challenges our customers are facing, we are launching the Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP), a holistic, end-to-end migration program that enables a simpler and faster path to success for our customers and partners.Repeatable processes, predictable resultsOver the years, we’ve learned a lot from listening to our customers and helping them migrate to Google Cloud. It has been interesting to learn from their experiences with other cloud providers about why certain projects succeed where others fail. In many cases, the success of cloud migration projects is determined by the ability to accurately and efficiently assess project requirements and dependencies up front. Organizations that take the time to do a complete, thorough analysis of their IT environments are consistently more successful in their cloud projects. By understanding their requirements, organizations can make informed decisions, allowing them to create a more comprehensive migration plan with improved priorities. Many customers tell us that Google Cloud is the easiest platform to build on and work with. To help with your migration planning, we’ve standardized our process into a phased model with predictable steps and repeatable outcomes:Assess and evaluate your IT landscape and workloadsPlan what can move, what should move, and in what orderMigrate by picking a path, and get startedOptimize your operations and save on costsWe want to help you reduce risk and costs while accelerating your success by providing a clear path to business value. To simplify your migration journey across each phase, RAMP is built on six key pillars to meet your cloud adoption and onboarding needs:Guidance – Migration best practices for business and technical leadership including white papers, reference architectures, and CIO guides for application migration, data center transformation, and large-scale migration.Training – Advanced labs and training resources to get you startedTools – Google Cloud-native tools and partners to make assessment and migration easier, faster, and more efficientPartners – Thousands of trusted partners to help you move to, build, and work in Google CloudGoogle Cloud Professionals – Hands-on with Google Cloud subject matter experts including Google Professional ServicesOffers – Customer and partner incentives for workload migrationGet started with your cloud migrationMigrating to the cloud should be easy, even if your project is large and has lots of moving parts. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to migrate—with RAMP, we want to make sure it works right for you. To help get things off the ground, we offer a free discovery and assessment so you can start crafting a migration plan. In addition, here are some other potential first steps you can take as you embark on your migration journey, all of which we’re eager to help you with: Review the material provided as part of RAMPMeet with partners, customer engineers and solution architectsPerform a discovery and assessment of your IT landscapeCraft a pilot for 100 low-risk VMsExperience the ease of migration and power of running VMs in Google CloudCreate a detailed cloud architecture and migration plan for your remaining workloadsOur team has helped scores of enterprises migrate to the cloud. Let your business be the next one we help. To get started, click here to estimate your cloud migration costs with a free assessment.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
Helping teach a community cloud skills with Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification
“Unconventional” doesn’t begin to describe Joy Payton’s career path in technology. Before becoming the Data Education Supervisor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adjunct faculty member at Yeshiva University, Joy spent 10 years working as a full-time volunteer in prisons, schools, and homeless shelters across Spain, Bolivia, and El Salvador. While Joy was always interested in tech, her time volunteering showed her the power of education and its ability to change people’s lives at every level.“I came back to full-time work because I love technology and I love education,” Joy said. “I’m lucky enough to combine the two.” But Joy still has that passion for helping underserved communities. She recently earned her Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification to grow professionally, but is also excited to use the skills she’s learned to help everyone she’s teaching—from a wide variety of backgrounds—work with the latest technology so they can thrive in a cloud-first world.“It’s exciting knowing that I have the skills in Google Cloud Platform and can help other people at all levels,” Joy explained. “I can really help someone grow their skills that will help them make a living, to help them provide for their families, and also improve a lot of organizations in under-resourced areas that are doing really important, good things.” With her certification, Joy has inspired others outside of her work to earn their own Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification and change their career path. And these certifications have measurable results. An independent third-party research organization found that almost one-in-five certified individuals were able to switch to a job that better utilizes cloud skills. In fact, 70% of Google Cloud certified individuals who applied for jobs received at least one job offer, with 42% percent receiving two or more. Additionally the Google Cloud certification impact report found that 17%, or almost one-in-five, of individuals received a raise at their existing job after becoming certified. “I had a conversation with someone who has a lot of information science experience but is not a programmer… and she said, ‘Can I pursue this?’” Joy recalled. “I said, ‘Absolutely. This initial associate-level exam is a great overview of lots of different things… If nothing else, this will give you a chance to learn a lot, figure out what parts you like, and what parts you don’t.’” Joy also wants to use the skills she’s built with her certification to help nonprofit organizations that serve under-resourced communities. “At the end of the day what I would love to do is go back into some of these lower-resourced areas and say, ‘Hey, NGOs [non-governmental organizations], I would like to help you boost your signal. Let’s take a look at your data.’’’ Joy explained. “‘And not only can I help you, NGO, can I help the community you serve? What’s the population you serve? What are they like?’ Because the wonderful thing about technology is not the formal degrees you have, it’s what you can do.” Want to learn more about Joy’s story? Watch our full conversation below: If Joy has inspired you to learn more about the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification, register for our no-cost “Next Steps: Associate Cloud Engineer Certification (ACE)” Cloud Study Jam session at Next ‘20: OnAir on July 29. Ready to start preparing for your Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification? Sign up to receive a six-week learning path designed to help you prepare.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform
Creating cloud ready environments with Azure landing zones
Moving to the cloud creates an opportunity to pause and think about how to operate the IT environment. Most organizations in the world have seen their ability to innovate and adopt cloud technologies slowed down by the rules and operating model that governs their existing IT environments. Organizations have their own set of processes, tools, and dedicated staff to ensure that these environments can continuously support business needs.
With the move to a cloud environment, IT has access to new tools and processes that unblock IT operations. By revisiting the operating model, technology-focused teams and Azure partners can help organizations improve agility, cost, and scale.
Azure landing zones in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure are designed to accelerate efforts to map, modernize, or even reimagine the operating model. Azure landing zones help build a cloud environment aligned to the optimal technology operations specific to your needs in the cloud.
As the following analogy illustrates, a standardized foundation can’t fit the variety of needs seen by organizations and operating models. Respecting any need for options and customization, we provide a range of landing zone architectures and implementation options. Organizations can use the implementation option that most clearly aligns to their current cloud strategy. As the approach to managing, operating, and governing the cloud platform matures, you can support your customers and refactor their Azure landing zone implementation to reflect changes to their operating model.
Landing zone analogy
The cloud environment is similar to laying a foundation in any construction project. All architects have to consider common decisions when designing and laying the foundation for any building. They all share things like concrete, rebar, and conduits to bring in necessary utilities, like plumbing or electricity. While foundations contain similar elements and considerations, they may have other considerations that make them unique and wildly different. The foundation for a house is concise and well-contained. The foundation for a stadium is larger and more complex. The foundation for a bridge is even more complex and may require stricter governance and performance standards. Designing the right foundation requires an understanding of what that foundation will support.
The cloud environments, created by Azure landing zones, are very similar as they are all built from the same common design elements. While commonalities exist across all environments, each landing zone implementation is customized to support a specific type of structure or cloud operating model. Like traditional foundations, the cloud environment will require review, modification, and iteration by an experienced architect to ensure that it supports the organization’s long-term needs.
When getting started or rethinking operations, Azure landing zones help accelerate the design, review, and implementation of the cloud environment. When working with your customers to accelerate their journey, Azure landing zones can guide your collaboration, as you validate, customize, and expand Azure landing zones to build the foundation for their digital transformation.
Azure landing zones
Azure landing zones provide a clear architecture, reference implementations, and code samples to create the initial cloud environment. This environment will support all other adoption efforts by consistently applying a set of common design areas. These design areas represent how the operating model is supported in the cloud.
Azure landing zones implementation options provides a reference implementation or approach to help make decisions regarding networking, identity, resource organization, governance, operations, and other design areas that impact the environment. The options provide a structure, which organizations can follow, to ensure all minimal design considerations have been made and decisions are reflected consistently across the cloud environment.
Azure landing zones implementation options
Azure landing zones are designed to meet our customers distinct needs based on today’s requirements, and then provide a clear path to customize and mature any personalized landing zone implementation. This starts with choosing an landing zone implementation option, which will quickly deploy a starting point for the cloud environment.
Some of the Azure landing zones are small by design to encourage skills development and customization. The “start small” implementation options establish an infrastructure-as-code approach and then provide the IT team with a series of decisions guides. This approach helps guide the thoughts and decisions that need to happen. This iterative approach builds the foundation in parallel to the cloud adoption plan to help the team make concrete decisions, as cloud experience matures.
For organizations with well-defined operating models, the “enterprise-scale” implementation option fills in those decisions. This option includes very detailed solutions for security, governance, and operations. These solutions are automated and enforced by Azure Policy and other governance tools in the reference implementations. When starting with enterprise-scale, organizations can reduce the number of decision points and implement a proven cloud operating model faster.
Azure landing zones development
Regardless of the landing zone chosen, the Ready methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure helps guide organizations while developing the skills needed to create and support their cloud environment. The theory behind Azure landing zones brings well-established development practices to the infrastructure management function.
As Azure landing zones are implemented and customized, the team will develop skills in general Azure architecture. It is also important to learn how to refactor landing zones to meet new business and technical requirements and how test-driven development can ensure high-quality changes are adding value to the cloud environment. You’ll also experience how the governance tools in Azure can be used to create an environment factory to provide your customers with the rapid deployment of security, well-governed, well-managed azure landing zones.
As your customer’s cloud adoption efforts advance, you can use the guidance found in the Govern and Manage methodologies to further help them mature their governance and operational management postures. As these processes and disciplines mature, Azure landing zones and the suite of Azure governance tools provide a convenient approach to apply changes to existing environments. This allows the collective technology teams to mature governance and management at the right pace, while ensuring that such progress isn’t stalled by technical compatibility challenges.
Learn more
To learn more about Azure landing zones, check out the Ready section under the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) including:
Read Azure landing zones defined.
Review the Azure landing zone design areas and begin thinking about your landing zone requirements.
Evaluate the Azure landing zone implementation options to find the deployment approach that best aligns with your needs.
If you are ready to help your customers deploy Azure landing zones, the following resources will help you get started:
Start small and expand: Deploy the CAF migration landing zone blueprint to start building out a migration ready environment. Add the CAF blueprint to begin adding governance tooling to any environment.
Start with enterprise-scale: For a more robust implementation, deploy the CAF enterprise-scale landing zones leveraging the reference implementation.
Third-party, multi-cloud option: Use CAF Terraform modules to deploy landing zones.
Already have workloads on Azure and want to assess them against best practices? Check out the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review.
Grow your business and strengthen your position, as a trusted cloud advisor, by leveraging Azure landing zones to create the right cloud environment to support your customer’s cloud adoption needs! Building on the right environment, ensures that your own and your customers’ modern operations are able to support the innovation and migration needs of the organization. Adopting the cloud on top of Azure landing zones is the first step to unlocking the agility, scale, and cost benefits of the cloud across your customer’s IT portfolio.
Quelle: Azure
