Februar 2021 - Seite 5 von 40 - Cloud Computing Köln

Blogging on WordPress.com is all about sharing your unique voice, and starting today, you can extend that to another platform: Anchor. We previously shared some tips and tricks for getting started with a podcast on WordPress.com and are thrilled to share this new option.

Anchor, part of the Spotify family, powers the most podcasts worldwide, with free tools to easily create, distribute, and monetize, no matter how you record — including podcasting with your WordPress.com blog!

Creating an Anchor podcast from your site is free and seamless. After all, you’ve already got a whole blog’s worth of written content to use. With Anchor, all that’s left is converting your words into audio, which can be as easy as using your blog to quickly record a text-to-speech version.

Blog-to-podcast benefits

Making a podcast out of your blog breathes new life into the work you’re already doing — you can make your unique blogging voice actually audible! By converting your blog into a podcast, you’re leveraging the power of audio to grow your brand, audience, and income — without any extra work. Hundreds of millions of listeners (and counting) consume podcasts every day, and they’re constantly looking for fresh voices and perspectives. Whether you have a built-in WordPress.com audience to bring over or not, an audio extension of your blog means another avenue for exposure — to your existing followers and new ones. And then there’s monetization: Anchor Sponsorships lets you read ads in your own voice during a break in your podcast; Anchor’s Listener Support feature, meanwhile, allows your biggest fans to support your work via a recurring monthly donation.

A podcast version of your WordPress.com blog also introduces an entirely different audience to your work, and frees listeners up to do what readers aren’t able to: multitask! There are, of course, many benefits to readers fully immersing themselves in the written content of a blog. But audio enables listeners to consume your work while performing everyday activities, like going for a walk, driving, cooking, or just relaxing. Last but not least, turning your blog into a podcast unlocks it for those who are visually impaired or may otherwise have difficulty accessing the written version.

Let your words do the talking

Connect your site to Anchor and your existing blog posts will import as episode drafts

Your blog can almost literally do the talking for you with direct text-to-speech, similar to an audio transcription of an article. This is a great option for blogs less dependent on top-notch production value and more focused on the content itself — such as well-researched news, sports, essays, and wellness stories. With text-to-speech conversion, your blog can be podcast-ready in a few minutes.

Converting your blog post to podcast-ready audio and distributing your new show takes just a few minutes.

Of course, if you want to create a podcast that highlights your actual speaking voice, you can record it by reading a transcript of your blog post, which will be imported directly into Anchor for easy access.

You can get more creative, too, by using your blog as a jumping-off point to host an audio discussion about the blog topic. Or let your blog serve as inspiration for a more traditional podcast, where you host and interview guests, record scripted segments, and much more, in ways amplified by audio!

Create a podcast today

There are a number of different ways to turn your WordPress.com blog into a podcast. The amount of work it takes can be surprisingly minimal — or more hands-on if you like. Whether you just want to create an audio version of your blog, expand your blog concept to a different platform, or simply try your hand (and voice) at a new medium, there’s a podcast structure for you. Most importantly, your written work means you’re not starting from scratch.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for creating a podcast on Anchor from your existing pages and posts on WordPress.com:

You can also convert all of your newly published pages and posts into podcasts as well.

If you’re looking for inspiration, a perfect example is TheDesignAir, whose blog covers aviation design and product news. Check out their text-to-speech podcast with Anchor:

Ready to turn your blog into an Anchor podcast for free? Get started by creating your Anchor account. Happy podcasting!
Quelle: RedHat Stack

23. Februar 2021

da Agency

What’s in a name? Understanding the Google Cloud network “edge”

Google is dedicated to building infrastructure that lets you modernize and run your workloads, and connect with more users, no matter where they are in the world. Part of this infrastructure is our extensive global network, which provides best-in-class connectivity to Google Cloud customers, and our edge network, which lets you connect with ISPs and end customers. When it comes to choosing how you connect to Google Cloud, we provide a variety of flexible options that optimize performance and cost. But when it comes to the Google network edge, what constitutes an edge point? Depending on your requirements and connectivity preferences, your organization may view different demarcation points in our network as the “edge,” each of which performs traffic handoffs in their own way. For example, a telco customer might consider the edge to be where Google Global Caches (GGC) are located, rather than an edge point of presence (POP) where peering occurs. In this blog post, we describe the various network points of presence within our edge, how they connect to Google Cloud, and how traffic handoffs occur. Armed with this information, you can make a more informed decision about how best to connect to Google Cloud.Click to enlargeGCP regions and zonesThe first thing to think about when considering your edge options is where your workloads run in Google Cloud. Google Cloud hosts compute resources in multiple locations worldwide, which comprise different regions and zones. A region includes data centers in a specific geographical location where you can host your resources. Regions have three or more zones. For example, the us-west1 region denotes a region on the west coast of the United States that has three zones: us-west1-a, us-west1-b, and us-west1-c.Click to enlargeEdge POPsOur edge POPs are where we connect Google’s network to the Internet via peering. We’re present on over 180 internet exchanges and at over 160 interconnection facilities around the world. Google operates a large, global meshed network that connects our edge POPs to our data centers. By operating an extensive global network of interconnection points, we can bring Google traffic closer to our peers, thereby reducing their costs, latency, and providing end users with a better experience. Google directly interconnects with all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the vast majority of traffic from Google’s network to our customers is transmitted via direct interconnections with the client’s ISP.Cloud CDNCloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) uses Google’s globally distributed edge POPs to cache Cloud content close to end users. Cloud CDN relies on infrastructure at edge POPs that Google uses to cache content associated with its own web properties that serve billions of users. This approach brings Cloud content closer to customers and end users, and connects individual POPs into as many networks as possible. This reduces latency and ensures that we have capacity for large traffic spikes (for example, for streaming media events or holiday sales).Click to enlargeCloud Interconnect POPsDedicated Interconnect provides direct physical connections between your on-premises network and Google’s network. Dedicated Interconnect enables you to efficiently transfer large amounts of data between networks. For Dedicated Interconnect, your network must physically meet Google’s network in a supported colocation facility, also known as an Interconnect connection location. This facility is where a vendor, the colocation facility provider, provisions a circuit between your network and a Google point of presence. You may also use Partner Interconnect to connect to Google through a supported service provider. Today, you can provision an Interconnect to Google Cloud in these 95+ locations.Edge nodes, or Google Global CacheOur edge nodes represent the tier of Google’s infrastructure closest to Google’s users, operating from over 1,300 cities in more than 200 countries and territories. With our edge nodes, network operators and ISPs host Google-supplied caches inside their network. Static content that’s popular with the host’s user base (such as YouTube and Google Play) is temporarily cached on these edge nodes, thus allowing users to retrieve this content from much closer to their location. This creates a better experience for users and reduces the host’s overall network capacity requirements.Region extensionsFor certain specialized workloads, such as Bare Metal Solution, Google hosts servers in colocation facilities close to GCP regions to provide low latency (typically <2ms) connectivity to workloads running on Google Cloud. These facilities are referred to as region extensions. To the edge and backAn edge is in the eye of the beholder. Despite this already vast investment in infrastructure, network, and partnership, we believe that the journey towards the edge has just begun. As Google Cloud expands in reach and capabilities, the landscape of applications is evolving again, with traits such as critical reliability, ultra low latency, embedded AI, as well as tight integration and interoperability with 5G networks and beyond. We are looking forward to driving the future evolution of network edge as well as edge cloud capabilities. Stay tuned as we continue to roll out new edge sites, capabilities, and services.We hope this post clarifies Google’s network edge offerings, and how they help connect your applications running in Google Cloud to your end users. For more about Google Cloud’s networking capabilities, check out these Google Cloud networking tutorials and solutions.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

23. Februar 2021

da Agency

Stay informed by customizing your budgets

TL;DR: By default, budget alerts only go to Billing Account Administrators and Billing Account Users. You can easily add up to 5 more custom emails by using a Cloud Monitoring channel. Try to send to groups, not individuals!Budgets and alerts fit well into the inform phase of the FinOps lifecycle for visibilityMy last post went over how to set up budgets and why you should definitely set them up (probably in too much detail). It’s definitely important to have a budget, but alerts for these budgets only go to Billing Account Administrators and Billing Account Users. So what happens when you want to keep more people informed of the budget status?Well, you could add them to the billing account as users or administrators, but then they might end up with more permissions than you want them to have. For example, users can link projects to a billing account, and that’s not something you may want to allow a bunch of people to do (least privilege and such). Instead, thanks to a new feature, you can easily add up to 5 email addresses that you specify to get alerts as well! So, let’s walk through exactly that.It’s basically just one checkboxFirst, you can go through setting up a budget just like the last post covered, or you can modify an existing budget. As you get to the end of setting up the budget, you’ll see this checkbox.That’s the checkbox I mentioned earlierThe next step should be pretty obvious, so go ahead and check that box! Now you’ll have to select a workspace with the notifications channels you want to use.These workspaces are for Cloud Monitoring (previously Stackdriver) and are basically ways to help you organize what you’re monitoring. You can read more about workspaces here but we don’t really need to know any of the finer details about them to add these budget alert emails. Chances are, you may not have a workspace if you haven’t worked with Cloud Monitoring, so let’s pause here and go set up a workspace.Okay, so maybe it’s more than just one checkboxThis part is pretty easy as well, but there’s an important note here. Workspaces are attached to projects, not billing accounts, so you’ll need to have a project that you want to use with this. I recommend creating a new project where you’re the owner and you just use it for these notifications. We’ll look at some other things in the future that require a project so you can use that same project for those assets as well!If you’re not sure how to create a new project, head to the console home screen. At the top left-ish, you’ll see a project selector that shows you the currently selected project. Clicking on that will pop up some options to choose a project or create a new one.If you haven’t created a workspace before, just use the left-nav and click on Monitoring under Operations to automatically create one for your current project.Creating a workspace may take a few moments, so grab a cup of tea while you waitOnce you’ve created a new workspace, you can go back to creating/editing a budget and once again, check that box!Those of you with a keen eye will notice it’s still the same boxHurray, you’ve now selected a workspace, but you still need to select our emails. Opening up the notification channels box will show an empty list if you haven’t added any notification channels (especially so if this is a new workspace) so you’ll need to follow that link that says “Manage Notification Channels” which will hopefully open in a new window.Hey, this is more than just one checkboxAlright, I’m sorry for dragging you back and forth but we’re almost done! I also find it a bit easier to interact with from the budget side rather than poking around the Cloud Monitoring interface. Either way, you should see a list of potential channels, such as Slack, webhooks, email, and more. Go ahead and use that “Add New” button next to email, which will cause this to pop up.Each email you add will need the email and a display nameSo, go through this process and add the emails you’re looking to send budget alerts to. One best practice worth noting:This really makes me appreciate having great friends in the officeIn general, you should try to use groups instead of individual users whenever possible. Whether it’s permissions or these budget alerts, it’s likely your teams will change over time and it’s a lot easier to manage a group through G Suite or whatever other interface than it is to constantly go back and update budgets.It’s also worth noting that if you spam a ton of people with budget alerts, no one will care about this budget alert. So think about who in your organization/team will actually care about these alerts. Will it be someone from the engineering team who can shut down the resources? Or perhaps someone from the finance team who wants to measure the spending? Maybe even a centralized FinOps team? Either way, you have the power to choose what makes the most sense for each budget!Go through and add a few emails and once you’re done, go back to the window where you had your budget. There’s a little “refresh” icon at the bottom of the selector so you can reload the list and add the emails you just entered.By using group emails, you won’t have to update the budget itselfSelect the emails that you want to be notified, save your budget, and you’re done!By default, this will be enabledIf you only want to send alerts to the emails you set up manually, go ahead and uncheck this option. Especially when creating lots of budgets, it may make sense to let your billing admins and users avoid receiving those alerts. Specific budgets, such as ones that cover one of your company’s applications, are likely to be more useful for the application team rather than for everyone on the billing account.Alright, technically it was several checkboxesSo, as you can see it’s relatively straightforward to add more people to your budget alerts. On top of that, you can add plenty of notification channels to your workspace, and then choose the right channels for each budget you have. Each budget can only have up to 5 channels, so that’s another good reason to use group emails.That’s an easy way to add more people/groups to your budget alerts, which makes budgets even more useful. You can read the full documentation here if you want more details. Now you can sit back, relax, know that the right teams will be notified about your budgets.]Stay tuned for the next post where we get to automate things with programmatic budget notifications!Related ArticleProtect your Google Cloud spending with budgetsBudgets are the first and simplest way to get a handle on your cloud spend. In this post, we break down a budget and help you set up aler…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

23. Februar 2021

da Agency

At your service! With schedule-based autoscaling, VMs are at the ready

We believe that managing even the most demanding VM-based application in Google Cloud should be easy. For instance, in a Compute Engine environment, managed instance groups (MIGs) offer autoscaling that lets you automatically change an instance group’s capacity based on current load, so you can rightsize your environment—and your costs. Autoscaling adds more virtual machines (VMs) to a MIG when there is more load, and deletes VMs when the need for VMs is lower.But if your VMs take several minutes to initialize, you might not have sufficient capacity to respond effectively to sudden increased demand. And chances are, this happens on a regular basis, for example, every morning when your users wake up and start to use your service, or when there’s a special event like a marketing campaign or a time-bound customer offer. If only you could tell the autoscaler to spin up more VMs in anticipation of those busy periods… Well, now you can!Introducing schedule-based autoscalingCompute Engine’s new schedule-based autoscaling lets you improve the availability of your workloads by scheduling capacity ahead of anticipated load. If you run your workload on a managed instance group (MIG), you can schedule the required number of virtual machine (VM) instances for recurring load patterns as well as one-off events. Use scaling schedules if your workload takes a long time to initialize and you want to scale out in advance of anticipated load spikes.Getting startedYou can create a schedule using the Google Cloud Console. Select an autoscaled MIG from the instance groups page and click Edit group. Under the Autoscaling policy section, click Add a new scaling schedule.The Cloud Console allows you to check the status and manage all your existing scaling schedules.You can also configure schedule-based autoscaling programmatically. Here’s an example command written using the gcloud CLI:For more details, including configuration using the API, refer to the documentation.Try schedule-based autoscalingSchedule-based autoscaling is available in Preview across all regions. For more information on how you can manage your scaling schedules, visit the documentation.Related ArticleScale in at your own pace with Compute Engine autoscaler controlsWith new scale-in controls for Compute Engine managed instance groups, you can control the rate at which VMs are turned down when load de…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform