The overwhelmed person’s guide to Google Cloud: week of May 9

The content in this blog post was originally published last week as a members-only email to the Google Cloud Innovators community. To get this content directly in your inbox (not to mention lots of other benefits), sign up to be an Innovator today.

New and shiny

Three new things to know this week

• Good Cloud services make hard things easier. Looking to send traffic directly into a VPC from Cloud Run? Up until now, you needed to set up a Serverless VPC Access connector. No more. Direct VPC egress is now GA and gives better performance. See the blog post, and docs.
• Find problems before your users do. I like our synthetic monitoring feature in Cloud Monitoring, and now you can create a broken-link checker that drops screenshots into Cloud Storage. See what your customer would see, and fix broken links before they cause a big problem.
• Artifact Registry adds support for downloads, immutable tags. With Container Registry riding into the sunset next year, all eyes are on Artifact Registry as the center of gravity. And this service keeps getting better. Now you can download files for standard or remote repos, set immutable tags for Docker repos, and scan for more language vulnerabilities.

Watch this

Instrument your Cloud Run app with Prometheus or OpenTelemetry metrics. Great session here from Lee and Kyle where you’ll learn about observability, Prometheus, OTel, and Cloud Run’s new sidecar feature.

Community cuts

Every week I round up some of my favorite links from builders around the Google Cloud-iverse. Want to see your blog or video in the next issue? Drop Richard a line!

• Send SMS messages with Cloud Functions for Firebase. I enjoy demonstrations that mash up different platforms, and Amanda does a terrific job showing us how to build a Cloud Function that uses the Vonage API to send SMS messages.
• Build an agent, ???, profit. Even if it’s just for fun, most of us will probably try and build an AI agent. Guillaume offers up an excellent walkthrough of the new Vertex AI Agent Builder. It actually inspired me to try it out too.
• Go behind the scenes on Dataflow. It’s not always required knowledge, but many of us like knowing the behind-the-scenes story about how something works. Vu looks at a paper that digs into the design principles and implementation of Google Cloud Dataflow.

Learn and grow

Three ways to build your cloud muscles this week

• Let’s do boring things that are very important. It’s 2024. We’re talking about accessing data cached in Redis from a Java app? You betcha. For every person building a generative AI app, there are likely fifty others applying this particular pattern. Check out this new code lab for accessing Memorystore data from a Spring Boot app.
• Can AI help us build better tests? Romin wants to build a synthetic monitor for his service. Can he use generative AI? With the new “help me code” button in this Cloud Monitoring experience, it actually works well. Good walkthrough!
• Let’s do complex AI tasks like RLHF, together. We need more “hello world” pieces out there, but we also need the level 400 content that helps us find the next gear. We’ve published a ton of new notebooks with advanced topics like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). This notebook goes step by step through this process with the Llama2 model and Vertex AI services.
• All the Gemini for Google Cloud, all in one place. Romin gets a second shoutout in this newsletter for his outstanding work keeping this curated list of resources up to date. Find product pages, videos, tutorials, blog posts and more that cover Gemini in Google Cloud.

One more thing

It’s time for DORA survey. Make your voice heard! The 2024 DORA survey is open, and we’re expanding on the largest body of research into good software delivery practices. Contribute to his research with your experience.

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