Last month today: GCP in November

December already? Where did November go? Here are some of last month’s highlights, in case you missed them.

What caught your attention in November

This month saw the release of the AI Hub and Kubeflow pipelines, designed for software and data engineers, not just data scientists. These pipelines let you build and share machine learning (ML) model workflows and share them throughout your organization. You’ll find some nice real-world examples in here, mostly based on the TensorFlow-based taxi fare tip prediction model that’s pulled from a Chicago cab public dataset. Get even more detail on Kubeflow pipelines in this explainer.

We also announced Cloud Scheduler, a fully managed cron job service that allows any application to invoke batch, big data and cloud infrastructure operations. Cloud Scheduler offers reliable delivery, fault-tolerant execution and a unified management experience, and lets you invoke schedules through the UI, API or CLI. The product can be used for a number of different use cases such as scheduling database updates and push notifications, triggering CI/CD pipelines, scheduling tasks such as image uploads and sending email, and invoking Cloud Functions.

And industry-standard runtime containerd is also now available in beta on Container-Optimized OS for Kubernetes Engine 1.11. The containerd runtime has a small footprint, plus a modular architecture and plugin mechanisms. It’s also got strong community support and a large user base. Trying out containred in Kubernetes Engine is easy. See Container-Optimized OS with containerd to get started.

Considering cloud storage decisions

On the storage front, two big Hadoop companies merged recently, bringing some decisions to lots of you in IT: Keep using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or consider moving those workloads to the cloud? This breakdown of the pros, cons and best-suited job types for each choice will give you a good picture of what might work best in your environment. Then, once you have moved to the cloud, take a look at these 10 tips for improving performance.

Check your cloud skills

We also brought a Google Cloud certification challenge from our solutions director Miles Ward to you last month, with a couple of free options for labs and training to prepare yourself for the Professional Cloud Architect exam. This is a useful way to feel productive and challenged before the end of the year, with the offers available through Dec. 31.

See you next year!