Last Month Today: GCP in October

This month on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) blog, we explored some new features, products and services, along with welcoming users to Google Cloud Next in London. Here are the highlights from October.

What caught your attention

• The PyTorch deep learning framework is now supported throughout more of Google Cloud’s AI platforms and services. This coincides with Facebook’s release of PyTorch 1.0 in preview. With this news, we’re now offering a new VM image and an extended TensorRT package in Kubeflow so it’s easier to support serving PyTorch models. Other features coming soon include deeper TensorBoard integration and the ability to connect PyTorch to Cloud TPUs.

• Go 1.11 is available in beta now for the App Engine standard environment. For Go developers using App Engine, this means that previous restrictions around organizing code and using an SDK no longer apply. Find some helpful tips here, plus a tutorial and video to help you get started with this new runtime.

• Container-native load balancing is now available for apps running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Kubernetes on Compute Engine. Containers no longer have to depend on older, VM-centric types of load balancing, and get performance and visibility benefits, among others, using an abstraction layer of network endpoint groups (NEGs).

Connecting the cloud

• There were a few developments on the cloud networking front announced at Next London this month, like the beta launch of Cloud NAT for network address translation and the beta launch of Firewall Rules Logging so you can audit and analyze how your firewall rules are actually working. Plus, we also announced managed TLS certificates for HTTPS load balancers, and a crop of new load balancing features to give you more flexibility, performance and control.

• We took an even closer look at Cloud NAT to offer more details on this new, fully managed service. It allows you to keep your cloud apps private, while still able to access the internet when needed for updates and legitimate business needs, and brings more security to your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) on GCP. Cloud NAT works for both VMs and containers.

Learn more about the Google Cloud network with this infographic.

Securing the cloud

• The new firewall rules logging announced this month helps with network security tasks like debugging, forensics, and auditing and compliance. This tool lets you track every connection that’s been allowed or denied in VM instances in near real-time. Firewall rules logging generates multiple records through this process, which can then be aggregated and analyzed in tools like Stackdriver or Cloud Pub/Sub.

• The Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners announcement arrived in October, too, designed to bring Google-level identity and access management (IAM) features to enterprise app developers. Those include customizable authentication and advanced user security that can be easily added to web and mobile apps.