Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions are the cornerstone of Google's cloud infrastructure, and over the past four years, have grown in number to 22, with 67 zones across 16 countries, delivering high-performance, low latency, zero emissions, cloud-based services to users throughout the world.
Introducing the newest GCP regions
As previously announced, over the next year Google will open regions in Jakarta, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Seoul, and Warsaw. And this week announced they we will launch additional cloud regions in Delhi (India), Doha (Qatar), Melbourne (Australia) and Toronto (Canada). When launched, each region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions, launch with a portfolio of key GCP products, and offer lower latency to nearby users. Delhi, Melbourne and Toronto are the second regions within those markets enabling in-country disaster recovery for mission critical applications.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/infrastructure/new-google-cloud-regions-for-2020
Jeff Barr discusses AWS's Cloud AI Developer recognition in Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant placing AWS in highest place in terms of Ability to execute and completeness of vision.
Microsoft Released Azure Sphere to the general public last week.
Azure Sphere—Microsoft’s integrated security solution for IoT devices and equipment—is widely available for the development and deployment of secure, connected devices. Azure Sphere’s general availability milestone couldn’t be timelier. From consumer device hacking and botnets to nation state driven cyberterrorism, the complexity of the landscape is accelerating. And as we expand our reliance on IoT devices at home, in our businesses and even in the infrastructure that supports transit and utilities, cybersecurity threats are increasingly real to individuals, businesses and society at large.
From its inception in Microsoft Research to general availability today, Azure Sphere is Microsoft’s answer to these escalating IoT threats. Azure Sphere delivers quick and cost-effective device security for OEMs and organizations to protect the products they sell and the critical equipment that they rely on to drive new business value.
As organizations continue to expand their use of IT and the cloud, protecting critical enterprise data becomes extremely important. And if you are a backup admin on Microsoft Azure, being able to efficiently monitor backups on a daily basis is a key requirement to ensuring that your organization has no weaknesses in its last line of defense.
Up until now, you could use a Recovery Services vault to get a bird’s eye view of items being backed up under that vault, along with the associated jobs, policies, and alerts. But as your backup estate expands to span multiple vaults across subscriptions, regions, and tenants, monitoring this estate in real-time becomes a non-trivial task, requiring you to write your own customizations.
Now there's a simpler way to aggregate information across your entire backup estate into a single pane of glass, enabling you to quickly identify exactly where to focus your energy on?
Microsoft were pleased to share the preview of Backup Explorer. Backup Explorer is a built-in Azure Monitor Workbook enabling you to have a single pane of glass for performing real-time monitoring across your entire backup estate on Azure. It comes completely out-of-the-box, with no additional costs, via native integration with Azure Resource Graph and Azure Workbooks.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/backup-explorer-now-available-in-preview/
Google reports : "At Google Cloud, we want you to be able to choose the best VMs for your workloads. Today, we’re excited to announce a new addition to our general purpose VMs: the N2D family, built atop 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors.
N2D VMs are a great option for both general-purpose workloads and workloads that require high memory bandwidth."
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/announcing-the-n2d-vm-family-based-on-amd
In January 2020 Microsoft enforced TLS 1.2 for intra-service traffic in all Azure services. For Azure SQL Database managed instance, this resulted in TLS 1.2 being enforced on outbound connections used for replication and linked server connections to SQL Server.
Because SQL Database managed instance architecture relies on various components that communicate with each other using TLS, versions of SQL Server older than 2016 experienced broken connectivity since they don’t support TLS 1.2 by default. To fix this, apply specific updates that will then allow SQL Server to communicate with SQL Database managed instance using TLS 1.2
Azure IoT Python SDK v2 has just been released with major new improvements. Version 2.1.0 includes two notable changes:
If you upgrade and check out these improvements for yourself, Microsoft are calling for any feedback through Github.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/v2-azure-iot-python-sdk-improvements/
Google's acquisition of Looker allows the cloud giant to offer customers a comprehensive analytics solution that integrates and visualizes insights at every layer of their business.
Looker will strengthen Google Cloud’s analytics and data warehouse capabilities, including BigQuery, enabling our customers to address some of their toughest business challenges, faster—all while maintaining complete control of their data.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-completes-looker-acquisition
AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud. With CloudHSM, you can manage your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. CloudHSM also automatically manages synchronization, high availability and failover within a cluster.
When the service first launched, many customers ran CloudHSM workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which required the CloudHSM client to be installed on the Amazon EC2 instance in order to communicate with the CloudHSM cluster. Today, we see customers who are interested in leveraging CloudHSM for serverless workloads using AWS Lambda, but when using Lambda there is no “instance” to install the CloudHSM client on. This blog post shows a workaround that can be used to satisfy the CloudHSM client installation requirement on Lambda functions to be able to run CloudHSM workloads within these Lambda functions.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-run-aws-cloudhsm-workloads-on-aws-lambda/
Demand for skills in big data and analytics is driving a lot of the hiring efforts at US companies, with most recruiters seeking mid-level developers with between two and five years' experience.
That recruitment climate means mid-level developers are in luck. Some 49% of 5,297 tech hiring leaders – including engineering managers, tech recruiters, and interviewers – report they most often search for mid-level candidates, according to a survey by developer skills matching platform HackerRank
https://www.zdnet.com/article/developer-jobs-these-are-the-coders-who-are-most-in-demand/
Google is making an all out push to enable its cloud platform to support mobile network operators and announced an expansive agreement with AT&T and other networking giants as part of that effort.
The Apache Software Foundation has released Apache Brooklyn 1.0, a production-level release of the open source framework for modeling, monitoring, and managing applications deployed on-premises or in the cloud.
Brooklyn uses YAML blueprints to describe an application and its components. These blueprints, which incorporate policies to manage an application, can be treated as modular components that can be composed and reused in many ways.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has published the results of its annual survey conducted in October 2019. Among the 1337 respondents, 37% were from Europe, 38% from North America and 17% were from Asia. The survey respondents included architects, DevOps managers and backend developers.
1. Kubernetes usage in production is skyrocketing
2. Customers are running at least 2 to 5 Kubernetes clusters in production
3. Public cloud is the most preferred destination while the hybrid cloud is gaining momentum
4. Containers are making their way to the production environments
5. Read More...
Register for this free, 60-minute online event to learn about strategies, insights, and technologies to optimize your hybrid cloud across on-premises, multicloud, and the edge. And, be among the first to hear about the latest innovations in Azure Arc and Azure Stack—two game-changing hybrid cloud offerings from Microsoft.
Join live and learn about:
You’ll also get to ask experts your questions about hybrid cloud during the live Q&A.
https://info.microsoft.com/ww-registration-azure-hybrid-virtual-event.html
Where: Sydney AU
When : 6-7th April 2020
For the first time HashiDays is coming to APAC: get ready for HashiDays Sydney at the Roslyn Packer Theatre on 7 April.
Exchange ideas and technical knowledge, connect with like-minded people, and learn about HashiCorp tools and products.
Want more than one day? Add a Training Day on 6 April to your visit.
https://hashidays.com/
DevOps Talks Conference (DOTC) attracts leaders and engineers who are practicing DevOps in startups and leading-edge enterprise companies. World-class speakers from cutting-edge IT startups and enterprises such as CHEF, AWS, Google, ANZ, NAB present about DevOps, Cyber Security, Containers, Cloud, Serverless, SRE, Blockchain, ChatOps and other advanced High Tech subjects and technologies.
Praised by several articles as being one of the best DevOps Conferences, including two consecutive years by Tech Beacon: “The Best DevOps Conferences of 2019”. Similarly, they were featured by the Net Guru as one of the “17 Must Attend Devops Conferences in 2019”, and HPE’s “16 Devops and System Admin Conferences Worth Your Attention in 2019”.
Some of their previous presentations are available on DevOps Talks Channel,
DevOps Talks Conference, 19-20 March, 2020 Melbourne, Australia
The Melbourne conference will be held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre and workshops will take place on 18th March 2020.
DevOps Talks Conference, 24-25 March, 2020, Auckland, New Zealand
The Auckland conference will be held at the Stamford Plaza Auckland and workshops will take place on 23rd March 2020.
For more details please refer to their website: https://devops.talksplus.com/
Where: Darling Harbour Sydney AU
When : Mar 31 - Apr 2 2020
AWS Summit returns to the International Convention Centre (ICC) Sydney in 2020, with three days of educational and inspirational keynotes, breakout sessions, and customer stories. Learn how cloud technology can help your business lower costs, improve efficiency, and innovate at scale.
Join us at Amazon Innovation Day on Tuesday, 31 March where you will hear inspiring stories from individuals and organisations who are innovating and driving change for social impact.
At AWS Summit on Wednesday, 1 April, our keynote will show how organisations are transforming using the latest cloud technology to deliver an enhanced customer experience. Continue your learning with educational breakout sessions ranging in level from beginner to advanced to help you get started on your cloud transformation journey.
Dive deeper on Thursday, 2 April with a keynote that educates on how to design, build, and deploy the latest AWS technology. Our educational breakout sessions will range in level from intermediate to expert, immersing you in architecture and code.
https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/sydney/
AWS Summits are happening all over the globe - you can probably find one near you :
| Location | Date |
| Paris, France | March 17, 2020 |
| Dubai UAE | March 24, 2020 |
| Brussels, Belgium | April 2, 2020 |
| Amsterdam, Netherlands | April 8, 2020 |
| Mumbai, India | April 8, 2020 |
| San Francisco, CA USA | April 14, 2020 |
| Singapore | April 15, 2020 |
| Seoul, South Korea | April 16, 2020 |
| London, UK | April 29, 2020 |
No travel budget ? Fear not.
Online AWSome Days: 19th March 2020
AWS experts are there to help accelerate your cloud journey, get up and running with AWS services fast and start adding value to your business as soon as possible. All you need to do is register to attend the free, AWSome Day Online Conference on 19.03.20!
Content will be available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Hebrew.
AWSome Day attendees will receive free, step-by-step introductions and training on core AWS services for compute, storage, database and networking. Plus, they'll share best practices for architecting and cost optimization.
AWS technical experts will provide detailed explanations of key service features, share real-world use cases, walk through technical demos, and be available to answer all your questions live.
https://pages.awscloud.com/EMEA-AWSome-Day-Online-Conference-2020.html
Source : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/
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