βΉοΈ News, Updates & Announcements

www.sciencealert.com
Google recently announced a significant step forward in the progress towards practical quantum computers. Their prototype quantum computer, called Sycamore, was able to perform a complex synthetic benchmark and complete the calculation in a matter of seconds, which would take the world's most powerful classical computer over a year to accomplish.

cointelegraph.com
Google Cloud has entered into a partnership with Voltage, an infrastructure provider specializing in the Bitcoin Lightning Network, to roll out Bitcoin-based services worldwide. This partnership highlights Google's growing understanding and acceptance of Bitcoin Lightning, contrasting with Apple's recent delisting of Lightning-friendly decentralized social media protocol apps.

www.lifewire.com
Google Cloud Next 2023 is the upcoming event for cloud developers and industry leaders, taking place from August 29-31, 2023, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event offers a Full Conference Pass for $1,599, providing access to all sessions over three days, and a Digital Pass for livestream access and on-demand sessions after the event. While Google likely won't make product announcements at Cloud Next 2023, it serves as a conference for learning, networking, and collaboration among developers and cloud enthusiasts.
π Stories, Tutorials & Articles

www.hashicorp.com
Continuous validation is a foundational feature for HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Plus, ensuring that infrastructure is working as expected by providing long-term visibility and checks for health and security. Users can define assertions using check blocks in Terraform configuration to monitor various aspects such as security gaps, budgets, certificate expiration, and the status of virtual machines. These assertions proactively monitor configurations and modules, notifying users if any assertions fail and helping them identify and address issues early on.

medium.com
Istio resources, such as VirtualService, ServiceEntry, and DestinationRule, have a default behavior of applying to the entire cluster, which can lead to undesired effects in multi-tenant clusters. To mitigate this, the article suggests three ways to limit the impact of Istio resources: setting the default configuration to apply only to the namespace they are created in, using Open Policy Agent (OPA) Gatekeeper to restrict resource creation and mutation to the same namespace, or changing the default scope in the Istio mesh configuration.

cloud.google.com
The inaugural State of Kubernetes Cost Optimization report provides insights and best practices for running cost-efficient clusters in the public cloud without compromising performance or reliability. The report highlights the importance of setting resource requests for workloads and offers tools to identify workloads that do not have requests set, emphasizing the need for workload rightsizing.

www.civo.com
Expenditure on cloud computing services reached $225 billion in 2022. With rising costs and resource wastage, organizations are implementing FinOps frameworks and facing challenges in right-sizing Kubernetes workloads. StormForge offers solutions for visibility, intelligence, and automation to optimize cloud resources and reduce wastage, leading to significant cost savings.

matduggan.com
GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) is praised as the best managed Kubernetes product available, offering a seamless experience for users. It simplifies various tasks such as node management, upgrades, and security, making it an attractive choice for those serious about using Kubernetes. GKE Autopilot, in particular, provides an even easier deployment experience, suitable for small companies that prefer to avoid infrastructure management.

sqlite.org
The cloud back-end SQLite (CBS) system allows databases to be stored within a cloud storage account, enabling reading and writing to the database without first downloading the entire database. The system supports concurrent access to the database by multiple clients and provides APIs for managing concurrent access.

itnext.io
VPC Service Controls is a powerful security feature offered by Google Cloud Platform that allows you to create a service perimeter to control communication within and across Google-managed resources. By defining ingress and egress rules, you can regulate access to resources and protect against unauthorized actions. Implementing VPC Service Controls involves configuring YAML files, setting up infrastructure using Terraform and Terragrunt, and adjusting access levels and permissions.
βοΈ Tools, Apps & Software

github.com
Token permissions Monitor and Advisor actions

gitlab.com
This project provides a guide on how to integrate GitLab with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using OpenID Connect (OIDC). The integration enables GitLab users to authenticate with their GCP credentials, which helps to improve security and reduce the need for multiple user accounts.

github.com
Achievements that did not make the cut.

github.com
EarlyBird is a sensitive data detection tool capable of scanning source code repositories for clear text password violations, PII, outdated cryptography methods, key files and more.