Last month today: GCP in May

There’s always something new to learn about cloud computing, and the top posts in May on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) blog covered several essential topics: security, APIs, and containers, not to mention ML. Here’s what was popular.

Learning cloud, one topic at a time

• API design is a hot topic in our increasingly microservices-oriented world. This popular post describes how to design APIs using links, not keys, to represent relationships. Expressing relationships between APIs is a big factor in successful API design. While database keys are a common way to express API relationships, using web links is less complicated and requires less documentation. This post goes in-depth on how to expose URLs instead of database keys in your web APIs.

• There’s also a lot to learn about Kubernetes as you’re getting up to speed on containers and microservices. Understanding how resources are allocated to containers is important, and this post covers how Kubernetes controls resources and how to use requests and limits accordingly in your environment. This can help avoid issues like nodes running out of memory or apps taking up excessive CPU resources.

Power to the pods

• This month also brought the beta release of our Cloud TPU Pods, which are machine learning (ML) accelerators that provide strong performance and are cost-effective. TPU Pods are based on our Google-designed custom silicon chips–Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The Cloud TPU Pods are multi-rack supercomputers that dramatically speed up the processing of ML workloads–from days or weeks on other systems to minutes or hours. You can train more capable ML models and iterate faster with these new units.

Security, everywhere

• Google’s big developer conference, Google I/O, took place last month, and this post covered the show’s highlights. The Android phone’s built-in security key is now generally available on Android 7.0+ devices. This lets you use your Android phone as a FIDO standard security key to verify your sign-in to Google and Google Cloud services.,

• At Next ’19, we announced Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Sandbox. This post covers more details about GKE Sandbox, now in beta, which can help prevent threats to your containers by adding an extra layer between containers and the host OS, lessening the likelihood of “container escape.”

That’s a wrap for May! Stay tuned for all the latest news.