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Cloud News – April 2021

12 Apr, 2021
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We have read and selected a few articles and other resources about the latest developments around cloud technology so you don’t have to. Read further and keep yourself up-to-date in five minutes!

Inventory management with BigQuery and Cloud Run

Cloud Run is often used just as a way of hosting websites, but there’s so much more you can do with it. In this blog, Aja Hammerly (Developer Advocate) will show us how to use Cloud Run and BigQuery together to create an inventory management system. The example uses a subset of the Iowa Liquor Control Board data set to create a smaller inventory file for a fictional store. 

Read more:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/inventory-management-bigquery-and-cloud-run

3 common serverless patterns to build with Workflows

The Workflows orchestration and automation service is a serverless product designed to orchestrate work across Google Cloud APIs as well as any HTTP-based API available on the internet, and it has recently reached General Availability. At the same time, Workflows has been updated with a preview of Connectors, which provide seamless integration with other Google Cloud products to design common architecture patterns that can help you build advanced serverless applications. 

Read more:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/building-serverless-apps-with-workflows-and-connectors

Back by popular demand: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2021 edition)

Google Cloud offers lots of products to support a wide variety of use cases. To make it easier to orient yourself, Google has created a set of resources that makes it easy to familiarize yourself with the Google Cloud ecosystem. You can use these resources to quickly get up to speed on different products and choose those that you’re most interested in for a deeper dive into documentation and other available resources. 

Read more:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/back-popular-demand-google-cloud-products-4-words-or-less-2021-edition

Node.js 14.x runtime now available in AWS Lambdar

While it is still OK to use node.js 12.x until the end of 2021, version 14.x brings a few things that make the life of a developer a lot nicer. Most of the changes come from the newly upgraded Javascript engine: v8.1 on which nodejs runs! New features include nullish coalescing operator, nullish assignment and optional chaining.

Read more:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-14-x-runtime-now-available-in-aws-lambda/

Cost savings on AWS

AWS recently introduced the “Compute Savings Plan” for Lambda. It allows for 12% to 17% discount on the expenses. So if you spend say $730 per month ($1 per hour) on lambda you can commit for $640 per month ($0.88 per hour). Leading to yearly savings of $1080. ($1 per hour is a LOT of Lambda usage though so probably your actual situation will not benefit this much).

Also it is now possible to save costs on CloudFront outbound traffic. In as use case where the traffic amounts to $50 per day the savings are around $800 per month!

Read more:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/savings-plan-update-save-up-to-17-on-your-lambda-workloads/ and https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/02/introducing-amazon-cloudfront-security-savings-bundle/

AWS DynamoDB audit logging and monitoring with CloudTrail

DynamoDB change logging was usually done through streams. Now it is possible to do logging with CloudTrail data events. This also allows for access logging including the queries used to access the data. These Cloudwatch data events also support access logging for S3, Lambda (invokes) and Managed Blockchain.

Read more:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-dynamodb-now-supports-audit-logging-and-monitoring-using-aws-cloudtrail/

S3 Object Lambda

A new type of Lambda can be attached to an S3 bucket that allows you to change the response for get requests. The Lambda is attached to an S3 Control Access Point which will lead the requests to the Lambda. Inside the Lambda you you can change header, body and status code based on your requirements. Use cases could be: resizing images, partially hiding some data based on requester identity or adding headers from another datasource.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-s3-object-lambda-use-your-code-to-process-data-as-it-is-being-retrieved-from-s3/

Credits: Header image by Luca Cavallin on nylavak.com

Luca Cavallin
Luca is a Software Engineer and Trainer with full-stack experience ranging from distributed systems to cross-platform apps. He is currently interested in building modern, serverless solutions on Google Cloud using Golang, Rust and React and leveraging SRE and Agile practices. Luca holds 3 Google Cloud certifications, he is part of the Google Developers Experts community and he is the co-organizer of the Google Cloud User Group that Binx.io holds with Google.
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