Zencore and Google Cloud - Q3 2022 Newsletter

Hello - This is the Quarter 3 installment of our monthly newsletter.

We are the first Google Cloud Native Partner.

To quickly recap our mission, we are a team of X-Googlers that have created a boutique consulting, engineering, reseller firm focused on Google Cloud.

We are the first Google Cloud Native Partner and have a laser focus on helping people migrate and accelerate their use of GCP.

Employee Growth, Europe Expansion

Over the first half of the year, we almost doubled our full time employee headcount. In Q2 we added principal architect Shaun Keenan, from client Sauce Labs, and Graham Polley, who will lead our efforts in Europe.

Europe in particular is an exciting growth opportunity for the company. One of our largest migration clients is based in Stockholm and it’s clear to us that there is a need for a Google Cloud focused migration partner.

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Cloud Security

Security is always a core tenant of any cloud strategy and at Zencore we have been helping our customers use Google Cloud native security products like Security Command Center (SCC), or features like binary authorization and container vulnerability scanning to secure their software supply chain. We have formalized some of those learnings into a set of offerings around Cloud Security to accompany customers every step of the way along their journey on or to Google Cloud.

We are now offering assessments, planning and implementation engagements to accommodate every need with regards to security.

Please reach out to sales@zencore.dev for more information about Zencore Cloud Security.

Customer Solution Spotlight

Managing Kubernetes jobs at scale can become hard without the right observability and metrics around it. This is particularly true for customers like Gridmatic, who are leveraging GKE clusters to get access to large scale pools of resources in order to train machine learning models, and may end up running thousands of those jobs in parallel.

Metrics for Kubernetes jobs do not exist out of the box on Google Cloud, so Zencore built a solution using kube-state-metrics and Managed Service for Prometheus to allow for monitoring of jobs which may end up running longer than expected, consuming resources for no reason. Kube-state-metrics listens to the Kubernetes API server and generates metrics about object state. Prometheus scrapes the kube-state-metric service and pushes those metrics into Cloud Monitoring. Finally, a custom query was developed to send alerts when jobs run beyond a specified threshold, and visualize in a dashboard.

You can find more details about this solution and others on our customer spotlight page and as always, please reach out to sales@zencore.dev if you would like more information about those solutions or a review of what is possible on Google Cloud for these use cases.

Employee Spotlight

Craig Bowers, Senior Solution Engineer

Craig joined Zencore in January as a Senior Solution Engineer and had an immediate impact on our customers’ journey on Google Cloud. He has done a tremendous job leading the efforts to migrate customers from self-managed Istio installs to Anthos Service Mesh (ASM), and provided feedback to the Google ASM product teams along the way in order to enhance ASM all together for the broader ecosystem of service mesh users on Google Cloud.

When not working on Kubernetes and cloud related products, Craig enjoys traveling and cooking! He makes what is known to (probably) be the best bolognese pasta in Chicago! :)

Zencore curated Google Cloud updates