GCP - Planning for the Worst

Last month, Google Cloud published Planning for the Worst: Reliability, Resilience, Exit and Stressed Exit in Financial Services. This happens to be a topic I have previously worked on, so I was very interested to hear the perspective that GCP would bring. The wider industry context here is that regulators are very interested in potential risks to the financial system arising from the wholesale migration to cloud computing; in March 2021 the Prudential Regulation Authority in the UK published two supervisory statements closely related to the topic, including Outsourcing and third party risk management, which introduces the concept of a “stressed exit”....

Maglev Load Balancers

Maglev is the codename of Google’s Layer 4 network load balancer, which is referred to in GCP as External TCP/UDP Network Load Balancing. I read the 2016 Maglev paper to better understand various implementation details of Maglev with an emphasis on security (in particular as affects availability). Maglev uses a scale-out approach, implemented within clusters built from commodity hardware achieving n+1 redundancy, providing greater tolerance to failure compared with traditional hardware load balancers deployed in pairs (only 1+1 redundancy)....

Google Workspace Super Admins

I recently had cause to remind myself of Google Workspace administrator account best practices. Briefly: Set up separate admin accounts, e.g. [email protected] to exist side-by-side with [email protected]. Keep accounts individually identifiable, and ideally ensure there are multiple Super Admins in your organization.1 Avoid using [email protected] for day-to-day use. One of these Super Admin accounts must be set as the primary account contact, but (due to the previous point) you’re unlikely to be checking the emails very often....

Bin Calendar

Around this time each year it is especially useful to know when the rubbish is due to be collected by the local council, since the schedule is inevitably disrupted by the holidays until well into January. In fact where I live we have fortnightly collections, with different types of bin collected on alternate weeks, so I never find it easy to remember which bin is due to be put out....