Hello, Cloud Gurus. Welcome to 2022, which as a brand new year is supposed to be completely different from 2021 and 2020. Right? Well, let's keep our fingers crossed for that, but as for Google Cloud Platform, anyway, we do already have some new things to tell you all about notably. We have some new UI to navigate the console, a key visualizer for Firestore, great new alerting options, upcoming security operations enhancements, plus some big changes to Google's partner program that are significant whether or not you're a partner yourself. I'm Mattias Andersson and you're watching GCP this month for January, 2022.

Let's start with our quick bites. Now, given that the Google Cloud Platform has a hundred different products, no exaggeration, it can sometimes be a bit of a pain to wade through them all to find what you need, especially in that little side menu. Right? So Google has just launched a new all products page. It makes it much easier to explore the products, including both short and longer descriptions for each one. Check it out at the top of the list and let us know what you think.

Another tool that I think you will see the benefit of using is Google's new key visualizer for Firestore. Firestore is a wonderful serverless, noSQL database, but it can still struggle if you structure your keys in problematic ways, the key visualizer aims to help you identify problems like this by mapping out your key usage, graphically bright spots on the report are worth following up on. Plus even if you find that all of your requests are already distributed evenly across your key space, you'll have a dazzling graphic to add to your next presentation or status update. Wow! Now you could already have Cloud Monitoring notify you of alerts through email SMS and the mobile app, but you can now add pub/sub, webhooks and Slack notifications to that list as they have just become generally available. Also for what it's worth PagerDuty notifications are currently in beta.

Now these are all great options, of course, but since webhooks are so extensible, this means you can now hook up pretty much anything you might need, even if it's not in this list. The world is your alerting oyster. SIEM stands for security information and event management and SOAR stands for security, orchestration, automation, and response. Well, this month Google has acquired a company called Siemplify, which is a SOAR provider. Now details are still a bit thin, but I think it's safe to assume that Google will be integrating their newly purchased product into their existing security offerings, very likely Chronicle, and maybe also their cloud security command center, SCC. Anyway, it's just a heads up for you.

Okay. Our gem this month is all about how Google is going to purposefully polish their powerful partner program. They will double down by devoting double the dollars and momentously minimize Marketplace margins. Magnificent, hmm? Okay. Enough with all the alliteration, let's dive deeper down into details. The most concrete part of this announcement is that Google is drastically lowering their commissions on the GCP Marketplace from 20% all the way down to a flat 3%.

This means that the Marketplace can be a much more efficient way to take advantage of partner provided solutions, things like MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, Jenkins, Gitlab, Redmine, NginX, and the list goes on and on. So if you're a customer using the Marketplace, this means you'll pay a lot less money to Google. And if you're a partner offering solutions on the Marketplace, this means you'll attract more customers and maybe take a bit more of that money home for yourself. And don't worry. Since the solutions generally still run on GCP, Google will still manage to turn a profit and will not go out of business. Now, the rest of the announcement is more focused on partners.

So you may well want to read that whole thing through if that's you, but highlights include new professional services, lead generation and lead sharing programs, plus financial benefits for industry specific solutions, cloud migrations, and resell. And there's a bunch more too, with the key takeaway that Google is investing significantly in improving their entire partner ecosystem. All right, as 2022 gets rolling. Have you given any thought to how you want to improve your own situation? Whether you're an individual trying to scale up on cloud or leading an entire organization to a complete cloud transformation or anything in between we here at A Cloud Guru and Pluralsight have got you covered. Check out our free trial of all the training we offer or start by signing up for our no credit card required free plan that gives you a rotating set of free courses every month. We're confident you'll find it valuable. Well, that's all for me. I hope that you are staying safe and doing well.

Take care of those around you and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.