Google Cloud rolls out new Firestore Key Visualizer, partner program changes

What's new with GCP this month? We have some new UI to navigate the console, a key visualizer for Firestore, great new alerting options, upcoming security operations enhancements, and some big changes to Google’s partner program that are significant whether or not you’re a partner, yourself.

Continue on for the full rundown!

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Given that the Google Cloud Platform has a hundred different products (no exaggeration!) it can sometimes be a pain to wade through them all to find what you need — especially in that little side menu.

So Google has just launched a new “All Products” page that makes it much easier to explore the products, including both short and longer descriptions for each one.

Check it out for yourself, or get more info here!

Another tool that I think you will see the benefit of 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 your requests are already distributed evenly across your keyspace, you’ll have a dazzling graphic to add to your next presentation or status update.

Learn more here.

You could already have Cloud Monitoring notify you of alerts through email, SMS, and the mobile app, but you can now add Pub/Sub, Webhook, and Slack Notifications to that list, as they have just become generally available. Also, PagerDuty notifications are currently in beta.

Now, these are all great options, of course! But since webhooks are so extensible, 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.

Get the full details here.

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, this is just a heads-up.

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, hmmm?

OK. 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 — the list goes 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 that 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.

The full announcement offers much more information on partners — so you may want to read through the whole thing, 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 resellers. And there’s a bunch more, too — with the key takeaway that Google is investing significantly in improving their entire partner ecosystem.

As 2022 gets rolling, have you given any thought to how you want to improve your own situation?

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