Google Cloud Functions provides a simple and intuitive developer experience to execute code from Google Cloud, Firebase, Google Assistant, or any web, mobile, or backend application. Oftentimes that code needs secrets—like API keys, passwords, or certificates—to authenticate to or invoke upstream APIs and services.

While Google Secret Manager is a fully-managed, secure, and convenient storage system for such secrets, developers have historically leveraged environment variables or the filesystem for managing secrets in Cloud Functions. This was largely because integrating with Secret Manager required developers to write custom code… until now. We listened to customer feedback and today we are announcing Cloud Functions has a native integration with Secret Manager!

This native integration has many key benefits including:

• Zero required code changes. Cloud functions that already consume secrets via environment variables or files bundled with the source upload simply require an additional flag during deployment. The Cloud Functions service resolves and injects the secrets at runtime and the plaintext values are only visible inside the process.
• Easy environment separation. It’s easy to use the same codebase across multiple environments, e.g., dev, staging, and prod, because the secrets are decoupled from the code and are resolved at runtime.
• Supports the 12-factor app pattern. Because secrets can be injected into environment variables at runtime, the native integration supports the 12-factor pattern while providing stronger security guarantees.
• Centralized secret storage, access, and auditing. Leveraging Secret Manager as the centralized secrets management solution enables easy management of access controls, auditing, and access logs.

Cloud Functions’ native integration with Secret Manager is available in preview to all Google Cloud customers today. Let’s take a deeper dive into this new integration.

Example

Suppose the following cloud function invoked via HTTP uses a secret token to invoke an upstream API:

  const https = require('https');
const token = process.env.TOKEN;

exports.secretDemo = (req, res) => {
  https.get(`https://upstream-api.example.com?token=${token}`, (innerRes) => {
    innerRes.on('end', () => { res.send('OK') });
  }).on('error', (err) => {
    res.send(`Error: ${err}`);
  });
}

Without Cloud Functions’ native integration with Secret Manager, this function is deployed via:

  $ gcloud functions deploy "secretDemo" \
    --runtime "nodejs14" \
    --trigger-http \
    --allow-unauthenticated \
    --set-env-vars "TOKEN=abcd1234"

This approach has a number of drawbacks, the biggest of which being that anyone with viewer permissions on the Google Cloud project can see the environment variables set on a cloud function.

To improve the security of this code, migrate the secret to Secret Manager in the same project:

  $ gcloud secrets create "token" \
    --replication-policy "automatic" \
    --data-file - <<< "abcd1234"

Finally, without changing any code in the function re-deploy with slightly different flags:

  $ gcloud beta functions deploy "secretDemo" \
    --runtime "nodejs14" \
    --trigger-http \
    --allow-unauthenticated \
    --set-secrets "TOKEN=my_token:latest"

It’s truly that easy to migrate from hard-coded secrets to using secure secret storage with Secret Manager! To add even more layers of security, consider running each cloud function with a dedicated service account and practice the principle of least privilege. Learn more in the Secret Manager Best Practices guide.

Making security easy

Security and proper secrets management are core pillars of modern software development, and we’re excited to provide customers a way to improve the security of their cloud functions. To learn more about the new native integration, check out the Cloud Functions documentation. You can also learn more about Cloud Functions or learn more about Secret Manager.

We created Traffic Director to bring to you a fully managed service mesh product that includes load balancing, traffic management and service discovery. And now, we’re happy to announce the availability of a fully-managed zero-trust security solution using Traffic Director with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Certificate Authority (CA) Service.

When platform administrators and security professionals think about modernizing their applications with a forward-looking security posture, they look for “zero-trust” security. This security posture is based on few fundamental blocks:

1. A means of allocating and asserting service identity (for example, using X.509 certificates)
2. Mutual authentication (mTLS) or server authentication (TLS)
3. Encryption for all traffic flows (TLS encryption)
4. Authorization checks and minimal privileges
5. Infrastructure to make all of the above manageable and reliable

Traffic Director does this by integrating with CA Service, a highly available private CA which issues private certificates expressing service identities, and provides a managed mTLS certificate infrastructure with full certificate lifecycle management. Together, these solve both certificate issuance and CA rotation complexities. 

With Traffic Director managing your service-to-service security, you can now enjoy end-to-end encryption, service-level authentication and granular authorization policies for your service mesh.

With this new capability, you can now:

• Implement mutual TLS (mTLS) and TLS between your services, including certificate lifecycle management. Communications within your mesh are authenticated and encrypted.
• Enable identity-based authorization, as well as authorization based on other parameters (such as the request method). These concepts underpin role-based access controls (RBAC) and enable you to take a “least privileges” stance where only authorized services can communicate with each other based on ALLOW/DENY rules.

mTLS is supported whether you’re using Envoy or proxyless gRPC for your service mesh. Authorization support for proxyless gRPC is coming later this year. Check out our documentation to learn more and get started with Envoy or proxyless gRPC.

Google Cloud and the DORA research team are excited to announce our eight sponsors for the 2021 State of DevOps report. We recently launched the 2021 State of DevOps survey, a 25-min survey for the DevOps community to share how they are using DevOps to improve software delivery performance. So if you haven’t taken the survey yet, this is your chance! 

For those unfamiliar with the State Of DevOps report, it is the largest and longest running research of its kind. It provides an independent view into how teams and companies can drive powerful business outcomes, no matter what stage of the DevOps journey

With the State of DevOps reports we aim to capture how teams and companies are driving excellence in technology delivery through the implementation of DevOps practices, no matter what stage of the DevOps journey your team is in. If you’re wondering how your team measures up in your industry take our DevOps Quick Check and discover which capabilities you should focus on to improve your performance.

To capture a diverse array of information on how those in the DevOps community are performing, our eight sponsors of the 2021 State of DevOps survey are focussed on helping organizations of all sizes and industries to develop and deliver software faster across the whole DevOps lifecycle. Captured below, you’ll find more information on our sponsors for this year and why they chose to sponsor the State Of the DevOps 2021 Report.

Armory

Armory enables enterprise companies to ship better software, faster through trusted, reliable, safe, and secure deployments — at its core, Armory is powered by Spinnaker OSS.

“Armory exists to unlock innovation through software. To achieve this, we help enterprises reliably deploy software at scale, naturally aligning with DevOps practices to improve software delivery performance. Given this, we applaud efforts like the State of DevOps Report that provides an independent view into the practices and capabilities that organizations can employ to drive better performance.” 

Carl Timm, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Armory

CircleCI

The world’s best software teams deliver quality code, confidently, with CircleCI. The world’s best software teams use CircleCI to go from next-up to feature shipped, at the speed ambitious businesses require. 

“Though the DevOps space is only over a decade old, it moves incredibly quickly. Google’s State of DevOps report is both a reflection and projection of the industry, capturing how DevOps culture drives business results and where DevOps practitioners can look to improve. At CircleCI, we rely heavily on this survey data to glean valuable insights into our market and our customers overall. We also build upon these insights to guide our own research into how engineering teams move code through pipelines in our annual State of Software Delivery report. Taken together, this research highlights teams’ reported and actual behavior and paints a vibrant picture of how technology-driven organizations drive for success.”

Emma Webb, VP, Corporate Communications, CircleCI 

Continuous Delivery Foundation

CD Foundation is an open-source community improving the world’s ability to deliver software with security and speed.

“Good decision-making is based on good data. Open source is a critical piece of the technology roadmap for DevOps, and the 2021 State of DevOps Report will provide actionable information for high performing teams in organizations of all types and sizes. The report will show where open source and DevOps intersect, and in a space that is changing so quickly, new relevant data is critical,” said Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation Executive Director. “CD Foundation members are deeply involved with producing this annual report, with over 10 years of historic research. Thank you to Google and our other members who have worked so hard on it. This report is a tangible result of working together.”

Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation Executive Director

Deloitte

Deloitte provides audit and assurance, tax, consulting, and risk and financial advisory services to a broad cross-section of the largest corporations and governmental agencies. At Deloitte, they are continuously evolving how they work and how they look at marketplace challenges so they can continually deliver measurable, sustainable results for their clients and communities.

“Software delivery is evolving rapidly and we know our customers need unique and compelling insights to make the right decisions. State of DevOps is a widely used report and considered as an Industry standard to understand the drivers for excellence in Software Development and Delivery. Deloitte is excited to help the team at DORA and Google Cloud in publishing this report through our sponsoring since we believe the insights from this report will help make software delivery better.” 

Manoj Mishra, Consulting Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP

GitLab

GitLab is the open DevOps platform built from the ground up as a single application for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle enabling Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project.

“We’re happy to sponsor the DORA Report and the vital work behind it. The more we understand the DevOps journey, the better we and our GitLab community can contribute to its future. We’re particularly interested to see this year’s results and the impact COVID-19 and remote work have had on DevOps. We appreciate the chance to be part of this exciting, informative process.”

Brendon O’Leary, Senior Developer Evangelist

Liquibase

Liquibase helps millions of developers easily manage database schema changes by enabling teams to track, version, and deploy database changes by delivering on the promise of CI/CD for the database.

“With their rigorous methodology, the DORA research team delivers actionable information with the simple goal of helping organizations of any size accelerate the development and delivery of software. Liquibase is honored to sponsor the 2021 State of DevOps Report and its role in helping so many organizations build value for their customers and shareholders”

Matt Geise, VP of Marketing at Liquibase

PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform that empowers the right action, when seconds matter.

“As a leader in digital operations management, PagerDuty is proud to sponsor this year’s report as it aligns with our dedication to helping DevOps professionals make better decisions. This report will inform tech and business leaders about the trends/challenges developers are facing and the opportunities there are to accelerate their own DevOps transformation.” 

Carolyn Guss, VP of Corporate Marketing

SysDig

Sysdig is driving the secure DevOps movement, empowering organizations to confidently secure containers, Kubernetes and cloud.

“There is a learning curve with all new technology, cloud is no exception. Learning from mistakes and sharing best practices is how we will ultimately ship secure applications, faster. For seven years, DORA and Google have partnered to understand the State of DevOps to help vendors and cloud practitioners to learn from each other and implement standards for best practices,”

Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig

Google Cloud, the DORA team, and our sponsors are very excited about this year’s report. We look forward to hearing from you, your colleagues, and networks about how DevOps is integrated into your workflow and ways we can help to further improve your performance. Please share your experience with software delivery by completing our survey that will be used to foster the next generation of DevOps best practices. To provide ample time for the DevOps community to contribute to this industry wide report we have extended the deadline for the survey until July 2nd.

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far, and the Google Cloud DORA team looks forward to hearing from even more of you soon!

The digital era turned the traditional formula for media and entertainment success on its head, ushering in new technologies that have changed how content is produced, distributed, experienced, and monetized. Audiences have more choice, flexibility, and power over what they consume, and today’s media companies have to embrace ongoing transformation or risk falling behind – or becoming irrelevant. 

A new wave of transformation is arriving with generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can interact with users in natural language and create novel data, ranging from story outlines, reports, and other text outputs to multimodal content like images, videos, and audio. Media and entertainment are inherently about content creation and creativity—so what does this new technology mean for the industry? 

At Google Cloud, we see tremendous opportunity for creative industries, from more efficient creation methods to improved user experiences. Let’s explore.

AI for media with Google Cloud

Google Cloud has a long history with large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI technologies—from their influence over the years on products like Document AI, to recent announcements like Generative AI support in Vertex AI, which lets businesses access and tune generative AI foundation models, and Generative AI App Builder, which lets developers build chatbots and other generative apps in minutes.  

We’ve helped our global media and entertainment customers with AI for personalization, search and recommendations, predictive analytics, and much more — and with generative AI now on the rise, we have some ideas to help media leaders, technologists, and creators think about and prepare to utilize powerful AI in their work. 

Three lenses on innovation in media

The media and entertainment industry is increasingly diverse and complex, with companies spanning over-the-top (OTT) subscription streaming services, 24-hour linear channels, live broadcasts of sporting events, digital journalism, traditional publishing, short-form user-generated social video, and more. More and more, the boundaries between these segments of the media industry are blurring — but common to them all is the focus on providing compelling content in an engaging audience experience that can be directly or indirectly monetized.

With this in mind, we suggest media and entertainment companies look at the application of innovative technologies like generative AI through the following three lenses:

1. Improving content creation, production, and management
2. Enhancing and personalizing audience experiences
3. Improving monetization

Improving content creation, production, and management

Generative AI democratizes many aspects of content creation, opening new ways to create written material, illustrations, sound effects, special effects, and more. Its recent maturation has been so rapid, some in the media industry have expressed concern that generative AI implies the end of creative professions. We think the opposite is more likely: just as photography, audio recordings, and computer generated images have enabled new modes of creativity, rather than making old ones obsolete, generative AI has the potential to both enable new forms of expression and enhance familiar ones. 

For example, journalists could use generative AI to speed up research by helping them synthesize and analyze large volumes of information, or to help them create initial drafts or summaries of editorial content. Film and television producers could leverage the technology to accelerate the post-production editing process, with new AI-enabled interfaces for rapidly adjusting or enhancing scene details such as lighting and color. Broadcasters could use generative AI to make vast libraries of video footage searchable and accessible for use in telling more compelling stories. The potential use cases go on and on.

Far from undermining incredible creative professions, generative AI is poised to free writers, artists, editors, and many others from the tedious and mundane aspects of their work, empowering them to focus more of their time on creativity.

Enhancing and personalizing audience experiences

Every media organization in the world today faces the reality that for most consumers, switching costs are extremely low. This puts incredible pressure on these companies to invest in delivering low-friction and compelling audience experiences that help mitigate subscribers from churning and viewers from abandoning content experiences for competitive platforms. 

Generative AI can help media companies engage and retain viewers, such as by enabling more powerful search and recommendations on their digital content platforms. With its increasingly multimodal capabilities extending from natural language to both audio and video content, generative AI is well-positioned to power more personalized audience experiences. 

Consumers often complain about “the paradox of choice” or their inability to find something interesting to watch on streaming platforms that have incredibly vast libraries of content available on demand. Imagine a not-too-distant future wherein a consumer can simply ask the content platform they’re using to help them find a specific show to watch based on mood, specific types of scenes, combinations of actors, award nominations, or practically anything they can think to ask. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — imagine generative AI’s potential to curate, assemble, and even create personalized content for a viewer to consume!

Improving monetization

As consumers’ content consumption further expands from traditional theatrical and linear television programming to include digital offerings across an array of platforms, devices, and content types, media companies face the challenge of maintaining and improving monetization. The conventional economics and approaches to advertising and subscription models are proving, in many cases, not to deliver sufficient ROI. 

Generative AI has the potential to help media companies improve their monetization of audience experiences. As mentioned previously, enhanced personalization can play a role in mitigating churn, which in turn can help sustain and grow subscription and advertising revenues. Going beyond this, generative AI can be leveraged to drive even greater advertising revenues via more targeted, contextual, and personalized advertisements. Imagine both display and video advertisements that are generated on the fly to personalize product specifics, messaging, style, colors, and innumerable other characteristics to drive greater engagement and higher click-through rates (CTR), and thus higher advertising CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).

Coming up next

Generative AI presents a significant opportunity for media companies to fundamentally transform content creation, engagement, and monetization. Compelling services are already on the market — but there is far more to come. 

Google Cloud continues to build on its deep experience and expertise with AI, and we are committed to working with the industry to develop compelling, accessible, trusted, and responsible AI solutions that will drive meaningful business outcomes. We are excited to create the future together with our global media customers and partners across the ecosystem. To learn more about this disruptive topic, read “Debunking five generative AI misconceptions” from Google Cloud vice president of AI & Business Solutions Phil Moyer, or explore our Trusted Tester Program for generative AI.