Welcome to our monthly Community Roundup series! Check out our latest news and upcoming events, along with new Community feature updates.
3 Next '22 sessions for designing best practice architectures on Google Cloud
It’s not too late! Google Cloud Next '22 kicked off on October 11th, but there’s still time to catch our three recommended sessions for designing best practice architectures on Google Cloud. Watch the playlist here.
Have other topics or questions you want the Google Cloud Architecture Framework team to cover? Please let us know what you want to learn more about in the comments.
This helps us better understand your needs and provide resources to help meet them.
Don’t miss announcements from Google Cloud Next '22
With 24 hours of in-person and global digital broadcasts and more than 200 live and on-demand sessions, Next '22 provides content and experiences to help you face your cloud challenges head on.
Stay on top of all the product announcements and key takeaways on the Cloud Blog and on social.
We’ll also be sharing recap posts in the Community over the next couple weeks with a summary of major updates. Stay tuned!
Ask Me Anything: Simplify Day-2 Operations
Congratulations - you’ve deployed your app, set up your Kubernetes cluster, or launched a new service. But now come the challenges of day-2 operations, managing: configuration drift, service reliability, scaling up, and more.
To help teams simplify day-2 operations, we’re hosting a live Ask Me Anything session on November 10th with Google Cloud operations experts, Rakesh Dhoopar, Omkar Suram, and others. We’ll quickly recap the NEXT '22 session on “Reducing Day-2 Operational Complexity” and cover additional topics in more depth.
Join us to learn the important activities and tools needed to efficiently:
- Operationalize your workload management
- Optimize day-2 operations using Google managed services
As always, you’ll have the opportunity to ask the experts questions and receive answers live.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Fundamentals
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) was born out of an internal need at Google in the early 2000s and has since evolved to become the industry-leading practice for service reliability.
In this article, we share the fundamental SRE principles and practices that you can apply in your organization that enable your systems to be more scalable, reliable, and efficient, including:
- What is SRE? The core problem that SRE solves and the high-level organizational structures that facilitate the practice of SRE.
- Key principles of SRE. The guiding principles SREs use to keep systems reliable.
- SRE practice areas. The areas of responsibility and expertise SREs have.
- How to get started with SRE. The summary of next steps to adopt SRE within your organization.
- Supporting resources. The resources, training, and certifications Google provides to help you achieve your reliability goals with SRE.
Updates in Learning and Certifications
#GoogleClout: Next Edition
Complete these 6 hands-on Google Cloud skills challenges by October 13th to earn a special digital badge, plus a no-cost e-copy of Priyanka Vergadia’s best selling Visualizing Google Cloud book! Get started.
Currently in the lead is Vishnu, Adam Vincent, and QiKaiSi! 
The Google Cloud Fly Cup
The Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge, is a 3-stage developer challenge, at no cost and NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED, with racing drones, prizes, and a trip for the winner to the Drone Racing League’s (DRL) World Championship to be celebrated on stage. Get started.
Currently in the lead is ichigo, Abhijat, Sarari, and Arundhati Bhardwaj!
NEW! Individual enhanced Google Cloud Skills Boost annual subscription
Just announced at Next '22, you can now purchase the Google Cloud Skills Boost annual subscription with Innovators Plus Benefits* for a full range of Google Cloud learning and developer benefits, including:
- Access to over 700 hands-on labs, skill badges, and courses
- $500 Google Cloud credits
- A Google Cloud certification voucher
- Bonus $500 Google Cloud credits after the first certification earned each year
- Live learning events led by Google Cloud experts
- Quarterly technical briefings hosted by Google Cloud executives
Questions? Contact Innovators-plus-support@google.com
Good news for Associate Cloud Engineer certification holders
For those of you who are Associate Cloud Engineer certification holders, or who are interested in becoming a certified Associate Cloud Engineer, we have some exciting news to share! Effective October 1, 2022, the validity period of the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification will be extended from two to three years.
Individuals with an Associate Cloud Engineer will see their updated certification expiration date reflected on their Associate Cloud Engineer digital certificate within the next few days.
For more information about this change, please see our FAQs from @msoss here.
GO! A startup and growth mindset challenge
Thanks everyone for participating in the GO! startup and growth mindset challenge and a special shoutout to our winners from Team CloudWish!
Dataflow observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting: Solving 7 data pipeline challenges
Based on customer feedback, observability is a key area where the Dataflow team continues to invest more - to deliver visibility into the state and performance of Dataflow jobs that are essential for business critical production pipelines.
In this article, learn from data analytics experts, Ashwin Kamath, Konrad Janica, and Wei Hsia:
- Dataflow observability capabilities and the latest new features
- Common issues and scenarios reported by customers for streaming pipelines
- How to use Dataflow observability features to troubleshoot
We’re listening! Help shape product roadmaps
Google’s User Research Team is interested in hearing what you have to say about a suite of GCP products (Workflows, Eventarc, Cloud Tasks and Cloud Scheduler) that provide foundation services for the platform.
We are looking for GCP customers with all experience levels with these products. Your input will help us enhance these products’ offerings based upon your and your company’s needs.
This survey takes approximately 15 minutes to complete. We will send you a $30 thank-you gift after you complete the entire survey.
Top five contributors in September
We love to see how many of you are eager to participate in the Community’s discussions. Let’s take a quick look at who contributed the most by replies authored and topics published in the month of September. Please meet our top five contributors:
Thank you @Abhishek213 , @imharry404 , @brlikhon , @SidVjSingh , and @Bholoubi . Keep it up! 
Are you ready to become our next top contributor? Learn all about how to contribute to the Community here.
Top three conversations in September
Here are our most popular discussions in the Google Cloud Community over the past month:
- GO! A startup and growth mindset challenge
- Good news for Associate Cloud Engineer certification holders
- This action couldn’t be completed. Try again later. [OR-BSBBF-103]
Looking for more topics and discussions? Visit our Google Cloud forums and join the conversation or start something new.
Thank you to all our Community members who continue to make this space an engaging and informative place to be. If you have any feedback, please feel free to add your thoughts to the Community Feedback forum or add a comment directly to this post.
Make sure you don’t miss out on the latest Community news, activities, or opportunities by subscribing to News & Announcements. To do so, go to the News & Announcements page and click on the blue button that says “Subscribe.” You can also learn more about how to manage your subscriptions and notifications in this article here.
Thanks everyone. Until next time!
The Google Cloud Community Team
