Welcome to the first edition of Pipeline—Counter’s monthly bitesize dive into the tools and technologies our Tech Leads are exploring. Pipeline is designed to share practical insights from the field so each month, our Tech Leads compile a list of tech: five things we’re using, learning about, or keeping an eye on and less than 100 words to summarise what you need to know.
Meet October’s Pipeline:
GCP Workload Identity Federation
If you need to authenticate tooling such as GitHub Actions to GCP services (EG. Google Cloud Run) then Workload Identity Federation in conjunction with OIDC is a much more secure way of authenticating services. It means you no longer need long lived service accounts.
More detail here.
Firebase data connect goes public preview
Firebase, the popular developer friendly cloud tooling now has the ability to run relational, transaction data workloads on Firebase now with data connect. Also introduces SDK for generating strongly typed functions to CRUD the data.
Notebook LM
Google’s AI research assistant. You can create a shareable ‘notebook’ by uploading data sources (e.g. text, audio, video, urls) and then can query the data sources in natural language. Could be a great tool to get people with a range of technical experience singing from the same hymn sheet or creating a technical knowledge base for a software project. It can handle a really impressive amount of source data as well – the equivalent of 52 copies The Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
Firebase Cloud Functions v2 Python
This isn’t brand-new but I’ve just started using it for a side-project and it is excellent. Support for python is an excellent extension to an already fantastic framework. No need to manage and scale servers, just run the backend code in response to whatever events you’re interested in (HTTPS, document changes, Admin SDK or scheduled jobs). Python code is stored on Google Cloud infrastructure.
Deno 2
They say: “a modern, all-in-one, zero-config toolchain for JavaScript and TypeScript development.”
We say: “great features, sparks joy, how big was the budget for your promo vid?”
Watch the promo video.
