A Week in Review: Google Cloud Secrets

Google cloud secrets

Google Cloud has announced a new service, the aptly named Google Cloud Secrets, which aims to provide a secure way to manage and store sensitive information - database credentials, API keys, and so on. The new service is an initiative to stop the long-standing problem of sensitive information ending up in source code repositories.

It is essentially a keystore optimized for storing small chunks of data with encryption optionally entirely managed by Google Cloud. Developers can use the Secret Manager API to store, list and retrieve credentials. The service is integrated with Google Cloud IAM (Identity and Access Management), which determines who and what actions the user using the API can take.

Opinion: it is worth considering the potential for an inadvertent lock-in factor - using Google Cloud specific APIs. Using in-memory environmental variables can address the need ever to consider storing credentials to file.

Cloud tips the enterprise spending balance

David S. Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting, reflected on an earlier IDC analysis in an InfoWorld article that points to enterprise cloud spend exceeding traditional IT spend in 2020. Traditional meaning anything not public or private cloud. The article raises some significant concerns with this rapid advancement, notably that "Most organizations are behind on skills and cultural changes needed to support cloud computing" and that "Most enterprises have no idea how to secure cloud-based solutions". This highlights the growing importance of understanding application security challenges in cloud-based environments, which many enterprises are struggling to address. The article concludes this momentum is set to continue at pace.The article concludes this momentum is set to continue at pace.

Opinion: This could point to some turbulent times ahead for enterprises that have not yet scaled up, with a lack of security awareness and cloud skills to handle an ever-growing portfolio of cloud-based applications.

Intellij speaks more languages

JetBrains shared some of their roadmap plans and new features coming in their IntelliJ-based IDEs which are a popular choice for building web apps. Most notably, localization support for the Asian market and by popular demand, better tooling for being used as a general-purpose text editor primarily through faster startup times.

One of the bigger long-term visions that will be coming incrementally during the year is machine-learning based code completion which should offer up better and more efficient suggestions when writing code.