The year in Google Cloud: Top news of 2023

In the world of technology and cloud computing, the news comes fast and furious. Blink and you’ll miss it. As we wind down the final days of 2023, here’s a look at the top stories of the year that we published on the Google Cloud blog — the product launches, research findings, and initiatives that resonated most with you.

January

The Google Cloud community started the year in a contemplative mood, thirsty for tools to give them deeper insights from their data, and more holistic views of their environments. The top stories of the month were:

1. Log Analytics in Cloud Logging is now GA
2. Manage Kubernetes configuration at scale using the new GitOps observability dashboard
3. Better together: Looker connector for Looker Studio now generally available
4. Introducing Security Command Center’s project-level, pay-as-you-go options
5. CISO Survival Guide: Vital questions to help guide transformation success

February

In February, readers looked ahead. We unveiled a new pricing approach that is decidedly forward-looking, made inroads on futuristic immersive technology, and planted seeds with the telecommunications community at Mobile World Congress. Readers were also really excited for the global roll-out of AlloyDB. The top stories for the month were:

1. Introducing new cloud services and pricing for ultimate flexibility
2. Extending reality: Immersive Stream for XR is now Generally Available
3. Reimagining Radio Access Networks with Google Cloud
4. Introducing Telecom Network Automation: Unlock 5G cloud-native automation with Google Cloud, and Introducing Telecom Data Fabric: Unlock the value of your data
5. AlloyDB for PostgreSQL goes global with sixteen new regions

March

If there has been one overarching theme to Google Cloud for 2023, it’s been generative AI, which made its first real showing this month, with the launch of support for the technology in Vertex AI, alongside an avalanche of news from our first-ever Data Cloud & AI Summit.

1. Google Cloud brings generative AI to developers, businesses, and governments
2. New BigQuery editions: flexibility and predictability for your data cloud
3. Build new generative AI powered search & conversational experiences with Gen App Builder
4. Introducing Looker Modeler: a single source of truth for BI metrics
5. Run AlloyDB anywhere - in your data center, your laptop, or in any cloud

April

We kicked the AI story up a notch in April with segment-specific news, and a glimpse into our AI-optimized infrastructure. We also made it easier for customers to interact with Google Cloud professional services, and introduced gamified training!

1. A responsible path to generative AI in healthcare
2. Supercharging security with generative AI
3. Bringing our world-class expertise together under Google Cloud Consulting
4. Google’s Cloud TPU v4 provides exaFLOPS-scale ML with industry-leading efficiency
5. Boost your cloud skills — play The Arcade with Google Cloud to earn points and prizes

May

Google I/O is usually a consumer-focused show, but Google Cloud’s foundational role in enabling generative AI let our news take center stage, including the launch of the Duet AI brand. With that as the backdrop, it’s no surprise readers were also excited about new multicloud connectivity capabilities.

1. Introducing Duet AI for Google Cloud – an AI-powered collaborator
2. Google Cloud advances generative AI at I/O: new foundation models, embeddings, and tuning tools in Vertex AI
3. At Google I/O, generative AI gets to work
4. Announcing A3 supercomputers with NVIDIA H100 GPUs, purpose-built for AI
5. Announcing Cross-Cloud Interconnect: seamless connectivity to all your clouds

June

Three short months after announcing support for generative AI for Vertex AI, we made good by bringing it to general availability, and expanding it to search experiences. We also helped thread the needle between generative AI and databases with vector support, and shared how generative AI is helping to evolve the threat landscape.

1. Generative AI support on Vertex AI is now generally available
2. Helping businesses with generative AI
3. Improving search experiences with Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder
4. Building AI-powered apps on Google Cloud databases using pgvector, LLMs and LangChain and Announcing vector support in PostgreSQL services to power AI-enabled applications
5. Expanding our Security AI ecosystem at Security Summit 2023

July

July is usually a relatively quiet month, as people head out on vacations, but not this year — the launch of even more models for our AI builder tools proved just as enticing as a day at the beach. We also shook up the MySQL community with a bold new Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus offering, and introduced a new, visual way for developers to connect their applications.

1. Google Cloud expands availability of enterprise-ready generative AI
2. Introducing Application Integration: Connect your applications visually, without code
3. Conversational AI on Gen App Builder unlocks generative AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents
4. Introducing Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus: New edition delivers up to 3x MySQL performance

August

If you think that generative AI news dominated Google Cloud Next this month, you’re only half right. It was certainly a thread in all our leading announcements, but there was also a lot of excitement for more traditional Google Cloud specialties around data analytics and Kubernetes.

1. Announcing BigQuery Studio — a collaborative analytics workspace to accelerate data-to-AI workflows
2. Vertex AI extends enterprise-ready generative AI development with new models, tooling
3. Expanding Duet AI, an AI-powered collaborator, across Google Cloud
4. Expanding our AI-optimized infrastructure portfolio: Introducing Cloud TPU v5e and announcing A3 GA
5. Introducing the next evolution of container platforms

September

Enough with the generative AI news already :) In September, readers remembered that it’s a big world out there, and that Google Cloud is a cloud provider with global coverage. From dashboards to databases, from subsea cables to blockchain, this month’s most popular stories showcased the breadth and depth of Google Cloud’s offerings.

1. Introducing Infrastructure Manager: Provision Google Cloud resources with Terraform
2. Meet Nuvem, a cable to connect Portugal, Bermuda, and the U.S.
3. Enhancing Google Cloud’s blockchain data offering with 11 new chains in BigQuery
4. BigQuery's user-friendly SQL: Elevating analytics, data quality, and security
5. Google is a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management

October

Around here, we like to talk about having a healthy disregard for the impossible. Like mitigating the largest-ever DDoS attack — again. Or rethinking Ethernet. Or halving the cost of Spanner compared to the competition. Whatevs, no big deal.

1. Google mitigated the largest DDoS attack to date, peaking above 398 million rps
2. Google opens Falcon, a reliable low-latency hardware transport, to the ecosystem
3. Shared fate: Protecting customers with generative AI indemnification
4. Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB, and with strong consistency and single-digit ms latency
5. 2023 State of DevOps Report: Culture is everything

November

Security researchers never sleep, and neither do our systems engineers, uncovering significant new vulnerabilities, and beating records for the world’s largest distributed training job for large language models. Oh, and Memorystore for Redis got an upgrade that delivered 60X more throughput.

1. Google researchers discover 'Reptar,’ a new CPU vulnerability
2. Google Cloud demonstrates the world’s largest distributed training job for large language models across 50000+ TPU v5e chips
3. Vertex AI Search adds new generative AI capabilities and enterprise-ready features
4. Memorystore for Redis Cluster is GA and provides up to 60 times more throughput and microseconds latency
5. GKE Enterprise, the next evolution of container platforms, is now generally available

December

Halfway through the month, we’re pretty sure we know what the top stories will have been: anything related to Gemini, Google’s latest and most capable AI model. Also a special shout out to Google Cloud’s Learning Content team, whose post about free generative-AI trainings shot up to be the top-viewed post of the entire year — in the matter of a few days. Seems like you are all as excited as we are about the Gemini era!

1. 12 days of no-cost training to learn generative AI this December
2. Imagen 2 on Vertex AI is now generally available
3. Gemini, Google’s most capable model, is now available on Vertex AI
4. MedLM: generative AI fine-tuned for the healthcare industry
5. Announcing General Availability of Duet AI for Developers and Duet AI in Security Operations

And that’s a wrap! On behalf of the Google Cloud blog team, wishing you peaceful and happy holiday season, and looking forward to seeing you here on these pages in 2024.