Last Month Today: December on GCP

2018 was a busy year for cloud technology, and December capped it off with some news and announcements from around Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Here’s what caught your attention last month.

Securing the cloud is a team effort

• There’s a new sheriff in town: The Cloud Security Command Center is now available for GCP users in beta. This central portal lets you track potential risks and vulnerabilities across your cloud asset inventory and get alerts on anomalies, see sensitive data in your cloud storage, and review access rights.
  
• In addition, we announced a partnership with Palo Alto Networksthat integrates their tools with Cloud Security Command Center. Palo Alto Networks will run both its Application Framework and GlobalProtect cloud service on GCP, bringing even more visibility and compliance readiness to users.
  
• In December, we released managed base images for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Historically, GKE users brought their own container images, but now with managed base images, you can point your Dockerfile’s FROM line to the Cloud Marketplace. Those images have received the latest patches from upstream and let you follow best security practices for base images.

The cloud of the future takes shape

• Moving to cloud is a leap for businesses, with lots of decisions to make. We laid out our open cloud vision last month, and delved into some of the tools involved to build your apps and services on containers and microservices. Using Istio as a service mesh on top of GKE, along with its new networking features, is the foundation we’re excited to share and continue building.
  
• If machine learning (ML) is something you’ve integrated into your technology stack, check out this look at faster ML model training to get better cost and performance. As you develop real-world applications powered by ML, you’ll need to scale to meet real-world challenges. We trained models using our Cloud TPU pod accelerator and measured performance and cost.

Learn about GCP in person this year

• Registration opened last month for our Next ‘19 conference, scheduled for April 9-11 in San Francisco, CA. You can expect lots of great sessions and presenters, with even more technical content and learning opportunities than before. Join us!

We wish you a productive, happy and successful 2019!