Google Cloud wrapped: Top 22 news stories of 2022, according to you

What a year! Over here at Google Cloud, we’re winding things down, but not before taking some time to reflect on everything that happened over the past twelve months. 

Inspired by the custom Spotify Wrapped playlist playing in our earbuds, we pulled the data about the best-read Google Cloud news posts of the year, to better understand which stories resonated most with you. 

Many of your favorite stories came as no surprise, as they tracked with major news, product launches, and events. But there were some sleeper hits in there too — stories whose viral success and staying power took us a bit by surprise. We also uncovered some fascinating data about the older posts that you keep coming back to, month after month, year after year (stay tuned for more on that in 2023). So, without further ado, here are the top 22 Google Cloud news stories of 2022, according to you, our readers.

1. Here's what to know about changes to kubectl authentication coming in GKE v1.26

2. How Google Cloud blocked the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack at 46 million rps

3. Protecting customers against cryptomining threats with VM Threat Detection in Security Command Center

4. Introducing the next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform

5. Even more pi in the sky: Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud

6. Introducing AlloyDB for PostgreSQL: Free yourself from expensive, legacy databases

7. Introducing Blockchain Node Engine: fully managed node-hosting for Web3 development

8. Introducing Google Public Sector

9. Google + Mandiant: Transforming Security Operations and Incident Response

10. Raising the bar in Security Operations: Google Acquires Siemplify

11. The L’Oréal Beauty Tech Data Platform - A data story of terabytes and serverless

12. Build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex, now generally available

13. Google Cloud launches new dedicated Digital Assets Team

14. Contact Center AI reimagines the customer experience through full end-to-end platform

15. Unveiling the 2021 Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award Winners

16. Automate Public Certificates Lifecycle Management via RFC 8555 (ACME)

17. AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Intelligent, database-aware storage

18. Bringing together the best of both sides of BI with Looker and Data Studio

19. Supercharge your event-driven architecture with new Cloud Functions (2nd gen)

20. Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security

21. Making Cobalt Strike harder for threat actors to abuse 

22. Securing tomorrow today: Why Google now protects its internal communications from quantum threats

Recognize any of your favorites? We thought you might. See anything you missed? Now’s your chance to catch up.

Let’s take a deeper look at these top posts as they landed throughout the year. 

January

Raising the bar in Security Operations: Google Acquires Siemplify (#10)

We set off some new year’s fireworks by acquiring security operations specialist Siemplify, combining their proven security orchestration, automation and response technology with our Chronicle security analytics to build a next-generation security operations workflow.

Google Cloud launches new dedicated Digital Assets Team (#13)

News flash: blockchain technology has huge potential. So it was no big surprise that readers responded with gusto to the news of Google Cloud’s new Digital Assets Team, whose charter is to support customers’ needs in building, transacting, storing value, and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms.

February

Protecting customers against cryptomining threats with VM Threat Detection in Security Command Center (#3)

Who wants their VMs to be hijacked by hackers mining crypto? No one. To help, we added a new layer of threat detection to our Security Command Center that can help detect threats such as cryptomining malware inside virtual machines running on Google Cloud. 

Here's what to know about changes to kubectl authentication coming in GKE v1.26 (#1)

The open-source Kubernetes community made a big move when it decided to require that all provider-specific code that currently exists in the OSS code base be removed (starting with v1.26). We responded with a blockbuster post (the #1 post of the year, in terms of readership) that outlines how this move impacts the client side. 

Supercharge your event-driven architecture with new Cloud Functions (2nd gen) (#19)

Developers eyeing serverless platforms responded with enthusiasm to news of our next-generation Functions-as-a-Service product, which offers more powerful infrastructure, advanced control over performance and scalability, more control around the functions runtime, and support for triggers from over 90 event sources. 

Build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex, now generally available (#12)

Building a data mesh is hard to do. But doing so lets data teams centrally manage, monitor, and govern their data across all manner of data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts, so they can make the data available to various analytics and data science tools. With Dataplex, data teams got a new way to do just that.

March

The L’Oréal Beauty Tech Data Platform - A data story of terabytes and serverless (#11)

Serverless, event-driven architecture, cross-cloud analytics… This customer story from L’Oréal about how it built its Beauty Tech Data Platform had it all. 

Contact Center AI reimagines the customer experience through full end-to-end platform (#14)

Customers rely on contact centers for help when they encounter urgent problems with a product or service, but contact centers often struggle to provide timely help. To bridge this gap with the power of AI, Google Cloud built Contact Center AI (CCAI) to streamline and shorten this time to value. CCAI Platform, the addition announced here, expanded this effort by introducing end-to-end call center capabilities.

Automate Public Certificates Lifecycle Management via RFC 8555 (ACME) (#16)

With this announcement, Google Cloud customers were able to acquire public certificates for their workloads that terminate TLS directly or for their cross-cloud and on-premises workloads using the Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. This is the same standard used by Certificate Authorities to enable automatic lifecycle management of TLS certificates.

April

Bringing together the best of both sides of BI with Looker and Data Studio (#18)

When Google Cloud acquired Looker in 2020 for its business intelligence and analytics platform, inquiring minds instantly began asking what would become of Data Studio, Google’s existing self-serve BI solution. This blog began to answer that question.

May 

Introducing AlloyDB for PostgreSQL: Free yourself from expensive, legacy databases (#6)

Live from Shoreline at Google I/O, we made one of our largest product announcements of the year, launching a PostgreSQL database that can handle both transactional and analytical workloads, without sacrificing performance.

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Intelligent, database-aware storage (#17)

Readers couldn’t get enough about AlloyDB, piling on to learn about the inner workings of its database-aware storage (not to mention its columnar engine). 

June/July 

Even more pi in the sky: Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud (#5)

A follow up to a reader favorite from 2019, we broke the record (again) by calculating the most digits of pi, leaning into significant advancements in Google Cloud compute, networking and storage. 

Unveiling the 2021 Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award Winners (#15)

Who consistently demonstrates a creative spirit, collaborative drive, and a customer-first approach? Google Cloud partners, of course! With this blog, we were proud to recognize you and to call you our partners!

Introducing Google Public Sector (#8)

The U.S. government had been asking for more choice in cloud vendors who could support its missions, and protect the health, safety, and security of its citizens. With the announcement of Google Public Sector, a subsidiary of Google LLC that will bring Google Cloud and Google Workspace technologies to U.S. public sector customers, we delivered.

August

How Google Cloud blocked the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack at 46 million rps (#2)

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been increasing in frequency and growing in size exponentially. In this post, we described how Cloud Armor protected one Google Cloud customer from the largest DDoS attack ever recorded — an attack so large that it was like receiving all of the requests that Wikipedia receives in a day in just 10 seconds. 

September

Google + Mandiant: Transforming Security Operations and Incident Response (#9)

Here, we took a moment to reflect on the completion of our acquisition of threat intelligence firm Mandiant. Bringing Mandiant into the Google Cloud fold will allow us to deliver a security operations suite to help enterprises globally stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle, and focus on eliminating entire classes of threats. 

Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security (#20)

For eight years now, DevOps professionals have pored over the results of DORA’s annual Accelerate State of DevOps Report. This year’s installment focused on the relationship between security and DevOps, using the Supply-chain Levels for Secure Artifacts (SLSA) and NIST Secure Software Development frameworks. 

October

Introducing the next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform (#4)

In April, we began to lay out our strategy for Looker and Data Studio. At Google Cloud Next ‘22, we took the next step, consolidating the two under the Looker brand umbrella, and adding important new capabilities. 

Introducing Blockchain Node Engine: fully managed node-hosting for Web3 development (#7)

Remember how in January we said that blockchain has a lot of potential? About that. News of the fully managed Blockchain Node Engine node-hosting service took readers by storm, catapulting it to the top ten of 2022, with just over two months left in the year. 

November/December

Making Cobalt Strike harder for threat actors to abuse (#21)

Legitimate versions of Cobalt Strike are a very popular red team software tool, but older, cracked versions are often used by malicious hackers to spread malware. We made available to the security community a set of open-source YARA Rules that can be deployed to help stop the illicit use of Cobalt Strike. 

Securing tomorrow today: Why Google now protects its internal communications from quantum threats (#22)

Google and Google Cloud have taken steps to harden our cryptographic algorithms used to protect internal communications against quantum computing threats. We explain here why we did it, and what challenges we face to achieve this type of future-proofing.

That’s a wrap!

Barring any last minute surprises, we’re pretty confident that what we have here is the definitive list of your favorite news stories of 2022 — you’ve got great taste. We can’t wait to see what stories inspire you in the new year. Happy holidays, and thanks for reading!