What’s new with Google Cloud - 2021

Want to know the latest from Google Cloud? Find it here in one handy location. Check back regularly for our newest updates, announcements, resources, events, learning opportunities, and more. 

Tip: Not sure where to find what you’re looking for on the Google Cloud blog? Start here: Google Cloud blog 101: Full list of topics, links, and resources.

Week of Dec 27-Dec 31, 2021

The most-read blogs about Google Cloud compute, networking, storage and physical infrastructure in 2021. Read more.

Top Google Cloud managed container blogs of 2021.

Four cloud security trends that organizations and practitioners should be planning for in 2022—and what they should do about them. Read more.

Google Cloud announces the top data analytics stories from 2021 including the top three trends and lessons they learned from customers this year. Read more.

Explore Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) and its momentum in 2021. Read more.

An overview of the innovations that Google Workspace delivered in 2021 for Google Meet. Read more.

Google Cloud’s top artificial intelligence and machine learning posts from 2021. Read more.

How we’ve helped break down silos, unearth the value of data, and apply that data to solve big problems. Read more.

A recap of the year’s infrastructure progress, from impressive Tau VMs, to industry-leading storage capabilities, to major networking leaps. Read more.

Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares his thoughts on the latest security updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team. Read more.

Google Cloud - A cloud built for developers — 2021 year in review. Read more.

API management continued to grow in importance in 2021, and Apigee continued to innovate capabilities for customers, new solutions, and partnerships. Read more.

Recapping Google’s progress in 2021 toward running on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030 — and decarbonizing the electricity system as a whole. Read more.

Week of Dec 20-Dec 24, 2021

And that’s a wrap! After engaging in countless customer interviews, we’re sharing our top 3 lessons learned from our data customers in 2021. Learn what customer data journeys inspired our top picks and what made the cut here. 

Cloud SQL now shows you minor version information. For more information, see our documentation.

Cloud SQL for MySQL now allows you to select your MySQL 8.0 minor version when creating an instance and upgrade MySQL 8.0 minor version. For more information, see our documentation.

Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports database auditing. Database auditing lets you track specific user actions in the database, such as table updates, read queries, user privilege grants, and others. To learn more, see MySQL database auditing.

Week of Dec 13-Dec 17, 2021

Google Cloud Security Talks, Zero Trust Edition: This week, we hosted our final Google Cloud Security Talks event of the year, focused on all things zero trust. Google pioneered the implementation of zero trust in the enterprise over a decade ago with our BeyondCorp effort, and we continue to lead the way, applying this approach to most aspects of our operations. Check out our digital sessions on-demand to hear the latest updates on Google’s vision for a zero trust future and how you can leverage our capabilities to protect your organization in today’s challenging threat environment.

Policy Troubleshooter for BeyondCorp Enterprise is now generally available! Using this feature, admins can triage access failure events and perform the necessary actions to unblock users quickly. Learn more by registering for Google Cloud Security Talks on December 15 and attending the BeyondCorp Enterprise session. The event is free to attend and sessions will be available on-demand.

A CRITICAL VULNERABILITY in a widely used logging library, Apache’s Log4j, has become a global security incident. Security researchers around the globe warn that this could have serious repercussions. Two Google Cloud Blog posts describe how Cloud Armor and Cloud IDS both help mitigate the threat.

Take advantage of these ten no-cost trainings before 2022. Check them out here.

Deploy Task Queues alongside your Cloud Application: Cloud Tasks is now available in 23 GCP Regions worldwide. Read more.

Managed Anthos Service Mesh support for GKE Autopilot (Preview): GKE Autopilot with Managed ASM provides ease of use and simplified administration capabilities, allowing customers to focus on their application, not the infrastructure. Customers can now let Google handle the upgrade and lifecycle tasks for both the cluster and the service mesh. Configure Managed ASM with asmcli experiment in GKE Autopilot cluster. 

Week of Dec 6-Dec 10, 2021

5 key metrics to measure cloud FinOps impact in 2022 and beyond - Learn about the 5 key metrics to effectively measure the impact of Cloud FinOps across your organization and leverage the metrics to gain insights, prioritize on strategic goals, and drive enterprise-wide adoption. Learn more

We announced Cloud IDS, our new network security offering, is now generally available. Cloud IDS, built with Palo Alto Networks’ technologies, delivers easy-to-use, cloud-native, managed, network-based threat detection with  industry-leading breadth and security efficacy. To learn more, and request a 30 day trial credit, see the Cloud IDS webpage.

Week of Nov 29-Dec 3, 2021

Join Cloud Learn, happening from Dec. 8-9: This interactive learning event will have live technical demos, Q&As, career development workshops, and more covering everything from Google Cloud fundamentals to certification prep. Learn more.

Get a deep dive into BigQuery Administrator Hub– With BigQuery Administrator Hub you can better manage BigQuery at scale with Resource Charts and Slot Estimator Administrators. Learn more about these tools and just how easy they are to use here.

New data and AI in Media blog - How data and AI can help media companies better personalize; and what to watch out for. We interviewed Googlers, Gloria Lee, Executive Account Director of Media & Entertainment, and John Abel, Technical Director for the Office of the CTO, to share exclusive insights on how media organizations should think about and ways to make the most out of their data in the new era of direct-to-consumer. Watch our video interview with Gloria and John and read more.

Datastream is now generally available (GA): Datastream, a serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service, allows you to synchronize data across heterogeneous databases, storage systems, and applications reliably and with minimal latency to support real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures. Datastream currently supports CDC ingestion from Oracle and MySQL to Cloud Storage, with additional sources and destinations coming in the future. Datastream integrates with Dataflow and Cloud Data Fusion to deliver real time replication to a wide range of destinations, including BigQuery, Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL. Learn more.

Week of Nov 22-24, 2021

Security Command Center (SCC) launches new mute findings capability: We’re excited to announce a new “Mute Findings” capability in SCC that helps you gain operational efficiencies by effectively managing the findings volume based on your organization’s policies and requirements. SCC presents potential security risks in your cloud environment as ‘findings’ across misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and threats. With the launch of ‘mute findings’ capability, you gain a way to reduce findings volume and focus on the security issues that are highly relevant to you and your organization. To learn more, read this blog post and watch this short demo video. 

Week of Nov 15 - Nov 19, 2021

Cloud Spanner is our distributed, globally scalable SQL database service that decouples compute from storage, which makes it possible to scale processing resources separately from storage. This means that horizontal upscaling is possible with no downtime for achieving higher performance on dimensions such as operations per second for both reads and writes. The distributed scaling nature of Spanner’s architecture makes it an ideal solution for unpredictable workloads such as online games. Learn how you can get started developing global multiplayer games using Spanner.

New Dataflow templates for Elasticsearch released to help customers process and export Google Cloud data into their Elastic Cloud. You can now push data from Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage or BigQuery into your Elasticsearch deployments in a cloud-native fashion. Read more for a deep dive on how to set up a Dataflow streaming pipeline to collect and export your Cloud Audit logs into Elasticsearch, and analyze them in Kibana UI.

Directory Sync is now available for public preview: The new cloud-based directory sync solution makes it easier to synchronize your user and group data from one or more Active Directory sources with your Google Cloud directory. It comes with integrated audit logs, which makes it easier to search, filter and set custom alerts. Learn more

We’re excited to announce the public preview of Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, a new monitoring offering designed for scale and ease of use that maintains compatibility with the open-source Prometheus ecosystem. While Prometheus works well for many basic deployments, managing Prometheus can become challenging at enterprise scale. Learn more about the service in our blog and on the website.

Week of Nov 8 - Nov 12, 2021

New study on the economics of cloud migration - The Total Economic Impact™ Of Migrating Expensive Operating Systems and Traditional Software to Google Cloud. We worked with Forrester on this study which details the cost savings and benefits you can achieve from migrating and modernizing with Google Cloud, especially with respect to expensive operating systems and traditional software. Download now!

New whitepaper on building a successful cloud migration strategy - The priority to move into the cloud and achieve a zero data center footprint is becoming top of mind for many CIOs. One of the most fundamental changes required to accelerate a move to the cloud is the adoption of a product mindset—the shift from an emphasis on project to product. Download “Accelerating the journey to the cloud with a product mindset” now. 

Week of Nov 1 - Nov 5, 2021

Export from Google Cloud Storage: Storage Transfer Service now offers Preview support for exporting data from Cloud Storage to any POSIX file system. You can use this bidirectional data movement capability to move data in and out of Cloud Storage, on-premises clusters, and edge locations including Google Distributed Cloud. The service provides built-in capabilities such as scheduling, bandwidth management, retries, and data integrity checks that simplifies the data transfer workflow. For more information, see Download data from Cloud Storage.

Document Translation is now GA! Translate documents in real-time in 100+ languages, and retain document formatting. Learn more about new features and see a demo on how Eli Lilly translates content globally.

Announcing the general availability of Cloud Asset Inventory console - We’re excited to announce the general availability of the new Cloud Asset Inventory user interface. In addition to all the capabilities announced earlier in Public Preview, the general availability release provides powerful search and easy filtering capabilities. These capabilities enable you to view details of resources and IAM policies, machine type and policy statistics, and insights into your overall cloud footprint. Learn more about these new capabilities by using the searching resources and searching IAM policies guides. You can get more information about Cloud Asset Inventory using our product documentation.

New whitepaper available: Migrating to .NET Core/5+ on Google Cloud - This free whitepaper, written for .NET developers and software architects who want to modernize their .NET Framework applications, outlines the benefits and things to consider when migrating .NET Framework apps to .NET Core/5+ running on Google Cloud. It also offers a framework with suggestions to help you build a strategy for migrating to a fully managed Kubernetes offering or to Google serverless. Download the free whitepaper. 

Week of Oct 25 - Oct 29, 2021

By establishing a robust value measurement approach to track and monitor the business value metrics toward business goals, we are bringing technology, finance, and business leaders together through the discipline of Cloud FinOps to show how digital transformation is enabling the organization to create new innovative capabilities and generate top-line revenue. Learn more.

We’ve announced BigQuery Omni, a new multicloud analytics service that allows data teams to perform cross-cloud analytics - across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud - all from one viewpoint. Learn how BigQuery Omni works and what data and business challenges it solves here.

BigQuery table snapshots are now generally available. A table snapshot is a low-cost, read-only copy of a table's data as it was at a particular time. 

Week of Oct 18 - Oct 22, 2021

Available now are our newest T2D VMs family based on 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors. Learn more.

In case you missed it — top AI announcements from Google Cloud Next. Catch up on what’s new, see demos, and hear from our customers about how Google Cloud is making AI more accessible, more focused on business outcomes, and fast-tracking the time-to-value. 

Too much to take in at Google Cloud Next 2021? No worries - here’s a breakdown of the biggest announcements at the 3-day event.

Check out the second revision of Architecture Framework, Google Cloud’s collection of canonical best practices.

Week of Oct 4 - Oct 8, 2021

Want to know what’s the latest with Google ML-Powered intelligence service Active Assist and how to learn more about it at Next’21? Check out this blog.

We’re excited to announce Google Cloud’s new goal of equipping more than 40 million people with Google Cloud skills. To help achieve this goal, we’re offering no-cost access to all our training content this month. Find out more here. 

Support for language repositories in Artifact Registry is now generally available. Artifact Registry allows you to store all your language-specific artifacts in one place. Supported package types include Java, Node and Python. Additionally, support for Linux packages is in public preview. Learn more.

Week of Sept 27 - Oct 1, 2021

It is now simple to use Terraform to configure Anthos features on your GKE clusters. Check out part two of this series which explores adding Policy Controller audits to our Config Sync managed cluster. Learn more.

Announcing the launch of Speaker ID. In 2020, customer preference for voice calls increased by 10 percentage points (to 43%) and was by far the most preferred service channel. But most callers still need to pass through archaic authentication processes which slows down the time to resolution and burns through valuable agent time. Speaker ID, from Google Cloud, brings ML-based speaker identification directly to customers and contact center partners, allowing callers to authenticate over the phone, using their own voice.   Learn more.

Your guide to all things AI & ML at Google Cloud Next. Google Cloud Next is coming October 12–14 and if you’re interested in AI & ML, we’ve got you covered. Tune in to hear about real use cases from companies like Twitter, Eli Lilly, Wayfair, and more. We’re also excited to share exciting product news and hands on AI learning opportunities. Learn more about AI at Next and register for free today!

Week of Sept 20 - Sept 24, 2021

Announcing the webinar, Powering market data through cloud and AI/ML. We’re sponsoring a Coalition Greenwich webinar on September 23rd where we’ll discuss the findings of our upcoming study on how market data delivery and consumption is being transformed by cloud and AI. Moderated by Coalition Greenwich, the panel will feature Trey Berre from CME Group, Brad Levy from Symphony, and Ulku Rowe representing Google Cloud. Register here.

New research from Google Cloud reveals five innovation trends for market data. Together with Coalition Greenwich we surveyed exchanges, trading systems, data aggregators, data producers, asset managers, hedge funds, and investment banks to examine both the distribution and consumption of market data and trading infrastructure in the cloud. Learn more about our findings here.

If you are looking for a more automated way to manage quotas over a high number of projects, we are excited to introduce a Quota Monitoring Solution from Google Cloud Professional Services. This solution benefits customers who have many projects or organizations and are looking for an easy way to monitor the quota usage in a single dashboard and use default alerting capabilities across all quotas.

Week of Sept 13 -Sept 17, 2021

New storage features help ensure data is never lost: We are announcing extensions to our popular Cloud Storage offering, and introducing two new services, Filestore Enterprise, and Backup for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Together, these new capabilities will make it easier for you to protect your data out-of-the box, across a wide variety of applications and use cases: Read the full article.

API management powers sustainable resource management: Water, waste, and energy solutions company, Veolia, uses APIs and API Management platform Apigee to build apps and help their customers build their own apps, too. Learn from their digital and API-first approach here.

To support our expanding customer base in Canada, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud Platform region in Toronto is now open. Toronto is the 28th Google Cloud region connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with Montreal, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

Cloud SQL now supports custom formatting controls for CSVs. When performing admin exports and imports, users can now select custom characters for field delimiters, quotes, escapes, and other characters. For more information, see our documentation.

How cloud technologies are improving outcomes and equity in healthcare: The healthcare and life sciences industries moved mountains to adapt to COVID-19. These changes were largely born out of necessity, and now is the time to unify all the transformation into a more holistic vision, so the shifts over the last 18 months can be leveraged for lasting momentum and impact. Read the full article in Forbes. 

Week of Sept 6 -Sept 10, 2021

Hear how Lowe’s SRE was able to reduce their Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) by over 80% after adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering practices and Google Cloud’s operations suite.

Week of Aug 30 -Sept 3, 2021

A what’s new blog in the what’s new blog? Yes, you read that correctly. Google Cloud data engineers are always hard at work maintaining the hundreds of dataset pipelines that feed into our public datasets repository, but they’re also regularly bringing new ones into the mix. Check out our newest featured datasets and catch a few best practices in our living blog: What are the newest datasets in Google Cloud? 

Migration success with Operational Health Reviews from Google Cloud’s Professional Service Organization - Learn how Google Cloud’s Professional Services Org is proactively and strategically guiding customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the Cloud, both during and after their migration process.

Learn how we simplified monitoring for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Google Cloud operations suite. Read more.

Week of Aug 23 -Aug 27, 2021

Google Transfer Appliance announces preview of online mode. Customers are increasingly collecting data that needs to quickly be transferred to the cloud. Transfer Appliances are being used to quickly offload data from sources (e.g. cameras, cars, sensors) and can now stream that data to a Cloud Storage bucket. Online mode can be toggled as data is copied into the appliance and either send the data offline by shipping the appliance to Google or copy data to Cloud Storage over the network. Read more.

Topic retention for Cloud Pub/Sub is now Generally Available. Topic retention is the most comprehensive and flexible way available to retain Pub/Sub messages for message replay. In addition to backing up all subscriptions connected to the topic, new subscriptions can now be initialized from a timestamp in the past. Learn more about the feature here.

Vertex Predictions now supports private endpoints for online prediction. Through VPC Peering, Private Endpoints provide increased security and lower latency when serving ML models. Read more.

Week of Aug 16 -Aug 20, 2021

Next up, look for us to take security one step further by adding authorization features for service-to-service communications for gRPC proxyless services, as well as to support other deployment models, where proxyless gRPC services are running somewhere other than GKE, for example Compute Engine. We hope you'll join us and check out the setup guide and give us feedback.

Cloud Run now supports VPC Service Controls. You can now protect your Cloud Run services against data exfiltration by using VPC Service Controls in conjunction with Cloud Run’s ingress and egress settings. Read more.

Read how retailers are leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine to move their on-premises applications to the cloud, where they can achieve the scale, intelligence, and speed required to stay relevant and competitive. Read more.

A series of new features for BeyondCorp Enterprise, our zero trust offering. We now offer native support for client certificates for eight types of VPC-SC resources. We are also announcing general availability of the on-prem connector, which allows users to secure HTTP or HTTPS based on-premises applications outside of Google Cloud. Additionally, three new BeyondCorp attributes are available in Access Context Manager as part of a public preview. Customers can configure custom access policies based on time and date, credential strength, and/or Chrome browser attributes. Read more about these announcements here.

We are excited to announce that Google Cloud, working with its partners NAG and DDN, demonstrated the highest performing Lustre file system on the IO500 ranking of the fastest HPC storage systems — quite a feat considering Lustre is one of the most widely deployed HPC file systems in the world. Read the full article.

The Storage Transfer Service for on-premises data API is now available in Preview. Now you can use RESTful APIs to automate your on-prem-to-cloud transfer workflows.  Storage Transfer Service is a software service to transfer data over a network. The service provides built-in capabilities such as scheduling, bandwidth management, retries, and data integrity checks that simplifies the data transfer workflow. 

It is now simple to use Terraform to configure Anthos features on your GKE clusters. This is the first part of the 3 part series that describes using Terraform to enable Config Sync.  For platform administrators,  this natural, IaC approach improves auditability and transparency and reduces risk of misconfigurations or security gaps. Read more.

In this commissioned study, “Modernize With AIOps To Maximize Your Impact”, Forrester Consulting surveyed organizations worldwide to better understand how they’re approaching artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in their cloud environments, and what kind of benefits they’re seeing.

If your organization or development environment has strict security policies which don’t allow for external IPs, it can be difficult to set up a connection between a Private Cloud SQL instance and a Private IP VM. This article contains clear instructions on how to set up a connection from a private Compute Engine VM to a private Cloud SQL instance using a private service connection and the mysqlsh command line tool.

Week of Aug 9 -Aug 13, 2021

Compute Engine users have a new, updated set of VM-level “in-context” metrics, charts, and logs to correlate signals for common troubleshooting scenarios across CPU, Disk, Memory, Networking, and live Processes.  This brings the best of Google Cloud’s operations suite directly to the Compute Engine UI. Learn more.

​​Pub/Sub to Splunk Dataflow template has been updated to address multiple enterprise customer asks, from improved compatibility with Splunk Add-on for Google Cloud Platform, to more extensibility with user-defined functions (UDFs), and general pipeline reliability enhancements to tolerate failures like transient network issues when delivering data to Splunk. Read more to learn about how to take advantage of these latest features. Read more.

Register for the Google Cloud Startup Summit, September 9, 2021 at goo.gle/StartupSummit for a digital event filled with inspiration, learning, and discussion. This event will bring together our startup and VC community to discuss the latest trends and insights, headlined by a keynote by Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X the moonshot factory. Additionally, learn from a variety of technical and business sessions to help take your startup to the next level.

Google Cloud and Harris Poll healthcare research reveals COVID-19 impacts on healthcare technology. Learn more.

Partial SSO is now available for public preview. If you use a 3rd party identity provider to single sign on into Google services, Partial SSO allows you to identify a subset of your users to use Google / Cloud Identity as your SAML SSO identity provider (short video and demo)

Week of Aug 2 -Aug 6, 2021

Gartner named Google Cloud a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, formerly Infrastructure as a Service. Learn more.

Private Service Connect is now generally available. Private Service Connect lets you create private and secure connections to Google Cloud and third-party services with service endpoints in your VPCs. Read more.

30 migration guides designed to help you identify the best ways to migrate, which include meeting common organizational goals like minimizing time and risk during your migration, identifying the most enterprise-grade infrastructure for your workloads, picking a cloud that aligns with your organization’s sustainability goals, and more. Read more.

Week of Jul 26 -Jul 30, 2021

Today we’re hosting our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit, a digital event dedicated to helping leading retailers and brands digitally transform their business. Read more.

See how IKEA uses Recommendations AI to provide customers with more relevant product information. Read more.

​​Google Cloud launches a career program for people with autism designed to hire and support more talented people with autism in the rapidly growing cloud industry. Learn more

Google Cloud follows new API stability tenets that work to minimize unexpected deprecations to our Enterprise APIs. Read more.

Week of Jul 19 -Jul 23, 2021

Register and join us for Google Cloud Next, October 12-14, 2021 at g.co/CloudNext for a fresh approach to digital transformation, as well as a few surprises. Next ‘21 will be a fully customizable digital adventure for a more personalized learning journey. Find the tools and training you need to succeed. From live, interactive Q&As and informative breakout sessions to educational demos and real-life applications of the latest tech from Google Cloud. Get ready to plug into your cloud community, get informed, and be inspired. Together we can tackle today’s greatest business challenges, and start solving for what’s next.

"Application Innovation" takes a front row seat this year– To stay ahead of rising customer expectations and the digital and in-person hybrid landscape, enterprises must know what application innovation means and how to deliver this type of innovation with a small piece of technology that might surprise you. Learn more about the three pillars of app innovation here.

The market for healthcare cloud is projected to grow 43%. This means a need for better tech infrastructure, digital transformation & Cloud tools. Learn how Google Cloud Partner Advantage partners help customers solve business challenges in healthcare.

We announced Cloud IDS, our new network security offering, which is now available in preview. Cloud IDS delivers easy-to-use, cloud-native, managed, network-based threat detection. With Cloud IDS, customers can enjoy a Google Cloud-integrated experience, built with Palo Alto Networks’ industry-leading threat detection technologies to provide high levels of security efficacy. Learn more.   

Key Visualizer for Cloud Spanner is now generally available.  Key Visualizer is a new interactive monitoring tool that lets developers and administrators analyze usage patterns in Spanner. It reveals trends and outliers in key performance and resource metrics for databases of any size, helping to optimize queries and reduce infrastructure costs. See it in action.

Week of Jul 12 -Jul 16, 2021

Simplify VM migrations with Migrate for Compute Engine as a Service: delivers a Google-managed cloud service that enables simple, frictionless, and large-scale enterprise migrations of virtual machines to Google Compute Engine with minimal downtime and risk. API-driven and integrated into your Google Cloud console for ease of use, this service uses agent-less replication to copy data without manual intervention and without VPN requirements. It also enables you to launch non-disruptive validations of your VMs prior to cutover.  Rapidly migrate a single application or execute a sprint with hundred systems using migration groups with confidence. Read more here.

The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR is now open for business, ready to host your workloads. Learn more and watch the region launch event here.

Introducing Quilkin: the open-source game server proxy. Developed in collaboration with Embark Studios, Quilkin is an open source UDP proxy, tailor-made for high performance real-time multiplayer games. Read more.

We’re making Google Glass on Meet available to a wider network of global customers. Learn more.

Transfer Appliance supports Google Managed Encryption Keys — We’re announcing the support for Google Managed Encryption Keys with Transfer Appliance, this is in addition to the currently available Customer Managed Encryption Keys feature. Customers have asked for the Transfer Appliance service to create and manage encryption keys for transfer sessions to improve usability and maintain security. The Transfer Appliance Service can now manage the encryption keys for the customers who do not wish to handle a key themselves. Learn more about Using Google Managed Encryption Keys. 

UCLA builds a campus-wide API program– With Google Cloud's API management platform, Apigee, UCLA created a unified and strong API foundation that removes data friction that students, faculty, and administrators alike face. This foundation not only simplifies how various personas connect to data, but also encourages more innovations in the future. Learn their story.

We’re rolling out general support of Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail within Google Workspace. Learn more.

Learn how DeNA Sports Business created an operational status visualization system that helps determine whether live event attendees have correctly installed Japan’s coronavirus contact tracing app COCOA.

Google Cloud CAS provides a highly scalable and available private CA to address the unprecedented growth in certificates in the digital world. Read more about CAS.

An enhanced region picker makes it easy to choose a Google Cloud region with the lowest CO2 output. Learn more.

Amwell and Google Cloud explore five ways telehealth can help democratize access to healthcare. Read more.

Major League Baseball and Kaggle launch ML competition to learn about fan engagement. Batter up!

Week of Jul 5-Jul 9, 2021

Google Cloud and Call of Duty League launch ActivStat to bring fans, players, and commentators the power of competitive statistics in real-time. Read more.

Building applications is a heavy lift due to the technical complexity, which includes the complexity of backend services that are used to manage and store data. Firestore alters this by having Google Cloud manage your backend complexity through a complete backend-as-a-service! Learn more.

Google Cloud’s new Native App Development skills challenge lets you earn badges that demonstrate your ability to create cloud-native apps. Read more and sign up.

Week of Jun 28-Jul 2, 2021

Storage Transfer Service now offers preview support for Integration with AWS Security Token Service. Security conscious customers can now use Storage Transfer Service to perform transfers from AWS S3 without passing any security credentials. This release will alleviate the security burden associated with passing long-term AWS S3 credentials, which have to be rotated or explicitly revoked when they are no longer needed. Read more.

The most popular and surging Google Search terms are now available in BigQuery as a public dataset. View the Top 25 and Top 25 rising queries from Google Trends from the past 30-days, including 5 years of historical data across the 210 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) in the US. Learn more.

A new predictive autoscaling capability lets you add additional Compute Engine VMs in anticipation of forecasted demand. Predictive autoscaling is generally available across all Google Cloud regions. Read more or consult the documentation for more information on how to configure, simulate and monitor predictive autoscaling.

Messages by Google is now the default messaging app for all AT&T customers using Android phones in the United States. Read more.

TPU v4 Pods will soon be available on Google Cloud, providing the most powerful publicly available computing platform for machine learning training. Learn more.

Cloud SQL for SQL Server has addressed multiple enterprise customer asks with the GA releases of both SQL Server 2019 and Active Directory integration, as well as the Preview release of Cross Region Replicas.  This set of releases work in concert to allow customers to set up a more scalable and secure managed SQL Server environment to address their workloads’ needs. Read more.

Week of Jun 21-Jun 25, 2021

Simplified return-to-office with no-code technology– We've just released a solution to your most common return-to-office headaches: make a no-code app customized to solve your business-specific challenges. Learn how to create an automated app where employees can see office room occupancy, check what desks are reserved or open, review disinfection schedules, and more in this blog tutorial. 

New technical validation whitepaper for running ecommerce applications—Enterprise Strategy Group's analyst outlines the challenges of organizations running ecommerce applications and how Google Cloud helps to mitigate those challenges and handle changing demands with global infrastructure solutions. Download the whitepaper. 

The full agenda for Google for Games Developer Summit on July 12th-13th, 2021 is now available. A free digital event with announcements from teams including Stadia, Google Ads, AdMob, Android, Google Play, Firebase, Chrome, YouTube, and Google Cloud. Hear more about how Google Cloud technology creates opportunities for gaming companies to make lasting enhancements for players and creatives. Register at g.co/gamedevsummit

Transfer from Azure ADLS Gen 2: Storage Transfer Service offers Preview support for transferring data from Azure ADLS Gen 2 to Google Cloud Storage. Take advantage of a scalable, serverless service to handle data transfer. Read more.

reCAPTCHA V2 and V3 customers can now migrate site keys to reCAPTCHA Enterprise in under 10 minutes and without making any code changes. Watch our Webinar to learn more. 

Bot attacks are the biggest threat to your business that you probably haven’t addressed yet. Check out our Forbes article to see what you can do about it.

Week of Jun 14-Jun 18, 2021

A new VM family for scale-out workloads - New AMD-based Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors. Learn more.

New whitepaper helps customers plot their cloud migrations—Our new whitepaper distills the conversations we’ve had with CIOs, CTOs, and their technical staff into several frameworks that can help cut through the hype and the technical complexity to help devise the strategy that empowers both the business and IT. Read more or download the whitepaper.

Ubuntu Pro lands on Google Cloud—The general availability of Ubuntu Pro images on Google Cloud gives customers an improved Ubuntu experience, expanded security coverage, and integration with critical Google Cloud features. Read more.

Navigating hybrid work with a single, connected experience in Google Workspace—New additions to Google Workspace help businesses navigate the challenges of hybrid work, such as Companion Mode for Google Meet calls. Read more.

Arab Bank embraces Google Cloud technology—This Middle Eastern bank now offers innovative apps and services to their customers and employees with Apigee and Anthos. In fact, Arab Bank reports over 90% of their new-to-bank customers are using their mobile apps. Learn more.

Google Workspace for the Public Sector Sector events—This June, learn about Google Workspace tips and tricks to help you get things done. Join us for one or more of our learning events tailored for government and higher education users. Learn more.

Week of Jun 7-Jun 11, 2021

The top cloud capabilities industry leaders want for sustained innovation—Multicloud and hybrid cloud approaches, coupled with open-source technology adoption, enable IT teams to take full advantage of the best cloud has to offer. Our recent study with IDG shows just how much of a priority this has become for business leaders. Read more or download the report.

Announcing the Firmina subsea cable—Planned to run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay, Firmina will be the longest open subsea cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable—a resilience boost at a time when reliable connectivity is more important than ever. Read more.

New research reveals what’s needed for AI acceleration in manufacturing—According to our data, which polled more than 1,000 senior manufacturing executives across seven countries, 76% have turned to digital enablers and disruptive technologies due to the pandemic such as data and analytics, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI). And 66% of manufacturers who use AI in their day-to-day operations report that their reliance on AI is increasing. Read more or download the report.

Simplifying Transfer Appliance configuration with Cloud Setup Application—We’re announcing the availability of the Transfer Appliance Cloud Setup Application. This will use the information you provide through simple prompts and configure your Google Cloud permissions, preferred Cloud Storage bucket, and Cloud KMS key for your transfer. Several cloud console based manual steps are now simplified with a command line experience. Read more. 

Google Cloud VMware Engine is now HIPAA compliant—As of April 1, 2021, Google Cloud VMware Engine is covered under the Google Cloud Business Associate Agreement (BAA), meaning it has achieved HIPAA compliance. Healthcare organizations can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications. Read more.

Introducing container-native Cloud DNS—Kubernetes networking almost always starts with a DNS request. DNS has broad impacts on your application and cluster performance, scalability, and resilience. That is why we are excited to announce the release of container-native Cloud DNS—the native integration of Cloud DNS with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to provide in-cluster Service DNS resolution with Cloud DNS, our scalable and full-featured DNS service. Read more.

Welcoming the EU’s new Standard Contractual Clauses for cross-border data transfers—Learn how we’re incorporating the new Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) into our contracts to help protect our customers’ data and meet the requirements of European privacy legislation. Read more.

Lowe’s meets customer demand with Google SRE practices—Learn how Low’s has been able to increase the number of releases they can support by adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework and leveraging their partnership with Google Cloud. Read more.

What’s next for SAP on Google Cloud at SAPPHIRE NOW and beyond—As SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference begins this week, we believe businesses have a more significant opportunity than ever to build for their next decade of growth and beyond. Learn more on how we’re working together with our customers, SAP, and our partners to support this transformation. Read more.

Support for Node.js, Python and Java repositories for Artifact Registry now in Preview–With today’s announcement, you can not only use Artifact Registry to secure and distribute container images, but also manage and secure your other software artifacts. Read more.

Google named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 report–Learn about the criteria where Google Dataflow was rated 5 out 5 and why this matters for our customers here.

Applied ML Summit this Thursday, June 11–Watch our keynote to learn about predictions for machine learning over the next decade. Engage with distinguished researchers, leading practitioners, and Kaggle Grandmasters during our live Ask Me Anything session. Take part in our modeling workshops to learn how you can iterate faster, and deploy and manage your models with confidence–no matter your level of formal computer science training. Learn how to develop and apply your professional skills, grow your abilities at the pace of innovation, and take your career to the next level. Register now.

Week of May 31-Jun 4, 2021

Security Command Center now supports CIS 1.1 benchmarks and granular access control–Security Command Center (SCC) now supports CIS benchmarks for Google Cloud Platform Foundation v1.1, enabling you to monitor and address compliance violations against industry best practices in your Google Cloud environment. Additionally, SCC now supports fine-grained access control for administrators that allows you to easily adhere to the principles of least privilege—restricting access based on roles and responsibilities to reduce risk and enabling broader team engagement to address security. Read more.

Zero-trust managed security for services with Traffic Director–We created Traffic Director to bring to you a fully managed service mesh product that includes load balancing, traffic management and service discovery. And now, we’re happy to announce the availability of a fully-managed zero-trust security solution using Traffic Director with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Certificate Authority (CA) Service. Read more.

How one business modernized their data warehouse for customer success–PedidosYa migrated from their old data warehouse to Google Cloud's BigQuery. Now with BigQuery, the Latin American online food ordering company has reduced the total cost per query by 5x. Learn more.

Announcing new Cloud TPU VMs–New Cloud TPU VMs make it easier to use our industry-leading TPU hardware by providing direct access to TPU host machines, offering a new and improved user experience to develop and deploy TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX on Cloud TPUs. Read more.

Introducing logical replication and decoding for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL–We’re announcing the public preview of logical replication and decoding for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. By releasing those capabilities and enabling change data capture (CDC) from Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, we strengthen our commitment to building an open database platform that meets critical application requirements and integrates seamlessly with the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Read more.

How 6 businesses are transforming with SAP on Google Cloud–Thousands of organizations globally rely on SAP for their most mission critical workloads. And for many Google Cloud customers, part of a broader digital transformation journey has included accelerating the migration of these essential SAP workloads to Google Cloud for greater agility, elasticity, and uptime. Read six of their stories.

Week of May 24-May 28, 2021

Google Cloud for financial services: driving your transformation cloud journey–This week, as we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’re sharing more on how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. Read more or watch the summit on demand.

Introducing Datashare solution for financial services–We announced the general availability of Datashare for financial services, a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers and data consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily. Read more.

Announcing Datastream in Preview–Datastream, a serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service, allows enterprises to synchronize data across heterogeneous databases, storage systems, and applications reliably and with minimal latency to support real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures. Read more.

Introducing Dataplex: An intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale–Dataplex provides a way to centrally manage, monitor, and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools. Read more. 

Announcing Dataflow Prime–Available in Preview in Q3 2021, Dataflow Prime is a new platform based on a serverless, no-ops, auto-tuning architecture built to bring unparalleled resource utilization and radical operational simplicity to big data processing. Dataflow Prime builds on Dataflow and brings new user benefits with innovations in resource utilization and distributed diagnostics. The new capabilities in Dataflow significantly reduce the time spent on infrastructure sizing and tuning tasks, as well as time spent diagnosing data freshness problems. Read more.

Secure and scalable sharing for data and analytics with Analytics Hub–With Analytics Hub, available in Preview in Q3, organizations get a rich data ecosystem by publishing and subscribing to analytics-ready datasets; control and monitoring over how their data is being used; a self-service way to access valuable and trusted data assets; and an easy way to monetize their data assets without the overhead of building and managing the infrastructure. Read more.

Cloud Spanner trims entry cost by 90%–Coming soon to Preview, granular instance sizing in Spanner lets organizations run workloads at as low as 1/10th the cost of regular instances, equating to approximately $65/month. Read more.

Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA and adds new security features for regulated industries–Bigtable instances with a multi-cluster routing policy across 3 or more regions are now covered by a 99.999% monthly uptime percentage under the new SLA. In addition, new Data Access audit logs can help determine whether sensitive customer information has been accessed in the event of a security incident, and if so, when, and by whom. Read more.

Build a no-code journaling app–In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, Google Cloud's no-code application development platform, AppSheet, demonstrates how you can build a journaling app complete with titles, time stamps, mood entries, and more. Learn how with this blog and video here.

New features in Security Command Center—On May 24th, Security Command Center Premium launched the general availability of granular access controls at project- and folder-level and Center for Internet Security (CIS) 1.1 benchmarks for Google Cloud Platform Foundation. These new capabilities enable organizations to improve their security posture and efficiently manage risk for their Google Cloud environment. Learn more.

Simplified API operations with AI–Google Cloud's API management platform, Apigee, applies Google's industry leading ML and AI to your API metadata. Understand how it works with anomaly detection here.

Announcing OS configuration management Preview in VM Manager–In January, we introduced VM Manager, a suite of infrastructure management tools to simplify and automate the maintenance of large fleets of Compute Engine VMs, including OS patch, OS inventory, and OS configuration management. The first version of OS configuration management helps install and maintain agents and operating system (OS) software configurations at scale, and is currently used in production by hundreds of customers. This week we introduced OS configuration management (Preview) with enhanced features and capabilities. Read more.

New user-friendly SQL capabilities in BigQuery–We announced three categories of BigQuery user-friendly SQL launches: Powerful Analytics Features, Flexible Schema Handling, and New Geospatial Tools. Read more.

Announcing support for Dataflow Import & Export of your database with the Cloud Spanner Emulator–Existing Dataflow pipelines that are configured to work with Cloud Spanner can be tested with the emulator. This allows for easy offline testing of existing pipelines without connecting to the actual Spanner backend. Read more.

Google Cloud 2021 Summit series kicks off this week with the Data Cloud and Financial Services Summits–Our Google Cloud Summit series begins this week with the Data Cloud Summit on Wednesday May 26 (Global). At this half-day event, you’ll learn how leading companies like PayPal, Workday, Equifax, and many others are driving competitive differentiation using Google Cloud technologies to build their data clouds and transform data into value that drives innovation. The following day, Thursday May 27 (Global & EMEA), discover how Google Cloud is helping financial institutions such as PayPal, Global Payments, HSBC, Credit Suisse, AXA Switzerland and more unlock new possibilities and accelerate business through innovation. Read more and explore the entire summit series.

Announcing the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th–With a surge of new gamers and an increase in time spent playing games in the last year, it’s more important than ever for game developers to delight and engage players. To help developers with this opportunity, the games teams at Google are back to announce the return of the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th. Hear from experts across Google about new game solutions they’re building to make it easier for you to continue creating great games, connecting with players and scaling your business. Registration is free and open to all game developers. Register for the free online event at g.co/gamedevsummit to get more details in the coming weeks. We can’t wait to share our latest innovations with the developer community. Learn more.

Week of May 17-May 21, 2021

Best practices to protect your organization against ransomware threats–For more than 20 years Google has been operating securely in the cloud, using our modern technology stack to provide a more defensible environment that we can protect at scale. While the threat of ransomware isn’t new, our responsibility to help protect you from existing or emerging threats never changes. In our recent blog post, we shared guidance on how organizations can increase their resilience to ransomware and how some of our Cloud products and services can help. Read more.

Forrester names Google Cloud a Leader in Unstructured Data Security Platforms–Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021 report, and rated Google Cloud highest in the current offering category among the providers evaluated. Read more or download the report.

Introducing Vertex AI: One platform, every ML tool you need–Vertex AI is a managed machine learning (ML) platform that allows companies to accelerate the deployment and maintenance of artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more.

Transforming collaboration in Google Workspace–We’re launching smart canvas, a new product experience that delivers the next evolution of collaboration for Google Workspace. Between now and the end of the year, we’re rolling out innovations that make it easier for people to stay connected, focus their time and attention, and transform their ideas into impact. Read more.

Developing next-generation geothermal power–At I/O this week, we announced a first-of-its-kind, next-generation geothermal project with clean-energy startup Fervo that will soon begin adding carbon-free energy to the electric grid that serves our data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada, including our Cloud region in Las Vegas. Read more.

Announcing Google Cloud datasets solutions–We're adding commercial, synthetic, and first-party data to our Google Cloud Public Datasets Program to help organizations increase the value of their analytics and AI initiatives, and we're making available an open source reference architecture for a more streamlined data onboarding process to the program. Read more.

Introducing custom samples in Cloud Code–With new custom samples in Cloud Code, developers can quickly access your enterprise’s best code samples via a versioned Git repository directly from their IDEs. Read more.

Retention settings for Cloud SQL–Cloud SQL now allows you to configure backup retention settings to protect against data loss. You can retain between 1 and 365 days’ worth of automated backups and between 1 and 7 days’ worth of transaction logs for point-in-time recovery. See the details here.

Cloud developer’s guide to Google I/O 2021–Google I/O may look a little different this year, but don’t worry, you’ll still get the same first-hand look at the newest launches and projects coming from Google. Best of all, it’s free and available to all (virtually) on May 18-20. Read more.

Week of May 10-May 14, 2021

APIs and Apigee power modern day due diligence–With APIs and Google Cloud's Apigee, business due diligence company DueDil revolutionized the way they harness and share their Big Information Graph (B.I.G.) with partners and customers. Get the full story.

Cloud CISO Perspectives: May 2021–It’s also been a busy month for us here at Google Cloud since our inaugural CISO perspectives blog post in April. Here, VP and CISO of Google Cloud Phil Venables recaps our cloud security and industry highlights, a sneak peak of what’s ahead from Google at RSA,  and more. Read more.

4 new features to secure your Cloud Run services–We announced several new ways to secure Cloud Run environments to make developing and deploying containerized applications easier for developers. Read more.

Maximize your Cloud Run investments with new committed use discounts–We’re introducing self-service spend-based committed use discounts for Cloud Run, which let you commit for a year to spending a certain amount on Cloud Run and benefiting from a 17% discount on the amount you committed. Read more.

Google Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus is now generally available–Cloud Armor, our Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection and Web-Application Firewall (WAF) service on Google Cloud, leverages the same infrastructure, network, and technology that has protected Google’s internet-facing properties from some of the largest attacks ever reported. These same tools protect customers’ infrastructure from DDoS attacks, which are increasing in both magnitude and complexity every year. Deployed at the very edge of our network, Cloud Armor absorbs malicious network- and protocol-based volumetric attacks, while mitigating the OWASP Top 10 risks and maintaining the availability of protected services. Read more.

Announcing Document Translation for Translation API Advanced in preview–Translation is critical to many developers and localization providers, whether you’re releasing a document, a piece of software, training materials or a website in multiple languages. With Document Translation, now you can directly translate documents in 100+ languages and formats such as Docx, PPTx, XLSx, and PDF while preserving document formatting. Read more.

Introducing BeyondCorp Enterprise protected profiles–Protected profiles enable users to securely access corporate resources from an unmanaged device with the same threat and data protections available in BeyondCorp Enterprise–all from the Chrome Browser. Read more.

How reCAPTCHA Enterprise protects unemployment and COVID-19 vaccination portals–With so many people visiting government websites to learn more about the COVID-19 vaccine, make vaccine appointments, or file for unemployment, these web pages have become prime targets for bot attacks and other abusive activities. But reCAPTCHA Enterprise has helped state governments protect COVID-19 vaccine registration portals and unemployment claims portals from abusive activities. Learn more.

Day one with Anthos? Here are 6 ideas for how to get started–Once you have your new application platform in place, there are some things you can do to immediately get value and gain momentum. Here are six things you can do to get you started. Read more.

The era of the transformation cloud is here–Google Cloud’s president Rob Enslin shares how the era of the transformation cloud has seen organizations move beyond data centers to change not only where their business is done but, more importantly, how it is done. Read more.

Week of May 3-May 7, 2021

Transforming hard-disk drive maintenance with predictive ML–In collaboration with Seagate, we developed a machine learning system that can forecast the probability of a recurring failing disk—a disk that fails or has experienced three or more problems in 30 days. Learn how we did it.

Agent Assist for Chat is now in public preview–Agent Assist provides your human agents with continuous support during their calls, and now chats, by identifying the customers’ intent and providing them with real-time recommendations such as articles and FAQs as well as responses to customer messages to more effectively resolve the conversation. Read more.

New Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure product map–Our updated product map helps you understand similar offerings from Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure, and you can easily filter the list by product name or other common keywords. Read more or view the map.

Join our Google Cloud Security Talks on May 12th–We’ll share expert insights into how we’re working to be your most trusted cloud. Find the list of topics we’ll cover here.

Databricks is now GA on Google Cloud–Deploy or migrate Databricks Lakehouse to Google Cloud to combine the benefits of an open data cloud platform with greater analytics flexibility, unified infrastructure management, and optimized performance. Read more.

HPC VM image is now GA–The CentOS-based HPC VM image makes it quick and easy to create HPC-ready VMs on Google Cloud that are pre-tuned for optimal performance. Check out our documentation and quickstart guide to start creating instances using the HPC VM image today.

Take the 2021 State of DevOps survey–Help us shape the future of DevOps and make your voice heard by completing the 2021 State of DevOps survey before June 11, 2021. Read more or take the survey.

OpenTelemetry Trace 1.0 is now available–OpenTelemetry has reached a key milestone: the OpenTelemetry Tracing Specification has reached version 1.0. API and SDK release candidates are available for Java, Erlang, Python, Go, Node.js, and .Net. Additional languages will follow over the next few weeks. Now that Trace has reached 1.0 status, customers can deploy OpenTelemetry Trace with confidence. Read more.

New blueprint helps secure confidential data in AI Platform Notebooks–We’re adding to our portfolio of blueprints with the publication of our Protecting confidential data in AI Platform Notebooks blueprint guide and deployable blueprint, which can help you apply data governance and security policies that protect your AI Platform Notebooks containing confidential data. Read more.

The Liquibase Cloud Spanner extension is now GA–Liquibase, an open-source library that works with a wide variety of databases, can be used for tracking, managing, and automating database schema changes. By providing the ability to integrate databases into your CI/CD process, Liquibase helps you more fully adopt DevOps practices. The Liquibase Cloud Spanner extension allows developers to use Liquibase's open-source database library to manage and automate schema changes in Cloud Spanner. Read more.

Cloud computing 101: Frequently asked questions–There are a number of terms and concepts in cloud computing, and not everyone is familiar with all of them. To help, we’ve put together a list of common questions, and the meanings of a few of those acronyms. Read more.

Week of Apr 26-Apr 30, 2021

Announcing the GKE Gateway controller, in Preview–GKE Gateway controller, Google Cloud’s implementation of the Gateway API, manages internal and external HTTP/S load balancing for a GKE cluster or a fleet of GKE clusters and provides multi-tenant sharing of load balancer infrastructure with centralized admin policy and control. Read more.

See Network Performance for Google Cloud in Performance Dashboard–The Google Cloud performance view, part of the Network Intelligence Center, provides packet loss and latency metrics for traffic on Google Cloud. It allows users to do informed planning of their deployment architecture, as well as determine in real time the answer to the most common troubleshooting question: "Is it Google or is it me?" 

The Google Cloud performance view is now open for all Google Cloud customers as a public preview. Check it out.

Optimizing data in Google Sheets allows users to create no-code apps–Format columns and tables in Google Sheets to best position your data to transform into a fully customized, successful app–no coding necessary. Read our 4 best Google Sheets tips.

Automation bots with AppSheet Automation–AppSheet recently released AppSheet Automation, infusing Google AI capabilities to AppSheet's trusted no-code app development platform. Learn step by step how to build your first automation bot on AppSheet here. 

Google Cloud announces a new region in Israel–Our new region in Israel will make it easier for customers to serve their own users faster, more reliably and securely. Read more.

New multi-instance NVIDIA GPUs on GKE–We’re launching support for multi-instance GPUs in GKE (currently in Preview), which will help you drive better value from your GPU investments. Read more.

Partnering with NSF to advance networking innovation–We announced our partnership with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), joining other industry partners and federal agencies, as part of a combined $40 million investment in academic research for Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation (NextG) Systems, or RINGS. Read more.

Creating a policy contract with Configuration as Data–Configuration as Data is an emerging cloud infrastructure management paradigm that allows developers to declare the desired state of their applications and infrastructure, without specifying the precise actions or steps for how to achieve it. However, declaring a configuration is only half the battle: you also want policy that defines how a configuration is to be used. This post shows you how.

Google Cloud products deliver real-time data solutions–Seven-Eleven Japan built Seven Central, its new platform for digital transformation, on Google Cloud. Powered by BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, and Apigee API management, Seven Central presents easy to understand data, ultimately allowing for quickly informed decisions. Read their story here.

Week of Apr 19-Apr 23, 2021

Extreme PD is now GA–On April 20th Google Cloud’s Persistent Disk launched general availability of Extreme PD, a high performance block storage volume with provisioned IOPS and up to 2.2 GB/s of throughput. Learn more.

Research: How data analytics and intelligence tools to play a key role post-COVID-19–A recent Google-commissioned study by IDG highlighted the role of data analytics and intelligent solutions when it comes to helping businesses separate from their competition. The survey of 2,000 IT leaders across the globe reinforced the notion that the ability to derive insights from data will go a long way towards determining which companies win in this new era. Learn more or download the study.

Introducing PHP on Cloud Functions–We’re bringing support for PHP, a popular general-purpose programming language, to Cloud Functions. With the Functions Framework for PHP, you can write idiomatic PHP functions to build business-critical applications and integration layers. And with Cloud Functions for PHP, now available in Preview, you can deploy functions in a fully managed PHP 7.4 environment, complete with access to resources in a private VPC network. Learn more.

Delivering our 2020 CCAG pooled audit–As our customers increased their use of cloud services to meet the demands of teleworking and aid in COVID-19 recovery, we’ve worked hard to meet our commitment to being the industry’s most trusted cloud, despite the global pandemic. We’re proud to announce that Google Cloud completed an annual pooled audit with the CCAG in a completely remote setting, and were the only cloud service provider to do so in 2020. Learn more.

Anthos 1.7 now available–We recently released Anthos 1.7, our run-anywhere Kubernetes platform that’s connected to Google Cloud, delivering an array of capabilities that make multicloud more accessible and sustainable. Learn more.

New Redis Enterprise for Anthos and GKE–We’re making Redis Enterprise for Anthos and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) available in the Google Cloud Marketplace in private preview. Learn more.

Updates to Google Meet–We introduced a refreshed user interface (UI), enhanced reliability features powered by the latest Google AI, and tools that make meetings more engaging—even fun—for everyone involved. Learn more.

DocAI solutions now generally available–Document (Doc) AI platform, Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI, built on decades of AI innovation at Google, bring powerful and useful solutions across lending, insurance, government and other industries. Learn more.

Four consecutive years of 100% renewable energy–In 2020, Google again matched 100 percent of its global electricity use with purchases of renewable energy. All told, we’ve signed agreements to buy power from more than 50 renewable energy projects, with a combined capacity of 5.5 gigawatts–about the same as a million solar rooftops. Learn more.

Announcing the Google Cloud region picker–The Google Cloud region picker lets you assess key inputs like price, latency to your end users, and carbon footprint to help you choose which Google Cloud region to run on. Learn more.

Google Cloud launches new security solution WAAP–WebApp and API Protection (WAAP) combines Google Cloud Armor, Apigee, and reCAPTCHA Enterprise to deliver improved threat protection, consolidated visibility, and greater operational efficiencies across clouds and on-premises environments. Learn more about WAAP here.

New in no-code–As discussed in our recent article, no-code hackathons are trending among innovative organizations. Since then, we've outlined how you can host one yourself specifically designed for your unique business innovation outcomes. Learn how here.

Google Cloud Referral Program Now Available—Now you can share the power of Google Cloud and earn product credit for every new paying customer you refer. Once you join the program, you’ll get a unique referral link that you can share with friends, clients, or others. Whenever someone signs up with your link, they’ll get a $350 product credit—that’s $50 more than the standard trial credit. When they become a paying customer, we’ll reward you with a $100 product credit in your Google Cloud account. Available in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Japan. Apply for the Google Cloud Referral Program

Week of Apr 12-Apr 16, 2021

Announcing the Data Cloud Summit, May 26, 2021–At this half-day event, you’ll learn how leading companies like PayPal, Workday, Equifax, Zebra Technologies, Commonwealth Care Alliance and many others are driving competitive differentiation using Google Cloud technologies to build their data clouds and transform data into value that drives innovation. Learn more and register at no cost.

Announcing the Financial Services Summit, May 27, 2021–In this 2 hour event, you’ll learn how Google Cloud is helping financial institutions including PayPal, Global Payments, HSBC, Credit Suisse, and more unlock new possibilities and accelerate business through innovation and better customer experiences. Learn more and register for free: Global & EMEA.

How Google Cloud is enabling vaccine equity–In our latest update, we share more on how we’re working with US state governments to help produce equitable vaccination strategies at scale. Learn more.

The new Google Cloud region in Warsaw is open–The Google Cloud region in Warsaw is now ready for business, opening doors for organizations in Central and Eastern Europe. Learn more.

AppSheet Automation is now GA–Google Cloud’s AppSheet launches general availability of AppSheet Automation, a unified development experience for citizen and professional developers alike to build custom applications with automated processes, all without coding. Learn how companies and employees are reclaiming their time and talent with AppSheet Automation here. 

Introducing SAP Integration with Cloud Data Fusion–Google Cloud native data integration platform Cloud Data Fusion now offers the capability to seamlessly get data out of SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and S/4HANA. Learn more.

Week of Apr 5-Apr 9, 2021

New Certificate Authority Service (CAS) whitepaper–“How to deploy a secure and reliable public key infrastructure with Google Cloud Certificate Authority Service” (written by Mark Cooper of PKI Solutions and Anoosh Saboori of Google Cloud) covers security and architectural recommendations for the use of the Google Cloud CAS by organizations, and describes critical concepts for securing and deploying a PKI based on CAS. Learn more or read the whitepaper.

Active Assist’s new feature, predictive autoscaling, helps improve response times for your applications–When you enable predictive autoscaling, Compute Engine forecasts future load based on your Managed Instance Group’s (MIG) history and scales it out in advance of predicted load, so that new instances are ready to serve when the load arrives. Without predictive autoscaling, an autoscaler can only scale a group reactively, based on observed changes in load in real time. With predictive autoscaling enabled, the autoscaler works with real-time data as well as with historical data to cover both the current and forecasted load. That makes predictive autoscaling ideal for those apps with long initialization times and whose workloads vary predictably with daily or weekly cycles. For more information, see How predictive autoscaling works or check if predictive autoscaling is suitable for your workload, and to learn more about other intelligent features, check out Active Assist. 

Introducing Dataprep BigQuery pushdown–BigQuery pushdown gives you the flexibility to run jobs using either BigQuery or Dataflow. If you select BigQuery, then Dataprep can automatically determine if data pipelines can be partially or fully translated in a BigQuery SQL statement. Any portions of the pipeline that cannot be run in BigQuery are executed in Dataflow. Utilizing the power of BigQuery results in highly efficient data transformations, especially for manipulations such as filters, joins, unions, and aggregations. This leads to better performance, optimized costs, and increased security with IAM and OAuth support. Learn more.

Announcing the Google Cloud Retail & Consumer Goods Summit–The Google Cloud Retail & Consumer Goods Summit brings together technology and business insights, the key ingredients for any transformation. Whether you're responsible for IT, data analytics, supply chains, or marketing, please join! Building connections and sharing perspectives cross-functionally is important to reimagining yourself, your organization, or the world. Learn more or register for free.

New IDC whitepaper assesses multicloud as a risk mitigation strategy–To better understand the benefits and challenges associated with a multicloud approach, we supported IDC’s new whitepaper that investigates how multicloud can help regulated organizations mitigate the risks of using a single cloud vendor. The whitepaper looks at different approaches to multi-vendor and hybrid clouds taken by European organizations and how these strategies can help organizations address concentration risk and vendor-lock in, improve their compliance posture, and demonstrate an exit strategy. Learn more or download the paper.

Introducing request priorities for Cloud Spanner APIs–You can now specify request priorities for some Cloud Spanner APIs. By assigning a HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW priority to a specific request, you can now convey the relative importance of workloads, to better align resource usage with performance objectives. Learn more.

How we’re working with governments on climate goals–Google Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt shares more on how we’re partnering with governments around the world to provide our technology and insights to drive progress in sustainability efforts. Learn more.

Week of Mar 29-Apr 2, 2021

Why Google Cloud is the ideal platform for Block.one and other DLT companies–Late last year, Google Cloud joined the EOS community, a leading open-source platform for blockchain innovation and performance, and is taking steps to support the EOS Public Blockchain by becoming a block producer (BP). At the time, we outlined how our planned participation underscores the importance of blockchain to the future of business, government, and society. We're sharing more on why Google Cloud is uniquely positioned to be an excellent partner for Block.one and other distributed ledger technology (DLT) companies. Learn more.

New whitepaper: Scaling certificate management with Certificate Authority Service–As Google Cloud’s Certificate Authority Service (CAS) approaches general availability, we want to help customers understand the service better. Customers have asked us how CAS fits into our larger security story and how CAS works for various use cases. Our new white paper answers these questions and more. Learn more and download the paper.

Build a consistent approach for API consumers–Learn the differences between REST and GraphQL, as well as how to apply REST-based practices to GraphQL. No matter the approach, discover how to manage and treat both options as API products here. 

Apigee X makes it simple to apply Cloud CDN to APIs–With Apigee X and Cloud CDN, organizations can expand their API programs' global reach. Learn how to deploy APIs across 24 regions and 73 zones here.

Enabling data migration with Transfer Appliances in APAC—We’re announcing the general availability of Transfer Appliances TA40/TA300 in Singapore. Customers are looking for fast, secure and easy to use options to migrate their workloads to Google Cloud and we are addressing their needs with Transfer Appliances globally in the US, EU and APAC. Learn more about Transfer Appliances TA40 and TA300.

Windows Authentication is now supported on Cloud SQL for SQL Server in public preview—We’ve launched seamless integration with Google Cloud’s Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AD). This capability is a critical requirement to simplify identity management and streamline the migration of existing SQL Server workloads that rely on AD for access control. Learn more or get started.

Using Cloud AI to whip up new treats with Mars Maltesers—Maltesers, a popular British candy made by Mars, teamed up with our own AI baker and ML engineer extraordinaire, Sara Robinson, to create a brand new dessert recipe with Google Cloud AI. Find out what happened (recipe included).

Simplifying data lake management with Dataproc Metastore, now GA—Dataproc Metastore, a fully managed, serverless technical metadata repository based on the Apache Hive metastore, is now generally available. Enterprises building and migrating open source data lakes to Google Cloud now have a central and persistent metastore for their open source data analytics frameworks. Learn more.

Introducing the Echo subsea cable—We announced our investment in Echo, the first-ever cable to directly connect the U.S. to Singapore with direct fiber pairs over an express route. Echo will run from Eureka, California to Singapore, with a stop-over in Guam, and plans to also land in Indonesia. Additional landings are possible in the future. Learn more.

Week of Mar 22-Mar 26, 2021

10 new videos bring Google Cloud to life—The Google Cloud Tech YouTube channel’s latest video series explains cloud tools for technical practitioners in about 5 minutes each. Learn more.

BigQuery named a Leader in the 2021 Forrester Wave: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021 report—Forrester gave BigQuery a score of 5 out of 5 across 19 different criteria. Learn more in our blog post, or download the report.

Charting the future of custom compute at Google—To meet users’ performance needs at low power, we’re doubling down on custom chips that use System on a Chip (SoC) designs. Learn more.

Introducing Network Connectivity Center—We announced Network Connectivity Center, which provides a single management experience to easily create, connect, and manage heterogeneous on-prem and cloud networks leveraging Google’s global infrastructure. Network Connectivity Center serves as a vantage point to seamlessly connect VPNs, partner and dedicated interconnects, as well as third-party routers and Software-Defined WANs, helping you optimize connectivity, reduce operational burden and lower costs—wherever your applications or users may be. Learn more.

Making it easier to get Compute Engine resources for batch processing—We announced a new method of obtaining Compute Engine instances for batch processing that accounts for availability of resources in zones of a region. Now available in preview for regional managed instance groups, you can do this simply by specifying the ANY value in the API. Learn more.

Next-gen virtual automotive showrooms are here, thanks to Google Cloud, Unreal Engine, and NVIDIA—We teamed up with Unreal Engine, the open and advanced real-time 3D creation game engine, and NVIDIA, inventor of the GPU, to launch new virtual showroom experiences for automakers. Taking advantage of the NVIDIA RTX platform on Google Cloud, these showrooms provide interactive 3D experiences, photorealistic materials and environments, and up to 4K cloud streaming on mobile and connected devices. Today, in collaboration with MHP, the Porsche IT consulting firm, and MONKEYWAY, a real-time 3D streaming solution provider, you can see our first virtual showroom, the Pagani Immersive Experience Platform. Learn more.

Troubleshoot network connectivity with Dynamic Verification (public preview)—You can now check packet loss rate and one-way network latency between two VMs on GCP. This capability is an addition to existing Network Intelligence Center Connectivity Tests which verify reachability by analyzing network configuration in your VPCs. See more in our documentation. 

Helping U.S. states get the COVID-19 vaccine to more people—In February, we announced our Intelligent Vaccine Impact solution (IVIs) to help communities rise to the challenge of getting vaccines to more people quickly and effectively. Google Cloud is proud to partner with a number of states across the U.S., including Arizona, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and the Commonwealth of Virginia to support vaccination efforts at scale. Learn more.

Week of Mar 15-Mar 19, 2021

A2 VMs now GA: The largest GPU cloud instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs—We’re announcing the general availability of A2 VMs based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs in Compute Engine. This means customers around the world can now run their NVIDIA CUDA-enabled machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC) scale-out and scale-up workloads more efficiently and at a lower cost. Learn more.

Earn the new Google Kubernetes Engine skill badge for free—We’ve added a new skill badge this month, Optimize Costs for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which you can earn for free when you sign up for the Kubernetes track of the skills challenge. The skills challenge provides 30 days free access to Google Cloud labs and gives you the opportunity to earn skill badges to showcase different cloud competencies to employers. Learn more.

Now available: carbon free energy percentages for our Google Cloud regions—Google first achieved carbon neutrality in 2007, and since 2017 we’ve purchased enough solar and wind energy to match 100% of our global electricity consumption. Now we’re building on that progress to target a new sustainability goal: running our business on carbon-free energy 24/7, everywhere, by 2030. Beginning this week, we’re sharing data about how we are performing against that objective so our customers can select Google Cloud regions based on the carbon-free energy supplying them. Learn more.

Increasing bandwidth to C2 and N2 VMs—We announced the public preview of 100, 75, and 50 Gbps high-bandwidth network configurations for General Purpose N2 and Compute Optimized C2 Compute Engine VM families as part of continuous efforts to optimize our Andromeda host networking stack. This means we can now offer higher-bandwidth options on existing VM families when using the Google Virtual NIC (gVNIC). These VMs were previously limited to 32 Gbps. Learn more.

New research on how COVID-19 changed the nature of IT—To learn more about the impact of COVID-19 and the resulting implications to IT, Google commissioned a study by IDG to better understand how organizations are shifting their priorities in the wake of the pandemic. Learn more.

New in API security—Google Cloud Apigee API Management platform's latest release, Apigee X, works with Cloud Armor to protect your APIs with advanced security technology including DDoS protection, geo-fencing, OAuth, and API keys. Learn more about our integrated security enhancements here.

Troubleshoot errors more quickly with Cloud Logging—The Logs Explorer now automatically breaks down your log results by severity making it easy to spot spikes in errors at specific times. Learn more about our new histogram functionality here.

Week of Mar 8-Mar 12, 2021

Introducing #AskGoogleCloud on Twitter and YouTube—Our first segment on March 12th features Developer Advocates Stephanie Wong, Martin Omander and James Ward to answer questions on the best workloads for serverless, the differences between “serverless” and “cloud native,” how to accurately estimate costs for using Cloud Run and much more. Learn more.

Learn about the value of no-code hackathons—Google Cloud’s no-code application development platform, AppSheet, helps to facilitate hackathons for “non-technical” employees with no coding necessary to compete. Learn about Globe Telecom’s no-code hackathon as well as their winning AppSheet app here. 

Introducing Cloud Code Secret Manager Integration—Secret Manager provides a central place and single source of truth to manage, access, and audit secrets across Google Cloud. Integrating Cloud Code with Secret Manager brings the powerful capabilities of both these tools together so you can create and manage your secrets right from within your preferred IDE, whether that be VS Code, IntelliJ, or Cloud Shell Editor. Learn more.

Flexible instance configurations in Cloud SQL—Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports flexible instance configurations, which offer you the extra freedom to configure your instance with the specific number of vCPUs and GB of RAM that fits your workload. To set up a new instance with a flexible instance configuration, see our documentation here.

Cloud Healthcare Consent Management API now generally available—The Healthcare Consent Management API is now GA, giving customers the ability to greatly scale the management of consents to meet increasing need, particularly amidst the emerging task of managing health data for new care and research scenarios. Learn more. 

Week of Mar 1-Mar 5, 2021

Cloud Run is now available in all Google Cloud regions Learn more.

Introducing Apache Spark Structured Streaming connector for Pub/Sub Lite—We’re announcing the release of an open source connector to read streams of messages from Pub/Sub Lite into Apache Spark.The connector works in all Apache Spark 2.4.X distributions, including Dataproc, Databricks, or manual Spark installations. Learn more.

Save the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12-14, 2021—Join us and learn how the most successful companies have transformed their businesses with Google Cloud. Sign-up at g.co/cloudnext for updates. Learn more.

Hierarchical firewall policies now GA—Hierarchical firewalls provide a means to enforce firewall rules at the organization and folder levels in the GCP Resource Hierarchy. This allows security administrators at different levels in the hierarchy to define and deploy consistent firewall rules across a number of projects so they’re applied to all VMs in currently existing and yet-to-be-created projects. Learn more.

Announcing the Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit—Over this half-day event, we’ll highlight proven best-practice approaches to data, architecture, diversity & inclusion, and growth with Google Cloud solutions. Learn more and Register for free.

Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2021 edition)—Our popular “4 words or less Google Cloud developer’s cheat sheet” is back and updated for 2021. Learn more.

Gartner names Google a leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services report—We believe this recognition is based on Gartner’s evaluation of Google Cloud’s language, vision, conversational, and structured data services and solutions for developers. Learn more.

Announcing the Risk Protection Program—The Risk Protection Program offers customers peace of mind through the technology to secure their data, the tools to monitor the security of that data, and an industry-first cyber policy offered by leading insurers. Learn more.

Building the future of work—We’re introducing new innovations in Google Workspace to help people collaborate and find more time and focus, wherever and however they work. Learn more.

Assured Controls and expanded Data Regions—We’ve added new information governance features in Google Workspace to help customers control their data based on their business goals. Learn more.

Week of Feb 22-Feb 26, 2021

21 Google Cloud tools explained in 2 minutes—Need a quick overview of Google Cloud core technologies? Quickly learn these 21 Google Cloud products—each explained in under two minutes. Learn more.

BigQuery materialized views now GA—Materialized views (MV’s) are precomputed views that periodically cache results of a query to provide customers increased performance and efficiency. Learn more.

New in BigQuery BI Engine—We’re extending BigQuery BI Engine to work with any BI or custom dashboarding applications that require sub-second query response times. In this preview, BI Engine will work seamlessly with Looker and other popular BI tools such as Tableau and Power BI without requiring any change to the BI tools. Learn more.

Dataproc now supports Shielded VMs—All Dataproc clusters created using Debian 10 or Ubuntu 18.04 operating systems now use Shielded VMs by default and customers can provide their own configurations for secure boot, vTPM, and Integrity Monitoring. This feature is just one of the many ways customers that have migrated their Hadoop and Spark clusters to GCP experience continued improvements to their security postures without any additional cost. 

New Cloud Security Podcast by Google—Our new podcast brings you stories and insights on security in the cloud, delivering security from the cloud, and, of course, on what we’re doing at Google Cloud to help keep customer data safe and workloads secure. Learn more.

New in Conversational AI and Apigee technology—Australian retailer Woolworths provides seamless customer experiences with their virtual agent, Olive. Apigee API Management and Dialogflow technology allows customers to talk to Olive through voice and chat. Learn more.

Introducing GKE Autopilot—GKE already offers an industry-leading level of automation that makes setting up and operating a Kubernetes cluster easier and more cost effective than do-it-yourself and other managed offerings. Autopilot represents a significant leap forward. In addition to the fully managed control plane that GKE has always provided, using the Autopilot mode of operation automatically applies industry best practices and can eliminate all node management operations, maximizing your cluster efficiency and helping to provide a stronger security posture. Learn more.

Partnering with Intel to accelerate cloud-native 5G—As we continue to grow cloud-native services for the telecommunications industry, we’re excited to announce a collaboration with Intel to develop reference architectures and integrated solutions for communications service providers to accelerate their deployment of 5G and edge network solutions. Learn more.

Veeam Backup for Google Cloud now available - Veeam Backup for Google Cloud automates Google-native snapshots to securely protect VMs across projects and regions with ultra-low RPOs and RTOs, and store backups in Google Object Storage to enhance data protection while ensuring lower costs for long-term retention.

Migrate for Anthos 1.6 GA—With Migrate for Anthos, customers and partners can automatically migrate and modernize traditional application workloads running in VMs into containers running on Anthos or GKE. Included in this new release: 

Week of Feb 15-Feb 19, 2021

Introducing Cloud Domains in preview—Cloud Domains simplify domain registration and management within Google Cloud, improve the custom domain experience for developers, increase security, and support stronger integrations around DNS and SSL. Learn more.

Announcing Databricks on Google Cloud—Our partnership with Databricks enables customers to accelerate Databricks implementations by simplifying their data access, by jointly giving them powerful ways to analyze their data, and by leveraging our combined AI and ML capabilities to impact business outcomes. Learn more.

Service Directory is GA—As the number and diversity of services grows, it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain an inventory of all of the services across an organization. Last year, we launched Service Directory to help simplify the problem of service management. Today, it’s generally available. Learn more.

Week of Feb 8-Feb 12, 2021

Introducing Bare Metal Solution for SAP workloads—We’ve expanded our Bare Metal Solution—dedicated, single-tenant systems designed specifically to run workloads that are too large or otherwise unsuitable for standard, virtualized environments—to include SAP-certified hardware options, giving SAP customers great options for modernizing their biggest and most challenging workloads. Learn more.

9TB SSDs bring ultimate IOPS/$ to Compute Engine VMs—You can now attach 6TB and 9TB Local SSD to second-generation general-purpose N2 Compute Engine VMs, for great IOPS per dollar. Learn more.

Supporting the Python ecosystem—As part of our longstanding support for the Python ecosystem, we are happy to increase our support for the Python Software Foundation, the non-profit behind the Python programming language, ecosystem and community. Learn more. 

Migrate to regional backend services for Network Load Balancing—We now support backend services with Network Load Balancing—a significant enhancement over the prior approach, target pools, providing a common unified data model for all our load-balancing family members and accelerating the delivery of exciting features on Network Load Balancing. Learn more.

Week of Feb 1-Feb 4, 2021

Apigee launches Apigee X—Apigee celebrates their 10 year anniversary with a new release of Apigee API management platform: Apigee X. Apigee X harnesses the best of Google technologies to accelerate and globalize your API-powered digital initiatives. Learn more about Apigee X and digital excellence here.

Celebrating the success of Black founders with Google Cloud during Black History Month—February is Black History Month, a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of the African heritage. Over the next four weeks, we will highlight four Black-led startups and how they use Google Cloud to grow their businesses. Our first feature highlights TQIntelligence and its founder, Yared.

Week of Jan 25-Jan 29, 2021

BeyondCorp Enterprise now generally available—BeyondCorp Enterprise is a zero trust solution, built on Google’s global network, which provides customers with simple and secure access to applications and cloud resources and offers integrated threat and data protection. To learn more, read the blog post, visit our product homepage, and register for our upcoming webinar.

Week of Jan 18-Jan 22, 2021

Cloud Operations Sandbox now available—Cloud Operations Sandbox is an open-source tool that helps you learn SRE practices from Google and apply them on cloud services using Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), with everything you need to get started in one click. You can read our blog post, or get started by visiting cloud-ops-sandbox.dev, exploring the project repo, and following along in the user guide. 

New data security strategy whitepaper—Our new whitepaper shares our best practices for how to deploy a modern and effective data security program in the cloud. Read the blog post or download the paper.   

WebSockets, HTTP/2 and gRPC bidirectional streams come to Cloud Run—With these capabilities, you can deploy new kinds of applications to Cloud Run that were not previously supported, while taking advantage of serverless infrastructure. These features are now available in public preview for all Cloud Run locations. Read the blog post or check out the WebSockets demo app or the sample h2c server app.

New tutorial: Build a no-code workout app in 5 steps—Looking to crush your new year’s resolutions? Using AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code app development platform, you can build a custom fitness app that can do things like record your sets, reps and weights, log your workouts, and show you how you’re progressing. Learn how.

Week of Jan 11-Jan 15, 2021

State of API Economy 2021 Report now available—Google Cloud details the changing role of APIs in 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, informed by a comprehensive study of Apigee API usage behavior across industry, geography, enterprise size, and more. Discover these 2020 trends along with a projection of what to expect from APIs in 2021, too. Download and read the report here. 

New in the state of no-code—Google Cloud's AppSheet looks back at the key no-code application development themes of 2020. AppSheet contends the rising number of citizen developer app creators will ultimately change the state of no-code in 2021. Read more here.

Week of Jan 4-Jan 8, 2021

Last year's most popular API posts—In an arduous year, thoughtful API design and strategy is critical to empowering developers and companies to use technology for global good. Google Cloud looks back at the must-read API posts in 2020. Read it here.