What’s new with Google Cloud

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 Nov 11 - Nov 15

• Subsea cable connectivity is coming to Tuvalu for the first time with the addition of the Tuvalu Vaka cable. Building on the Bulikula subsea cable system announced last year, this new network infrastructure is a collaboration among several partners including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, Tuvalu, Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation and the United States, and will help reduce the digital divide in the Pacific.

Week of Nov 4-8

• We are excited to announce the reCAPTCHA Password Leak Detection Container App, a new tool that makes it easier than ever to protect your users from account takeovers. This container app simplifies the integration of reCAPTCHA's powerful password leak detection, allowing you to instantly detect compromised credentials and proactively prompt users to change their password before their account is compromised. With pre-built libraries and a streamlined process, you can significantly reduce integration time and enhance your website's security with ease.

Week of Oct 21-25

• We're excited to announce GA support for scanning: Rocky Linux, Alma, SUSE (SLES), Red Hat (UBI), Chainguard, Wolfi & Google Distroless. These operating systems are now supported in both Artifact Registry scanning, as well as On Demand Scanning.
  When the Container Scanning API is enabled, any container with these new operating systems or distroless images will automatically be scanned for vulnerabilities when pushed to Artifact Registry. We've also upgraded our On Demand scan to include; NPM, Python, Ruby, Rust, .Net & PHP language packages. See all supported package types.
• Term Extension Now Available for Compute Engine Committed Use Discounts: You can now extend the term length of your Compute Engine resource-based Committed Use Discounts (“CUDs”) beyond the preset 1-year and 3-year options. CUDs offer significant cost savings for predictable workloads. You can now choose a CUDs term length beyond the original commitment end date that perfectly aligns with your workload needs, from one year and one day up to 6 years. Learn more

Week of Oct 14-18

• Announcing Google Cloud Marketplace private offer enhancements that enable additional payment flexibility for enterprises, including when transacting generative AI models.

Week of Oct 7-11

• We are excited to announce the launch of new Google Cloud Cortex Framework data integration and analytics solution content for BigQuery and Looker with Oracle EBS data. To learn more read our announcement blog.
• Google Cloud is partnering with leading AI and cybersecurity startups to accelerate their growth and innovation, through the ISV Startup Springboard program, announced this week at the Google Cloud Startup Summit. Learn more and register interest.
• Privileged Access Manager (PAM) is now Generally Available. The GA release offers new capabilities in addition to recently released public preview and includes features such as Pub/Sub integration for custom alerting and monitoring, alerts on IAM grant modifications outside of PAM, and integration with VPC Service Controls to tackle data exfiltration. Learn more.

Week of Sept 23-27

• We are excited to announce that registration is open for the App Dev & Infrastructure Summit on October 30 (AMER) and October 31 (EMEA). Google Technology Fellows - our luminary technical leaders - and industry experts will share strategies and learnings on how to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and speed up AI innovation for your cloud and application infrastructure at this global digital event. Register here.

Week of Sept 16-20

• Starting this week, Google Cloud customers with eligible support plans can access assistance for the Cluster Toolkit through the Cloud Console. Cluster Toolkit, formerly known as Cloud HPC Toolkit, is open-source software offered by Google Cloud which simplifies the process for you to deploy HPC, AI and ML workloads on Google Cloud. The Cloud Support team will handle filed cases, ensuring that users receive timely and effective support for their Cluster Toolkit implementations. Select 'Cluster Toolkit' as the sub-category under 'Compute Engine' when creating a support ticket in your Cloud Console to get in touch about any Cluster Toolkit issues.
• Backup and DR service is excited to announce the public preview of backup vaults and simplified VM backup offering. Backup vaults provide secure backups for cyber resilience through immutable and indelible backups for VMs and databases, delivering security against accidental or malicious data deletion. Simplified Compute Engine VM backup with a fully-managed experience, directly integrated into the cloud console makes backing of VMs as easy as 1-2-3. The solution also enables backup admins to empower application developers to self-protect their VMs while retaining centralized governance and oversight. Read the full blog to learn more and try out the new features.

Week of Sept 2-6

• We’re excited to share that Topaz will be extended to Taiwan. Announced in 2022, the transpacific subsea cable system was the first to connect Canada and Japan. Now, with the extension of Topaz to Taiwan, we’ll provide the region with increased reliability and resilience for network operators, for Google, and for users.

Week of Aug 26-30

• We are excited to announce the general availability of Instant snapshots for Google Compute Engine Persistent Disks, which provide near-instantaneous, high-frequency, point-in-time checkpoints of a disk that can be rapidly restored as needed. Read the full blog to try it out.
• In response to customer and partner requests for pollen data in Japan, we are excited to announce that data for Japanese Cedar and Cypress trees-the 2 main sources of pollen allergens in Japan-have been added to our Pollen API from Google Maps Platform.

Week of Aug 19-23

• We are excited to announce we’re adding support for NVIDIA L4 GPUs to Cloud Run, in preview. Developers love Cloud Run for its simplicity, fast autoscaling, scale-to-zero capabilities, and pay-per-use pricing. Those same benefits come into play for real-time inference apps serving open gen AI models. Check out this launch blog. Also watch demos from this launch event webinar Run AI on Cloud run.
• We are excited to announce that Google Cloud Functions is now Cloud Run functions — event-driven programming in one unified serverless platform. This goes beyond a simple name change. We’ve unified the Cloud Functions infrastructure with Cloud Run, and developers of Cloud Functions (2nd gen) get immediate access to all new Cloud Run features, including NVIDIA GPUs. Read the launch blog and watch demos from this launch event webinar Run AI on Cloud run.

Week of Aug 5-9

• Google’s Workforce Identity federation now enables Microsoft Entra ID users to access Google BigQuery from Microsoft Power BI with Single-Sign-On. No users or groups need to be provisioned in Google Cloud as Workforce identity Federation leverages a syncless federation capability using attribute based access control to authorize access to Google BigQuery using Microsoft Entra user attributes such as user group membership. You can refer to our documentation to learn more.
• We are excited to announce the preview of SQL support in Bigtable to bring Google’s pioneering NoSQL database to a broader developer audience. Bigtable leverages GoogleSQL ─the same SQL dialect used by BigQuery─ making it easier to use Bigtable as low-latency analytics serving layer in combination with BigQuery’s newly announced continuous queries but does so with extensions to support its signature data model so you can use SQL without giving up on all the flexibility that comes with a NoSQL database. It also simplifies migrations from open source databases such as Apache Cassandra. With over 100 new functions from JSON processing capabilities, kNN for GenAI and HLL for real-time analytics, SQL opens the door to many new possibilities with Bigtable. Learn more in our detailed blog post.
• We are excited to announce the public preview of BigQuery continuous queries, a groundbreaking new feature that empowers users to run continuously processing SQL statements that can process, analyze, and transform data as new events arrive in BigQuery, ensuring insights are always up to date. Native integration with the Google Cloud ecosystem unlocks the ability of Vertex AI and Gemini to perform machine learning inference on incoming data in real time. As well as streaming replication of continuous query results to Pub/Sub topics, Bigtable instances, or other BigQuery tables. Read the full blog and try it out!
• AlloyDB’s AutoPilot capabilities- Automatic memory management, Adaptive AutoVacuum, Automatic storage tiering ,Automatic data columnarization and query rewrite- makes management super efficient and easy. AlloyDB eliminates the drudgery of maintaining a PostgreSQL database by using, behind the scenes , advanced self-tuning machine learning algorithm. In this blog we will look into a real world example of AlloyDB Adaptive AutoVacuum in work and how AlloyDB Cluster Storage Space is Released
• Google Cloud Identity Platform, our consumer identity solution, now supports Passkeys. With Passkeys, developers can authenticate their app's end users securely, protecting them from account takeover attacks like phishing and leaked credentials. To join the private preview, contact your Google account team.

Week of July 15-19

• Google Cloud is excited to launch the Modern SecOps Masterclass, now available on Coursera. This course equips security professionals with cutting-edge skills to modernize their Security Operations Centers (SOCs) using our Autonomic Security Operations framework and Continuous Detection, Continuous Response (CD/CR) methodology. Read the full blog and enroll now.
• Learn how to potentially achieve a strong consistency in Cloud Bigtable for your next big data solution. Bigtable offers high throughput at low latency. It is ideal for storing large amounts of data in a key-value store while supporting high read and write throughput at low latency for fast access. Bigtable provides eventual consistency as well as strong consistency. This blog talks about achieving strong data consistency in a multi-cluster Bigtable instance. Read the full blog.

Week of June 24-28

• Introducing Google Cloud Marketplace Channel Private Offers, enabling customers, ISV partners, and channel partners to efficiently transact private offers via reseller-initiated sales of third-party solutions listed on the Google Cloud Marketplace. This differentiated program also empowers channel partners to manage the customer relationship from billing, collections to revenue recognition. Read the full blog.
• A blog on benchmark study (collaborated with Yahoo) by comparing the cost and performance of Apache Flink and Google Cloud Dataflow for two specific streaming data processing use cases. The goal of the study was to determine the most cost-effective platform for these use cases by establishing a fair comparison methodology and controlling variables such as throughput and workload. The results indicate that, with some optimization on Dataflow can perform on-par with Apache Flink. Read the full blog.
• A Blog on Secure Gateways: Mutual TLS for Ingress Gateway Secure Gateways: Mutual TLS for Ingress Gateway," discusses the implementation of mutual TLS (mTLS) for enhanced security in ingress gateways. It explains how mTLS ensures both client and server authentication through certificates, going beyond the traditional server-only verification. The article explores the setup process and the benefits of using mTLS, emphasizing its role in establishing secure communication channels in modern cloud architectures. Read the full blog.
• A Blog on Wildcard certificates with Ingress Gateway "Wildcard certificates with Ingress Gateway" provides a guide on how to use wildcard certificates to secure multiple services behind a single Istio Ingress Gateway. This simplifies certificate management and improves the user experience by allowing seamless connections across different services within the same domain. The article demonstrates the configuration process step-by-step and explains how wildcard certificates are matched to incoming requests. Read the full blog

Week of June 17-21

• Learn how to leverage BigQuery vector search to analyze your logs and asset metadata stored in BigQuery. Using vector search, you can find semantically similar logs which can be helpful in several use cases such as outlier detection, triage and investigation. This how-to blog walks you through the setup from processing logs, generating vector embeddings, to analyzing vector search results. It includes sample SQL queries which can be adapted for your own logs and use case. Read the full blog.
• Nuvem, first announced last year, is a transatlantic subsea cable system that will connect Portugal, Bermuda, and the United States. We are now working with the Regional Government of Azores to enable extending the system to the Azores as well. Named after the Portuguese word for “cloud,” Nuvem will improve network resiliency across the Atlantic, helping meet growing demand for digital services and further establishing its landing locations as digital hubs.

Week of June 10-14

• General Availability of A3 Mega, a new instance type in the A3 VM family. A3 Mega is powered by the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU, delivers a 2.4x improvement in large scale training performance over multiple A3 instances.
  • 2x the GPU-to-GPU networking bandwidth over A3 Instances.
  • Enhanced GPUDirect-TCPXO networking offloads GPUDirect memory access from the CPU, providing direct access through through the NIC (Network Interface Card) to GPU memory, based on Titanium TOPs, which improves performance of multi-node distributed training workloads.
• Simplify your Network: The Cloud Networking Product Management and Engineering team will be traveling across US cities in June/July and Sept. Learn how Cross-Cloud Network can transform your infrastructure. The workshop will address Cross-Cloud Networking for hybrid and multicloud enterprises with distributed applications, internet-facing content and applications, security, and AI-assisted network operations with Gemini Cloud Assist. Join us at one of the following Google office locations and meet the experts who will share the latest innovations, use cases, and demos. Register here.
• Learn how you can leverage the cloud deployment archetypes (zonal, regional, multi-regional, global, hybrid, & multicloud) to architect cloud topologies that meet your workload’s requirements for reliability, cost, performance, & operational simplicity. Read the full blog.

Week of May 20-24

• Maximize performance and optimize spend with Compute Engine’s latest General Purpose VMs, N4 and C4. N4's flexible configurations and price-performance gains help optimize costs, while C4 provides top-tier performance for demanding applications. With N4 and C4, you get tailored solutions for all your general-purpose workloads, so you can lower the total cost of running your business without compromising on performance or workload-specific requirements. Learn more here.

Week of Apr 22 - April 26

• Simplify your connectivity to Google by using a Verified Peering Provider to connect to Google, instead of using Direct Peering. Verified Peering Providers handle all of the complex connectivity allowing you to focus on your core business. Learn more here.

Week of Apr 15- Apr 19

• New training in AI, data analytics and cybersecurity, designed to expand onramps to tech careers through colleges and employers. Learn more.

Week of Apr 1- Apr 5

• Security Command Center (SCC) Enterprise is now generally available (GA). It is the industry’s first cloud risk management solution that converges cloud security and enterprise security operations into a single platform, supercharged by Mandiant expertise and AI. Learn more in our announcement blog.
• Identify common container runtime attacks, analyzes suspicious code, and use natural language processing to pinpoint malicious scripts with GKE threat detection, powered by Security Command Center. Now in public preview.
• Get a fully managed compliance service that automatically delivers end-to-end coverage for GKE, scanning for issues against the most important benchmarks with GKE compliance, now in public preview. Near-real-time insights are available in a centralized dashboard, with compliance reports automatically produced for you.
• Streamline your GCE backup strategy! With tag-based backups in Google Backup and DR, protection is automated – new VMs with the right tags are protected immediately, saving you time and increasing reliability. Read more on the blog here. Differential privacy enforcement with privacy budgeting is now available in BigQuery data clean rooms so organizations can prevent data from being reidentified when it is shared.

Week of Mar 18- Mar 22

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and NVIDIA NeMo framework are used to train large language models (LLMs). Due to the increasing demand for efficient and scalable training of LLMs, the need for GPUs at a large scale with high speed networking is rapidly growing. GKE offers a comprehensive set of features that make it suitable for enterprise-level training and inference. This blog post shows how generative AI models can be adapted to your use cases by demonstrating how to train models on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using the NVIDIA NeMo framework.
• Cloud Run now supports volume mounts! Mount a Cloud Storage bucket or NFS file share as a volume to easily serve static assets, access app configuration data, or access an AI/ML model. Learn more in our blog post.

Week of Mar 11- Mar 15

• Datastream adds support for SQL Server sources, now in preview. With existing support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, support for SQL Server sources extends the reach of Datastream and empowers you to replicate data from a range of relational sources to several Google Cloud services, such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, AlloyDB, and Spanner. Read more in the blog here.

Week of Feb 5- Feb 9

• Check out this new blog and learn more about the Integrated Commerce Network (ICN) delivered by Kin + Carta and built on Google Cloud. The ICN features 3 of our premier digital commerce partners for an integrated end-to-end solution including Bloomreach, commercetools and Quantum Metric.

Week of Jan 29- Feb 2

• IDC finds 318% ROI from migrating to Google Cloud IaaS: Check out the latest IDC research study to learn how organizations worldwide are benefitting by adopting Google Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.

Week of Jan 15-19

• Check out the latest generative AI training available from Google Cloud : Take a look at our top ten trainings in Duet AI to help boost your productivity in 2024.

Week of Jan 1-5

• The year in Google Cloud: Top news of 2023: A look back at the biggest stories of 2023 from Google Cloud, covering generative AI, DevOps, containers, data and databases, security, and more.