Last month today: GCP in September

Here at Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we welcomed fall and back-to-school season in September with new Anthos and Kubernetes features, along with sharing new customer stories. Here are the top stories from last month.

Building your cloud, your way

• A few new Anthos capabilities came out last month, adding even more flexibility to our hybrid services platform. New Anthos Service Mesh connects, manages, and secures microservices, and Cloud Run for Anthos lets you run stateless workloads on a fully managed Anthos environment. Together, these new features help to free up time for developers to build apps, not worry about infrastructure.

• Container-native load balancing in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is now generally available. This feature can improve the efficiency, traffic visibility and support for advanced load balancer capabilities by removing the second hop between VMs running containers in your GKE cluster and the containers serving requests. The new load balancing feature lets you create services using network endpoint groups (NEGs) to streamline the process.

• We announced the general availability of virtual display devices for Compute Engine VMs, so you can now add these devices to any VM on Google Cloud. It’s a way to give video graphics array (VGA) capabilities to your VMs without having to use pricier GPUs. These come in handy if you’re running systems management tools, remote desktop software, and graphics-heavy apps. You can add the virtual display at VM startup or to already existing and running VMs.

Cloud adoption on the ground

• We were happy to share Mayo Clinic’s Google Cloud story in September. The renowned hospital and research center is building its data platform on Google Cloud, along with using our AI capabilities to improve patient and community health by understanding healthcare data insights at scale. Mayo Clinic also plans to create machine learning models for serious and complex diseases that can eventually be shared with caregivers around the world.

• And advertising holding company WPP shared their Google Cloud adoption story last month, with details on how cloud helps them provide media, creative, public relations and marketing analytics expertise for their enterprise customers. Getting value out of all their data at scale, and avoiding silos, is essential for WPP to serve its clients and their audiences. Using GCP, they’ll focus on a few key initiatives: campaign governance, customer data management, and AI and ML.

Coding on a Pixelbook–more than just fun and games

• Finally, in the spirit of learning new things as the school year starts, here are some tips on using a Pixelbook for software development. Here, a Google Cloud engineer walks you through how to set up a workflow on a Pixelbook that allows for simple, repeatable, productive development; portability among platforms; and support for the GCP SDK, Github, Kubernetes and Docker. You’ll get a step-by-step look at setting up the development environment using Cloud Code for Visual Studio Code, remote extensions and more.

That’s a wrap for September. Stay tuned to the blog and find us on Twitter for all the latest on Google Cloud.