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 Jun 14-Jun 18 2021

  • 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.
  • Cloud SQL offers even faster maintenance—Cloud SQL maintenance is zippier than ever. MySQL and PostgreSQL planned maintenance typically lasts less than 60 seconds and SQL Server maintenance typically lasts less than 120 seconds. You can learn more about maintenance here.
  • 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 Registrynow 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 10–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 controlSecurity 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–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 PreviewDatastream, 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 scaleDataplex 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.
  • This week: 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) at the Financial Services Summit, 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 needVertex 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.
  • Contributing to an environment of trust and transparency in Europe–Google Cloud was one of the first cloud providers to support and adopt the EU GDPR Cloud Code of Conduct (CoC). The CoC is a mechanism for cloud providers to demonstrate how they offer sufficient guarantees to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures as data processors under the GDPR. This week, the Belgian Data Protection Authority, based on a positive opinion by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), approved the CoC, a product of years of constructive collaboration between the cloud computing community, the European Commission, and European data protection authorities. We are proud to say that Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace already adhere to these provisions. Learn 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 2021Google 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 been a busy month 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 previewAgent 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. 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 GALiquibase, 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 four 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 availableDocument (Doc) AI platformLending 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 GADataproc 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. Many states have deployed IVIs, and have found it able to meet demand and easily integrate with their existing technology infrastructures. 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 and download the report.

  • 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.

Logs Explorer
The Logs Explorer histogram

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.
  • The Cloud Healthcare Consent Management API is 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.
  • Google Cloud Next ‘21 is 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: 

    • In-place modernization for Anthos on AWS (Public Preview) to help customers accelerate on-boarding to Anthos AWS while leveraging their existing investment in AWS data sources, projects, VPCs, and IAM controls.

    • Additional Docker registries and artifacts repositories support (GA) including AWS ECR, basic-auth docker registries, and AWS S3 storage to provide further flexibility for customers using Anthos Anywhere (on-prem, AWS, etc). 

    • HTTPS Proxy support (GA) to enable M4A functionality (access to external image repos and other services) where a proxy is used to control external access.

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 its 10 year anniversary with Apigee X, a new release of the Apigee API management platform. 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. Read our blog post here or 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.


Week of Dec 21-Dec 25 2020


Week of Dec 14-Dec 18 2020

  • Memorystore for Redis enables TLS encryption support (Preview)—With this release, you can now use Memorystore for applications requiring sensitive data to be encrypted between the client and the Memorystore instance. Read more here.
  • Monitoring Query Language (MQL) for Cloud Monitoring is now generally available—Monitoring Query language provides developers and operators on IT and development teams powerful metric querying, analysis, charting, and alerting capabilities. This functionality is needed for Monitoring use cases that include troubleshooting outages, root cause analysis, custom SLI / SLO creation, reporting and analytics, complex alert logic, and more. Learn more.


Week of Dec 7-Dec 11 2020

  • Memorystore for Redis now supports Redis AUTH—With this release you can now use OSS Redis AUTH feature with Memorystore for Redis instances. Read more here.
  • New in serverless computing—Google Cloud API Gateway and its service-first approach to developing serverless APIs helps organizations accelerate innovation by eliminating scalability and security bottlenecks for their APIs. Discover more benefits here.
  • Environmental Dynamics, Inc. makes a big move to no-code—The environmental consulting company EDI built and deployed 35+ business apps with no coding skills necessary with Google Cloud’s AppSheet. This no-code effort not only empowered field workers, but also saved employees over 2,550 hours a year. Get the full story here.
  • Introducing Google Workspace for Government—Google Workspace for Government is an offering that brings the best of Google Cloud’s collaboration and communication tools to the government with pricing that meets the needs of the public sector. Whether it’s powering social care visits, employment support, or virtual courts, Google Workspace helps governments meet the unique challenges they face as they work to provide better services in an increasingly virtual world. Learn more.


Week of Nov 30-Dec 4 2020

  • Google enters agreement to acquire Actifio—Actifio, a leader in backup and disaster recovery (DR), offers customers the opportunity to protect virtual copies of data in their native format, manage these copies throughout their entire lifecycle, and use these copies for scenarios like development and test. This planned acquisition further demonstrates Google Cloud’s commitment to helping enterprises protect workloads on-premises and in the cloud. Learn more.
  • Traffic Director can now send traffic to services and gateways hosted outside of Google Cloud—Traffic Director support for Hybrid Connectivity Network Endpoint Groups (NEGs), now generally available, enables services in your VPC network to interoperate more seamlessly with services in other environments. It also enables you to build advanced solutions based on Google Cloud’s portfolio of networking products, such as Cloud Armor protection for your private on-prem services. Learn more.
  • Google Cloud launches the Healthcare Interoperability Readiness Program—This program, powered by APIs and Google Cloud’s Apigee, helps patients, doctors, researchers, and healthcare technologists alike by making patient data and healthcare data more accessible and secure. Learn more here.
  • Container Threat Detection in Security Command Center—We announced the general availability of Container Threat Detection, a built-in service in Security Command Center. This release includes multiple detection capabilities to help you monitor and secure your container deployments in Google Cloud. Read more here.
  • Anthos on bare metal now GA—Anthos on bare metal opens up new possibilities for how you run your workloads, and where. You can run Anthos on your existing virtualized infrastructure, or eliminate the dependency on a hypervisor layer to modernize applications while reducing costs. Learn more.


Week of Nov 23-27 2020

  • Tuning control support in Cloud SQL for MySQL—We’ve made all 80 flags that were previously in preview now generally available (GA), empowering you with the controls you need to optimize your databases. See the full list here.
  • New in BigQuery ML—We announced the general availability of boosted trees using XGBoost, deep neural networks (DNNs) using TensorFlow, and model export for online prediction. Learn more.
  • New AI/ML in retail report—We recently commissioned a survey of global retail executives to better understand which AI/ML use cases across the retail value chain drive the highest value and returns in retail, and what retailers need to keep in mind when going after these opportunities. Learn more  or read the report.


Week of Nov 16-20 2020

  • New whitepaper on how AI helps the patent industry—Our new paper outlines a methodology to train a BERT (bidirectional encoder representation from transformers) model on over 100 million patent publications from the U.S. and other countries using open-source tooling. Learn more or read the whitepaper.
  • Google Cloud support for .NET 5.0—Learn more about our support of .NET 5.0, as well as how to deploy it to Cloud Run.
  • .NET Core 3.1 now on Cloud Functions—With this integration you can write cloud functions using your favorite .NET Core 3.1 runtime with our Functions Framework for .NET for an idiomatic developer experience. Learn more.
  • Filestore Backups in preview—We announced the availability of the Filestore Backups preview in all regions, making it easier to migrate your business continuity, disaster recovery and backup strategy for your file systems in Google Cloud. Learn more.
  • Introducing Voucher, a service to help secure the container supply chain—Developed by the Software Supply Chain Security team at Shopify to work with Google Cloud tools, Voucher evaluates container images created by CI/CD pipelines and signs those images if they meet certain predefined security criteria. Binary Authorization then validates these signatures at deploy time, ensuring that only explicitly authorized code that meets your organizational policy and compliance requirements can be deployed to production. Learn more.
  • 10 most watched from Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir—Take a stroll through the 10 sessions that were most popular from Next OnAir, covering everything from data analytics to cloud migration to no-code development. Read the blog.
  • Artifact Registry is now GA—With support for container images, Maven, npm packages, and additional formats coming soon, Artifact Registry helps your organization benefit from scale, security, and standardization across your software supply chain. Read the blog.


Week of Nov 9-13 2020

  • Introducing the Anthos Developer Sandbox—The Anthos Developer Sandbox gives you an easy way to learn to develop on Anthos at no cost, available to anyone with a Google account. Read the blog.
  • Database Migration Service now available in preview—Database Migration Service (DMS) makes migrations to Cloud SQL simple and reliable. DMS supports migrations of self-hosted MySQL databases—either on-premises or in the cloud, as well as managed databases from other clouds—to Cloud SQL for MySQL. Support for PostgreSQL is currently available for limited customers in preview, with SQL Server coming soon. Learn more.
  • Troubleshoot deployments or production issues more quickly with new logs tailing—We’ve added support for a new API to tail logs with low latency. Using gcloud, it allows you the convenience of tail -f with the powerful query language and centralized logging solution of Cloud Logging. Learn more about this preview feature.
  • Regionalized log storage now available in 5 new regions in preview—You can now select where your logs are stored from one of five regions in addition to global—asia-east1, europe-west1, us-central1, us-east1, and us-west1. When you create a logs bucket, you can set the region in which you want to store your logs data. Get started with this guide.


Week of Nov 2-6 2020

  • Cloud SQL adds support for PostgreSQL 13—Shortly after its community GA, Cloud SQL has added support for PostgreSQL 13. You get access to the latest features of PostgreSQL while Cloud SQL handles the heavy operational lifting, so your team can focus on accelerating application delivery. Read more here.
  • Apigee creates value for businesses running on SAP—Google Cloud’s API Management platform Apigee is optimized for data insights and data monetization, helping businesses running on SAP innovate faster without fear of SAP-specific challenges to modernization. Read more here.
  • Document AI platform is live—The new Document AI (DocAI) platform, a unified console for document processing, is now available in preview. You can quickly access all parsers, tools and solutions (e.g. Lending DocAI, Procurement DocAI) with a unified API, enabling an end-to-end document solution from evaluation to deployment. Read the full story here or check it out in your Google Cloudconsole.
  • Accelerating data migration with Transfer Appliances TA40 and TA300—We’re announcing the general availability of new Transfer Appliances. 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 next generation Transfer Appliances. Learn more about Transfer Appliances TA40 and TA300.


Week of Oct 26-30 2020

  • B.H., Inc. accelerates digital transformation—The Utah based contracting and construction company BHI eliminated IT backlog when non technical employees were empowered to build equipment inspection, productivity, and other custom apps by choosing Google Workspace and the no-code app development platform, AppSheet. Read the full story here.
  • Globe Telecom embraces no-code development—Google Cloud’s AppSheet empowers Globe Telecom employees to do more innovating with less code. The global communications company kickstarted their no-code journey by combining the power of AppSheet with a unique adoption strategy. As a result, AppSheet helped Globe Telecom employees build 59 business apps in just 8 weeks. Get the full story.
  • Cloud Logging now allows you to control access to logs via Log Views—Building on the control offered via Log Buckets (blog post), you can now configure who has access to logs based on the source project, resource type, or log name, all using standard IAM controls. Logs views, currently in Preview, can help you build a system using the principle of least privilege, limiting sensitive logs to only users who need this information. Learn more about Log Views.
  • Document AI is HIPAA compliantDocument AI now enables HIPAA compliance. Now Healthcare and Life Science customers such as health care providers, health plans, and life science organizations can unlock insights by quickly extracting structured data from medical documents while safeguarding individuals’ protected health information (PHI). Learn more about Google Cloud’s nearly 100 products that support HIPAA-compliance.


Week of Oct 19-23 2020

  • Improved security and governance in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL—Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now integrates with Cloud IAM (preview) to provide simplified and consistent authentication and authorization. Cloud SQL has also enabled PostgreSQL Audit Extension (preview) for more granular audit logging. Read the blog.
  • Announcing the AI in Financial Crime Compliance webinar—Our executive digital forum will feature industry executives, academics, and former regulators who will discuss how AI is transforming financial crime compliance on November 17. Register now.
  • Transforming retail with AI/ML—New research provides insights on high value AI/ML use cases for food, drug, mass merchant and speciality retail that can drive significant value and build resilience for your business. Learn what the top use cases are for your sub-segment and read real world success stories. Download the ebook here and view this companion webinar which also features insights from Zulily.
  • New release of Migrate for Anthos—We’re introducing two important new capabilities in the 1.5 release of Migrate for Anthos, Google Cloud’s solution to easily migrate and modernize applications currently running on VMs so that they instead run on containers in Google Kubernetes Engine or Anthos. The first is GA support for modernizing IIS apps running on Windows Server VMs. The second is a new utility that helps you identify which VMs in your existing environment are the best targets for modernization to containers. Start migrating or check out the assessment tool documentation (Linux | Windows).
  • New Compute Engine autoscaler controls—New scale-in controls in Compute Engine let you limit the VM deletion rate by preventing the autoscaler from reducing a MIG’s size by more VM instances than your workload can tolerate to lose. Read the blog.
  • Lending DocAI in previewLending DocAI is a specialized solution in our Document AI portfolio for the mortgage industry that processes borrowers’ income and asset documents to speed-up loan applications. Read the blog, or check out the product demo.


Week of Oct 12-16 2020

  • New maintenance controls for Cloud SQL—Cloud SQL now offers maintenance deny period controls, which allow you to prevent automatic maintenance from occurring during a 90-day time period. Read the blog.
  • Trends in volumetric DDoS attacks—This week we published a deep dive into DDoS threats, detailing the trends we’re seeing and giving you a closer look at how we prepare for multi-terabit attacks so your sites stay up and running. Read the blog.
  • New in BigQuery—We shared a number of updates this week, including new SQL capabilities, more granular control over your partitions with time unit partitioning, the general availability of Table ACLs, and BigQuery System Tables Reports, a solution that aims to help you monitor BigQuery flat-rate slot and reservation utilization by leveraging BigQuery’s underlying INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Read the blog.
  • Cloud Code makes YAML easy for hundreds of popular Kubernetes CRDs—We announced authoring support for more than 400 popular Kubernetes CRDs out of the box, any existing CRDs in your Kubernetes cluster, and any CRDs you add from your local machine or a URL. Read the blog.
  • Google Cloud’s data privacy commitments for the AI era—We’ve outlined how our AI/ML Privacy Commitment reflects our belief that customers should have both the highest level of security and the highest level of control over data stored in the cloud. Read the blog.
  • New, lower pricing for Cloud CDN—We’ve reduced the price of cache fill (content fetched from your origin) charges across the board, by up to 80%, along with our recent introduction of a new set of flexible caching capabilities, to make it even easier to use Cloud CDN to optimize the performance of your applications. Read the blog.

  • Expanding the BeyondCorp Alliance—Last year, we announced our BeyondCorp Alliance with partners that share our Zero Trust vision. Today, we’re announcing new partners to this alliance. Read the blog.

  • New data analytics training opportunities—Throughout October and November, we’re offering a number of no-cost ways to learn data analytics, with trainings for beginners to advanced users. Learn more.

  • New BigQuery blog series—BigQuery Explained provides overviews on storage, data ingestion, queries, joins, and more. Read the series.


Week of Oct 5-9 2020

  • Introducing the Google Cloud Healthcare Consent Management API—This API gives healthcare application developers and clinical researchers a simple way to manage individuals’ consent of their health data, particularly important given the new and emerging virtual care and research scenarios related to COVID-19. Read the blog.

  • Announcing Google Cloud buildpacks—Based on the CNCF buildpacks v3 specification, these buildpacks produce container images that follow best practices and are suitable for running on all of our container platforms: Cloud Run (fully managed), Anthos, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Read the blog.

  • Providing open access to the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD)—Our collaboration with Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard provides free access to one of the world’s most comprehensive public genomic datasets. Read the blog.

  • Introducing HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Cloud Run—Server-side HTTP streaming for your serverless applications running on Cloud Run (fully managed) is now available. This means your Cloud Run services can serve larger responses or stream partial responses to clients during the span of a single request, enabling quicker server response times for your applications. Read the blog.

  • New security and privacy features in Google Workspace—Alongside the announcement of Google Workspace we also shared more information on new security features that help facilitate safe communication and give admins increased visibility and control for their organizations. Read the blog.

  • Introducing Google Workspace—Google Workspace includes all of the productivity apps you know and use at home, at work, or in the classroom—Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Chat and more—now more thoughtfully connected. Read the blog.

  • New in Cloud Functions: languages, availability, portability, and more—We extended Cloud Functions—our scalable pay-as-you-go Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform that runs your code with zero server management—so you can now use it to build end-to-end solutions for several key use cases. Read the blog.

  • Announcing the Google Cloud Public Sector Summit, Dec 8-9—Our upcoming two-day virtual event will offer thought-provoking panels, keynotes, customer stories and more on the future of digital service in the public sector. Register at no cost.

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