Just when you thought Google Cloud Platform couldn’t get more powerful, it did! Here’s the scoop on the Google Cloud Platform news from the 2018 Google Cloud Next event, where the company made 105 product/solution launches and announcements.
This included 50 updates targeting GCP. Our Cloud team got a first-hand look at what to expect from these latest updates and learn how they will impact cloud infrastructure services and your journey to Going Google.
What Are the Recent Google Cloud Platform Updates?
While there are too many updates and announcements to fully list in this blog, here’s a quick look at a few of them...
Application Development
- Cloud Build, a fully managed, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, lets users build container and non-container artifacts. It integrates with a wide variety of developer tools.The GitHub repository also is now available with Cloud Build.
- Cloud Functions, an event-driven serverless compute service, is now widely available. It includes multilingual support and performance, networking and security features. Serverless containers to better support custom runtimes are now offered in early previews.
Infrastructure Services
- Stackdriver Monitoring has a new view that shows operators how end users experience their systems. This allows you manage against site reliability engineering (SRE)-inspired service-level objectives (SLO). This feature is in the early access phase.
- Compute Engine will have resource-based pricing this fall, featuring Google’s new method for calculating sustained usage. It will aggregate all of your virtual central processing units (vCPUs) and memory resources to maximize savings.
Security
- Shielded virtual machines (VM), in beta, leverage advanced security to help ensure your VMs haven’t been compromised.
- In beta, geo-based Cloud Armor provides access control based on the location of the client trying to connect to your application.
- Content-aware access helps you define granular access to Google Cloud Platform’s resources, APIs, G Suite and third-party SaaS based on users’ identity, location and request.
Data Analytics
- BigQuery has three notable new capabilities. In beta are BigQuery ML and BigQuery Clustering are both in beta. BigQuery ML allows you to easily build machine-learning models directly from BigQuery using simple SQL commands. Big Query Clustering adds a layer of data optimization through clustered tables to accelerate query performance. The third capability, BigQuery GIS, is in public alpha. Its functions and data types follow the SQL/MM Spatial standard.
- Data Studio Explorer has a deeper integration between BigQuery and Google Data Studio so users can quickly visualize data. It’s currently in beta.
- GCP’s streaming analytics updates include ones for Python Streaming and Dataflow Streaming Engine, both of which are in beta. The updates create more responsive auto-scaling by separating compute and state storage.
AI and Machine Learning
Google Cloud announced 17 GCP updates in this area, including:
- Cloud Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text boast improved features and performance, including multilingual capabilities
- Cloud Vision API’s handwriting recognition, object location in images and PDF/TIFF support are now generally available.
- Powerful ML models (Cloud AutoML Vision, AutoML Natural Language and AutoML Translation) can be extended without the need for machine learning or coding knowledge. All three are in beta.
The above updates are just a small sampling of how Google continues to bolster its robust Google Cloud Platform. Have questions? Just ask!
Our Cloud Specialists know Google Cloud Platform inside and out. We recently earned the Google Cloud Infrastructure Partner Specialization, which means we have proven our expertise in developing and deploying successful client solutions with Google Cloud Platform technology.
“We understand that elevating your organization with secure, elastic cloud infrastructure services gives you the agility to adapt quickly to changing business and technical challenges,” says Doug Sainato, Onix Sales Manager, Cloud Solutions Team. “These latest updates to Google Cloud Platform will continue to propel you along your cloud journey. They’ll provide you with amazing infrastructure and an even stronger edge for business growth in today’s fast-paced, competitive marketplace.
