All news with #google cloud tag

🔷 Google Spanner has been ranked #1 by Gartner in the Critical Capabilities report for the Lightweight Transactions use case for the second consecutive year and #2 for OLTP. The post highlights Spanner’s distributed transaction support (5.0/5.0), high transactional consistency (4.9/5.0), and AI/ML integration (4.6/5.0). It also summarizes 2025 product advances—Spanner Graph GA, integrated hybrid search, a columnar engine, and Cassandra-compatible APIs—and cites customer deployments at Palo Alto Networks, Mercado Libre, and Unico.

🔗 Ab Initio and Google Cloud announce integrations of data connectors, metadata connectors, and agent capabilities to help enterprises build agentic AI across hybrid environments. The integration federates distributed data into a unified layer and extends Dataplex with bi-directional metadata exchange, lineage, and active metadata. Together with BigQuery and Gemini, this enables explainable, auditable agents that operate on trustworthy, multi-cloud data.

🔗 Google Cloud and Ab Initio announced an integrated suite of data and metadata connectors, agents, and governance capabilities to give Gemini and other AI models reliable access to enterprise data across hybrid environments. The partnership federates over 500 sources and supplies field-level lineage from 100+ extractors to populate Dataplex and BigQuery with AI-ready context. This unified metadata hub aims to support explainable, auditable agentic AI while preserving distributed data ownership and compliance.

🔗 Gemini CLI's Neo4j extension connects graph databases to Gemini's reasoning via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The extension bundles four MCP servers to manage Neo4j Aura, translate natural language into Cypher, support interactive data modeling and visualization, and use Neo4j as long-term memory for agentic flows. Developers can provision databases, run Cypher queries, and persist knowledge from the terminal to accelerate GraphRAG workflows.

💡 Google Cloud updated its spend-based Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), moving from a credit-based model to a direct discounted price model that makes net costs and savings visible at a glance. The rollout began in July 2025 and is now generally available, expanding SKU coverage to include Cloud Run and H3/M-series VMs and correcting reporting gaps for mixed Flex CUD environments. The unified CUD Analysis provides hourly granularity (up to 30 days), CSV exports, and a metadata export for programmatic joins with Billing BigQuery Export datasets. Enhanced recommendation and scenario modeling let FinOps teams size commitments, tune coverage thresholds, and validate pre/post migration savings.

🛡️ This week at the Munich Security Conference, Google Cloud released a whitepaper, "Staying Ahead of the Shadows: Digital Resilience in the Era of AI," that outlines current digital threats and recommends a unified, full‑stack defense to help democracies. It highlights supply‑chain targeting, employee‑focused manipulation, and sustained China‑nexus espionage. The paper prescribes a five‑layer resilience model — Infrastructure, Architecture, Models, Applications, and Security — supported by technologies such as Gemini, Workspace, CodeMender, SAIF, and post‑quantum cryptography.

🛡️ Google Cloud outlines an AI-driven approach to operational resilience for financial institutions, using Gemini Enterprise to generate context-aware incident scenarios based on a customer's real production data. The Technical Account Management team ingests logs, architecture, SLAs and support history to craft bespoke timelines that test cross-functional response and communication. The program supports DORA readiness and has driven immediate remediation actions and process changes.

🔒 The European Commission has given unconditional approval for Google's $32 billion acquisition of cloud security vendor Wiz, removing a major regulatory hurdle. The clearance lets Google Cloud fold Wiz's multi‑cloud security capabilities into its stack while regulators found no meaningful competition harm. Analysts warn the tie-up could accelerate hyperscaler-led security consolidation, raise long-term lock-in risks, and shift incentives away from cloud neutrality.

🔧 This guide explains how to adapt foundation models on Google Cloud by fine-tuning both managed and self-managed workflows. It contrasts a fully managed Vertex AI Supervised Fine-Tuning path for models like Gemini with a customizable GKE approach using LoRA on open-source models such as Llama. The labs walk through data preparation, baseline evaluation, tuning, and automated evaluation metrics, as well as GKE infrastructure, GPU provisioning, security with Workload Identity, and containerized training for production readiness.

🧰 The Google Cloud samples team describes building a specialized end-to-end system that uses Gemini on Vertex AI and Genkit to produce production-ready educational code samples across many languages and products. Their architecture separates generation, validation, and delivery so LLM outputs are combined with deterministic automations, linters, unit tests, and human review. The post presents seven practical technical takeaways—decomposition, determinism, precise prompts, vetted evaluation, scaled downstream processes, end-to-end testing, and solid engineering practices—that drove reliable, scalable sample generation.

🔒 Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped 1.15 introduces networking updates that give regulated environments more control, visibility, and scalability while preserving isolation. Preview features include Cloud NAT for configurable egress IPs and timeouts, enhanced connectivity enabling standard clusters to reach organizational workloads securely, and HTTP/HTTPS load balancer health checks for application-level monitoring. IPAM's subnet group capability (GA) simplifies subnet scaling by letting child subnets reference multiple parent subnets.

📡 Cloud Observability now accepts OTLP for metrics in Cloud Monitoring, extending prior OTLP trace support. Using OpenTelemetry and the OTLP format, customers can send provider-agnostic metrics via the OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector directly to Cloud Monitoring, with storage and query parity with Managed Service for Prometheus. The rollout unlocks DELTA metrics, exponential histograms, dotted metric names and label keys, direct SDK exports for very high-volume sources, and zero-code auto-instrumentation options.

🔍 New analysis by Ontinue details VoidLink, a Linux-based command-and-control framework that generates implant binaries for credential theft, data exfiltration and stealthy persistence across cloud and enterprise hosts. The agent fingerprints AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba and Tencent environments and adapts its behavior, loading modular plugins for container escape and kernel-level stealth. Researchers identified unusual development artefacts — structured "Phase X:" labels, duplicated numbering, verbose debug logs and embedded documentation — that suggest parts of the implant were written or assisted by a large language model coding agent with limited human review.

🚀 The Vertex AI team deployed the GKE Inference Gateway, built on the Kubernetes Gateway API, to reduce inference latency and improve cache efficiency without a custom scheduler. The gateway applies load-aware routing—scraping Prometheus metrics like KV cache utilization and queue depth—and content-aware routing that inspects request prefixes to send traffic to pods with warm context. In production this cut Time to First Token by ~35% for Qwen3-Coder, improved P95 by ~52% for a bursty chat model, and doubled prefix-cache hit rates from 35% to 70%.

🛡️ Google Cloud outlines its expanded Sovereign Cloud portfolio—Google Cloud Data Boundary, Google Cloud Dedicated, and Google Cloud Air‑Gapped—to help governments and organizations retain control of unencrypted data, comply with local law, and sustain critical services. The announcement details regional infrastructure and workforce investments worldwide and legal, technical, and operational controls to limit or challenge external data access. It emphasizes open-source compatibility, client-side encryption options, and flexible deployment models that enable third‑party operators and avoid vendor lock‑in.

🚀 Starfish Space is using Google Cloud to accelerate development and validation of its autonomous satellite-servicing vehicle, Otter. The company runs millions of Monte Carlo simulations on Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine to train and harden docking software in virtual orbital environments. Managed Kubernetes lets engineers scale high-performance compute for complex simulations and control costs by scaling down resources when not required. This software-first model supports contracts with NASA, the U.S. Space Force, SES, and the Space Development Agency.

🚀 Google Cloud is launching a two-day roadshow across North America focused on building production-grade and multimodal AI systems. Day 1, the Production-Ready AI Intensive, covers stability, security, and scalable architecture including multi-agent orchestration with the Agent Development Kit (ADK), A2A protocols on Cloud Run, automated evaluation via the Vertex AI Gen AI Evaluation SDK, and defenses like Model Armor and Sensitive Data Protection. Day 2, the Multimodal Frontier, is a hands-on, code-first workshop on real-time perception and interaction: simultaneous audio/video processing, Graph RAG with Spanner Graph, Persistent Memory Banks, and the Gemini Live API for zero-latency, interruptible agents. Sessions include labs, credits, and networking; seats are limited.

🔔 Google Cloud has announced General Availability of Unified Maintenance, a centralized dashboard for tracking planned maintenance across its services. The dashboard aggregates events for Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, AlloyDB, and Looker, providing a single view of upcoming work. It delivers standardized alerts via Cloud Logging, enabling integration with existing monitoring and ticketing systems, and clearly marks events that offer user controls.

🤖 Our inaugural survey of 251 senior public sector leaders, commissioned by Google Cloud and conducted by National Research Group, finds agentic AI is already mission‑critical: 55% report using AI agents and 42% have deployed more than 10 in production. Respondents expect to allocate 50%+ of future AI budgets to agents. The report highlights productivity gains (70% improved; 46% at least doubled) and security improvements (79% better threat identification, 70% improved intelligence/response integration), and points to Gemini for Government with FedRAMP High-authorized protections as a clear path to scale.

🔐 Single-tenant Cloud HSM is now generally available in the U.S. and EU, offering dedicated, hardware-enforced key isolation for regulated workloads. It provides FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated Marvell LiquidSecurity HSMs, quorum-based administration, and the ability to revoke Google access to make keys unavailable. Google manages provisioning and high availability while customers retain root key control and can provision clusters in minutes using gcloud.