Cloud regions let developers run hosted services closer to where their users are located for a faster, more reliable experience. Google Cloud today announced a trio of new regions for Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Chile.

Beyond Chromebooks for K-12, Google’s products can play a big role in higher education especially as computing moves to the cloud. The company today announced that it’s expanding a deal with the Internet2 consortium of 316 universities to offer Google Cloud Platform “special benefits.”

When Google Code, Google’s free hosting for open source projects, began shutting down in 2015, the developer community was reasonably upset. Google seems to have taken some of that criticism to heart with the launch of the Cloud Source Repositories beta, while adding powerful new features for enterprise customers.

Google Cloud Platform is launching a new hardware-based offering to complement its Cloud Key Management Service with new standards compliant key generation methods to help customers with their most sensitive information.

Update: Third-party services started to come back online at 12:58PM, with Google reporting that all issues have been resolved as of 1:05PM.

Update 7/18: Google has issued a technical explanation for the issue that boils down to a bug in a new feature that wasn’t caught during testing.

The Google Cloud Platform is down this afternoon with the official status page noting outages for a handful of services. As a result, Spotify, Snapchat, and other companies that use Google as a backend are currently unavailable.

Many developers when creating applications today also have to target the smart speakers platform and other similar devices. Google’s solution for creating conversational Actions is called Dialogflow and today the Enterprise Edition is now generally available.

At the start of 2018, Google revealed that over the last three years it has spent $30 billion to improve its infrastructure. Including data center and undersea cables, this helps the performance of both consumer services and Cloud infrastructure for enterprise. Google announced today that it’s investing in the Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) Cable System.

Google and Ubisoft have today announced Agones, an in-development game server hosting project. Agones, which appropriately means “contest” in greek, is powered by Google-made Kubernetes, which is an open source system “for building complex workloads and distributed systems.”

Relentlessly focussed on capturing the enterprise market, Google Cloud’s latest move is the acquisition of Internet of Things service Xively to boost its existing management service for the quickly growing field.

This week Google announced a significant price cut to its pricing on storage in Google Cloud Platform, giving customers access to high-speed SSDs for up to 63% less than previous prices.

Google this evening has announced that with the general availability of Google Cloud CDN, it has expanded the number of CDNs in the ecosystem to eight. This move, the company says, offers “choice and speed to Google Cloud Platform customers.”

Used internally to run several large services, Google is making its Spanner globally-distributed database solution available for third-party developers. Cloud Spanner is launching in public beta today with the promise of bringing both consistency and scaling to mission-critical applications…

Via a blog post earlier today, Google announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Apigee, an API management platform. The company went public last year and has worked with clients such as Walgreens, AT&T, Bechtel, Burberry, First Data, and Live Nation. Google will shell out $625 million for the company, slightly higher than Apigee’s market cap yesterday of $498 million…

Today Google has announced a new faster API for its NoSQL database for web and mobile apps. It goes without saying that this is read as a foreign language to anyone without a development background, Google says that it  has “redesigned the underlying architecture that supports the cross-platform API for accessing Datastore outside of Google App Engine, such as from Google Container Engine and Google Compute Engine“…

Spotify has announced that it is moving its music streaming backend to the Google Cloud Platform. The gigantic task will take place over the coming weeks and months and hopefully should not result in any service disruptions for users. For Google, the move is a clear win for their burgeoning cloud business.

If you’ve searched for objects or landmarks in Google Photos, you have already used Google’s Cloud Vision API without knowing it. Today, the Mountain View company announced that it is now opening up the API to more developers as it enters beta. Launched in limited preview last December, Google has also announced pricing for the service.

Google has today launched a couple of new products for Google Cloud Platform customers: Google Cloud Datalab, and Google Cloud Shell. Both of them are available via the web today in beta form…

Here’s the scoop on Cloud Datalab:

Google Cloud Datalab, available today in Beta is a web-based interactive developer tool that allows you to get insights from your raw data and explore, share, and publish reports in a fast, simple and cost-effective way. Cloud Datalab combines the power of Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage with familiar data science ecosystems built around IPython, removing the need for complex integration between products.

And here’s the gist on Cloud Shell:

Our customers want to be able to easily manage their infrastructure and applications when running on Google Cloud Platform no matter where they are.  Building on the ability to SSH from the browser we released for Google Compute Engine VM instances last year, today we’re launching Google Cloud Shell Beta, which extends from just VMs to all aspects of the platform.

These announcements are certainly irrelevant for the vast majority of regular users, but for those of you out there that are running apps on Google’s Cloud Platform, you have a couple of new tools. On a somewhat related note, an Amazon Web Services VP accidentally showed a picture of Google’s data centers at re:Invent last week.

Google has today released a new app called “Cloud Console” in beta, and it brings a convenient mobile management console to those who have solutions running on Google’s Cloud Platform.

Among the app’s highlighted features, you’ll find the ability to check the status of Google App Engine and Compute Engine resources, create custom dashboards to get a “glanceable overview” of your solutions, take action from your mobile handset like stopping virtual machines, and view and manage incidents in Google Cloud monitoring.

Here’s the official description:

The Cloud Console enables you to manage your solution running on the Google Cloud Platform directly from your Android phone or tablet:

* Check the state of your Google App Engine or Compute Engine resources * Create your own custom dashboard to get a glanceable overview of your solution * Take quick actions directly from your device such as stopping a virtual machine * View and manage Incidents tracked in Google Cloud monitoring

We plan on shipping new features regularly. Please give us your feedback in the app by swiping from the left and tapping “Send feedback”.

You can get the app for free on the Play Store.

Update: The app has now been officially announced:

Imagine being away from your desk and receiving automatic alerts when an issue occurs in your Google App Engine app. Or waiting at the airport and stopping your test VMs before leaving for vacation. With the beta launch of Cloud Console for Android, managing Google Cloud Platform from your phone or tablet is possible (and yes, an iOS version is in the works).

Google has announced on its Google Cloud Platform Blog that it is planning to make four Google Cloud Platform services available to VMware customers later this year:

Many businesses around the world rely on VMware datacenter virtualization solutions to virtualize their infrastructure and optimize the agility and efficiency of their data centers. Today we’re excited to announce that we are teaming up with VMware to make select Google Cloud Platform services available to VMware customers via vCloud Air, VMware’s hybrid cloud platform. We know how valuable flexibility is to a business when determining its total infrastructure solution, and with today’s announcement, enterprise businesses leveraging VMware’s datacenter virtualization solutions gain the flexibility to easily integrate Google Cloud Platform.

Read more…

Google announced on Monday that it has expanded Windows support for Google Cloud Platform by releasing three enhancements to Google Compute Engine for running Windows-based workloads. The additions will make it easier for Windows users to leverage the performance and scale of Google data centers.

On the Google Cloud Platform blog, Google has announced that it has now publicly released its ‘Andromeda’ virtualization stack to all Platform users. Users on its US central and western European servers should see ‘major’ performance gains automatically. Google is rolling out the same changes to its other zones in the coming months, so all users will benefit from the same efficiency gains.

Andromeda’s goal is to expose the raw performance of the underlying network while simultaneously exposing network function virtualization (NFV). We expose the same in-network processing that enables our internal services to scale while remaining extensible and isolated to end users. This functionality includes distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, transparent service load balancing, access control lists, and firewalls. We do this all while improving performance, with more enhancements coming.

Hence, Andromeda itself is not a Cloud Platform networking product; rather, it is the basis for delivering Cloud Platform networking services with high performance, availability, isolation, and security. For example, Cloud Platform firewalls, routing, and forwarding rules all leverage the underlying internal Andromeda APIs and infrastructure. Our site presents the details of these and other advanced network capabilities.

Full technical details of the Andromeda changes can be found in the blog post.

Google announced today on its Cloud Platform Blog that the data stored in its Cloud Storage platform will now be automatically encrypted before written to disk at no additional charge to developers. Google said the process will not involve any input or configuration from developers and that the new encryption will cause “no visible performance impact”:

We manages the cryptographic keys on your behalf using the same hardened key management systems that Google uses for our own encrypted data, including strict key access controls and auditing. Each Cloud Storage object’s data and metadata is encrypted with a unique key under the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128), and the per-object key itself is encrypted with a unique key associated with the object owner. These keys are additionally encrypted by one of a regularly rotated set of master keys.

Google noted that developers will still be able to encrypt data using their own methods and manage their own decryption keys, but from now on Google will free developers from the effort and cost associated with doing so. The new server-side encryption is active starting today for new data written to the platform, and Google says it will work with both new objects or for overwriting existing objects. It also said that “older objects will be migrated and encrypted in the coming months.”

In July, reports claimed that Google was also readying server-side encryption for files stored in its consumer-facing Drive cloud storage service.