Now ex-Director of Product Management for Google’s Cloud Platform Greg DeMichillie has departed the Mountain View company to head back to Adobe to serve as its Head of Developer Platform & Ecosystem. This is a move back to Adobe because, before his time at Google, DeMichillie was at the creative, marketing, and document software company as a Director of Product Management between 2008 and 2012…
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…
With Cloud Machine Learning, Google hopes to “take machine learning mainstream” by allowing developers to build “a new class of intelligent applications.” The company is launching two new natural language and speech APIs in open beta today. Additionally, a new Cloud Region will result in users on the North American West Coast seeing less latency in apps and services.
Google just confirmed its latest acquisition with an announcement on its Google Cloud Platform blog that it’s purchasing video/broadcasting platform Anvato.
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“…
Google today kicked off its GCP Next 2016 event in San Francisco, California, and with it comes — not surprisingly — the announcement of some new products that will bolster Google’s cloud offerings. The company announced plans to take machine learning mainstream with Cloud Machine Learning, many enterprise feature enhancements, a new unified monitoring, logging and diagnostics service called Stackdriver, new partners for cloud ops, and more…
According to CRN and other sources, iCloud will soon be partially powered by the Google Cloud Platform by way of a deal that could also be used as leverage to cut its cloud costs with Amazon and Microsoft. Such a move is a big win for Google’s burgeoning cloud enterprise business.
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.
Google has its own enterprise-grade cloud storage offering which competes with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft for storing data from big Internet players like Snapchat and Netflix. Now you can send your data to their cloud in the most literal, or most lazy, way ever before possible.
Google has today announced big price drops for all Google Compute Engine Instance types, following the Moore’s law pricing philosophy that the company committed to last year. Effective today, the prices of virtual machines through Google Cloud Platform are dropping up to 30%, and Google is also introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines that could bring prices even lower in some cases…
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”.
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.
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. Expand Expanding Close
Google announced on Tuesday that professional services company PwC is the latest business to adopt the Apps for Work suite and Google Cloud Platform. The news comes less than one day after Google tabbed Squarespace and WordPress as two other new Google for Work partners, greatly expanding its business portfolio as competition increases. Expand Expanding Close
Whether you’re an avid soccer fan or a compulsive gambler looking for an edge, Google’s cloud platform could be your best friend or worst enemy, depending on who you’re rooting for in this year’s World Cup. In a blog post today, product marketing manager, Benjamin Bechtolsheim revealed that so far the company’s system has managed to correctly predict winners for each match in the tournament’s Round of 16.
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.
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.
Twilio, a voice and messaging API solution, announced a partnership with Google’s Cloud Platform today.
Twilio is the first of its kind to integrate with Google App Engine and give developers voice and messaging services for their apps with just a few lines of code, and its APIs are priced on a pay-per-use scale, as first noted by TechCrunch. Voice services like making calls, for instance, start at 2 cents per minute, and the ability to receive calls costs just $1 per phone number and 1 cent per minute.
“We’re very excited to partner with Google to be the first voice and messaging platform integrated with Google Cloud Platform,” explained Twilio on its blog, while also listing step-by-step instructions on how to register with Google App Engine, build a messaging app, etc.
Twilio’s SDK notably includes one-to-one voice and messaging, SIP support, in-app conference calling, group texting, two-factor authentication, phone numbers, and mobile app distribution. Hipmunk, for instance, uses Twilio’s distribution feature to supply users with a text message and link to download its app.
