Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Supercharge your data the open-source way: Memorystore for Valkey is now GA - Google Cloud's Memorystore for Valkey, a fully managed in-memory service, is now generally available. It offers a 99.99% SLA, Private Service Connect support, zero-downtime scaling, integrated vector similarity search, managed backups, cross-region replication, multi-VPC access, and persistence. Memorystore for Valkey supports both Valkey 7.2 and Valkey 8.0, which provides exceptional performance, optimized memory efficiency, and enhanced reliability.

Spring cleaning with FinOps Hub 2.0 - Google Cloud's FinOps Hub 2.0 helps customers optimize their cloud infrastructure by identifying and eliminating wasted resources. It provides utilization insights, cost optimizations, and integration with Gemini Cloud Assist for personalized cost reports and automated workflows. The new IAM role permission allows tech solution owners to access FinOps insights and Gemini Cloud Assist insights across all their projects in a single view.

Announcing cloud-native integration of security service edge (SSE) with Cloud WAN - Google Cloud's NCC Gateway, a regionally managed spoke of Network Connectivity Center (NCC), integrates cloud-native security services, starting with third-party security service edge (SSE) solutions. It simplifies network security and boosts performance for hybrid and multi-cloud environments by providing a unified security solution, high-bandwidth on-ramp for branch users, high-performance private off-ramp for remote users, and protected application access to the internet.

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Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Cloud CISO Perspectives: 27 security announcements at Next ‘25 - A recap of security updates from Next ‘25.

Migration from Amazon Web Services provider to Google Cloud Platform - A Tale of Two Cloud Providers: How we made the pivotal decision to migrate several of our major European workloads from AWS to GCP.

Validated TLS Cert Made Simpler: Testing Google Cloud External Load Balancers Without Owning a Domain - This article explains how to create TLS certificates for testing Google Cloud External Load Balancers without owning a domain.

Automate Google SecOps Detections: Introducing a Terraform Module for Rules and Reference Lists - Use Infrastructure as Code to deploy & manage Google SecOps detection rules and reference lists via this new secops-rules Terraform module.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Querying Google Cloud Datastore Using Spring Boot and DatastoreTemplate - This article explains how to use Spring Boot and the spring-cloud-gcp-data-datastore library.

Google Firebase Studio App with Gemini - Create applications using natural language with Firebase Studio.

Launched: ABAP SDK v1.10 unleashing Powerful AI/ML, Eventing, and Storage Capabilities - The ABAP SDK v1.10 for Google Cloud introduces powerful AI/ML capabilities, simplified event-driven integration, cost-effective content management, and expanded API access. Key features include the BigQuery AI and ML SDK for ABAP, Business Eventing Toolkit, Cloud Storage as a scalable content repository, and enhanced Vertex AI SDK capabilities.

C4D VMs on Google Cloud: Breaking Records Again with EPYC Turin - Benchmarks of recent supported CPUs on GCP.

How We Cut Google API Costs by 4x on Navcolo (And Made the System Better in the Process) - Navcolo, a multilingual platform for searching and interacting with street addresses, faced escalating infrastructure bills due to inefficient use of the Google Maps API for address translations. By optimizing the API calls and leveraging the Google Translate API, the team achieved a 75% cost reduction, improved performance, and simplified the codebase.

Google Cloud — Cloud Hub and App Hub (Hands-on) - Cloud Hub and App Hub are two services in Google Cloud that provide a centralized view of operations data and insights for applications and resources. Cloud Hub displays data for a selected Google Cloud project or App Hub application, including active events, health data, capacity data, failed App Hub application deployments, and open support cases. App Hub organizes Google Cloud resources in an application-centric way, enabling administrators to easily manage infrastructure resources drawn from one or more projects.

Building an App with Gemini Code Assist - Using Gemini and Gemini Code Assist to build a bit.ly clone app.

Extending Your AI Application with Genkit MCP - This article introduces Genkit MCP, a framework for connecting large language models to external data and tools. It explains how to integrate Genkit MCP with Genkit, Google Firebase's AI orchestration framework, using the genkitx-mcp plugin.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

AI and BI converge: A deep dive into Gemini in Looker - Gemini in Looker, a new AI-powered business intelligence tool, simplifies data preparation, dashboard creation, and report building. It features natural language processing, automatic slide generation, formula assistance, and advanced visualization assistance. The LookML semantic modeling layer ensures data accuracy and consistency for AI-generated insights.

Forecasting the Future with BigQueryML TimesFM: A Game-Changer in Time Series Analysis - TimesFM, a foundation model built on Google's Large Language Model (LLM) architecture, revolutionizes time series forecasting by offering zero-shot performance and eliminating the need for dataset-specific training. Integrated into BigQuery ML as the AI.FORECAST function, it empowers data analysts to generate sophisticated forecasts using familiar SQL syntax.

Migrating Kafka to BigQuery — Fixing Field Name Compatibility in Self-Managed Connectors - A Deep Dive Into Schema Sanitization When Moving Away From Confluent Managed Connectors.

Reap all the benefits of incremental dbt-models in BigQuery - Incremental dbt models in BigQuery enable efficient processing of new or updated data, improving performance and potentially reducing costs. However, using them with BigQuery requires proper clustering and variable handling to avoid unnecessary data processing. The solution involves creating a variable for the event time offset and handling potential errors and reference issues. By following these steps, you can optimize incremental models and save costs when working with large datasets in BigQuery.

Connect & Act: Google ADK Agents with GCP Integration Connectors to Perform Tasks Across 100+ Systems - Google's new Agent Development Kit (ADK) enables building multi-agent AI applications. A key feature is native integration with GCP Integration Connectors, allowing agents to use "Tools" that can actively perform actions across over 100 different Google and third-party systems.

Agent Development Kit: Enhancing Multi-Agents Systems with A2A protocol and MCP server

Reimagining E-commerce: Automated Catalog Quality Checks with Google’s Agent Development Kit - This article demonstrates how to build a Sequential Agent for a crucial e-commerce task: automating catalog image quality checks using ADK.

Building a Trustworthy AI: Automated Fact-Checking with Google’s Agent Development Kit - This article introduces an automated fact-checking pipeline built using Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK). The pipeline combines specialized language model (LLM) agents with the Google Search tool to analyze marketing content, identify factual claims, search for evidence, and deliver a verifiable assessment of accuracy.

Multi-agent Application with Agent Development Kit - Build a Kitchen Renovation System using Vertex AI ADK!

Build AI Agents your way on Google Cloud - Build AI agents on Google Cloud with a comprehensive ecosystem for agent development. Select frameworks like ADK or CrewAI, power agents with Gemini or Gemma models, equip them with tools, data, and grounding, enable collaboration with A2A protocol, and deploy to Agent Engine or Cloud Run. Explore resources and start building the next generation of AI applications on Google Cloud. Publish agents to Google Agentspace for controlled sharing and centralized governance.

Architecting a Multi-Agent System with Google A2A and ADK - This article introduces the concepts of building collaborative agent systems using Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) and the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol. It demonstrates these concepts through an Agentic Trading Simulator, which consists of specialized agents for trading strategies and risk management that communicate using A2A.

Shielding Your AI Models: A Dive into Google Cloud Model Armor for Securing LLMs - An overview of Google Cloud Model Armor.

Various

A New Era of Innovation: Public Sector Highlights from Next ‘25 - Key announcements included enhancements to Google Distributed Cloud, Agentspace integration with Chrome Enterprise, support for generative media models and Gemini 2.5, the launch of Google Unified Security, and a significant discount on Google Workspace for U.S. federal government agencies.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #219 Beyond the Buzzwords: Decoding Cyber Risk and Threat Actors in Asia Pacific.

Releases

Anthos clusters on VMware - Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for VMware 1.30.800-gke.66 is now available for download. The following functional change was made in 1.30.800-gke.66: Removed support in the Konnectivity server (konnectivity-server) for the following weak cryptographic cipher suites: TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 and TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256. Fixed an issue that prevented user cluster upgrades when Dataplane V2 was explicitly configured with forward mode. The 1.30.800-gke.66 release includes many vulnerability fixes.

Apigee UI - On April 15, 2025 we released an updated version of Apigee Analytics and the Apigee UI. Starting with this release, the Analytics dashboards available in the Apigee Classic UI redirect to the comparable dashboards in Apigee UI in Cloud console.

Apigee Hybrid - 1.11.2-hotfix.3. hybrid 1.11.2-hotfix.3 On April 14, 2025 we released an updated version of the Apigee hybrid software, 1.11.2-hotfix.3. Stricter class instantiation checks included in this release. v1.14.0. On April 14, 2025 we released an updated version of Apigee. Announcing data collectors data residency (DRZ) compliance for Apigee and Apigee hybrid.

Cloud Architecture Center - Parallel file systems for HPC workloads: Added guidance about Google Cloud Managed Lustre. (New guide) Oracle E‑Business Suite with Oracle Database on Compute Engine VMs: Shows how to build the infrastructure to run Oracle E‑Business Suite applications with Oracle Database on Compute Engine VMs in Google Cloud.

Artifact Registry - Artifact Registry attachments are available in Preview for all repository formats.

BigQuery - You can now use BigQuery DataFrames version 2.0, which makes security and performance improvements to the BigQuery DataFrames API, adds new features, and introduces breaking changes. You can use partial ordering mode in BigQuery DataFrames to generate efficient queries.

Chronicle - Chrome Enterprise Threats Category This feature is currently in Preview. Entity Context in Search This feature enhances security investigations and incident response by letting users search for and view context events related to entities. We are releasing updated versions of the following premium parsers: Crowdstrike Detection Monitoring (CS_DETECTS) Crowdstrike Falcon (CS_EDR) Microsoft Defender for Endpoint These updates include significant improvements to parser mappings.

Chronicle Security Operations - Chrome Enterprise Threats Category This feature is currently in Preview. Entity Context in Search This feature enhances security investigations and incident response by letting users search for and view context events related to entities. We are releasing updated versions of the following premium parsers: Crowdstrike Detection Monitoring (CS_DETECTS) Crowdstrike Falcon (CS_EDR) Microsoft Defender for Endpoint These updates include significant improvements to parser mappings.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.3.43 is being rolled out to the first phase of regions as listed here. Release 6.3.42 is now available for all regions.

Contact Center AI Platform - Headless web SDK 3.6.4 is released Headless web SDK 3.6.4 fixes a problem where the virtual agent was sending multiple repeated messages to end-users in chat sessions.

Dataplex - Encrypting Dataplex data with customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) is now available.

Dataproc Serverless - New Dataproc on Compute Engine subminor image versions: 2.0.137-debian10, 2.0.137-rocky8, 2.0.137-ubuntu18 2.1.85-debian11, 2.1.85-rocky8, 2.1.85-ubuntu20, 2.1.85-ubuntu20-arm 2.2.53-debian12, 2.2.53-rocky9, 2.2.53-ubuntu22. Dataproc on Compute Engine: The Spark BigQuery connector has been upgraded to version 0.34.1 in the latest 2.2 image version. Fixed a bug in which Jupyter fails to restart upon cluster restart on Personal Authentication clusters.

Dataproc - New Dataproc on Compute Engine subminor image versions: 2.0.137-debian10, 2.0.137-rocky8, 2.0.137-ubuntu18 2.1.85-debian11, 2.1.85-rocky8, 2.1.85-ubuntu20, 2.1.85-ubuntu20-arm 2.2.53-debian12, 2.2.53-rocky9, 2.2.53-ubuntu22. Dataproc on Compute Engine: The Spark BigQuery connector has been upgraded to version 0.34.1 in the latest 2.2 image version. Fixed a bug in which Jupyter fails to restart upon cluster restart on Personal Authentication clusters.

Deep Learning VM - M129 release Updated the Dataproc JupyterLab plugin to version 0.1.85.

Cloud Filestore - You can now use custom constraints with Organization Policy to provide more granular control over specific fields for some Filestore resources.

Gemini - Fixed markdown rendering issues in chat for IntelliJ Gemini Code Assist.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2025-R15) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. GKE Inference Gateway is now available to significantly improve the performance, efficiency, and observability of generative AI workloads on GKE.

GKE new features - GKE Inference Gateway is now available to significantly improve the performance, efficiency, and observability of generative AI workloads on GKE.

Cloud Logging - In the Logs Explorer, you can now view the most frequently occurring fields and values in the JSON payload of your logs.

Resource Manager - Custom organization policies are now generally available for Filestore.

Secure Source Manager - Regional endpoints are now available in Secure Source Manager.

Security Command Center - The ability of Event Threat Detection to analyze foundational log sources is generally available (GA).

Service Mesh - Managed Cloud Service Mesh & 1.22.x & 1.23.x & 1.24.x. New troubleshooting tools for your service mesh are now available. 1.21.x. In-cluster Cloud Service Mesh 1.21 is no longer supported.

SAP Solutions - ABAP SDK for Google Cloud version 1.10 (On-premises or any cloud edition) Version 1.10 of the on-premises or any cloud edition of the ABAP SDK for Google Cloud is generally available (GA).

Cloud Spanner - End-to-end tracing is now generally available (GA).

Vertex AI - Persistent resources for custom training is generally available (GA) and supports rebooting.

Vertex AI Workbench - The M129 release of Vertex AI Workbench instances includes the following: Updated the Dataproc JupyterLab plugin to version 0.1.85.