Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Simplify database fleet management with AI-powered Database Center, now GA - Google Cloud announced the general availability of Database Center, an AI-powered unified fleet management solution. It simplifies database fleet management with enhanced monitoring, optimization, and security features across Google Cloud databases using Gemini AI.

Supercharge data access performance with GKE Data Cache - GKE Data Cache, now generally available, accelerates read performance for stateful and stateless applications on Google Kubernetes Engine by utilizing local SSDs as a caching layer for persistent disks. This leads to lower read latency, higher throughput, and potential cost optimization, as demonstrated by significant improvements in PostgreSQL performance.

Introducing Cassandra-compatible APIs in Spanner for zero-code-change migration - Spanner now offers Cassandra-compatible APIs, enabling near-zero code-change migration from Cassandra. This allows users to leverage Spanner's benefits like easy operations, elastic scaling, and strong consistency, while also reducing TCO and unlocking new data possibilities with Google Cloud integration.

Multi-cloud AI made easier: Aiven for AlloyDB Omni now generally available - Aiven for AlloyDB Omni is now generally available, providing a fully managed, high-performance PostgreSQL-compatible solution across major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud). It simplifies data management and offers benefits like strong uptime SLA, consistent multi-cloud experience, marketplace availability, disaster recovery, superior price/performance, and flexible licensing, enabling efficient building of intelligent, AI-powered applications.

AI Hypercomputer developer experience enhancements from Q1 25: build faster, scale bigger - The article discusses recent enhancements to Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer, designed to improve the AI developer experience. These enhancements include Pathways on Cloud for interactive scaling, Xprofiler for performance analysis, optimized container images for popular AI frameworks, and recipes for boosting GPU training efficiency.

Understand why your metrics moved with contribution analysis in BigQuery ML, now GA - BigQuery ML contribution analysis models, now GA, automate insight generation and output key change drivers from multidimensional data.

Announcing open-source enhancements to LangChain PostgreSQL - Google Cloud has announced open-source enhancements to the LangChain PostgreSQL package, including asynchronous PostgreSQL drivers, faster SQL filtering via relational metadata columns, and robust connection pooling for enterprise-level scalability.

Evaluate your gen media models with multimodal evaluation on Vertex AI - Google Cloud introduces Gecko on Vertex AI, a new rubric-based autorater for evaluating generative AI models, addressing the challenge of assessing the quality of images and videos produced by models like Lyria, Imagen, and Veo.

Google Cloud Marketplace simplifies deals and improves economics - Google Cloud Marketplace is introducing a variable revenue share model to improve partner deal economics, reducing revenue share to as low as 1.5% based on deal attributes. Additionally, commit drawdown is simplified for purchases through channel partners, and the Marketplace Customer Credit Program is generally available to incentivize new workloads with up to 3% in Google Cloud credits for first-time ISV solution purchases.

Expanding our Risk Protection Program with new insurance partners and AI coverage - Google Cloud has enhanced its Risk Protection Program (RPP) by adding new insurance partners like Beazley and Chubb, and expanding globally. The program now offers AI-specific coverage and addresses future quantum exploit risks. The Cyber Insurance Hub streamlines risk assessment and insurance procurement, potentially leading to better pricing.

Google Cloud announces first-of-its-kind generative AI leader certification - Google Cloud is launching a new Generative AI Leader certification targeted at non-technical professionals. The certification aims to validate strategic understanding of generative AI and is accompanied by a free learning path on Google Cloud Skills Boost.

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Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Fortifying Your Cloud: Zero Trust with Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) - Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) is a powerful tool for implementing Zero Trust security in cloud environments. It acts as a reverse proxy, enforcing access policies based on user identity and context before requests reach applications, reducing attack surface and simplifying user access. By centralizing authentication, enabling granular access controls, and integrating with services like Google's Access Context Manager, IAP strengthens cloud security posture.

Zero-Downtime Pod Migration in Kubernetes using Readiness Probes and preStop Hooks - The article explains how to achieve zero-downtime pod migrations in Kubernetes using readiness probes and preStop hooks. It demonstrates how to configure these features to ensure no service disruption during node maintenance or pod evictions. The author emphasizes the importance of combining readiness probes and preStop hooks for graceful rollouts and uninterrupted service.

Zero-Downtime Node Upgrades with Pod Disruption Budgets and GKE Strategies - The article explains how to achieve zero-downtime node upgrades in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs) and GKE's upgrade strategies.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Getting AI to write good SQL: Text-to-SQL techniques explained - Google Cloud leverages Gemini to generate SQL from natural language, enhancing productivity for developers and analysts while empowering non-technical users. These advancements are driving improvements in text-to-SQL capabilities across Google Cloud products like BigQuery Studio, Cloud SQL Studio, AlloyDB AI, and Vertex AI.

Unlock software delivery excellence and quality with Gemini Code Assist agents - The latest DORA research indicates that while AI tools like Gemini Code Assist boost individual developer productivity, increased AI adoption correlates with decreased software delivery throughput and stability. The article emphasizes strategic AI adoption, focusing on the entire SDLC and addressing technical debt through code review, documentation, and testing, ultimately improving software quality and maintainability. It also suggests organizations to try Gemini Code Assist to improve their software delivery process.

Push Images To Artifact Registry using GitHub Actions & Workload Identity

Moving Google Cloud Scheduler between projects: A Safe Strategy - Bash script to migrate Cloud Scheduler jobs from one project to another.

Using AWS S3 Tools with Google Cloud Storage: Critical Update - Recent AWS SDK and CLI updates introduced default data integrity protections that rendered them incompatible with Google Cloud Storage due to checksum mismatches.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Democratizing database observability with AI-assisted troubleshooting - AI-assisted troubleshooting for Cloud SQL and AlloyDB helps developers manage databases more efficiently, even without specialized expertise. It predicts potential problems, identifies root causes, and recommends actionable solutions, integrating with Cloud SQL Studio for easy implementation.

Spanner & BigQuery — Comprehending Reverse-ETL and its associated trade-offs - The article explores using Reverse ETL to export data from BigQuery to Spanner, highlighting the trade-offs between write throughput and Spanner performance. Testing revealed that high write concurrency from Reverse ETL jobs can significantly impact Spanner read latency and throughput and that having secondary indexes over the target table can cause writes throttling affecting RETL jobs duration. The author provides mitigation strategies like limiting job concurrency, using stale reads, and adjusting BigQuery slots reservation and Spanner nodes provisioning to balance performance and cost.

How I Optimized 70TB of GA4 Data in BigQuery Using Dataform - One way to handle when execution time becomes the bottleneck of a data pipeline with Dataform.

Your guide to finding inactive tables in Biguery - This article provides a BigQuery script to identify inactive tables and reduce storage costs. The script analyzes `INFORMATION_SCHEMA` views to determine the last usage time of tables based on queries, data changes, loads, and copies. By identifying and removing these tables, users can optimize their BigQuery storage and potentially lower their Google Cloud costs.

Automate DBT Runs to BigQuery with Docker, GCR, Cloud Run & Scheduler - This article guides developers on automating DBT runs for daily data refreshes to designated BigQuery tables using Docker, Cloud run.

An Introduction to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for Commerce and the 4 Features of that Help Retailers Increase the Revenue per Visit - Vertex AI Search for Commerce offers Search and Browse, Conversation, Recommendations, and Vision capabilities.

Session Management with Googles Multimodal Live API - Explore how to build even more resilient and long-lasting conversational applications.

Google ADK + Vertex AI Live API - Going Beyond the ADK CLI by Building Streaming Experiences with the Agent Development Kit and the Vertex AI Live API.

A guide to Google ADK and MCP integration with an external server - The article guides developers on integrating Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) agents with external Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, focusing on Server-Sent Events (SSE) and the newer Streamable HTTP for communication, using a Wikipedia access example.

Cool stuff customers built, May edition: Visual scouts, racing agents, agile ads & more - This blog post highlights how various customers are leveraging Google Cloud technologies to innovate and improve their businesses.

Inside Infinity Learn's AI Tutor, powered by Google Cloud - Learn how Infinity Learn, a pioneer in tech-forward education, collaborated with Google Cloud Consulting to develop an AI tutor to assist students during exam prep.

Multimodal Live API Tooling - The article discusses how to enhance a voice assistant using Google Cloud's Live API with tooling/function calling, allowing it to interact with external services. It explains how to define tools, configure the Live API session, handle tool calls, and process the responses to provide users with relevant information.

Various

Preparing for Google Cloud’s New Foundational Certification Generative AI Leader Exam - The article provides exam tips, emphasizing understanding core GenAI terminology, Google Cloud's AI offerings (Vertex AI, Gemini models), and strategic AI implementation.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #252 KubeCon EU 2025.

Security Podcast - #225 Cross-promotion: The Cyber-Savvy Boardroom Podcast: EP2 Christian Karam on the Use of AI.

Releases

AlloyDB - The default major version of PostgreSQL compatibility for new AlloyDB clusters is now PostgreSQL 16.

Anthos clusters on VMware - Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for VMware 1.30.900-gke.57 is now available for download. The following functional changes were made in 1.30.900-gke.57: Upgraded etcd to v3.4.33-0-gke.3. The following issues were fixed in 1.30.900-gke.57: Fixed vulnerabilities listed in Vulnerability fixes. Preview: You can use the Google Cloud console to create admin clusters and view admin cluster details.

Apigee API Hub - API overview and metrics The Get Started with API hub page now includes new charts and scorecards to provide a quick overview of your API landscape. Attach and manage Tags You can now add custom tags to your APIs and API deployments, making it easier to organize, categorize, and discover your API resources in API hub. Updated UI for API hub The API hub user interface is now updated to Google Material Design 2.

Apigee Hybrid - 1.14.2-hotfix.1. hybrid 1.14.2-hotfix.1 On May 16, 2025 we released an updated version of the Apigee hybrid software, 1.14.2-hotfix.1. Bug ID Description 393615439 OASValidation behavior for allOf with additionalProperties: true. Bug ID Description N/A Incorporated an updated base image for stackdriver-logging-agent, improving the overall security of the service.

BigQuery - You can now schedule automated data transfers from Snowflake to BigQuery using the BigQuery Data Transfer Service. BigQuery now supports cross-region transfers for batch loading and exporting data. Vector indexes support the TreeAH index type, which uses Google's ScaNN algorithm. The following SQL features are now generally available (GA) in BigQuery: GROUP BY STRUCT and the SELECT DISTINCT clause. BigQuery resource utilization charts have the following changes: The default timeline shown in the event timeline chart has changed from one to six hours. You can now view the Query text section in a BigQuery execution graph to understand how the stage steps are related to the query text. You can now use BigQuery and BigQuery DataFrames to enable multimodal analysis, transformation, and data engineering (ELT) workflows in both SQL and Python.

Bigtable - You can export query results from Bigtable Studio.

Chronicle - New premium versions of the following parsers are now available: ZSCALER_WEBPROXY ZSCALER_FIREWALL ZSCALER_DNS ZSCALER_INTERNET_ACCESS ZSCALER_VPN ZSCALER_ZPA ZSCALER_TUNNEL ZSCALER_CASB ZSCALER_DLP ZSCALER_ADMIN_AUDIT We recommend using the documented topology for each parser. A feature rollout on May 8, 2025, introduced new APIs that may require updated permissions for custom roles to access the detection UI page. YARA-L search with data tables updates Data tables are now accessible from the Investigation menu, instead of Detection, in the web interface.

Chronicle Security Operations - Create playbooks with Gemini This feature is now in General Availability. New premium versions of the following parsers are now available: ZSCALER_WEBPROXY ZSCALER_FIREWALL ZSCALER_DNS ZSCALER_INTERNET_ACCESS ZSCALER_VPN ZSCALER_ZPA ZSCALER_TUNNEL ZSCALER_CASB ZSCALER_DLP ZSCALER_ADMIN_AUDIT We recommend using the documented topology for each parser. A feature rollout on May 8, 2025, introduced new APIs that may require updated permissions for custom roles to access the detection UI page. YARA-L search with data tables updates Data tables are now accessible from the Investigation menu, instead of Detection, in the web interface.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.3.45 is now available for all regions. Release 6.3.46 is is being rolled out to the first phase of regions. Create playbooks with Gemini This feature is now in General Availability. A new status dashboard provides status tracking for Google SecOps SOAR.

Cloud Composer - A new Cloud Composer release has started on May 14, 2025. It is now possible to migrate from Cloud Composer 1 to Cloud Composer 3 using snapshots in all regions supported by Cloud Composer 3. It is now possible to restart the Airflow web server through Cloud Composer API by using the RestartWebServer method. The default value of the [scheduler]max_tis_per_query Airflow configuration option is set to 128. Cloud Composer 3 and Cloud Composer 2 no longer support files with gzip encoding (content-type=gzip). (Cloud Composer 3) Fixed an issue where the Airflow scheduler failed to initialize and work properly if a custom email backend was enabled. (Cloud Composer 3) Improved the computation of metrics related to snapshots. (Cloud Composer 2) In Cloud Composer versions 2.11.5 and later, log processing is switching to using OpenTelemetry instead of Fluentd. (Airflow 2.9.3) The apache-airflow-providers-google package was upgraded to version 15.1.0 in Cloud Composer 2 images and Cloud Composer 3 builds. (Airflow 2.9.3) Changes in preinstalled packages: apache-airflow-providers-standard was upgraded to 1.0.0 from 0.4.0. New Airflow builds are available in Cloud Composer 3: composer-3-airflow-2.10.5-build.3 (default) composer-3-airflow-2.9.3-build.23. New images are available in Cloud Composer 2: composer-2.13.1-airflow-2.10.5 (default) composer-2.13.1-airflow-2.10.2. Cloud Composer version 2.8.0 has reached its end of support period.

Compute Engine - Public Preview: You can use the flex-start provisioning model to increase your chances of obtaining GPUs for short-duration workloads. Google has applied fixes for a vulnerability (CVE-2024-45332) affecting the following Intel processors: CascadeLake, Ice Lake XeonSP, Ice Lake XeonD, Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids. A vulnerability (CVE-2024-28956) affecting Intel Cascade Lake processors and Intel Ice Lake processors was discovered and is being addressed. Public preview: In a managed instance group (MIG), you can use a health check to monitor your application health without triggering repairs of an unhealthy VM, if the application fails the health check.

Contact Center AI Platform - Version 3.35 pre-release announcement Version 3.35 of Google Cloud CCaaS is not yet released, but we expect the capabilities of version 3.35 to closely match the capabilities described in this announcement. QM integration now includes chat session events You can now export chat session events to an external quality management (QM) system. Remove email subjects from interaction data We now support removing email subjects when you delete interaction data from your instance for specified end-users. New sender email with auto-response emails You can now configure an outbound-only email address and use it as the sender address for auto-response emails. Include images in outbound emails You can now include images in outbound emails. The following issues were addressed in this release: Fixed an issue where calls were were being logged as Call with unknown contact in HubSpot instead of under the correct contact name. Mobile SDK 2.12 is released Mobile SDK 2.12 includes the following updates: Added support for the following languages: Ukrainian English - India Hindi Romanian Croatian Russian Tagalog End-users can receive and download attachments during sessions. Version 3.34 is released All release notes published on this date are part of version 3.34. Co-browse is renamed to Screen Share We've renamed the Co-browse capability to Screen Share. Manual wrap-up is automatically assigned to the last completed chat When an agent manually enters wrap-up status, wrap-up is automatically assigned to the agent's last completed chat. Spelling and grammar check is available for SMS and WhatsApp sessions Spelling and grammar check is now available for SMS and WhatsApp chat sessions. Virtual agent to virtual agent chat transfers A virtual agent can now transfer a chat session to another virtual agent by transferring to the queue that the destination virtual agent is assigned to. The following issues were addressed in this release: Fixed an issue that prevented agents from calling other agents using a phone number with an extension.

Dataplex - Bulk export of universal catalog metadata is generally available (GA).

Dataproc Serverless - New Dataproc Serverless for Spark runtime versions: 1.1.103 1.2.47 2.2.47. Dataproc Serverless for Spark: Spark UI for Dataproc Serverless batches and interactive sessions, which lets you monitor and debug your serverless Spark workloads, now features Event Timeline and Task Quantile views for enhanced troubleshooting.

Datastream - Global transaction identifier (GTID)-based replication for MySQL sources is now generally available (GA). Datastream is now available in the europe-north2 (Stockholm) region.

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

Eventarc - Support for creating custom organization policy constraints in Eventarc Advanced and in Eventarc Standard is generally available for some Eventarc resources.

Cloud Functions - Labels you previously set for your Cloud Run functions using either gcloud functions commands or the Cloud Functions v2 API propagate to Cloud Run when you deploy your functions in Cloud Run.

IAM - The predefined role reference and the permissions reference have been reorganized to improve performance and searchability.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2025-R19) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. GKE now provides insights and recommendations that help you to identify and troubleshoot clusters with Custom Resource Definitions that contain an invalid or malformed Certificate Authority bundle, which might disrupt cluster operations. GKE Autopilot clusters fail to update the cgroup_mode field and display the following error: ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.update) ResponseError: code=400, message=INVALID_ARGUMENT: invalid node_pool_auto_config.linux_node_config. In GKE version 1.33 and later, the Compute Engine persistent disk CSI Driver supports provisioning Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volumes in the ReadWriteOnce, ReadWriteOncePod, and ReadWriteMany access modes.

GKE new features - GKE now provides insights and recommendations that help you to identify and troubleshoot clusters with Custom Resource Definitions that contain an invalid or malformed Certificate Authority bundle, which might disrupt cluster operations. In GKE version 1.33 and later, the Compute Engine persistent disk CSI Driver supports provisioning Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volumes in the ReadWriteOnce, ReadWriteOncePod, and ReadWriteMany access modes.

Load Balancing - A security vulnerability was detected in the classic Application Load Balancer service prior to April 26, 2025. Global and cross-region load balancers now support enabling traffic isolation on the service load balancing policy.

Looker - Looker (Google Cloud core) and Looker (original) changes. Looker 25.8 is expected to include the following changes, features, and fixes: Expected Looker (original) deployment start: Monday, May 19, 2025 Expected Looker (original) final deployment and download available: Thursday, May 29, 2025 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) deployment start: Monday, May 19, 2025 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) final deployment: Monday, June 2, 2025. An issue has been fixed where HTML in a LookML dimension wasn't being applied to Y-axis labels. SSL host validation is now enabled by default. You can now create connections using the Amazon Redshift 2.1+ or Amazon Redshift Serverless 2.1+ SQL dialect, both of which use the Redshift JDBC driver. The Presto JDBC driver version has been updated to 0.291. You can now select the JDBC driver version when you create or edit a connection. The sync_lookml_dashboard API endpoint now accepts an optional dashboard_ids parameter to specify a subset of dashboards to synchronize. The gemini_in_looker permission can now be applied to selected models on the Looker instance. When you create a custom measure, suggestions are now displayed for tier filters. An issue has been fixed where some of the Project API endpoints wouldn't create a fresh dev mode copy of the LookML project files if no dev mode copy already existed. An issue has been fixed where Elite System Activity data could be delayed. An issue has been fixed where navigating between Looks could cause the System Activity Explore to correlate an incorrect Look ID with a query ID. An issue has been fixed where filtering on a pivoted field while Grid Layout by Row was enabled could return a server error. An issue has been fixed where duplicating a dashboard tile and editing it could cause the tile to load indefinitely. An issue has been fixed where scheduled reports could include limited columns even if All Results was enabled for the schedule. An issue has been fixed where links in data tables couldn't be clicked. An issue has been fixed where changes to the row limit and visualization configuration that were applied by custom visualizations were not saved in the System Activity query record. An issue has been fixed where Looks could appear before dashboards in embedded folder navigation. An issue has been fixed where running queries would not be canceled if a user navigated away from a dashboard, for example, by clicking an Explore from here link. An issue has been fixed where all the folders in the IDE would collapse when a user toggled a folder on a new session. An issue has been fixed where a scatterplot visualization could crash if there were less than three rows of data and clustering was enabled. An issue has been fixed where additional queries that were used for totals and pivots would not include context comments. An issue has been fixed where blank measure filters could prevent Looker from correctly displaying subtotals in table visualizations. An issue has been fixed where the BigQuery storage project ID could be set to a user attribute value, even though Looker doesn't support user attributes in this field. Looker (Google Cloud core) only changes. Previously, using Application Default Credentials (ADC) with a BigQuery connection caused Looker to incorrectly display the service account file upload button on the PDT Override panel; this button has now been removed and this feature now performs as expected. Looker (Google Cloud core) only changes. You can now create Looker (Google Cloud core) instances that use Private Service Connect with a hybrid network configuration.

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

Cloud Run - The region selector when creating a service or a job from the Google Cloud console now defaults to europe-west1. Labels you previously set for your Cloud Run functions using either gcloud functions commands or the Cloud Functions v2 API propagate to Cloud Run when you deploy your functions in Cloud Run.

Security Command Center - The GA release of enhanced data residency support in the European Union and United States is temporarily delayed. When you enable Security Command Center for the first time in an organization, and you enable data residency in the European Union or United States, data residency controls are enforced at rest, in use, and in transit.

Sensitive Data Protection - By default, scans for MAC_ADDRESS findings now include MAC_ADDRESS_LOCAL findings.

Cloud Spanner - You can now create a pre-filtered vector index that indexes only rows in your database that match a specific filter condition. Spanner now supports the INTERVAL data type in GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL, which represents a duration or an amount of time. Spanner now supports the SPLIT_SUBSTR() GoogleSQL function, which splits an input string using a delimiter and returns a substring composed of a specific number of segments, starting from a given segment index.

Cloud SQL MySQL - Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports minor version 8.0.42. You can now use advanced disaster recovery (DR) for your Private Service Connect (PSC) enabled Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition instances.

Cloud SQL Postgres - You can now use advanced disaster recovery (DR) for your Private Service Connect (PSC) enabled Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition instances.

Cloud SQL SQL Server - Cloud SQL for SQL Server now supports TLS connections to Active Directory endpoints without requiring server certificate trust or the use of IP addresses.

Cloud Translation - The latency and quality of Translation LLM has been improved. Translation LLM now supports even more languages.

Vertex AI - Vertex AI custom training supports the following accelerators: A3 Ultra A4 Vertex AI online prediction supports the following accelerators: A3 Mega A4 For regional availability of accelerators, see Using accelerators.

Virtual Private Cloud - You can exclude IP address ranges from being used for automatic IP address allocation for internal ranges.