Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Powering public sector innovation: New networking features in GDC air-gapped - Three major advancements in Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped networking are designed to give you more control over your environment.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Cloud CISO Perspectives: The global threats facing EU healthcare - To help protect healthcare in the EU from cyber threats, we need to prioritize cybersecurity investment, and emphasize collaboration with the private sector.

Protecting the Core: Securing Protection Relays in Modern Substations - Protection relays are prime targets for cyber-physical attacks targeting substation automation systems and grid management systems.

Google Cloud Networking 101: Quick Reference Guide - Demystify Google Cloud networking with this guide. Learn core concepts, specialized networking for AI Data Centers (RDMA, InfiniBand, RoCE, NVLink, GPU, TPU), and find resources for hands-on practice.

Integrating GKE with Google Cloud Services (Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, etc.) - The article discusses the importance of integrating Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with other Google Cloud services like Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage for building scalable microservices architectures.

Understanding Google Cloud’s Dynamic Workload Scheduler - Learn how to use Dynamic Workload Scheduler to your advantage!

Understanding Quota Project Warnings When Using Google Cloud ADC

From Prompt to Infrastructure with Gemini Cloud Assist - How to design infrastructure using natural language with Gemini Cloud Assist on Google Cloud.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Is your database holding you back? Boosting database efficiency and ROI with Cloud SQL - Hear from IDC about how Cloud SQL for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server workloads can boost database performance and cut costs.

Debugging and Preventing Out-of-Memory (OOM) Issues on Google Compute Engine - The article discusses debugging and preventing out-of-memory (OOM) issues on Google Compute Engine. It covers identifying OOM kills using `dmesg`, common causes like memory leaks and unbounded caches, and tools for monitoring memory usage, such as `top` and `htop`.

Fresh from the GCP Dataverse [Jul 5th 25]: Shipping AI Is Now a Database Problem - The latest GCP database updates and what they mean for your production systems, dev workflows, and architecture.

How to Set Up a Static Backend IP for Cloud Run Revision using VPC Connector

Bi-Directional Replication between RDS and AlloyDB - This article covers technical, step-by-step configuration to enable bi-directional replication between two PostgreSQL databases. Migrating from AWS RDS to AlloyDB.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Why Are My BigQuery Storage Costs Over Budget? - Written By: Anbu Cheeralan.

Managing External Data in dbt: Seeds, External Tables and APIs - How to bring Google Sheets, external APIs, and GCS files into your dbt workflows with full traceability and automation.

BigQuery On Steroids: 21x Performance Boost With Vectorized Execution - Google Cloud's BigQuery advanced runtime, now in preview, enhances query performance through improved vectorization and encoding techniques. Benchmarks demonstrate significant speed improvements, up to 21x, by processing data in chunks and optimizing data storage.

BigQuery Advanced Runtime: Testing Performance - BigQuery's Advanced Runtime, enabled via an ALTER PROJECT command, boosts query performance by approximately 30% and reduces compute costs by 32% through enhanced vectorization. The new runtime requires no code changes and provides immediate improvements, making it beneficial for users seeking faster queries and reduced resource consumption, regardless of pricing model.

BigQuery vs Clickhouse — How we decided - Learn how Userbird evaluated BigQuery vs Clickhouse as our time series database.

Migrating Databricks to BigQuery: Delta Sharing & Spark Procedure - The article explores using Databricks Delta Sharing with BigQuery Spark Procedures for efficient data migration from Databricks to Google BigQuery.

Leverage BigQuery’s Analytical Prowess with the Gemini CLI and MCP Toolbox (Part 1) - Access Google Cloud’s largest data analytic service directly from your terminal!

Gen AI Evaluation Service — Computation-Based Metrics - The article discusses computation-based metrics within Google Cloud's Gen AI Evaluation Service, highlighting their deterministic nature and reliance on ground truth for comparison.

Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 2 : Gemini CLI Command line parameters - The article is a tutorial on using Gemini CLI command-line parameters, covering options like specifying models, debugging, checkpointing, and telemetry.

Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 3 : Configuration settings via settings.json and .env files - Welcome to Part 3 of the Gemini CLI Tutorial series.

Web Scraping made simple with URL Context - The article discusses Google Cloud's new URL Context tool in Gemini (now available in Vertex), which simplifies building AI applications by allowing users to scrape webpages and generate responses by simply providing a URL.

How to Fix “Gemini Cannot Be Accessed Through Vertex Predict API” Error When Using Finetuned Models - The Complete Guide to Integrating Finetuned Gemini Models with Vertex AI in Python.

How to build a simple multi-agentic system using Google’s ADK - Learn how to build a simple multi-agentic system in just a few steps using Google’s ADK – Agent Development Kit.

A guide to converting ADK agents with MCP to the A2A framework - Transform standalone Google ADK agents into collaborative A2A components. This guide shows how to unlock multi-agent potential and interoperability.

How to build Web3 AI agents with Google Cloud - Google Cloud provides a flexible, end-to-end suite of tools for building Web3 AI Agents, allowing you to start simple and scale to highly complex, customized solutions.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #232 The Human Element of Privacy: Protecting High-Risk Targets and Designing Systems.

GCP Bytes Podcast - #20 In this episode we discuss; Untangle Firewall, Pi-Hole, UWS Cyber attacks, GDG, New Google CFO, Google gaining ground, Global Cloud Spending, VMWARE Price Hikes, Pixel banned in Japan, Open Cloud Buckets, AI in sheets, Gemini CLI, MS Struggling to sell co-pilot.

Releases

Apigee Advanced API Security - On July 1, 2025 we released a new version of Advanced API Security Abuse Detection. Support for AppGroups in Abuse Detection attributes Abuse Detection incidents and detected traffic now show information on AppGroups and AppGroup apps when the AppGroup is part of the request or traffic.

AppEngine Standard JAVA Second Generation - For new deployments, the URL Fetch API validates the certificate of the host it contacts by default.

AppEngine Standard Python3 - For new deployments, the URL Fetch API validates the certificate of the host it contacts by default.

Cloud Architecture Center - (New guide) GraphRAG infrastructure for generative AI using Vertex AI and Spanner Graph: Shows how to design infrastructure for GraphRAG-capable generative AI applications in Google Cloud by using Vertex AI and Spanner Graph.

BigQuery - You can now update a Cloud KMS encryption key by updating the table with the same key. You can use the @@location system variable to set the location in which to run a query. BigQuery now supports the following Apache Hadoop migration features in Preview: Use the dwh-migration-dumper tool to migrate the metadata necessary for a Hadoop permissions and data migration. You can now create and manage scheduled notebooks using the Schedule details pane in BigQuery Studio.

Chronicle - Google SecOps has updated the list of supported default parsers. Data tables are multicolumn constructs that let you input your own data into Google SecOps.

Chronicle Security Operations - Share Case Queue Filters You can now share case queue filters with other users. Google SecOps has updated the list of supported default parsers. Data tables are multicolumn constructs that let you input your own data into Google SecOps.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.3.52 is being rolled out to the first phase of regions as listed here. Share Case Queue Filters You can now share case queue filters with other users. Release 6.3.51 is now available for all regions.

Colab - Preview: You can consume reservations with Colab Enterprise runtimes.

Cloud Composer - Cloud Composer 1 and Cloud Composer 2 environments with version 2.0.x are approaching their end of life. A new Cloud Composer release has started on July 1, 2025. This release includes internal infrastructure improvements to Cloud Composer. New Airflow builds are available in Cloud Composer 3: composer-3-airflow-2.10.5-build.8 (default) composer-3-airflow-2.9.3-build.28. New images are available in Cloud Composer 2: composer-2.13.6-airflow-2.10.5 (default) composer-2.13.6-airflow-2.9.3.

Compute Engine - Preview: You can reserve GPU VMs that use A4 and A3 Ultra machine types by using future reservations in calendar mode. Generally available: You can create Z3 VMs using smaller machine types, ranging in size from 14 to 88 vCPUs. Preview: The general purpose C4 machine series now supports the following machine types on Intel's Xeon 6 processor (Granite Rapids): C4 VMs with Titanium Local SSD attached using two new machine types: c4-standard-*-lssd c4-highmem-*-lssd Three new bare metal machine types: c4-standard-288-metal c4-highcpu-288-metal c4-highmem-288-metal C4 standard, highmem, and highcpu VMs with 144 and 288 vCPUs To learn more, see the C4 machine series. Generally available: You can now modify licenses attached to your disks.

Contact Center AI Platform - Version 3.36 is released All release notes published on this date are part of version 3.36. Configure storage of Screen Share recordings You can now configure how long to store Screen Share recordings in your external storage settings. Restrict auto-assignment for email queues You can now configure email queues so that incoming emails are auto-assigned only during queue operating hours or to agents who are signed in. Salesforce: New closed record options for scheduled calls If you've integrated Google Cloud CCaaS with the Salesforce CRM, you can configure how your instance handles scheduled calls for closed records. The following issues were addressed in this release: Fixed an issue where calls weren't being assigned to the correct agent in Google Cloud CCaaS reporting.

Database Migration Service - Database Migration Service support for heterogeneous SQL Server to PostgreSQL migrations is now generally available (GA).

Dataproc Serverless - New Dataproc Serverless for Spark runtime versions: 1.1.110 1.2.54 2.2.54 2.3.5.

Datastream - Datastream is now available in the northamerica-south1 (Mexico) region.

Cloud Networking Products - Using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) forwarding target is available for outbound DNS forwarding in GA.

Document AI - Custom Extractor model pretrained-foundation-model-v1.5-2025-05-05 is in General Availability (GA) and has fine-tuning available for the US and EU.

Integration Connectors - The customer-managed encryption keys (CMEKs) feature is now generally available (GA).

KMS - Cloud HSM for Google Workspace now lets you use Cloud HSM keys for client-side encryption (CSE) to protect sensitive workloads in Google Workspace.

Backup for GKE - Backup for GKE now supports backing up and restoring Hyperdisk ML and Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability volumes.

Migration Center - The Migration Center discovery client v5 and the Rapid Migration Assessment API were shut down on June 30, 2025, and are no longer available.

Policy Intelligence - Policy Simulator for Organization Policy is now generally available (GA).

Resource Manager - Policy Simulator for Organization Policy is now generally available (GA).

Cloud Run - You can apply maximum instance configuration at the service level (in Preview).

Security Command Center - Security Command Center now supports the detection of Chokepoints for the following cloud service provider platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Azure Support for Chokepoints with Microsoft Azure and AWS is in Preview. You can download risk reports as PDFs. The following Virtual Machine Threat Detection detectors are in General Availability. The Defense Evasion: Unexpected kernel code modification detector of Virtual Machine Threat Detection is shut down.

Service Extensions - Plugins for Cloud Load Balancing help you insert WebAssembly (Wasm) code in a fully managed serverless environment directly into the data path of most Cloud Load Balancing Application Load Balancers.

SAP Solutions - ABAP SDK for Google Cloud version 1.11 (On-premises or any cloud edition) Version 1.11 of the on-premises or any cloud edition of the ABAP SDK for Google Cloud is generally available (GA).

Cloud Spanner - Spanner supports the following new client-side metrics to the Spanner API frontend (AFE) and Google frontend (GFE) for Java and Go applications: AFE connectivity error count AFE latencies GFE connectivity error count GFE latencies These metrics can be used with server-side metrics to enable faster troubleshooting of performance and latency issues. To troubleshoot or understand your Spanner queries better, you can download and save your query execution plan as a JSON file.

Cloud SQL MySQL - The write endpoint feature for Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition instances is now generally available (GA).

Cloud SQL Postgres - The write endpoint feature for Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition instances is now generally available (GA).

Cloud Storage - Bucket IP filtering for Cloud Storage is now generally available (GA).

Vertex AI - The global endpoint is generally available (GA) for Anthropic's Claude Opus 4. Mistral Nemo, which is offered as a Model as a Service (MaaS) model in Model Garden, is deprecated. Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus, which is offered as a Model as a Service (MaaS) model in Model Garden, is deprecated. Vertex AI online inference now offers Preview support of PSC service automation that can automatically create PSC endpoints for dedicated private endpoints. Vertex AI now offers GA support of Private Service Connect Interface and includes Private DNS Peering.

VMware Engine - VMware Engine single-node private clouds, created after June 4th 2025, will no longer delete after 60 days.

VPC Service Controls - Preview stage support for the following integration: FleetPackage API.