Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

Expanding Z3 family with 9 new VMs and a bare metal instance for storage and I/O intensive workloads - With up to 36 TiB local SSD, and 72 TiB for bare metal, Z3 VMs run I/O-intensive workloads that require large local storage capacity and high storage performance.

Accelerate your AI workloads with the Google Cloud Managed Lustre - Google Cloud Managed Lustre, now GA, offers four distinct performance tiers and is powered by DDN’s EXAScaler Lustre.

Beyond GROUP BY: Introducing advanced aggregation functions in BigQuery - BigQuery has three new categories of advanced aggregation functions: group by extensions, user-defined and approximate aggregate functions.

Zero-shot forecasting in BigQuery with the TimesFM foundation model - BigQuery ML TimesFM model is now in preview, and forecasts datasets through the use of generative AI.

Enhancing GKE data protection with cross-project backup and restore - Strengthen disaster recovery, centralize backup management, and improve security with Backup for GKE's cross-project backup and restore.

Cloud Storage bucket relocation: An industry first for non-disruptive bucket migrations - Cloud Storage bucket relocation makes it easy to change a bucket’s location, eliminates complex manual planning and prevents extended downtime.

Announcing Vertex AI Agent Engine Memory Bank available for everyone in preview - Announcing Vertex AI Memory Bank, a managed service empowering developers to build highly intelligent and personalized conversational agents.

Get better at getting better: Take the 2025 DORA survey - The 2025 DORA Survey is open until July 18, 2025.

From localhost to launch: Simplify AI app deployment with Cloud Run and Docker Compose - Cloud Run supports Docker Compose spec for multi-container and AI apps.

Strengthening network resilience with the Sol transatlantic cable - Alongside the Nuvem subsea cable, the new Sol cable brings added transatlantic resiliency, connecting in the U.S., Iberia, Bermuda and the Azores.

Google is a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery - Google was named a Leader in the Gartner 2025 Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Google Public Sector supports AI-optimized HPC infrastructure for researchers at Caltech - Google Public Sector supports Caltech with AI-optimized HPC infrastructure, empowering researchers with cutting-edge tools and resources for accelerated scientific discovery.

Isolated Recovery Environments: A Critical Layer in Modern Cyber Resilience - How isolated recovery environments differ from traditional disaster recovery strategies, and how to implement them.

Terraform Module Customisation with GCP Parameter Manager - The article explains how to use Google Cloud Parameter Manager to manage environment-specific Terraform variables, including secrets, for cleaner and more secure infrastructure deployments. By storing configurations in Parameter Manager, Terraform code becomes reusable across environments, with dynamic updates and granular access control.

The Hidden Gotchas of GKE Multi-cluster Mesh - This article discusses a common pitfall when setting up GKE Multi-cluster Mesh: the "single fleet per project" limitation. If a Google Cloud project already has GKE clusters registered to a fleet, all other clusters in that project must join the same fleet.

The Factory Must Grow… on a Budget! Factorio on GKE with Spot VMs and Auto-Shutdown - This article explains how to host a Factorio server on Google Kubernetes Engine using Spot VMs and auto-shutdown to minimize costs.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

How Jina AI built its 100-billion-token web grounding system with Cloud Run GPUs - Jina Reader’s ReaderLM-v2 is a purpose-built 1.5-billion-parameter AI model that intelligently extracts content to understand web structure beyond simple rules.

Formula E accelerates its work with Google Cloud Storage and Google Workspace - When it comes to innovating in motorsport, Formula E, with its focus on the future of mobility and sustainability, regularly takes the checkered flag with the help of Google Cloud.

Query your database using natural language using the MCP Toolbox from GCP - Getting started with Agents that interact with Google Cloud Databases using natural language.

Improve your coding flow with Gemini Code Assist, Gemini CLI and Gitlab - Getting the most out of the new Code Assist agent mode and Gemini CLI and integrate them with your Gitlab environment.

Getting Started with Apigee: API Management Made Simple with a Cloud Run Example

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Firestore Migrations - Firestore is a powerful real-time NoSQL database — but migrating its data between Google Cloud projects can be surprisingly frustrating.

Simplify your Open Telemetry tracing in Google Cloud - Review 2 simple steps to convert your OTel implementation to use native OTLP endpoint of Google Cloud.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

SQL reimagined: How pipe syntax is powering real-world use cases - Learn how organizations are using pipe syntax, an extension to GoogleSQL, to streamline data transformations, build reports, and analyze logs.

From news to insights: Glance leverages Google Cloud to build a Gemini-powered Content Knowledge Graph (CKG) - Glance and Google Cloud build a Gemini-powered Knowledge Graph to enhance content discovery, improve engagement, and uncover real-time trends.

This migration from Snowflake to BigQuery accelerated model building and cut costs in half - SmarterX’s migration also helped unify its tech stack and accelerated model building.

How to tap into natural language AI services using the Conversational Analytics API - Learn how to create custom data agents, map business terms, and define calculations using Conversational Analytics API.

Chat with confidence: Unpacking security in Looker Conversational Analytics - Your data remains under your control when using Looker Conversational Analytics, letting you use Gemini generative AI to better understand your data.

Submitting a PySpark Job to Serverless Dataproc from a Cloud Run Function - The article discusses how to submit PySpark jobs to Serverless Dataproc from a Python-based Cloud Run function for scalable batch processing on Google Cloud.

BigQuery meets ADK: 10 tips to safeguard your data (and wallet) from agents - The article provides ten tips for safeguarding data and managing costs when using agents with BigQuery and ADK, including explicit system instructions, callbacks, SQL parameterization etc.

Implementing Custom AI Investigators in Vertex AI for Google SecOps - This article details how to leverage Gemini AI models within Google Cloud's Vertex AI and SecOps platform to automate alert triage.

Unlock the Power of MCP Toolbox in Your Go Applications - A new Go SDK to seamlessly integrate database backed tools into your GenAI applications.

Effortless ADK Deployments : A First Look at Agent Engine (Part 1/3) - The article explores deploying AI agents to Google Cloud's Agent Engine using the Agent Development Kit (ADK), highlighting the benefits of a managed platform.

Gen AI Evaluation Service — Model-Based Metrics - The article discusses model-based metrics within Vertex AI's Gen AI Evaluation Service, highlighting the use of LLMs as judges for evaluating model outputs. It covers built-in metrics for translation, fluency, safety, and more, as well as custom metrics, including RAG triad implementation.

Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 4 : Built-in Tools - Welcome to Part 4 of the Gemini CLI Tutorial series.

Power your MCP servers with Google Cloud Run - What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Various

Manipal Hospitals and Google Cloud partner to transform nurse handoffs with GenAI - Manipal Hospitals uses Gemini and GenAI to reduce time and errors in the nurse handoff process.

London Summit: agentic AI leaders, training 100,000 civil servants, AI sovereignty, and more - AI is poised to inject more than £400 billion into the UK economy by 2030. This year’s summit reaffirms Google’s long-term commitment to helping the UK realise its potential.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #255 HPC Workload Scheduling, with Ricardo Rocha.

Security Podcast - #233 Product Security Engineering at Google: Resilience and Security.

Releases

Agent Assist - Google Cloud provides quotas for using Agent Assist APIs.

Apigee Hybrid - On July 9, 2025 we released an updated version of the Apigee hybrid software, 1.13.4. Bug ID Description 420675540 Fixed Cassandra based replication for runtime contracts in synchronizer. Bug ID Description 396944778 Security fixes for apigee-synchronizer.

App Hub - Dataproc Metastore services are now generally available (GA).

Google Cloud Armor - Cloud Armor preconfigured WAF rules can now inspect up to the first 64kB (either 8kB, 16kB, 32kB, 48kB, or 64kB) of the POST or PATCH request body content in Preview.

BigQuery - Starting August 1, 2025, GoogleSQL will become the default dialect for queries run from the command line interface (CLI) or API. You can now use your Google Account user credentials to authorize the execution of a data preparation in development.

Bigable - When you undelete a table, Bigtable automatically enables deletion protection for that table.

Chronicle - Dashboards for enhanced visualizations and threat hunting You can now use the Google SecOps Dashboards to enhance data visualization, investigations, and threat hunting.

Chronicle Security Operations - Dashboards for enhanced visualizations and threat hunting You can now use the Google SecOps Dashboards to enhance data visualization, investigations, and threat hunting.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.3.53 is being rolled out to the first phase of regions as listed here. Release 6.3.52 is now available for all regions.

Contact Center AI Platform - Portal version 3.37 pre-release notes Here are the pre-release notes for portal version 3.37. Restrict email transfers You can now configure your instance to prevent users with the agent role from transferring email sessions to other agents. Skip the connecting message playback You can now configure your instance to skip playback of the connecting message when calls are connected to agents. Workforce Management terminology update We've updated the terminology in the Workforce Management interface to align with Google Cloud CCaaS terminology. Web SDK version 3.37 Starting with version 3.37, web SDK releases align with portal releases and share the same version number. The following issues were addressed in this release: Fixed an issue where a blank error message box appeared in the agent adapter when a call connected. Mobile SDK 2.13 is released Mobile SDK 2.13 includes the following updates: End-users can download chat transcripts to their devices during a session or after a session ends. The following issues were addressed in this release: Android SDK: Fixed an issue where system messages containing an empty space were being sent, even though the message strings were set to NULL. Session metadata in Conversational Insights conversations is GA The Google Cloud CCaaS capability of including session metadata when creating conversations in Conversational Insights is now generally available (GA).

Dataproc Serverless - The Cluster Scheduled Stop feature is available in preview.

Dataproc - The Cluster Scheduled Stop feature is available in preview.

Anti Money Laundering AI - A new major engine version is now available for Retail and Commercial lines of business, within the v4 tuning version.

Infrastructure Manager - You can use preview deployments to view resource drift using Infrastructure Manager. Infrastructure Manager is available in the following regions: africa-south1 europe-north2 europe-southwest1 europe-west8 europe-west9 europe-west10 europe-west12 me-central1 me-west1 northamerica-south1 us-east5 us-south1 For more information about regions, see Infrastructure Manager locations.

Cloud Life Sciences - As of July 8, 2025, Cloud Life Sciences is beginning to shut down.

Load Balancing - Application Load Balancers and Proxy Network Load Balancers now support TLS certificates with large key sizes. Zonal affinity, configured on the backend service of an internal passthrough Network Load Balancer, lets you limit cross-zone traffic, reduce latency, and improve performance, all while maintaining the benefits of a multi-zonal architecture.

Memorystore for Redis Cluster - You can now use the Google Cloud console to work with cross-region replication.

Secret Manager - Enhanced tagging capabilities for Secret Manager: You can now add tags directly at the time of secret creation.

Secure Source Manager - Secure Source Manager is now available in the following regions: australia-southeast1 (Sydney) asia-northeast1 (Tokyo).

Security Command Center - Notebook Security Scanner is a built-in package vulnerability detection service of Security Command Center. In the Google Cloud console, the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) security posture dashboard shows the top software vulnerabilities that affect your GKE workloads.

Service Mesh - 1.25.x. 1.25.3-asm.8 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh. 1.24.x. 1.24.6-asm.4 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh. 1.23.x. 1.23.6-asm.11 is now available for in-cluster Cloud Service Mesh.

SAP Solutions - BigQuery Connector for SAP version 2.9 Version 2.9 of the BigQuery Connector for SAP is generally available (GA).

Cloud SQL SQL Server - Cloud SQL for SQL Server now offers Active Directory support for write endpoints.

Cloud Storage - You can now create caches with Anywhere Cache in the us-west3-a, us-west3-b, and us-west3-c zones.

Vertex AI - To reduce the cost of running your inference jobs, you can now use flex-start VMs, which are powered by Dynamic Workload Scheduler.

Vertex AI Workbench - he M131 release of Vertex AI Workbench instances includes the following: Updated the Dataproc JupyterLab plugin to version 0.1.89.

VMware Engine - When upgrading to Windows Server 2022 or newer images on your GCVE private clouds, you can use a combination of Windows Server BYOL for Windows Server 2019 and earlier images and on-demand licensing for Google-provided Windows Server 2022.

Virtual Private Cloud - Dynamic Private Service Connect interfaces are available in Preview. VPC Network Peering supports peering connections in consensus mode. The following features of policy-based routes are available in General Availability: Applying policy-based routes to IPv6 traffic Using a next hop that is in a peered VPC network For more information, see Create policy-based routes.

Workstation - Cloud Workstations is available in the europe-central2 region (Warsaw).