Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

AlloyDB on Axion-powered C4A instances is generally available - Compared to N series instances, the Arm-based C4A provides nearly 50% better price-performance for AlloyDB transactional workloads.

OpenTelemetry Protocol comes to Google Cloud Observability - Google Cloud Observability’s Cloud Trace now supports users sending trace data using OpenTelemetry (OTLP) via telemetry.googleapis.com.

Now available: Rust SDK for Google Cloud - Announcing the of the official Rust SDK for Google Cloud. Develop high-performance, secure, and reliable applications with idiomatic Rust, accessing over 140 Google Cloud APIs.

Accelerate data science with new Dataproc multi-tenant clusters - New Dataproc multi-tenant clusters allow multiple data scientists to run their notebook workloads at the same time.

Automate app deployment and security analysis with new Gemini CLI extensions - Introducing new Gemini CLI extensions to automate security analysis and cloud deployment.

Scaling high-performance inference cost-effectively - GKE Inference Gateway, now GA, provides faster, more efficient inference serving, while GKE Inference Quickstart helps select the best infrastructure.

Deliver intuitive shopping experiences with Conversational Commerce agent - Conversational Commerce agent turns e-commerce challenges into opportunities through a more intuitive shopping experience. Get started today on Vertex AI.

Introducing the Agentic SOC Workshops for security professionals - As we build our agentic vision, we’re also excited to invite you to the first Agentic SOC Workshop, a free, half-day event series.

Our approach to carbon-aware data centers: Central data center fleet management - Learn about Google’s “central fleet” program, which has helped us shift our internal resource management system from a machine economy to a more sustainable resource and performance economy.

Introducing no-cost, multicloud Data Transfer Essentials for EU and U.K. customers - At Google Cloud, interoperability and openness are key to enable customer choice and multicloud strategies, so today we’re launching Data Transfer Essentials.

Prove your expertise with our Professional Security Operations Engineer certification - Our new Professional Security Operations Engineer certification can help train specialists to detect and respond to new and emerging threats.

Registration now open: Our no-cost, generative AI training and certification program for veterans - Registration is now open for Google’s no-cost, generative AI training and certification program for veterans. Sign up today.

Announcing partner-built AI security innovations on Google Cloud - Google Cloud drives secure AI innovations and works with partners to meet the evolving needs of customers. Check out these new partner security solutions.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Building scalable, resilient enterprise networks with Network Connectivity Center - Get scalable, resilient enterprise networks with Network Connectivity Center, which simplifies connectivity and reduces operational overhead.

Fast and efficient AI inference with new NVIDIA Dynamo recipe on AI Hypercomputer - A recipe for disaggregated inferencing with NVIDIA Dynamo on AI Hypercomputer provides better performance and cost while meeting latency needs.

IP Address Planning for Large-Scale GKE Deployments - The article emphasizes the importance of properly sizing and allocating subnets for nodes, Pods, and Services to avoid IP exhaustion and ensure long-term success, especially in large-scale and multi-cluster deployments.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

How Rent the Runway supercharges developer speed and insights with Cloud SQL - To address its complex e-commerce and reverse logistics model, RtR is investing heavily in building modern, data-driven services that support every customer touchpoint.

Modeling Data in Bigtable: Practical Lessons from Production - Bigtable's performance hinges on schema design and predictable traffic. The article emphasizes understanding access patterns first, designing row keys carefully to avoid hotspots, and maintaining steady traffic to keep tablets warm for optimal performance. It also shares practical examples of schema design mistakes and fixes encountered in production.

Optimizing Dataflow with Bigtable: Cost and Performance Savings - A real-world case study on how a simple change in data storage format led to a 25% cost reduction and a 50% latency improvement.

How We Cut 2 Million Logs/Day and Saved $1,000/Month in GCP Cloud Logging - This article describes reducing costs for Cloud logging.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Three-part framework to measure the impact of your AI use case - Learn about this three-part framework to help you measure the impact and calculate the value of your AI use case.

BigQuery under the hood: The power of the Column Metadata index aka CMETA - BigQuery’s Column Metadata (CMETA) index delivers superior scalability and performance, with no maintenance overhead, and may reduce slot usage.

BigQuery Keyboard Shortcuts I Can’t Live Without - Save time, stay in flow, and make the BigQuery console work for you.

Achieve High-Performance Data Ingestion with the Storage Write API - The article discusses the BigQuery Storage Write API, introduced in 2022 as a replacement for the insertAll API, which enables efficient data streaming into BigQuery.

Dataplex Catalog Export to BigQuery - Dataplex has introduced a feature to export catalog data to Google Cloud Storage, enabling snapshotting and analysis with BigQuery.

Hi Gemini, Secure the Room - Building a Real-Time AI-Powered Security System with Google’s Live Stream API and Gemini Live 2.0.

Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 11: Gemini CLI Extensions - Welcome to Part 10 of the Gemini CLI Tutorial series.

Create Custom MCP Servers in Minutes with MCP Toolbox - Recreating the OpenNutrition MCP Server with MCP Toolbox.

How to add modules and PIP libraries to Dataproc PySpark Serverless jobs - In this post I explain how to add pip libraries and python modules into Dataproc Spark Serverless jobs.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #242 The AI SOC: Is This The Automation We've Been Waiting For?

GCP Bytes Podcast - In this episode we discuss; Google inactive account manager, GeeekPi Rack, Passkeys, uBlock Origin, Mark Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg, NBN Upgrades, Ians Wifi, GDG Cloud, Google Cuts 35 Percent Of Managers, Tesco Sues Bradcomm, VMWARE License Changes, Intel & Trump, TSMC & China, Chrome and Android to stay with Google, Gift Card Pins Hacked, Huge ddos, IPv6, Android Sideloading, AI to predict future, AI on premises.

Releases

BigQuery - Use the BigQuery migration assessment for Informatica to assess the complexity of migrating data from your Informatica platform to BigQuery. Gemini now recommends natural language prompts for you in the SQL generation tool. When you use the Data Science Agent in BigQuery, you can now use the Apache Spark or PySpark keywords in your prompt. You can load files from Cloud Storage in BigQuery data preparations. The batch and interactive translators now caches your metadata, which can improve latency when you run a SQL translation. You can now perform supervised tuning on a BigQuery ML remote model based on a Vertex AI gemini-2.5-pro or gemini-2.5-flash-lite model. You can configure reusable, default Cloud resource connections in a project. You can now add tables and views as tasks to BigQuery pipelines. When you use the Data Science Agent in BigQuery, you can now use the @ symbol to search for BigQuery tables in your project, and you can use the + symbol to search for files to upload. You can now include table parameters when you create a table-valued function (TVF).

Carbon Footprint - We have corrected an issue affecting the market-based Scope 2 emissions for the europe-west2 (London) region in the July 2025 Carbon Footprint data.

Chronicle - New parser documentation now available New parser documentation is available to help you ingest and normalize logs from the following sources: Collect Akamai Cloud Monitor logs Collect Akamai DataStream 2 logs Collect Aware audit logs Collect AWS API Gateway access logs Collect AWS VPC Transit Gateway flow logs Collect Bitwarden Enterprise event logs Collect Box Collaboration JSON logs Collect Censys logs Collect Code42 Incydr core datasets Collect CSV Custom IOC files Collect Deep Instinct EDR logs Collect DigiCert audit logs Collect DomainTools Iris Investigate results Collect Duo administrator logs Collect Duo authentication logs Collect Duo entity context logs Collect Google Cloud Abuse Events logs Collect Harness IO audit logs Collect HPE Aruba Networking Central logs Collect Jamf Pro context logs Collect PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud logs Collect Slack audit logs Collect Snyk group-level audit logs Collect Snyk group-level audit and issues logs Collect Venafi Zero Touch PKI logs Collect Veritas NetBackup logs Collect VMware AirWatch logs Collect VMware Avi Load Balancer WAF logs Collect VMware Horizon logs Collect VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN logs Collect Zoom operation logs.

Chronicle Security Operations - SecOps Labs This feature is in preview. View data retention start date You can now view the start date for your account's data retention period. New parser documentation now available New parser documentation is available to help you ingest and normalize logs from the following sources: Collect Akamai Cloud Monitor logs Collect Akamai DataStream 2 logs Collect Aware audit logs Collect AWS API Gateway access logs Collect AWS VPC Transit Gateway flow logs Collect Bitwarden Enterprise event logs Collect Box Collaboration JSON logs Collect Censys logs Collect Code42 Incydr core datasets Collect CSV Custom IOC files Collect Deep Instinct EDR logs Collect DigiCert audit logs Collect DomainTools Iris Investigate results Collect Duo administrator logs Collect Duo authentication logs Collect Duo entity context logs Collect Google Cloud Abuse Events logs Collect Harness IO audit logs Collect HPE Aruba Networking Central logs Collect Jamf Pro context logs Collect PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud logs Collect Slack audit logs Collect Snyk group-level audit logs Collect Snyk group-level audit and issues logs Collect Venafi Zero Touch PKI logs Collect Veritas NetBackup logs Collect VMware AirWatch logs Collect VMware Avi Load Balancer WAF logs Collect VMware Horizon logs Collect VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN logs Collect Zoom operation logs.

Compute Engine - Preview: H4D VMs, designed for high performance computing (HPC) workloads, are now in preview. Generally available: The accelerator-optimized A4X machine type, the first GPU VM to run on Arm, is available on Compute Engine. Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability disks are available in all regions. Preview: Eight new organization policy constraints are available to help you enforce security best practices for Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances.

Dataflow - Dataflow now supports using secure tags to set firewall rules on worker VMs.

Dataform - You can now update an incremental table schema without a full table refresh.

Dataproc Serverless - New Dataproc Serverless for Spark runtime versions: 1.2.61 2.2.61 2.3.12. Announcing the Preview release of Serverless for Apache Spark 3.0 runtime: Spark 4.0.0 BigQuery Spark Connector 0.42.3 Cloud Storage Connector 3.1.5 Conda 25.3.0 Java 21 Python 3.12 R 4.4 Scala 2.13.

Dataproc - Announcing the Preview release of Dataproc on Compute Engine image version 3.0: Spark 4.0.0 Hadoop 3.4.1 Hive 4.1.0 Tez 0.10.5 Cloud Storage Connector 3.1.4 Conda 24.11 Java 17 Python 3.11 R 4.3 Scala 2.13. New Dataproc on Compute Engine subminor image versions: 2.3.11-debian12, 2.3.11-ubuntu22, 2.3.11-ubuntu22-arm, 2.3.11-ml-ubuntu22, 2.3.11-rocky9.

Document AI - Custom Extractor version pretrained-foundation-model-v1.4-2025-02-05 will no longer be accessible on February 5, 2026. Document AI supports two service tiers and associated quotas: provisioned and best effort tiers.

Gemini - Introducing Release Channels in Gemini Code Assist We're rolling out Release Channels in Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise to give you more control over the features and models you access, helping us deliver new capabilities faster. VS Code Gemini Code Assist 2.49.0. Performance and stability improvements for VS Code Numerous performance and stability improvements have been made to the Gemini Code Assist extension, further reducing extension crashes and related adverse functional events. Edit a prior prompt in VS Code You can edit a prior prompt in Gemini Code Assist and receive a regenerated response based on your edited prompt. Regenerate a prompt response in VS Code You can regenerate a prompt response to your most recent prompt, where Gemini Code Assist re-evaluates your prompt and provides a new response. Delete prompt and response pair in VS Code You can delete your prompt and Gemini's response to that prompt in your chat with Gemini Code Assist. VS Code Gemini Code Assist 2.48.0. Deploy apps to Cloud Run in Gemini Code Assist agent mode (Preview) Leverage the power of Gemini CLI extensions in VS Code Gemini Code Assist agent mode with the /deploy custom slash command. IntelliJ Gemini Code Assist 1.29.0. Add terminal output to context in IntelliJ You can attach terminal output to the chat context with IntelliJ Gemini Code Assist. Regenerate a prompt response in IntelliJ You can regenerate a prompt response to your most recent prompt, where Gemini Code Assist re-evaluates your prompt and provides a new response.

IAM - IAM offers predefined roles that are tailored to specific job functions. Permission errors in the Google Cloud console contain actionable steps for remediation.

Integration Connectors - Salesforce connected app requires installation for OAuth 2.0 authentication To configure a Salesforce connector that uses OAuth 2.0 authentication, you must install the relevant connected app in your Salesforce account.

GKE new features - GKE now provisions fast-starting nodes, which have significantly lower startup time, in Autopilot mode for G2 nodes with NVIDIA L4 GPUs. The accelerator-optimized A4X VM, an exascale platform based on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, is now Generally Available on GKE. Starting with GKE version 1.33.4-gke.1036000, ComputeClass supports the following new sysctls configurations: kernel.shmmni kernel.shmmax kernel.shmall net.core.rmem_default net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_buckets net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_close_wait net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_time_wait net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_time_wait net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_acct vm.dirty_background_ratio vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs vm.overcommit_memory vm.overcommit_ratio vm.vfs_cache_pressure fs.aio-max-nr fs.file-max fs.inotify.max_user_instances fs.inotify.max_user_watches fs.nr_open For more information, see the ComputeClass CRD reference.

Load Balancing - The global and classic external Application Load Balancers implemented on Google Front-Ends (GFEs) now support HTTP/1.0 explicitly as a protocol during ALPN (Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation) negotiation.

Looker - Looker (Google Cloud core) and Looker (original) changes. Looker 25.16 is expected to include the following changes, features, and fixes: Expected Looker (original) deployment start: Monday, September 15, 2025 Expected Looker (original) final deployment and download available: Thursday, September 25, 2025 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) deployment start: Monday, September 15, 2025 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) final deployment: Monday, September 29, 2025. Looker no longer supports connections to Firebolt. Suggest queries now respect the concurrency limit in the connection configuration. The Spanner JDBC Driver has been updated to version 2.32.1. The Looker-Excel Connector is now generally available. Looker 25.16 contains the following accessibility improvements: Improved keyboard navigation for embed folders. When you upload a p12 file to a database connection, Looker now checks that it is a valid file before completing the upload. An issue has been fixed where adding multiple filters to the same field could cause filter conditions to overwrite each other. An issue has been fixed where changing the size of a visualization could cause the visualization to flicker. An issue has been fixed where users could enter color codes that were longer than six characters when they were updating custom color collections. An issue has been fixed where Explore drill links would not open correctly if cookieless embed was enabled. An issue has been fixed where generating a view inside a folder could fail if the folder's name contained special characters. An issue has been fixed where generating an embed URL from a LookML dashboard could fail with the following error: 'models' param cannot be converted to an array of String. An issue has been fixed where loading JavaScript files for custom visualizations could take more than one second. An issue has been fixed where non-admin users were unable to select a project when they added a connection. An issue has been fixed where scheduled deliveries could fail with the following error message: Async delivery failed due to errors Internal server error. An issue has been fixed where subtotal rows could fail to appear in downloaded result sets. An issue has been fixed where the OAuth client secret could not be updated in the Connections page. An issue has been fixed where total references and row total references in table calculations could return the following error if there was no data: Field either does not exist in the current query or is a measure. An issue has been fixed where updating a Spanner connection could fail to save changes. An issue has been fixed where users with only the embed_browse_spaces permission could be incorrectly classified as Standard users instead of Viewer users. An issue has been fixed where using the matches_filter function in custom filters could return an error. An issue has been fixed where visualizations could render twice when they were first loaded on an Explore or a dashboard. The Athena JDBC driver version has been downgraded from 2.2.1 to 2.1.5 to fix an issue with result set streaming. Dashboards that are not configured to run on load no longer show past query results when you revisit the dashboard in the same browser session. An issue has been fixed where the Collapse subtotal toggle on table visualizations was unresponsive. An issue has been fixed where updating a customer-hosted instance could fail with the following error message: Data import is in progress and some features will not be available. An issue has been fixed where SQL Runner could fail to return new results after running a second query. Looker (original) only changes. A new Labs feature, Favoriting LookML Dashboards, enables LookML dashboards to be marked as favorites causing the LookML dashboards to appear on the Looker Favorites tab. The Full Screen Visualizations Labs feature is now generally available. An issue has been fixed where updating the Host URL in the Admin - Settings page could fail to be saved. An issue has been fixed where visualization templates could be edited by API users without the need for the explore permission. Looker (Google Cloud core) only changes. Looker (Google Cloud core) 90-day trial instances are now available. The Full Screen Visualizations feature is now generally available.

Migration Center - Generally available: Migration Center now includes AI-powered suggestions for software detection.

Resource Manager - You can use custom constraints with Organization Policy to provide more granular control over specific fields for some Live Stream API resources. Designate project environments with tags: You can now use tags to visually distinguish projects based on their environment—such as production, staging, or development—directly within the Google Cloud console. Preview: Eight new organization policy constraints are available to help you enforce security best practices for Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances. You can use custom constraints with Organization Policy to provide more granular control over specific fields for some Cloud Deploy resources.

Cloud Run - You can deploy and configure a multi-region service from a single gcloud CLI command or by using a YAML or Terraform file (GA). Cloud Run Threat Detection is available in General Availability.

Secure Source Manager - Secure Source Manager is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and is also FedRAMP High compliant.

Security Command Center - Security Command Center has improved the automatic selection of resources when running attack path simulations using the default high-value resource set. Security Command Center changed how Google Cloud subnets are handled when running attack path simulations. Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS) now supports Go packages. Cloud Run Threat Detection is available in General Availability. The Model Armor monitoring dashboard provides a centralized view to track interactions and violations within your projects. Multiple pages in Security Command Center Premium have been improved: The Risk overview page is enhanced to provide a view of threats, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations.

Cloud SQL MySQL - Cloud SQL read pools are now generally available and provide operational simplicity and scaling for your read workloads. You can have Cloud SQL create a Private Service Connect endpoint automatically.

Cloud SQL Postgres - If a specific active query is blocked or running much longer than expected, it can block other dependent queries. The rollout of the following extension versions is complete: Extensions and plugins pg_ivm is upgraded from 1.9 to 1.11. Cloud SQL read pools are now generally available and provide operational simplicity and scaling for your read workloads. You can have Cloud SQL create a Private Service Connect endpoint automatically.

Cloud SQL SQL Server - You can have Cloud SQL create a Private Service Connect endpoint automatically.

Vertex AI - Vertex AI Agent Engine Agent Engine now supports the following features: Agent Engine Code Execution, now in Preview, lets your agent run code in an isolated sandbox environment. Vertex AI Agent Engine In version v1.112.0 of the Vertex AI SDK for Python, the agent_engines module has been refactored to a client-based design. EmbeddingGemma and DeepSeek-V3.1 models are available through Model Garden. AI Singapore's SEA-LION V4 models are available through Model Garden.

VMware Engine - You can now use Privileged Access Manager (PAM) to accelerate the deletion of "soft deleted" private clouds.

Agent Assist - Agent assist offers Summarization automatic evaluation.

AlloyDB - AlloyDB supports C4A Arm VMs on Google's custom-built Axion processors.

Apigee API Hub - API hub navigation update The API hub section is now moved to the top level of the Apigee left navigation menu. Updated Go client library. Enable and disable semantic search You can now enable and disable semantic search from the API hub > Settings> Actions page in the Google Cloud console. Automatic discovery of OpenAPI Spec from Apigee proxy resources API hub now automatically discovers and ingests valid OpenAPI specifications when they are included in an Apigee API proxy resource. Deprecation of Vertex AI Extensions in API hub The Vertex AI Extensions feature is no longer supported in API hub as of September 8, 2025.

Apigee Integrated Portal - On September 8, 2025 we released a new version of the Apigee integrated portal. Workforce Identity Federation users can now manage Integrated Portals using the Apigee Cloud console.

Application Integration - Connected app requires installation for OAuth 2.0 authentication in Salesforce trigger To configure a Salesforce trigger that uses OAuth 2.0 authentication, you must install the relevant connected app in your Salesforce account.

Cloud Architecture Center - RAG infrastructure for generative AI using Google Agentspace and Vertex AI: Design infrastructure for a generative AI application with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) using Google Agentspace and Vertex AI.

Assured OSS - Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS) now supports Go packages.