Google Cloud Platform Newsletter

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News

260 things we announced at Google Cloud Next '26 – a recap - A whirlwind recap of Google Cloud Next 26, including a synopsis of over 250 product, customer and ecosystem announcements.

Day 1 at Google Cloud Next ‘26 recap - A concise look at the news, keynotes, sessions and big moments from the first day of Google Cloud Next ‘26.

Day 2 at Google Cloud Next: A marathon developer keynote - At Google Cloud Next ‘26, the developer keynote demoed Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform with agents to plan a marathon through Las Vegas.

Enabling the agentic enterprise: business and industry agents arrive in Gemini Enterprise - Today, we’re bringing partner-built agents from Agent Marketplace directly into the Agent Gallery inside the Gemini Enterprise app. Discover specialized AI from partners like Adobe, Atlassian, and more.

Announcing Spanner Omni: Your infrastructure, Google’s innovation - Downloadable edition of Google Spanner that allows organizations to run apps in their own data centers, across clouds or even at the edge.

Introducing the Google Cloud Knowledge Catalog - Introducing the Knowledge Catalog: The evolution of Dataplex into a dynamic context engine for the enterprise. Unify metadata, enrich data with Gemini, and enable reliable AI agents with high-precision, secure retrieval.

Introducing Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA - Today at Next ‘26, we’re launching Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the trust platform for the agentic web and the next evolution of reCAPTCHA.

Introducing Virgo Network, Google’s scale-out AI data center fabric - Google designed Virgo Network, a new megascale data center fabric that underpins AI Hypercomputer to fuel the next decade of machine learning.

Introducing Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, powering the next wave of agents - Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform is our new platform to build, scale, govern, and optimize agents. It integrates the model selection, model building, and agent building capabilities of Vertex AI, with new features for agent integration, DevOps, and orchestration, and security.

Gemini Enterprise for the agentic task force: introducing long-running agents, agentic collaboration spaces, advanced governance, and more - Today, we are expanding Gemini Enterprise to transition AI from an isolated productivity tool into a secure, collaborative, autonomous engine for your business. Gemini Enterprise is the end-to-end system for the agentic era, including both the Gemini Enterprise app and our newly announced Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Welcome to Google Cloud Next ‘26 - This is an adapted transcript of Thomas’ keynote remarks for Next ‘26 where a number of new innovations were introduced.

Building the Agentic Enterprise with Google Cloud partners and a $750M innovation fund - Announcing for partners a $750 million innovation fund to build and deploy AI agents, early access to Google agents and models, and forward-deployed engineers, and more.

GEAR up to get the most out of AI learning at Google Cloud Next ‘26 - The new GEAR program, powered by Google Skills, equips every professional with the hands-on AI training needed to build and launch enterprise-ready agents at scale.

Introducing the Builders Hub from the Google Developer Program - Introducing Builders Hub from the Google Developer Program: a new centralized workbench for developers offering a unified project dashboard, personalized learning, and seamless execution. Eliminate friction, move faster, and build your legacy in AI and beyond.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Next-gen FinOps for the AI era - Announcing the next generation of Google Cloud FinOps. Get clear visibility into AI cost drivers with the Explainability Agent and absolute control with new project-level Spend Caps.

What’s next in Google AI infrastructure: Scaling for the agentic era - New AI infrastructure capabilities to help you to innovate faster, deliver better customer experiences, and optimize for cost efficiency.

Snow Flurries: How UNC6692 Employed Social Engineering to Deploy a Custom Malware Suite - UNC6692 uses social engineering via email spamming and Microsoft Teams phishing to deploy a modular malware suite.

What’s new with the Cross-Cloud Network at Next ‘26 - Innovations to Google Cloud's Cross-Cloud Network at Next ’26 to accelerate AI infrastructure, strengthen security, and simplify operations.

What’s new in GKE at Next ‘26 - New performance, efficiency, security, and scale enhancements for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to enable agentic and AI applications.

Next ‘26: Redefining security for the AI era with Google Cloud and Wiz - Today at Google Cloud Next, we’re showcasing how we can help you defend against threats at machine speed, protect AI and multicloud environments, and secure cloud workloads at scale.

Cross-cloud infrastructure innovation for the agentic enterprise - Next ‘26 cross-cloud infrastructure enhancements in four areas: fluid compute, connectivity, a unified data layer, and digital sovereignty.

New innovations in Google Distributed Cloud - At Google Cloud Next ‘26, we announced innovations to Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) to bring Google's AI services wherever you need them.

Inside the eighth-generation TPU: An architecture deep dive - The 8th generation TPUs are engineered with system-level co-design to accelerate the AI lifecycle. TPU 8t is built for frontier-model training and TPU 8i is built for large-scale inference and reinforcement learning.

Announcing new partner-supported workflows for Google Security Operations - Today at Google Cloud Next, we’re introducing new partners for Google Security Operations as part of the Google Cloud Security Integration Ecosystem program.

I Told gVisor I Was Root & It Believed Me - How I Got Root in Google’s Secure Container Runtime With One Syscall.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

What’s new with Databases: Powering the agentic future - Learn how we're building the Agentic Data Cloud with Google Cloud databases. Unlock the full potential of your data for every AI application and agent.

What’s new with compute: Scaling core and agentic workloads - Learn how to scale web servers, databases, and enterprise applications to fuel your AI agents with the latest offers on Google Compute Engine.

Converging operational and analytical data for AI transformation - Break down walled gardens with integrations that eliminate the friction and complexity of manual integration, and enable AI transformation.

Gemini Cloud Assist: Proactive cloud operations that work for you, even before you ask - The redesigned Gemini Cloud Assist proactively executes tasks such as designing applications and optimizing costs that used to need human oversight.

Google Cloud and SAP unveil blueprint for the Agentic Enterprise - Announcing the Unified Data Foundation, with zero copy data sharing, enhancing SAP Engagement Cloud and SAP Sovereign, and more.

New ways to navigate the AI era with Google’s enterprise platforms and devices

Ship production AI features faster with Firebase AI Logic - At Cloud Next '26, Firebase AI Logic introduced significant updates to enhance security, prompt management, and cost optimization for client-first AI applications. Key new features include server prompt templates with function calling and multi-turn chat, replay attack protection for App Check, type-safe automatic function calling, explicit context caching, and hybrid on-device inference for Android.

Next '26 Hands-On: 10 Codelabs to Build Featured Tech - Translate Google Cloud Next '26 AI announcements into functional code with 10 hands-on codelabs. Build on the key announcements, talks, and demos for your own AI workflows.

What’s new in Cloud Run at Next ‘26 - Cloud Run updates at Next include integrations with Google AI Studio and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform plus support for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.

Storage innovations to accelerate your AI workloads at Next ‘26 - From high-performance infrastructure to AI-driven Smart Storage, explore new Cloud storage offerings from Next ‘26.

Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud: The foundation for the Agentic Enterprise - Announcing new regions, enhanced AI capabilities, and a range of integrations are just some new features for Oracle Database@Google Cloud at Next ‘26.

Cloud Spanner: Cutting storage costs by up to 50% through native schema design choices - How eliminating the text tax on binary data can reclaim up to half your storage budget.

My Favorite Firebase Abstractions - This article introduces a collection of open-source libraries designed to significantly improve the developer experience when working with Firebase and Google Cloud. These tools primarily focus on bringing strong type safety and reducing boilerplate across services like Firestore, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Tasks, making backend development more robust and efficient.

The Hidden Cost of GCP Cloud Logging — And the Open Source Stack We Replaced It With - How GCP Cloud Logging became our most expensive infrastructure decision — and the open-source rabbit hole that led us to a better way.

DMS MCP Tool Brings Database Migrations to Gemini - Medium encountered a "Service Unavailable" error, specifically a "Gateway time-out," indicating an issue with its web server. Users were advised to try again shortly, with the error originating near Prague and processed via Cloudflare.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

The future of data lakehouse: Open and interoperable for the agentic era - Transition to an AI-native, cross-cloud Lakehouse built for agentic AI. Deliver 117% ROI with managed Apache Iceberg, always-on context, and high-performance Spark.

What’s new in the Agentic Data Cloud: Powering the System of Action - Build your agentic enterprise on Google Cloud with a System of Action designed for scale, security, and cross-cloud interoperability.

What’s new in BigQuery: Powering the Agentic Era - BigQuery unveils new capabilities for lakehouse, knowledge graph, built-in AI, and agentic-first experiences.

Welcome to the agentic BI era with Looker - At Google Cloud Next, we shared how we are reimagining the Looker business intelligence (BI) stack for agentic AI.

Google Next 2026: What’s New for Looker, BigQuery, Data Platforms and Agentic Analytics - Google Next 2026 unveiled the "Agentic Data Cloud," shifting analytics towards proactive, AI-driven actions powered by an integrated stack of BigQuery, Knowledge Catalog, Gemini, and Looker.

Optimizing Dataproc Batch Jobs: How We Cut Cluster Runtime and Costs by Rethinking Container Sizing and Engine Selection - This article demonstrates how optimizing Google Cloud Dataproc batch jobs can significantly reduce runtime and costs. It details two case studies: one where container right-sizing for Hive workloads boosted concurrency, and another where moving a bottleneck task from Hive to Spark dramatically improved performance for skewed data.

I built Dataform Sentinel because the console wasn’t enough - Dataform Sentinel is a new tool developed to provide enhanced, real-time monitoring for Google Cloud Dataform pipelines, especially across multiple projects where the native console falls short.

Level Up Your Agents: Announcing Google's Official Skills Repository - Announcing Google's official Agent Skills repository, launched at Cloud Next 2026. Equip your AI agents with condensed, real-time expertise for Google Cloud products like BigQuery, GKE, and the Gemini API, avoiding context bloat.

The new Gemini Enterprise: one platform for agent development, orchestration, and governance - Gemini Enterprise is now the end-to-end system for the agentic era, built to help you delegate business outcomes to agents rather than micromanage tasks. It unifies the best AI models, an intuitive UI, and a secure development framework, providing agents the native system access needed to successfully deploy at global scale.

Small and midsize businesses jumpstart their AI transformations with Gemini Enterprise - The agentic era is allowing small and medium business embrace cloud and AI technologies like never before, building with Gemini models and the Gemini enterprise platform.

Agents CLI in Agent Platform: create to production in one CLI - Google Cloud has introduced the Agents CLI, a specialized tool designed to bridge the gap between local development and production-grade AI agent deployment. The CLI provides coding assistants with machine-readable access to the full Google Cloud stack, reducing context overload and token waste during the scaffolding process.

Production-Ready AI Agents: 5 Lessons from Refactoring a Monolith - The blog post outlines the transition of a brittle sales research prototype into a robust production agent using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK). By replacing monolithic scripts with orchestrated sub-agents and structured Pydantic outputs, the developers eliminated silent failures and fragile parsing.

Google’s Agents CLI: From Create to Production - Google's new Agents CLI streamlines the entire lifecycle of AI agent development on Google Cloud, providing a single tool for scaffolding, evaluation, infrastructure provisioning, and deployment.

Various

Startups are building the next big thing with Google Cloud AI - Google’s top AI models, purpose-built infrastructure, intelligent multi-model databases, and security and sovereignty solutions are core tools for leading startups.

Building the foundation for AI across the public sector through our partner ecosystem - Google Public Sector is helping our customers scale AI. See how our ecosystem with NVIDIA and Carahsoft are fast-tracking mission-critical results.

Announcing our 2026 Google Cloud Partners of the Year - The awards recognize partners who have displayed a commitment to excellence by leveraging Google Cloud technology to deliver innovative solutions that drive customer success.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Security Podcast - #273 From CISA to Cloud: AI Assurance, Concentration Risk, and the New Regulatory Frontier.

GCP Bytes Podcast - #39 In this episode we discuss; Youtube Music, Paperclip AI, Caveman, ML Engineer Path, Claude, Filestore, Firestore, Google NEXT, Judo Bank, South32, Intel & Google, Gemini Agent Platform, Google TPU’s, Cloud Run, Claude Mythos, Mythos and Banks, Anthropic & Broadcom, Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, AI Chat Law Ruling.

Releases

Cloud Spanner - You can now use Spanner Studio to visually create and manage a Spanner Graph schema. Visual modeling simplifies graph design by enabling you to map nodes and edges through an intuitive interface instead of creating manual DDL statements. This feature is available in Preview. You can use the Database Insights remote MCP server to analyze Spanner's performance and system metrics. This feature is generally available ( GA ). he Spanner remote MCP server lets you interact with Spanner instances from LLMs, AI applications, and AI-enabled development platforms. Spanner full-text search supports custom dictionaries to create custom synonym mappings. You can use custom dictionaries with the SEARCH, SCORE, and SNIPPET functions.

Billing - GKE workload recommenders now available in the FinOps hub You can now view recommendations for right-sizing overprovisioned workloads and optimizing underprovisioned workloads for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters directly in the FinOps hub. For more information, see Optimize workload resource utilization.

Cloud Firestore - Firestore Enterprise edition now supports the update(...) and delete() pipeline operation stages. Use these stages to Modify data with Pipeline operations. This feature is in Preview. You can now use pipeline operations to perform joins with subqueries. To learn more, see Perform joins with subqueries. Firestore Enterprise edition now supports Text search and Geospatial search. These features are in Preview. Firestore Enterprise edition in Native mode and the Pipeline operations interface are now supported at the General Availability ( GA ) level. The Firestore emulator now supports Enterprise edition. See Start emulator in specific edition.

Looker - Now available in preview, the Looker VS Code Extension brings LookML development to local desktop IDEs like Visual Studio Code, Claude Code, and Cursor. The extension supports syntax highlighting, autocomplete, real-time file synchronization with your Looker instance, and LookML validation. With the Looker MCP server, it enables AI-assisted development, allowing you to use natural language with agents like Gemini to generate and edit LookML code.

Cloud SQL Postgres - Database Migration Service quick-start migrations are now integrated into Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to provide a lightweight, continuous migration flow. This feature automates setup for sources with private IPs in a VPC network, including Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instances and self-managed databases on Compute Engine. For more information, see Quick-start migrations overview in the Database Migration Service documentation. This feature is in Preview.

Cloud Run - Cloud Run ephemeral disk, which allows you to mount a volume that persists only for the duration of your service, job, or worker pool instance, is in Preview.

GKE new features - Accelerator network profile is Generally Available (GA), simplifying your AI/ML node pool setup. Accelerator network profile automates networking configuration, including the creation of necessary VPCs and subnets, removing the need for complex, manual steps previously required for configuring GPU and TPU workloads. For details, see Configure automated networking for accelerator VMs. Starting in GKE version 1.35.2-gke.1842000, you can install the Slurm Operator add-on for GKE ( Preview ). This managed installation of the Slurm Operator allows you to enable Slurm scheduling capabilities on any GKE cluster. The add-on provides the foundation to build customized AI and HPC platforms, including CPU, GPU, and TPU machines (covering specific scenarios). For more information, see About Slurm on GKE. For clusters running GKE version 1.35.3-gke.1389000 or later, you can now use the c4a-highmem-96-metal ( Preview ) machine type from the C4A machine series with the following features: Autopilot mode Node auto-provisioning ComputeClasses that auto-create node pools Cluster autoscaling

Dataflow - You can now add existing Apache Parquet files from cloud-based storage, for example, Cloud Storage or Amazon S3, to an Apache Iceberg table in Google Cloud Lakehouse using the Dataflow job builder. This process registers the files without moving or rewriting the underlying data. For more information, see Import Parquet files from storage to Lakehouse using Dataflow. Dataflow job builder now supports external Iceberg REST Catalogs as a source. You can now ingest data from external Apache Iceberg REST catalogs (IRC) directly into Google Cloud Lakehouse tables using Dataflow's job builder UI without writing code. For more information, see Import data from external Iceberg catalogs to Lakehouse using Dataflow.

Database Migration Service - You can now use quick-start migrations for homogeneous PostgreSQL migrations to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and AlloyDB for PostgreSQL. Quick-start migrations are a lightweight continuous migration flow where Database Migration Service can automatically set up everything you need to migrate sources that have a private IP assigned in a VPC network, such as self-managed databases on Compute Engine or Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instances. This feature is in Preview.

Cloud Composer - Managed Service for Apache Airflow supports Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations capabilities. The new troubleshooting agent can now troubleshoot failed Airflow task instances and DAG runs. The feature is available through Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations, which is currently accessible in Private Preview.

IAM - Agent Identity is generally available ( GA ). Agent Identity provides a strongly attested, cryptographic identity for each agent that is tied to the lifecycle of the resource hosting the agent. For more information, see Agent Identity overview. Agent Identity auth manager is available in preview. You can use Agent Identity auth manager to help securely authenticate your agents to third-party services using 3-legged OAuth, 2-legged OAuth, or API keys. For more information, see Agent Identity auth manager. Privileged Access Manager supports agent identities as grant requesters and approvers. This feature is available in preview. For more information, see Privileged Access Manager overview.

Eventarc - Eventarc support for creating triggers for direct events from Gemini Cloud Assist is available in Preview.

VPC Service Controls - Preview stage support for the following integration: Agent Registry Preview stage support for the following integration: App Topology

Cloud Monitoring - Application Monitoring in Google Cloud provides both agent observability and application observability. Your Application Monitoring dashboards display performance metrics, including the error rates and token usage of your AI resources. Those metrics can help you understand the health and performance of your AI resources. To learn more, see the following: Agent observability Application Monitoring overview Investigate applications, services, and workloads View AI resources The Cloud Monitoring API MCP server is generally available (GA). To learn about using the Monitoring MCP server to let agents and AI applications interact with your metrics data, see Use the Cloud Monitoring remote MCP server.