It’s that time of the year again: at Google Cloud Next, lots of announcements were made about new features and plans for Google Cloud.
What follows is a selective summary, with a focus on computing, data and devops. This article will be updated through the next fext days as more announcements are made..
(last update: 2022-10-12 09am CET)
General announcements
- 4 new data centers announced in Europe: 🇦🇹 Austria, 🇬🇷 Greece, 🇳🇴 Norway, 🇿🇦 South Africa, 🇸🇪 Sweden (source)
- Partnership with Coinbase will allow GCP customers to pay with crypto currency (article)
Computing
- New CPU optimized C3 machine series (blog article)
- Hyperdisk, new persistent storage with configurable performance (blog article)
- TPU v4 is announced, which runs large-scale training workloads up to 80% faster and up to 50% cheaper.
Containers and Kubernetes
- New security dashboard in Kubernetes with lots of insights on container security and best practices on configuration (documentation)
Analytics
- “Looker” will be the new umbrella for all analytics tools in GCP.
- Data Studio remains free, but is renamed to Looker Studio (blog article)
- Data Studio gets a -non-free- pro version with an expanded feature set like extended collaboration features.
- Looker will be further integrated in the GCP console
- Better integration with Tableau and Power BI
Data
- Ability to use objects (like images) directly from Bigquery using object tables (demo).
- new streaming options to stream directly from SQL databases to bigquery for realtime analytics
- A new integrated experience in BigQuery for Apache Spark.
- use custom models in BigQuery ML.
- Confidential space is announced: a new way to collaborate on sensitive data with the guarantee that the other party can only use the data for the agreed purpose. (blog article)
- Launching a new capability to analyze unstructured and streaming data in BigQuery.
- GCP adds support for major data formats in the industry, including Apache Iceberg, and announced upcoming support for Linux Foundation Delta Lake and Apache Hudi.
- Expanding the capabilities of Dataplex for automated data quality and data lineage to help ensure customers have greater confidence in their data.
- Launching Vertex AI Vision, a new service that can make powerful computer vision and image recognition AI more accessible to data practitioners.
- Translation Hub, Document AI and Contact Center AI announced (blog)
Security
- Data sovereignty: partners will be able to deploy GCP compatible infrastructure with strict guarantees on where data resides.
- Chronicle is the new umbrella name for security products in GCP.
- The knowledge from the acquired Mandiant company will be further integrated in existing products.
- Cronicle Security Operations is announced with SIEM and SOAR capabilities (Blog)
- Cloud workstations for developers documentation