In June, we had a lot to discuss about getting the most out of the cloud for your business, from speeding up web traffic to running fully managed apps easily. Here’s a quick look at some of the highlights from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) news this month.

What caught your attention this month

Some of the most-read stories this month reflected new technology developments or integrations that will be useful for developers and engineers.

• You can now deploy your Node.js app to the Google App Engine standard environment—and based on readership, many of you are excited about this. Node.js works easily on App Engine, without any language, module or API restrictions. You’ll get very quick deployment times, and a fully managed experience once you’ve deployed those apps, just as in other apps on the fully managed App Engine.
• QUIC is a transport protocol, optimized for HTTPS, that makes web traffic run faster. The protocol itself isn’t new, but last month we announced QUIC support for our HTTPS load balancers. Network performance is a huge part of a successful public cloud operation, so this new support could make a big impact on web page load times for your cloud services. Enabling QUIC means your connections can be established faster, which is especially useful for latency-prone connections, and clients who don’t yet support QUIC will seamlessly continue to use HTTPS.
• If you’re a Kubernetes fan, you may have already explored the new kubemci command-line interface (CLI). It lets you configure ingress for multi-cluster Kubernetes Engine environments, using Cloud Load Balancer. It’s also the first step in a long-term solution that will consist of a multi-cluster ingress system controlled via kubectl CLI or Kubernetes API calls.

Hot topics

You can now run your GCP workloads in Finland to improve availability and reduce your latency in the Nordics, and we announced that the Los Angeles region will open next month.

We also added some new storage tools to your arsenal. We’re adding Cloud Filestore as a GCP storage option so you can run enterprise applications that need a file system interface and shared file system for data. It’s fully managed and offers high performance for applications that need low latency and high throughput. For those of you supporting and running creative industry applications on GCP infrastructure, Cloud Filestore works great for render farms, website hosting and content management systems.

In addition, the Transfer Appliance became generally available in June, allowing a type of cloud data migration that will work well if you’ve got more than 20TB of data to upload to GCP, or that would take more than a week to upload. In early use, Transfer Appliance customers have gotten quick starts on analytics projects by moving test data to GCP, along with moving backup data and some or all of a data center to GCP.

And in the “Cloud powers some very cool projects” category, take a look at how the new Dragon Ball Legends game creator built the backend on GCP. Bandai Namco Entertainment knew that players of the latest addition to their Dragon Ball Z franchise would want to play against one another in real-time, with players around the globe. They turned to GCP for the scalability, global reach and real-time analytics they needed to make that possible.

Behind the compute curtain

This news of sole-tenant nodes for Google Compute Engine will come in handy for those of you at companies that need dedicated cloud servers. With this option, it’s possible to launch new VM instances as usual, but on server capacity dedicated to you. This choice is nice for industries with strict compliance and regulatory rules around data, and for getting higher utilization from VM instances along with instance placement, done either manually or by Compute Engine.

Building applications on GCP involves some upfront choices for app developers: Which compute offering will you pick, and what language will you use? Whether you’re a fan of containers or VMs, containers, App Engine or Cloud Functions, you’ll find in this post some excellent concrete examples the time and effort involved in building a “Hello, World” app in each of GCP’s four compute platforms.

That’s a wrap for June. This month brings the Next ‘18 conference, July 24-26. Join us and thousands of other IT practitioners in San Francisco to learn all you need to know about building a modern cloud infrastructure. Till then, build away!