Google Cloud has stayed busy over the summer with new programs, events, tools and products making their introductions in July. Here are the most popular posts last month from the Google Cloud blog. 

Making hiring more equitable 

Last month we announced Google Cloud’s new Autism Career Program, designed to help the expanding cloud industry hire and support more talented people with autism. Working with the Stanford Neurodiversity Project, the program will break down common barriers for candidates with autism, and train Google Cloud managers and others involved in hiring processes. We’ll work effectively and empathetically with autistic candidates to ensure our interview processes are structured to include reasonable accommodations like extended interview time, providing questions in advance or conducting the interview in writing rather than verbally. Stanford will also provide coaching and ongoing support to our new Google Cloud team members with autism. 

Expanding access to Google Cloud Next

Our blog announced the opening of registration for Google Cloud Next, taking place from October 12 through 14. Our global digital conference is designed to be open and flexible, with the freedom to create your own personalized experience. Tune in for live broadcasts and keynotes about our latest launches, and learn how customers and partners use Google Cloud to meet their business challenges. Interactive, digital experiences and on-demand sessions that align with your schedule and interests will also be available, including dedicated sessions and programming for our global audiences. Next ’21 is free this year, making the experience inclusive and accessible to all. Register to get informed, be inspired and expand your expertise. 

Connecting global customers to higher performance

To help customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific accelerate their digital transformation, we announced the opening of our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR). This new data center joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions on our connected network, helping our customers better serve their users with faster and stronger performance for their applications. The new region will protect against service disruptions and will offer key Google Cloud products like Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable and BigQuery. We also announced two new submarine cable systems linking the Middle East with southern Europe and Asia. The Blue and Raman Submarine Cable Systems will help Google users and customers around the globe communicate with friends, family, and business partners. 

Securing the cloud with new solutions

Last month we also announced a wealth of new security products and solutions that bring together the best of Google, help businesses address critical security challenges and deliver a trusted cloud:

• Cloud IDS will help customers detect and respond to network threats. 

• Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection uses machine learning (ML) to detect and block attacks targeting applications.

• Chronicle will integrate with Google Cloud’s analytics platforms Looker and BigQuery to help with reporting, compliance, security-driven data science and more.

• Autonomic Security Operations will guide businesses through the journey of protecting their assets from modern-day threats.  

• Risk Protection Program connects our Google Cloud customers to insurers with specialized cyber security programs. 

All these Google Cloud security solutions are designed to help businesses rethink, reshape and transform their security programs.

Helping IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) recommend the next best purchase 

Finally, we shared a story about how global retail giant IKEA experimented with Google Cloud Recommendations AI to deliver a more personalized shopping experience to their customers. Recommendations AI helped IKEA customers in two ways: 

1. Customers found products that they liked and established their preferred choice among other options more quickly, reducing the number of clicks needed in their shopping journey and increasing IKEA’s clickthrough rate by 30%.

2. Customers found attractive and complementary products that expanded purchases from a single product to an entire home furnishing solution, giving IKEA a 2% surge in average order value. 

Along the way, Google Cloud was there to support IKEA’s testing. With their strong business results, IKEA continues to explore more places in the customer journey to use the options provided by Recommendations AI, which now powers most of IKEA’s site recommendations.

June was full of news about new products, technologies and information from Google Cloud to help people connect, build and explore. Here’s a recap of June’s most popular posts on the Google Cloud blog. 

New subsea cable will connect the US and South America

Last month we announced that Google is building a new, open subsea cable that will run from the East Coast of the United States to points in South America that include Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Named after Maria Firmina dos Reis, Brazil’s first novelist, the resilient Firmina cable will be the longest of its kind in the world that can run entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable. As one of 16 subsea cables Google has invested in around the world, Firmina will improve access for South American users to Google products likeSearch, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services. 

A powerful family of virtual machines say hello

In June we also announced a new virtual machine (VM) family type coming to Google Cloud, our Tau VMs. VMs are just like an actual computer, complete with an entire operating system, that is run in a separate window on a host computer or a remote server in a data center. They make it easier and faster for developers to build and run software in the cloud. Tau VMs will offer enterprises market-leading performance improvements and cost savings for their software applications. Learn more about Tau VMs’ performance versus competitors and read testimonials from companies like Snap and Twitter who’ve already benefited from this new offering. 

A new dataset lets you do more with top Google Search terms

Trends in the top Google Search terms can tell people and businesses a lot about what’s on consumers’ minds. To expand access to this data and make it easier for enterprises to analyze these trends, we announced preview availability of a new public dataset for Google Trends. This will bring Google-owned Search data into Google Cloud Datasets for convenient analysis through favorite business tools like BigQuery, Google Cloud’s multicloud data warehouse. The dataset will allow you to gauge interest in specific topics or search terms across Google Search, from around the United States, down to the city level. This new public dataset is just the beginning of our process to make Google's first-party data more accessible to businesses and enhance their data analysis projects.

Google gets one step closer to 24/7 carbon-free data centers

One of last month’s top announcements focused on Google data centers and sustainability. In 2020, we announced an ambitious sustainability goal to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Last month, in the spirit of transparency, we released our updated carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%) for all Google data centers in 2020, as well as overall progress on our 2030 goal. The blog post details how we achieved 67% 24/7 carbon-free energy across all our data centers, up from 61% in 2019. This means that of all the energy used by Google data centers last year, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis. You can check out an animation that explores events that helped us achieve these numbers. Decarbonizing the world’s power grids quickly will help prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Google is committed to clearing a path for others and encouraging collective action to achieve this goal. Let’s move, together, toward a carbon-free future.

June was full of news about new products, technologies and information from Google Cloud to help people connect, build and explore. Here’s a recap of June’s most popular posts on the Google Cloud blog. 

New subsea cable will connect the US and South America

Last month we announced that Google is building a new, open subsea cable that will run from the East Coast of the United States to points in South America that include Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Named after Maria Firmina dos Reis, Brazil’s first novelist, the resilient Firmina cable will be the longest of its kind in the world that can run entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable. As one of 16 subsea cables Google has invested in around the world, Firmina will improve access for South American users to Google products likeSearch, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services. 

A powerful family of virtual machines say hello

In June we also announced a new virtual machine (VM) family type coming to Google Cloud, our Tau VMs. VMs are just like an actual computer, complete with an entire operating system, that is run in a separate window on a host computer or a remote server in a data center. They make it easier and faster for developers to build and run software in the cloud. Tau VMs will offer enterprises market-leading performance improvements and cost savings for their software applications. Learn more about Tau VMs’ performance versus competitors and read testimonials from companies like Snap and Twitter who’ve already benefited from this new offering. 

A new dataset lets you do more with top Google Search terms

Trends in the top Google Search terms can tell people and businesses a lot about what’s on consumers’ minds. To expand access to this data and make it easier for enterprises to analyze these trends, we announced preview availability of a new public dataset for Google Trends. This will bring Google-owned Search data into Google Cloud Datasets for convenient analysis through favorite business tools like BigQuery, Google Cloud’s multicloud data warehouse. The dataset will allow you to gauge interest in specific topics or search terms across Google Search, from around the United States, down to the city level. This new public dataset is just the beginning of our process to make Google's first-party data more accessible to businesses and enhance their data analysis projects.

Google gets one step closer to 24/7 carbon-free data centers

One of last month’s top announcements focused on Google data centers and sustainability. In 2020, we announced an ambitious sustainability goal to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Last month, in the spirit of transparency, we released our updated carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%) for all Google data centers in 2020, as well as overall progress on our 2030 goal. The blog post details how we achieved 67% 24/7 carbon-free energy across all our data centers, up from 61% in 2019. This means that of all the energy used by Google data centers last year, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis. You can check out an animation that explores events that helped us achieve these numbers. Decarbonizing the world’s power grids quickly will help prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Google is committed to clearing a path for others and encouraging collective action to achieve this goal. Let’s move, together, toward a carbon-free future.

May flowered with new products, technologies and learning resources from Google Cloud. Here’s a recap of May’s most popular posts on the Google Cloud blog. 

A new platform makes machine learning easier

At Google I/O, our annual conference for developers, we announced the general availability of Vertex AI, Google’s unified machine learning platform that allows companies to speed up the building, deployment and management of their artificial intelligence (AI) models. Because it requires far less coding to build custom models, Vertex AI can be used by data analysts and data scientists with varying levels of expertise. For example, a division of L'Oreal uses Vertex AI to create tools that let people “try on” beauty products online.

New data products come in threes

At our Data Cloud Summit, we introduced a number of new solutions to help organizations gain value from their data in support of their data cloud strategies. These include Dataplex, which allows organizations to centrally manage,  monitor and govern data across a variety of systems; Datastream, which allows companies to replicate data in real-time across heterogeneous databases, storage systems and applications reliably and with minimal latency; and Analytics Hub, which provides a way to access and share data and analytics models across organizational boundaries. 

A first-of-its-kind technology powers carbon-free energy

We announced a new technology that will help us reach our goal of operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Fervo is a next-generation geothermal project that will soon add carbon-free energy to the electric grid that powers our data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada. Using fiber-optic cables inside wells, Fervo will gather information on flow, temperature and performance of the geothermal resource. Fervo will bring our data centers in Nevada closer to round-the-clock clean energy, and demonstrate how clean energy sources such as next-generation geothermal could eventually help replace carbon-emitting power sources around the world.

A video series teaches Anthos basics

Anthos is a managed application platform that extends Google Cloud services and engineering practices to development environments so you can modernize apps faster and establish operational consistency across them. To help you get started, we introduced the Anthos 101 video learning series, a great starting point for understanding the basics of Anthos and how to use it. Even better, you can watch the whole series of 11 episodes in less than an hour.

FAQs that clear up the clouds

Speaking of 101s, we also created a popular one with frequently asked questions about cloud computing. Do you want to learn the basics of containers, virtual machines, Kubernetes, data warehouses and more? The blog gives a quick rundown of common cloud computing terms and products. It’s just one guide available in our learning resources to help you understand cloud computing and start working with cloud-based tools and products. 

That’s a wrap for May. Stay tuned to the Google Cloud blog for all things cloud.