What was new with Google Cloud in 2018? Well, it depends on what particular cloud technology you’re interested in. There was plenty of news on the AI and machine learning front, along with developments on a variety of enterprise cloud components. The open cloud community continued to be a thriving place to collaborate, and Google Cloud user productivity and efficiency grew, too.

These popular stories from last year illustrate some of what you can do with Google Cloud technology.

1. Machine and deep learning made leaps. On the hardware front, special chips designed for high performance, called Cloud TPUs, are now broadly available to speed up machine learning tasks. And we partnered with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to use ML to build simulations and algorithms to answer one big question: Is there life on other planets?
   
2. Organizations are starting to extract more value from their data. Tools like BigQuery and the Ethereum digital currency dataset, which we recently made available to everyone, help businesses find insights from their data. And The New York Times is digitizing its huge photo archive, along with all its associated data, using Google Cloud storage and database technology.
   
3. There’s a new way to keep your information secure. The Titan Security Key arrived in the Google Store in 2018. Use these security keys to add two-factor verification to your Google Accounts and other services. They’re designed to defend against attacks like phishing that steal user credentials.
   
4. The cloud opened the door to creating all kinds of applications and projects. For game developers, the OpenMatch open source project cuts down on development time for building multiplayer games with its matchmaking framework. And a novelist is using the new Cloud Speech-to-Text API to add visuals to poetry readings.
   
5. Productivity gains with cloud came in all shapes and sizes. Check out the new developer hub for G Suite, providinglots of pro tips for developers to create, manage, and track their projects, including this tip on automatically adding a schedule from Google Sheets into Calendar.
   
6. You can build on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) even more easily. A new type of containers called gVisor arrived to give developersmore options when building applications. Plus, we brought the infrastructure that powers Google Search to developers with Cloud Source Repositories for easier code search. And the Cloud Services Platform arrived in 2018—this integrated family of cloud services lets you build an end-to-end cloud while removing manual tasks from the daily workload.  
   

For even more of what was popular last year in Google Cloud, take a look at the top Google Cloud Platform stories of 2018. And if one of your goals this year is to start using cloud more, mark your calendar to attend Google Cloud Next ’19.