Get into “Focus mode” at work with help from Android

Holding your focus and attention at work can sometimes be a challenge, but Android offers helpful tools so that you can reduce distractions and get work done on your own terms. Whether it’s news alerts, social media, or other apps you find distracting, Focus mode lets you pause apps that could keep you from tackling those important tasks. The work profile also clearly labels work apps in a separate tab, so you can quickly access the important ones you need to get your job done.

Get in the zone with Focus mode

Use Focus mode to pause apps in your personal profile that you find distracting.

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Pause selected apps with Focus mode.

Once you turn on Focus mode, the apps you chose will be grayed out on your screen and their notifications will be hidden. Also, any notifications from those apps are put on hold until Focus mode is turned off.

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With one tap, turn on Focus mode and quiet any potential distractions.

To suit your work hours, you can create a daily schedule with Focus mode so it launches automatically during the time period you specify. If you’re on a lunch break or need to check any of the paused apps, you can take a break from Focus mode to use those apps for a short period.  When the break’s over, Focus mode resumes automatically so those apps won’t bother you.

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Take a break for a while, then Focus mode will turn back on.

Work profile organizes the apps you need

On personally enabled devices, the work profile helps you quickly get to the apps you need. When it’s time to step away from work, you can pause the work profile—work apps will be unavailable and won’t send you any notifications until they’re back on.

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Pause work profile to snooze notifications and apps.

Focus mode and work profile are among the many ways that Android works the way you want. Learn more about what Android can do for you at work.

Actions to reduce the need for people to come into our offices

During the unprecedented COVID-19 situation, many companies are closing their offices and directing their employees to work from home (WFH), schools are moving to online classes and people are quickly adopting social distancing measures. Our priority is to take care of people who work in our offices—including employees, vendors and temporary staff—and the communities they work in. So we’ve been taking action to reduce the need for people to come into our offices, particularly in locations where local COVID-19 conditions merit increased precaution.

At the same time, we know that people rely on Google’s products and services, so a limited proportion of employees, temporary staff and vendors continue to work in our offices, because some important jobs can only be done onsite—like those who need to access the most sensitive content or account data for user and customer safety and security. (For example, the people who help you if your account gets hacked.)

Here’s how we’re reducing the need for people to come into our offices while ensuring that our products continue to operate under these unique circumstances. 

Remote access

In most parts of the world, we’ve recommended that everyone who can work from home should do so. We’re also increasing the ability for employees, temporary staff and vendors to work from home by rolling out remote access and equipment, like secure laptops, where feasible. We’re working closely with our partners to provide the right equipment and guidance as fast as possible.

Prioritizing workflows

To reduce the need for support staff to come into the office, where possible we’re prioritizing support work that is critical—like account recovery, security, and certain advertising-related reviews (such as preventing COVID-19 scams, or inappropriate ad placements). 

Increasing automation 

We’ve always used a combination of humans and machines to review content on our platforms, like YouTube. We will temporarily be increasing our reliance on automated systems given this unique situation, to reduce the need for people to come into the office. Our goal is to continue to act quickly to remove content that violates our community guidelines and policies. 

Adjusting shifts

To promote social distancing and reduce the number of people in the office at a given time, in some locations, we’ll change the timing of shifts, the timing between shifts, and the number of people on a given shift based on the work required.

Temporary implications for support times

We know that right now, people around the world need information, communication and computation more than ever. We’re deeply committed to helping. All our products remain fully operational. The changes we’re making to our operations won’t impact their availability. 

However, given the steps we need to take due to these unprecedented times, there may be some temporary limitations and delays in support in some cases:

  • Some users, advertisers, developers and publishers may experience delays in some support response times for non-critical services, which will now be supported primarily through our chat, email, and self-service channels. 

  • Our goal on YouTube is to ensure we are removing content that violates our policies. We've invested significantly in automated systems for content review but they are not always as accurate or granular in their analysis of content as human reviewers. These systems are configured deliberately to identify content that may violate our policies. So on YouTube there may be an increase in content classified for removal during this time—including some content that does not violate our policies. Turnaround times for appeals against these decisions may be slower. You can read more on the YouTube blog. 

  • For other Google products, our automated systems may not always accurately classify content for removal, and human review of these decisions may be slower.

We will provide updates if there are additional delays in support over time.

Covering our workforce

As we temporarily reduce the need for people to come into the office, we’ve committed that during this time, members of our extended workforce who are affected by reduced schedules will be compensated for the time they would have worked. We also established a COVID-19 fund so that members of our extended workforce who would not otherwise be paid will be compensated for their normal working hours if they can’t come into work because they have potential symptoms of COVID-19 or if they’re quarantined. For those coming to the office, we have significantly enhanced our hygiene and cleaning operations, are increasing spacing between people, and in some locations have instituted temperature checks.

We thank you for your support and understanding during this challenging period, and we think this is the right thing to do for the people who work here, and the community at large.

Beta Channel Update for Desktop

The beta channel has been updated to 81.0.4044.69 for Windows, Mac, and, Linux.

A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels?  Find out how here. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.



Prudhvikumar Bommana
Google Chrome

Women at Google: Meet Natacha Mainville


For Women's History Month, we're profiling some of the powerful, dynamic and creative Canadian women at Google.


For Natacha Mainville, innovation is in her DNA. Coming from a family of engineers, she’s always been enthused by problem-solving and critical thinking. She’s harnessed these qualities into a rewarding career in artificial intelligence.

Throughout her career, she’s led the charge on transformational programs. She touts these experiences as monumental moments that have helped her to identify ways to adapt work environments so that women can grow to their fullest potential.

She credits her success and desire to help women reach their full potential, to her work and home life. When I ask her what brunch is like at her home, she admits that she’s often amazed when she hears her 8-year old twin girls use words like “neural networks” and “deep learning” - something that naturally happens when both your parents work in AI! To Natacha, it’s two more reasons to keep breaking barriers for women in tech.

How would you describe your job at a dinner party to people who don't work in tech?

I would start by polling the table (polling - a research instinct!) to know how many people have heard of artificial intelligence (AI). If there’s some recognition around the room, I would say I work with a team of brilliant AI researchers and engineers to push the boundaries of science.

But - if I’m met with many blank stares, I might instead say that I’m part of a global research team called Google Brain, that’s focused on research within the artificial intelligence space. Our goal is to improve people’s lives, and we empower researchers with the freedom to do ambitious, fundamental, and open machine learning research at Google. We foster strong connections and collaborations with academia, and explore research in various areas from visual understanding to arts to natural language understanding.

Was there something specific that pushed you toward your career in tech?

I grew up in a family of engineers - my dad and brother are both computer engineers. I also married an engineer! Seeing this field up close at home made it easier for me to consider a career in tech. I originally chose to focus in computer engineering because it’s what I was exposed to, but I later found where I could better fit and uniquely add value.

You mentioned that seeing a career path at home helped you to choose yours. How important do you think that is for young girls?

I think it is imperative for girls to see and know role models in the tech space in order to visualize that career opportunity. My passion is finding ways to introduce young children to careers in STEM, and consider the field as an option. In my previous work before Google I was the CIO at TandemLaunch inc., a deep tech startup incubator and was inspired to co-found a startup called Young Ladies in Tech. Our mission was to introduce girls to tech roles like software engineer, mechanical engineer, AI engineer and robotics. I still remember meeting a young girl who was 11 years old, who told me that her councillor suggested she pursue a career in teaching because she was a girl. After seeing our videos on different roles in tech, she asked me if it was too late for her. To her and to everyone - it is never too late to explore a career in tech and challenge yourself.

What do you want to see more of, when it comes to getting girls into STEM?

I think continuing to create avenues and opportunities for young girls to see and explore a career in tech and AI. An exciting project I’m currently working on is a collaboration with Curium to launch an AI Hub for youth.
Working with experts in the field, we created fun and engaging videos that talk about AI in relatable ways for youth. The hub also includes worksheets for educators and is now live in schools in Quebec. We’re currently working on creating an English version so that we can educate and raise AI awareness in classrooms coast to coast. Stay tuned for more!

Let’s talk about AI. Is AI the next big thing?

We interact with AI in so many different ways regularly, people don’t even realize it. Something as simple as receiving suggested language while you’re typing emails is AI in action!
For me what’s most exciting is seeing how AI is producing significant breakthroughs that are solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We recently released research around using AI to improve breast cancer screening. That’s only one example of the ways in which AI research will impact this generation!

What is the most challenging part of your job?

When the Google Brain team started, it was growing exponentially every year, and expanding across the globe. We now have 12 locations around the world, and a key part of my role is to build bridges and make sure our teams are collaborating effectively to maximize our impact. When you consider different languages, time zones, interests and projects, this can be tough! But it’s a challenge I enjoy every day, and the stronger our community becomes, the better our collaboration and research outputs will be.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

My job is AWESOME. I love being able to help our researchers and engineers consider new ways to apply their research, or grow their research agenda and teams. Not to mention, I get to work with some of the most brilliant scientists in the world, including Canadians Samy Bengio and Hugo Larochelle.

What is your secret power that makes you successful?

I think emotional intelligence and operational experience at scale are huge strengths of mine. I work on a team of highly skilled technical experts and scientists, so bringing a strategic approach to the team’s operations and growth, as well as empathy when navigating different research priorities and the people leading them is critical. Something as simple as offering praise, understanding different strengths of different team members, or enhancing communication to favour collaboration can create a stronger work culture.

What's one of the best pieces of advice you've ever gotten?

Undoubtedly the best advice I’ve gotten is ‘who you work for matters’.

Make sure that you have a manager who inspires you, helps you grow, and advocates for you and your work. This can make a world of a difference to your growth, as well as your success. When interviewing for a new role, remember it is a two way interview. The organization is assessing you, but you should also be assessing to see if this organization is the right place for you. Don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions to determine if you align to the organization’s culture and values and if it’s a place that will inspire you to do your best work.


COVID-19: How we’re continuing to help

For 21 years, Google’s mission has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Helping people get the right information to stay healthy is more important than ever in the face of a global pandemic like COVID-19. Since my last update, we’ve accelerated our work to help people stay safe, informed and connected. Here are the latest developments in our ongoing global response.

Helping people find useful information

We’re partnering with the U.S. government in developing a website dedicated to COVID-19 education, prevention, and local resources nationwide. This includes best practices on prevention, links to authoritative information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and helpful tips and tools from Google for individuals, teachers and businesses. We’ll be rolling out an initial version of the website late Monday, March 16, and we’ll continue to enhance and update it with more resources on an ongoing basis.


We also continue to help people find timely and useful information through our products, including Search, Maps and YouTube. Right now on the Google homepage we’re promoting the “Do the Five” campaign to raise awareness of simple measures people can take to slow the spread of the disease, according to the WHO. In the first 24 hours, these tips have already been seen by millions in the U.S. We’ve added more useful information to our COVID-19 SOS Alerts, including links to national health authority sites and a map of affected areas from the WHO.
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“Do the Five” raises awareness of simple measures people can take to slow the spread of the disease, according to the World Health Organization.

On YouTube, we’re using the homepage to direct users to videos from the CDC or other locally relevant public health agencies. We’re highlighting content from authoritative sources when people search for COVID-19, and inserting information panels to provide additional context from high-quality sources.


With so many disruptions to daily life, people are looking for more information about school or business closures. Based on data from governments and other authoritative sources, Google Search and Maps will now display if a place, like a school or local business, is temporarily closed. In the coming days, we’ll make it possible for businesses to easily mark themselves as “temporarily closed” using Google My Business. We’re also using our artificial intelligence (AI) technology Duplex where possible to contact businesses to confirm their updated business hours, so we can reflect them accurately when people are looking on Search and Maps. 


For travelers looking for which airlines are offering flexible cancellation policies and change fees, we’re helping to direct users of Google Flights to a special webpage with the information they need. This page is currently offered in English, with more languages coming soon.

Protecting people from misinformation

Promoting helpful information is only one part of our responsibility. We’re also removing COVID-19 misinformation on YouTube, Google Maps, our developer platforms like Play, and across ads. On YouTube, we’ve taken down thousands of videos related to dangerous or misleading coronavirus information, and we continue to remove videos that promote medically unproven methods to prevent coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment. On Google Maps, our automated and manual review systems continue to take down false and harmful content such as fake reviews and misleading information about healthcare locations. 


When it comes to advertising on our platforms, we have strict policies to govern the types of ads we allow. This includes a sensitive events policy which prohibits advertising that may try to capitalize on tragic events such as a natural disaster, conflict or death. Since January we’ve blocked hundreds of thousands of ads attempting to capitalize on the coronavirus pandemic, and last week we announced a temporary ban on all ads for medical masks and respirators.

Enabling productivity for remote users and students

As more employers have asked workers to stay at home to help slow the spread of COVID-19, we’re seeing more people using the premium features of Meet, our video conferencing app, which we made available to all G Suite customers at no cost until July 1, 2020. We’ve also shared tips and resources for remote workers of all kinds.


For educators around the globe, we’ve created new distance learning resources, including a collection of training materials, a new YouTube Learning Hub, and a series of blog posts and webinars. We're working with Google Educator Groups around the world, for example in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan, to provide local content from teachers for teachers. In Italy, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, we’re helping schools quickly get set up with G Suite for Education and are working to provide additional technical support through partners. We’ll continue working with educators to see what more we can do to help as they navigate the transition to distance learning.
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For educators and schools facing closures, distance learning tools can help keep students engaged.

Supporting relief efforts and government organizations

Through our philanthropic arm Google.org, we are committing $50 million to the global COVID-19 response, focusing on health and science, access to educational resources and small business support. 


We have been working in close collaboration directly with the WHO. As part of that collaboration, on Friday we announced we’ll bematching up to $5 million in donations to the WHO’s new COVID-19Solidarity Response Fund. The fund will help the WHO track and understand the spread of the virus and help frontline workers with essential supplies and information. We also made a $500,000 grant to a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital working onHealthMap, a website that provides up-to-date trends of emerging public health threats and outbreaks. Our grant and technical expertise will support development of their infrastructure to inform COVID-19 response and epidemiological modeling.


In the coming weeks, we’ll launch a Distance Learning Fund to help learning continue around the globe, as well as support for small businesses, including resources and access to capital. 


Another way we’re supporting governments and relief organizations is through our $25 million Google Ad Grants crisis relief program. To date, COVID-19 public service announcements are live in more than 15 countries.

Advancing health research and science

Alphabet’s Verily, which is focused on health and life sciences, is working in collaboration with California state, local and federal health authorities to help establish testing sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, and on an online tool to increase risk screening and testing for people at high risk of COVID-19. Californians will be able to take an online COVID-19 screener survey through Verily’s Project Baseline, and those who meet eligibility and requirements for testing will be directed to mobile testing sites based on capacity. While Verily is in the early stages of this pilot program, the plan is to expand to other locations over time.


As previously shared, DeepMind released predictions that could help scientists better understand the coronavirus protein structure in order to develop future treatments.

Taking care of our global community

Across all of this work, we’re focused on the impact the disease is having on our communities. That includes our own workforce. Last week, we established a COVID-19 fund, which will allow all our temporary staff and vendors globally to take paid sick leave if they have potential symptoms of COVID-19 or can’t come into work because they’re quarantined. We’ll continue to make sure our workforce is supported as this crisis evolves. 


In this unprecedented moment, we feel a great responsibility to help. We’ll keep doing everything we can to deliver on our mission, and help people take care of themselves and their communities. 

Even without internet at home, students can keep learning

If your school is operating virtually as a result of COVID-19, you may be wondering how to continue teaching students who don’t have access to the internet at home, or who only have low-bandwidth access. Fortunately, there are many ways to keep Chromebooks and G Suite up and running even when online access is slow or unavailable. We’ve pulled together ideas for educators and school IT teams who want to encourage all students to keep learning, regardless of their online access. 

For edtech and IT teams: The basics of enabling offline access

Using Chromebooks and G Suite without Wi-Fi or low connectivity is relatively easy, but you may want to enlist your EdTech and IT teams to set up offline access for everyone. Here are the key steps in the process, along with useful Google support links. 

Keep in mind that people need to go through this process while they still have online access. Consider taking a few minutes to guide students and staff through the process while they’re on school Wi-Fi networks.

Step 1: To help students, teachers and staff work in G Suite offline, the first step is to enable offline access for all users. Your IT or EdTech team can do this from G Suite’s admin console using these instructions for managed devices; in the Features and Applications section of the Admin console, administrators can click “Allow users to enable offline access.” 

Step 2: G Suite users also need to download the Google Docs Offline extension for Chrome Browser, which will allow them to use Google Docs, Sheets, Drive and Slides without online access. 

Step 3: Finally, people should turn on offline access for the G Suite applications they’d like to use before they go offline. Share these instructions for opening G Suite files offline. It’s a good idea to ask students to test that offline access is working properly; help them turn off W-iFi access and try to access a G Suite file. Students can download notes from Slides, Docs, and more, and download the lectures from Classroom and Drive to watch later if they do not have internet at home.

For teachers: Things to do offline

Remind students that even if they don’t have Wi-Fi access away from school, there’s a lot that they can do with their Chromebooks:

For edtech and IT teams: Chrome extensions that work offline

Encourage students to use Chrome extensions that help them do classwork while offline--and ask your edtech or IT team to push out the extensions to all G Suite and Chromebook users. Search theChromebook App Hub or the Chrome Web Store using the “runs offline” option to find useful extensions, or start with Screencastify for recording and editing videos and Soundtrap for recording and saving audio files. 

Tips from teachers

Teachers are already brainstorming creative ways to help students without home online access continue their studies:

Create a “file upload” feature in Google Forms:Eric Lawson, director of technology at Maine’s York School Department, shared that you can create a Google Form directly from Google Classroom. One of the question options in Google Forms is to create a “file upload.” This allows for students to work on podcasts, videos, journals, infographics, etc. and simply submit them to their teacher through a form. On a day where students may not have internet access, they can still work on their project offline on their Chromebooks at home and then submit the file when they have access.

Offer mobile hotspot access:At Grain Valley Schools in Missouri, Kyle Pace, director of technology, plans to remind students that they can check out mobile hotspot devices from the school’s libraries--just as they’d check out books.

If you use Google Classroom and want to make sure students can view assignments offline, follow this YouTube tutorial from Stewart Lee, technology integration coordinator with Anderson School District 3 in South Carolina.

Fast and Easy Infinitely Wide Networks with Neural Tangents

Posted by Samuel S. Schoenholz, Senior Research Scientist and Roman Novak, Research Engineer, Google Research

The widespread success of deep learning across a range of domains such as natural language processing, conversational agents, and connectomics, has transformed the landscape of research in machine learning and left researchers with a number of interesting and important open questions such as: Why do deep neural networks (DNNs) generalize so well despite being overparameterized? What is the relationship between architecture, training, and performance for deep networks? How can one extract salient features from deep learning models?

One of the key theoretical insights that has allowed us to make progress in recent years has been that increasing the width of DNNs results in more regular behavior, and makes them easier to understand. A number of recent results have shown that DNNs that are allowed to become infinitely wide converge to another, simpler, class of models called Gaussian processes. In this limit, complicated phenomena (like Bayesian inference or gradient descent dynamics of a convolutional neural network) boil down to simple linear algebra equations. Insights from these infinitely wide networks frequently carry over to their finite counterparts. As such, infinite-width networks can be used as a lens to study deep learning, but also as useful models in their own right.
Left: A schematic showing how deep neural networks induce simple input / output maps as they become infinitely wide. Right: As the width of a neural network increases , we see that the distribution of outputs over different random instantiations of the network becomes Gaussian.
Unfortunately, deriving the infinite-width limit of a finite network requires significant mathematical expertise and has to be worked out separately for each architecture studied. Once the infinite-width model is derived, coming up with an efficient and scalable implementation further requires significant engineering proficiency. Together, the process of taking a finite-width model to its corresponding infinite-width network could take months and might be the topic of a research paper in its own right.

To address this issue and to accelerate theoretical progress in deep learning, we present Neural Tangents, a new open-source software library written in JAX that allows researchers to build and train infinitely wide neural networks as easily as finite neural networks. At its core, Neural Tangents provides an easy-to-use neural network library that builds finite- and infinite-width versions of neural networks simultaneously.

As an example of the utility of Neural Tangents, imagine training a fully-connected neural network on some data. Normally, a neural network is randomly initialized and then trained using gradient descent. Initializing and training many of these neural networks results in an ensemble. Often researchers and practitioners average the predictions from different members of the ensemble together for better performance. Additionally, the variance in the predictions of members of the ensemble can be used to estimate uncertainty. The downside is that training an ensemble of networks requires a significant computational budget, so it is often avoided. However, when the neural networks become infinitely wide, the ensemble is described by a Gaussian process with a mean and variance that can be computed throughout training.

With Neural Tangents, one can construct and train ensembles of these infinite-width networks at once using only five lines of code! The resulting training process is displayed below, and an interactive colaboratory notebook going through this experiment can be found here.
In both plots we compare training of an ensemble of finite neural networks with the infinite-width ensemble of the same architecture. The empirical mean and variance of the finite ensemble is displayed as a dashed black line between two dotted black lines. The closed-form mean and variance of the infinite-width ensemble is displayed as a solid colored line inside a filled color region. In both plots finite- and infinite-width ensembles match very closely and can be hard to distinguish. Left: Outputs (vertical f-axis) on the input data (horizontal x-axis) as the training progresses. Right: Train and test loss with uncertainty over the course of training.
Despite the fact that the infinite-width ensemble is governed by a simple closed-form expression, it exhibits remarkable agreement with the finite-width ensemble. And since the infinite-width ensemble is a Gaussian process, it naturally provides closed-form uncertainty estimates (filled colored regions in the figure above). These uncertainty estimates closely match the variation of predictions that are observed when training many different copies of the finite network (dashed lines).

The above example shows the power of infinite-width neural networks to capture training dynamics. However, networks built using Neural Tangents can be applied to any problem on which you could apply a regular neural network. For example, below we compare three different infinite-width neural network architectures on image recognition using the CIFAR-10 dataset. Remarkably, we can evaluate ensembles of highly-elaborate models like infinitely wide residual networks in closed-form under both gradient descent and fully-Bayesian inference (an intractable task in the finite-width regime).
We see that, mimicking finite neural networks, infinite-width networks follow a similar hierarchy of performance with fully-connected networks performing worse than convolutional networks, which in turn perform worse than wide residual networks. However, unlike regular training, the learning dynamics of these models is completely tractable in closed-form, which allows unprecedented insight into their behavior.

We invite everyone to explore the infinite-width versions of their models with Neural Tangents, and help us open the black box of deep learning. To get started, please check out the paper, the tutorial Colab notebook, and the Github repo — contributions, feature requests, and bug reports are very welcome. This work has been accepted as a spotlight at ICLR 2020.

Acknowledgements
Neural Tangents is being actively developed by Lechao Xiao, Roman Novak, Jiri Hron, Jaehoon Lee, Alex Alemi, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, and Samuel S. Schoenholz. We also thank Yasaman Bahri and Greg Yang for the ongoing contributions to improve the library, as well as Sergey Ioffe, Ben Adlam, Ravid Ziv, and Jeffrey Pennington for frequent discussion and useful feedback. Finally, we thank Tom Small for creating the animation in the first figure.

Source: Google AI Blog


WebAssembly brings extensibility to network proxies

With the Istio 1.5 release we are happy to introduce WebAssembly (Wasm) extensions in Envoy, built with our long running collaborators Lyft and IBM. With partners like Solo.io deepening their engagement as well, we are excited to see the community and ecosystem developing around this segment of the open source world.

The Envoy service proxy has taken the Cloud Native landscape by storm since it was open sourced by Lyft in 2016, quickly becoming a fixture in modern app deployment—both at the edge and as a sidecar. Since Google and IBM started the Istio project and selected Envoy as the proxy of choice for service mesh, we have been working with the Envoy community to improve performance and add functionality. In fact, Google now commits more code to Envoy than any other company.

Envoy has always had an extension mechanism, either with compiled-in C++ modules or Lua scripts—both with downsides. One of our design goals with Istio was to bring ease of extensibility to allow an ecosystem of policy, telemetry, and logging systems. We did this with a control plane component and out-of-process adapters that could be written in any language, but this approach introduced additional network hops and latency.

This is where Wasm comes in. Wasm is a binary instruction format, compilable from over 30 languages, with a runtime to execute it in a sandboxed environment. Already embedded in all major browsers and with a W3C working group defining the standards, we are now bringing it server-side via Envoy. It allows adding functionality to the Envoy proxy without recompiling it, without forking, and without difficult rollouts. Istio can distribute extensions to proxies and load them without even restarting. This really brings together the best of both worlds in terms of extensibility—choice of language and great performance.

“I am extremely excited to see Wasm support land in Envoy; this is the future of Envoy extensibility, full stop. Envoy’s Wasm support coupled with a community driven hub will unlock an incredible amount of innovation in the networking space across both service mesh and API gateway use cases. I can’t wait to see what the community builds moving forward.” – Matt Klein, Envoy creator

To make sure that developing Wasm extensions is a great experience, our partner Solo.io has been working hard on creating a great developer experience. Solo.io recently announced WebAssembly Hub, a service for building, sharing, discovering and deploying Wasm extensions. With the WebAssembly Hub, Wasm extensions are as easy to manage, install and run as containers.

“We are committed to creating the most user friendly developer experience for service mesh. Like Docker did for containers, our goal is to simplify the consumption of WebAssembly extensions, which is the ‘why' behind WebAssembly Hub. By working with Google and the Istio open source community, we are able to simplify the experience of creating, sharing and deploying WebAssembly extensions to Envoy proxy and Istio, to bring the power of WebAssembly to more languages, and to enable a broader set of developers to innovate on service mesh." said Idit Levine, CEO and Founder, Solo.io.

One major retailer is looking to use Wasm to integrate with their policy system as they standardize use of Envoy—at the edge, as a sidecar, and even in their stores. The ability to roll out a policy change that is enforced everywhere they serve traffic, all with a great developer experience, makes Wasm a very attractive option for them.

By Dan Ciruli, Istio

New interface for domain management in the Admin console

Quick launch summary


We’ve updated the interface you use to manage your primary domain, secondary domains, and domain aliases. When you go to Admin console > Domains > Manage domains, you may notice:
  • An updated interface with more complete information and descriptions of items and domain state. 
  • New grouped action buttons which make it easier to see and select the action you want to take, such verifying domains, changing your primary domain, setting up MX records, and more. 
  • A new side panel which shows information about domains registered through Google, enabling you to quickly see and manage renewals and advanced DNS settings. 

Getting started

  • Admins: Find domain management at Admin console > Domains > Manage domains. Use our Help Center to learn more about how to add and manage domains in G Suite. 
  • End users: There is no end user impact. 


The new domain management interface in the Admin console


The old domain management interface in the Admin console

Rollout pace



Availability


  • Available to all G Suite customers

Resources




Dev Channel Update for Desktop

The Dev channel has been updated to 82.0.4083.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.
A partial list of changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.
Lakshmana Pamarthy Google Chrome