Tag Archives: Announcements

Bringing the best of serverless to you

By Eyal Manor, Vice President, Engineering

Every business wants to innovate—and deliver—great software, faster. In recent years, serverless computing has changed application development, bringing the focus on the application logic instead of infrastructure. With zero server management, auto-scaling to meet any traffic demands, and managed integrated security, developers can move faster, stay agile and focus on what matters most—building great applications.

Google helped pioneer the notion of serverless more than 10 years ago with the introduction of App Engine. Making developers more productive is just as important today as it was then. Over the past few years, we have been working hard to bring the benefits of serverless that we learned from App Engine to our compute, storage, database, messaging services, data analytics, and machine learning offerings.

Today, in tandem with the launch of our Cloud Services Platform, we are sharing several important developments to our serverless compute stack:
  • New App Engine runtimes
  • Cloud Functions general availability, support for additional languages, plus performance, networking and security features
  • Serverless containers on Cloud Functions
  • GKE serverless add-on
  • Knative, Kubernetes-based building blocks for serverless workloads
  • Integration of Cloud Firestore with GCP services

Expanding serverless compute

Today we are announcing support for new second-generation App Engine standard runtimes such as Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 in addition to recent support for Node.js 8. Second generation runtimes provide developers idiomatic, open-source language runtimes capable of running any framework, library, or binary. Based on gVisor technology, these new runtimes enable faster deployments and increased application performance.

Also, Cloud Functions, our event-driven compute service, is generally available starting today, complete with predictable service guaranteed by an SLA, and a global footprint with new regions in Europe and Asia. In addition, we are bolstering Cloud Functions with a range of new and heavily requested features including support for Python 3.7 and Node.js 8, networking and security controls, and performance improvements across the board. Cloud Functions also lets you seamlessly connect and extend more than 20 GCP services such as BigQuery, Cloud Pub/Sub, machine learning APIs, G Suite, Google Assistant and many more.

Serverless and containers: the best of both worlds

Whether you’re using App Engine or Cloud Functions, Google’s serverless platform offers a complete mix of tools and services. However, many customers tell us they have custom requirements like specific runtimes, custom binaries, or workload portability. More often than not, they turn to containers for an answer. At Google Cloud, we want to bring the best of both serverless and containers together.

Today, we’re also introducing serverless containers, which allow you to run container-based workloads in a fully managed environment and still only pay for what you use. Sign up for an early preview of serverless containers on Cloud Functions to run your own containerized functions on GCP with all the benefits of serverless.

And what if you are already using Kubernetes Engine? A new GKE serverless add-on lets you run serverless workloads on Kubernetes Engine with a one-step deploy. You can go from source to containers instantaneously, auto-scale your stateless container-based workloads, and even scale down to zero. Here’s what T-mobile had to say about running their serverless workloads on Kubernetes Engine:
"The technology behind the GKE serverless add-on enabled us to focus on just the business logic, as opposed to worrying about overhead tasks such as build/deploy, autoscaling, monitoring and observability"
-Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T- Mobile

With Knative, run your serverless workloads anywhere

While we believe Google Cloud is a great place to run all types of workloads, some customers need to run on-premises or across multiple clouds. Based on this feedback, we’re excited to announce Knative (pronounced kay-nay-tiv), which is an open-source set of components from the same technology that enables the GKE serverless add-on.

Developed in close partnership with Pivotal, IBM, Red Hat, and SAP, Knative pushes Kubernetes-based computing forward by providing the building blocks you need to build and deploy modern, container-based serverless applications.

Knative focuses on the common but challenging parts of running apps, such as orchestrating source-to-container builds, routing and managing traffic during deployment, auto-scaling workloads, and binding services to event ecosystems. Knative provides you with familiar, idiomatic language support and standardized patterns you need to deploy any workload, whether it’s a traditional application, function, or container.

Knative provides reusable implementations of common patterns and codified best practices, shared by successful, real-world Kubernetes-based frameworks and applications. For instance, Knative comes with a build component that provides powerful abstraction and flexible workflow for building, testing, or deploying container images or non-container artifacts on a Kubernetes cluster. By integrating Knative into your own platform, you don’t have to choose between the portability and familiarity of containers and the automation and efficiency of serverless computing. And you can enjoy the benefits of Google Cloud’s extensive experience delivering serverless computing whether you run on GCP, on-premises or in any other cloud. Get started today with Knative or join the conversation.

A comprehensive serverless ecosystem

Of course, serverless computing is a non-starter if you can’t easily build and deploy the code, store your data, and manage your applications in production as part of your overall IT environment. At Google Cloud, we’re committed to enabling the comprehensive ecosystem of serverless offerings.

Cloud Build, for instance, lets you create a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for your serverless applications. You can define custom workflows for building, testing, and deploying across multiple serverless environment such Cloud Functions, App Engine and even Knative.

Cloud Firestore, one of the most recent additions to our serverless stack, lets you store and sync your app data at global scale. Soon, app developers will be able to easily access Cloud Firestore within the GCP Console, and it will also be compatible with Cloud Datastore.

Finally, our Stackdriver suite has four core capabilities—monitoring, logging, application performance management (APM) and the newly released Service Monitoring—and lets you operate and rapidly diagnose your serverless applications in production.

Toward ubiquitous serverless computing

We’re firm believers in finding ways to simplify operations and bring solutions to market faster. Last week’s launch of commercial Kubernetes applications in GCP Marketplace demonstrates how third-party solutions providers are adopting new technologies rapidly to support enterprise demand for extensible solutions. Now, with these new offerings, we’ll help more developers adopt serverless computing in the languages and platforms of their choice.

Click here to learn about the full breadth of Google Cloud serverless technologies.

Partnering with Intel and SAP on Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for SAP HANA

By Nan Boden, Senior Director, Global Technology Partnerships, Google Cloud, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Distinguished Engineer

Our customers do extraordinary things with their data. But as their data grows, they face challenges like the cost of resources needed to handle and store it, and the general sizing limitations with low latency in-memory computing workloads.

Our customers' use of in-memory workloads with SAP HANA for innovative data management use cases is driving the demand for even larger memory capacity. We’re constantly pushing the boundaries on GCP’s instance sizes and exploring increasingly cost-effective ways to run SAP workloads on GCP.

Today, we’re announcing a partnership with Intel and SAP to offer GCP virtual machines supporting the upcoming Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory for SAP HANA workloads. These GCP VMs will be powered by the future Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code-named Cascade Lake) thereby expanding VM resource sizing and providing cost benefits for customers.

Compute Engine VMs with Intel Optane DC persistent memory will offer higher overall memory capacity with lower cost compared to instances with only dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). This will help enable you to scale up your instances while keeping your costs under control. Compute Engine has consistently been focused on decreasing your operational overhead through capabilities such as Live Migration. And coupled with the native persistence benefits of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, you’ll get faster restart times for your most critical business applications.

Google Cloud instances on Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for SAP HANA and other workloads will be available in alpha later this year for customer testing. To learn more, please fill out this form to register your interest.

To learn more about this partnership, visit our Intel and SAP partnership pages.

5 must-see network sessions at Google Cloud NEXT 2018

By Neal Mueller, Product Lead

Whether you’re moving data to or from Google Cloud, or are knee-deep plumbing your cloud network architecture, there’s a lot to learn at Google Cloud Next 2018 next week in San Francisco). Here’s our shortlist of the five must-see networking breakout sessions at the show, in chronological order from Wednesday to Thursday.
Operations engineer, Rebekah Roediger, delivering cloud network capacity one link at a time, in our Netherlands cloud region (europe-west4).

GCP Network and Security Telemetry
Speakers: Ines Envid, Senior Product Manager, Yuri Solodkin, Staff Software Engineer and Vineet Bhan, Head of Security Partnerships
Network and security telemetry is fundamental to operate your deployments in public clouds with confidence, providing the required visibility on the behavior of your network and access control firewalls.
When: July 24th, 2018 12:35pm


A Year in GCP Networking
Speakers: Srinath Padmanabhan, Networking Product Marketing Manager, Google Cloud and Nick Jacques, Lead Cloud Engineer, Target
In this session, we will talk about the valuable advancements that have been made in GCP Networking over the last year. We will introduce you to the GCP Network team and will tell you about what you can do to extract the most value from your GCP Deployment.
When: July 24th, 2018 1:55pm


Cloud Load Balancing Deep Dive and Best Practices
Speakers: Prajakta Joshi, Sr. Product Manager and Mike Columbus, Networking Specialist Team Manager
Google Cloud Load Balancing lets enterprises and cloud-native companies deliver highly available, scalable, low-latency cloud services with a global footprint. You will see demos and learn how enterprise customers deploy Cloud Load Balancing and the best practices they use to deliver smart, secure, modern services across the globe.
When: July 25th, 2018 12:35pm


Hybrid Connectivity - Reliably Extending Your Enterprise Network to GCP
Speaker: John Veizades, Product Manager, Google Cloud
In this session, you will learn how to connect to GCP with highly reliable and secure networking to support extending your data center networks into the cloud. We will cover details of resilient routing techniques, access to Google API from on premise networks, connection locations, and partners that support connectivity to GCP -- all designed to support mission-critical network connectivity to GCP.
When: July 26th, 2018 11:40am


VPC Deep Dive and Best Practices
Speakers: Emanuele Mazza, Networking Product Specialist, Google, Neha Pattan, Software Engineer, Google and Kamal Congevaram Muralidharan, Senior Member Technical Staff, Paypal
This session will walk you through the unique operational advantages of GCP VPC for your enterprise cloud deployments. We’ll go through detailed use cases, how to seal and audit your VPC, how to extend your VPC to on-prem in hybrid scenarios, and how to deploy highly available services.
When: July 26th, 2018 9:00am


Be sure to reserve your spot in these sessions today—space is filling up!

Kubernetes wins OSCON Most Impact Award

By Paris Pittman, Kubernetes Community Manager, Google

Today at the Open Source Awards at OSCON 2018, Kubernetes won the inaugural Most Impact Award, which recognizes a project that has had a ‘significant impact on how software is being written and applications are built’ in the past year. Thank you O’Reilly OSCON for the recognition, and more importantly, thank you to the vast Kubernetes community that has driven the project to where it is today.

When we released Kubernetes just four years ago, we never quite imagined how successful the project would be. We designed Kubernetes from a decade of experience running production workloads at Google, but we didn’t know whether the outside world would adopt it. However we believed that if we remained open to new ideas and new voices, the community would provide feedback and contributions to move the project forward to meet the needs of users everywhere.

This openness led to Kubernetes’ rapid adoption—and it’s also one of the core pillars of Google Cloud: our belief in an open cloud, so that you can pick-up and move your app wherever you want. Whether it’s Tensorflow, an open source library for machine learning, Asylo, a framework for confidential computing, or Istio, an open platform to connect microservices, openness remains a core value here at Google Cloud.

To everyone who has helped make Kubernetes the success it is today, many thanks again.

If you haven’t tried Kubernetes, it’s easy to get started with using Google Kubernetes Engine. If you’re interested to learn more about Kubernetes and the ecosystem it spawned, then subscribe to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google to hear weekly insights from leaders in the community.

VMware and Google Cloud: building the hybrid cloud together with vRealize Orchestrator

By Shan Kulandaivel, Product Manager, Google Compute Engine

Many of our customers with hybrid cloud environments rely on VMware software on-premises. They want to simplify provisioning and enable end-user self service. At the same time, they also want to make sure they’re complying with IT policies and following IT best practices. As a result, many use VMware vRealize Automation, a platform for automated self-service provisioning and lifecycle management of IT infrastructure, and are looking for ways to leverage it in the cloud.

Today, we’re announcing the preview of our plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator and support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources in vRealize Automation. With these resources, you can now deploy and manage GCPresources from within your vRealize Automation environment.

The GCP plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator provides a consistent management and governance experience across on-premises and GCP-based IT environments. For example, you can use Google-provided blueprints or build your own blueprints for Google Compute Engine resources and publish to the vRealize service catalog. This means you can select and launch resources in a predictable manner that is similar to how you launch VMs in your on-premises VMware environment, using a tool you’re already familiar with.

This preview release allows you to:
  • Create vRealize Automation “blueprints” for Compute Engine VM Instances
  • Request and self-provision resources in GCP using vRA’s catalog feature
  • Gain visibility and reclaim resources in GCP to reduce operational costs
  • Enforce access and resource quota policies for resources in GCP
  • Initiate Day 2 operations (start, stop, delete, etc.) on Compute Engine VM Instances, Instance Groups and Disks
The GCP plug-in for vRealize makes it easy for you to unlock new hybrid scenarios. For example:

  1. Reach new regions to address global business needs. (Hello Finland, Mumbai and Singapore.)
  2. Define large-scale applications using vRA and deploy to Compute Engine to leverage GCP’s worldwide load balancing and automatic scaling.
  3. Save money by deploying VMs as Compute Engine Preemptible VM Instances and using Custom Machine Types to tailor the VM configuration to application needs.
  4. Accelerate the time it takes to train a machine learning model by using Compute Engine with NVIDIA® Tesla® P100 GPUs.
  5. Replicate your on premises-based applications to the cloud and scale up or down as your business dictates.
While this preview offers support for Compute Engine Virtual Machines in vRealize Automation, we’re working together with VMware to add support for additional GCP products such as Cloud TPUs—we’ll share more on that in the coming months. You can also find more information about this announcement by reading VMware’s blog.

In the meantime, to join the preview program, please submit a request using the preview intake form.

Bringing GPU-accelerated analytics to GCP Marketplace with MapD

By Venkat Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Product, MapD


 Editor’s note: Today, we hear from our partner MapD, whose data analytics platform uses GPUs to accelerate queries and visualizations. Read on to learn how MapD and Google Cloud are working together.

MapD and public cloud are a great fit. Combining cloud-based GPU infrastructure with MapD’s performance, interactivity and operational ease of use is a big win for our customers, allowing data scientists and analysts to visually explore billion-row datasets with fluidity and minimal hassle.

Our Community and Enterprise Edition images are available on AWS, MapD docker containers are available on NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC), as well as our own MapD Cloud. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the availability of MapD on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, helping us bring interactivity at scale to the widest possible audience. With services like Cloud DataFlow, Cloud BigTable and Cloud AI, GCP has emerged as a great platform for data-intensive workloads. Combining MapD and these services let us define scalable, high-performance visual analytics workflows for a variety of use cases.

On GCP, you’ll find both our Community and Enterprise editions for K80, Pascal and Volta GPU instances in the GCP Marketplace. Google’s flexible approach to attaching GPU dies to standard CPU-based instance types means you can dial up or down the necessary GPU capacity for your instances depending on the size of your datasets and your compute needs.

We’re confident that MapD’s availability on GCP marketplace will further accelerate the adoption of GPUs as a key part of enterprise analytics workloads, in addition to their obvious applicability to AI, graphics and general purpose computing. Click here to try out MapD on GCP.

Improving our account management policies to better support customers

By Ben Treynor Sloss, VP 24x7

Recently, a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customer blogged about an incident in June, in which a project they were running on Google Cloud Platform was suspended. We really appreciated the candid feedback, in which our customer noted several aspects of our account management process which needed to be improved. We also appreciated our customer’s followup and recognition of the Google Cloud support team, “who have reached out and assured us these incidents will not repeat.”

Here’s what we are doing to be as good as our word, and provide a more careful, accurate, thoughtful and empathetic account management experience for our GCP customers. These changes are intended to provide peace of mind and a predictable, positive experience for our GCP customers, while continuing to permit appropriate suspension and removal actions for the inevitable bad actors and fraud which are a part of operating a public cloud service.

No Automatic Fraud-Based Account Suspensions for Established Customers with Offline Payment. Established GCP customers complying with our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP, TOS and local laws), with an offline billing contract, invoice billing, or an active relationship with our sales team, are not subject to fraud-based automatic account suspension.



Delayed Suspension for Established Online Customers. Online customers with established payment history, operating in compliance with our TOS, AUP and local laws, will receive advance notification and a 5 day cure period in the event that fraud or account compromise activity is detected in their projects.

Other Customers. For all other customers, we will institute a second human review for flagged fraud accounts prior to suspending an account. We’re also modifying who has authority to suspend an account, as well as refreshing our training for the teams that review flagged accounts and determine response actions; re-evaluating the signals, sources, and the tools we use to assess potential fraudulent activity; and increasing the number of options we can use to help new customers quickly and safely grow their usage while building an account history with Google.

In addition to the above, for all customers we are making the following improvements:

24X7 Chat Support. We are rolling out 24X7 chat support for customers that receive account notices, so that customers can always reach us easily. We expect this to be fully rolled out for all customers by September.

Correcting Notices About our 30 Day Policy. Our customer noted, with appropriate concern, that their suspension email stated “we will delete your account in 3 days.” This language was simply incorrect -- our fraud suspension policy provides 30 days before removal. We have corrected the communication language, and we are conducting a full review of our communication verbiage and systems and ensuring that our messages are accurate and clear.

Updating Our Project Suspension Guidelines. We will review and update our project suspension guidelines to clarify our practices and describe what you should expect from Google.

Improving Customer Contact Points. We will encourage customers to provide us with a verifiable phone number, email, and other contact channels, both at sign-up and at later points in time, so that we can quickly contact you if we detect suspicious activity on your account.

Creating Customer Pre-Verification. We will provide ways for customers to pre-verify their accounts with us if they desire, either at sign-up or at a later point in time.

These suspensions are our responsibility.There are also steps that customers can take to help us protect their accounts including:
  1. Make sure to monitor emails sent to your payments and billing contacts so you don’t miss important alerts.
  2. Provide a valid phone number where we can reach you in the event of suspicious activity on your account.
  3. Provide one or more billing admins to your account.
  4. Provide a secondary payment method in case there are problems charging your primary method.
  5. Contact our sales team to see if you qualify for invoice billing instead of relying on credit cards.
We’re making immediate changes to ensure our policies will improve our customer’s experience. Our work here is never done and we will continue to update and optimize based on your feedback.

We sincerely apologize to all our customers who’ve been concerned or had to go through a service reinstatement. Please keep the feedback coming, we’ll work to continue to earn your trust every day.

Introducing commercial Kubernetes applications in GCP Marketplace

By Anil Dhawan, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Building, deploying and managing applications with Kubernetes comes with its own set of unique challenges. Today, we are excited to be the first major cloud provider to offer production-ready commercial Kubernetes apps right from our marketplace, bringing you simplified deployment, billing, and third-party licensing.

Now you can find the solution you need in Google Cloud Platform Marketplace (formerly Cloud Launcher) and deploy quickly on Kubernetes clusters running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes Engine, on-prem, or even other public clouds.

Enterprise-ready containerized applications - We are on a mission to make containers accessible to everyone, especially the enterprise. When we released Kubernetes as open source, one of the first challenges that the industry tackled was management. Our hosted Kubernetes Engine takes care of cluster orchestration and management, but getting apps running on a Kubernetes cluster can still be a manual, time-consuming process. With GCP Marketplace, you can now easily find prepackaged apps and deploy them onto the cluster of your choice.

Simplified deployments - Kubernetes apps are configured to get up and running fast. Enjoy click-to-deploy to Kubernetes Engine, or deploy them to other Kubernetes clusters off-GCP. Now, deploying from Kubernetes Engine is even easier, with a Marketplace window directly in the Kubernetes Engine console.

Production-ready security and reliability - All Kubernetes apps listed on GCP Marketplace are tested and vetted by Google, including vulnerability scanning and partner agreements for maintenance and support. Additionally, we work with open-source Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to create standards for Kubernetes apps, bringing the knowledge of the open-source community to your enterprise.

Supporting hybrid environments - One of the great things about containers is their portability across environments. While Kubernetes Engine makes it easy to click-to-deploy these apps, you can also deploy them in your other Kubernetes clusters—even if they’re on-premises. This lets you use the cloud for development and then move your workloads to your production environment, wherever it may be.

Commercial Kubernetes applications available now

Our commercial Kubernetes apps, developed by third-party partners, support usage-based billing on many parameters (API calls, number of hosts, storage per month), simplifying license usage and giving you more consumption options. Further, the usage charges for your apps are consolidated and billed through GCP, no matter where they are deployed (not including any non-GCP resources they need to run on).


“Cloud deployment and manageability are core to Aerospike's strategy. GCP Marketplace makes it simpler for our customers to buy, deploy and manage Aerospike through Kubernetes Engine with one-click deployment. This provides a seamless experience for customers by allowing them to procure both Aerospike solutions and Kubernetes Engine on a single, unified Google bill and providing them with the flexibility to pay as they go.”
- Bharath Yadla, VP-Product Strategy, EcoSystems, Aerospike

"As an organization focused on supporting enterprises with security for their container-based applications, we are delighted that we can now offer our solutions as commercial Kubernetes application more simply to customers through the GCP Marketplace commercial Kubernetes application option. GCP Marketplace helps us reach GCP customers, and the one-click deployment of our applications to Google Kubernetes Engine makes it easier for enterprises to use our solution. We are also excited about GCP’s commitment to enterprise agility by allowing our solution to be deployed on-premises, letting us reach enterprises where they are today."
- Upesh Patel, VP Business Development, Aqua Security

“Couchbase is excited to see GCP Marketplace continue the legacy of GCP by bringing new technologies to market. We've seen GCP Marketplace as a key part of our strategy in reaching customers, and the new commercial Kubernetes application option differentiates us as innovators for both prospects and customers."
-Matt McDonough, VP of Business Development, Couchbase

"With the support for commercial Kubernetes applications, GCP Marketplace allows us to reach a wider range of customers looking to deploy our graph database both to Google Kubernetes Engine and hybrid environments. We're excited to announce our new offering on GCP Marketplace as a testament to both Neo4j and Google's innovation in integrations to Kubernetes."
- David Allen, Partner Solution Architect, Neo4j

Popular open-source Kubernetes apps available now

In addition to our new commercial offerings, GCP Marketplace already features popular open-source projects that are ready to deploy into Kubernetes. These apps are packaged and maintained by Google Cloud and implement best practices for running on Kubernetes Engine and GCP. Each app includes clustered images and documented upgrade steps, so it’s ready to run in production.

One-stop shopping on GCP Marketplace

As you may have noticed, Google Cloud Launcher has been renamed to GCP Marketplace, a more intuitive name for the place to discover the latest partner and open source solutions. Like Kubernetes apps, we test and vet all solutions available through the GCP Marketplace, which include virtual machines, managed services, data sets, APIs, SaaS, and more. In most instances, we also recommend Marketplace solutions for your projects.
With GCP Marketplace, you can verify that a solution will work for your environment with free trials from select partners. You can also combine those free trials with our $300 sign-up credit. Once you’re up and running, GCP Marketplace supports existing relationships between you and your partners with private pricing. Private pricing is currently available for managed services, and support for more solution types will be rolling out in the coming months.

Get started today

We’re excited to bring support for Kubernetes apps to you and our partners, featuring the extensibility of Kubernetes, commercial solutions, usage-based pricing, and discoverability on the newly revamped GCP Marketplace.
If you are a partner and want to learn more about selling your solution on GCP Marketplace, please visit our sign-up page.

Top storage and database sessions to check out at Next 2018

Whatever your particular area of cloud interest, there will be a lot to learn at Google Cloud Next ‘18 (July 24-26 in San Francisco). When it comes to cloud storage and databases, you’ll find useful sessions that can help you better understand your options as you’re building the cloud infrastructure that will work best for your organization.

Here, we’ve chosen five not-to-miss sessions, where you’ll learn tips on migrating data to the cloud, understand types of cloud storage workloads and get a closer look at which database is best for storing and analyzing your company’s data. Wherever you are in your cloud journey, there’s likely a session you can use.

Top cloud storage sessions


First up, our top picks for those of you delving into cloud storage.

From Blobs to Tables, Where to Store Your Data
Speakers: Dave Nettleton, Robert Saxby
What’s the best way to store all the data you’re creating and moving to the cloud? The answer depends on the industry, apps and users you’re supporting. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers many options for storing your data. The choices range from Cloud Storage (multi-regional, regional, nearline, coldline) through Persistent Disk to various database services (Cloud Datastore, Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner) and data warehousing (BigQuery). In this session, you’ll learn about the products along with common application patterns that use data storage.

 Why attend: With much to consider and many options available, this session is a great opportunity to examine which storage option fits your workloads.

Caching Made Easy, with Cloud Memorystore and Redis
Speaker: Gopal Ashok
In-memory database Redis has plenty of developer fans: It’s high-performance and highly available, making it an excellent choice for caching operations. Cloud Memorystore now includes a managed Redis service. In this session, you’ll hear about its new features. You’ll also learn how you can easily migrate applications using Redis to Cloud Memorystore with minimal changes.
Why attend: Are you building an application that needs sub-millisecond response? GCP provides fully managed service for the popular Redis in-memory datastore.

Google Cloud Storage - Best Practices for Storage Classes, Reliability, Performance and Scalability
Speakers: Geoff Noer, Michael Yu
Learn about common Google Cloud Storage workloads, such as content storage and serving, analytics/ML and data protection. Understand how to choose the best storage class, depending on what kind of data you have and what kind of workload you're supporting. You’ll also learn more about Multi-Regional, Regional, Nearline and Coldline storage.
Why attend: You’ll learn about ways to optimize Cloud Storage to the unique requirements of different storage use cases.

Top database sessions


Here are our top picks for database sessions to explore at Next ‘18.

Optimizing Applications, Schemas, and Query Design on Cloud Spanner
Speaker: Robert Kubis
Cloud Spanner was designed specifically for cloud infrastructure and scales easily to allow for efficient cloud growth. In this session, you’ll learn Cloud Spanner best practices, strategies for optimizing applications and workloads, and ways to improve performance and scalability. Through live demos, you’ll see real-time speed-ups of transactions, queries and overall performance. Additionally, this talk explores techniques for monitoring Cloud Spanner to identify performance bottlenecks. Come learn how to cut costs and maximize performance with Cloud Spanner.
Why attend: Cloud Spanner is a powerful product, but many users do not maximize its benefits. You’ll get an inside look at this session at getting the best performance and efficiency results out of this type of cloud database.

Optimizing performance on Cloud SQL for MySQL
Speakers: Stanley Feng, Theodore Tso, Brett Hesterberg
Database performance tuning can be challenging and time-consuming. In this session, you’ll get a look at the performance tuning our team has conducted in the last year to considerably improve Cloud SQL for MySQL. We’ll also highlight useful changes to the Linux kernel, EXT4 filesystem and Google's Persistent Disk storage layer to improve write performance. You'll come away knowing more about MySQL performance tuning, an underused EXT4 feature called “bigalloc” and how to let Cloud SQL handle mundane, yet necessary, tasks so you can focus on developing your next great app.
Why attend: When GCP provides fully managed services for databases, we put lots of innovations under the hood, so that your database runs in the most optimal way. Come and learn about Google’s secret sauce that lets you optimize Cloud SQL performance.

Check out the full list of Next sessions, and join your peers at the show by registering here.

Cloud Spanner adds import/export functionality to ease data movement

By Deepti Srivastava, Product Manager, Cloud Spanner

We launched Cloud Spanner to general availability last year, and many of you shared in our excitement: You explored it, started proof-of-concept trials, and deployed apps. Perhaps most importantly, you gave us feedback along the way. We heard you, and we got to work. Today, we’re happy to announce we’ve launched one of your most commonly requested features: importing and exporting data.

Import/export using Avro

You asked for easier ways to move data. You’ve got it. You can now import and export data easily in the Cloud Spanner Console:
  • Export any Cloud Spanner database into a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket.
  • Import files from a GCS bucket into a new Cloud Spanner database.
These database exports and imports use Apache Avro files, transferred with our recently released Apache Beam-based Cloud Dataflow connector.

Adding imports and exports opens up even more possibilities for your Cloud Spanner data, including:
  • Disaster recovery: Export your database at any time and store it in a GCS location of your choice as a backup, which can be imported into a new Cloud Spanner database to restore data.
  • Testing: Export a database and then import it into Cloud Spanner as a dev/test database to use for integration tests or other experiments.
  • Moving databases: Export a database and import it back into Cloud Spanner in a new/different instance with the console’s simple, push-button functionality.
  • Ingest for analytics: Use database exports to ingest your operational data to other services such as BigQuery, for analytics. BigQuery can automatically ingest data in Avro format from a GCS bucket, which means it will become easier for you to run analytics on your operational data.
Ready to try it out? See our documentation on how to import and export data. Learn more about Cloud Spanner here, and get started with a free trial. For technical support and sales, please contact us.

We're excited to see the ways that Cloud Spanner—making application development more efficient, simplifying database administration and management, and providing the benefits of both relational and scale-out, non-relational databases—will continue to help you ship better apps, faster.