Tag Archives: google cloud

Strengthen your cloud skills with Google Cloud training

Posted by Yuri Grinshteyn, Site Reliability Engineer

We know many of you are looking for ways to keep learning and connecting with other developers virtually right now, and we want to help. Below you can check out our top on-demand Google Cloud training webinars and resources where you can take hands-on labs and learn, at no charge, more about everything from the basics of Google Cloud to more advanced topics like building robust cloud architecture.

Starting with the basics

You can tune in from May 19-20 to watch instructors in Cloud OnBoard break down what it takes to migrate to Google Cloud and explain the basics of the Google Kubernetes Engine, a managed, production-ready environment for running containerized applications. After the sessions, you’ll have a chance to test what you’ve learned by participating in hands-on labs and challenges with the Cloud Hero Online Challenge. Missed the live recording on May 19-20? No worries! You can view it on-demand starting May 21 and still participate in hands-on labs.

Gaining more hands-on experience and a deeper understanding of Google Cloud products

Ready to gain more hands-on cloud experience and deeper product knowledge? We have webinars where Googlers will walk you through more hands-on labs on Qwiklabs and share product tips and tricks.

If you’re interested in big data and machine learning, you can do a lab I recorded in the Baseline: Data, ML, AI webinar to get more experience using tools like Big Query, Cloud Speech API, and Cloud ML Engine. You can also learn how to use BigQuery and other Google tools to draw insights and visualize data from the public health data sets Google released to support the COVID-19 research process in our Data science for public health: Working with public COVID-19 datasets webinar.

Getting role-based training and preparing for certification

For those of you who are already cloud professionals, our top webinars this year so far are Professional Cloud DevOps and Professional Cloud Architect.

You can learn how to improve the way you build software delivery pipelines, deploy and monitor services, and manage incidents in the DevOps webinar. The Cloud Architect webinar will discuss how to ensure you’re designing, developing, and managing effective solutions.

Both webinars will also help prepare you to earn Google Cloud certifications. If you’d like to learn more about the certification program, you can attend our on-demand webinar Why Certify? Everything to know about Google Cloud Certification.

More no-cost resources to check out

We’re also offering our extensive catalog of Google Cloud on-demand training courses on Pluralsight and Qwiklabs at no cost when you sign up by May 31, 20201. You can learn how to prototype an app, build prediction models, and more—at your own pace by registering here.

We hope these webinars and resources help you continue learning new skills and stay connected with the broader Google developer community.

1. Your 30-days access to these Google Cloud training courses at no cost starts when you enroll for your courses. These offers are valid until May 31, 2020. After your 30-days, you will incur charges on Pluralsight; for Qwiklabs, you will need to purchase credits to continue taking labs.

Google Meet is here to host your video meetings, for free

When I joined Google last year to lead G Suite, I couldn’t have imagined how the world was about to change. But in a few short months, working together took on a whole new meaning, and meetings became about so much more than getting things done. From doctor check-up meetings, to meetings with financial advisors, to study meetings, workout meetings, and birthday meetings. They may not look or feel like traditional meetings, but they’re the most important meetings happening right now.

That’s why we’ve re-engineered Google Meet, originally built for secure business meetings, to make it free and available to all. Since making Meet's advanced features free for all G Suite and G Suite for Education users in March, we've seen daily usage grow by 30x, with Meet hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings daily. Last month, we were adding roughly 3 million new users every day. That's why we're expanding the offering to more people around the world.

Now that the rollout we announced two weeks ago is complete, anyone with an email address can sign up and get started at meet.google.com, for free. And to make meetings even more accessible and helpful, in the coming days you’ll also be able to use Meet directly in Gmail.

  • Gmail 1 Meet in Gmail highlight.png
  • [Gmail]-2.-Start-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif
  • [Gmail]-3-Join-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif

Click “Start a meeting" and a new window opens with a unique, secure meeting for you to join and then share with others. You can also easily join meetings shared with you by entering a meeting code. And you can plan video meetings and invite others directly from Google Calendar.

Because video meetings have never been more important, we’ve been fast-tracking the most requested features for Meet, and are now making them available to all. Anyone can use Meet’s simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view—all built on Google’s secure, reliable global infrastructure. Speaking from my own experience, the new features in Meet are already making our team (and my family) meetings better. We love how tiled view makes us feel more connected—and the occasional surprise visits from kids and family pets! 

And we’re continuing to look for ways to make Google Meet more accessible and useful. For example, we know video meetings can be challenging to follow for those with hearing loss, which is why we made sure AI-powered automatic live captioning was available to everyone. One of the most meaningful emails I’ve received was from a parent whose child was able to feel more included thanks to live captioning. Google AI has also made it possible to provide helpful features like low-light mode, which can automatically adjust your video to make you more visible to others.

Meet is available for free for everyone at meet.google.com and on iOS or Android. If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), you can sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once). Or look for Meet right in Gmail.  

We hope Meet will help you connect to all your important meetings—from work meetings, to graduation meetings, to wedding meetings, and everything in between.

Cloud Covered: What was new with Google Cloud in April

April brought many adaptations to the new reality of working from home and socially distancing. At Google Cloud, we kept our focus on helping our customers navigate the many impacts of COVID-19 by meeting and connecting securely and virtually.

Try Google Meet and its new features, now free.
Last month, we announced that Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, is now free for everyone. Meet’s availability will be gradually expanding over the next few weeks, and can be used by anyone with an email address. Plus, Meet has some new features like an expanded tiled layout, background noise cancellation, and options to present with higher audio quality. G Suite customers can use Meet’s advanced features, like meetings of up to 250 participants, until Sept. 30.

Even better, Meet has a secure foundation.
In an almost-entirely-virtual world, it’s important to make sure that online meetings and other interactions are secure. Our approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit and our array of safety measures are continuously updated to prevent abuse. Learn more. 

Working securely includes meetings, devices, emails, and more.
To help enterprises adjust to new numbers of remote workers securely, businesses can now use BeyondCorp Remote Access. This is something that’s been used within Google for almost ten years, and enterprises can now address the issue of remote access to internal web apps. It’s based in the cloud, so it’s easy to get started, and lets a company’s employees and contractors use the company’s web applications on their devices, without needing to set up a virtual private network (VPN). In addition, you can take a look here at how our machine learning models used by Gmail to detect threats continue to evolve to keep up with new COVID-19-related threats.

The new Las Vegas region helps power the cloud.
Google Cloud’s newest region in Las Vegas opened up last month, providing cloud computing capacity so that companies can better serve users in the Las Vegas region. Companies located near Las Vegas can get faster access to their data than if data was stored farther away. Other cloud regions in western U.S. include Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Oregon.

Learn new things without leaving the house.
All this month, you can explore free cloud learning resources from Qwiklabs and Pluralsight. You’ll find cloud basics and courses in on-demand skill areas, like data analytics, machine learning, and Kubernetes. The Google Cloud Essentials lab offers an introductory tour of Google Cloud and explanations of basic cloud concepts. 

That’s a wrap for April. Stay well and keep up to date on the Cloud Blog.

Cloud Covered: What was new with Google Cloud in April

April brought many adaptations to the new reality of working from home and socially distancing. At Google Cloud, we kept our focus on helping our customers navigate the many impacts of COVID-19 by meeting and connecting securely and virtually.

Try Google Meet and its new features, now free.
Last month, we announced that Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, is now free for everyone. Meet’s availability will be gradually expanding over the next few weeks, and can be used by anyone with an email address. Plus, Meet has some new features like an expanded tiled layout, background noise cancellation, and options to present with higher audio quality. G Suite customers can use Meet’s advanced features, like meetings of up to 250 participants, until Sept. 30.

Even better, Meet has a secure foundation.
In an almost-entirely-virtual world, it’s important to make sure that online meetings and other interactions are secure. Our approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit and our array of safety measures are continuously updated to prevent abuse. Learn more. 

Working securely includes meetings, devices, emails, and more.
To help enterprises adjust to new numbers of remote workers securely, businesses can now use BeyondCorp Remote Access. This is something that’s been used within Google for almost ten years, and enterprises can now address the issue of remote access to internal web apps. It’s based in the cloud, so it’s easy to get started, and lets a company’s employees and contractors use the company’s web applications on their devices, without needing to set up a virtual private network (VPN). In addition, you can take a look here at how our machine learning models used by Gmail to detect threats continue to evolve to keep up with new COVID-19-related threats.

The new Las Vegas region helps power the cloud.
Google Cloud’s newest region in Las Vegas opened up last month, providing cloud computing capacity so that companies can better serve users in the Las Vegas region. Companies located near Las Vegas can get faster access to their data than if data was stored farther away. Other cloud regions in western U.S. include Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Oregon.

Learn new things without leaving the house.
All this month, you can explore free cloud learning resources from Qwiklabs and Pluralsight. You’ll find cloud basics and courses in on-demand skill areas, like data analytics, machine learning, and Kubernetes. The Google Cloud Essentials lab offers an introductory tour of Google Cloud and explanations of basic cloud concepts. 

That’s a wrap for April. Stay well and keep up to date on the Cloud Blog.

Inviting students to participate in Code to Learn competition 2020

COVID has had a significant impact on how students engage with hands-on learning and poses additional responsibilities for parents and teachers to engage their students in meaningful learning experiences. 


Today,  we are launching the seventh edition of the Code to Learn competition as a means to immerse students in creative and computational thinking, along with building their skills in programming.


Students from Class 5 to 12 from any school in India can register through their parents or teachers to show their coding genius using exciting tools like Scratch, App Inventor and Google AutoML to build games, animation, android apps and/or their own machine learning applications; without writing even a single line of code!


Over the years, Computer Science and Programming has evolved and become one of the strongest means of solving real-life problems. The Code to Learn competition provides a platform for kids to learn the basics of coding and build a stronger foundation in Computer Science. In a fun and engaging way,  we aim to inspire students to use technology to solve problems around them.


In line with this objective, we have been running the Code to Learn competition successfully for school students in India for the last six years. The program has also been adopted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India under the Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan.  


Artificial Intelligence has become a strong enabler to solve many challenging problems of society. Google has put AI to use to solve some of the most pressing issues, from helping predict early blindness to giving timely updates on floods in India. We have a special AI track for class 9 -12 students where they use Google’s existing Machine Learning models to create projects with a problem statement and a data set of their choice. Students define a problem and select any open dataset or create their own (images or text) and train a pre-trained machine learning model to create their own Machine Learning application using Google Cloud AutoML.


Code to Learn concluded successfully in 2019 and witnessed an overwhelming participation of students from across the country with innovative and exciting projects. We saw powerful applications ranging from fun games to applications that help farmers with timely information. In the Artificial Intelligence theme, we received excellent projects where students defined and tried to solve various societal problems like early detection of breast cancer, predicting learning disabilities through images of handwriting and segregating recyclable plastic waste using Computer Vision models.
The competition registrations are now open and parents, teachers or legal guardians can register on behalf of the student on the competition website (g.co/codetolearn). Students from across India can submit their projects by 31st July, 2020. We also have online resources available on our website to learn Scratch, AppInventor and Google Cloud AutoML to get started.


We are very excited about this year's competition, and are looking forward to seeing the innovation and creativity that students will present to us via their projects! For more details, visit our website: g.co/codetolearn.


Code to Learn is co-organized by Google Cloud, ACM India, CS Pathshala, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), IIIT Bangalore. ACM is the worldwide society for scientific and educational computing with an aim to advance Computer Science both as a science (through CS Pathshala) and as a profession. IISc and IIIT Bangalore are research-oriented universities based in Bangalore.


Posted by Divy Thakkar, Research and Education Program Manager, and Ashwani Sharma, Head of Research Operations and University Relations, India, AU/NZ and SEA 

Connecting and collaborating with Google Meet & G Suite

In this unprecedented time in history, we’ve seen millions of businesses across India adapt to the new normal of working remotely and learning from home. It is human nature to connect, and video conferencing plays a pivotal role here. 
We saw more than 3 million new users connecting on Google Meet every day as of this month, spending over 3 billion minutes a day together. That’s a massive 30x jump from the numbers we saw earlier in January. And today, we’re making our premium video conferencing tool, Google Meet free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. 
Stay home, stay safe, stay connected 
Starting May, anyone with an email address can create a Google Account and use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone — whether it’s a virtual dance class, a weekly book club, neighborhood meetings, or any other reason to connect with your community, friends, and family. 
Until today, Google Meet was only available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Now, it is freely available on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. And if you use Google Calendar, you can easily start or join from there too. 
We’re also rolling out new features including tiled layout for larger calls, the option to present a Chrome tab (instead of just presenting their window or entire screen), low-light mode and eventually noise cancellation. 
Secure by design
Meet is designed, built and operated to be secure at scale — for everyone. We employ a vast array of safe-by-default measures to keep your meetings safe without doing a thing, everytime. We don't require or ask for any plugins to be installed, reducing the amount of software users and businesses need to patch with security updates on their machines. 
We also ensure that only authorised users can use and access Meet services by using a 2-Step Verification option for account — making them secure and convenient. Google Meet users can enroll their accounts in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking, and is specifically designed for the highest-risk accounts.
Helping businesses collaborate with G Suite
We’re not just connecting over video. We’ve also seen huge spikes in the use of our entire G Suite offering as more people create, share, and connect together while working remotely. Earlier this year we marked another major milestone — surpassing six million paying businesses and organisations who use G Suite. 
“Employees are able to access every business application via Google Cloud Platform and continue to communicate as usual not only between themselves but also with customers, vendors and other stakeholders with G Suite. The Google Cloud team is always accessible and supportive to help us ease things. The use of collaborative tools has facilitated important human contact and responsiveness in an unprecedented time of remote work,” said V M Samir, Group CIO, Rustomjee, a leading real estate company in Mumbai.
Mathan Babu Kasilingam, CISO of National Payments Corporation of India, an umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in India says, “Google Meet has played a good role in helping our teams stay connected. It’s great to see that it is possible to work across various remote locations and manage to carry on business as usual through video conferencing.” 
Here is what TR Chadha & Co, one of India’s prominent chartered accountancy firms, had to say. “G Suite has been a lifeline for the teams for the past month since we have transitioned to a work from home set-up due to the pandemic. With G Suite, our teams can securely log-in from any device to work wherever they are at any time,” said Gautam Kumar, IT Manager, TR Chadha.
Securely stay connected and productive not just today but also in the future
We’re carefully rolling out Meet incrementally over the coming weeks to ensure we can provide everyone with the reliability and security they expect from Google. This means you might not be able to create meetings right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.
Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we will not enforce this time limit until after September 30.  Creating a trusted meeting space is important, so being mindful when sharing meeting links in public forums can help create a safe experience for all attendees. For more tips on how to use Meet securely and effectively, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, Google Cloud India

Google Meet premium video conferencing—free for everyone

Technology that connects us while we're apart helps keep us safe and productive. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the power of video meetings bring us together—whether we’re working with teammates, talking to healthcare professionals, sharing with loved ones, or learning from home. 

Today, we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’veaccelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view. 

It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

MeetInGmail-Telehealth-1779x1095.jpg

Meet operates on a secure foundation, keeping users safe, data secure, and information private—including between patients and caregivers.

Video meetings built on a secure foundation

Meet is designed, built and operated to be secure at scale. Since January, we’ve seen Meet’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million. With this growth comes great responsibility. Privacy and security are paramount, no matter if it’s a doctor sharing confidential health information with a patient, a financial advisor hosting a client meeting, or people virtually connecting with each other for graduations, holidays and happy hours.

Our approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures:

  • We provide a strong set of host controls such as the ability to admit or deny entry to a meeting, and mute or remove participants, if needed. 

  • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. 

  • Meet meeting codes are complex by default and therefore resilient to brute-force “guessing.”

  • Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit, and all recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted in transit and at rest.

  • We don’t require plugins to use Meet on the web. It works entirely in Chrome and other modern browsers, so it’s less vulnerable to security threats.

  • On mobile, we have dedicated Google Meet apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

  • Meet users can enroll their account in Google’s Advanced Protection Program—our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking.

  • Google Cloud undergoes regular rigorous security and privacy audits for all its services. Our global compliance certifications can help support regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education. 

  • Your Meet data is not used for advertising, and we don't sell your data to third parties.

We operate a highly secure and resilient private network that encircles the globe and connects our data centers to each other—ensuring that your data stays safe. Trust is built on transparency and we publish the locations of all our data centers. You can learn more about how Meet keeps your video meetings safe in this post.

Free Google Meet accounts for individuals

You can use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone—for a virtual yoga class, weekly book club, neighborhood meeting, or happy hour with friends. Until now, Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. And if you use Google Calendar, you’ll be able to easily start or join from there, too.
Google Meet - Create-New-Meeting_gb.gif

Use your existing Google Account to start a secure meeting in Google Meet

If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once).

Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30. Creating a trusted meeting space is important, and being mindful when sharing meeting links in public forums can help create a safe experience for all attendees. For more tips on how to use Meet securely and effectively, visit our Help Center. 

Google Meet for groups and teams

Groups within an organization can also use Meet to create video meetings that help coworkers connect one-on-one, collaborate as a team, and more. For organizations that aren’t already G Suite customers, today we’re announcing G Suite Essentials. G Suite Essentials is perfect for teams that need access to Meet’s more advanced features, such as dial-in phone numbers, larger meetings, and meeting recording. G Suite Essentials also includes Google Drive for easy and secure access to all of a team’s content, and Docs, Sheets and Slides for content creation and real-time collaboration. 

Through Sept. 30, we’re providing G Suite Essentials and all of these advanced features free of charge. If you’re interested in G Suite Essentials, complete this form to get in touch with our sales team. 

Google Meet for businesses and organizations

Whether it’s hospitals supporting patients via telehealth, banks working with loan applicants, retailers assisting customers remotely, or manufacturers interacting safely with warehouse technicians, businesses across every industry are using Meet to stay connected. If you’re one of the 6 million companies and organizations that use G Suite to power remote productivity, you already have access to Meet. Admins simply need to enable Meet by following instructions outlined on our Help Center. In the spirit of being helpful during this time, we’re providing three ways for new and current enterprise customers to access Meet through Sept. 30: 

  • Free access to Meet’s advanced features for all G Suite customers, such as the ability to live stream for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain.

  • Free additional Meet licenses for existing G Suite customers without any amendments to their current contract.

  • Free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers. 

Enterprises can get in touch with our sales team to learn more.
Meet - Live captions.jpg

Google Meet includes live captions powered by Google’s speech recognition technology

Google Meet in schools and higher-ed institutions

Many schools and colleges today use Meet to power secure virtual classes, PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, tutoring, and even school socials. Meet is included in G Suite for Education, which serves more than 120 million students and teachers globally. If your school already uses G Suite for Education, your administrator can enable Meet at no additional cost. If your school doesn’t use G Suite for Education, you can sign up here. To access resources for distance learning, visit Teach from Home.

Our hope is that by making Meet and G Suite more readily available for all, it will be easier to securely stay connected and productive—now and in the future.

Google Meet premium video conferencing—free for everyone

Technology that connects us while we're apart helps keep us safe and productive. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the power of video meetings bring us together—whether we’re working with teammates, talking to healthcare professionals, sharing with loved ones, or learning from home. 

Today, we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’veaccelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view. 

It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

MeetInGmail-Telehealth-1779x1095.jpg

Meet operates on a secure foundation, keeping users safe, data secure, and information private—including between patients and caregivers.

Video meetings built on a secure foundation

Meet is designed, built and operated to be secure at scale. Since January, we’ve seen Meet’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million. With this growth comes great responsibility. Privacy and security are paramount, no matter if it’s a doctor sharing confidential health information with a patient, a financial advisor hosting a client meeting, or people virtually connecting with each other for graduations, holidays and happy hours.

Our approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures:

  • We provide a strong set of host controls such as the ability to admit or deny entry to a meeting, and mute or remove participants, if needed. 

  • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. 

  • Meet meeting codes are complex by default and therefore resilient to brute-force “guessing.”

  • Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit, and all recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted in transit and at rest.

  • We don’t require plugins to use Meet on the web. It works entirely in Chrome and other modern browsers, so it’s less vulnerable to security threats.

  • On mobile, we have dedicated Google Meet apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

  • Meet users can enroll their account in Google’s Advanced Protection Program—our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking.

  • Google Cloud undergoes regular rigorous security and privacy audits for all its services. Our global compliance certifications can help support regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education. 

  • Your Meet data is not used for advertising, and we don't sell your data to third parties.

We operate a highly secure and resilient private network that encircles the globe and connects our data centers to each other—ensuring that your data stays safe. Trust is built on transparency and we publish the locations of all our data centers. You can learn more about how Meet keeps your video meetings safe in this post.

Free Google Meet accounts for individuals

You can use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone—for a virtual yoga class, weekly book club, neighborhood meeting, or happy hour with friends. Until now, Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. And if you use Google Calendar, you’ll be able to easily start or join from there, too.
Google Meet - Create-New-Meeting_gb.gif

Use your existing Google Account to start a secure meeting in Google Meet

If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once).

Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30. Creating a trusted meeting space is important, and being mindful when sharing meeting links in public forums can help create a safe experience for all attendees. For more tips on how to use Meet securely and effectively, visit our Help Center. 

Google Meet for groups and teams

Groups within an organization can also use Meet to create video meetings that help coworkers connect one-on-one, collaborate as a team, and more. For organizations that aren’t already G Suite customers, today we’re announcing G Suite Essentials. G Suite Essentials is perfect for teams that need access to Meet’s more advanced features, such as dial-in phone numbers, larger meetings, and meeting recording. G Suite Essentials also includes Google Drive for easy and secure access to all of a team’s content, and Docs, Sheets and Slides for content creation and real-time collaboration. 

Through Sept. 30, we’re providing G Suite Essentials and all of these advanced features free of charge. If you’re interested in G Suite Essentials, complete this form to get in touch with our sales team. 

Google Meet for businesses and organizations

Whether it’s hospitals supporting patients via telehealth, banks working with loan applicants, retailers assisting customers remotely, or manufacturers interacting safely with warehouse technicians, businesses across every industry are using Meet to stay connected. If you’re one of the 6 million companies and organizations that use G Suite to power remote productivity, you already have access to Meet. Admins simply need to enable Meet by following instructions outlined on our Help Center. In the spirit of being helpful during this time, we’re providing three ways for new and current enterprise customers to access Meet through Sept. 30: 

  • Free access to Meet’s advanced features for all G Suite customers, such as the ability to live stream for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain.

  • Free additional Meet licenses for existing G Suite customers without any amendments to their current contract.

  • Free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers. 

Enterprises can get in touch with our sales team to learn more.
Meet - Live captions.jpg

Google Meet includes live captions powered by Google’s speech recognition technology

Google Meet in schools and higher-ed institutions

Many schools and colleges today use Meet to power secure virtual classes, PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, tutoring, and even school socials. Meet is included in G Suite for Education, which serves more than 120 million students and teachers globally. If your school already uses G Suite for Education, your administrator can enable Meet at no additional cost. If your school doesn’t use G Suite for Education, you can sign up here. To access resources for distance learning, visit Teach from Home.

Our hope is that by making Meet and G Suite more readily available for all, it will be easier to securely stay connected and productive—now and in the future.

Automate & Extend with Apps Script (Google Cloud for Student Developers)

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud


In the previous episode of our new Google Cloud for Student Developers video series, we introduced G Suite REST APIs, showing how to enhance your applications by integrating with Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. However, not all developers prefer the lower-level style of programming requiring the use of HTTP, OAuth2, and processing the request-response cycle of API usage. Building apps that access Google technologies is open to everyone at any level, not just advanced software engineers.

Enhancing career readiness of non-engineering majors helps make our services more inclusive and helps democratize API functionality to a broader audience. For the budding data scientist, business analyst, DevOps staff, or other technical professionals who don't code every day as part of their profession, Google Apps Script was made just for you. Rather than thinking about development stacks, HTTP, or authorization, you access Google APIs with objects.

This video blends a standard "Hello World" example with various use cases where Apps Script shines, including cases of automation, add-ons that extend the functionality of G Suite editors like Docs, Sheets, and Slides, accessing other Google or online services, and custom functions for Google Sheets—the ability to add new spreadsheet functions.

One featured example demonstrates the power to reach multiple Google technologies in an expressive way: lots of work, not much code. What may surprise readers is that this entire app, written by a colleague years ago, is comprised of just 4 lines of code: 

function sendMap() {
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  var address = sheet.getRange('A1').getValue();
  var map = Maps.newStaticMap().addMarker(address);
  GmailApp.sendEmail('[email protected]',
     'Map', 'See below.', {attachments:[map]});
}

Apps Script shields its users from the complexities of authorization and "API service endpoints." Developers only need an object to interface with a service; in this case, SpreadsheetApp to access Google Sheets, and similarly, Maps for Google Maps plus GmailApp for Gmail. Viewers can build this sample line-by-line with its corresponding codelab (a self-paced, hands-on tutorial). This example helps student (and professional) developers...

  1. Build something useful that can be extended into much more
  2. Learn how to accomplish several tasks without a lot of code
  3. Imagine what else is possible with G Suite developer tools

For further exploration, check out this video as well as this one which introduces Apps Script and presents the same code sample with more details. (Note the second video emails the map's link, but the app has been updated to attach it instead; the code has been updated everywhere else.) You may also access the code at its open source repository. If that's not enough, learn about other ways you can use Apps Script from its video library. Finally, stay tuned for the next pair of episodes which will cover full sample apps, one with G Suite REST APIs, and another with Apps Script.

We look forward to seeing what you build with Google Cloud.

Cloud Covered: Google Cloud in March

This past month brought dramatic changes to our daily routines as a result of COVID-19. In a time of social distancing, technology helped fill many of the gaps in our lives. So we explored how cloud technology is helping, and how it’s keeping up with all of our online needs. 

We worked at home, together.
As work-from-home situations became a necessity globally in March, technology like video conferencing and live streaming became even more essential at work and school—and with friends. So we announced free access to our advanced Meet capabilities to G Suite and G Suite for Education customers, including room for up to 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive.

IT administrators support those newly at-home workers.
Lots of people are working from home now for the first time. This means that networks are strained with more people accessing their email and internet from home, as well as taking part in video conferences. With this in mind, the G Suite Meet team shared some best practices for IT teams helping their company’s employees navigate these new challenges. For example, an IT administrator may need to provide support for a corporate device remotely, as well as communicate effectively and help provide a good experience. 

Women’s History Month brought inspiration.
We sat down with some Cloud Googlers in March to celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, and talked about technology, identity, and careers. Komal Singh, author of kids’ book Ara the Star Engineer, talked about how she decided to write her first book, and why books are the best way to reach kids. And three of Google Cloud’s customer engineers shared their paths to working in people-centered technology roles, and offered advice to those newer to the workforce. One takeaway: be tenacious, and pursue what you want until you get it. 

Keeping technology running in a time of uncertainty.
Making sure Google Cloud customers can run their businesses smoothly every day involves lots of technical experts to run some very sophisticated systems. That’s true even when traffic spikes or there are unexpected events. Take a look at how we keep systems running smoothly at Google, including established principles around what to do in an emergency, longstanding disaster recovery testing, Google-owned hardware, and built-in reserve capacity to ensure everyone gets the information they need without slow internet. 

Data to help research COVID-19 became freely available.
Data plays a huge role in public health, and access to data and tools to analyze all that data are essential for researchers, data scientists, and analysts responding to COVID-19. There’s now a hosted repository of related public datasets available to explore and analyze for free from the Google Cloud Console. These include the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, Global Health Data from the World Bank, and more. Data scientists can use Google Cloud to analyze that data, cross-cut it with other data, and make predictions using machine learning.

That’s a wrap for March.