Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Announcing the 2021 Google Cloud Customer Award Winners in Government
We’re thrilled to celebrate this year’s seven state, local and federal government winners of the Google Cloud Customer Awards. The second annual Google Cloud Customer Awards program recognizes organizations who have demonstrated inspirational and meaningful transformation with the use of Google Cloud products and solutions. Google experts from around the world judged and scored an unprecedented […]

GCP – GKE release channels: Balancing innovation and speed of change, now with more granular controls
If you run your business on Kubernetes, you know how important it is to perform regular patching and upgrades to maintain a healthy environment. At Google Cloud, we automatically upgrade the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster control plane, and if you enable node auto-upgrade, we also automatically upgrade and patch your cluster nodes. Moreover, you […]

GCP – Pride Month: Q&A with Beepboop founders about more creative, effective approaches to learning a new language
June is Pride Month—a time for us to come together to bring visibility and belonging, and to celebrate the diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and identities of the LGBTQ+ community. Over the next few weeks, Lindsey Scrase, Managing Director, Global SMB and Startups at Google Cloud, will showcase conversations with startups led by LGBTQ+ founders […]

GCP – Package management for Debian/Ubuntu operating systems on Google Cloud
Most customers are operating in a restrictive environment with limited egress connectivity to the Internet. This results in customers investing in third-party tools such as Jfrog Artifactory, Nexus, etc. to store operating system packages and libraries. There is a pressing need to download these dependencies without going to the internet and also avoid investing in […]

GCP – Startup Highnote builds end-to-end embedded finance platform on Google Cloud
The ability to quickly introduce and evolve payment options for products or services is essential for businesses, as nearly50% of consumers who can’t use a preferred payment method abandon their purchase. At the same time, gift cards, branded credit cards and rewards programs are critical tools that companies rely on to build more loyal and […]

AWS – Easily customize your notifications while using Amazon Lookout for Metrics
We are excited to announce that you can now add filters to alerts and also edit existing alerts while using Amazon Lookout for Metrics. With this launch you can now add filters to your alerts configuration to only get notifications for anomalies that matter the most to you. You can also simply modify existing alerts […]

GCP – Ciao, Milano! New cloud region in Milan now open
Today, we are excited to celebrate the opening of our new Google Cloud region in Milan, in partnership with TIM. You can now store data and leverage fast, reliable, and secure cloud services to build and deliver highly-available, low-latency applications for your customers — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Fantastico, no? The […]

GCP – Speed up model inference with Vertex AI Predictions’ optimized TensorFlow runtime
From product recommendations, to fraud detection, to route optimization, low latency predictions are vital for numerous machine learning tasks. That’s why we’re excited to announce a public preview for a new runtime that optimizes serving TensorFlow models on the Vertex AI Prediction service. This optimized TensorFlow runtime leverages technologies and model optimization techniques that are […]

AWS – AWS Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs now supports IAM condition keys to manage retention rules
You can now use Identity and Access Management (IAM) condition keys to specify which resource types are permitted in the retention rules created for Recycle Bin. With Recycle Bin, you can retain deleted EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs for a period of time so that you can recover them in the event of an accidental […]
AWS – Amazon EC2 VT1 now supports the AMD-Xilinx Video SDK 2.0 that enables GStreamer and 10-bit video transcoding
We are excited to announce that the Amazon EC2 VT1 instances now support the AMD-Xilinx Video SDK 2.0, bringing support for Gstreamer, 10-bit HDR video, and dynamic encoder parameters. In addition to new features, this new version offers improved visual quality for 4k video, support for a newer version of FFmpeg (4.4), expanded OS/kernel support, […]