Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – How Spanner and BigQuery work together to handle transactional and analytical workloads
As businesses scale to meet the demands of their customers, so do their need for efficient products to collect, manage and analyze data to meet their business goals. Whether you are building a multi-player game or a global e-commerce platform, it’s critical to ensure that data can be stored and queried at scale with strong […]

GCP – Powering Nest’s Camera Cloud with Cloud Spanner
When we, the Nest team, set out to build the next generation platform to power millions of Nest cameras, it was essential to fulfill our video storage needs at large scale with reliability at the forefront. To accomplish this, we needed to choose the right database. This article goes into details about what our requirements […]

GCP – Maximize your Cloud Spanner savings with new committed use discounts
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database that offers near unlimited scale, strong consistency, and industry leading high availability of up to 99.999%. Spanner powers applications of all sizes in multiple industries including financial services, gaming, retail, and healthcare. Spanner provides great value and price-performance since it helps you save operational costs, provides multiple […]

GCP – Virta Health transforms Type 2 diabetes care with Google Cloud
The pandemic shined a light on the metabolic disease crisis, especially here in the United States for the millions of Americans with type 2 diabetes. According to the American Diabetes Association, 11.3% of the U.S. population (37M+) has diabetes and an estimated 8.5 million Americans are undiagnosed, leaving them vulnerable to complications such as amputation, […]

AWS – Amazon Comprehend launches entity-based sentiment analysis
Amazon Comprehend is a natural-language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover insights in text data. Starting today, Comprehend now offers Targeted Sentiment, a new API that provides more granular sentiment insights by identifying the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral, or mixed) towards entities within text. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon EC2 adds new AMI property to view timestamp of the latest instance launch using the AMI
Amazon EC2 now adds a new property called ‘lastLaunchedTime’ for owners of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This property helps AMI owners view the timestamp of the last time the AMI was used for an EC2 instance launch. It allows AMI owners to understand the usage of their AMIs, especially publicly-shared AMIs, and to make informed […]

AWS – AWS Systems Manager Change Manager now supports taking actions on multiple change requests together
Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to approve or reject multiple change requests together, thereby making it easier for approvers to take bulk actions on pending change requests. Change Manager simplifies the way you can request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on […]

Azure – Public preview: Azure Backup support for trusted launch Azure Virtual Machines
Trusted Launch VM Backup support from Azure Backup helps to protect Trusted Launch VMs which improves the security of generation 2 VMs in Azure. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon DynamoDB increases default service quotas to simplify use of large numbers of tables
Amazon DynamoDB increases default service quotas to simplify use of large numbers of tables. DynamoDB increased the default quota for the number of DynamoDB tables you can create and manage per AWS account and AWS Region from 256 to 2,500 tables. DynamoDB also increased the number of table management operations you can perform concurrently from 50 […]
Azure – Generally available: Azure Chaos Studio Key Vault and Classic Cloud Services faults
Azure Chaos Studio has new faults available for denying access to a Key Vault and shutting down a Classic Cloud Service. Read More for the details.