Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – AI/ML-ready Apache Spark with Dataproc
Apache Spark is the cornerstone for large-scale data processing, model training, and inference for AI/ML workloads. Yet, the complexities of environment configuration, dependency management, and MLOps integration can slow you down. To accelerate your AI/ML journey, Dataproc now delivers powerful, ML-ready capabilities for Spark. Available on both Dataproc on Compute Engine clusters and Google Cloud […]

GCP – Shaping the future together with our partners: The potential of agentic AI
Partners have always been central to the Google Cloud ecosystem, becoming more and more instrumental in bringing Google’s AI innovations to enterprises. I am inspired by how partners have already built more than 1,000 agentic use cases across every domain to solve deeply entrenched pain points for our shared customers. The emergence of agentic AI […]

GCP – Cloud CISO Perspectives: Our Big Sleep agent makes a big leap, and other AI news
Welcome to the first Cloud CISO Perspectives for July 2025. Today, Sandra Joyce, vice president, Google Threat Intelligence, talks about an incredible milestone with our Big Sleep AI agent, as well as other news from the intersection of security and AI. As with all Cloud CISO Perspectives, the contents of this newsletter are posted to […]

AWS – Amazon MemoryDB now supports an AWS FIS action to pause multi-Region cluster replication
Amazon MemoryDB now supports an AWS Fault Injection Service action to pause replication for multi-Region clusters. FIS is a fully managed service for running controlled fault injection experiments to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resilience. Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region is a fully managed, active-active, multi-Region database that lets you build multi-Region applications with up to […]

AWS – Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points are now available in 12 additional AWS Regions
Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points are now available in 12 additional AWS opt-in Regions: Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, and Melbourne), Europe (Zurich, Spain, and Milan), Middle East (Bahrain and UAE), Canada West (Calgary), Africa (Cape Town) and Israel (Tel Aviv) Regions. To get started, you need to first enable the AWS opt-in Region […]

GCP – Tzafon selects Google Cloud to build next generation agentic machine intelligence
Tzafon, a San Francisco-based startup and AI R&D lab, is partnering with Google Cloud to utilize Google’s AI-optimized infrastructure and cloud services, which will help Tzafon deliver automation at large scale. The Tzafon team aims to do this by building systems and models that can support multiple, autonomous AI agents that are capable of working […]

GCP – Securely deploy ChromeOS Flex – from anywhere
Just three years ago, ChromeOS Flex was born with a mission to breathe new life into existing hardware, offering a modern, sustainable, and secure experience in the process. Today, we’re proud to have over 600 certified devices, and millions of ChromeOS Flex devices being used around the world every day. But we aren’t resting on […]

AWS – Introducing AI agents and tools in AWS Marketplace
AWS Marketplace now offers AI agents and tools from AWS Partners, allowing customers to find and buy third-party AI agent solutions with streamlined procurement and multiple deployment options. Customers can accelerate their discovery of AI agents and agent tools in a centralized catalog while enjoying the benefits of purchasing through AWS Marketplace and Partners can […]

AWS – AWS API MCP Server now available
Today, AWS announces the developer preview of the AWS API model context protocol (MCP) server, a new tool that enables foundation models (FMs) to interact with any AWS API through natural language by creating and executing syntactically correct and valid CLI commands. With the AWS API MCP Server, customers using popular MCP clients can streamline […]
GCP – Build with more flexibility: New open models arrive in the Vertex AI Model Garden
In our ongoing effort to provide businesses with the flexibility and choice needed to build innovative AI applications, we are expanding the catalog of open models available as Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) offerings in Vertex AI Model Garden. Following the addition of Llama 4 models earlier this year, we are announcing DeepSeek R1 is available for everyone […]