Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Helping employees make the switch to Chromebooks
Businesses are continually looking for new ways to grow, stay competitive, and provide positive experiences for their employees—and often, they need to introduce new technologies to their workforce to meet these needs. We know that changing the way your organization works is never easy, particularly when you’re introducing technology that’s a fundamental part of employees’ […]

Azure – Announcing extended term reservation for the Azure HBv2 Virtual Machine
High-performance computing (HPC) organizations typically calculate cost projections five-to-six years for the typical lifespan of an on-premises HPC cluster. Read More for the details.

Azure – Azure Automation is now available in the USGov Arizona region
Azure Automation is now available in the USGov Arizona region. Read More for the details.

Azure – Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series is now available in West Europe
Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in East US, Canada Central, UK South, and West Europe. Read More for the details.

GCP – Introducing Pub/Sub as a new notification channel in Cloud Monitoring
Around the world, operations teams are working to automate their monitoring and alerting workflows, looking to reduce the time they spend on rote operational work (what we call “toil”), so they can spend more time on valuable work. For instance, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering organization aims to keep toil below 50% of an SRE’s time, […]

GCP – How maintenance windows affect your error budget — SRE tips
So, you’ve started down the site reliability engineering (SRE) path at your organization. You have set up your service. You have analyzed how your users interact with it, which helped you identify some key metrics that correlate with user happiness. You set your service-level objectives, which in turn gives you an error budget. Great work! […]

GCP – Open Match simplified matchmaking for developers is now 1.0
As interest in multiplayer games continues to grow, providing better and faster matches has been a key need for game developers. But matchmaking—the art of matching a set of players together to maximize their enjoyment of the game—is not easy. Each game is unique. That forces game developers to either create new matchmaking solutions from […]

AWS – Amazon Connect now supports higher-quality, natural-sounding Text-to-Speech voices
Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices within their contact-center. These new voices deliver groundbreaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. The new neural voices are available in eight US English, three UK […]

AWS – Amazon Redshift materialized views support external tables
Amazon Redshift adds materialized view support for external tables. With this enhancement, you can create materialized views in Amazon Redshift that reference external data sources such as Amazon S3 via Spectrum, or data in Aurora or RDS PostgreSQL via federated queries. Read More for the details.
AWS – AWS Elemental MediaLive improves input switching for live channels
You can now use the AWS Elemental MediaLive schedule feature to prepare a MediaLive channel input prior to switching to it. In the context of live video streaming, this functionality is also known as an ‘input cue’. Preparation of an input in advance of a switch helps reduce the latency of the scheduled switch action. […]