Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Unlock personalized web experiences: Enhancing user context with Vertex AI embeddings
In our fast-paced digital world, grasping user context is crucial for platforms like KARTE by PLAID, Inc., which offers real-time analytics on user behaviors on websites and applications to enhance the customer experience. Recently, PLAID and Google Cloud embarked on a project to leverage generative AI, including large language models (LLMs) and embedding techniques on […]

GCP – Unlock the potential of your data: Build reliable and intelligent applications with Spanner editions
Operational databases are the cornerstone of modern applications. As user demands evolve and application complexity grows, organizations have adopted a multitude of specialized databases to meet specific needs. However, this trend has led to challenges. Each database often brings its own unique data modeling, storage, and retrieval mechanisms, creating data silos and increasing the complexity […]

GCP – Can’t stop, won’t stop: More innovations from the Google Cloud database portfolio
As AI adoption continues to accelerate, operational databases provide the foundation for building enterprise AI apps that are accurate, relevant, and grounded in enterprise truth. Our goal at Google Cloud is to deliver the best databases for building and running AI apps. To that end, we’re excited to announce several new capabilities that make it […]

GCP – Launching a landmark partnership to support AI startups with Y Combinator
More than half of the world’s generative AI startups are building on Google Cloud — using a wide choice of leading models, AI-optimized infrastructure, GPUs and TPUs, Vertex AI, and more to build the next generation of exciting AI applications, models, and tooling. These customers range from very early-stage businesses to the largest of AI […]

GCP – Now GA: Compute Engine C3 bare-metal and X4 instances
Enterprise workloads present unique challenges when migrating to a public cloud. Whether it’s a 32TB in-memory database, a private cloud built on a commercial hypervisor, or an application that can’t run in a virtual machine, these business-critical workloads are a high-priority for technology leaders to migrate to the cloud. To help ease and accelerate migrating […]

GCP – AI capabilities and controls to power up your workday with Chrome Enterprise
Tired of endless tabs, repetitive tasks and constantly trying to find that document you were in just a few days ago? Everyone can relate to these common workplace frustrations. But good news – Chrome Enterprise’s AI-powered shortcuts will help users streamline their workflows and give IT teams the controls they need. Chrome Enterprise’s vision for […]

AWS – Announcing fine-grained access control via AWS Lake Formation with EMR Serverless
We are excited to announce the general availability of fine-grained data access control (FGAC) via AWS Lake Formation for Apache Spark with Amazon EMR Serverless. This enables you to enforce full FGAC (database, table, column, row and cell-level) policies defined in Lake Formation to take effect for your data lake tables from your EMR Serverless […]

AWS – Amazon Connect now enables agents to view pre-approved windows when scheduling time off
Amazon Connect now enables agents to view pre-approved time off windows for their scheduling group (group allowance), making it easier for agents to identify available options when requesting time off. For example, when creating a time off request for 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., an agent can now see that while there is available group […]

GCP – Understanding new Gemini model inference, tuning, grounding and safety settings in BigQuery
The proliferation of digital devices and platforms such as social media, mobile devices, and IoT sensors has led to an exponential growth in unstructured data such as images, audio files, videos, and documents. To help organizations unlock valuable insights from your data, BigQuery, Google’s AI-ready cloud data platform, is integrated with Vertex AI, Google’s fully-managed […]
GCP – Collect OTLP data from GKE apps with new curated OpenTelemetry ingestion pipeline
OpenTelemetry is an open-source, vendor-agnostic observability standard for logs, metrics, and traces that’s quickly growing as a format for application monitoring, thanks to its collection of libraries, agents, compatible backends, and community support. As more customers told us they wanted to adopt the OpenTelemetry standard for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we provided documentation on instrumenting […]