Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Expanding Z3 family with 9 new VMs and a bare metal instance for storage and I/O intensive workloads
Today, we are thrilled to announce the expansion of the Z3 Storage Optimized VM family with the general availability of nine new Z3 virtual machines that offer local SSD capacity ranging from 3 TiB to 18 TiB per VM, complementing existing Z3 VMs which offer 36TiB of Local SSD per VM. We are also very […]

GCP – Google Public Sector supports AI-optimized HPC infrastructure for researchers at Caltech
For decades, institutions like Caltech, have been at the forefront of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) research. As high-performance computing (HPC) clusters continue to evolve, researchers across disciplines have been increasingly equipped to process massive datasets, run complex simulations, and train generative models with billions of parameters. With this powerful combination, researchers have accelerated scientific discovery […]

GCP – Formula E accelerates its work with Google Cloud Storage and Google Workspace
In the high-speed world of global motorsport, operational efficiency and technological innovation are as critical off the track as they are on it. And when it comes to innovating in the field, Formula E, with its focus on the future of mobility and sustainability, regularly takes the checkered flag. Formula E orchestrates thrilling races with […]

GCP – Chat with confidence: Unpacking security in Looker Conversational Analytics
The landscape of business intelligence is evolving rapidly, with users expecting greater self-service and natural language capabilities, powered by AI. Looker’s Conversational Analytics empowers everyone in your organization to access the wealth of information within your data. Select the data you wish to explore, ask questions in natural language, as you would a colleague, and […]

GCP – This migration from Snowflake to BigQuery accelerated model building and cut costs in half
In 2024, retail sales for consumer packaged goods were worth $7.5 trillion globally. Their sheer variety — from cosmetics to clothing, frozen vegetables to vitamins — is hard to fathom. And distribution channels have multiplied: Think big box stores in the brick-and-mortar world and mega ecommerce sites online. Most importantly, jury-rigged digital tools can no […]

GCP – Isolated Recovery Environments: A Critical Layer in Modern Cyber Resilience
Written by: Jaysn Rye Executive Summary As adversaries grow faster, stealthier, and more destructive, traditional recovery strategies are increasingly insufficient. Mandiant’s M-Trends 2025 report reinforces this shift, highlighting that ransomware operators now routinely target not just production systems but also backups. This evolution demands that organizations re-evaluate their resilience posture. One approach gaining traction is […]

AWS – Amazon SNS now supports delivery to Amazon Data Firehose in three additional AWS Regions
Amazon Simple Notification Services (Amazon SNS) now supports notification delivery to Amazon Data Firehose endpoints in three additional AWS Regions, Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) Regions. You can now use Amazon SNS to deliver notifications to Amazon Data Firehose (Firehose) endpoints for storage and analysis. Through Firehose delivery streams, customers can […]

AWS – AWS Fargate now supports SOCI Index Manifest v2 for greater deployment consistency
Amazon ECS customers using AWS Fargate launch mode now benefit from improved deployment consistency with SOCI Index Manifest v2 support. Seekable OCI (SOCI) accelerates Amazon ECS task launches by enabling containers to start running before the full container image is downloaded. SOCI Index Manifest v2 uses a cryptographic method to establish an explicit link between […]

AWS – Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness launches accuracy improvements and new challenge setting for improved UX
Today, AWS announces accuracy improvements and new settings for Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness. Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness is a feature of Amazon Rekognition that detects in real-time whether real users, not bad actors using spoofs, can access your services. Customers across financial, gig economy, telecommunications, healthcare, and social media use Rekognition Face Liveness detection for […]
AWS – Amazon EC2 R7i instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R7i instances are available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region. Amazon EC2 R7i instances are powered by custom 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids), available only on AWS, and offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers. […]