Welcome to above the clouds
GCP – What’s new with Cloud SQL for MySQL: Vector search, Gemini support, and more
Cloud SQL for MySQL offers the robust performance, scalability, and reliability businesses need for a wide range of applications. Whether managing complex game data or powering smart home devices, companies like Chess.com and Nest are already leveraging Cloud SQL for MySQL to drive innovation and enhance user experiences, providing a solid foundation for data-driven solutions. […]
GCP – Unlocking API performance insights with Apigee custom reports
Monitoring API performance is crucial for user experience, business protection, and proactive issue resolution. To understand API performance, you need to understand key metrics like response time, throughput, error rate, latency, and availability. Poor performance can lead to user frustration, lost business, and damage to a company’s reputation, making optimization of these metrics essential. The […]
GCP – Five more ways to save on Compute Engine costs
In previous post I shared with you five tips on how to save money when using Google Compute Engine. We were just getting started. Here are five more ways to save! 1. Let go of external IPs Compute instances, by default, when created with gcloud or in the Google Cloud console come with an ephemeral […]
GCP – How to safeguard your SSH environment with Identity-Aware Proxy and Security Command Center
Identifying and securing internet-facing resources is an essential part of cloud security risk management. Google Cloud offers tools to help you understand risks and add strong access controls to your organization and projects where they are needed. These tools and controls can help mitigate the risks such as the recent critical security vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) discovered […]
GCP – Build maps in the cloud with BigQuery DataFrames, Gemini, and CARTO
In today’s data-driven world, unlocking the power of location data is crucial for gaining deeper insights and making informed decisions. By leveraging the scalability and efficiency of BigQuery for massive geospatial datasets and the visualization capabilities of CARTO, you can now create powerful interactive visualizations and conduct advanced spatial analysis — all without leaving your […]
GCP – Free to be SRE, with this systems engineering syllabus
Creating and implementing reliable systems (of code, infrastructure, or anything really) forms the discipline of systems engineering, which is used extensively by Google site reliability engineers (SREs). To help you learn more about systems engineering, and how to get hands-on with best practices, we’ve assembled some resources for you to get started. The Systems Engineering […]
GCP – UNC3944 Targets SaaS Applications
Introduction UNC3944 is a financially motivated threat group that carries significant overlap with public reporting of “0ktapus,” “Octo Tempest,” “Scatter Swine,” and “Scattered Spider,” and has been observed adapting its tactics to include data theft from software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to attacker-owned cloud storage objects (using cloud synchronization tools), persistence mechanisms against virtualization platforms, and lateral […]
AWS – Productionize Foundation Models from SageMaker Canvas
Amazon SageMaker Canvas now supports deploying Foundation Models (FMs) to SageMaker real-time inference endpoints, allowing you to bring generative AI capabilities into production and consume them outside the Canvas workspace. SageMaker Canvas is a no-code workspace that enables analysts and citizen data scientists to generate accurate ML predictions and use generative AI capabilities. SageMaker Canvas […]
AWS – Amazon RDS for SQL Server Supports Minor Version 2022 CU13
A new minor version of Microsoft SQL Server is now available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, providing performance enhancements and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports the latest minor version of SQL Server 2022 across the Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise editions. We encourage you to upgrade your Amazon RDS for […]
GCP – Join the latest Google Cloud Security Talks on the intersection of AI and cybersecurity
As AI continues to change the way we work, security professionals are thinking about how to apply generative AI to help them in their jobs, and how to safeguard the AI systems their organizations are beginning to use. They’re also envisioning new ways to use threat intelligence, sharpen their risk assessments, and increase visibility into […]