Welcome to above the clouds
GCP – Powering AI commerce with the new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
Today, Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol developed with leading payments and technology companies to securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms. The protocol can be used as an extension of the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP). In concert with industry rules and standards, it establishes a […]
GCP – Announcing the new Practical Guide to Data Science on Google Cloud
Data science is undergoing a profound transformation with new tools and platforms empowering practitioners like never before. To help you navigate this evolving landscape, we’re excited to announce the release of our new ebook: A Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud. Google Cloud provides extensive data science-related tooling, and this new practical guide […]
GCP – Unlocking a new era for SAP on Google Cloud
The world of enterprise technology is at an inflection point. Businesses are no longer just looking to modernize their infrastructure; they’re seeking to infuse intelligence and automation into every aspect of their operations. At Google Cloud, we believe the future lies in a unified, intelligent, and flexible enterprise landscape. That’s why we’re so excited about […]
AWS – Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances are now available in additional regions
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8i and R8i-flex instances are available in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Singapore) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The R8i […]
GCP – Introducing the Class of 2025 Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First MENA and Turkey
Today, we are thrilled to announce the 14 innovative startups selected to join the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey. These companies are leveraging AI to tackle significant challenges and create new opportunities across various industries. From real estate and finance to enhancing healthcare and industrial safety, […]
AWS – Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Derived Source for storage optimization
Amazon OpenSearch Service introduces support for Derived Source, a new feature that can help reduce the amount of storage required for your OpenSearch Service domains. With derived source support, you can skip storing source fields and dynamically derive them when required. OpenSearch stores each ingested document in the _source field and also indexes individual fields for search. […]
AWS – Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Star-Tree Index
OpenSearch has introduced Star-Tree Index, a new feature that significantly improves aggregation performance for high-cardinality and multi-dimensional queries. This index pre-aggregates data across configured dimensions and metrics at ingestion time, enabling sub-second response times for frequent aggregations like terms, histogram, and range. Star-Tree Index is designed for real-time analytics and requires no changes to query syntax; OpenSearch automatically uses […]
AWS – Amazon S3 Batch Operations now supports managing buckets or prefixes in a single step in AWS Management Console
Amazon S3 Batch Operations now supports managing objects within an S3 bucket, prefix, suffix, or more, in a single step in AWS Management Console. When creating an S3 Batch Operation, customers can specify the objects on which to perform the operation. With this feature you have the option to instead specify an entire bucket, prefix, […]
AWS – Amazon SageMaker HyperPod announces health monitoring agent support for Slurm clusters
Today, Amazon SageMaker HyperPod announces the general availability of the health monitoring agent for Slurm clusters. SageMaker HyperPod helps you provision resilient clusters for running machine learning (ML) workloads and developing state-of-the-art models such as large language models (LLMs), diffusion models, and foundation models (FMs). The health monitoring agent performs passive, background health checks of […]
GCP – Cloud CISO Perspectives: APAC security leaders speak out on AI and key topics
Welcome to the first Cloud CISO Perspectives for September 2025. Today, Daryl Pereira and Hui Meng Foo, from our Office of the CISO’s Asia-Pacific office, share insights on AI from security leaders who attended our recent Google Cloud CISO Community event in Singapore. As with all Cloud CISO Perspectives, the contents of this newsletter are […]