Welcome to above the clouds

Azure – Public preview: Assess cost optimization opportunities using new workbook template in Azure Advisor
Review cost optimization insights for your Azure environment and identify savings using the new Cost Optimization workbook template in Azure Advisor. Read More for the details.

Azure – Generally available: Cloud Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) by Palo Alto Networks – an Azure Native ISV Service
The first ISV next-generation firewall service natively integrated in Azure is now generally available. Read More for the details.

GCP – Cloud CISO Perspectives: Late July 2023
Welcome to the second Cloud CISO Perspectives for July 2023. Security, privacy, and protecting data is one of the major drivers behind the accelerated transformations in healthcare. Cyber threats to healthcare are on the rise, including compromised access and data, ransomware, and exploitation of vulnerabilities — and not enough is being done to stem this […]

GCP – Announcing public binaries for Spack on Google Cloud
Today, we are pleased to announce a new build cache for Spack, providing portable and optimized builds targeting select microarchitectures available on Google Cloud and the HPC VM Image (CentOS 7-based). Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software across a wide variety of computer platforms and operating […]

GCP – Ensuring a reliable end-user experience with synthetic monitoring
A reliable system and end-user experience are essential for an organization’s success. Any downtime or degradation of the user experience can impair an organization’s ability to create value for its stakeholders. As modern applications become more complex, composed of hundreds of microservices, containers, and sub-components, it is critical for application owners to not only monitor […]

GCP – How to run inference workloads from a Dataflow Java pipeline
Many data engineers desire the ability to more easily run their python-based machine learning workloads from Java or Go pipelines. There are a number of reasons why users want to do this: they might already have a pipeline written in a language that they want to enrich with ML, they might have access to special […]

GCP – Simplify data lake pipelines with new Pub/Sub Cloud Storage subscriptions
Ever wanted to move your data from Pub/Sub into Cloud Storage? Until today, data engineers focused on building the data lake for their organizations had to put together complex data pipelines to ingest streaming data from Pub/Sub into Cloud Storage. In order to land streaming data into Cloud Storage, they either needed to write their […]

GCP – Introducing predictable cost options for Cloud Data Loss Prevention
Cloud Data Loss Prevention’s Discovery service can help you discover, profile, and monitor sensitive data across your entire organization or just select projects. We’ve expanded the service to cover BigQuery and BigLake, with more cloud analytics services that manage sensitive data coming later this year. Continuous visibility of where your sensitive data is stored and […]

GCP – Accelerating the mission with generative AI
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to join public sector leaders to discuss a topic that is top of mind for everyone – generative AI. At our Generative AI Live + Labs event in Washington DC, we shared how this technology is already revolutionizing our lives in how we live and work. In government, […]
AWS – Announcing Amazon ECS templates for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Blueprints
Amazon EC2 adds templates for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to the Spot Blueprints portfolio. With Spot Blueprints, you can generate a reusable quick start template as CloudFormation or Terraform, based on your workload, and use the template to configure a compute environment using EC2 Spot Instances. This saves you time learning to use Spot […]