Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – The Modernization Imperative: Is your platform engineering project doomed to fail?
Recently in The Modernization Imperative (TMI), my colleague Richard Seroter shared about the importance of shifting down rather than shifting left — leveraging pre-built platform functionality to lighten the load for both your developers and operators. From my work advising engineering leaders on cloud modernization, I couldn’t agree more. However, if your organization is building […]

GCP – Three unique ways to add maps to custom, native, no code mobile applications
Editor’s note: Today’s article comes from John McMullan, Head of Marketing at Thunkable. Thunkable gives users the ability to create custom, native, no code mobile applications for Android, iOS, and mobile web—without any technical expertise required. In this post John shares how their customers are incorporating maps into their mobile application experiences. Mobile applications have […]

GCP – The rise of GenEng: How AI changes the developer role
The widespread availability of generative AI, such as chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), has captured our imaginations about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. In the enterprise, generative AI has the potential to revolutionize customer experiences and employee productivity. As enterprise leaders try to distill their opportunities and competitive risks, I see a fundamental […]

GCP – Of barks and bots: Woof revolutionizes pet care with AI chatbot powered by Google Cloud
As pet owners, we all want to make sure our pets are happy and healthy. But with so many different products and services competing for our attention, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones are best. That’s whereWoof comes in. We are on a mission to revolutionize the pet industry by providing the best […]

GCP – Tembici rolls out bike sharing across Latin America with Google Cloud
For more than 12 years,Tembici has been democratizing easy access to transportation, promoting sustainability, and improving life in urban areas through bicycle sharing programs. The company got its start in Brazil as a university project. When I joined as a software engineering specialist in 2019, the company was just expanding to Chile and Argentina. In […]

GCP – Improving the Slurm on Google Cloud Experience
If you use the Slurm workload manager to manage your HPC workloads on Google Cloud, get ready for some new enhancements to Slurm on Google Cloud. We’re pleased to announce a set of improvements to the Slurm on Google Cloud open-source code, developed by SchedMD. This includes support for more resource types and operating systems, […]

AWS – Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio now supports Apache Flink version 1.15
Customers can now use Apache Flink 1.15 with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio to perform ad hoc queries to quickly inspect data streams and build and run stream processing applications in minutes. Read More for the details.

AWS – AWS announces Amazon Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (Public Preview)
Amazon Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now available in public preview. This feature enables near real-time analytics and machine learning (ML) on petabytes of transactional data stored in Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. Data written into Aurora is available in Amazon Redshift within seconds, so you can quickly act on it without having […]

AWS – Aurora MySQL improves performance when binlog is enabled in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now supports a new, enhanced binary log (binlog). The enhanced binlog reduces the compute performance overhead caused by enabling binlog, which, in certain cases, can reach up to 50%, down to 13%. The enhanced binlog also improves database recovery time by up to 99% after restarts and failovers, as compared to […]
GCP – Unlocking cloud cost optimization: A guide to Google FinOps Resources
We’ve been saying it for years, the benefits and potential of the cloud abound. And yet, more than 80% of respondents in a survey of 753 business leaders point to managing cloud spend as their top organizational challenge, and these same respondents estimate that nearly 1/3 of their cloud spend is inefficient or wasted (Flexera, […]