Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Buy or build? A Framing Up FinOps case study on advanced reporting
According to this year’s State of FinOps report, across cloud providers, organizations employ 4.1 cloud cost-management tools. Four point one! We’ve observed a similar trend with our own customers. On average, they report using four tools — native, third-party, and homegrown — to make sense of their cloud bills. Astoundingly, we’ve learned from some of […]

GCP – How to build an optimized infrastructure without burning out your IT team
IT infrastructure is essential to the success of any organization. Unfortunately burnout is a very real threat to many IT teams’ wellbeing and productivity, compromising their ability to deliver and maintain that infrastructure. We’ve seen that utilizing the public cloud can reduce burnout, but many IT teams still aren’t sure how to make that switch. […]

GCP – Improve training time of distributed machine learning with NCCL Fast Socket
Large Machine Learning (ML) models – such as large language models, generative AI, and vision models – are dramatically increasing the number of trainable parameters and are achieving state-of-the-art results. Increasing the number of parameters results in the model being too large to fit on a single VM instance thus demands distributed compute to spread […]

Azure – Public Preview: Azure Dedicated Host – Resize
Introducing resize capability for Azure dedicated hosts Read More for the details.

Azure – Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available
Microsoft Dev Box is generally available now. Dev Box is a virtualized solution that empowers developers to quickly spin up self-service workstations preconfigured for their tasks while maintaining centralized management to maximize security and compliance. Read More for the details.

Azure – General availability: ExpressRoute private peering support for BGP communities
Set BGP community tags on traffic sent from Azure to on-premises over ExpressRoute, enabling a greater variety of hybrid network designs. Read More for the details.

GCP – Operational goodies for your IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack Kubernetes clusters
Are you ready to start your IPv6 journey? Is your cloud provider ready to start it with you? Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) supports dual-stack Kubernetes clusters to help your journey to IPv6 while ensuring your applications are v6-ready. And to address the operational demands for IPv6 workloads, we’re adding several features to GKE networking to […]

GCP – Managed containers: An enterprise standard at Colgate-Palmolive
Kubernetes is an increasingly key part of the application deployment strategies at large organizations, and one of the most recommended options for the teams we work with. An idea brought to life at Google, organizations throughout the world use containers and Kubernetes on-premises, in Google Cloud, or in a multi-cloud scenario, and it has emerged […]

GCP – Save time, money and modernize your legacy database estate …. but first assess
As companies modernize their applications and infrastructure, many IT stakeholders are looking to open source technologies to help them do so. One area where open source is gaining traction is in relational database management systems (RDBMS). Open-source RDBMSs such as PostgreSQL are becoming increasingly popular alternatives to commercial RDBMSs such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL […]
GCP – Introducing Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus: New edition delivers up to 3x MySQL performance
Cloud SQL is Google Cloud’s enterprise-ready, fully managed database service for running MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server workloads. It’s used across industries from digital services to banking to retail, with more than 95% of Google Cloud’s top 100 customers using Cloud SQL today. As more demanding workloads move to the cloud, some of you have […]