Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Helcim transforms payments for small and medium-sized businesses
Small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises are the backbone of the US economy generating more than 44% of GDP1. Yet these organizations are still underserved when it comes to online financial tools—and dealing with payments is no exception. Complaints include hidden fees, limited capabilities, long-term lease agreements, and poor customer service. These are the issues […]

GCP – Sentiment analysis with BigQuery ML
Introduction We recently announced BigQuery support for sparse features which help users to store and process the sparse features efficiently while working with them. That functionality enables users to represent sparse tensors and train machine learning models directly in the BigQuery environment. Being able to represent sparse tensors is a useful feature because sparse tensors […]

GCP – 5 GKE console features to help you optimize your clusters
In this post, we’ll be discussing 5 features in GKE you can use to optimize your clusters today. To get started with testing these in GKE, check out our interactive tutorials for getting started with standard and autopilot clusters. If you find value from running workloads on Kubernetes clusters in your organization, chances are your […]

AWS – AWS Key Management Service now supports FIPS 140-2 enabled interface VPC endpoint
Starting today, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) lets you add a VPC endpoint using AWS PrivateLink that connects through the AWS KMS Regional endpoint that has been validated under the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 program. With this new launch, you can easily use AWS PrivateLink with AWS KMS for those regulated workloads […]

AWS – AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Hamburg, Germany
Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location in Hamburg, Germany. By connecting your network to AWS at the new location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. Read More for the details.

AWS – AWS IoT SiteWise now supports Time-Weighted Average and Standard Deviation
AWS IoT SiteWise now supports time-weighted average (timeweightedavg) and time-weighted standard deviation (timeweightedstdev) functions that make it easier to automatically factor in the numerical levels of a particular variable, as well as the amount of time spent in that variable. With the new time-series functions, process engineers can define metrics for time-series data that isn’t […]

AWS – AWS CloudShell now supports the modular variant of AWS Tools for PowerShell
AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that makes it easier for you to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. CloudShell uses your AWS Console credentials for pre-authentication. Common development tools are pre-installed so that no local installation or configuration is required. With CloudShell, you can run scripts with the AWS Command Line […]

AWS – Amazon OpenSearch Service extends Amazon Graviton2 (C6g, M6g, R6g) instances support in four additional regions
We are excited to announce support for the Amazon Graviton2 instance family in four additional regions. Supported instance types include compute optimized (C6g), general purpose (M6g), and memory optimized (R6g) instances. Support for C6g, M6g, and R6g is available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), and Europe (Milan) regions. Read […]

GCP – How to improve your Kubernetes security posture with GKE Dataplane V2 network policies
As more organizations adopt Kubernetes, they also embrace new paradigms for connecting and protecting their workloads. Relying on perimeter defense alone is no longer an effective strategy. With microservice architecture patterns continuing to evolve rapidly, it is imperative that organizations adopt a defense-in-depth strategy to keep their applications and data protected. To effectively manage a […]
GCP – A developer’s guide to understanding carbon
I’m guessing you aren’t thinking about carbon when you’re writing code, scheduling jobs, or building applications. (I wasn’t either) You’re probably thinking about security, scaling, cost, latency…But it’s important to include carbon in that list. In this post, I’ll break down the basics of how to be a carbon aware developer. We’ll look at: Where […]