Welcome to above the clouds

AWS – Announcing the FreeFormInput Slot Type for Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and IVR systems. Today, Amazon Lex launches the FreeFormInput built-in slot type. Read More for the details.

GCP – Chrome keeps getting better for Mac and iOS devices
There’s no doubt that the way people work has changed – and it’s changed for the better. Now, companies must be ready to support their workforce no matter where they’re working or what type of device they’re working from – but hybrid work brings its own set of challenges. IT teams are being held responsible […]

GCP – Automate document processing with Document AI for government
The Challenge Many government agencies remained overwhelmed with paper, even as the pandemic drove digitization and modernization. As a result, government agencies continue to look for better ways to streamline manual processes that overwhelm their workers and take focus from higher value initiatives. Modernization helps agencies better serve citizens, improve benefit delivery speed, and resolve […]

GCP – From the NFL to Google’s Data Centers: Why KP Philpot still values teamwork over everything
Editor’s note: KP Philpot is the Environmental Health & Safety Manager at Alphabet’s data center campus in Douglas County, Georgia. It’s a long way from both a childhood in Chicago’s South Side, and standing in football stadiums with thousands of fans, but one thing has always held true for him: The importance of personal and […]

GCP – Accelerating app development lifecycle with managed container platforms, Firebase and CI/CD
We understand that for startups in the build phase, the highest priority task is to continuously ship features based on your users’ needs. There are three main focus areas when building applications: Development: When it comes to development, focus on tasks that make your app unique by offloading backend setup and processing to someone else. […]

GCP – Run interactive pipelines at scale using Beam Notebooks
To all Apache Beam and Dataflow users: If you’ve experimented with Beam, prototyped a pipeline, or verified assumptions about a dataset, you might have used Beam Notebooks or other interactive alternatives such as Google Colab or Jupyter Notebooks. You might also have noticed a gap between running a small prototype pipeline in a notebook and […]

GCP – All you need to know: Cloud Logging and pricing for Cloud Admins
Flexera’sState of the Cloud Report 2022 pointed out that significant cloud spending is wasted, a major issue that is getting more critical as cloud costs continue to rise. In the current macroeconomic conditions, companies focus on identifying ways to reduce spending. To effectively do that, we need to understand the pricing model. We can then […]

GCP – Powering up Firestore to COUNT() cost-efficiently
Frequently, your application may need to count the number of matches for a given query. For example, if you’re developing a social application, you may need to count the number of friends an individual has. With today’s Preview launch of count(), you can easily and cost-efficiently perform a count() directly in Firestore. It’s accessible via […]

Azure – General availability: OpenTelemetry exporter for Azure Data Explorer
Azure Data Explorer now supports ingestion of data from many receivers via the OpenTelemetry exporter. Read More for the details.
GCP – Backup & Disaster Recovery strategies for BigQuery
BigQuery is increasingly becoming the landing zone of choice for many customers’ data in Google cloud. BigQuery is designed to provide high data durability. Data is written synchronously to 2 availability zones and within these zones, data is written using erasure encoding to make sure data can be recovered from multiple disk failures. As of […]