Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Google Cloud expands higher education credits to support 75+ countries globally
To better support equity and opportunity in higher education across the globe, we are pleased to announce the expansion of Google Cloud research, teaching, and learning credits to support additional countries in Asia Pacific and Latin America. “Credits allow users to learn, build, and discover through hands-on access to the computing power of Google Cloud.” […]

GCP – View policy enforcement metrics for ACM Policy Controller
Policy Controller enables the enforcement of fully programmable policies for your clusters. These policies act as “guardrails” and prevent any changes from violating security, operational, or compliance controls at admission time, and post admission, using continuous audit. Through ongoing conversations with platform and security administrators, we have received feedback about increasing visibility into how the […]

GCP – Building a Machine Learning Platform with Kubeflow and Ray on Google Kubernetes Engine
Increasingly more enterprises adopt Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to enhance their services, products, and operations. As their ML capabilities mature, they build centralized ML Platforms to serve many teams and users across their organization. Machine learning is inherently an experimental process requiring repeated iterations. An ML Platform standardizes the model development and deployment workflow to […]

GCP – Benchmarking your Dataflow jobs for performance, cost and capacity planning
Calling all Dataflow developers, operators and users… So you developed your Dataflow job, and you’re now wondering how exactly will it perform in the wild, in particular: How many workers does it need to handle your peak load and is there sufficient capacity (e.g. CPU quota)? What is your pipeline’s total cost of ownership (TCO), […]

AWS – Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now provides additional performance metrics and enhanced monitoring dashboard
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully managed file storage built on Windows Server, now provides additional performance metrics for improved visibility into file system activity and an enhanced monitoring dashboard with performance insights and recommendations. You can use the new metrics and dashboard to right-size your file systems and optimize performance […]

Azure – Public preview: Expanded feature regional availability for Azure NetApp Files backup
Regional coverage has expanded for Azure NetApp Files backup. Read More for the details.

AWS – Introducing the Smart City Competency program
We are excited to launch the AWS Smart City Competency to provide best-in-class partner recommendations to our customers and broader market. With cities at the front line of economic, social, and global challenges such as energy and water use, traffic management, sanitation, and sustainability, the quest to build cities that “work” is increasingly reliant on […]

AWS – Amazon Polly NTTS voices now available in the AWS Europe (Paris) Region
Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in the Europe (Paris) Region. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler launches new advanced settings for Amazon Athena data sources
Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time that it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes in Amazon SageMaker Studio, the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for ML. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step […]
GCP – New Google Maps Platform launch stages and what they mean for you
Your application’s users expect a certain amount of reliability and predictability, so we want to make it easier for you to identify the commitments behind the Google Maps Platform services that power your applications. Consistent launch stages communicate the capabilities, support, and production-readiness of the products and features you’re using. To make it easier for […]