Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Building a sustainable agricultural supply chain on Google Cloud
Working to put food on all of our tables, today’s farmers are facing a higher amount of instability from input supply chain issues to weather patterns. Adding to this challenge are problems farmers face when trying to correctly time grain purchases, sales and transport. Farmers have always been stewards of the land, but now the […]

GCP – Vertex AI Example-based Explanations improve ML via explainability
Artificial intelligence (AI) can automatically learn patterns that humans can’t detect, making it a powerful tool for getting more value out of data. A high-performing model starts with high-quality data, but in many cases, datasets have issues such as incorrect labels or unclear examples that contribute to poor model performance. Data quality is a constant […]

GCP – Staying in sync: Effective collaboration strategies for distributed workforces
Workplace collaboration continues to evolve as hybrid work expands its footprint. While both “same-time” and “staggered-time” (or asynchronous) collaboration modes each have their place in the hybrid work environment, organizations and teams sometimes overuse one mode over another. That’s probably because in-person meetings or collaborating in real time have been the default for many organizations, […]

Azure – General availability: Azure Data Explorer supports native ingestion from Amazon S3
Azure Data Explorer (ADX) now supports bringing data from S3 natively without complex ETL pipelines. Read More for the details.

GCP – How to Connect to Cloud SQL using Python … the easy way!
Connecting to Cloud SQL using Python is not always straightforward. Depending on the context, sometimes you have to connect to a Unix domain socket, sometimes you have to allow-list IP addresses for TCP connections, or sometimes you have to run the Cloud SQL Auth proxy locally. Making these connections secure is yet another challenge: you […]

AWS – Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now reuses SageMaker Training instances to reduce start-up overheads by 20x
Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now reduces the start-up time of each training job launched to tune your models by 20x on average (from 2.5 minutes to 8 seconds). In scenarios where you have a large number of hyperparameter evaluations, the reuse of training instances can cumulatively save 2 hours for every 50 sequential evaluations. […]

AWS – Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for read replicas
Starting today, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle supports Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for read replica instances (read-only and mounted) deployed in separate AWS Regions, or in different Availability Zones of a given Region. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon Location Service now supports refined access control for geofences and tracked devices
Amazon Location Service now supports service specific condition keys allowing developers to set access control rules for each individual tracked device and geofence within a collection. This adds an additional layer of security and prevents unauthorized and unintended access while managing devices and geofences. Read More for the details.

GCP – Route Datadog monitoring alerts to Google Cloud with Eventarc
A few weeks ago, we announced third-party event sources for Eventarc, with the first cohort of third-party providers by our ecosystem partners. This blog post describes how to listen for events from one of those third-party providers, Datadog, and route them to a service in Google Cloud via Eventarc. Datadog is a monitoring platform for […]
AWS – Amazon Forecast now supports what-if analyses
Now with Amazon Forecast, you can seamlessly conduct what-if analyses to quantify the potential impact of business scenarios on your demand forecasts. Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) algorithms to deliver highly accurate time series forecasts. Simulating hypothetical scenarios through what-if analyses is a powerful business tool to stress test […]