This week in Google Cloud — “GKE, TPU, & ELK”

In addition to Kubernetes 1.6(.x) being available to the world, Google Container Engine (GKE) now supports this latest version. This new release comes with fully-managed nodes and the Container-Optimized OS, now generally-available.

Google has put out a paper on how TPUs compare to GPUs and CPUs in performance and energy efficiency. This is also discussed in this article from nextplatform.com and resulted in a few datacenters Google did NOT have to build (wired.com).

Google and Elastic have announced managed Elasticsearch and Kibana on GCP. This means a fully-hosted and managed version of the latest Elastic software including commercial features with support from the source.

There was a *lot* more GCP news this past week :

• Cloud Launcher now with new VM solutions, Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and new standalone SaaS solutions.
• Cloud Translation API enters GA (with more languages)
• Increasing the Firebase Realtime Database concurrency limits
• Cloud Functions for Firebase — Popular Samples
• Jelastic Private PaaS on Google Cloud Platform
• Google Cloud IAM for AWS users
• DeepBreath: Preventing angry emails with machine learning
• Using R with Google BigQuery
• Consistent Hashing with Bounded Loads
• Google invests in INDIGO undersea cable to improve cloud infrastructure in Southeast Asia
• Espresso makes Google cloud faster, more available and cost effective by extending SDN to the public internet

GCP elsewhere on the interwebs…

App dev

• Coolest features of Google Container Builder (medium.com)
• Getting Started with Google Cloud Functions (medium.com)
• JHipster, Kubernetes and Google Cloud SQL (jhipster.github.io)
• Building your first Action for Google Home (medium.com)
• Building a Serverless Go App on Google Cloud (medium.com)

Big Data & Machine Learning

• Wootric & Google Cloud: Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Analyze Qualitative Feedback (wootric.com)
• BI Performance Benchmarks with Google BigQuery (atscale.com)
• How to Use BigQuery for Large-Scale SEO (moz.com)
• Beer, Bots and Broadcasts: Companies Start Using AI in the Cloud (bloomberg.com)

GCP Podcast

• #70 Drone CI with Brad Rydzewksi and Jessie Frazelle
• #71 Cloud Machine Learning Engine with Yufeng Guo

The screenshot of the week if taken from “Quantifying the performance of the TPU, our first machine learning chip”

That’s it for this week!

-Alexis