A recap of last week’s Google Cloud announcements

Greg Wilson
Google Cloud - Community
3 min readOct 5, 2016

Last Thursday at the Google Horizon event in San Francisco, we made a ton of announcements across a broad spectrum of topics. The announcements were coming so fast, it was hard to keep up! Now that the dust has settled, I’ve put together a recap to get you caught up.

Introducing Google Cloud

Diane Greene, SVP, blogged Introducing Google Cloud. The new Google Cloud brand spans every layer of business and includes Google Cloud Platform, machine learning tools and APIs, enterprise Maps API, Android and Chrome devices that access the cloud, and the newly named G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work).

New regions, Kubernetes new features, CRE

Brian Stevens, VP, blogged Google Cloud Platform sets a course for new horizons — announcing eight new Google Cloud Regions: Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, Sao Paulo, London, Finland, and Frankfurt (with more to be announced next year). Brian also covered Kubernetes’ latest feature, Cluster Federation that supports straightforward deployment across multiple clusters and multiple clouds. He also mentioned that Google Container Engine usage is doubling every 90 days! Last but not least, Brian announced a new role: Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) that directly integrates with our customers operation’s team.

BigQuery Enterprise Data Warehousing Features

Fausto Ibarra, Product Management Director, blogged BigQuery: introducing powerful new enterprise data warehousing features announcing a bunch of new enterprise features in Google BigQuery including identity access management (IAM), monitoring through Google Stackdriver, flat rate pricing, improved compatibility with ecosystem data tools, new ODBC drivers, support for standard SQL, and the ability to update, delete, and insert rows and columns in BigQuery datasets (DML). He also describes how Coca-Cola European Partners, The New York Times, and Viant are relying on BigQuery.

Cloud Machine Learning Public Beta

Riku Inoue, Product Manager, blogged Google Cloud Machine Learning: now open to all with new professional services and education programs, announcing that Google Cloud Machine Learning is now publicly available in beta and includes a new feature called HyperTune that automatically improves predictive accuracy. The post also discusses how Airbus Defense and Space tested the use of Google Cloud Machine Learning to automate analyzing satellite images and solved a problem that has existed for decades. Riku also announced a new dedicated machine learning practice within our Professional Services team and new programs and certifications to help business learn how to use machine learning to solve real business problems.

Pokemon Go + Google Cloud

Luke Stone, Director of Customer Reliability Engineering, blogged Bringing Pokemon GO to life on Google Cloud, providing a behind-the-scenes look into the launch of Pokemon GO. This post provides some amazing details into the explosive growth of Pokemon GO including how the app grew to 50x the original usage estimate requiring some heroic measures, and went on to become the largest Kubernetes deployment on Google Container Engine ever. This post is like reality TV for developers!

Google and Accenture partnership

Caliah Manson, Head of Global Strategic Alliances, blogged Google and Accenture: building for the enterprise, announcing a new alliance between Google and Accenture to develop solutions that bring together cloud, mobility, and collaboration for enterprises that will help clients embrace the digital transformations technology can enable.

G Suite new features

Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President Apps, blogged G Suite: intelligent tools designed for teams and announced several new features with G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work). These new features bring amazing machine intelligence to calendar, docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Also announced was Google Drive for Teams that provides team-level content ownership and sharing, and Meetings for teams that supports up to 50 participants and allows joining of meetings with a simple link.

The momentum is exciting and more announcements are coming — we’re firing on all cylinders.

Stay tuned!

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