Welcome to issue #394 April 15th, 2024

In this issue, all related to Cloud Next 2024 is covered (and there was plenty of it!!!).

News

All 218 things we announced at Google Cloud Next ‘24 – a recap

Welcome to Google Cloud Next ‘24

Day 1 at Next ’24 recap: AI agents for everyone

Day 2 at Next ’24 recap: building AI agents

Investing $1 billion in digital connectivity to Japan

Expanded Confidential Computing portfolio and introducing Confidential Accelerators for AI workloads

Delivery Navigator: Now generally available to our services partners

Google Cloud partners fuel media and entertainment boom: Viewers reap the rewards

Powering Google Cloud with Gemini

Introducing Chrome Enterprise Premium: The future of endpoint security

Google Public Sector achieves Top Secret and Secret cloud authorization

Introducing Isolator: Enabling secure multi-party collaboration with healthcare data

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs

Announcing Cloud Service Mesh - the evolution of service mesh for Google Cloud

The container platform for the next decade of AI and beyond

What’s new in Google Cloud’s workload-optimized infrastructure

Announcing the general availability of Next Gen Firewall Enterprise

Apache XML Security for C++ Library Allows for Server-Side Request Forgery

Run AI anywhere with Google Distributed Cloud innovations

What’s new with Google Cloud Networking at Next ’24

Make Google part of your security team anywhere you operate, with defenses supercharged by AI

Your scannable list of our top migration announcements from Next ‘24

Cloud FinOps news from Next ‘24

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Powering generative AI with Cloud Storage innovations at Next '24

Introducing Shadow API detection for your Google Cloud environments

App Hub - Manage your application, forget the toil

What's new and what's next for Google Cloud databases

Celebrating 20 years of Bigtable with exciting announcements at Next

Introducing ScaNN vector indexing in AlloyDB, bringing 12 years of Google research to speed up vector search

Accelerating database modernization with Gemini in Database Migration Service

Migrate your SQL Server workloads to Cloud SQL with Database Migration Service, now in preview

Private, secure, and seamless connectivity to Cloud SQL using Private Service Connect

Ushering in a new era for app developers

Turbocharge applications with Memorystore’s persistence and flexible node types

What’s new with Firestore at Next ‘24

Using Gemini Code Assist to build APIs, integrations, and automation flows

Gemini in Databases — supercharge database development and management

Natural language support in AlloyDB for building gen AI apps with real-time data

Build powerful gen AI applications with Firestore vector similarity search

Migrating Docker Images from Google Container Registry (gcr) to Artifacts Registry - A guide to migrate from Cloud Container registry (that will be deprecated in 2025) to Artifact Registry.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

What’s new with Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer architecture

What’s next for data analytics at Google Cloud Next ’24

BigQuery is now your single, unified AI-ready data platform

Get to know BigQuery data canvas: an AI-centric experience to reimagine data analytics

Announcing Delta Lake support for BigQuery

Introducing multimodal and structured data embedding support in BigQuery

How Gemini in BigQuery accelerates data and analytics workflows with AI

Analyze images and videos in BigQuery using Gemini 1.0 Pro Vision

Introducing Gemini in Looker to bring intelligent AI-powered BI to everyone

Introducing ML Productivity Goodput: a metric to measure AI system efficiency

Announcing Vertex AI Agent Builder: Helping developers easily build and deploy gen AI experiences

Introducing new Vertex AI text embedding models

Google Cloud announces updates to Gemini, Imagen, Gemma and MLOps on Vertex AI

Gemma on Google Kubernetes Engine deep dive: New innovations to serve open generative AI models

Accelerate AI Inference with Google Cloud TPUs and GPUs

Performance deep dive of Gemma on Google Cloud

Offering the most extensible and optimized AI stack with our partners

Eating our own dogfood: Building an AI-driven business at Google Cloud Consulting

Grounding generative AI in enterprise truth

Discover 100+ generative AI solutions from our partners at Next ‘24

Various

New Google Cloud Consulting programs designed to accelerate your cloud journey

Powering the next generation of AI startups with Google Cloud

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #222 KubeCon EU 2024.

Security Podcast - #167 Stolen Cards and Fake Accounts: Defending Google Cloud Against Abuse.

Releases

AlloyDB - Fixed the issue causing AlloyDB Omni running in Kubernetes to run out of memory and crash under some heavy workloads. The following Gemini in Databases features are now available in Public Preview (see the release page for information). AlloyDB Omni version 15.5.1 has the following AlloyDB AI features available in Preview: (see the release page for information). You can preview a simplified installation method for AlloyDB Omni. AlloyDB Omni version 15.5.1 is now available. The following issue was fixed on April 12, 2024: Some heavy workloads might cause AlloyDB Omni running in Kubernetes to run out of memory and crash.

Google Distributed Cloud Bare Metal - 1.28. Release 1.28.400-gke.77 GKE on Bare Metal 1.28.400-gke.77 is now available for download. Functionality changes: Updated preflight checks to add a check for networking kernel modules. Fixes: Fixed a cluster upgrade issue where the lifecycle-controller-deployer Pod was unable to migrate existing GKE on Bare Metal resources to the latest API version. Fixes: The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed in 1.28.400-gke.77: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-6040 CVE-2023-6356 CVE-2023-6536 CVE-2023-6606 CVE-2023-46838 CVE-2023-52439 CVE-2023-52444 CVE-2023-52445 CVE-2023-52451 CVE-2024-1086 CVE-2024-26586 Medium-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-6915 CVE-2023-39198 CVE-2023-46218 CVE-2023-52443 CVE-2023-52449 Low-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-52438 CVE-2023-52448 CVE-2023-52454 CVE-2023-52456 CVE-2023-52457 CVE-2023-52462 CVE-2023-52463 CVE-2023-52467 CVE-2024-0646 CVE-2024-24860. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see GKE on Bare Metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section. 1.16. Release 1.16.7 GKE on Bare Metal 1.16.7 is now available for download. Fixes: Fixed an issue with configuring a proxy for your cluster that required you to manually set HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY environment variables on the admin workstation. The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed in 1.16.7: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-28948 CVE-2023-29499 Medium-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-6004 CVE-2023-6918 CVE-2023-32611 CVE-2023-32665 CVE-2023-46218 CVE-2023-49290 CVE-2024-21664 GHSA-2c7c-3mj9-8fqh Low-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2021-25743. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see GKE on Bare Metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

GDCV for VMware - GKE on VMware 1.16.7-gke.46 is now available. The following issues are fixed in 1.16.7-gke.46: Fixed the known issue where the controlPlaneNodePort field defaults to 30968 when the manualLB spec is empty.

BigQuery ML - BigQuery ML now offers the following expanded embedding support features in preview: Using the ML.GENERATE_EMBEDDING function with a remote model based on a Vertex AI multimodalembedding large language model (LLM) to create multimodal embeddings, which embed text and images into the same semantic space.

BigQuery - You can now create a data canvas in BigQuery Studio. The following Gemini in BigQuery features are now available in Public Preview (check release page for detailed information)BigQuery Studio is generally available (GA). BigQuery DataFrames is generally available (GA). The BigQuery materialized view recommender analyzes your past query jobs to identify opportunities to apply materialized views to your queries for potential cost savings.

Bigtable - Bigtable now integrates with LangChain, an LLM orchestration framework. Bigtable Data Boost, a serverless compute service designed for high-throughput read jobs and queries, is available in Preview. You can now build distributed counters with Bigtable with write-time aggregates. You can control access to data in your Bigtable tables with authorized views. Bigtable app profiles let you configure request priorities to prioritize certain workload data requests over others. Bigtable now lets you increase the retention period in the garbage collection policy for a column family in a replicated table.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.2.53 is now in General Availability. Remote Agent Release 1.5.0 is now in General Availability. Release 6.2.54 is currently in Preview. In Release 6.2.45 the option to manually enter General placeholders was added. Error when adding or removing a tag on a closed case (ID #50195120). Unable to import dynamic parameters (ID #00262571). Playbooks re-running during platform update (ID 00282275). Playbook block input can't be used to select dynamic instance (ID #00276416). Refreshing dashboard changes displayed data (ID #49716319). Playbooks not saving correctly (ID #49142793). When logging in via SAML it doesn't show up in the SOAR Audit logs.

Cloud Composer - Starting from June 15, 2024 it will not be possible to create Cloud Composer 1 environments in Google Cloud console.

Compute Engine - Generally available: N4 VMs are generally available on the Intel Emerald Rapids CPU with 640 GB DDR5 memory. Generally available: You can plan ahead for VM maintenance on M1, M2, and M3 machine types by viewing their maintenance schedule notifications. Pricing change: On January 26, 2024, Red Hat announced a price model update on RHEL and RHEL for SAP for all Cloud providers that scales image subscription costs according to vCPU count. On January 26, 2024, Red Hat announced a price model update on RHEL and RHEL for SAP for all Cloud providers that scales image subscription costs according to vCPU count. Generally available: You can limit the run time of VMs by using automatic termination, which automatically stops or deletes a VM after a specific time or duration. As of April 8, 2024, automatic termination will no longer be automatically cleared when a VM is stopped or suspended.

Database Migration Service - Database Migration Service support for code conversion with Gemini assistance is now available in preview. Database Migration service support for homogeneous SQL Server migrations to Cloud SQL for SQL Server is now available in preview. Database Migration Service support for Oracle to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL migrations is now generally available. Database Migration Service conversion workspaces for heterogeneous migrations are now generally available (GA).

Dataproc Serverless - Dataproc Serverless for Spark: The preview release of Advanced troubleshooting, including Gemini-assisted troubleshooting, is now available for Spark workloads submitted with the following or later-released runtime versions: 1.1.55 1.2.0-RC1 2.0.63 2.1.42 2.2.0-RC15. Dataproc Serverless for Spark: Announcing the preview release of Autotuning Spark workloads.

Datastore - Firestore in Datastore mode now supports the following additional locations: africa-south1 Johannesburg europe-north1 Finland europe-southwest1 Madrid europe-west10 Berlin europe-west12 Turin europe-west8 Milan southamerica-west1 Santiago us-central1 Iowa us-east5 Columbus For a full list of supported locations, see Locations.

Cloud Quotas - Cloud Quotas support for Terraform is generally available (GA).

Cloud Firestore - Firestore now supports the following additional locations: africa-south1 Johannesburg europe-north1 Finland europe-southwest1 Madrid europe-west10 Berlin europe-west12 Turin europe-west8 Milan southamerica-west1 Santiago us-central1 Iowa us-east5 Columbus For a full list of supported locations, see Locations.

Cloud NGFW - Cloud NGFW Enterprise, including the intrusion prevention service, is available in General Availability. Starting April 9, 2024, you will be charged for the Cloud NGFW Enterprise feature—intrusion prevention service. Cloud Firewall in Google Cloud is now Cloud Next Generation Firewall (NGFW).

Google Kubernetes Engine - GPUDirect-TCPX is now supported on GKE version 1.27 and later and requires the following patch versions: For GKE version 1.27, use GKE patch version 1.27.7-gke.1121000 or later. The N4 machine family is generally available in GKE Standard clusters running on GKE 1.29 and later. Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are now available in GKE Autopilot clusters running version 1.29.2-gke.1521000 or later. (2024-R09) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated.

Load Balancing - Application Load Balancers now support Certificate Manager allowlisted certificates.

Looker - Looker (Google Cloud core) and Looker (original) changes. Looker 24.6 includes the following changes, features, and fixes: Expected Looker (original) deployment start: Wed, April 17, 2024 Expected Looker (original) final deployment and download available: Thursday, April 25, 2024 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) deployment start: Monday, April 15, 2024 Expected Looker (Google Cloud core) final deployment: Monday, April 22, 2024. The Embedded Looker Studio feature is now available to preview. Open SQL Interface now supports parameters and filter-only fields. As part of a Looker Studio Pro subscription, Looker Studio Pro licenses are available at no cost to Looker users. The Performant Field Picker is now generally available. An issue that caused user attribute filter values to fail to load in some situations has been fixed. The json_bi and json_detail_lite_stream query result formats did not respect the apply_formatting parameter in certain cases. Previously, fields with full_suggestions would not show suggestions while interacting with the filter. An issue has been fixed where the fiscal year was not rendering correctly in some Excel downloads. A more descriptive error message is now returned when a user tries to delete a project using the API while not in dev mode. An issue has been fixed where some projects were empty when a user first entered dev mode. Previously, an issue would cause Looker to incorrectly generate derived table SQL if a derived table referenced a view that referenced another derived table that was using the SQL_TABLE_NAME syntax. When New LookML Runtime is enabled, the LookML Validator will now include more descriptive error information when an aliased derived table's definition references an unqualified field name in Liquid. Previously, comparison text on single value visualization dashboard tiles could be cut off when the tile was a specific height. Performance for PDT stable view publishing has been improved. An issue was causing the LookML Validator to incorrectly mark some fields as duplicates. Previously, an unclear error message was returned when you selected a measure in an aggregate query using the SQL interface. An intermittent issue was rendering a blank page when content was added to a board. Looker (original) only changes. An issue was causing QR codes for mobile app authentication to be improperly generated.

Cloud Memorystore - Vector search capabilities are now Generally Available on Memorystore for Redis.

Cloud NAT - Hybrid NAT is now available in Preview.

Network Intelligence Center - Flow Analyzer is now available in Preview.

Cloud PubSub - If you use Pub/Sub metrics as a signal to autoscale your pipeline, refer to Best practices for using Pub/Sub metrics as a scaling signal. You can now ingest streaming data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams into Pub/Sub by using an import topic.

Cloud Shell - Code Transformations for Gemini Code Assist are now available for Public Preview.

Cloud Spanner - The following Gemini in Databases features are now available in Public Preview: Spanner Studio (GA): lets users interact with the SQL database and run SQL queries from the Google Cloud console to access and manipulate data. Spanner now supports the ML_PREDICT_ROW() function for PostgreSQL. You can now generate ML predictions using the Spanner emulator with GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL. Spanner GoogleSQL now supports SAFE.ML.PREDICT(), which allows you to return a null instead of an error in your predictions. You can generate and backfill vector embeddings for textual data (STRING or JSON) stored in Spanner using GoogleSQL partitioned DML and the Vertex AI textembedding-gecko model. Spanner now supports several new PostgreSQL JSONB functions: spanner.jsonb_query_array() jsonb_build_array() jsonb_build_object() The PostgreSQL CONCAT() function also supports more than 4 arguments. Spanner has extended the array data type with the VECTOR LENGTH parameter (in Preview). Spanner now supports the dot_product() function (in Preview). Spanner now supports the float32 (GoogleSQL) and float4/real (PostgreSQL) data type (in Preview). Spanner now supports the use of Gemini models with GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL machine learning prediction functions (in Preview). Spanner now supports using LangChain with the vector store, document loader, and chat message history objects. You can now add a time to live (TTL)-based deletes filter to your Spanner change streams using the exclude_ttl_deletes option. You can now add a table modification type filter to your Spanner change streams to exclude INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE table modifications. Spanner change streams now support a new value capture type called NEW_ROW_AND_OLD_VALUES.

Cloud SQL MySQL - The Gemini in Databases features are now available in Public Preview. Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports the storage of vector embeddings in MySQL 8.0.36 and later databases. Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition primary instances with high availability (HA) now require less than one second of downtime for planned maintenance.

Cloud SQL Postgres - The Gemini in Databases features are now available in Public Preview.. Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition primary instances with high availability (HA) now require less than one second of downtime for planned maintenance.

Cloud SQL SQL Server - The Gemini in Databases features are now available in Public Preview.

Workstation - Code Transformations for Gemini Code Assist are now available for Public Preview.