Welcome to issue #418 September 30th, 2024

News

Announcing Public Preview of Vertex AI Prompt Optimizer - Vertex AI Prompt Optimizer, a new tool from Google Cloud, helps users optimize prompts for large language models (LLMs) on Vertex AI. It employs an iterative LLM-based optimization algorithm to generate and evaluate candidate prompts, selecting the best instructions and demonstrations based on user-specified evaluation metrics.

Introducing Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI - Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI combines conversational AI products with contact center functionality and the latest Gemini 1.5 Flash model to deliver exceptional customer experiences across web, mobile, voice, email, and apps. It supports multimodal information, including text, voice, and images, and provides a unique combination of strict controls with natural language instructions alongside adaptive generative AI.

Meta's Llama 3.2 is now available on Google Cloud - Meta's new generation of multimodal models, Llama 3.2, is now available on Google Cloud's Vertex AI Model Garden. Llama 3.2 includes new vision and lightweight models designed for edge devices, enabling more private and personalized AI experiences.

From millions to billions: Announcing vector search in Memorystore for Valkey and Redis Cluster - Memorystore for Valkey and Redis Cluster now support vector search, enabling ultra-low latency in-memory vector search, zero-downtime scalability, and powerful high-performance vector search across millions or billions of vectors. With hybrid queries, you can combine vector searches with filters on numeric and tag fields for more precise results.

BigQuery vector search now GA, setting the stage for a new class of AI-powered analytics - BigQuery vector search integrates generation, management, and search of embeddings within the data platform, providing a serverless and integrated vector-analytics solution for various use cases.

AI-powered visualization and LookML assistants debut for Gemini in Looker - Gemini in Looker, a business intelligence tool, introduces two new AI-powered features: LookML Assistant and Visualization Assistant. LookML Assistant simplifies LookML code creation, while Visualization Assistant allows users to customize visualizations using natural language. These innovations enhance data analysis and collaboration within organizations.

Moving from experimentation into production with Gemini models and Vertex AI - Google Cloud announces updates to its Gemini and Imagen models, along with new capabilities in Vertex AI, to help enterprises move from AI experimentation to production. Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash models receive quality improvements and reduced costs, while Imagen 3 offers enhanced prompt understanding, photorealistic quality, and safety features.

Empower data-driven insights with new Google Workspace Analytics Block for Looker - Google Workspace Analytics Block is now available in the Looker Marketplace. It offers pre-built metrics for Workspace administrators to create dashboards that capture valuable business and user productivity metrics.

BigQuery jobs explorer: Your central hub for monitoring and troubleshooting BigQuery jobs - BigQuery jobs explorer, now generally available, provides a central hub for monitoring and troubleshooting BigQuery jobs. With real-time monitoring, powerful filtering, and actionable insights, jobs explorer empowers users to identify performance bottlenecks, control costs, and maintain a healthy and performant BigQuery environment.

Introduction to Threat Intelligence and Attribution course, now available on-demand - Google Threat Intelligence and Google Cloud Security have released an on-demand course called "Introduction to Threat Intelligence and Attribution." This six-hour, five-module course is designed for cybersecurity practitioners and covers topics such as the components of a threat group, exploring raw information to discover potential relationships, and recognizing threat actor behaviors.

Launch your cloud career: A no-cost training and certification program for veterans - Google Cloud Launchpad for Veterans is a no-cost training and certification program designed to equip veterans with the cloud knowledge and skills they need to drive innovation and contribute to their current or future employer's digital transformation strategy.

Google named a Leader in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SIEM for Enterprise 2024 Vendor Assessment - Google has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SIEM for Enterprise 2024 Vendor Assessment.

Articles, Tutorials

Infrastructure, Networking, Security, Kubernetes

Implementing Comprehensive Security Logging in GCP with Terraform - This blog post describes how to implement logging in GCP using Terraform to enhance log management, facilitate forensic investigations, enable real-time threat detection etc.

The Post Deployment Activities Of Cloud Architect (Google Cloud Platform) - What Are The Post Deployment Activities of Cloud Architect?

Leveraging Class E IPv4 Address space to mitigate IPv4 exhaustion issues in GKE - Google Cloud introduces Class E IP addresses to address IPv4 exhaustion challenges in GKE. It's compatible with Google Cloud VPC and many operating systems, but requires careful planning for transition and migration.

How to get started with automatic password rotation on Google Cloud - Google Cloud offers automatic password rotation to enhance security and reduce the risk of compromised passwords. This guide provides best practices for automating password rotation on Google Cloud, including a reference architecture for rotating passwords for Cloud SQL instances.

Staying a Step Ahead: Mitigating the DPRK IT Worker Threat - North Korea's IT workers pose a significant and growing cyber threat, targeting businesses globally for financial gain and state objectives. They use stolen identities, remote access tools, and sophisticated evasion tactics to gain employment and maintain access to corporate systems.

Cloud CISO Perspectives: How CISOs can work with cloud providers to improve incident response - Google Cloud’s Vinod D’Souza and Chris Cornillie discuss the vital role that CISOs play in working with cloud providers to improve their organization’s incident preparedness. They emphasize the importance of shared fate, regular testing of disaster recovery systems and incident response playbooks, understanding service level agreements (SLAs), setting up customer account-recovery processes and out-of-band communication channels, and harnessing threat intelligence for preparedness and response.

Part1: Switching from Terraform to OpenTofu and Automating your infrastructure on Google Cloud . - Hope you have heard the new buzzword OpenTofu. If not, this is the blog that you need!????.

Monitoring Policy Enforcement Changes in GCP - This article provides a step-by-step guide to setting up alerts for monitoring policy enforcement changes in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.

Simplified Onboarding and Secure GitLab Deployments on Google Cloud with Workload Identity Federation - GitLab and Google Workload Identity Federation simplify application onboarding in Google Cloud. Eliminate service account keys and enhance security. Enforce controlled deployment using Google Resource Hierarchy, Identity and Access Management, and Identity Pools. Automate setup with Terraform.

Understanding Proxy-only Subnets in Google Cloud Platform - An overview of proxy-only subnets in Google Cloud Platform.

App Development, Serverless, Databases, DevOps

Powering Web3-enabled gaming with GameShift by Solana Labs - GameShift by Solana Labs, now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, offers a comprehensive suite of Web3 primitives and actions for gaming, including wallets, tokenized assets, and on-chain markets.

Project management à la SRE: How to juggle the needs of your project and production - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams at Google face unique challenges in project management due to their dual responsibilities of supporting production and delivering infrastructure projects. To address this, SRE teams employ enhanced planning, including reserving engineering hours and carefully timing project starts.

Google Cloud database news roundup, September 2024 edition - An overview of GCP database updates for September.

You’re Using Pip Wrong in the Cloud! - How python’s most used package manager could leave your serverless workloads open to dependency confusion attacks.

Big Data, Analytics, ML&AI

Enhancing LLMs with function calling: A Gemini case study - This blog post explores how to enhance Google's Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) with function calling using the Vertex AI SDK. By leveraging the ReAct (Reasoning and Acting) pattern, Gemini can interact with external systems for precise calculations and complex string manipulations.

Customers are putting Gemini to work - Google Cloud customers are showcasing nearly 50 success stories highlighting the impact of generative AI when put to work at scale.

Winners of the 2024 Looker Hackathon (Vertex AI Edition) - The 2024 Looker Hackathon (Vertex AI Edition) invited developers and data communities to collaborate and create AI-driven applications, tools, and data experiences using Looker, Looker Studio, and Vertex AI. Over 160 participants from 34 countries participated, resulting in 20 innovative hacks.

BigQuery External Tables with JSON data - BigQuery external tables don't support flexible column names, which can cause issues when querying JSON data with special characters like hyphens and spaces. To work around this limitation, you can create an external table with the JSON records as rows of text and then use a view to parse the text as JSON at runtime. This allows you to query the JSON data as if it were stored in a regular table.

Migrating Dependent Views in BigQuery - This blog post outlines the approach to migrate tables, queries and dependent views.

Checking Differences Between Two Tables in BigQuery SQL: A Step-by-Step Guide - The easiest method to detect changes and discrepancies.

How to Execute Dataform Workflows with Parameters from Cloud Run Functions - This article considers more options for executing the Dataform workflow using Python code.

Upcoming Changes in Python Version Support for the Google Cloud BigQuery Client Library and Connectors for Python - The Google Cloud BigQuery client library and connectors for Python will no longer support Python 3.7 and 3.8 after October 2024.

Analyzing Dataform projects with Dataform Rate - Dataform Rate is a Python-based tool that analyzes Dataform projects, evaluates them against predefined best practices, and reports any violations. It focuses on metadata validation, naming conventions, SQL best practices, partitioning, required labels, and comprehensive descriptions.

Linking Looker activity with BigQuery costs - Monitoring and optimizing the BigQuery costs generated by Looker usage.

Fine-Tuning LLM: Crafting Personalized Ad Copy with Tuned-Gemini Model - This article presents a proof of concept for fine-tuning large language models for specific marketing needs. The authors fine-tuned Google's Gemini-1.0-pro-002 model on a dataset of Facebook ads from Planned Parenthood Action, resulting in a specialized AI capable of generating ad copy that closely mimics the organization's style and messaging.

Various

Google Cloud files complaint with European Commission regarding Microsoft’s anti-competitive licensing practices - Google Cloud has filed a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft's anti-competitive licensing practices. Microsoft's licensing terms restrict European customers from moving their current Microsoft workloads to competitors' clouds or impose a significant price markup.

Slides, Videos, Audio

Kubernetes Podcast - #237 Spotify AI Platform, with Avin Regmi and David Xia.

Security Podcast - #191 Why Aren't More Defenders Winning? Defender’s Advantage and How to Gain it!

GCP Bytes Podcast - #2 In this episode we discuss; GDG Melbourne, GDG Sydney, GDG Auckland, Gartner Magic Quadrant, Hyperdisk Storage Pools, Qualcomm Intel Takeover, Living Computer Museum, Composer Vulnerability, Chromebook 2024, Google 4k Streamer, Nuclear Powered AI, OLLama, Kling Ai1.5, State Of AI.

Releases

Agent Assist - Agent Assist now offers a new version of summarization with custom sections in preview.

AlloyDB - You can now set up AlloyDB free trial clusters using a copy of your Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL backup.

Anthos Config Management - 1.19.1. You can now configure Config Sync fleet defaults with gcloud commands starting in gcloud version 494.0.0. Upgraded the git-sync dependency from v4.2.3 to v4.2.4.

Google Distributed Cloud Bare Metal - 1.30. Release 1.30.100-gke.96 Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal 1.30.100-gke.96 is now available for download. Functionality changes: Added --skip-preflight flag to the bmctl upgrade command to prevent preflight checks from running during an upgrade. The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed in 1.30.100-gke.96: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2020-22218 CVE-2024-7348 GHSA-87m9-rv8p-rgmg Medium-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-6104 GHSA-mh55-gqvf-xfwm. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section. 1.28. Release 1.28.1000-gke.60 Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal 1.28.1000-gke.60 is now available for download. Fixes: Fixed Cloud Audit Logging failure due to allowlisting issue with multiple project IDs. The following container image security vulnerabilities have been fixed in 1.28.1000-gke.60: Critical container vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-37371 High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2020-22218 CVE-2024-0553 CVE-2024-0567 CVE-2024-37370 GHSA-87m9-rv8p-rgmg Medium-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-6104 GHSA-mh55-gqvf-xfwm. Known issues: For information about the latest known issues, see Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal known issues in the Troubleshooting section.

Anthos clusters on VMware - Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for VMware 1.28.1000-gke.59 is now available for download. Fixed the following vulnerabilities in 1.28.1000-gke.59: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-28642 CVE-2023-27561 GHSA-87m9-rv8p-rgmg Container-optimized OS vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-44987 CVE-2024-42302 CVE-2024-45491. A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes clusters with Windows nodes where BUILTIN\Users may be able to read container logs and AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users may be able to modify container logs.

GDCV for VMware - Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for VMware 1.28.1000-gke.59 is now available for download. Fixed the following vulnerabilities in 1.28.1000-gke.59: High-severity container vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-28642 CVE-2023-27561 GHSA-87m9-rv8p-rgmg Container-optimized OS vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-44987 CVE-2024-42302 CVE-2024-45491. A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes clusters with Windows nodes where BUILTIN\Users may be able to read container logs and AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users may be able to modify container logs.

Apigee API Hub - On September 26, 2024, Apigee announced the GA launch of Apigee API hub. A new "Get started with API hub" page was added to the user interface. We added a new Supply chain page where you can create, view and manage your dependencies across API operations. The Semantic Search (formerly Smart Search) user interface has been improved, and search results are shown across all API hub entities, such as APIs, deployments, specifications, and versions. We added support for GMEK and CMEK in the provisioning steps. We added support for Cloud audit logging. The List APIs for specifications, dependencies, and external APIs have been enhanced to return a complete response, including user-defined attributes. While you can use API hub by making direct REST over HTTP requests, we now provide client libraries for several popular languages. Significant user interface improvements were made, such as standardization of cards on the API details page, unlinking of deployments, various performance fixes, and more.

Apigee X - On September 26, 2024 we released an updated version of Apigee. If you have CMEK org policy constraints on your Google Cloud project, Apigee will enforce compliance with those constraints and guide you in choosing valid configuration, and prevent you from using Apigee features that are not CMEK-compliant. A known issue was added: Apigee does not support Cloud External Key Manager. A known issue was added: Apigee does not support key re-encryption, which means even after rotation, the old key version will still be used and you cannot change the CMEK key after org creation.

AppEngine Flexible PHP - The runtime support schedule for some PHP runtimes has been extended to match PHP's public support schedule.

AppEngine Standard PHP Second Generation - The runtime support schedule for some PHP runtimes has been extended to match PHP's public support schedule.

Application Integration - View logs in Cloud Logging Viewing integration execution logs in Cloud Logging is now generally available (GA). The Resolve JSON Path data transformer function is now available.

Cloud Architecture Center - (New guide) Business continuity with CI/CD on Google Cloud: Learn how to plan and implement business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) for the CI/CD process.

BigQuery - Cloud console updates: You can now use keyboard shortcuts to control tab navigation in the details pane. You can now use Cloud KMS Autokey to automate the creation and use of customer-managed encryption keys (CMEKs), including the Cloud HSM service. BigQuery ML now offers the following expanded embedding support features: 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, image, and video into the same semantic space. BigQuery ML now offers the following AI features: You can process documents from BigQuery object tables by doing the following: Creating a remote model based on the Document AI API, including specifying a document processor to use. You can now create workflows to execute code assets in sequence at a scheduled time.

Bigtable - You can perform similarity vector search in Bigtable by finding the K-nearest neighbors.

Billing - Avoid charges for underutilized Compute Engine reservations in the FinOps hub You can now get recommendations to modify or delete your underutilized, on-demand reservations for Compute Engine resources when you haven't consumed your specified threshold of resources for at least 7 days. Use Gemini AI assistant to find or create Billing Reports (preview) Gemini Cloud Assist in Cloud Billing Reports provides FinOps-focused AI assistance to create the cost reports you need to analyze your cost trends and to summarize key insights from the cost reports.

Cloud Build - Cloud Build is now available in the africa-south1 region.

Carbon Footprint - Scope 2 market-based emissions data is now Generally Available.

Chronicle SOAR - Release 6.3.19 is now in General Availability. Release 6.3.20 is currently in Preview. The case report now includes all information written to the Case wall. It is now possible to merge cases where the requester is not the assignee both in the platform and through the API endpoint: api/external/v1/cases-queue/bulk-operations/MergeCases. Custom integration is reverted to the latest imported code after saving custom integration settings. Remote agents not visible in the drop-down field. Timeout error when trying to add an alert grouping rule. Time Zone sync issue (ID #52421707). Inaccurate case tag data in Advanced Reports (ID #00308538). Tags are displayed in the database after being deleted from the platform (ID #53263012). Timeout error for playbook action (ID #52418008). Release 6.3.18 is now in General Availability.

Colab - You can now use customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) to protect notebooks in Colab Enterprise.

Compute Engine - OS Login POSIX groups support is deprecated.

Confidential VM - Support for Intel TDX on c3-standard-* machine types is now released to General Availability.

Config Connector - Config Connector version 1.123.1 is now available. Starting from this version, all new CustomResources (CRs) have the cnrm.cloud.google.com/state-into-spec annotation field default to absent. You can use the alpha.cnrm.cloud.google.com/reconciler: direct annotation on DataflowFlexTemplateJob resource to opt-in the Direct Cloud Reconciler, which provides an advanced status update solution for some timeout issues. If you use the CloudIdentityGroup, CloudBuildTrigger and FirestoreIndex resources, do not use version 1.123.0, as it contains regression issues for these resources due to the state-into-spec setting. BigQueryDataTransferConfig (v1alpha1) now uses direct reconciliation. BigQueryConnectionConnection (v1alpha1) now uses direct reconciliation. DataformRepository is promoted from alpha to beta. Added FirestoreDatabase (v1alpha1). Config Connector switches between the Direct and TF-based reconcilers depending on the SQLInstances objects' use of the spec.cloneSource field.

Contact Center AI Platform - Version 3.26 is released All release notes published on this date are part of version 3.26. Agent-level deflections With agent-level deflections, you can let your agents set their own deflection options for agent to agent calls. Rich messaging With rich messaging, you can do the following when creating and sending messages: use bold, italic, and underline formatting; create bulleted and numbered lists; and add links. First In First Out queue routing With First In First Out queue routing, you can set equal priority for transferred calls and chats and non-transferred (standard) calls and chats. Direct inbound calling With direct inbound calling, you can create direct phone numbers and assign them to agents or queues. Fixed an issue where the Interaction JSON metadata file was sometimes not being sent to the Kustomer CRM after a chat or call ended. Fixed an issue where the queue duration of a chat was sometimes doubled in reporting. Fixed an issue where messages were not sent to chat participants for chats initiated by the chat API. Fixed an issue where co-browse metadata was not saved when the recording option was disabled. Fixed an issue where co-browse session events were not generated at session start and end. Made improvements to barge. Fixed an issue where users with a permission group in workforce management could not be created or edited . Fixed an issue where the generic message was played for custom after hours deflection. Fixed an issue where agents had more permissions than that role permits. Fixed an agent assist integration timeout issue. Implemented a change that prevents the administrator account from being deactivated or changed using bulk user update. VPC Service Controls are GA VPC Service Controls in Contact Center AI Platform are GA. Mobile SDK 2.9 is released Mobile SDK 2.9 includes the following updates: Android SDK and iOS SDK: Support for rich messaging. Web SDK 2.24 is released Web SDK 2.24 includes the following update: Support for rich messaging.

Data Fusion - The SAP ODP batch source plugin version 0.11.3 is available in Cloud Data Fusion versions 6.8.0 and later. The Cloud Data Fusion version 6.10.1.1 patch revision is generally available (GA). The Cloud Data Fusion version 6.9.2.4 patch revision is GA.

Database Migration Service - Database Migration Service support for homogeneous SQL Server to Cloud SQL for SQL Server migrations is now generally available (GA). Database Migration Service for homogeneous PostgreSQL migrations to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL version 16.

Dataproc Serverless - New Dataproc Serverless for Spark runtime versions: 1.1.79 1.2.23 2.2.23. Dataproc Serverless for Spark: In runtime versions 1.2 and 2.2, minimized the dynamic memory footprint of the Spark application by setting XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio to 30% and XX:MinHeapFreeRatio to 10%. Dataproc Serverless for Spark: Added the google-cloud-dlp Python package by default to the Dataproc Serverless for Spark runtimes. Dataproc Serverless for Spark: Fixed an issue that would cause some batches and sessions to fail to start when using the premium compute tier.

Deep Learning VM - M125 release TensorFlow 2.17 VM images are now available.

Dialogflow - Starting in late 2024 and ending in early 2025, there will be changes to some Dialogflow product names, feature names, and consoles. Dialogflow CX: You can now enable security checks to prevent prompt injection attacks. Dialogflow CX: Cloud Text-to-Speech europe-west1 and europe-west3 regions for Neural2 voices now use corresponding regions.

Buildpacks - The runtime support schedule for some PHP runtimes has been extended to match PHP's public support schedule.

Document AI - Effective April 9, 2025, the following Custom Extractor versions will no longer be accessible: pretrained-foundation-model-v1.0-2023-08-22 pretrained-foundation-model-v1.1-2024-03-12 You will need to migrate to a later version to avoid any service disruptions, such as pretrained-foundation-model-v1.2-2024-05-10 and pretrained-foundation-model-v1.3-2024-08-31 for improved quality from the latest proprietary vision models and foundation models. The following earlier versions of Document AI Enterprise Document Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Expense Parser will be discontinued in the United States (US) and European Union (EU) starting April 30, 2025. v1. Models pretrained-expense-v1.3.2-2024-09-11 and pretrained-expense-v1.4.2-2024-09-12 are available as Release Candidates (RC) for Expense Parser.

Cloud Functions - The runtime support schedule for some PHP runtimes has been extended to match PHP's public support schedule.

Gemini - The following Gemini in Looker features are available in Public Preview: Create custom Looker visualizations: The Visualization Assistant lets you customize formatting options for Looker visualizations using natural language.

Cloud Identity - Cloud Identity POSIX groups are deprecated.

KMS - Cloud KMS with Autokey is now in General Availability for Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, BigQuery, Secret Manager, Cloud SQL, and Spanner.

Google Kubernetes Engine - (2024-R37) Version updates GKE cluster versions have been updated. GKE clusters using the Network Policy feature and Pods specifying a hostPort might have experienced networking connectivity issues after control plane upgrades. A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes clusters with Windows nodes where BUILTIN\Users may be able to read container logs and AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users may be able to modify container logs.

Looker - Looker (Google Cloud core) only changes. The following Gemini in Looker features are available in Public Preview: Create custom Looker visualizations: The Visualization Assistant helps you generate custom formatting options for Looker visualizations by using natural language.

Memorystore for Redis Cluster - Added support for cross-region replication (Preview).

Cloud Monitoring - The layout of the incident detail page has been updated.

Network Intelligence Center - Network Analyzer now includes additional information in the IP address utilization summary insights.

Retail Recommendations AI - Vertex AI Search for retail: Conversational search API As part of Search for retail's Guided search package, ConversationalSearchSpec sits on top of the Retail API. Vertex AI Search for retail: Tile navigation As part of Search for retail's Guided search package, tile navigation allows tiles to appear for each of the most likely to be used dynamic facets across a search page.

Cloud Run - GPU support (Preview) is now available in the following region: asia-southeast1. The runtime support schedule for some PHP runtimes has been extended to match PHP's public support schedule.

Security Command Center - YARA rule names that appear in Virtual Machine Threat Detection findings will be renamed On or after October 28, 2024, YARA rule names that appear in Malware: Malicious file on disk (YARA) findings from Virtual Machine Threat Detection will be renamed.

SAP Solutions - New SAP HANA certifications: X4 bare metal machine types for OLTP workloads SAP has certified the Compute Engine bare metal machine types x4-megamem-960-metal, x4-megamem-1440-metal, and x4-megamem-1920-metal, for use with SAP HANA OLTP workloads in scale-out configurations with up to 4 nodes. Google Cloud storage manager for SAP HANA standby nodes version 2.8 Version 2.8 of the Google Cloud storage manager for SAP HANA standby nodes is generally available (GA).

Cloud Spanner - Spanner now supports the spanner.farm_fingerprint() hash function in PostgreSQL-dialect databases. Spanner now offers editions, a tier-based pricing model that provides greater flexibility, better cost transparency, and opportunities for cost savings. Spanner is now enabled for use with Cloud KMS Autokey.

Cloud SQL Postgres - You can now set up AlloyDB free trial clusters using a copy of your Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL backup.

Cloud Storage - Cross-bucket replication is now available in Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage is now enabled for use with Cloud KMS Autokey. A weekly digest of client library updates from across the Cloud SDK. In order to set a bucket to store Cloud Storage usage logs and storage logs, the bucket must now reside within the same organization as the bucket being logged. You can now use hierarchical namespace with Cloud Storage FUSE.

Vertex AI Workbench - The M125 release of Vertex AI Workbench managed notebooks includes the following: Patched a vulnerability with adm and docker permissions when the instance's root access isn't enabled. The M125 release of Vertex AI Workbench instances includes the following: bigframes 1.9.0 is now available in all environments except TensorFlow.

VMware Engine - VMware Engine ve2 nodes are available in Frankfurt, Germany, Europe (europe-west3-a).

Virtual Private Cloud - Private Service Connect supports IPv6 in General Availability for the following supported configurations: Service consumers can access published services by using Private Service Connect endpoints that have IPv6 addresses.

Workstation - Cloud Workstations is available in the us-west4 region (Las Vegas, Nevada, North America).