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Google Cloud Adds Self-Managed VMware Cloud Foundation on Bare Metal
Google Cloud has made a self-managed VMware solution generally available, running VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x on dedicated Z3 bare metal with root access across ESXi, vCenter and NSX in 22 regions. It sits beside the Google-managed VMware Engine and matches customer-operated offerings from AWS and Oracle, shifting lifecycle, patching and Broadcom licensing back to the customer.
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Google Cloud API Gateway Introduces Streaming Support for Real-Time and AI-Powered Applications
Google has announced the public preview of streaming support for API Gateway, extending its traditional request-response model to support applications requiring real-time communication. According to Google, this is particularly relevant for AI applications that provide streaming model responses, multi-step agent workflows, and interactive sessions.
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Google’s Data Agent Kit Hits GA, Splitting Agent Guardrails Between Skills and IAM
Google has made Data Agent Kit generally available, a free set of MCP tools and 37 open-source skills that connect coding agents to more than fifteen Google Data Cloud services. Two kinds of guardrail ship with it, and practitioners need to tell them apart: one is a skill asking the agent to stop, the other an IAM deny policy that refuses the call.
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HashiCorp Relased Terraform Google Cloud Provider 8.0 in General Availability
HashiCorp has announced the general availability of version 8.0 of the Terraform provider for Google Cloud. The major release updates the default load balancing for two Compute Engine resources. It also removes resources linked to retired Google Cloud services.
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Spanner Omni Reaches GA, Replacing Google's Atomic Clocks and File System with Software
Google has made Spanner Omni generally available, running its distributed SQL database on-premises, across clouds or on a laptop. Doing so meant replacing Colossus with a Colossus-like abstraction layer and TrueTime with software-based time synchronization. There is no availability SLA, and practitioners are pricing the move in tail latency and operational toil.
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GKE Pod Snapshots Cut Model Load Times, and Move the Work to Snapshot Lifecycle Management
Google has published benchmarks for GKE Pod snapshots, reporting up to 89% lower startup latency and a 70B model loading in 37 seconds. The feature checkpoints CPU and GPU memory through gVisor into Cloud Storage. Practitioners have asked whether invalidation is the harder problem, since snapshots match on a spec hash, machine series, and kernel and driver versions.
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Beyond Zero: Google Publishes Successor to BeyondCorp
In a recent research paper, Google introduced Beyond Zero, a “security model for the AI era” that extends Zero Trust to autonomous AI agents. The new approach moves access decisions from the application level to individual resources and actions, combining static authorization controls with dynamic AI-driven decisions to enable machine-speed enforcement for humans and agents.
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Google Cloud Launches AI-powered Agents to Simplify Database Lifecycle Management
Google Cloud has introduced AI-powered Database Operations Agents, featuring an Onboarding Agent that streamlines database setup and an Observability Agent that helps automate troubleshooting, performance optimization, and tuning. Integrated with Gemini Cloud Assist, these agents support multiple database services, including AlloyDB, Bigtable, and Spanner.
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Spotify Builds External Index to Enable Low Latency Point Queries on its Data Lake
Spotify introduced external indexing architecture for Apache Parquet data lakes that enables low-latency point queries without replicating datasets into operational databases. The approach maps lookup keys to Parquet files and row locations, allowing targeted reads from cloud object storage while supporting analytics, machine learning, AI applications, and online services from the same datasets.
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Google's AlphaEvolve Reaches General Availability with Evolutionary Code Optimization as a Service
Google's AlphaEvolve reached general availability on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, turning the DeepMind research project into an evolutionary code optimization service. Evaluators run client-side so code never leaves the customer's infrastructure. Klarna doubled ML training throughput; practitioners note it only works where a measurable evaluation function exists.
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Google Cloud Workbench Notebooks Extension Connects VS Code to Google Cloud's Jupyter Notebooks
The Google Cloud Workbench Notebooks extension for VS Code is a new tool that enables developers to connect their local IDE directly to managed Jupyter notebook environments on Google Cloud.
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Google's Genkit Ships Agents API with Detached Turns and Human-in-the-Loop for TypeScript and Go
Google released the Genkit Agents API in preview for TypeScript and Go. The open-source framework packages message history, tool loops, streaming, and state persistence behind a single chat() interface. Detached turns let agents work after clients disconnect. Interruptible tools provide human-in-the-loop control with anti-forgery validation on resume.
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Google Cloud Suspends Railway's Production Account, Causing Eight-Hour Platform-Wide Outage
Google Cloud's automated systems suspended Railway's production account without notice, triggering an eight-hour platform-wide outage affecting 3 million users. The cascade took down workloads across all providers including AWS and bare metal because Railway's control plane was hosted on GCP. Railway is demoting GCP to backup-only status.
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Google Expands SynthID Adoption for AI Watermarking, Previews Content Detection API
Google's SynthID, designed to embed imperceptible signals into AI-generated content, is adding a new Content Detection API on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, after gaining adoption by several industry players including Nvidia and OpenAI.
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Google Cloud Introduces Cross-Engine Iceberg Support in BigQuery
At the Apache Iceberg Summit last month, Google announced new interoperability features for Apache Iceberg in BigQuery. The preview of the serverless Iceberg REST catalog lets teams create, update, and query the same Apache Iceberg tables in BigQuery and in engines like Spark, Flink, and Trino without duplicating data.