I know, I repeat myself. But even though March and April were very busy, May sets a new benchmark (maybe because Google I/O and Cloud Data Summit took place last month;):

1. Security 1: When Data spreads in Hybrid- or Multi-Cloud-Scenarios, it’s harder to secure. Google Cloud has taken on this challenge and is recognized by Forrester as a leader in this field.

2. AI: Following the motto “sharing is caring”, Google announced that “building upon the success of the existing Public Datasets Program, Google expanded the aperture to include commercial datasets, synthetic datasets, and first-party Google data assets that can be used to increase the value of analytics and AI initiatives.” Read the full announcement here.

3. Software Development 1: Do you want to harness your best practices created with a big deal of work for everything that your devs are currently building? Google makes it way easier by providing “new custom samples, so that developers can quickly access your enterprise’s best code samples via a versioned Git repository directly from their IDEs.”

4. GDPR: “The EU GDPR Cloud Code of Conduct (CoC) is a mechanism for cloud providers to demonstrate how they offer sufficient guarantees to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures as data processors under the GDPR. Google is proud to say that Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace already adhere to these provisions.”

5. Network Management: Network Intelligence Center is the new central place for your GCP Network Management. With Firewall Insights, Google adds an important new functionality, which helps you keep track of your firewall rules as your environment grows over time.

6. Google Maps: You can read how huge Google Maps was at Google I/O in this article with all the announcements.

7. Machine Learning: Aiming to streamline ML operations, Google also announced a new, fully managed Machine Learning Platform called VertexAI at Google I/O. Check out this article and highlighted links for details.

8. Sustainability: “Google and clean-energy startup Fervo have just signed the world’s first corporate agreement to develop a next-generation geothermal power project, which will provide an ‘always-on’ carbon-free resource that can reduce our hourly reliance on fossil fuels.” If you want to delve deeper into sustainability, check out the highlights report from our latest event “Green Practices with Google Cloud & Wabion” – we planted 420 more trees.

9. Save money 1: Do you want to lower development costs by optimizing the uptime of your Cloud SQL instance as a development server? This article “will walk you through the steps to configure your Cloud SQL instance to start and stop each workday using Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud Scheduler.”

10. Security 2: Check out “Cloud CISO Perspectives: May 2021” – a monthly must-read.

11. Save money 2: Letting you commit for a year to spending a certain amount on Cloud Run and benefiting from a 17% discount on the amount you committed, Google introduced “self-service spend-based committed use discounts for Cloud Run.” Both thumbs up!

12. DDoS protection: After bringing more functionalities to Cloud Armor during the last months, Google Cloud announced “Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, which is a managed application protection service that bundles advanced DDoS protection capabilities, WAF capabilities, ML-based Adaptive Protection, efficient pricing, bill protection and access to Google’s DDoS response support service into an enterprise-friendly subscription.” It’s available in two different tiers, check out this article for more details.

13. Storage: Check out this great GCP Sketchnote to find the right storage option for you within Google Cloud.

14. Security 3: It’s never too late to start optimizing security for user account authentication and password management: Read the updated tips and tricks provided by Google.

15. Multi-cloud map: How does GCP map to AWS and Azure? Many things make GCP unique, but there are other hyperscalers. It’s always good to know how the various services in GCP relate to their counterparts in AWS or Azure, in particular when you’re considering multi-cloud as an option. Check out the new GCP, AWS and Azure Product Map.

16. Data Analytics 1: If you’re interested in Data, you know Databricks for sure. It’s now finally GA on GCP.

17. Data Analytics 2: Are you up for rethinking data lake architecture? Then you should definitely read these great insights on the challenges and solutions that exist when building modern cloud-based data lakes. Read part I and part II on Medium.

18. Software development 2: “Developers around the world are constantly creating open source tools and tutorials but have a hard time getting them discovered. The content published often spanned many different sites – from GitHub to Medium. Therefore Google decided to create a space where they can highlight the best projects related to Google technologies in one place – introducing the Developer Library.”

19. Data Analytics 3: Have you ever wondered about “how can you run real-time analytics against operational and transactional data?” Then, “Real-time Change Data Capture for data replication into BigQuery” with Google Cloud DataStream. It can also be used to make migration from Oracle to PostGreSQL easier and more enjoyable.

20. Data Analytics 4: “Dataplex is an intelligent data fabric that provides a way to centrally manage, monitor, and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools.” If it sounds interesting to you, read on here.

21. Databases: A lot of customers love Dataflow because of its simplicity, speed and scalability when it comes to setting up data pipelines. It just got even better with Dataflow Prime. Read this article for more information.

22. Site Reliability Engineering: Here’s some great advice on how to jumpstart your SRE practice.

23. Anthos: Do you fancy an Anthos deep dive? This article leads you to all the articles in Google Cloud’s hybrid and multicloud development series. Still not enough? Here’s more with the Anthos 101 Learning Series.

24. Financial Services: Here comes Datashare for financial services, “a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem — data publishers, and data consumers — to exchange market data securely and easily.”

Wow, May was indeed major;). I hope you got to read many great articles. And now, let the summer begin.

Stay safe and healthy,

Jörn