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Google Introduces Free Trial for AlloyDB PostgreSQL Database
Google has announced a free trial program for AlloyDB, its fully-managed PostgreSQL-compatible database service. The trial allows users to test AlloyDB's capabilities with their own workloads for up to 30 days. AlloyDB is designed to provide high performance, scalability, and reliability, while maintaining full compatibility with open-source PostgreSQL.
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Google Cloud Introduces Geo-Partitioning for Spanner: Reduced Latency and Cost Optimization
Google Cloud has announced adding geo-partitioning to Spanner, its fully-managed, globally distributed database. According to the company, this new feature aims to improve performance and user experience for geographically dispersed applications and users while optimizing operational costs.
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Google Cloud Introduces Hierarchical Namespace for Cloud Storage in Preview
Google Cloud has announced a significant update to its Cloud Storage services by introducing the Hierarchical Namespace (HNS). Now available in preview, this new feature allows users to organize their storage buckets in a hierarchical file system structure, enhancing performance, consistency, and manageability.
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Google Provides Extended Support for Cloud SQL MySQL and PostgreSQL End-of-Life Versions
Google Cloud has announced extended support for end-of-life Cloud SQL MySQL and PostgreSQL versions to help users maintain database operations and plan upgrades more efficiently. Starting February 1, 2025, versions such as MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and PostgreSQL 9.6 to 12 will enter an extended support phase, allowing customers to continue using these versions beyond their standard support dates.
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Recap of Google I/O 2024: Gemini 1.5, Project Astra, AI-powered Search Engine
Google recently hosted its annual developer conference, Google I/O 2024, where numerous announcements were made regarding Google’s apps and services. As anticipated, AI was a focal point of the event, being incorporated into almost all Google products. Here is a summary of the major announcements from the event.
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Google Brings Gemini Nano to Chrome to Enable On-Device Generative AI
At its Google I/O 2024 developer conference, Google announced it is working to make support for on-device large language models a reality by bringing the smallest of its Gemini models, Gemini Nano, to Chrome.
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How Google Does Chaos Testing to Improve Spanner's Reliability
To ensure their Spanner database keeps working reliably, Google engineers use chaos testing to inject faults into production-like instances and stress the system's ability to behave in a correct way in the face of unexpected failures.
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UniSuper’s Entire Infrastructure Deleted by Internal Google Cloud Error
An Australian superannuation fund manager, UniSuper, using Google Cloud for an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) contract, found it had no disaster recovery (DR) recourse when the entire infrastructure subscription was deleted.
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Google Launches Gemini 1.5 Flash for Lower-Latency and More Efficient AI Serving
Part of the Gemini family of AI models, Gemini Flash is a lighter-weight iteration that is designed to be faster and more efficient to use than Gemini Pro while offering the same "breakthrough" context window of one million tokens.
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Jetpack Compose Extends Transitions and Animations, and Improves Performance
The latest release of Jetpack Compose, announced at Google I/O 2024, brings several extensions, including support for shared element transitions, lazy list item animations, improved performance, and more.
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Google Text Embedding Model Gecko Distills Large Language Models for Improved Performance
Gecko is a text embedding model that Google created by distilling knowledge from large language models into a general-purpose model. Gecko is trained using a novel approach on a variety of tasks including document retrieval, semantic similarity, and classification, and aims to be as general-purpose as it goes as well as highly performant.
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Gemini Code Assist to Create APIs, Integrations, and Automation Flows in Public Preview
At the Cloud Next Conference, Google unveiled its enterprise-focused AI Code completion and assistance tool, Gemini Code Assist, which is available in public preview for Apigee API Management and Application Integration.
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Shadow API Detection for Google Cloud Environments in Preview
During Google Cloud Next, Google announced the preview release of shadow API detection in Advanced API Security, part of the Apigee API Management solution. This managed API Broker service in the Google Cloud allows users to design, secure, deploy, monitor, and analyze APIs.
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Google Cloud Run Volume Mounts in Preview: Easier Access to Files in Containers
Google recently announced a new feature called volume mounts in preview. This feature aims to streamline the integration of cloud-native applications with shared data storage solutions, such as Cloud Storage buckets and NFS shares, directly within Cloud Run instances.
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xAI Releases Grok as an Open-Source Large Language Model
Elon Musk announced that xAI would make its AI chatbot Grok open source, and now the release is accessible on GitHub and Hugging Face. This move enables researchers and developers to expand upon the model, influencing how xAI evolves Grok in the face of competition from tech giants like OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others.