When it comes to AI use cases, language translation is amongst the most practical and widely adopted by companies and organizations alike. From Canva to Bloomberg, companies have pursued the flywheel of automatic multi-lingual translation, seeking to make content more accessible to employees, customers, communities, and the public. Since introducing the transformer architecture in 2017, which powers today’s large language models (or LLMs),  Google has continued to produce pioneering work, including many advancements in AI Translation. In this blog post, we’re pleased to announce a new ge ..read more

The Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) is a fundamental tool for managing the scalability and efficiency of your environment, working by deploying more Pods in response to increased load. However, achieving the best price-performance with HPA requires a nuanced understanding of its settings, particularly your CPU utilization targets. The common assumption that a 50% CPU target is a good starting point can actually lead to higher costs. In fact, the 50% HPA CPU target might require significantly more provisioned resources compared to a 70% target, with a marginal impact on performance ..read more

One of the secrets behind Spanner’s reliability is the team’s extensive use of chaos testing, the process of deliberately injecting faults into production-like instances of the database. Although engineers focus on testing the “happy path,” most software bugs occur when things go wrong. Given Spanner’s complex architecture and constantly evolving codebase, it is inevitable that bugs will be introduced. Here, we give an overview of the types of chaos testing we employ and the kinds of bugs it finds. A fault-tolerant design foundation Spanner is built from “mostly reliable” components including ..read more

Introduction Cloud SQL for SQL Server offers configurable auditing, capturing events like login attempts, DDLs, and DMLs. These events are stored locally on the instance for up to 7 days and can be preserved longer in GCS buckets. Some customers want to access and analyze their Cloud SQL for SQL Server audit data in other systems, like BigQuery or Tableau. While a custom-built pipeline can achieve this, it introduces complexity and maintenance burdens. Constant investment is needed for support, monitoring, and ensuring no audit records are lost. In this blog, we walk through the steps to build ..read more

Data-driven companies are increasingly infusing real-time data into their applications and user experiences, especially with the advent of new technologies that make data capture more on-demand – and at a higher volume – than ever before. Change data capture (CDC) is a long-standing mechanism that data practitioners use to connect their transactional systems with their analytical warehouses. Historically, customers have had to manage temp tables and schedule merge statements to keep their systems in sync, which can be a lot of work and prone to failures. To solve these problems, BigQuery incl ..read more

Data is the lifeblood of the organization. Being able to make quick, accurate and actionable decisions based on authoritative data enables enterprises to offer differentiated services and improve customer satisfaction. The rise of generative AI has only further amplified this. It’s therefore important that your database provides near-real-time performance when interacting with operational data. For PostgreSQL databases, we offer Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL Enterprise Plus edition, which offers improved performance out of the box, improved data protection (35 days of PITR) and improved availabili ..read more

Over the last year, there’s been a lot of change in the commercial image and video asset industry: New generative AI applications let users create their own still and live images based on prompts, and traditional stock-media asset providers are offering customers richer search experiences that have a deep understanding of the image/live image content and that expose it with a natural language interface.  To continually push the state of the art, these organizations must use data to evolve their products rapidly, for example to:  Optimize still and live image generation models Id ..read more

The Active Assist portfolio of intelligent tools can help you reduce costs, increase performance, improve security, and even help you make more sustainable decisions. Today, we’re excited to announce some new Active Assist features that address some of our customers’ largest concerns. These features unlock some key functionality that help you better understand and use recommendations, all aimed to help make managing and optimizing your cloud simpler and easier.  Revamped Recommendation Hub Recommendation Hub is a centralized page on Google Cloud that helps you view all of your recommenda ..read more

Geographical redundancy is a fundamental part of building a resilient cloud-based data strategy. For many years, BigQuery has offered an industry-leading 99.99% uptime service-level agreement (SLA) for availability within a single geographical region. Full redundancy across two data centers within a single region is included with every BigQuery dataset you create and is managed in a completely transparent manner.  For customers looking for enhanced redundancy across large geographic regions, we are now introducing managed disaster recovery for BigQuery. This feature, now in preview, offe ..read more

The modern workplace relies on web-based applications and cloud services, making browsers and their sensitive data a primary target for attackers. While the risks are significant, Chrome Enterprise can help organizations simplify and strengthen their endpoint security with secure enterprise browsing.  Following our recent Chrome Enterprise Premium launch, today at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, we’re announcing a growing ecosystem of security providers who are working with us to extend Chrome Enterprise’s browser-based protections and help enterprises protect their users working on ..read more