Google Boosts Cloud Platform with New Features

SAN FRANSISCO: Google announces a plethora of new features for its Google Cloud Platform (GCP), emphasizing that it is striving to be the world leader in the Cloud development platform.

Google has recognized machine learning and security as its prime focus behind its updated business-and-tech strategy. The new features are as follows:

Machine Learning

Google is adding new machine learning capabilities to its cloud platform. The company has integrated its open-source AI tool, TensorFlow, to the platform and unveiled a set of new APIs for enterprise customers. These include Google's technology for translating languages, recognizing speech and scanning an image and detailing it immediately.

Stackdriver

Google unveiled its Stackdriver cloud monitoring and logging utility. Users can deploy Stackdriver to monitor both GCP and the competing Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds in the same dashboard.

Google said Stackdriver is the first service to include rich dashboards, uptime monitoring, alerting, log analysis, tracing, error reporting and production debugging -across GCP and AWS - in a single unified offering. This combinationsignificantly reduces the time that teams spend finding and fixing issues in production.

PagerDuty Integration with StackDriver

PagerDuty, a provider of information technology and services, announces its integration with Stackdriver. PagerDuty is an operations performance platform delivering visibility and actionable intelligence across the entire incident lifecycle.

 The new integration provides DevOps and ITOps teams with a view across their cloud applications development pipelines, which reduces incident response times and improves application reliability.

PagerDuty's Google Stackdriver integration also enables users to use PagerDuty as a hub for operations teams to centralize, classify, and enrich events coming from Google Stackdriver. Users can see their PagerDuty schedules inside Stackdriver to know who is on call. Users can also use PagerDuty's multi-channel alert notification services, including the mobile app, email, SMS and phone for the ideal frequency and re-routing notification methods; and  access responsive, bi-directional alerts that reduce resolution times by including live interactive Stackdriver graphs in PagerDuty.

PagerDuty offers more than 150 integrations for ITOps, DevOps, ChatOps and ticketing tools to keep cloud services running.

Cloud Identity and access management (IAM)

Cloud IAM enables large enterprises to make sure that only authorized employees can perform their permissioned duties within the Google cloud infrastructure. Cloud IAM works with Google accounts, service accounts, Google groups, and Google Apps domains. Cloud IAM is available now for beta testing.

"IAM allows you to assign permissions to your Cloud Platform resources through IAM roles, which are defined as a collection of permissions as owner/editor/viewer that gives users permissions to all resources in a project,"  says Google Cloud Platform Vice President of Product Management, Brian Stevens, in his blog.