What’s Up in the Cloud: Google Powers Mayo Clinic’s Transformation, New GCP Capabilities, More

Between Labor Day weekend, thousands of photos of kids returning to school flooding social media, and the start of football season, the past two weeks have flown by. But while everyone was busy soaking up the last of summer, the Google Cloud announcements did not slow down. So Maven Wave is back with our second blog recapping the latest new features, product updates, and Google Cloud news. In case you missed the first iteration, you can find it here. 

Below are some of the highlights from the past few weeks:

• Mayo Clinic selects Google as digital transformation partner: Top U.S. hospital, Mayo Clinic, is partnering with Google in an effort to improve the future of patient experiences, patient outcomes, and clinical research. This large scale digital transformation encompasses data warehousing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. One anticipated use case includes creating machine learning models for diseases. As part of the partnership, Google will open an office in Rochester, Minn. to enable its staff to work alongside the medical experts at Mayo. 

• Out of the Office notification in Gmail and Hangouts Chat: While you are likely accustomed to using the Vacation Responder functionality in Gmail, it’s always been difficult to know when someone you’re about to chat is simply away from their desk or out of the office altogether. Until now. Google has announced that now when you set an Out of Office entry on your calendar, a status update will also appear in Gmail and on Hangouts Chat letting the person sending you an email or a chat know that you are out of the office and what date you will be back.

• New way to view word count in Docs: If you have an assignment to write a certain number of words, you may find yourself frequently going to the Tools menu to manually look it up several times while typing. To eliminate this repetitive action, Google has introduced a new setting in Docs that displays your word count while typing in the lower left corner of the doc.

• 6 and 12 TB VMs now available for SAP HANA instances on GCP: Many enterprises run on SAP, so GCP is now supporting larger SAP deployments to enable those companies to scale their SAP HANA workloads. Google is addressing this need by adding two new machine types to their VM portfolio so that customers can deploy workloads requiring 6 or 12 TB of memory in a single node. This all-VM infrastructure offers flexibility to scale up and down as needed.

• Cloud Dataproc on Kubernetes: Cloud Dataproc is a managed cloud service for developers to run Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop clusters. Now, Google has announced the launch of Cloud Dataproc on Kubernetes in alpha, which in turn gives enterprise customers the ability to run Apache Spark jobs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This enables customers to use one cluster management system and offers a single view across YARN and Kubernetes clusters.

• Increased security with Shielded GKE Nodes: Google is proactively increasing security in Kubernetes to protect against attackers as more and more companies are moving sensitive workloads into containers. New Shielded GKE nodes in beta provide a strong, verifiable node identity and integrity. Shielded GKE nodes protect against a variety of potential attacks, including node OS provenance check, enhanced rootkit and bootkit protection, and standards-based security.

Stop by in a few weeks for another update on the latest buzz and updates around Google Cloud. Are you interested in learning more about how GCP can power your company’s digital transformation? Subscribe to our newsletter to hear about our latest white papers, customer stories, and blog posts showcasing our solutions spanning the entire GCP product portfolio.

As the two-time Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year, Maven Wave works with leading companies to make the shift to digital with solutions that are agile, rooted in analytics, and built in the cloud. Contact us today to set up a time to speak with our experts.