Last month today: February on the Google Cloud blog

There’s never a dull moment in cloud technology, as cloud app development and infrastructure mature and there are more ways to manage and use cloud data. February’s highlights included plenty of news. Here’s what was popular last month on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) blog.Bringing cloud homeHybrid cloud continues to grow, with the announcement last month of our Cloud Services Platform, a software-based approach to incorporate GCP services into your on-premises infrastructure. CSP is built on top of open-source technologies like Kubernetes and Istio, and deploys Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) On-Prem to remotely manage on-prem clusters. The bottom line: With CSP, you can build and manage a less disruptive, more flexible hybrid cloud.More ways to containerize and build appsOpen-source tool Jib became generally available last month, making it easier to containerize Java applications. Previously, developers dealt with slow build times and too-large containers when containerizing these apps. Besides the ability to dockerize Maven and Gradle projects, Jib 1.0 adds the ability to dockerize WAR projects, integration with Skaffold for Kubernetes development, and Jib Core, a container library for Java.Cloud Firestore is now generally available, too, bringing a NoSQL database that’s ideal for use with web, mobile and IoT applications. Though Cloud Firestore is part of GCP’s database family, it’s really a data back end that includes edge storage, security and synchronization features, among other things. Developers using Cloud Firestore can build apps that update quickly, even if connectivity is spotty.Play with your dataWe released six new cryptocurrency blockchain data sets last month as part of our BigQuery public data sets. Making this data publicly available means you can access and explore this data to better understand blockchain and to integrate it into your applications—for example, to compare the ways in which these different blockchains query payments and receipts.And finally, there’s a new way to explore BigQuery without entering credit card information. The new BigQuery sandbox makes it easy to explore this serverless data warehouse to run SQL queries over both large and small data sets. As a BigQuery sandbox user, you can access the same compute power as paying users, and just like paying users, you get to use new capabilities like BigQuery Machine Learning and BigQuery Geospatial Information Systems. BigQuery sandbox provides you with up to 1 terabyte per month of query capacity and 10GB of free storage.Till next month, we wish you happy data integration and fruitful cloud building. Don’t forget to check out our Next ‘19 site to register and see the session listings.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform