Category: Google Cloud Platform

There was an exciting new announcement today from Google Cloud Platform and Fitbit.  The fitness wearable company is not only moving to GCP as their preferred cloud platform provider, but they will also be taking advantage of the Google Cloud Healthcare API.

The Cloud Healthcare API… “provide an interoperability solution that enables their users to collaborate on care with their own healthcare providers.”  This could be a big deal as there have been some 76 million Fitbit devices sold and some 25 million active users.

Just days after opening the new Netherlands region for Google Cloud Platform, the new Montreal region is now open to customers.  The new data center joins Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina and Northern Virginia in North America as being available for apps, storage and compute needs.

The new Montreal region will offer all of the functionality of Google Cloud Platform with quick access to those in the region.  These areas include security, Big Data, Compute, storage and network.

As Google continues its relentless growth of its data and cloud services, the company announced today their plans to have three new undersea data cables by the end of 2019.  The cables are fully owned by Google and will provide data infrastructure support to various regions and the company’s Cloud Platform.

The announcement came as part of a larger GCP (Google Cloud Platform) announcement where the company indicated 5 new GCP locations will be coming online in 2018.  These will be Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal, Netherlands, and Finland.  These new POPs will give GCP more localize control and cut down data haul times (measured in milliseconds) to those areas & regions.

Today at Google Cloud Next, the company made it clear:  They want to be the platform for your Windows applications.  In the keynote message, Google’s Brian Stevens announced that they were releasing a wide set of tools to help enterprises migrate their Windows-based servers and other solutions to Google Cloud Platform.  The company already has SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core in Google Compute Engine but they certainly upped the ante today.  Now on GCP, you have SQL Server Enterprise plus a beta of .NET for both Google App Engine and Google Container Engine.  Further, things like Active Directory and other Windows-based server solutions can now be migrated to GCP.

The move is aimed at making GCP a solid base by which you can run your Windows-based solutions without having to actually have a physical server sitting on your premise, yet keeping the Windows solutions available to your enterprise.  In other words, to use GCP, you don’t necessarily have to use Google solutions.