Welcome to the June 16–30, 2021 edition of Google Cloud Platform- Technology Nuggets.

Tau VM Family

Compute Engine, a core offering on Google Cloud that provides Virtual Machines, is known for its security, reliability and flexibility vis-a-vis the choice of VMs for running your workloads. While we provide you a range of Compute Engine VM families ranging from standard, high compute, high memory and even custom configurations, we have just introduced our latest offering : Tau VM family that provides cost-effective performance of scale-out workloads.

To help you position the new VM family correctly, we have also put together a…

Welcome to the June 1–15, 2021 edition of Google Cloud Platform- Technology Nuggets.

We heard your feedback about increasing the frequency of Technology Nuggets and this is our first iteration to bring you technology news on Google Cloud Platform every two weeks. For those, who are reading this for the first time, we look at the recent announcements and highlight a few articles to read along with our own commentary.

Build on GCP Architecture Series

Priyanka Vergadia, Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, has launched a new mini-series titled “Build on GCP”. The series will be exclusive on Twitter and LinkedIn…

Welcome to Google Cloud Platform Technology Nuggets. We look at all the announcements in the previous month and highlight a few articles to read along with our own commentary.

Updates from Google I/O

Our annual developer event Google I/O was held on May 18–20 and saw a great set of announcements ranging from Android, WearOS, Flutter, Tensorflow and of course Google Cloud. Specifically speaking of Google Cloud, there were announcements in areas of AI, Serverless and Google Workspace. You can read the summary but more specifically, check out the Cloud Developers guide to I/O that contains links to the sessions…

We recently covered a 3-part series on Compute Engine Pricing, which I list down over here:

• Part 1 : Sustained Use Discounts and Committed Use Discounts
• Part 2 : Custom Machine Types
• Part 3 : Preemptible VMs

In Part 1 , we covered On-demand pricing , where you are charged for the time that you keep the Virtual Machine instances running. We also covered the scenario, that in development and testing environments, one of the recommendations is not to keep the instances running all the time. …

In the previous part, we took a look at Custom Machine Types in Google Compute Engine and how you could provision a VM as per your specific vCPU / RAM requirements and save on the cost.

In this article, we are going to look at how you can save a lot more of the list price of a VM via what are know as Preemptible Virtual Machines. We will also understand more importantly, where you can ideally use this type of a VM.

What is a Preemptible Virtual Machine?

I would like to present the definition via two points:

• This is an instance that you can…

In the previous part, we took a look at understanding the basics of Sustained Use Discounts (SUD) and Committed Use Discounts (CUD) and how they are related to pricing a Virtual Machine in Google Compute Engine.

In this article, we are going to take a look at one of the biggest differentiators in Google Cloud Platform : Custom Virtual Machine Types.

Before we get to that, let us continue with the Virtual Machine instance type that we used in the previous article i.e. n1-standard-1 , which as per the documentation gives us 1 vCPU and 3.75 GB RAM.

Google Compute…

This is series of articles that I plan to write to help understand the various pricing levers that you have in Google Cloud Platform’s core compute offering : Google Compute Engine. I plan to explain this vis easy to understand and practical examples with the help of the Google Cloud Cost Calculator, that is available publicly.

Let’s get going.

Google Compute Engine provides a core infrastructure component : Virtual Machines (VM). These VMs are classified into different families

• General purpose
• Memory Optimized
• Compute Optimized

Each family has various machine types. How do you select which machine type, what kind of…

Dialogflow is a great tool for designing and building out Agents that can run in a variety of Messaging Platforms. In my interactions with customers, a frequent request that comes up is about support for multiple languages. Not just that but complex scenarios like “Can an Agent support more than 1 language in a single utterance?”, etc.

The objective of this blog post is to show you step by step how you can start designing an Agent in Dialogflow that can support two languages. …