Google Cloud Diary: GCP Slashes Price Of Nvidia Tesla GPUs By 36 Percent

September 2017: Google’s first German GCP Region is Live

Google’s third European region is now open for business, allowing customers to run applications and store data on GCP.

The company claims ‘europe-west3’ can boost latency by up to 50 percent for customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland will offer compute, big data, storage and networking services at launch.

it is also claimed companies east of Frankfurt should also enjoy an improvement in service.

The launch of local data centres is seen as essential for cloud expansion as they offer performance gains and compliance with local data regulations.

September 2017: Google Dedicated Interconnect Offers Direct Access to GCP

Google is offering customer a direct connection to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), following in the footsteps of many of its public cloud competitors who already offer such a service.

Dedicated Interconnect is pitched as an easy way to migrate to GCP, offering a private connection that offers high bandwidth and security, and for organisations that want to extend private data centres into the public cloud.

Locations include London, the US, Asia and Europe and can be managed from the cloud console.

“Dedicated Interconnect lets you establish a private network connection directly to Google Cloud Platform through one of our Dedicated Interconnect locations,” said John Veizades, product manager for Direct Interconnect. “Dedicated Interconnect also offers increased throughput and even a potential reduction in network costs.

“Once connected, the Google network provides access to all GCP regions using a private fiber network that connect more than 100 points of presence around the globe. The Google network is the largest cloud network in the world, by several measures, including by the number of points of presence.”

August 2017: Google Cloud Speech API adds 30 new languages

Google Cloud Speech API can now handle longform audio more effectively and supports 30 new languages, covering one billion additional speakers.

The speech recognition technology can now support files of up top 3 hours in duration, up from 80 minutes, and there is the possibility of an extension on a case-by-case basis.

Google says it has also added time stamps for each word in a conversation – one of the most requested features from GCP customers.

Among the new languages are Bengali, Latvian and Swahili, bringing the total number to 119. Google says this allows for an almost global reach, helping customers to expand.

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