The big news coming out of the Google Cloud Platform Global User Conference (GCP NEXT 2016) in San Francisco this week revolves around the company’s new machine learning service. Google said that it is releasing its Cloud Machine Learning service in a limited preview.
Cloud Machine Learning relies on the open source TensorFlow machine learning library, according to Google. The tool will take machine learning mainstream, offering data scientists and developers a way to build a new class of intelligent applications, the company said. It provides access to the same technologies that power Google Now, Google Photos and voice recognition in Google Search as application program interfaces.
Faster Learning Models
In a blog post about Cloud Machine Learning, Google said the tool makes it easy for developers to build large-scale machine learning models in less time. Cloud Machine Learning is portable, fully managed and scalable, and works with data in several formats.
The product integrates with such cloud platform products as Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud Datalab, the company said. It offers users the opportunity to build predictive analytics models using their own training data.
In one instance, Cloud Machine Learning can augment a financial services app that predicts values using regression models, or a classification service for images by handling such chores as data ingestion prediction. Google said that Cloud Machine Learning helps any application that can take advantage of the same deep learning techniques that power many of Google’s own services.
“We are excited to bring the best of Google Research to Google Cloud Platform,” Google Research software engineer Slaven Bilac said in a blog post.
Other Products Discussed
At the conference, Google also unveiled its Stackdriver cloud monitoring and logging utility, which was released into free beta testing this week. According to Google, Stackdriver is the first service to include rich dashboards, uptime monitoring, alerting, log analysis, tracing, error reporting and production debugging in one product. Google said the combination should reduce the time it takes to find and fix issues in production.
Stackdriver will be integrated with PagerDuty, an operations performance platform that its San Francisco-based makers said brings visibility and actionable intelligence across the entire incident lifecycle. The partnership will provide development teams with a view across their cloud applications development pipelines, giving them information such as PagerDuty schedules and ticketing status.
Google’s new cloud service, Cloud IAM, was also discussed at GCP NEXT 2016, which ends today. Now available for beta testing, Cloud IAM lets large enterprises ensure that only authorized employees can perform their permissioned duties within the Google cloud infrastructure. It contains beefed up security and compliance features, and also lets users assign permissions to their Cloud Platform resources. Cloud IAM works with Google accounts, service accounts, Google groups and Google Apps domains.
Image Credit: GCP NEXT 2016 Conference images via Google.
