Best of Google Cloud Platform — January 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of lastweekinawsThe Last Week in AWS·16w

    AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate

    AWS remains financially strong with $132B annual revenue and 29% market share, but faces challenges in operational excellence and talent retention. While Azure's growth numbers are questionable due to unclear financial reporting, Google Cloud emerges as the real competitive threat with clean 34% growth and $155B backlog. AWS's re:Invent 2025 announcements signal strategic shifts toward multi-cloud acceptance, on-premises investment, and democratized AI model training. Though AWS's AI capabilities have become credible with Nova 2 and Trainium3, execution concerns persist—particularly the October us-east-1 outage response time and 69-81% regretted attrition among senior engineers. Success in 2026 depends on whether AWS can maintain operational excellence while retaining institutional knowledge during organizational restructuring.

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    Article
    Avatar of gcpGoogle Cloud·13w

    Introducing Google Cloud Vertex AI Extensions for .NET

    Google Cloud announces the Google.Cloud.VertexAI.Extensions library, enabling .NET developers to integrate Gemini models on Vertex AI through Microsoft.Extensions.AI abstractions. The library provides a unified API for multi-provider AI applications, supporting chat, embeddings, and image generation. It complements the existing Google Gen AI .NET SDK by offering flexibility for developers who need to work with multiple AI providers (Google, OpenAI, Azure) while maintaining consistent code patterns. The library is currently in beta and includes code samples for common use cases.

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    Article
    Avatar of newstackThe New Stack·16w

    Bryan Cantrill: How Kubernetes Broke the AWS Cloud Monopoly

    Kubernetes broke AWS's cloud dominance by introducing a vendor-neutral orchestration layer that eliminated API lock-in. Before 2014, AWS seemed unbeatable with five times the capacity of competitors and relentless execution. Companies felt trapped by AWS APIs, believing competitors like Google Cloud and Azure could never catch up without API compatibility. Kubernetes changed this by allowing applications to be built against its APIs instead of cloud-specific ones, enabling true multi-cloud portability. Google open-sourced Kubernetes to encourage cloud neutrality, knowing they had the most to gain as the underdog. While AWS still leads with 30% market share, the cloud market has expanded into a trillion-dollar industry with diverse participants, partly thanks to Kubernetes democratizing infrastructure orchestration.

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    Article
    Avatar of gcpGoogle Cloud·16w

    Cloud SQL for MySQL introduces optimized writes

    Google Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise Plus edition now includes optimized writes, a feature that automatically tunes MySQL configurations based on real-time workload metrics to improve write performance. The feature delivers up to 3x better write throughput compared to Enterprise edition, with five automated optimizations that adjust parameters and data handling without manual intervention. The post includes detailed benchmarking instructions using sysbench to measure performance improvements across different instance configurations, demonstrating the benefits for write-intensive OLTP workloads.

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