Last month today: March on the Google Cloud blog

Whew—March was a busy month around here, with a new region opening, an actual Guinness World Record, and some interesting stories of using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for gaming and basketball data analytics. Here are the top stories that caught your interest last month.

Bulking up infrastructure

• GCP’s sixth European region, in Zurich, Switzerland, opened last month. It launched with our standard set of products across compute, databases, storage, security, big data and networking, including Compute Engine, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery and more. The Zurich region comes with three availability zones and Cloud Interconnect, our private, software-defined network to speed cloud access and data movement. See which GCP region is closest to you at GCPing.com.
• On the infrastructure front, we introduced a new Cloud Storage pricing plan. The Storage Growth Plan tackles data growth and volatility that many of our users experience. We want to keep cost unpredictability out of that equation, so this new plan lets you commit to 12-month periods of using Cloud Storage for a fixed dollar amount.

Using cloud for fun and π

• We celebrated Pi Day, 3/14, here at Google Cloud with the excitement of winning a Guinness World Record for the most digits of π ever calculated, to 31.4 trillion decimal places. Google Cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao used Compute Engine VMs running y-cruncher to do the calculations. In addition to this being the most π digits ever calculated, it’s the first time this record was set using the cloud. Using cloud also brings the benefit of easy sharing: You can get your hands on the digits via pi.delivery.
• Also last month: The annual March Madness tournament started, and we continued our partnership to explore the NCAA’s 80-plus years’ worth of historical basketball data using Google Cloud. This year, we’re bringing student developers into the fold and adding a new online course so you can learn how to use BigQuery to analyze NCAA data with SQL and make a machine learning model to make predictions based on the historical data. We also built a public Data Studio dashboard with plenty of new insights to help you survive the madness. We’ll have bootcamps at Next ‘19 to continue the fun.
• And speaking of fun and games, Google Cloud made a big splash at this year’s Game Developers Conference, where we highlighted how Stadia and Google Cloud are better together, as well as how GCP is powering popular games like Apex Legends and Tom Clancy’s The Division 2. These multiplayer games run on GCP infrastructure around the world so players can constantly access matchmaking, statistics and high score data.

Putting tools and concepts together for an SRE service

• The latest installment in our series about using Istio covers how you can bring application metrics into your reporting and in line with your site reliability engineering (SRE) practice. Since Istio integrates with Stackdriver, you can get about a dozen metrics right away without further configuration. This post covers how you might choose from those metrics as you’re setting service-level indicators (SLIs), and how you can use Stackdriver Logging and Trace to get into the details that are most relevant for your team and business.

That’s a wrap for March. We’ll see you next month—and at Next ‘19 in the meantime!