1. The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service

News about our subsea cables is a perennial reader favorite, and the Dunant ready-for-service announcement was no exception. Originally announced in 2018, the Dunant cable will transmit 250 Terabits of data per second between the U.S. and France. Details here.

2. New Tau VMs deliver leading price-performance for scale-out workloads

We welcomed a new addition to our Compute Engine family this year! Based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, the T2D (the first instance type in the Tau VM family), offers 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors — all without having to reengineer your workloads for another microprocessor architecture. Read the blog here.

3. Colossus under the hood: a peek into Google’s scalable storage system

It’s no secret that a lot of the technologies that underlie Google Cloud were originally designed to power Google as a whole, and the Colossus file system is just one example. In this post, Google storage leads take you on a behind-the-scenes look into the Colossus architecture and how it delivers its impressive scalability. More here.

4. Expanding our global footprint with new cloud regions

Year in, year out, the number of geographies where you can find a Google Cloud region continues to grow. A year ago, we announced new regions in Chile, Germany and Saudi Arabia. More recently, we announced we would open a second region in Germany, and new U.S. regions in Columbus, Ohio, and Dallas, Texas.

5. Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable

Along with a new GCP region in Chile, we also announced that we’re building a subsea cable to South America that goes from the East coast of the United States all the way to Argentina. Firmina joins the Curie subsea cable, which takes a Pacific route from the U.S. to South America. Read about Firmina here.

6. Announcing Backup for GKE: the easiest way to protect GKE workloads

Anyone that runs mission-critical workloads in the cloud needs an easy way to back them up. Backup for GKE, a first-party backup solution that makes it easy to protect stateful data from applications running in GKE, was one of our most popular storage launches of 2021. Read all about it here.

7. Introducing Network Connectivity Center: A revolution in simplifying on-prem and cloud networking

Meanwhile, over in Google Cloud networking land, readers grooved on news of our new Network Connectivity Center, a network management solution that works across on-prem and cloud-based networks. Get the details.

8. What’s in a name? Understanding the Google Cloud network “edge”

People throw around the word ‘edge’ all the time, but what exactly does it mean — especially in the context of Google Cloud? In this popular blog post, learn about the difference between Google Cloud regions and zones, edge POPs, Cloud CDN, Cloud Interconnect POPs, edge nodes, and region extensions. Read all about it.

9. How Cloud Storage delivers 11 nines of durability—and how you can help

Besides new product launches, the content that resonates most reliably with readers tends to be explainers. In this top storage piece, learn what we even mean by 11 nines, and the techniques Cloud Storage uses to achieve it. Check it out.

10. Google named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services again

With all this great technology, it’s fitting that Google Cloud was named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. Again. Check out the blog and register to read the full report here.

Hopefully this list gives you a taste of what the fuss over Google Cloud infrastructure is all about. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for 2022!