Google Cloud Programming Tutorials & Engineering Articles

AI infrastructure engineers, storage developers, and cloud service providers need fast and secure access to high-capacity file and object storage to support AI…

How do Postgres providers handle a query that exhausts memory? A recursive query benchmark compares query failures and cluster survival across ClickHouse Managed Postgres, Cloud SQL, PlanetScale, and Amazon RDS.

The MaxText team successfully reproduced AI2’s OLMo 3 7B language model from scratch on Google Cloud TPUs using JAX/XLA, precisely matching the original PyTorch-on-GPU reference across pre-training and mid-training stages on all held-out evaluations. The implementation achieved up to 57.4% Model Flops Utilization (MFU) and demonstrated robust infrastructure portability by surviving mid-run cluster resizes and cross-generation TPU shifts without requiring recipe alterations. Crucially, the exercise proved the necessity of comprehensive held-out validation by catching a silent data-loader memorization bug that artificially depressed training loss and would have otherwise faked a performance win.

Google Cloud API Gateway now acts as a native remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, eliminating the need to build and maintain custom middleware to expose REST APIs to AI agents. By simply adding specific annotations (like x-google-api-management.mcp) to existing OpenAPI 3.x specifications, developers can instantly convert standard REST operations into discoverable, agent-ready tools. The gateway automatically transcodes incoming MCP JSON-RPC requests into REST calls, ensuring that your existing authentication, quotas, and logging policies apply seamlessly to agent traffic without requiring new infrastructure.

AI factories are power-limited systems that deliver maximum value when fully optimized. GPU workload placement is a key optimization.

The Gemini Enterprise Developer Experience (DevEx) program conducts ongoing sprint testing of end-to-end developer workflows to identify and rapidly resolve friction points without relying on internal shortcuts. This recent sprint focused on optimizing enterprise AI governance, including refining setup prerequisites, securing extension configurations, and clarifying policy enforcement mechanics to ensure a smoother, more reliable deployment. Developers can now leverage updated documentation and standardized code samples to improve their experience with Agent Gateway and Semantic Governance configurations.

Google Cloud has natively integrated TPU support into the vLLM serving engine, allowing developers to elastically scale high-demand embedding pipelines using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). To handle massive 15K+ token contexts for models like Qwen3-Embedding-8B, the engineering team implemented TPU-specific optimizations such as hardware-safe tensor alignment, JAX/XLA compilation pre-warming, and a hybrid StepPool architecture for chunked prefill management. These enhancements achieve near-perfect numerical parity with reference GPU baselines, and developers can immediately leverage the open-sourced setup recipes on the AI-Hypercomputer GitHub to build their own high-throughput semantic retrieval applications.

Building autonomous AI agents that mutate production state requires moving beyond soft system prompts to a robust zero-trust architecture. To secure Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) workflows against prompt injections and malicious execution, developers must implement hardware-backed cryptographic signatures for database writes, kernel-level sandboxing with gVisor for dynamic code, and deterministic semantic gateways for I/O validation. By enforcing these hard security boundaries at the infrastructure level, you can safely deploy multi-tool AI agents without risking unauthorized data manipulation or server compromise.

HeyGen ported their 18B+ parameter Avatar IV video generation model to Google Cloud's Trillium (v6e) TPUs via torchax and XLA, utilizing FSDP and Ulysses sequence parallelism across an eight-chip mesh. To achieve a 1.86x speedup for real-time streaming, the engineering team pipelined exposed all-to-all collectives, aligned sparse attention block sizes to eliminate mask padding, and bypassed softmax serial dependencies using a precomputed Cauchy-Schwarz upper bound. These custom Pallas kernel and compiler optimizations were deployed only after passing rigorous two-tier quality gates to guarantee byte-identical or mathematically equivalent pixel outputs.

Long-running AI agents spend most of their time on high-volume execution: tool calls, result validation, and subagent delegation. Using a frontier reasoning…

The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification replaces legacy stateful constraints with a fully stateless core, enabling cloud-native horizontal scaling, serverless deployments, and standard round-robin load balancing. This architectural shift introduces standardized HTTP headers for efficient routing without deep packet inspection, caching controls, and Multi Round-Trip Requests (MRTR) to handle interactive and long-running tasks without blocking connections. Developers can immediately begin migrating their agentic applications to this highly scalable infrastructure using the newly available beta SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, and C#.

Google Cloud API Gateway now offers a model routing feature in Public Preview, allowing developers to dynamically route traffic to models like Gemini, Claude, or OpenAI OSS-GPT without hardcoding endpoints or managing open-source proxies. Developers can easily configure these routing rules directly within their OpenAPI 3.x specifications by mapping virtual model names to specific backend targets on a shared host. Once deployed, the Gateway acts as a serverless ingress layer that accepts standard OpenAI-compatible requests, automatically transcodes the payload to the native schema of the target model, and routes the traffic on the fly.

Agent Platform's evaluation service is now generally available, providing developers with a unified engine to measure agent quality consistently across local development experiments and live production traffic. You can evaluate agents using over 20 pre-built metrics, DeepMind-backed adaptive rubrics, or custom code-based and LLM-as-a-judge metrics stored in a centralized, versioned registry. The service integrates directly into existing workflows via the Agent Platform SDK, agents-cli, and ADK, offering built-in user and environment simulators to automate complex multi-turn testing and streamline CI pipelines.

This second installment explores how Ray’s higher-level libraries—Serve, Data, and Train—abstract the complexities of running AI workloads on Google's TPU slices. Ray Serve uses a simple topology configuration to correctly gang-schedule large multi-host models, while Ray Data eliminates data-loading bottlenecks by feeding accelerators directly with native JAX batches. Finally, JaxTrainer streamlines distributed training across TPUs by automatically handling cross-slice coordination, checkpointing, and fault tolerance.

Ray 2.55 introduces official, first-class support for Google Cloud TPUs, enabling developers to run distributed Python workloads on Google's accelerators using the familiar Ray task-and-actor APIs. To handle the strict networking requirement of keeping multi-host TPU "slices" together over their Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI), the KubeRay Operator on GKE automatically provisions and labels the underlying hardware layout. Ray Core utilizes these labels via its slice_placement_group() primitive to atomically reserve complete slices, allowing developers to deploy jobs through KubeRay, Ray Train, or Ray Serve simply by declaring a hardware topology (like "4x4") without writing custom placement code.

Welcome to the July 2026 ClickHouse newsletter, which will round up what’s happened in real-time data warehouses over the last month.

Google Cloud has partnered with Parallel Web Systems to natively integrate Parallel's search infrastructure as a web grounding provider on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. This integration enables developers to anchor their AI agents in verifiable, real-time web results, significantly improving factual accuracy for complex enterprise workflows. Additionally, the partnership offers expanded architectural flexibility, allowing users to programmatically extract, permanently cache, and process web data alongside other large language models.

The NVIDIA Nemotron Model Reasoning Challenge invited the Kaggle community to explore a focused question: What techniques can improve reasoning accuracy when…

On May 23, 2026, fresh off the stage at Google I/O, our Google Developer Experts (GDEs) converged on...

The open-source Genkit framework has introduced the Agents API, a full-stack tool designed to simplify the complex plumbing of conversational AI by packaging message history, tool loops, and streaming into a single interface. The API supports flexible, server- or client-managed state persistence—allowing for advanced workflows like history branching, long-running detached tasks, and multi-agent coordination—while seamlessly connecting backends to frontends via a unified wire protocol. Currently available in preview for TypeScript and Go, it also integrates with the Genkit Developer UI to allow developers to easily test, debug, and inspect agent snapshots without writing client code.

The Google Cloud Workbench Notebooks extension for VS Code has officially launched, allowing developers to connect their local IDE to scalable, cloud-based Jupyter environments. This integration streamlines the machine learning lifecycle by eliminating context switching and providing direct access to high-performance Google Cloud infrastructure. To support transparency and community-driven innovation, the newly released extension is fully open-sourced and available on GitHub and the VS Code Marketplace.

Celebrating the first anniversary of the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, this blog post highlights how the framework enables autonomous AI agents to securely collaborate and hand off tasks without the rigidity of traditional APIs. By delegating complex workflows to specialized peer agents, A2A prevents context pollution, ensures data privacy, and simplifies application design through modularity. To demonstrate this ecosystem in action, the post spotlights FoldRun—an agentic interface for life sciences that orchestrates complex protein structure predictions—alongside diverse A2A use cases spanning commerce, data streaming, DevOps, and telecommunications.

An open specification for finding and verifying tools, skills, and agents across the web.Agents are ...

Google has officially launched the TPU Developer Hub, a centralized educational resource designed to help model builders and developers maximize the performance of Google Cloud TPUs. The hub offers code-first resources, open-source recipes, and deep-dive documentation covering hardware architecture, software optimization, debugging, parallelism, and networking. These materials are tailored for both human developers and AI-assisted tools to streamline everything from large-scale training to low-latency inference workloads.

DiffusionGemma is an experimental text-generation model built on the Gemma 4 architecture that uses diffusion-based parallel generation instead of token-by-token autoregression, enabling much faster inference, bidirectional context awareness, and real-time self-correction while remaining deployable on consumer GPUs. Its architecture generates and refines 256-token blocks in parallel through iterative denoising, allowing it to handle complex constraint-based tasks such as Sudoku more effectively than traditional language models and demonstrating strong gains from fine-tuning. The model integrates with vLLM and other popular inference frameworks, giving developers access to a new non-autoregressive approach that combines high performance, efficient long-context scaling, and straightforward customization and deployment.

Quick lets anyone at Shopify ship a site in seconds. It has changed the culture of how we build and share.

Single-turn chatbots are evolving into long-running agents that can reason, maintain context, use tools, and run efficiently across many turns to complete…

The newly released Gemma 4 12B is a dense, multimodal model designed for high-performance local AI execution on consumer devices. By introducing a novel, encoder-free architecture, it bypasses traditional visual and audio encoders to feed multimodal data directly into the LLM backbone.

Google is unifying its AI terminal tools by transitioning the community-focused Gemini CLI into Antigravity CLI, a new agent-first platform built for complex, multi-agent workflows. This new Go-based tool offers faster execution, asynchronous processing, and a unified architecture that syncs with the Antigravity 2.0 desktop application. While enterprise customers will maintain existing access, individual and free users must transition to the new platform before Gemini CLI stops serving requests on June 18, 2026.

The Google Cloud and NVIDIA developer community is celebrating its first anniversary with 100,000 members and a renewed focus on providing builders with advanced AI infrastructure and resources. To accelerate development, the community offers curated learning pathways for mastering LLM optimization, GPU-accelerated data analytics, and monthly expert-led webinars. Moving into its second year, the initiative will expand to include hands-on labs, engineering events, and specialized content focused on the growth of agentic AI.

Researchers at UCSD have successfully implemented DFlash, a block-diffusion speculative decoding method, on Google TPUs to bypass the sequential bottlenecks of traditional autoregressive drafting. By "painting" entire blocks of candidate tokens in a single forward pass rather than predicting them one-by-one, the system achieved average speedups of 3.13x, with peak performance nearly doubling that of existing methods like EAGLE-3. This open-source integration into the vLLM ecosystem optimizes TPU hardware by leveraging "free" parallel verification and high-quality draft predictions for complex reasoning tasks.

Google Cloud has introduced a high-performance integration that connects Rapid Storage directly to PyTorch via the fsspec interface to eliminate AI training bottlenecks. By utilizing Google’s Colossus architecture and bidirectional gRPC streaming, the solution offers up to 15 TiB/s aggregate throughput and significant reductions in latency. These improvements allow developers to speed up total training time by 23% with zero code changes required beyond updating the storage bucket type.

AI integration is redefining mainstream enterprise applications, from productivity software like Microsoft Office to more complex design and engineering tools.

Google Cloud has introduced the Agents CLI, a specialized tool designed to bridge the gap between local development and production-grade AI agent deployment. The CLI provides coding assistants with machine-readable access to the full Google Cloud stack, reducing context overload and token waste during the scaffolding process. By streamlining evaluation, infrastructure provisioning, and deployment into a single programmatic backbone, the tool enables developers to move from initial concept to a live service in hours rather than weeks.

The blog post outlines the transition of a brittle sales research prototype into a robust production agent using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK). By replacing monolithic scripts with orchestrated sub-agents and structured Pydantic outputs, the developers eliminated silent failures and fragile parsing. Additionally, the post highlights the necessity of dynamic RAG pipelines and OpenTelemetry observability to ensure AI agents are scalable, cost-effective, and transparent in real-world applications.

The Google Cloud AI Agent Bake-Off highlights a shift from simple prompt engineering to rigorous agentic engineering, emphasizing that production-ready AI requires a modular, multi-agent architecture. The post outlines five key developer tips, including decomposing complex tasks into specialized sub-agents and using deterministic code for execution to prevent probabilistic errors. Furthermore, it advises developers to prioritize multimodality and open-source protocols like MCP to ensure agents are scalable, integrated, and future-proof against rapidly evolving model capabilities.

Co-designed hardware, software, and models are key to delivering the highest AI factory throughput and lowest token cost. Measuring this goes far beyond peak…

Google has released version 1.0.0 of the Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Java, introducing powerful new features like Google Maps grounding, built-in URL fetching, and a standardized Agent2Agent protocol for cross-framework collaboration. The update enhances agent control through a new "App" and "Plugin" architecture, which allows for global logging, automated context window management via event compaction, and "Human-in-the-Loop" workflows for action confirmations. Additionally, the release provides robust session and memory services using Google Cloud integrations like Firestore and Vertex AI to manage long-term state and large data artifacts.

Reasoning models are growing rapidly in size and are increasingly being integrated into agentic AI workflows that interact with other models and external tools.

Agentic AI systems need models with the specialized depth to solve dense technical problems autonomously. They must excel at reasoning, coding…

Deploying large language models (LLMs) requires large-scale distributed inference, which spreads model computation and request handling across many GPUs and…

Wednesday Build Hour is a weekly, interactive "technical gym session" led by Google Cloud experts to help developers and architects sharpen their cloud skills. Moving beyond passive slide decks, the program focuses on hands-on building, covering advanced topics like AI agents, Vertex AI, and developer productivity tools. Each hour-long session is designed to provide tangible results that participants can immediately deploy into their own workflows. It serves as a consistent, dedicated space for builders to stay ahead of the curve and connect with a community of cloud engineers.