Platform Pulse: Serverless, Big Data, and the Evolution of Identity

⚡ Community Corner

Best articles from the wider community and deep-dive tutorials.

1. First look at Google Cloud N4A VMs: benchmarked against N4, C4A and AWS M8g: Tested the newest N4A instance family offering from Google Cloud so you don’t have to.
2. The Surprising Simplicity of Temporal Worker Pools on Cloud Run: Describes how using Cloud Run Worker Pools to host Temporal workers allows teams to replace YAML configurations with code-native orchestration.
3. Deploy to Cloud Run Without Building Containers (Preview): Google Cloud has introduced a new no-build deployment option for Cloud Run, allowing developers to deploy application source code directly without creating a container image.
4. Just for Fun: Migrating a legacy Spring Boot application with Conductor in Gemini CLI: Learnings for how to modernize legacy code with Gemini CLI and the Conductor extension.
5. The Configuration Trap: Why gcloud config is Your Best Friend (and Worst Enemy): Explores how to effectively manage Google Cloud CLI configurations to prevent common deployment errors, such as deploying to the wrong project.
6. BigQuery + DuckDB Together: The “Local Hot Cache” Pattern: Proposes a "local hot cache" pattern using DuckDB alongside BigQuery to significantly reduce query costs without losing governance.
7. DBT Migration at Malt: Malt undertook a comprehensive, eight-month migration to transition its custom, in-house data stack to DBT, a standardized data transformation tool.
8. Accelerating model refinement: automating Fine-Tuning through checkpoint interpolation with Authentrics Z-TOM: Describes a new orchestration layer from Authentrics.ai that optimizes AI models like Gemma by mathematically blending existing checkpoints.
9. Building a Reliable AI Analytics Agent with BigQuery, a Semantic Layer, and Google ADK: How to prevent your LLM from confidently giving you the wrong numbers.
10. Supercharge Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide to Function Calling in Vertex AI: A beginner's guide to Function Calling in Vertex AI, a powerful feature that allows the Gemini LLM to execute custom code.

🚀 Official Release Notes & Updates

Official product announcements and feature releases.

1. Okta Secures AI for the PGA of America: Okta has expanded its relationship with the PGA of America to secure their AI initiatives and application access.
2. Okta Region Expansion (GA): Okta expands its identity cloud regions into Canada and India, while additionally rolling out French Language Support.
3. Auth0 Bot Detection Upgrade: JA4 Signals (GA): Auth0 has upgraded its bot detection engine to incorporate JA4 signals, improving mitigation against sophisticated automated threats.
4. Auth0 Agent Skills: Structured guidance that teaches AI coding assistants how to implement Auth0 authentication correctly across frameworks.
5. Auth0 MCP Server Gemini CLI Extension: Official Auth0 extension for Gemini CLI to interface with Auth0 infrastructure directly.
6. Introducing Conversational Analytics in BigQuery: Conversational Analytics in BigQuery (preview) brings a sophisticated AI-powered reasoning engine directly into BigQuery Studio.
7. BigQuery AI supports Gemini 3.0: BigQuery gen AI functions AI.GENERATE and AI.GENERATE_TABLE are now GA, and can be used with the new AI.EMBED and AI.SIMILARITY.
8. Introducing Google Cloud Vertex AI Extensions for .NET: Enable .NET developers to integrate Google Gemini models on Vertex AI using unified Microsoft.Extensions.AI abstractions.
9. Accelerate GKE cluster autoscaling: Support for concurrency in GKE with node pool auto-creation significantly reduces provisioning latency and autoscaling performance.
10. Datastream now supports Spanner as a source: Datastream officially supports capturing data changes from Cloud Spanner as a source.
11. Cloud Spanner UUID data type: Spanner now natively supports the UUID data type for both GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL-dialect databases, along with new Zstandard compression functions.

🛡️ Security & Advisories

CVEs, Bulletins, and Critical Patches.

1. Okta tackles shadow AI with new Agent Discovery tools: Okta has launched Agent Discovery within its Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) product to detect OAuth consent grants and uncover hidden identity risks from unsanctioned "shadow AI" tools.
2. Vishing for Access: Tracking the Expansion of ShinyHunters-Branded SaaS Data Theft: Operations are using sophisticated vishing and victim-branded sites to steal data from cloud-based SaaS applications.
3. No Place Like Home Network: Disrupting the World's Largest Residential Proxy Network: Insight into how IPIDEA’s proxy infrastructure is a component of the digital ecosystem leveraged by a wide array of bad actors.
4. Cloud CISO Perspectives: 5 top CISO priorities in 2026: An outline of the top 5 priorities for CISOs this year, spanning from securing AI environments to modernizing IAM implementations.
5. Guidance from the Frontlines: Proactive Defense Against ShinyHunters-Branded Data Theft: This proactive hardening and detection guide arms security teams with actionable strategies to defend against ShinyHunters-branded extortion.
6. Diverse Threat Actors Exploiting Critical WinRAR Vulnerability CVE-2025-8088: Espionage and financially motivated threat actors are actively exploiting critical WinRAR vulnerability CVE-2025-8088.
7. Guarding the Gates: A Technical Deep Dive into Model Armor: Model Armor is a critical policy-based security layer that acts as a transparent proxy for Large Language Models, filtering both prompts and responses.
8. NSA Publishes New Zero Trust Implementation Guidelines: Formal guidelines and strategies published by the NSA for executing zero-trust architectures within modern cloud environments.
9. Gravitee State of AI Agent Security 2026 Report: A detailed report analyzing the security vulnerabilities that arise when AI agent deployment outpaces institutional control measures.