Google Cloud release notes

Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports minor version 8.0.44. To upgrade your existing instance to the new version, see Upgrade the database minor version.

Generally available: You can verify which reservation a VM consumes and view a list of VMs that consume a reservation. For more information, see View reservation consumption.

VPC Network Peering supports peering connections in consensus mode. This feature is available in General Availability. For more information, see Connection mode.

If you need to synchronize time with high accuracy and monitor its accuracy for your Compute Engine instances, you can sync your VM clock with its host server clock using chrony and ptp_kvm. This configuration provides accuracy within 1 ms for supported setups. For more information, see Configure accurate time for Compute Engine VMs.

Generally available: Dynamic NICs let you add or remove network interfaces to or from an instance without restarting or recreating the instance.

You can also use Dynamic NICs when you need more network interfaces. The maximum number of vNICs for most machine types in Google Cloud is 10; however, you can configure up to 16 total interfaces by using Dynamic NICs.

For more information, see the following:

• Multiple network interfaces overview
• Create VM instances with multiple network interfaces
• Add Dynamic NICs to an instance

Dynamic Network Interfaces (NICs) are available in General Availability.

Dynamic NICs let you update an instance to add or remove network interfaces without having to restart or recreate the instance.

You can also use Dynamic NICs when you need more network interfaces. The maximum number of vNICs for most machine types in Google Cloud is 10; however, you can configure up to 16 total interfaces by using Dynamic NICs.

For more information, see the following:

• Dynamic NICs
• Create a VM instance with Dynamic NICs
• Add Dynamic NICs to an existing instance

You can specify a custom ephemeral /96 IPv6 address range when creating a regional IPv6 forwarding rule. For more information, see the following:

• Internal passthrough Network Load Balancer overview
• Backend service-based external passthrough Network Load Balancer overview
• Protocol forwarding overview

This feature is in General availability.

You can specify a /96 IPv6 address range when reserving static regional IPv6 addresses. For more information, see the following:

• Reserve a static internal IP address
• Reserve a static external IP address

This feature is available in General Availability.

You can view IP address utilization when you list or describe subnets. IP address utilization displays the number of free and allocated IP addresses in a subnet. This feature is available in General Availability.

Generally available: Future reservations let you reserve capacity for a specific date up to one year in advance. For more information, see About future reservation requests.

Generally Available: The G4 accelerator-optimized machine series is designed for graphics-intensive workloads such as NVIDIA Omniverse simulations, video transcoding, and virtual desktops. The G4 machine series also provides a cost-effective solution for single-host inference and model tuning. The G4 machine series is available in the following regions and zones:

• APAC
  • Jurong West, Singapore: asia-southeast1-b
• Europe
  • Eemshaven, Netherlands: europe-west4-a
• North America
  • Council Bluffs, Iowa: us-central1-b
  • Ashburn, Virginia: us-east4-c
  • Columbus, Ohio: us-east5-c

To get started with G4 machine types, see Create a G2 or G4 instance.

Generally Available: You can use the Compute Engine alpha API at the project level through a self-service process. By enabling the alpha API, you can use the Google Cloud console, Google Cloud CLI, API, and Terraform to view and manage preview features. For more information, see Use the Compute Engine alpha API.

Generally Available: You can use the Compute Engine alpha API at the project level through a self-service process. By enabling the alpha API, you can use the Google Cloud console, Google Cloud CLI, API, and Terraform to view and manage preview features. For more information, see Use the Compute Engine alpha API.

Cloud VPN supports customizable cipher options for your VPN tunnels. You can configure ciphers as per your security requirements. This feature is Generally Available.

For more information, see Configure ciphers in Cloud VPN tunnel.

Cloud NAT gateways for Public NAT support source-based NAT rules for IPv4 addresses. This feature is available in Preview.

You can use the URL filtering service to filter your workload traffic by using domain and Server Name Indication (SNI) information available in the egress HTTP(S) messages. For more information, see URL filtering service overview. This feature is available in Preview.

Generally available: You can create and use Flex-start VMs. Flex-start VMs are virtual machine (VM) instances that can run for up to seven days, and that use the flex-start provisioning model. This model provisions resources from a secure pool of capacity, increasing your chances of obtaining high-demand resources like GPUs. These features make Flex-start VMs suitable for short-duration workloads that can start at any time, such as the following:

• Small model pre-training
• Model fine-tuning
• High performance computing (HPC) simulation
• Batch inference

You can create standalone Flex-start VMs, or add Flex-start VMs all at once to a managed instance group (MIG) by using resize requests. Based on the machine type that your Flex-start VMs use, you get discounts for vCPUs, memory, and any attached GPUs.

For more information, see About Flex-start VMs.