The dragon days of summer: this week on Google Cloud Platform

Ah, summer! The time for relaxing, taking the kids to a matinee, and . . . using machine learning to recognize everyday objects using the Cloud Vision API!

That’s what the fine folks at Disney and Google Zoo are doing to promote their new movie Pete’s Dragon: Accessing the Cloud Vision RESTful API, Disney has created a mobile website that allows your mobile device to recognize objects in your field of vision and display Elliot the Dragon in and around those objects in Augmented Reality (AR). Try it out from your mobile device at Dragonspotting.com.

But in Google Cloud Platform circles, that’s been the extent of the relaxing. In the past week, the GCP team has been exceptionally busy, releasing new versions of Google Cloud Dataflow and Google Cloud Datalab, adding support for Python 3 in Google App Engine flexible environment, acquiring Orbitera, partnering with Facebook on a new DC 48V power standard and dropping prices on Preemptible VMs!

Other community members chimed in on how to perform rolling updates on managed GCP databases, analyzing residential construction trends using Google BigQuery, exploring the performance model of Cloud DataFlow and analyzing GitHub pull requests using BigQuery.

Maybe all this hard work is paying off. A recent survey of 200 IT professionals found that 84% of them are using public cloud services, and that GCP beats out the other major providers as their preferred platform.

OK, so maybe we’ll take a vacation next week . . .