What’s new with Google Cloud: September highlights and practical updates
A concise roundup of recent Google Cloud product launches, previews, tutorials, and events that affect operations, migration planning, API tooling, and cloud storage.
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VM Extension Manager is generally available to enforce declarative guest software policies and provide continuous drift detection and phased rollouts.
Apigee tooling updates include migration assessment improvements, new debugging and testing tutorials, and community TechTalks for operationalizing API proxies and agent authorization.
New previews and model options include GKE Agentic Migration for EKS-to-GKE moves and Claude Opus 5.5 availability on Google Cloud for agentic workloads.
This week's Google Cloud update collects product releases, previews, tutorials, and events that matter to engineers and platform owners. The items below focus on lifecycle automation for VMs, API and agent tooling in Apigee, migration aids for Kubernetes and data lakes, model availability, and storage management improvements.
VM guest management: VM Extension Manager (GA)
Google Cloud announced VM Extension Manager is generally available. It removes the need for custom startup scripts across Compute Engine fleets by letting you define declarative, project-wide policies that enforce desired guest OS extension states across regions and zones. It provides continuous drift detection with automatic self-healing, supports multi-zone phased rollouts with automated rollbacks on failure, and integrates fleet health visibility with Cloud Monitoring.
Apigee: migration, debugging, testing, and agent governance
Apigee migration assessments can be run earlier in planning using an updated --skip-target-validation flag in the Apigee Migration Assessment Tool. That flag produces a full inventory and assessment without requiring a target environment during the initial discovery phase.
In the security and agent space, a Community TechTalk will cover using Apigee to provide fine-grained authorization and audit trails when positioning Apigee between Model Context Protocol (MCP) clients and enterprise backends. That session emphasizes authorization, audit, and policy evaluation workflows and will be hosted in French with live-translated captions available in multiple languages.
Agentic and migration tooling for Kubernetes
GKE Agentic Migration entered Public Preview. This open-source agent plugin runs locally in development, indexes source infrastructure-as-code, maps cloud-specific primitives (for example mapping Karpenter to Custom Compute Classes), and generates reviewable pull requests and data-migration runbooks without making live cluster mutations. It aims to remove manual LLM prompting by delivering an AI-assisted workflow protected by deterministic guardrails.
Claude Opus 5.5 is now available on Google Cloud. The announcement positions the model for agentic coding, research, and analysis workloads, and notes it handles long-running work at a lower cost per token. Google Cloud continues to offer multiple model choices for enterprise agents.
Google Cloud scheduled several Community TechTalks and tutorials in early October covering Apigee testing, trace analysis, and agent authorization. There are also hands-on guides and GitHub links for the GKE Agentic Migration plugin and other tools referenced above.
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