GCP Release Notes: May 18, 2026

BigQuery

Feature

You can group reservations together to prioritize idle slot sharing within the group. Reservations within a reservation group share idle slots with each other before making them available to other reservations in the project, giving you more control over slot allocation for high-priority workloads. This feature is generally available (GA).

Feature

You can now use a custom organization policy to allow or deny specific operations on workload management resources including reservations, assignments, capacity commitments, and BI reservations. This feature is in Preview.

Feature

You can manage and version control SQL scripts and notebooks with BigQuery Studio Git repositories, which provide a streamlined, folder-based integration with remote Git repositories. This feature is in preview.

Bigtable

Feature

You can enable row-affinity routing for a standard app profile in the Google Cloud console. For more information, see Create a standard app profile.

Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for VMware

Announcement

Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for VMware 1.33.800-gke.75 is now available for download. To upgrade, see Upgrade clusters. Google Distributed Cloud 1.33.800-gke.75 runs on Kubernetes v1.33.11-gke.100.

If you are using a third-party storage vendor, check the Google Distributed Cloud-ready storage partners document to make sure the storage vendor has already passed the qualification for this release.

After a release, it takes approximately 7 to 14 days for the version to become available for use with GKE On-Prem API clients: the Google Cloud console, the gcloud CLI, and Terraform.

Fixed

The following issues were fixed in 1.33.800-gke.75:

• Fixed vulnerabilities listed in Vulnerability fixes.
• Fixed an issue that prevented administrators from running cluster health checks and gathering diagnostics on non-advanced user clusters managed by an advanced admin cluster. After the fix, you can use gkectl diagnose on user clusters that are awaiting migration to advanced mode.
• Fixed an issue where the gkectl check-config command failed during preflight checks when bundled ingress was disabled and the loadBalancer.vips.ingressVIP field was left blank. This failure occurred because the validation process incorrectly attempted to generate a network configuration for test VMs using the empty VIP, resulting in an invalid command (such as ip addr add /32) and causing test VM initialization to fail.

Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for bare metal

Announcement

Google Distributed Cloud (software only) for bare metal 1.33.800-gke.75 is now available for download. To upgrade, see Upgrade clusters. Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal 1.33.800-gke.75 runs on Kubernetes v1.33.11-gke.100.

After a release, it takes approximately 7 to 14 days for the version to become available for installations or upgrades with the GKE On-Prem API clients: the Google Cloud console, the gcloud CLI, and Terraform.

If you use a third-party storage vendor, check the Google Distributed Cloud-ready storage partners document to make sure the storage vendor has already passed the qualification for this release of Google Distributed Cloud for bare metal.

Fixed

The following issues were fixed in 1.33.800-gke.75:

• Fixed vulnerabilities listed in Vulnerability fixes.

NetApp Volumes

Feature

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified service level is available with limited performance in the following regions:

• asia-northeast1 (Tokyo)

• europe-west2 (London)

• europe-west9 (Paris)

• us-west2 (Los Angeles)

• us-west3 (Salt Lake City)

For more information about limited performance regions, see Key features and Supported regions for Flex Unified limited performance.

Feature

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified service level is available in the following region:

• us-south1 (Dallas)

For more information about available regions, see Supported regions.

Feature

The replication features, such as external, in-region, cross-region, and cross-project replication, are generally available (GA) for Flex Unified volumes across all supported protocols. For more information, see About volume replication.

Feature

ONTAP-mode supports S3 endpoints on NFS and SMB volumes, thick clone splitting, and advanced or diagnostic privilege levels as generally available (GA) features. The backup capabilities are also available in Preview. For more information, see ONTAP-mode S3 multiprotocol support and Allowed ONTAP actions.

Source: Google Cloud Platform