Recent and Upcoming Google Cloud Service Name Changes

Google is kind of infamous for frequently changing the names of Google Cloud services.

What's tricky for us is that even when Google changes the names of their GCP services, they don't always change their references to those services on their certification exams.

This makes teaching a certification prep course difficult, because we need our materials to be up to date, but we also need them to match the exam. We don't want to immediately change the name of a service in our course when the name of that service hasn't yet been changed on the exam.

We want at the very least to let you know about recent and upcoming changes to Google Cloud's service names, so that you are at least aware of them, and you know the multiple ways that a service may be referenced in Google documentation and exam questions.

We will try to definitively update the names of these services in practice exams and course lessons once we are confident that Google themselves have definitively updated their references to these services on the actual exam questions.

Here are the recent or upcoming service name changes we are aware of:

• "Vertex AI" is renamed to "Agent Platform"
• "Agent Builder" is renamed to "Agent Studio" or "Agent Platform" depending on the context
• "Data Catalog" renamed to "Knowledge Catalog"
• "Dataplex" renamed to "Knowledge Catalog"
• "Data Loss Prevention" renamed to "Sensitive Data Protection"
• "DLP API" and "Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API" now refer only to the API, which is part of, but not synonymous with, the Sensitive Data Protection service.
• "Looker" now refers to the enterprise edition only.
• "Looker Studio" the free edition is renamed back to "Data Studio", its original name before it was renamed to Looker Studio a few years ago
• "Dataproc" is renamed to "Managed Service for Apache Spark", or "Managed Spark"
• "Cloud Composer" is renamed to "Managed Service for Apache Airflow" or "Managed Airflow"
• "BigLake" is renamed to "Lakehouse for Apache Iceberg" or just "Lakehouse"
• "Cloud Functions" is renamed to "Cloud Run Functions," but is also sometimes still referred to as "Cloud Functions"

In the vast majority of cases, the actual nature of the services themselves (the functionality, features, information you need to know for the exam) is the same. It's just the names that have changed. So the information in any course lessons is still valid.

And again, sometimes Google itself does not actually update the names of the services in their documentation and exams even after they have announced a rebrand/name change.

So, if in one of our courses, you see a service whose name hasn't been updated yet, please understand:

(1) that might not be because we forgot to update it. It could be because Google hasn't actually updated their exams yet.

(2) this happens frequently and it's very difficult to make all the changes immediately as they occur. But we are aware of them and working through them. In the meantime, we will try to keep you updated so that you at least are aware of the new names or upcoming name changes.