All five major cloud platforms shipped agent memory APIs in 2025–2026, but their design philosophies diverge sharply: OpenAI writes memory as files, Anthropic mounts memory as a directory, Google uses vectors with topic classification, AWS combines events with pluggable strategy pipelines, and Microsoft abstracts memory behind context providers. Pricing ranges from free to $0.75/1K records/month; tenant isolation spans from 'your app handles it' to IAM as a first-class citizen.
Vertex AI is more than the Gemini API: it puts access to 200+ models, training, evaluation, deployment, and governance under one Google Cloud control plane. Since April 2026, its products and roadmap have moved into Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, while the Vertex AI API, documentation paths, and many resource names remain in active use.
Model Armor can inspect prompt injection, jailbreaks, sensitive data, malicious URLs, and unsafe content at runtime; it is a probabilistic detector, not an authorization or sandbox boundary.
Cloud Run is more than an HTTP container platform: choose request-serving, run-to-completion, or always-on pull work first, then design concurrency, identity, and scaling.
GKE manages the Kubernetes control plane and Autopilot manages most node infrastructure, while workloads, policy, networking, upgrade compatibility, and cost governance remain yours.