Our longstanding partnership with Google has helped us drive toward an important goal: to make it as easy as possible for customers to maximize the use of their data when building with Google.
After a busy week at Google Cloud Next 25 in Las Vegas, the DataStax team has been reflecting on how our work with Google is helping enterprises and developers take advantage of the latest AI innovations. Here are a few highlights.
Astra DB Plugin for Firebase Genkit
Genkit is a framework built by the Firebase team that helps developers to build, test, and deploy AI features. This week we announced the Astra DB plugin for Firebase Genkit, a new integration that makes it easy to build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications in Genkit using Astra DB for accurate, low-latency vector search.
Read the announcement, and check out this tutorial to roll up your sleeves and get started!
Gemini Code Assist tools
Google Cloud unveiled its Gemini Code Assist tools, a novel way for developers to get the information and tools they need to build and manage apps. Our integration with Gemini Code Assist was highlighted in Google Cloud’s announcement with a quote from our chief product officer Ed Anuff:
“We're excited to bring together DataStax Astra DB, Langflow, and Google Gemini Code Assist. This integration empowers developers to seamlessly access their database structures, create data models, get query assistance, and design flows — all within their IDE. By embedding these capabilities directly into the coding environment, we're significantly streamlining development workflows and enhancing productivity for developers who rely on Astra DB and Langflow.”
Stay tuned for more on this exciting integration!
Customer spotlights: Bud Financial, WealthAPI, and Staque
Interviews with two of our customers are now featured on Google Cloud’s YouTube channel (and highlighted on the Google Cloud blog).
WealthAPI’s CTO and cofounder Wolfram Stacklies described how Astra DB on Google Cloud enabled his team to build a next-generation, highly scalable wealth management app in three months. Stacklies said that response times were cut by up to 90%, and wealthAPI gained the ability to handle massive data volumes and deliver real-time financial insights at scale to its customers.
Jakub Piotrowski, vice president of product at Bud Financial, explained how Astra DB manages all of its clients’ transactions. Astra DB’s scalability and its ability to handle massive workloads, coupled with Google’s Vertex AI platform and Gemini, is helping Bud’s banking and financial institution customers understand their user much better.
And Muhammad Ali Khan, founder and CEO of high-performance computing company Staque, joined The Cube at Google Next 25 to explain how his company employs Astra DB and Langflow to power AI agents and hybrid quantum-classical pipelines for autonomous healthcare solutions and complex problem-solving.
During the interview, Khan said he discovered DataStax and Langflow because Staque’s chief operating officer needed to build an agent demo in a day. After Langflow enabled them to quickly spin up an agent, the simplicity of moving to production—combined with Astra DB’s performance as a vector database—made DataStax an easy choice, Khan said.
“It's all about speed,” he said. “Where we have seen a big advantage in DataStax tooling is being able to quickly spin up MVPs that we can show to the end-customers to say, 'This is how our AI agent is going to help you navigate complexity, solve it faster, and save millions of dollars potentially’.”
Google’s new Agent2Agent protocol
The future of AI isn’t just about building smarter agents—it’s about enabling them to work together seamlessly. Google last week launched the open Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability protocol, a new standard designed to enable intelligent agents to communicate and collaborate securely without requiring access to each other's internal architectures.
A2A unlocks significant business value by fostering seamless interoperability between diverse AI agents, empowering enterprises to automate complex workflows and drive innovation. As a leader in real-time AI, we’re excited to contribute to the definition and development of A2A’s technical specifications.
This collaboration represents a shared vision for an open, AI-driven future where intelligent agents, regardless of their underlying technology, can interoperate to accelerate enterprise automation and transform business outcomes. Stay tuned for more!
DataStax joins Google Cloud’s Startup Perks program!
We’re thrilled to join Google Cloud’s new Startup Perks program as a launch partner! This initiative connects startups with exclusive discounts and top-tier technology solutions to help them build and scale efficiently.
As part of this program, we’ll offer up to $2,000 in credits with the Astra DB Starter Pack, enabling startups to leverage a powerful, scalable database built on Apache Cassandra. Startups can easily discover and redeem this offer via Google Cloud’s Startup Perks page, accelerating their journey with seamless access to cutting-edge database technology.
And that’s a wrap!
Besides meeting a lot of you at our Google Next booth, last week was punctuated by a bunch of other exciting happenings and news, including two new DataStax listings on the Google Marketplace and a talk by our own Greg Stachnick’s on building agentic AI that dove into the best use cases, best practices for ensuring accuracy, and how to get agentic AI into production.
