From RSS to Email: Automating Google Cloud Release Notes Summaries
A daily summary of Google Cloud release notes delivered by email after automated parsing and summarization of the official RSS feed.
If you work with Google Cloud (or any other cloud provider for that matter), you know the importance of keeping up with the daily stream of feature releases, fixes, and announcements. In a fast paced environment, it's easy to miss the stuff that actually matters. At least, it felt like that to me. So, I automated it. Instead of visiting the Google Cloud release notes page every day, I now have a daily summary of the release notes sent straight to my inbox.
Let's back up a bit. Google Cloud has a pretty good changelog of product releases for the past 60 days. This covers new features, announcements, issues, fixes, libraries, and changes. Now, you could simply visit the page every day if you're diligent, or add the feed URL to your favourite feed reader and parse through each item. But, like me, if attention is your scarce resource, you'll probably prefer a summarised version sent to your email (or chat application).
To address this need, I wrote a simple Python script that fetches Google Cloud release notes from the official RSS feed, extracts product-specific Announcements and Features, summarises them using Gemini, and sends a daily email digest using Resend. The app is deployed as a cron job on Railway, my preferred serverless platform, but you could just as easily deploy this to DigitalOcean, Cloud Run, and others. I have excluded Issues, Fixes, Libraries, and Changes, but you could make a trivial change in code to include them if you wanted.
Finally, set the following environment variables for the app to work:
GCP_RELEASE_FEED_URL:https://cloud.google.com/feeds/gcp-release-notes.xmlLOOKBACK_HOURS:24GOOGLE_API_KEY:your_gemini_api_key(get it here)GEMINI_MODEL:gemini-2.5-flashRESEND_API_KEY:your_resend_api_key(get it here)EMAIL_FROM:you@example.comEMAIL_TO:recipient@example.com
This setup turned a noisy, overwhelming stream of updates into a lightweight daily digest I can actually keep up with - just the highlights, in my inbox, every morning. If you work with Google Cloud, I recommend giving this workflow a try. It’s easy to adapt, and you can even extend it to other providers if you want to keep all your cloud updates in one place.