Woolpert @ Google Cloud Next ‘19

San Francisco played host to Google’s annual Cloud Next conference from April 9 to 11, 2019. The week saw a flood of new products and enhancements across Google Cloud and G Suite—122 total (by Google’s count). To help you find the most relevant ones, I’ll point out a few of the most exciting announcements.

Kubernetes Everywhere
Anthos, formerly known as Cloud Services Platform, is Google’s solution for deploying applications in cloud and hybrid environments. Built on Kubernetes, Anthos provides a common platform for on-premise and cloud deployments.

Do you love Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) but wish it could run locally in your own data center? Now you can build your own cluster or purchase offerings from partners like Cisco or Dell to mimic the GKE environment on your own hardware.

Taking that a step further, Anthos is also multi-cloud and will support deployment to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure with no vendor lock-in.

Serverless
Google continues to innovate serverless technology, and it introduced some exciting new offerings and existing platform improvements.

The completely new Cloud Run is built on Knative, a platform for running containerized, stateless microservices. Cloud Run makes it possible to deploy lightweight, highly scalable HTTP services on Google’s managed infrastructure or in-house GKE clusters.

Cloud Functions, Google’s event-driven serverless compute platform, continues to evolve. Google promoted several beta runtimes to general availability and added support for several additional ones. They also released the new open-source Functions Framework for Node.js to help make the code more portable.

App Engine was one of Google’s first cloud products, and 11 years later, it is still going strong. Here, also, Google promoted some runtimes and added some alpha/beta runtimes to its growing list of second-generation environments.

Google + Microsoft
You don’t expect to hear the name Microsoft mentioned much at a Google conference, but Google has been doing a lot of work recently to make it easier to run Windows and other Microsoft workloads in the cloud. These efforts include:

• Customers with Microsoft volume licensing agreements can now bring their own licenses to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) virtual machines to reduce cost.
• Windows containers are now supported on GKE.
• Google has a new managed Active Directory service for creating new domains in the cloud or synchronizing with existing on-premises controllers.
• Google’s managed database service, Cloud SQL, will soon be adding support for SQL Server.
• G Suite will soon provide native Office file editing and collaboration without the need to first convert to Google’s format.

G Suite
G Suite is constantly evolving to help people work more productively. Here are a few highlights:

• Google Assistant can access work calendars.
• Hangouts Chat can be integrated directly into the Gmail sidebar.
• Hangouts Meet conferences can now be transcribed in real time for increased accessibility.
• Google Voice for G Suite is now generally available to transcribe voicemails and fight spam.
• Google+ received a makeover and is now known as Currents.

Wildcards
With so many exciting announcements across so many verticals, highlighting just a few leaves so many out! Here are a few more announcements I found intriguing:

• A new “ice cold” Cloud Storage tier, intended for archival data, will be offered below cold storage.
• BigQuery GIS is now generally available, bringing large-scale spatial analytics to that platform.
• Kubeflow and AI Platform offer new ways to run and maintain libraries of machine learning projects.