Special Report on Google Cloud Next’19

Google Cloud Next ’19 was an amazing conference like AWS re:Invent a few months ago.

These cloud players redefine conferences around multiple topics with tons of news, large expo, long list of training and certification sessions and experts talks in a real casual atmosphere and sunny San Francisco, CA. Definitely something is happening there.

There was more than 230 exhibitors in various domains and the attendees passed 30,000 people according to the organizer. It was also the first event led by Thomas Kurian, the new CEO of Google Cloud entity.

Among all topics covered we noticed some obvious ones like AI, multi-cloud, analytics, big data, open source, security and privacy, collaboration and storage related subjects like online storage and data protection.

The goal for Google is to differentiate from direct competition like AWS or Azure and promote their own development and industry contributions. As said several times, the battle is on between them. And between us, Google is a different animal with several famous applications we all used every day Google Search, YouTube, Maps, Drive or Docs to name a few.

Among the tons of new stuff unveiled by Google, our own selection:

• Anthos: Introduced last year, Anthos is the new name of Google Cloud Services Platform. It is a Trojan horse to control and manage customers workloads running on GCP of course but also in AWS, Azure or on-premises thanks to Kubernetes, a key contribution of Google to the industry.
• Storage: Following recent AWS announcement with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Google reacts with Archive Cold Storage at $0.0012/GB/month, the difference seems to be in the retrieve data duration. For both of them, the annual cost for 1PB is around $12,000.
• Analytics and big data: Several angles here with Cloud Data Fusion, in beta, to aggregate all data in one interface, convenient before you ingest them to BigQuery. BigQuery Data Transfer Service with 100+ applications integration based on Fivetran. A connection to Google Sheets with a new type of infinite spreadsheet. A boost to Google Data Studio to visualize data powered by BigQuery BI Engine, soon open to Looker and Tableau. The company adds AutoML to BigQuery ML and finally a metadata management service called Data Catalog but we don’t know if Google picked Alation, Collibra, Datum or Informatica will offer this service.
• AI: Google wishes to democratize AI so they offer easy access to AI and ML models. The company launched the beta of AI Platform to build, test and deploy on-premise or in the cloud leveraging AutoML in multiple flavors, it will help to boost AI adoption within the enterprise.
• Database: The company adds SQLServer to Cloud SQL in addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• Open source: Google shakes the databases palm again with the integration of seven open sources solutions in the Google cloud console: Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs Enterprise, indicating clearly a different path versus AWS illustrated by Kubernetes, Go or TensorFlow examples. These seven players are leaders in their respective category.
• G Suite: The assistant is added and a collaboration with Dropbox is unveiled explain why Dropbox had a booth.

The show was also the opportunity to meet three vendors who announced a back-as-a-service offering available on the marketplace: Actifio, Cohesity and HYCU, beyond their proven data protection comfort zone, I should say:

• Actifio adds Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Actifo GO, also available for Azure and AWS, to protect VM, file system, SQLServer and SAP Hana,
• Cohesity extends their on-premises approach with Data Protect running in GCP named Cloud Backup Service and
• HYCU with an updated Backup-as-a-Service for GCP to protect Google Cloud SQL in addition to VMs.

And we noticed the presence of Backupify, SpinBackup and Spanning, three key players in SaaS backup for SaaS applications. For SaaS storage, we saw Dropbox and Skysync but Box was absent.

Among other storage presence, here is a selection of  some announcements:

• Portworx now run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE on-premise,
• Hammerspace Data-as-a-Service approach is now integrated with Kubernetes and available on the marketplace,

with also interesting talks at several booths: AtScale, ClearSky Data, Fivetran, H2O.ai, Hitachi, HPE, IBM, Iguazio, Intel, NetApp, NGINX, Nutanix, LogDNA, Logic Monitor, Looker, Panzura, Red Hat, Suse, Trifacta or YugaByte.

It was really a good conference with a confirmation of the role of Kubernetes everywhere illustrating the impact of open source and Google contribution. In other words, if you don’t support Kubernetes, you’re out, if yes, you just continue to play…

The conference helps attendees to understand that Google is about innovation developing new products and not about running applications in the cloud, a ball has started to roll.