The important announcements from Google’s Cloud Next event

02.05.2019 2,019 14

Martin Deshev

Google’s cloud business is going through some changes. This made the company’s annual Cloud Next event quite interesting. For one, Google decided to walk the IBM route and not be a direct competitor of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. On paper, at least.

One could say that’s a logical and even expected decision. Both AWS and Azure have grown so much they have a hefty lead over Google and other similar services. So, why bother? Well, it’s still a bit of a surprising decision, considering the continuous increase of the multi-cloud approach by enterprises. That being said, Google Cloud isn’t going anywhere, but it is changing.

Welcome, Anthos

One of the big changes at the Cloud Next event is Anthos. This is the new name for the Google Cloud Services Platform. It’s basically the same service as before and you can run applications in a private data center and in the cloud.

However, the new name comes with some new features. One of them is support for… AWS and Azure. So, while Google is technically no longer going after the big competitors, it is offering a solution which allows enterprises to use a single platform (Google’s) to run and manage applications on any cloud. Of course, powered by containers and Kubernetes.

Open-source incoming

Another big announcement is that the Google Cloud Console will become even more open-source friendly. It has several new partners among which we find MongoDB, DataStax, InfluxData, Confluent and others. Google also plans to integrate even more open-source products and they will become part of the main platform.

This means you will pay a single fee and get support from the service providers. Basically, Google wants to go the exact opposite way of AWS which is often criticized for the way it handles open-source services.

Even more AI

AI talk is everywhere and it didn’t miss out on the cloud, either. Google puts even more emphasis on AI in the cloud than before with the new AI Platform. It’s a new service which allows developers to train and test their models and then put them into production. It will also offer pre-built models. The AI Platform aims to be an end-to-end solution.

For fans of coding

Google also announced Cloud Code. This will have a bunch of extensions and plugins like VS Code, IntelliJ and others. The idea is simple – offering an easier way to create cloud-native apps.

Does all of this matter?

Google positioned the event as a “Welcome to the future of digital transformation”. The company wants to show how useful the cloud can be for a variety of industries including healthcare, retail, financial, media, manufacturing and so on.

As such it also offers several industry-specific cloud services. All of this isn’t important just for Google’s baseline, though. It helps other companies too, as it gives them more ideas about the possibilities the cloud opens. And it should help motivate enterprises as well and show them more new ways they can use the cloud to their advantage.