So for those that weren’t at Google Next in San Fransicso this week and like myself just watched the keynote from home and looked at all the announcements and figured what else did Google announce during the conference? Well unlike Microsoft and Amazon, Google is that good at getting the information out there and the new stuff can be found on different sources around the interwebs, so I decided to write a summary post on what was announced during the conference.
Infrastructure and Security Platform Updates
- Context-aware access capabilities, available now for select customers in beta for VPC Service Controls, and coming soon to beta for Cloud IAM, Cloud IAP and Cloud Identity –> https://cloud.google.com/vpc-service-controls/
- Titan Security Key, available now to Cloud customers, and coming soon to the Google Store –> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17613332/google-titan-security-key-login-2fa
- Shielded VMs, available now in beta –> https://cloud.google.com/shielded-vm
- Binary Authorization, coming soon to beta –> https://cloud.google.com/binary-authorization/
- Container Registry Vulnerability Scanning, coming soon to beta –> https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/docs/get-image-vulnerabilities
- Cloud Armor geo-based access control, available now in beta –> https://cloud.google.com/armor/
- Cloud HSM, coming soon to beta –> https://cloud.google.com/hsm/
- Access Transparency, soon to be generally available –> https://cloud.google.com/access-transparency/
- Partnered with managed service providers (MSPs) so you can now run Oracle workloads on GCP using dedicated hardware. (Important to note that this is delivering my a managed service partner to GCP and not by Google themselves.
- Intel and SAP collaboration to be able to run SAP HANA workloads on Compute Engine VMs powered by Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for more capacity at lower cost (With 4TB machine types now in general availability, and coming with new virtual machines that support 12TB of memory by next summer, and 18TB of memory by the end of 2019.)
Google Cloud Service Platform
- Cloud Service Platform is going to be the first of Google’s hybrid platform which is a set of products focused on delivering a unified platform to deliver and build applications
- Service mesh: Availability of Istio 1.0 in open source, Managed Istio, and Apigee API Management for Istio
- Hybrid computing: GKE On-Prem with multi-cluster management which allows us to manage GKE Clusters using the GCP Console
- Policy enforcement: GKE Policy Management, to take control of Kubernetes workloads
- Ops tooling: Stackdriver Service Monitoring
- Serverless computing: GKE Serverless add-on and Knative, an open source serverless framework
- Developer tools: Cloud Build, a fully managed CI/CD platform
Now a bit in-depth on the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine – On-prem solution) which is essentially being able to deliver the GKE as a service in your own datacenter. Which is now in Alpha release, and as of now is going to be supported running on vSphere 6.5 using Google-hardened Ubuntu image; same one they use for GKE.This is really the beginning of multi-cluster scenarios that work well across different environments. Failover from on-prem -> GKE is something they are working on as well. When it comes to the architecture Masters will run on-prem. Google will have connection agent that let’s them securely talk to the Kube API Server from GCP. Since they want to ensure that the cluster is fully functional even if the connection goes down.
- Expanding the availability of the Cloud Firestore beta to more users by bringing the UI to the GCP console,
- Regional replication across zones is now available for Cloud Bigtable
- Beta version of Key Visualizer for Cloud Bigtable, which helps debug performance issues by mapping key access patterns.
- Compute Engine now uses a resource-based pricing model, so your costs will be based on how many resources you consume over a given time period, giving customers more savings and a simpler bill.
Big Query Announcements
- BigQuery ML –> https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/#bigqueryml
- BigQuery Clustering –> https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/clustered-tables
- BigQuery GiS –> https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2018/07/bridging-the-gap-between-data-and-insights
Google GSuite
- Google Search Enterprise –> https://cloud.google.com/products/search/
- Google Voice Enterprise –> https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__voice-eap.html
- Google Drive Enterprise –> https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__drive-enterprise.html
- G Suite security center investigation tool, available now via Early Adopter Program –> https://gsuite.google.com/products/admin/security-center/
- G Suite data regions, now generally available –> https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2018/07/gsuite-data-regions.html
ML and IoT
- A new solution, Contact Center AI, which includes new Dialogflow features alongside other tools to assist live agents and perform analytics.
- New enhancements to Dialogflow Enterprise Edition enable you to design smarter and more conversational interfaces.
- Cloud AutoML Vision, Natural Language, and Translation extend powerful ML models to suit specific needs, without requiring any specialized knowledge in machine learning or coding.
- Cloud TPU Pods and TPU v3 are now available in alpha, allowing you to train models faster on Cloud ML Engine.
- Cloud IoT Edge extends Google Cloud’s powerful AI capability to gateways and connected devices, Iot Edge Kit can be ordered here –> https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/bringing-intelligence-to-the-edge-with-cloud-iot/
- Kubeflow v0.2 makes it easier to use machine learning software stacks on Kubernetes.
PaaS Updates
- DataStudio Explorer –> https://datastudio.google.com/overview
- Cloud Composer, a managed Apache Airflow service, is now generally available.
- Dataflow Shuffle is now generally available
- service mesh based on the open-source Istio, which will soon move to version 1.0, and Managed Istio, a fully managed version thereof, running in GCP
- Stackdriver Service Monitoring provides an SRE-inspired, service-oriented view of your workloads, showing you how your end users experience your systems.
- Cloud Functions is now GA –> https://cloud.google.com/functions/
- Google Knative –> https://cloud.google.com/knative/ (Building Blocks For a Portable Function Platform) built together with Pivotal
- Google Cloud Build and integration with GitHub –> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/go-fast-safely-and-easily-with-cloud-build-and-github.html
Might be something that I’ve missed from the announcements as well, but it is clearly that Google has a couple of areas that they are more interested then other vendors. IoT, Cloud-native applications (with all the announcements around Kubernetes with On-prem and managed istio and other enhancements) and also Machine Learning with edge support for TPU and new auto ML features.