With over 25,000 people registered to attend, Global Knowledge’s resident Google Cloud gurus weren’t the only ones excited for the Google Cloud Next ’18 conference in San Francisco. With interest in Google Cloud growing, the conference expanded to 500 sessions, consisting of talks, bootcamps and breakout sessions, and participation by more than 290 customer speakers.
The key focus and theme remained consistent with Google Cloud’s core values: “Fast. Open. Reliable. Secure.” The vast partner ecosystem is a vital source to drive business and adoption forward.
Throughout the three-day conference, the Google Cloud team released more than 20 new products and services. Since all of our instructors have real-world experience or consult on the side, they attend tech conferences to learn, learn and learn. We asked them what new GCP products or services they’re most excited about, how they plan to use them and our impression of each release.
1. Cloud Services Platform (CSP)
• Overview: CSP is a family of products offering hybrid cloud software for application modernization that provides consistent, automated operations on-premises and in the cloud. Combining Kubernetes and Istio with Google Cloud’s infrastructure, security and operations practices will increase application reliability and manage governance at scale.
• Planned use: Enterprises can use CSP whether their applications are on-prem or on a cloud platform. CSP will improve service reliability, enhance developer productivity, provide consistent operations with automated governance and security, and quickly modernize on-prem applications without having to re-architect the entire app.
• Our view: Developers will relish the thought of modernizing infrastructure in a less painful way. There was tons of talks and influence around hybrid cloud environments at Next ’18, proving that developers are a vital role in the future of cloud.
2. Titan Security Key
• Overview: This is a FIDO security key that includes Google-developed firmware. It provides a phishing-resistant second authorization factor to Google Cloud, G Suite apps like Gmail, and other services like Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook and more.
• Planned use: Customers can implement a two-step verification process with the security key that uses cryptography. It ensures you’re logging in to the service originally registered and verifies it’s the correct security key. This two-step security verification is said to be more secure than the text message verification that we’re all used to.
• Our view: IT administrators (including sysadmins and cloud admins) and security professionals can add this to their toolkit as reliable keys to security protocol and help to prevent phishing attacks in their organization. CISOs and IT decision-makers can have peace of mind knowing this service will help keep infiltrators away from high-value data.
3. Knative (kay-native)
• Overview: Knative is a product within the Cloud Services Platform that provides open-source building blocks. It’s been developed on top of Kubernetes using the same technology as the GKE serverless add-on that enables developers to run serverless workloads anywhere. With built-in partnerships with industry leaders like Pivotal, SAP, IBM, Red Hat, and others, this open source product will allow companies to run their serverless workloads on-prem, on a cloud platform or with a third-party data center.
• Planned use: Knative will increase developer productivity by providing pre-built middleware components that build, deploy and manage applications. Developers can now focus on doing what they love most: writing code! This product also supplies flexible workflows for building, testing or deploying container-based apps.
• Our view: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google’s managed environment for deploying containerized applications, allows developers to get products to market quicker. It also enables portability across different cloud environments (which is a dream come true in today’s multi-cloud world). The fact that this powerful engine underlies Knative’s serverless add-on will only contribute to a developer’s ability to remain flexible, agile and ahead of the game.
4. Velostrata Migrations of VMs
• Overview: Velostrata delivers a purpose-built, enterprise-grade migration solution that enables companies to efficiently migrate and operationalize their applications to run on GCP within minutes.
• Planned use: Velostrata migrates apps efficiently and effectively. It’s free to use for all customers migrating apps to GCP. This product will also save organizations up to five hours of labor per server during migration and eliminate costly on-prem hardware. The ability to use built-in testing for pre-migration validation directly in GCP without impacting live apps reduces organizational risk.
• Our view: IT professionals responsible for either a lift-and-shift or legacy app migration, or those planning to use a hybrid cloud model, will benefit from this easy-to-use product because of the time they save and the wealth of support provided by Google and their partners.
5. BigQuery ML (Beta)
• Overview: A new capability that opens up predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) to millions of users. And the best news—you don’t need a data science background to use it! This product enables data analysts to leverage ML with only two lines of SQL.
• Planned use: It allows organizations to build custom ML models with petabyte scale data using SQL. You’ll no longer need to sample or move data from the data warehouse to build ML models, so it’ll help to increase efficiencies and leave your team with more time. BigQuery ML will simplify ML by automating engineering, model selection and hypertuning processes.
• Our view: Anyone that’s well aware of the current pool of IT talent knows the cost of hiring enough data scientists to build a rock-solid data analytics solution in the warehouse. The rise of machine learning is not only creating new roles, but also creating skills gaps. Although there’s a lot to learn, this tool is meant to help speed the process up so that organizations get more from their data, quicker.
Google Cloud has big goals concerning growth and adoption in the coming year. One way Diane Greene and the other keynote speakers truly believe they’ll hit these goals is through training. Training accelerates adoption. As a Google Cloud Premier Authorized Training Partner, Global Knowledge offers the entire training portfolio with content developed directly by Google. The courses align to job roles and key skills, like cloud infrastructure, data engineering and machine learning, so that GCP users can maximize their cloud investment.
Right now there are three GCP certifications (also aligned to job roles) – and trust us, the GCP Certified Data Engineer Professional certification is no joke! Our trainers go through a rigorous program to learn the systems, course content and skills prior to getting one or more certification—all of this before stepping into the classroom. So you can trust you’ll be learning the best from the best.
To catch up on sessions you may have missed, check out Next OnAir to see on-demand recordings. There’s also free resources which have daily recap articles on conference announcements, including more product releases.
Related courses
• Data Engineering on Google Cloud Platform
• Getting Started with Kubernetes and Google Container Engine
• Architecting with Google Cloud Platform: Infrastructure
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The post 5 New Google Cloud Platform Services We’re Most Excited About appeared first on Global Knowledge Blog.