Google Cloud Next 2022 was an exciting event, with the company announcing innovations in three major areas: infrastructure, data, and collaboration. To learn more about the announcements and what you can get out of them, read on.
Infrastructure
Google Cloud took steps to improve its infrastructure and security in the following ways:
- Virtual machines updates. A new series of C3 virtual machines that use an Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) that Google and Intel jointly developed, together with a 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor.
- Dual operation allows users to run two instances of their mainframe systems at the same time. The capacity is built on top of the tech that Santander first developed.
- The OpenXLA project is an initiative led by companies like ARM, Intel, Nvidia, and others to develop open source ML libraries for easier ML development.
- Global cloud region expansion. Google has announced its intention to launch new cloud regions in Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden – which will be available in coming months.
- Cybersecurity AI. Automated tools and other methods help organizations improve their cybersecurity posture by increasing visibility into threats, detecting anomalies, and reducing false positives.
While infrastructure is core to Google Cloud, how teams use it is even more important. And that is another aspect of this year’s update announcements.
Data
There were several updates, partnerships, and launches that Google announced in relation to data. Some of the most notable were:
- Open cloud platform. Google is moving forward with its plans for an open cloud platform, which includes both public and private clouds.
- Big Query updates. This platform enables you to store structured and unstructured data (such as text files, audio files, images, videos) and allows you to query the data with SQL.
- GCP real-time analytics. New connections between GCP services allow organizations to replicate real- time analytics from various external sources directly into the platform.
- Dataplex updates. New automated QA and lineage processes were developed for dataplex.
- BigTable integrations. Apache Hadoop HDFS and Amazon S3 are now supported by the BigTable storage system.
- Looker partnership. Google has announced its partnership with Looker, which allows users to develop deeper integrations between Looker, Google Cloud Platform, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Additionally, partners can now access Looker APIs from within their own products.
- Vertex AI Vision. A new service called Vertex AI Vision aims to make powerful computer vision and image recognition AI more accessible to data professionals.
- BI integrations. Increased connectivity to leading business intelligence (BI) tools such as Elastic, MongoDB, PalantiR Foundry, and Service Now.
In addition to data, some of Google’s most exciting updates were in regard to security.
Collaboration
Working together requires efficient teamwork and security – the focus of Google’s updates:
- Communication apps. Google developed new Google Meet capabilities, APIs for Chat and Meeting, an add-on SDK, and the new integration of the Google Sheets API.
- Immersive, AI communication. Features added to the Google Meet app included adaptive framing for AI-enabled cameras and new presentation modes.
- Security expansions include the addition of cloud-based DLP for Google Apps, client-side encryption for Gmail and Calendar, and the capability to create more granular trust rules for Drive.
Especially when much of our work is currently remote (including Metrist’s team!), it’s important that teams can communicate smoothly and securely.
Significant Expansions, but a True Competitor?
Google Cloud made great strides to implement useful updates to their data, infrastructure, and collaboration offerings. Now users can get even more out of the product, and collaborate about it more easily.
And it appears that they are doing their best to become a true competitor to AWS and Azure. These features from these announcements certainly help move that goal forward but at this point, they appear to be a distant third in comparison.
In any case, with increased reliance/use of any cloud platform’s products, an outage can cause significant implications for your business. If you’d like to get up-to-date about GCP’s status and get visibility into their health, sign up for Metrist.
