2019 was a big year for Google Cloud Next. Unofficially, we’ve heard it increased from 26,000 attendees in 2018 to almost 35,000 this year. As the conference has evolved, the personas that we have seen visiting the conference are different as well, shifting from what felt like a technology conference with more engineers, but now you see DevOps, Finance, Security, C-suite all being represented. The conference is not only growing in these aspects, but it also feels like the conference will outgrow Moscone soon. Las Vegas in 2021? Your guess is as good as ours at this point.
This year it was impressive to see Thomas Kurian, the new CEO of Google Cloud, up on the stage. He had a lot to talk about regarding terms of changing customer needs, platform features and updates, and finally about the growing ecosystem. On day one he had an impressive list of co-presenters join him on the stage including Sanjay Poonen, the COO of VMware(!). During the opening keynote Thomas Kurian also shared his strategy and vision for Google Cloud, which was very well received.
We were thrilled to see everyone we did at our CloudHealth by VMware booth. It was a busy conference for us and we demoed our new capabilities for Google Cloud Platform. We spoke to a variety of attendees from enterprises, gaming companies, the retail sector, to FinTech businesses. Having met with CIOs, VP of Infrastructure, VP of Applications, DevOps teams, Site Reliability Engineers, and Developers, we heard all about how they are excited about the new applications they want to develop on GCP.
Out of the many announcements during Google Next, one of the most talked about was the General Availability of Anthos platform. This is a very forward-looking open source service from Google that can scale across Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It is a managed service that helps customers manage workloads across other major clouds. We heard great excitement from most of the attendees around Anthos. Other top announcements from during Google Next are listed below:
- Open source partner ecosystem growing rapidly: Google wants to bring open source to customers in a simplified manner. It announced strategic partnerships with open-source centric companies in the data management and analytics domain. This will add benefits like fully managed services, unified billing, single interface, for an open ecosystem. Some of the participants in this ecosystem are Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis Labs.
This ecosystem will only keep on growing in the future.
- Google announced a security management and data risk platform for Google Cloud Platform called Cloud Security Command Center. Cloud Security Command Center makes it easier for you to prevent, detect, and respond to threats.
- The serverless wars are just heating up. Cloud Run, a serverless compute platform for container apps was announced at the conference. It is a serverless compute platform that can help customers with containerized apps with built-in portability.
- Currently, in beta, BigQuery Business Intelligence Engine is in-memory analysis service that lets customers visualize and interact with large or complex data almost immediately.
- Cloud Bigtable gives a multi-region replication and is now generally available. This provides customers the flexibility to make their data available across a region or worldwide as demanded by your app.
This is a small snapshot of all the announcements that were made at the conference. We saw that most attendees were very happy about the expanding ecosystem across clouds, vendors, and Google Cloud Platform. These announcements provide the depth of features which will help organizations on their multicloud journey. It is not often that a major cloud provider embraces open source and keeps customer choice at the center of the platform. This will add a new level of trust in the Google Cloud Platform and we look forward to Google Next in 2020 and the updates that will come with it.
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