Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of representing VeloCloud at the VMware Booth at Google Cloud Next ‘19, Google’s annual Cloud Next developer conference. It was a busy week for us as there was a lot of interest in our SD-WAN solution and how it integrates with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well as NSX-SM and PKS.
Held in San Francisco, Next ‘19 brought together over 30,000 developers and other cloud professionals to share challenges, discuss emerging technologies and attend over 500 sessions.
In one of the highlights from the conference, Google introduced Anthos—formerly Cloud Services Platform—to help customers by providing a unified programming model and monitoring/policy management framework across on-premises and multiple clouds, not just GCP. Sanjay Poonen from VMware joined Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on stage to talk about how Google and VMware are working together to make hybrid cloud a reality.
While we had the opportunity to meet many network professionals, lots of folks were new to SD-WAN and were naturally curious about how we integrated with different Cloud platforms. Folks also wanted to find out how we are integrating SD-WAN with NSX.
We tried to think of creative methods to attract people to our booth—including an attempt at juggling—but ultimately attendees were drawn organically to the booth simply because SD-WAN is a powerful technology and they genuinely wanted to learn more.
In addition to the exciting announcement by VMware and Google Cloud, here are a few of the other big takeaways from Google Cloud Next ‘19:
Google’s Anthos Announcement
Anthos is now generally available on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE On-Prem, so you can deploy, run and manage your applications on-premises or in the cloud. Coming soon, Google will extend that flexibility to third-party clouds like AWS and Azure. Anthos is also launching with the support of more than 30 hardware, software and system integration partners so you can get up and running fast.
Partners such as VMware have committed to delivering Anthos on their own hyperconverged infrastructure for their customers. By validating Anthos on their solution stacks, our mutual customers can choose hardware based on their storage, memory, and performance needs.
Partnership between VMware & Google
At Google Next we demonstrated a new integration with VMware SD-WAN™ by VeloCloud®. VMware and Google demonstrated a “one-click” workflow to extend SD-WAN from branch offices or retail stores to GCP for Google Cloud service or workload access. VMware SD-WAN Cloud Gateways were strategically deployed across the globe at the doorsteps of Google Cloud. VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator provided policy-driven configurations, which simplified the workflow at scale.
Google also announced that through their partnership with VMware, customers will be able to run distributed, cloud-native applications across Google Cloud and on-premises environments via an integration with VMware NSX Service Mesh.
VMware and Google Cloud gave a demonstration of a federated service mesh across Kubernetes clusters on-premises with VMware PKS and in the cloud with GKE. The demo showed how users are able to gain visibility into Google services, and enable security policies based on Google services, alongside other services on-premises and in the cloud.
Overall, our experience at Google Next 2019 was a highly positive one. With VMware gaining traction as a major GCP partner, we will only see more positive developments in this area in the near future. We look forward to a continued relationship with Google, Cloud developers and other partners.
For more details, check out our Whitepaper, Google Cloud Platform Integration with VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. Contact our Sales Team for access: https://www.velocloud.com/contact/
For more details on the daily activities:
Event Recap for Day 1
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/next19-recap-day1
Event Recap for Day 2
Event Recap for Day 3
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/next19-recap-day3
