Google Cloud Platform is coming strong

Last month, San Francisco hosted Google Cloud Platform Next 2016, an important event designed to show Google is serious about competing in the public cloud market against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer.

Google talked a lot about the enormous amount of security that goes into building and running its world-class data centers, while impressing the audience with its unmatched capabilities in high-performance computing and scalability. The message was clear that for enterprises the Google Cloud Platform was the place to go for both price and performance.

Moreover, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), talked about his vision of where technology is heading. He declared that the amount of innovation we will see in the next five years will exceed all the innovation we’ve seen in all prior years.

The keynotes were filled with announcements of new services and demos. Most notable among those are:

• Ten new regions to be added in the next year – Google announced ambitious plans to expand the geographic scope of its cloud platform around the globe. Google announced two new regions: US West in Oregon and East Asia in Tokyo, Japan, with plans to add 10 more regions at undisclosed locations by the end of 2017. Google’s cloud now has six regions including Eastern US (South Carolina), Central US (Iowa), Western Europe (Belgium), and East Asia (Taiwan) with more to come.

• Cloud IAM – GCP finally got its own authentication and authorization mechanism in the form of Cloud IAM. The new model enables enterprises in effectively delegating cloud management to third-parties and MSPs.

• Machine Learning as a Service – Google Cloud Machine Learning lets you build apps that can see, hear, and interact with the world around them. You can either use models like Cloud Vision API, Speech API, and Translate API or you can train your own, and harness the analytical power of Google’s Cloud Data platform to create apps that grow smarter with use.

• Stackdriver monitoring for GCP and AWS – Google Stackdriver was built from the ground up to provide a unified view of the health, performance, and availability of your cloud-powered applications. Stackdriver combines metrics, logs, error reporting, and diagnostics from GCP and AWS to enable users to find and fix issues faster.

• Kubernetes 1.2 – Google’s hosted Kubernetes – based cluster management system adds dynamic configuration, turnkey deployment, automated cluster management, a new GUI, and a 400% increase in cluster scale.

Cloud computing has come a long way over the last several years. Innovation is increasing at rates never experienced before and will continue to do so. Cloud computing started as a way to abstract physical infrastructure and data centers, but the next generation of cloud computing will focus on abstracting virtual infrastructure and the operational processes that go along with managing that infrastructure.  This is an area where Google has a clear competitive advantage over the other cloud vendors because the new services they’re bringing to market have been proven and used internally at Google for years.

Foto source: https://cloud.google.com/