Google Cloud Next ’22 – What Got Us Excited

By @intelia | October 17

Over 3 jam-packed days, Google Cloud Next announced some of the most innovative updates in recent years across Data, AI/ML, Security, App Dev and Infrastructure.

Not only were our two founders there for live events in San Fransisco, but our #onetribe tuned in online to catch the most exciting announcements and highlights around what’s in store over the coming year!

Data & AI

Continuing as the leader in the Data & Analytics space, Google is further enhancing the way organisations build and manage advanced analytics solutions.

BigQuery Analytics

BigQuery Analytics now lets you analyse semi-structured and streaming data directly from BQ! We’re really excited to see how this pans out as the team no longer have to transform and flatten PDF, audio and video files for analysis. Another highlight is the upcoming support for Delta Lake.

Vertex AI Vision

Vertex AI Vision now allows organisations to build and deploy vision based applications with a fully managed, end to end dev environment. Our team have spent countless months custom building these kind of solutions that can now be built and deployed by end users in minutes!

 

Translation Hub

Translation Hub provides a fully managed hub to allow anyone to translate content (including text and audio) across 135 languages at the click of a button.

Looker Studio & Looker Hub

Google is looking to enhance their BI offering under the Looker umbrella. They have rebranded Data Studio as Looker Studio and will begin to create a deep integration of Looker with other BI, AI & ML tools.

Next Big Things for Developers

The Dev team across Google showcased their key areas of focus and advancement. The key topics of note were:
– Designing for neurodiversity
– Curated open source
– Security (ops managed through code)
– AI (inc Vertex AI Vision)
– Data & Analytics (real time push, focus on Governance)
– Sustainability
– Multicloud
– Business Applications (AppSheet and no-code solutions)

Security, Security, Security!

With the recent focus on security incidents, the updates across GCP’s security stack couldn’t come sooner. Off the back of Google Cloud Armor being named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Web Application Firewalls, Q3 2022, there were also announcements across:

– Software Delivery Shield: A solution for improving the security of all the code, people, systems, and processes that contribute to development and delivery of your software supply chain. Google introduced the SLSA framework for secure software delivery. Cloud build supports SLSA 1 framework.
– The JetBrains partnership offering fully managed Jetbrains IDEs as part of Cloud Workstations
– Google’s new Assured Open Source Software service, providing enterprises secure, validated OSS packages that are used by Google themselves internally
– The introduction of Chronicle Security Operations, a cloud based software suite to significantly enhance secops for organisations of all sizes.

DevOps:
Log Analytics: Gone are the days of having to route cloud logs to BigQuery. Logs stored in buckets can now be directly queried using SQL from BigQuery using Log Analytics. This reduces operational overhead and also saves cost!

Partner Tech

Several intelia partners also got a mention at Google Cloud Next including C3.ai, Collibra, Confluent and Fivetran across further collaboration (including managed service partners for Private Service Connect) and integration (natively into Database services).

 

 

 

 

 

5 New Google Cloud Regions

Google announced 5 new tenancy regions across Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa and Sweden further increasing the global footprint.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that’s a wrap for this year – Reach out to us if any of this sounds like it could solve some of the problems your organisation is facing or if you’re keen for a chat!