Google Cloud Next 2022: Key takeaways

The 2022 Google Next event took place over three days, with talks running around the clock on a range of different topics, from design through to innovation. This year’s keynote featured Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google and Alphabet) and Thomas Kurian (CEO, Google Cloud), who both talked about some of the exciting recent developments on the platform and what the future holds for Google Cloud. During the keynote, it was highlighted that Google Cloud is one of Google’s fastest growing businesses, with a $25bn annual revenue run rate. Five themes were identified as being key factors behind this success, with each theme providing some clues as to the direction that Google Cloud is headed:

AI/Analytics

AI and analytics are one of the key differentiators for Google Cloud and they are continuing to evolve their capabilities in this area. By making proprietary technologies such as BigQuery (from Google Search) and Google Vision API available to customers, they have a truly unique and powerful product offering in the area and allow customers to leverage the products that make Google the success that it is today. Further to existing products, Google announced the introduction of the translation Hub, which allows customers to translate documents into 153 languages whilst preserving their formatting and design. This will be a valuable service to any companies operating in multiple countries as it has the potential to greatly reduce translation costs.

DevSecOps

Google is renowned for its DevSecOps and the company retains its leadership position in this space. They are sharing more practices and tools with customers through Opinionated Golden Paths for application deployment and Software Delivery Shield. Opinionated Golden Paths define best practices for different types of applications, whilst Software Delivery Shield is a new set of tools which allow developers to work safely on the platform with Cloud Workstations and Assured Open-Source Software, amongst others. In addition to these tools, Google Cloud announced their acquisition of Mandiant to bring advanced threat intelligence and incident response services, and we heard from Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant, to tell us about the merger.

Infrastructure

The global infrastructure that supports Google Search and YouTube is available to customers through Google Cloud. In his introduction, Sundar Pichai referenced the 22 subsea cables that help to link 35 regions. Expanding on this, Google Cloud announced the introduction of five new regions in Austria, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and Greece. Thomas Kurian also talked extensively about the need for workload optimised infrastructure, where the constraints of Moore’s law are being reached. Google are offering further optimised hosting options through C3 compute instances (Intel's 4th gen Xeon CPU) and HyperDisk (80% faster block storage for high end DBMS), as well as talking about their partnership with VMWare to allow migrations directly from the VMWare Console.

Collaboration

Google’s collaboration tools are universal, with the likes of Gmail and Google Meet being used extensively. Sundar Pichai made a point of how useful these tools are for organisations and how they changed ways of working during the covid-19 pandemic. Google believes that a lot of these changes are here to stay, with many continuing to work flexibly and dividing their time between the office and remote working. To help customers do this more effectively, Google are improving their collaboration tools and introducing text actions in Google Chat to automatically update documents. Further to this, Sundar Pichai announced a pilot of Google Starline with key partners. Starline combines hardware and software to help people feel closer together by creating the impression that they are in the same room.

Environment

The environment and climate change were recurring themes throughout the keynote and conference, with Google making clear their commitment to reducing carbon emissions and slowing down climate change. Sundar Pichai talked about Google being the ‘cleanest cloud’ and mentioned case studies of climate change modelling on the platform, which is helping scientists model the impacts of climate change. One such use case was modelling flooding impact with Google Earth and visualising it with the help of the vision API. Building on this, Thomas Kurian announced Carbon Footprint, which is a Google Cloud product that reports on customers' carbon usage through Google Cloud.

Key takeaways

• Google Cloud is growing and will continue to reveal more of Google’s infrastructure, services, and best practices to customers.

• Google are growing their AI and Analytics offering with Translation Hub, which will be a huge benefit for companies that rely on document translation.

• Already leaders in DevSecOps, Google are helping customers to adopt the same practices and tools that they use themselves to safely accelerate customer’s development lifecycles.

• By expanding their already powerful infrastructure offering, Google are building data centres closer to even more customers and giving them a performance boost with workload optimised instances.

• Google are piloting an exciting product called Starline, which makes it feel like collaborators are working in the same room.

• Google are committed to reducing their environmental impact and are helping their customers do the same with tools like Carbon Footprint on Google Cloud.

We have seen many of our clients embracing Google Cloud platform for its strength in Infrastructure, development best practices, and best-in-class AI/Analytics capabilities. We look forward to working with our clients to leverage these cutting-edge services to expand their capabilities and accelerate their digital transformation.