GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT '20: ON AIR
WHAT'S NEXT
HIDDEN FORCES: WHAT'S NEXT IN ENTERPRISE IT
Hello, and thanks for tuning in to the final keynote of Next OnAir 2020.
Today I'm going to talk to you about the upcoming revolution in cloud
one of the rare cases where picking the right path today
helps you both in the short term and over the next two decades.
But first a bit of background, so bear with me for a few minutes.
I'm Urs Hölzle.
And in my 21 years of leading the technical infrastructure teams at Google
I have had the good fortune
to work with many of the world's smartest engineers
software developers, and business leaders.
Not just at Google but at customers, our partners
and in academia and the open-source community.
Working together, we've been able to take on
one of the biggest problems in IT, the sorry state of enterprise innovation.
The sad fact is today much of enterprise IT is like a dinosaur
big but slow and in danger of dying out.
And we see all the innovation that consumers enjoy
and we wonder, why can't we have that too?
So it's easy to get depressed about the future of IT
and worry about its extinction.
But it wasn't always like this.
When I was a teenager, back in the last millennium
the best technology for pretty much anything was in the enterprise.
Big companies had the best computers, the best databases
even the best cameras.
But starting about 25 years ago, around 1995 something extraordinary happened.
For the first time ever
consumers began to enjoy innovation at an unprecedented speed
literally unheard of in human history.
Enterprise technology, always the leader in the past
began to fall behind.
Consumers got webmail, search, internet maps, cloud-based storage
and then machine learning, real-time video, awesome user experiences, automated backups
products that just kept getting better.
Enterprise technology, meantime, continued at its old, slower pace.
What caused this reversal in technology leadership?
Do consumers spend more on technology now and enterprises spend less?
No.
Did consumer software engineers become much more talented?
No.
Is there a magic quantum hyperspace innovation accelerator
that only works for consumer products?
Of course not.
What did happen was a new way of seeing and building technology
and for a long time, the enterprise has missed that way.
With the invention of the web
there was a programming surface, HTML
that allowed any application developer or SaaS vendor
to deliver software to any customer, and all these customers look the same.
They all run on the same platform.
And then 10 years ago with Android and iPhone
the same thing happened to phones.
In both cases, the stacks auto-update
so everyone is on the same version of the same stack all the time.
No different versions, just a single powerful experience
usually on open standards for maximum velocity.
And with this approach
developers spend more time on programming
without having to deal with a myriad of different versions at customers.
They can use practices like continuous deployment and integration
which rolls out small releases more frequently
starting with small sets of users to make sure they're safe.
They find bugs with the first percent of users and fix them fast.
And then the new release can go out to all users.
And that's low risk because they're all on the same version of the stack.
Let's pause here for a second because this is the crucial point.
If we find bugs early in the rollout with 1% of users
then to the rest of the users
it looks like the bug rate is 100 times smaller.
Services just work with a hundred times higher perceived quality
so there's no need to fear upgrades
and it's no wonder that consumers don't demand to qualify new releases
before they're installed.
They assume they work because they almost always do.
So the obvious question is why hasn't this happened for the enterprise?
Why are even companies that move to the cloud
often dissatisfied with their rate of innovation
the quality of their operational visibility or their security?
It's because enterprises are in a tough spot.
We all use similar hardware and software
but we integrated them differently and we all have our own version matrix.
So it's mostly similar stuff on a macro level
but each arrangement is as unique as a snowflake.
So each enterprise is a snowflake with its own unique version mix.
So when I'm a SaaS vendor trying to update a new customer
it's literally the first time I'm deploying that update
into exactly this environment.
So everyone is nervous about the update
because things tend to break on the first attempt.
And even after I've updated 10,000 other companies
the next one is like the first time because it's a new snowflake.
So my software quality doesn't look great to the customer.
Updates are expensive, and they're slow and infrequent.
So it's the snowflake that's killing the enterprise dinosaur.
And if we don't get rid of snowflakes enterprise innovation is going to be doomed
because we cannot evolve, just like the dinosaurs.
These snowflakes have made an enormous difference
to the slope of the innovation curve.
When you assume just a 20% additional friction from snowflakes
compounded over 25 years that's a factor of 100.
That's why consumer innovation has surged ahead.
So what is the answer?
How can we allow enterprises
to each create their own unique value proposition
but with automation, scale, and standardization
at consumer-like speed?
Well, the enterprise needs a software platform that is always up to date
where everyone uses exactly the same stack, so updates see exactly the same environment.
It needs to be open-source
so improvements can happen in any environment, with no vendor login.
And the platform needs to accommodate legacy systems too
because nobody can afford to rewrite everything.
And it needs to run on-prem and in any cloud, wherever you want it.
This platform exists today.
It's seeing impressive enterprise adoption and its name is Anthos.
We introduced Anthos a year ago at Next.
And since then we've been working closely
with a number of developers, partners, and customers
to make it even stronger and more capable.
Recently, an independent study showed an almost 5-times ROI when deploying Anthos.
That's not just an improvement.
It's a small revolution.
Anthos integrates dozens of open-source packages
including Kubernetes containers
and provides them as a fully managed stack not just on GCP, but across many clouds
in your on-premise data center and at the edge.
It's based on open-source APIs, making it for clouds
what the Linux operating system was for servers 20 years ago
a safe choice to avoid locking, with a rich ecosystem
and plenty of developers who know it.
Using Anthos, you can keep your server hardware
your cloud provider of choice
and run pretty much anything on top of it.
That's as true for enterprises with on-prem services and mainframes
as it is for companies that were born in the cloud.
What all this gets you is the ability to develop software
faster than ever before
to bring to your enterprise the kind of speed of innovation
normally associated only with consumer-oriented companies.
But Anthos goes beyond just making it easier to write new software.
It helps you operate and secure existing applications.
The fact is most enterprises don't have the time or energy
to rewrite their existing applications.
So you need a platform that meets you where you are today
with a complex mix of third-party and home-grown applications
commercial and open-source
and helps you bring those systems into the future.
And Anthos can help there as well.
In fact, I'd argue Anthos is even more valuable
for existing applications.
Take just one example, Java apps.
Organizations often have hundreds
or even thousands of Java enterprise applications.
These applications are important to the business
but get relatively little attention because they're mature.
So they languish until they become so difficult to maintain
that they have to be rewritten from scratch.
Now, in the fastest case, with Anthos' migration tools
you can take those apps and migrate them automatically
moving them to containers.
You can keep these containers on-prem or move to the cloud.
That's your choice.
But you see an immediate return
because you're reducing infrastructure and licensing costs
and you have lower operating and maintenance costs too
because Anthos make it simple to run, monitor, secure and update applications.
You can even apply these same migration techniques to Windows apps
enabling you to bring legacy Windows Server apps to containers.
This includes Windows Server 2008, which recently reached end of support.
A study conducted by Forrester found that using Anthos
application migrations were 58% to 75% faster.
Platform operating efficiency improved up to 55%.
And productivity for security tasks improved up to 75%.
But Anthos is not a dead end where you park old applications.
For the apps you continue to develop
Anthos makes it easy to adopt modern cloud-native development practices
including automated testing and deployment
reducing the time it takes your development teams
to safely roll out new versions.
You even get the ability to secure your software supply chain
with automated security analysis
such as vulnerability scanning and secure assigned binaries.
This kind of speed with stability and security
is what enables consumer-oriented companies to be so innovative.
And with Anthos, you can have that too.
And every step of the way
your operations team gets new insight into systems performance and reliability
including the ability to set and monitor service-level objectives
as well as getting a comprehensive view of your application dependencies.
All of this comes from using a system that encapsulates the best practices
learned from our own decades of experience
in running containers at scale, going all the way back to 2006
when we first brought containers into the Linux kernel.
And we've distilled all this learning and experience into Anthos
so your teams can follow practices that have stood the test of time.
And this is not just a future possibility.
It is available today.
In a previous keynote, you heard about how organizations
as diverse as the bank HSBC, the retailer HEB, Telegraph Media Group
and Major League Baseball are all using Anthos.
And of course, we're using it ourselves
to bring our marquee analytic service to data stored in AWS
with BigQuery Omni that was announced a few weeks ago.
Anthos is seeing broad uptake in the enterprise.
That's testimony to both the proven open-source products inside Anthos
and the work done at Google
and the great results that enterprises are seeing.
All of this changes how you should see cloud.
And it's not really about the big three clouds, as most people think.
Now, let me go back to history to explain what I mean.
In the 1990s, enterprise faced the new world of PCs, workstations, and servers.
And they agonized over choosing HP, Sun, Compaq, or someone else.
It was a big deal, because once they chose one
they got the vendor's OS, compilers, databases.
Everything was different.
That was the world in 1995.
But less than a decade later, everyone realized
there were just two choices that mattered.
Not server companies, but operating systems: Linux and Windows Server.
That's the choice that stayed with you for two decades.
And of these two, open-sourced Linux became a powerful standard.
And it has become more central to enterprise computing
every single year since then.
Anthos offers the same open-source answer for cloud
across on-premise data centers, hybrid environments
single or multi-cloud, and even telco edge environments.
Choosing Anthos is like choosing Linux.
Multi-platform, more economical, more innovative, open
lower risk, at lower cost.
Choosing Anthos helps enterprise developers
write amazing new modern applications
but it also gives brownfield applications
an incremental path to connect to a rich future.
Some applications can even be migrated automatically.
But most importantly, Anthos can be adopted incrementally
one step at a time with low risk.
Now, some in the industry have argued
that this kind of portability degrades the cloud experience
or leads to a least common denominator approach.
They want you to stay inside one cloud all the time.
But in fact, it's the opposite
because Anthos standardizes things
that do not differentiate your business operations.
When developers do not have to learn everything from scratch
when there is one way to develop, operate and secure your workloads on any cloud
you can focus on value-adding activities.
You're free to choose the best-in-class tools and services that are right for you
and if those needs change, you don't have to start over from scratch.
So you could take advantage of best-in-class offerings, wherever they are
because you are not deeply locked in to one provider via provider-specific APIs
for all the minutiae required to make things work.
Your configs, your load balancing, your service management
they're the same everywhere.
So when you have to learn something new
it's because you chose a unique service to use
not because you have to learn again
how to perform common tasks in a new cloud
just to get to the unique service that you want.
So Anthos maximizes your ability
to take advantage of unique cloud functionality.
I can't stress enough how big a change this will be in the industry
because, until now, adopting cloud meant choosing a vendor
being locked in, having only one choice, and having a heck of a hard time
integrating with existing on-premise services.
No longer.
Anthos revives enterprise computing with an open, auto-updating software stack
for the next 20 years.
And unlike previous shifts in technology
Anthos doesn't require an architectural forklift.
It doesn't force you to rewrite.
It's one of the rare cases where it's strategically the right choice
but also easy to adopt
with same-year benefits for your developers and operators.
We're seeing our Anthos customers thrive, not just with Anthos itself
but with a rich and growing ecosystem
of products, services, partners, and tools and best practices.
Some have traditionally focused IT
others are on the cutting edge of modern microservices.
But all are getting better security, cost savings, better budget control
and much higher developer velocity.
So we look forward to more of you joining this proven new era of innovation.
And we're eager to help you get started.
Be sure to catch our live keynote Q&A
where we'll address top-of-mind questions from this discussion.
Thank you.