[MUSIC PLAYING]
BRIAN KRACIK: Hello, everyone.
I'd like to welcome you back to Google Cloud Innovators Tech
Talks for Telecommunications.
I'm Brian Kracik, head of telecommunications industry
marketing for Google Cloud globally.
And I'll be your host for this series.
I'm really excited to bring to you one of our Google experts.
And he'll be talking about the Edge,
and what are we doing with our Google Distributed Cloud Edge,
and how are we helping our communication service providers
not only create new revenue streams at the Edge,
but also how we can help them reexamine and develop
their network to become more Cloud native.
So for that, I have Hassan Sipra,
our principal engineering lead of Google Distributed Cloud
Edge.
Hassan, welcome to the show, and over to you.
HASSAN SIPRA: Hi, everyone.
My name is Hassan.
And I lead engineering for Google Distributed Cloud Edge.
Today, I'm going to give you a brief high level
overview of the GDC platform.
First, let's start by describing what Google Distributed
Cloud, or GDC, is.
GDC is a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software
solutions that extend Google Cloud's infrastructure
and services to the Edge and to customer data centers.
It's ideal for workloads that need local data processing,
low latency connectivity, or for modernizing
your on-premise environments and running
sensitive workloads that satisfy sovereignty requirements.
Products in this portfolio include Google Distributed
Cloud Hosted, which focuses on providing operational and data
sovereignty for sensitive workloads in environments
that need to be disconnected from Google Cloud.
And there's Google Distributed Cloud Edge, which
will be our focus for today.
Google Distributed Cloud Edge is a fully managed hardware
and software product.
It's intended for running local data processing, low latency
Edge compute workloads, modernizing
your on-premise environment, or for deploying
modern Cloud native 5G and LTE solutions.
You can run GDCE and its solutions
in one of three scenarios.
The first is enterprise on-prem.
These are customer-owned locations and data centers
where you have the ability to deploy and manage
workloads with Cloud consistency in your own environments.
The second is Google's Network Edge.
These are Google-owned locations deployed
in over 140 global metro regions and population centers.
This allows enterprises and application developers
to run their applications with very low latency access to end
users.
The third is what we call Operator Edge.
These are facilities hosted within telco or communication
service provider networks.
And they're deeply integrated with the network infrastructure
to provide low latency connectivity
to end users, such as 5G access.
Google Distributed Cloud Edge is powered
by Anthos, a modern application development platform that
provides open APIs and management
consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
More on this later.
So first, I'd like to describe some of the customer pain
points that GDCE addresses before we
dig into the technical details.
First is the cost of operations with existing solutions.
It's too high.
Customers need to manage infrastructure, applications,
their services, and the operational tooling
independently.
GDCE provides a fully integrated hardware and software offering.
This allows customers to instead focus
on developing the solutions that are critical to their business
needs, and avoids the toil of managing the infrastructure
and services that provide them.
And it does this with the flexibility
to run the workloads anywhere, regardless
of whether it's in our space of power
or in the customer space of power.
For example, retailers can focus on developing
AI- and ML-powered smart retail solutions
instead of supporting the infrastructure and services
necessary to run the applications.
Second, existing solutions tend to lock in customers
into closed ecosystems.
As I mentioned, GDCE is powered by Anthos,
which is a truly open and consistent environment,
and gives the customers the flexibility
to run their workloads on multiple clouds, not just ours.
It's also built using off the shelf hardware,
which gives a great deal of flexibility to tailor
the hardware and iterate on it rapidly to meet
our customers' evolving needs.
Third, GDCE takes an ecosystem-driven approach
to developing solutions.
We provide a modern application development platform.
But in addition, we validate a large number of ISV partners
and provide the assurance that these applications
and solutions work and run as expected
without customers having to integrate
the solutions by themselves.
Finally, we take an integrated security approach
across the hardware and software infrastructure,
in addition to providing secure mechanisms
for data transport, application security, data security,
and access management.
Together, this ensures that customers' data and IP remain
safe.
Now for a quick peek under the hood.
Looking at this from the bottom, GDCE
is supportable infrastructure that
can be deployed at scales that range
from a small number of machines to multiple racks in varieties
of locations.
These locations span from on-premise, telco-hosted data
centers, and Google's own hosted metro Edge locations.
And it supports hybrid network topologies
and secure connectivity with core GCP regions.
Second, GDCE is built using prescriptive
off the shelf hardware, and supports a variety
of deployment profiles.
I'll spend a few moments describing this in more detail
later.
Third, GDCE provides the modern application development
platform powered by Anthos, and supports,
in particular, high performance, ultra low latency containerized
and virtualized applications.
These include network functions, things
that require extremely low latency and local data
processing.
Anthos provides the cloud-native platform
that supports a wide variety of Edge services,
including Google's first party applications
and a broad ecosystem of ISV partners.
The infrastructure running at the Edge
is managed by a centralized control
plane that provides familiar APIs for cluster management,
infrastructure management, in addition
to Anthos's best in class multi-cloud capabilities
for app development, CI/CD, and configuration management.
Finally, a centralized management plane
provides service assurance, health monitoring,
lifecycle management, observability,
and administration of the underlying infrastructure
natively using Google Cloud Console.
Moving on, let's take a closer look at the hardware platform.
As I mentioned, GDCE consists of prescriptive off the shelf
hardware and uses Intel x86 processors,
and includes support for GPU and network accelerators.
We support a mix of machine configurations
to support the needs of specific application types.
This provides the agility to iterate on the hardware
configurations quickly to suit the fast evolving needs
of our customers.
The infrastructure is fully lifecycle
managed by Google from day zero turn up to day one service
integration and day two operations,
including software, OS, and hardware lifecycle management.
Second, GDCE host infrastructure runs container-optimized OS
with enhancements for real time kernel
extensions on bare metal.
This provides a substrate for ultra low latency
and high performance network intensive workloads,
such as 5G network functions.
It's maintained and fully managed by Google,
and is security hardened to provide a minimal attack
surface for compromise.
Finally, a redundant ToR pair is integrated with the platform
and managed through the same Cloud APIs
to manage cluster network configuration and host network
configuration, and provides interconnectivity
to customer LAN and WAN networks.
GDCE also provides secure and managed connectivity
to customer VPC instances running in core GCP regions.
With this initial launch, GDCE will
support a variety of CPU and GPU configurations
in both rackless and integrated rack configurations.
We'll continuously update hardware SKU configurations
based on our customers' needs.
Next, let's take a closer look at deployment and operations
of a GDCE rack.
GDCE provides fully automated ordering installation
and billing workflows.
Customers determine where they want to deploy GDCE instances,
and order directly from a portal in Google Cloud Console,
as part of which, they fill a brief questionnaire
about the facility's configuration for space, power,
and network connectivity, and select the desired SKU
configuration.
Once submitted, Google automatically
orders, pre-configures, and ships the
GDCE instances with secure bootstrap credentials
for that customer.
Once on site, Google's licensed partners
assist in the physical installation
of the infrastructure, power up, and integrate
in network connectivity.
And when the GDCE instance comes online,
it automatically registers with our management systems
in the back end, and images and configures the ToRs and host
machines automatically.
Once this is complete, Google administers automated workflows
for ongoing maintenance, including firmware, OS,
and software updates, in addition to physical repairs
and hardware replacement.
At this point, the GDCE system is ready for customers
to configure their Anthos clusters using familiar G Cloud
APIs, and to start deploying their applications using
the powerful application and service management capabilities
provided by Anthos.
More on this coming up next.
Next, I'll describe the application platform
that powers GDCE.
GDCE is powered by Anthos, which provides the same modern app
development platform with open APIs
that provides customers with a consistent experience
and runtime across multiple clouds.
This allows customers the freedom
to port their application to the environment
that best suits their needs without being locked
into a specific cloud provider.
GDCE supports Kubernetes container runtime,
and provides VM support using KubeVirt
for virtualized applications.
In order to support advanced high performance applications,
such as 5G network functions and low latency edge applications,
GDCE also provides bare-metal nodes,
and is optimized with several advanced networking
capabilities for high performance network processing,
including SR-IOV, [? multi-ng, ?] and DPDK.
Anthos is at the heart of GDCE, where Anthos clusters can
be deployed in fully managed GDCE instances
on-prem in a Google location or in a telco location,
in addition to Google central Cloud regions,
and AWS and Azure.
Every cluster joined to the control plane
gets configured in a common way.
For instance, security policies limiting file system access
can apply uniformly across all of your clusters
regardless of where they are.
Customers can define configurations
as declarative resources and apply them
to any or all of the clusters regardless of location.
Anthos enables customers to solve modern microservices
challenges with a mesh for service telemetry,
and offloads network infrastructure libraries,
like service discovery, instead of requiring them to sit
integrated with your codebase.
Around all of this, you have linkages
to a common Cloud Management layer for things
like logging and monitoring.
To summarize GDCE's flexible and managed Cloud Infrastructure,
coupled with Anthos's best in class application modernization
platform, provides a unique and differentiated Distributed
Cloud Platform.
Let's talk about why.
First, the hardware platform management and operations.
GDCE allows for highly flexible deployment configurations
that are fully managed by Google for day zero, day one, and day
two operations.
This allows customers to focus on developing solutions rather
than managing infrastructure.
Second is the application platform.
The capabilities of Anthos as a modern cloud-native application
platform provides customers with a consistency
and open experience to run across multiple clouds
without worry of locking.
Next, security.
Application and platform security
is foundational for the GDCE platform
with advanced controls for access and identity management,
and robust mechanisms for providing transport, data,
and application security.
Next are the integrated services.
The basic promise of GDCE is to enable customers
to focus on developing Distributed Cloud solutions
that matter to their businesses without having
to worry about infrastructure, application and service
management, or operations.
GDCE provides a broad suite of integrated ISV solutions
tailored to meet specific industry vertical needs,
in addition to Google's own first party services.
Finally, the flexibility and the deployment
models that GDC supports, it's truly distributed.
With GDCE customers can build their applications once
and expect a consistent experience
across a highly distributed cloud that
extends from on-premise infrastructure
to operator Edge locations and Google's global Edge locations,
in addition to the broad centralized regions that we
already support with GCP.
BRIAN KRACIK: Hassan, thank you so
much for all of that insight and the knowledge
that you've bestowed upon us.
I really appreciate what we're doing with Google Distributed
Cloud Edge, and how we're helping our CSP customers
not only explore new revenue streams,
but also change how their core and RAN get deployed
in a cloud-native manner.
Thank you.