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RETO MEIER: Hi, there.
And thanks for joining us.
I'm Reto Meier.
STEPHANIE WONG: And I'm Stephanie Wong.
Many of us are reaching for hybrid cloud nirvana, which
makes the workplace mobility between on-premise and cloud
computing ideal for our work.
To help us navigate through this,
we welcome Chen Goldberg, Engineering Director
for Google Cloud.
Nice to have you here.
CHEN GOLDBERG: Hi.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
RETO MEIER: Absolutely.
Now hybrid cloud is a common strategy
that businesses look to modernize,
while still supporting their current applications.
How does Google Cloud approach this particular charge?
CHEN GOLDBERG: So first of all, it's
important to understand why customers want to modernize
and why they are looking for that.
And the most important thing is for them, in order to compete,
they have to increase their developer agility
and help them to be more focused.
And they really want to take advantage
of the amazing capabilities that are available in the cloud
and using new cloud services.
But they have to make a decision and a choice because they
cannot modernize everything at once.
That's one of their concerns.
The second thing is that they also
have concerns from regulations that requires
them to stay on premises.
So from their perspective, it is a reality
that hybrid is here to stay and they
have to choose a hybrid strategy in order
to modernize and advance their business.
For us at Google Cloud, we understand
that we need to support our customers in their journey.
OK?
And our goal is to make sure that we
help them reduce the risk, instead
of increasing the risk when going through this journey.
And risk are coming in different levels.
For example, not fragmenting your talent
and allowing to create a consistent experience
everywhere, and also really leveraging the existing assets
you have today.
So not asking them to buy new hardware, for example,
but really blending in to their existing environment.
STEPHANIE WONG: And how does this truly differ
from other hybrid offerings?
CHEN GOLDBERG: Google puts the user at first, in the center.
And we understand that our customers
appreciate to have choice.
They want to be able to choose where they're
going to deploy their workloads, what kind of tools, resources
to use.
And our goal is to make that possible, while reducing risk.
We do it by building our platform based on open source
technologies, which are ensuring that their work is portable
and we are not locking them in.
And we're also now approaching multi-cloud strategically
and giving consistent experience wherever customers choose
to deploy their workloads.
RETO MEIER: Yeah.
That's amazing.
What components make up Anthos?
And how do those components work together
to provide a really integrated approach for our customers?
CHEN GOLDBERG: So Anthos is a premiere platform
managed by Google.
In the foundation, in the core of it,
we are using open source technologies
originated by Google, like Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative.
But this is not sufficient for our customer
to manage their trigenious environments they have.
On top of that, we are building a multi-cloud, multi-cluster
control plane that lets our customers connect
to all of their environments and manage them in a [INAUDIBLE]
through a single pane of glass.
We also give them tools to manage policies and control
in all of those environments.
But not everything is containerized.
And this is also about investing with what they have today.
So on top of that, we are creating a service management
platform, which allows them to connect all those services,
regardless of what compute there is.
And on top of everything we have an awesome marketplace
that allows us to provide, both first party
and third party applications available in all
of those environments.
STEPHANIE WONG: So you just mentioned
investing in what our customers are already using today.
How can Anthos be used to help them modernize in place?
CHEN GOLDBERG: So what we hear from our customers,
that when they come and they want to use new cloud services,
they have first to qualify and make sure that the cloud meets
their bar, right?
Let's say they want to use BigQuery or even GKE,
they need to go through the specific process, usually
manual process, to make sure they can
let their developers use it.
With GKE On-Prem they don't need to go through that process
because we bring this technology into their data center
and they know it meets the bar.
So that's actually the fastest way for them to innovate.
RETO MEIER: That's great.
What about conflict management with Anthos?
How can you write multi-cluster policies right out of the box?
CHEN GOLDBERG: So that's a great question.
I think that the number one concern that CEOs have
is how they manage risk and, specifically, how can
they make sure that they know who
access what resources and making sure
that they know what policies are applied everywhere.
And when you have more and more environments
you have to build more and more tools
and have more people manage that.
So Anthos Config Management allows
you to manage those policies from a centralized place.
And even if by accident or by a malicious user,
someone is trying to break that policy,
automatically we will apply that policy
and bring that environment back to be compliant.
RETO MEIER: Great.
STEPHANIE WONG: So more environments, more tools.
Can you elaborate on what we're doing
to users the visibility they need,
so that they can see what's happening
across all these environments?
CHEN GOLDBERG: Yes.
So we are leveraging open APIs, which
allows us to actually integrate with every environment,
wherever the user chooses.
And we are creating tools, centralized tools,
in the control plane that gives you signals or monitoring
data from all of those environments
in a consistent way.
And we're also leveraging things like Knative.
We just announced Cloud Run as beta
to give a simple and effective user experience for developers,
again to deploy to all of those environments.
So when I think about it, it's not
about portability of workloads, but it's actually
about portability of skills.
Can my developers, can my service operators
use the same set of tools, regardless of which environment
they want to use?
And by leveraging open source technologies,
this is actually possible.
RETO MEIER: Yeah.
That's fantastic.
I'm curious, how are customers using Anthos today?
And what are some of the more interesting use cases
that you may have come across?
CHEN GOLDBERG: I'm smiling because, ever since we've
announced back that it was CSP eight months ago as alpha,
we've seen an overwhelming excitement with our customers.
Over 1,000 customers showed interest, just during Next,
to try out CSV Anthos.
And we see a different type of use cases.
So I would say for someone like HSBC,
they were excited to give their developers platform,
a modern platform, without having
to go through all the qualification
and making sure that the new environment meets the bar.
So they're doing both.
But they know that for some of their workloads
they will have to stay On-Prem.
And we see other customers, like Kohl's for example,
that are looking to innovate, both On-Prem
and in the cloud and create a consistent environment.
And maybe talking about a customer like KeyBank.
OK?
So they're really excited about the agility.
So really leveraging new tools and making sure they
can deploy quickly in other environments.
So different customers see different use cases
to begin with, but they're all very excited, by both agility
and reducing risk.
RETO MEIER: Thanks, Chen, for walking us
through the possibilities of Anthos.
CHEN GOLDBERG: Thank you for having me.
RETO MEIER: Of course.
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