Hello cloud gurus. Google has just put on their primary yearly conference,
Google Cloud next,
and it included by their count 123 announcements.
Not only that,
the total runtime of their all sessions YouTube playlist is two days,
three hours, 49 minutes, and 48 seconds. Even at 3x speed.
That's just too much to watch them all.
So this episode will be my highlights from and guide to the Google Cloud next
22 event. We've got a lot to cover, so let's jump in.
And feel free to open up Google's massive next 22 announcements, blog, post,
and follow along. As I jump around,
it should be the first link in the video description.
Well, alright, right off the bat,
let's cover Google's announcements one through five,
which are the new regions coming to Austria, Greece, Norway,
South Africa and Sweden.
[speaks Swedish] This brings the total to 48 regions live or announced.
Jumping down to number 112 for a minute,
Google and Coinbase will now begin working together. Now,
it doesn't really affect us much that Coinbase will be moving its infrastructure
to gcp, but I think it's more interesting that Google will begin to accept
cryptocurrencies as payment for Google services. I will caveat though,
because the announcement says that this will be for certain Google Cloud
customers and I would also guess that service prices will be denominated in
dollars and converted to crypto at the time of payment. Anyway, in the keynote,
Google and Coinbase talked about how this will support innovation in the Web
three ecosystem.
So I'm interested to see what comes of it all. Announcement number 70 on their
list is that Looker will be the new unified name for Google's business
intelligence platform. Data Studio is therefore being renamed to Looker Studio.
Jumping down a couple, Looker Studio Pro is announcement number 72,
and this offers new features for team collaboration and enterprise management.
Plus it includes service level agreements in the database's space Cloud Big
table now offers change streams to enable you to replicate its data to things
like Big Query. That was number 77.
And number 80 is that Spanner is getting a smooth integration with Vertex AI,
so you can write simple SQL statements that use machine learning models.
All the way back up to announcements six, seven, and eight.
These are all about the latest processing hardware available on Google Cloud,
including the new C3 compute engine,
virtual machine family powered by fourth generation Intel Xeon processors.
Also Cloud TPU V4 Pods now generally available for training large scale
machine learning models with better carbon efficiency and the A2 Ultra
GPU also now GA,
which are powered by Invidia A100 tenser core GPUs with
80 gigabytes of memory. Moving down the list to networking,
these announcements span all the way from numbers 11 to 32.
My first highlight here is number 15 because it ties back into the compute
announcements. In particular,
the new C3 virtual machine family features 200 gigabit per second low latency
networking that can connect to Google's recently announced hyper disk block
storage product. My next highlights are around Cloud armor.
Not only can the machine learning based adaptive protection automatically
deploys proposed rules,
something I noted in August that led to blocking the biggest layer seven DDoS
attack ever. But my very favorite Cloud Armor announcement is number 26 -
preconfigured WAF rules are now generally available for the OWASP top 10
web app vulnerability risks.
And if you don't immediately know what I mean when I mention OWASP,
well then you are one of today's Lucky 10,000 because it's worth a few minutes
of your time to Google the open Web application security project and their top
10 list of web application vulnerabilities. Next,
let's look at some announcements around developer productivity and security.
Announcement 38 is that Cloud Deploy can now directly target cloud run,
and 39 is that new cloud run integrations can make it easier to coordinate with
other parts of GCP such as configuring and domain on a load balancer.
At number 43,
Google has announced a new software delivery shield product to secure our
software supply chains.
This incorporates Google's assured open source software service that I reported
as one of the gems in our May episode.
And if you don't remember why this is really important,
I humbly suggest that you should rewatch that.
We'll drop a link directly to that segment in the description below.
The next announcement is related because Google's new fully managed development
environments cloud workstations are a part of software delivery shield and also
tied into this software supply chain stuff.
My last highlight in this section is number 50, That cloud build now officially
supports SLSA level three builds.
If this stuff interests you and you wanna understand it better,
then I highly recommend that you check out Kelsey Hightower's recent talk on the
matter.
I was fortunate enough to see it live at the StrangeLoop 2022 conference,
but the recording has just recently been posted to YouTube,
so we'll add links to this as well. One person commented on that video,
It is both educational and entertaining. Okay,
in the data analytics section of announcements,
I wanna highlight Big Query announcement number 64 is a big deal because Big
Query will now let you analyze unstructured data too.
Google points out that as much as 90% of all data is considered unstructured,
so this could open up the power of Big Query to handle many more scenarios than
before.
And announcement number 66 is also pretty cool because this is about how Big
Query is getting a new integrated experience for Apache Spark. Next,
let's take a look at AI and ml.
Google is celebrated for their artificial intelligence and machine learning
innovations,
so we should expect them to have some great new announcements here too, right?
And indeed they do. Number 59 is Translation Hub,
a fully managed AI agent that can translate documents into 135 languages at the
click of a button,
all while preserving the layout and styling of the documents it's given.
And another thing, number 62 is the new Vertex AI vision service,
a vision tuned offering of Vertex AI to make it quick to build and set up from
scratch an app and supporting tooling as Google puts it,
the one stop shop to build, deploy, and manage a computer vision application.
My last two highlights fall into the management and migration tools category,
but that doesn't mean they're on important.
Number 55 is not gonna affect most people or organizations,
but if you are still dealing at all with mainframes,
then this one's for you. Dual run is a new offering to let you run mainframe
workloads simultaneously on both existing mainframes and on Google Cloud.
This means that you can do real time testing to help you finally cut over and
retire your old digital beasts of burden,
maybe send them to a nice server retirement farm.
Last but not least though is announcement number 57.
Google's carbon footprint tool is now generally available.
As Google writes,
this provides granular emissions data for cloud workloads and transparency into
the energy scores of Google Cloud regions.
And since our great many people in organizations care a lot about trying not to
mess up this one world, we've got,
this is an important part of doing the next right thing. Well, alright,
after all those announcements,
you might be feeling like it's hard to understand how it all applies to you.
Well, one of the best ways to overcome this feeling is to get cloud happy. Okay,
that might sound weird,
but what I mean is that we're currently offering free training for you to
achieve Google's Cloud Digital Leader certification. Now,
maybe you'd prefer to target Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or dive
deeper into Kubernetes or Terraform instead, and that would be fine.
Each one of these five options could be very valuable to you.
But Google's Cloud Digital leader certification in particular really equips you
to understand the cloud ecosystem and how to take advantage of it.
It truly does help you to be a cloud leader regardless of whether you manage
people or contribute individually.
As Google Cloud CEO Thomas Curian said in his Next '22 keynote address,
the success of any organization hinges on unlocking the talent and productivity
of its people. And that's what we at Pluralsight want to do for you.
And I know I did already say this,
but it bears repeating what we're offering right now for Cloud Happy is
absolutely free, not even any credit card required,
and you get access to our courses and other support. So check it out now. Well,
that's a wrap for both Cloud Next 22 and our October episode of GCP this month.
I hope you've found this valuable and I hope you'll let me know in the comments
what your favorite announcement was and what extra one maybe you think I should
have added to this episode. If I could only add just one more announcement.
And until next time, stay safe, take care of those around you,
and keep being awesome Cloud gurus.