Google Cloud Next 2018 kicks off today in San Francisco! As I review the amazing choice of workshops and breakouts available at Next, it becomes obvious where Google is investing in its Cloud Future. Here are five best bets based on what Google is presenting at its annual cloud conference:
- Velostrata for Large Scale Cloud Migrations – With Google’s May 2018 acquisition of Velostrata, an Israeli Cloud Migration leader, this comes as no surprise. Google is integrating Velostrata into the GCP family at a rapid pace. Large enterprises are looking for tools which can simplify and accelerate app migrations to the Cloud, so the GCP/Velostrata value statement is appealing. With Velostrata, Google Cloud customers obtain two important benefits: they’ll be able to adapt their workloads on-the-fly for cloud execution, and they can decouple their compute from storage without performance degradation. This means they can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud. On top of that, customers can control and automate where their data lives at all times—either on-premises or in the cloud—in as little as a few clicks.
- Kubrenetes and Istio for Microservices – Istio is an open source platform which supports a layer of infrastructure combined with service deployments commonly referred to as a service mesh. Istio will connect, monitor, and secure microservices, including services running on Kubernetes Engine. Google is recommending the Istio/Kubrenetes solution when moving large and complicated applications. Currently Istio requires manual deployment into GKE, a more automated and integrated experience is on the future roadmap. Google also intends to bring Istio capabilities to Cloud End Points and Apigee. This will provide common visibility and management for both APIs and microservices for organizations of any size.
- Kubrenetes for Containers – Even if your organization is not mature enough in your cloud journey to consider a full service mesh architecture, Google still recommends deploying containers as a cloud migration best practice. Containers are portable assets that let corporations take their monolithic code base and turn it into several lightweight modules that are more easily managed.Google’s own research shows that 90% of it’s customers will adopt a multi-cloud strategy. Standardizing with Kubrenetes containers will allow customers to rapidly move and share apps across GCP, AWS and Azure.
- Firebase for Mobile Apps – Firebase is Google’s mobile app development platform. Firebase and GCP share two products: Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage. Functions and Storage exist in Google Cloud, and are simply exposed for client-side developers via Firebase. Customers can access the same data from the server SDKs (Cloud) and the client SDKs (Firebase), so your frontend and backend teams can work in concert. This is a great alternative to using AppEngine for Mobile App Development because Firebase comes with OOTB APIs for more rapid integration into other systems and App Engine is more of a custom build.
- TensorFlow for AI/ML – Tensorflow is a computational framework for building machine learning models. TensorFlow provides a variety of different toolkits that allow you to construct models at your preferred level of abstraction. TensorFlow was originally developed by Google but in 2015 they made it available as an opensource software and it has been widely deployed within organizations, and instates of higher learning ever since. Google, and their partners, are starting to offer packaged AI/ML solutions using TensorFlow at the core. Most of the solutions will require further development to address specific client needs. That said, the further development and implementation will be much faster and easier than building from the ground up.
Perficient is a Velocity sponsor of Google Cloud Next 2018. Please stop by our booth #W2500 on the second floor of Moscone West to meet our team!
Sources:
https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-announces-intent-to-acquire-velostrata/
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/istio-modern-approach-to-developing-and.html
https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/gcp-integration
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/mobile/mobile-firebase-app-engine-flexible
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/running-distributed-tensorflow-on-compute-engine
