Google Cloud Next ‘21 Recap

While Google Cloud Next ‘21 has come and gone, there is so much to still talk about. Over the course of three days and multiple keynotes, deep dives, and announcements, we’d like to share with you some of the highlights of the event! 

Here is just a small recap of the exciting announcements and developments featured at Google Cloud Next 2021. 

At the event, Google Distributed Cloud was announced, which is a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions built on Anthos. 

With businesses seeking accelerated cloud adoption for various benefits, some of their workloads cannot move to the public cloud entirely or right away, due to multiple factors. These factors range from compliance and data sovereignty needs, low latency or local data-processing requirements, or because they need to run close to other services.

That’s where Google Distributed Cloud comes in, which extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure into customers’ data centers and out to the edge of the network.

Google Distributed Cloud can be run across multiple locations depending on the needs of the organization. This includes Google’s network edge, the operator edge, customer edge, or customer data centers. 

Speaking of Anthos, at Google Cloud Next ‘21, it was revealed that Anthos for Virtual Machines (VM) is now in preview. This allows organizations to standardize on Kubernetes while running some workloads that cannot be easily containerized in VMs. 

This is especially beneficial for developers seeking a unified development platform where developers can build, modify, and deploy applications residing in both containers and VMs in a common, shared environment. 

According to Google’s blog post: “Anthos for VMs will help platform developers standardize on an operation model, process and tooling; enable incremental modernization efforts; and support traditional workloads like Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or stateful monolithic workloads.”

But that wasn’t all that was featured about Anthos at Google Cloud Next ‘21! Additionally, Google Cloud revealed the new Anthos Multi-Cloud API, which allows users to manage workloads already running in other clouds. This API allows for the provision and manage GKE clusters running on AWS and Azure infrastructure through a centralized Google-Cloud-backed control plane. Be on the lookout for this update in Q4 of 2021!

Developers rejoice! Google also announced the Cloud Build Hybrid, which lets developers build, test, and deploy across clouds and on-prem systems. Based on an open-source Kubernetes-native Tekton CI/CD framework, Cloud Build Hybrid allows for consistency across environments. All with the added Google-managed control plane benefits to manage all pipelines across environments.

For us data analytics junkies, this announcement was huge. Showcased in public preview at Google Cloud Next ‘21 was the Vertex AI Workbench. Now, data scientists can utilize a single environment in their machine learning (ML) work. From experimentation, to deployment, to managing and monitoring models. It features a Jupyter-based, fully-managed, scalable, enterprise-ready compute infrastructure with security controls and user management capabilities.

Data scientists aren’t the only ones benefitting from the Vertex AI Workbench. For example. data analysts, data scientists, and all data and AI practitioners can now analyze all their data from BigQuery, Dataproc, Spark, Looker, and Vertex AI in one interface.

That’s not all for data analytics! General availability for BigQuery Omni, a multi-cloud analytics service, was also announced. This solution assists data and analytics teams to break down barriers by using BigQuery to securely and cost-effectively analyze data across clouds. 

BigQuery Omni will be available to all customers later this month on Amazon Web Services and for select customers on Microsoft Azure. The solution enables secure connections to S3 data in AWS or Azure Blob Storage data in Azure.

We’ve only touched a tiny fraction of what the event showcased, with other focus areas highlighted such as:

• Security
• Specializations
• Google Workspace
• Products
• Updates and New Features

For a full list of the latest announcements featured at Google Cloud Next ‘21, be sure to check out their blog post!

Pandera is proud to be a Google Cloud Premier Partner, where we have been awarded several specializations along the way to further solidify ourselves as your go-to Google Cloud partner. We look forward to the continued growth of Google Cloud and the expansive possibilities that our partnership entails for businesses across various industries.