NEXT 2018 — Google crossing the cloud chasm?
By: Andrew Pym
Tags: Big Data, Cloud Computing, Kubernetes, Google, Google Cloud Platform

Last week I had a great time at NEXT in San Francisco where Google audaciously, in front of 25,000 people outlined where it is heading with Google Cloud. Below is my synthesis on the vast amount of material that was conveyed.

Only 5–10% of payloads that will end up on public cloud, have been migrated

It was highlighted a couple of times that only a fraction of possible payloads are on public cloud. My inner history nerd took note, having long been a fan of Geoffrey Moore’s seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm” and it’s technology adoption curve. It is universally acknowledged that in regards to public cloud, Amazon won the early phases. Google and others are working hard to compete, but the stat outlines the main prize is still up for grabs.

What I witnessed at NEXT, was Dianne Greene and her team’s play on how they are working to cross the chasm, to win the early majority phase. Something Dianne and many of her team achieved at VMWare and virtualisation.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Google’s play on AI was threaded through the whole week. The message has evolved to be a little more tempered and nuanced. Companies who harness AI will be enhancing experiences rather than taking over the world with Daleks or drones. Conversational AI in the call centre looks imminent. Dialogflow had a phone gateway and sentiment features added. For companies willing to invest, the opportunity to have a cost effective, but yet engaging “AI enabled” triage process on the phone, or in online chat for better customer engagement outcomes can start to be achieved.

I have led a number of Cloud Vision API projects in the past 6 months. AutoML Vision will add a bump to accuracy over the generic vision models without the need for a team of data engineers and data scientists to manage a neural net pipeline. AutoML will be comparatively easy to use for those who understand stats and and can use an API.

Deploying the new mobile Edge TPU processors with TensorFlow Lite gives a path to embedding ML algorithms at remote sides with hardware acceleration to provide real time feedback. Useful for miners, manufacturing plants and the like. I expect the initial use cases to be initially deployed on stock Android devices running TensorFlow Lite without the hardware acceleration.

I participated in a Business Transformation workshop where we worked up and pitched ideas on how to expand the impact of Wildbook, which is crowd sourcing video and camera phone images to help track individual animals via their markings. This collectively enables the mapping of endangered species and their human interaction. Their solution uses a combination of GCP Cloud ML APIs and custom Tensorflow models. All open sourced and available for budding data scientists to look at.

From Data to Insights

Google’s advantage in data tooling is being pressed home. BigQuery just keeps getting better and better with announcement at NEXT in regards to Machine Learning and Geolocation. Tino Tereshko the BigQuery Product Manager, graciously provided some time with Graham Polley and myself on Friday after the conference, my takeaway — the BQ roadmap has a mix of continuous improvement and cool shiny new things. It is only going to get more powerful, more capable, while still being easy to use.

BigQuery as a Marketing Data platform also emerged through a number of marketing related sessions — a space, we at Servian are excited to be working in. GCP and BigQuery gives Marketing and Customer Experience the power to ingest and process various data sources to personalise customer journeys while being responsive to marketers needs. There were a number of use cases where leading brands in the USA were using GCP to give visibility of attribution, and provide personalisation insights to improve outcomes. At Servian, we see this becoming more common as GPDR, privacy concerns and CFOs nudge marketers towards adopting techniques aligned to enterprise data approaches. It will require these techniques to be deployed on well architected and managed cloud solutions to provide the flexibility marketers need to be effective.

The boring data privacy stuff is also being addressed. The Data Loss Prevention API can scan, redact and tokenize any sensitive data on static or streaming data.

Developing & running applications

Kelsey Hightower in his “container” on stage

For developers, Google showed off its natural engineering flair. Kelsey Hightower rocked the stage in the Keynote on Day 3. Cloud Build, KNative serverless containers, all add capabilities to the platform. They help the speed and ease of developing code and then testing, deploying plus running it. Google are also making their platform capabilities easier to leverage by development teams through open source projects such as Spring Cloud and Go-cloud.

GKE On Prem running in VSphere

All the above however does not provide a runtime bridge to on prem data centres. GKE On Prem however does. Many companies use cloud for dev/test and run production in their on prem data centres. Google have just provided an end to end way to support this hybrid pattern through its combo of Kubernetes, Istio and GKE on Prem under its unified Cloud Services Platform .

Google’s acquisition of Velostrata was also detailed. Velostrata provides tooling support for Google Cloud customers that enables VMWare or AWS migrations to GCP with minimum down time, and rollback if needed. Google bought a migration bridge to compliment the runtime bridge they built.

Security

Many enterprise security stakeholders express concerns about public cloud vendors and their PaaS style services which are typically exposed on internet facing endpoints. They want them to be secured within a VPC. Google announced their answer to this customer need with VPC Service Controls entering Beta.

Istio is addressing a need to secure service interactions but with a policy managed approach. There are a number of financial services organisations who have built this kind of service mesh or dynamic secure networking capability themselves. Istio provides an open source approach to meeting this need. Google are once again making this easy to operate with Istio part of its Cloud Services Platform, PaaS style service. I think many people are missing that Istio can be applied beyond micro-services, with the Istio Mesh Expansion. Once it matures a little more, it will be able to extend the service mesh beyond Kubernetes to secure traditional 2/3 tier applications. Thus bringing observability and policy driven security on service interactions. All of this able to be undertaken, without impacting application code — providing secure operational agility beyond what is typically achieved in many on-prem environments.

Google’s BeyondCorp model which outlines defence in depth for employee enterprise applications had a range of security capabilities outlined at NEXT including an Identity aware proxy for internal applications, geo-aware Cloud Armor DDOS protection and the Titan security key for 2 Factor Authentication.

In Summary

Diane Greene, her ex-VMWare crew plus the rest of the Googlers lifted the curtain on their capability roadmap at NEXT. With so much to take in, it is only when I have stepped back, that I appreciated the strategic vision, direction and focus. What I believe is clear, is that, as the announcements from NEXT move to be generally available over the next 12 months. Google Cloud will have a clear, coherent end to end public cloud capability.

The remaining question then will be, whether or not Google and their partners get the marketing right to cross the chasm by winning the hearts and minds of customers to buy into Google Cloud.

The has beens — beer miler, e-gamer and sprinter

From a personal viewpoint, I had a really enjoyable panel discussion on stage with Jon Fong, Jason Martin and Dhruv Parpia on running a successful cloud practice.

In regards to San Fran, it was 3 years between visits — Americans seems to be using the term ‘mobile’ now in contrast to ‘cell’, when describing their phones — not sure when that happened. Skateboarding is back. The contrast between the wealth and poverty seemed to be starker. Looking up at the multiple gleaming Salesforce office towers provided a sobering backdrop against many of the poor on the streets.

https://www.servian.com/gcp/