
{"id":4417,"date":"2023-09-14T14:59:18","date_gmt":"2023-09-14T14:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rax-stg-wp-aws.com\/blogs\/google-cloud-next-23-highlights-ai-and-beyond\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T19:26:43","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T19:26:43","slug":"google-cloud-next-23-highlights-ai-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"blogs","link":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/de\/blogs\/google-cloud-next-23-highlights-ai-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Cloud Next \u201923 Highlights\u2014 AI and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Google Cloud Next is one of the most anticipated cloud computing events every year \u2014 and this year&#8217;s event did not disappoint. Not surprisingly, the focus was on AI, machine learning, and generative AI. Google announced several new features and capabilities that will help businesses of all sizes take advantage of these cutting-edge technologies.<\/p>\n<p>In this post, we cover the highlights of this year\u2019s event. But first, before sharing a human\u2019s view of the event, in keeping with this year\u2019s AI theme, we thought we would run a little generative AI experiment just for fun. We asked three generative AI platforms to create a list of the event\u2019s highlights for this blog post. Let\u2019s see what they had to say \u2014 following by a human\u2019s point of view.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>ChatGPT 3.5 test \u2014 lacked access to content <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>ChatGPT 3.5 did not deliver a lot of content. This is because the application does not have content dated prior to September 2021. Here\u2019s its output:<\/p>\n<p><drupal-entity data-embed-button=\"media_entity_embed\" data-entity-embed-display=\"view_mode:media.full\" data-entity-type=\"media\" data-entity-uuid=\"8a8bfcf3-5946-4a79-974d-764a896c90d0\" data-langcode=\"en\"><\/drupal-entity><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Microsoft Bing Chat test \u2014<\/strong> <strong>minimalist content generator<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Microsoft Bing Chat performed better than ChatGPT 3.5 by providing a bit of relevant information. Here\u2019s its output:<\/p>\n<p><drupal-entity data-embed-button=\"media_entity_embed\" data-entity-embed-display=\"view_mode:media.full\" data-entity-type=\"media\" data-entity-uuid=\"929394a6-76be-41a0-bd53-97a2d361171c\" data-langcode=\"en\"><\/drupal-entity><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Google\u2019s Bard test \u2014 the clear generative AI winner<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Google\u2019s Bard performed the best in this simple generative AI experiment. Here\u2019s its output:<\/p>\n<p><drupal-entity data-embed-button=\"media_entity_embed\" data-entity-embed-display=\"view_mode:media.full\" data-entity-type=\"media\" data-entity-uuid=\"c7e6e86b-6123-4bf4-b92c-1b113fc8ead5\" data-langcode=\"en\"><\/drupal-entity><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Now for the human-generated event highlights<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Maybe the prompts just weren\u2019t right, but we think we humans can do a bit better in sharing our favorite highlights from the event with you. Here goes.<\/p>\n<p>Our first two picks focus on AI\/ML \u2014 Vertex AI and Duet AI. These technologies are becoming increasingly important for businesses of all sizes and Google is ramping up the features to help organizations take advantage of them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Vertex AI: <\/strong>This is Google\u2019s unified platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models.<\/p>\n<p>These are the Vertex AI features we\u2019re most excited about:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Enterprise search on Generative AI App Builder and Conversational AI on Generative AI App Builder are now renamed Vertex AI Search and Conversation. They are <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/ai-machine-learning\/vertex-ai-search-and-conversation-is-now-generally-available\">generally available<\/a><strong> <\/strong>and can be used to build personalized and compelling generative applications with Vertex AI.<\/li>\n<li>Google is adding Meta\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/ai.meta.com\/llama\/\">Llama 2<\/a> and TII\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/falconllm.tii.ae\/\">Falcon<\/a> to Vertex AI, making it the <strong>first <\/strong>cloud provider to support first-party, open source and third-party models. APIs of these models will be accessible through the Model Garden on Vertex AI.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Powered by Google DeepMind\u2019s SynthID, Google announced <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deepmind.com\/blog\/identifying-ai-generated-images-with-synthid\">Digital Watermarking<\/a> on Vertex AI, a feature that embeds the watermark directly into the image of pixels, making it invisible to the human eye and difficult to tamper with.<\/li>\n<li>Not a direct feature, but Google Cloud has forged an interesting partnership with DocuSign to pilot a project to see how Vertex AI could be used to help generate <a href=\"https:\/\/www.docusign.com\/blog\/piloting-future-smart-agreements-google-cloud-vertex-ai\">smart contract assistants<\/a>.<br \/>\n\t&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Duet AI: <\/strong>This AI collaborator application, launched during Google I\/O, is now available in preview. It\u2019s interesting and makes an appearance in several different places, starting with Google Workspaces for content generation, security analysis in Security Command Centre (SCC) and Mandiant, and integration into Big Query for a simplified query language.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some of notable mentions of Duet AI:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Duet AI is now part of Google Workspace and has a <a href=\"https:\/\/workspace.google.com\/blog\/product-announcements\/duet-ai-in-workspace-now-available\">zero-cost trial<\/a>. Integrated into Google Meet, it brings some interesting functions, like meeting summaries and recaps. People who don\u2019t like attending too many meetings might rejoice as it allows a user to attend a meeting via a virtual bot that will take notes for them.<\/li>\n<li>Duet AI will help across the entire software development lifecycle, with the aim of minimizing context switching to help developers be more productive. In addition to code completion and code generation, it can assist with code refactoring and building APIs using simple natural language prompts. This will be a competitor to Microsoft\u00ae CoPilot<\/li>\n<li>Application and infrastructure operations, which often pour through documentation looking for configuration instructions, can chat with <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/application-modernization\/introducing-duet-ai-for-google-cloud\">Duet AI in natural language<\/a> across a number of services directly in the Google Cloud Console to retrieve how-to information about infrastructure configuration, deployment best practices, and expert recommendations on cost and performance optimization.<\/li>\n<li>Duet AI also makes an appearance in BigQuery. This is great for users who struggle with getting their SQL queries. It will provide <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/bigquery\/docs\/write-sql-duet-ai\">contextual assistance<\/a> for writing SQL queries, as well as Python code. It can generate full functions and code blocks, auto-suggest code completions and explain SQL statements in natural language. Also, it can generate recommendations based on schema and metadata. This sounds very cool and powerful!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Beyond AI<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Along with updates to AI applications, Google also presented many more general announcements, including its Compute Engine, data and databases, and networking and security. Here are some that got our attention.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Compute Engine:<\/strong> We found some interesting updates in this area, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>General availability of A3 virtual machines from September 2023. A3 VMs will be powered by <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/compute\/introducing-a3-supercomputers-with-nvidia-h100-gpus\">Nvidia H100 GPUs<\/a><u>,<\/u> and are purpose-built to train and serve demanding large-language models.<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/compute\/whats-new-in-googles-workload-optimized-computing\">general-purpose Compute Engine<\/a> family got a good <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/compute\/whats-new-in-googles-workload-optimized-computing\">refresh<\/a>. It includes a third-generation Compute Engine instance, a next-generation Hyperdisk block storage, larger VMware Engine nodes and much more.<\/li>\n<li>A new GCE uptime SLA of 99.95% for memory-optimized VMs makes it the highest amongst hyperscalers.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/compute\/docs\/instances\/future-reservations-overview\">Future reservations<\/a>, now in preview, is a new Compute Engine feature that allows the user to reserve compute capacity for up to one year in the future.<\/li>\n<li>GKE has a new <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/containers-kubernetes\/whats-new-with-gke-at-google-cloud-next\">enterprise version<\/a> and a cool new multi-cluster feature called fleets that lets platform engineers easily group similar workloads into dedicated clusters, apply custom configurations per fleet, and even delegate cluster management to other teams.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Data and databases:<\/strong> You cannot leverage the power of AI and machine learning (AI\/ML) without data. There weren&#8217;t a lot of major new releases in this area, but, in our opinion, there were two big ones and one small one that are important.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/alloydb\/omni\">AlloyDB Omni<\/a> moves to public preview. By the way, you can read about a talk we did at Next \u201923 on <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/rax-incubate\/gcp-mc-demo\/tree\/main\">taking AlloyDB and Anthos on a multicloud ride<\/a> using Omni.<\/li>\n<li>The fully managed <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/databases\/memorystore-for-redis-cluster-launched\">Memorystore for Redis Cluster<\/a> is available in preview. This is an open-source compatible service that provides up to 60 times more throughput than Memorystore for Redis, with microsecond latencies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>If you\u2019re invested in Cloud Bigtable and need a cross-region backup, you can <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/bigtable\/docs\/backups#working-backups\">now<\/a> create a copy and store it in any project or region in which you have a Bigtable instance, and retain your backups for up to 90 days.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Networking and security:<\/strong> Security engineers might be a bit miffed that security is always mentioned last. We apologize but know we\u2019re all used to it by now. Here are the most significant event mentions about security in our opinion:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Powered by Palo Alto, and in preview, the <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/firewall\">Cloud Firewall Plus<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/firewall\">tier<\/a> provides GCP-native firewalls with intrusion prevention capabilities. This is based on the current <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/intrusion-detection-system\">Cloud IDS<\/a> product, which only provides intrusion detection.<\/li>\n<li>The TL;DR on Duet AI is that it has invaded the security landscape, including these features, which are all in preview:\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/identity-security\/rsa-Introducing-ai-powered-insights-threat-intelligence\">Mandiant Threat Intelligence<\/a>: It helps surface the most prevalent tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors against organizations by summarizing frontline threat intelligence.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/identity-security\/rsa-introducing-ai-powered-investigation-chronicle-security-operations\">Chronicle Security Operations<\/a>: It aids in threat detection, investigation and response for cyber defenders by simplifying search, complex data analysis and threat detection engineering.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/identity-security\/rsa-introducing-ai-powered-risk-summaries-security-command-center\">Security Command Center<\/a>: It offers near-instant analysis of security findings and possible attack paths.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Agentless vulnerability scanning, powered by Tenable, has been integrated into <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/blog\/products\/identity-security\/rsa-introducing-ai-powered-risk-summaries-security-command-center\">Security Command Center<\/a> to detect operating system, software and network vulnerabilities on Compute Engine VMs.<\/li>\n<li>A win for private access, the internal Application Load Balancer now supports <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/load-balancing\/docs\/l7-internal#three-tier_web_services_with_global_access\">global access<\/a>, which allows private clients from any Google Cloud region to access internal load balancers residing in any other Google Cloud region.<\/li>\n<li>Cloud Application Load Balancer now supports <a href=\"https:\/\/cloud.google.com\/load-balancing\/docs\/https#cross-project\">cross-project service referencing<\/a>. If you\u2019ve managed multi-project deployments where you are trying to use the Cloud Application Load Balancer from one Google Cloud project with a Cloud Function in another, you will relate to this new feature.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That wraps up our review of Google Cloud Next \u201923. We hope you appreciated the human-generated version in our rapidly expanding AI world. In the future, the prompt-based AI tools will ultimately evolve into faster, simpler solutions, enabling modern organizations to solve a wide range of business problems and eliminating bottlenecks.<\/p>\n<p>While Google Cloud has invested in making these technologies available to customers, generative AI needs both a strategic and tactical approach to the data platform, data lifecycle, ethics, security and more. Rackspace Technology\u00ae can assess your company\u2019s workloads and recommend the best generative AI and Google Cloud solutions tailored to your specific needs.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ll see where the world of AI takes us next year at Google Cloud Next \u201924 on April 9 to 11 in Las Vegas, NV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did you miss this year\u2019s Google Cloud Next \u2014 or just want a quick recap? Our attendees on the ground have all the highlights for you \u2013 from AI to security. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6401,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","nid":"26039","content_type":"blog","created_by":"11788","authored_on":"2023-09-14T14:59:17+00:00","field_article_industries":"","tag_category":"Cloud Insights","field_blog_author_text":"by Sriram Rajan, Senior Principal Architect, and Zlatan Brkic, Product Manager IV, Rackspace Technology","seo_description":"Rackspace Technology Google Cloud Next \u201923 attendees share highlights of this year\u2019s event. 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