Our top-five takeaways from Google Cloud Next ‘22

Sriram Rajan, Senior Technical Architect, Rackspace Technology

Rackspace x Google Cloud Next with the letter 5

Google Cloud Next ‘22 concluded on October 13 in cities around the world. From the opening keynote in New York City to the “Top 10 Cloud Predictions” in the developer keynote from the Google Cloud headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, to all the breakout sessions that followed, the event was filled of exciting announcements.

Here are our top-five takeaways:

  1. New region

    Google announced plans to build new regions in six countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, South Africa and Sweden. South Africa will be the first African region for Google Cloud, while Doha (Qatar) & Dammam (Saudi Arabia) are the new Middle East regions outside of Tel Aviv. The expansion is particularly helpful to reach previously low-coverage locations.

  2. C3 instances and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors

    The launch of C3 instance family was touted as the first VM in the public cloud to run on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and the custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) that Google co-designed. The C3 machine instances feature a System on a Chip (SoC) architecture which opens the doors for future support of pure native bare-metal instances.

  3. Firewall updates

    Google Cloud Firewall will have two tiers: Cloud Firewall Essential and Cloud Firewall Standard. This is an interesting change on two fronts. It draws a line on the current features and puts it under Cloud Firewall Essential for no cost.

    For an additional cost, the new Cloud Firewall Standard offers expanded policy objects for firewall rules that can simplify configuration and micro-segmentation to protect your cloud infrastructure and workloads. The best feature is the auto-update capability of Google Cloud Threat Intelligence objects, one of which is known as malicious IPs, which can be used to provide robust and highly scalable protection. Such advanced features are an interesting addition to the security portfolio and make the VPC firewall in Google Cloud Platform™ one of the most advanced firewalls on the market.

  4. BigQuery and Bigtable updates

    A couple of big announcements in the data space made for exciting reading. Google announced support for unstructured data in BigQuery, expanding its ability to work with all types of data. Datastream for BigQuery helps replicate data from AlloyDB, PostgreSQL and MySQL directly into BigQuery.

    A preview of an integrated experience for Apache Spark — a popular open-source analytics tool for data processing — is also available. The move will enable data practitioners to create BigQuery-stored procedures using Spark that integrate with their existing SQL pipelines. If you take a high-level view of these releases, it’s clear to see that BigQuery is being unified as an operational hub for databases.

    Complementing the integrations above is the Bigtable preview of change streams, where you can track writes, updates and deletes to Bigtable databases and replicate them to downstream systems such as BigQuery. Change streams help support real-time analytics, event-based architectures and multicloud operational database deployments. This capability joins recently launched Spanner change streams to allow for interesting use of data pipelines to leverage the best data tool, both in Google Cloud Platform and open source for the right workload.

  5. Vertex AI Vision

    Vertex AI Vision service extends the capabilities of Vertex AI and makes it more accessible to data practitioners. Through this release, a new end-to-end application development environment allows users to easily build and deploy computer vision applications to understand and utilize the data. For example, streaming video in manufacturing plants to help ensure safety, streams from store shelves to improve inventory analysis, or following traffic lights to manage busy intersections. An exciting feature is a drag-and-drop interface and a library of pre-trained ML models for everyday tasks such as occupancy counting, product recognition and object detection. This allows the creation of complex workflows with an easy-to-use interface without needing advanced engineering skills.

How Rackspace Technology and Google Cloud Platform help accelerate modernization

Rackspace Technology® is a multicloud technology solutions leader focused on data, cloud native applications and security solutions in any cloud, and for businesses of all sizes, including government, healthcare, financial services and education organizations.

Google Cloud Platform™ empowers you to quickly build new applications and modernize existing ones to increase your agility and reap the benefits of the multicloud. Google Cloud offers a consistent platform and data analysis for your deployments no matter where they reside, along with a service-centric view of all your environments.

Together, Rackspace Technology and Google Cloud help organizations worldwide solve their most critical challenges with deep expertise and solutions for the next generation of cloud.

No matter where you are on your transformation journey, Rackspace Technology can help at any point of our engagement model: Advise, Transform, Manage, Optimize.

  • Advise. We’re here to help you assess your current needs, explore your options and build your transformation plan for cloud, data, application and security solutions.
  • Transform. We’ll help you build infrastructure-aware application and data workloads that are designed to be easy to evolve, operate and optimize on an ongoing basis.
  • Manage. We offer managed services for cloud native application development, applied AI, machine learning and MLOps, and multicloud engineering.
  • Optimize. We offer cloud platform optimization services aimed at optimizing costs, performance and capabilities of integrated cloud solutions.

Because you need a cloud solutions partner that can deliver outcomes every day, we’re fueled by our unwavering focus: Customer First. Cloud First.

 

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