Google Cloud Next ’24 Highlights

Over 30,000 attendees participated in this year’s Google Cloud Next ’24 in Las Vegas from April 9 to 11. The event showcased Google Cloud developments, offering attendees technical deep dives in workshops, bootcamps and demonstrations and announcements on the latest developments in Google Cloud.

Rackspace Technology was a signature sponsor and active participant in Google Cloud ’24. At our booth in the exhibition hall, we showcased our Google Cloud partnership and leading-edge generative AI services and solutions from the Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR™). It was a great opportunity to introduce our AI expertise to thousands of attendees, including our comprehensive AI solutions for data, security, applications and platforms.

At our booth, attendees participated in an interactive StickerVerse Generative AI-based activity. Participants received custom stickers featuring a live, multi-modal LLM demo using Imagen2, showcasing the potential of future generative AI applications.

It wasn’t all work at Google Next this year. We also had a relaxing time with our partner, Ternary, and attendees at our co-hosted happy hour at Rhythm & Riffs Lounge in Mandalay Bay.

Rackspace Technology experts share insights

Along with our active booth, representatives from Rackspace Technology also participated in a variety of speaking events, including:

• Google Cloud executive tracks: Leadership from Rackspace Technology offered exclusive interactive opportunities with senior leadership from Google Cloud and other partners throughout the week.
• Live sessions: We presented live talks, including my own discussion, Build Secure Architecture Designs on Google Cloud, where I discussed what cloud-native tools to use for a robust and secure cloud. We also participated in sessions with NetApp on using NetApp Cloud Volumes on Google Cloud.

Google Cloud Partner Summit achieves milestone

With over 2,500 partners and 400 sponsors in attendance, this year’s Google Cloud Partner Summit was the largest ever.

At the summit, Google Cloud made several important announcements, including:

• Complementary AI bootcamps, challenge labs and personalized training for Google Cloud Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio.
• The availability of Google Cloud Consulting’s Delivery Navigator to all qualified service partners, which offers step-by-step instructions during project kick-off, execution and delivery.

Another highlight of the event for Rackspace Technology was receiving two more honors from Google Cloud. This year we were honored to receive two additional specializations — in infrastructure modernization and application development. (Little known fact: Rackspace Technology was the first Google Cloud Managed Services Provider Partner in 2017.)

Key announcements from Google Cloud leadership

Every year announcements from Google Cloud are a highlight of the conference. This year there were a grand total of 218 announcements! Here is an overview of some of the leading announcements presented by Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, at the opening keynote.

Vertex AI announcements

• Vertex AI with Gemini 1.5 Pro: It’s in public preview and can now process audio streams.
• Imagen 2.0 on Vertex AI: It offers text-to-video generation with inpainting and outpainting and SynthID watermarking.
• Vertex AI Agent Builder: Currently in preview, it lets you build Customer Agents and Employee Agents using natural language or a code-first approach.

Security announcements

• Gemini in Threat Intelligence: In preview, it offers conversational access to Mandiant Threat Intelligence within workflows.
• Gemini in Security Command Center: In preview, it enables natural language threat hunting, improving threat detection intuition.
• Gemini Cloud Assist: It provides a platform for application design, troubleshooting and optimization. It includes root cause analysis capabilities for production environments. (Note: This one looks promising, let’s put this tool to work and observe how it responds.)
• Gemini Code Assist: Powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, it showcases capabilities in a demo. Acting as a Tier 3 agent, it uses detailed logs to pinpoint application outage sources, faulty products and root cause, and suggests tailored resolution commands.

Data analytics announcements

• BigQuery: It now integrates Vertex AI Gemini models for multimodal data analysis with vector embeddings and enables LLM task-specific fine-tuning on enterprise data. 
• Gemini in BigQuery and Continuous Queries in BigQuery: It constructs analytics applications and data agents, leveraging multimodal AI assistance, functioning akin to a real-time processing engine.

Infrastructure announcements

• A3 Mega VMs powered by NVIDIA H100 tensor core GPUs: General availability is coming soon.

Workspace and collaboration announcements

• Google Vids: An AI-powered video creation application, to be released to Workspace Labs in June 2024, and will be available inside Google Docs, sheets and slides.

Development announcements

• Cloud Run Canvas: A unified development environment for Cloud Run applications that supports generation, modification, and deployment with integrations to Vertex AI, Firestore, Memorystore, Cloud SQL, load balancing and Gemini Cloud Assist.
• GKE + Ray Integration Simplified: A new checkbox in GKE's UI allows easy ray integration with Kubernetes® clusters, facilitating AI model deployment. 

See all 218 announcements listed here. Also, view the keynote recordings here.

Key event takeaway

The buzz at Google Cloud Next ’24 was undeniably around Gemini. We’re looking forward to leveraging that momentum and using it to shape the digital landscape with our customers and partners!

At Rackspace Technology, we’ve been expanding our presence in the AI world, harnessing numerous innovative features to set ourselves apart in the marketplace. Thanks to FAIR™, we're already ahead in the AI game.

Rackspace Technology continuously seeks opportunities to create value for our customers. We do this by working hand-in-hand with our valued partners, prioritizing innovation, safeguarding data, and optimizing processes to exceed expectations and build a thriving AI culture with our partners and for our customers. Every year’s Google Cloud Next event is an incredible opportunity to expand our know-how and expand our potential — this year was no exception.