What a way to kick off Next ‘18. We started by welcoming our community of leaders, developers, and entrepreneurs to Moscone Center in San Francisco. As Diane mentioned in her keynote, it was Google’s biggest event ever, with more than 25,000 registrants. We learned how the cloud is reimagining work, rethinking the contact center, and redefining what’s possible for many of our customers. (Plus, there was a surprise visit from Sundar.) Read on for the highlights.
Better building in the cloud
Cloud computing is so much more than outsourced infrastructure—it promises agility, reliability and scale. We want to deliver on that promise, so today, we announced Cloud Services Platform, a set of foundational services and technologies that deliver advanced operational and management capabilities to your IT environment, in the cloud and on-premise. Read more in our Cloud Services Platform and serverless announcements.
What we announced
We’re introducing a service mesh based on the open-source Istio, which will soon move to version 1.0, and Managed Istio, a fully managed version thereof, running in GCP. Also, Apigee API Management for Istio lets enterprises operationalize microservices created by the Istio service mesh with their existing API management tools.
For Istio and App Engine workloads, the new Stackdriver Service Monitoring provides an SRE-inspired, service-oriented view of your workloads, showing you how your end users experience your systems.
We’re furthering hybrid computing with GKE On-Prem, a Google-configured version of Kubernetes that includes multi-cluster management, that you can deploy on-premise or in other clouds.
GKE Policy Management establishes a single source of truth for the policies that govern your Kubernetes workloads, across any enrolled cluster.
We want you to build all your applications serverlessly, even if you use Kubernetes. To help you do that, we will offer the new GKE serverless add-on. Then, we’re releasing that same serverless framework as open-source under the name Knative.
Speaking of serverless, we’re adding support for Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2 runtimes on App Engine standard environment.
Cloud Functions is now generally available, with support for additional languages, plus performance, networking and security features.
Serverless containers on Cloud Functions allow you to run container-based workloads in a fully managed environment and still only pay for what you use.
Cloud Firestore lets you store and sync your app data at global scale, with access within the GCP Console coming soon.
Finally, Cloud Build is our new continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) service that’s integrated with popular developer tools and that lets you build serverless applications.
AI for every business
Empowering businesses and developers to do more with AI means providing them with tools that make it possible to take advantage of machine learning, regardless of skill level or expertise. Read more in our AI and Contact Center blog posts.
What we announced
Cloud AutoML Vision, Natural Language, and Translation extend powerful ML models to suit specific needs, without requiring any specialized knowledge in machine learning or coding.
TPU V3s, our custom ASIC chips designed for machine learning workloads, are in alpha.
New enhancements to Dialogflow Enterprise Edition enable you to design smarter and more conversational interfaces.
A new solution, Contact Center AI, which includes new Dialogflow features alongside other tools to assist live agents and perform analytics.
Reimagining how we work
In order to stay competitive, companies are reimagining how their global teams work together using cloud-native collaboration in G Suite that’s smart, simple and secure. Proactively protect against security threats, manage where company data is stored and shared and communicate more effectively with these new, assistive capabilities in G Suite. Read more in this post from G Suite.
What we announced
A new investigation tool in the Security Center helps admins identify which users are potentially infected, see if anything’s been shared externally and remove access to Drive files or delete malicious emails.
Customers can choose where to store primary data for select G Suite apps—globally, distributed, U.S. or Europe—with Data Regions for G Suite.
Smart Reply is coming to Hangouts Chat. Using AI, Smart Reply recognizes which messages need responses and proposes reply options that are casual enough for chat, yet appropriate for the workplace.
Smart Compose in Gmail intelligently autocompletes emails for you—by filling in greetings, common phrases and more–so you collaborate more efficiently. Smart Compose will be available to G Suite customers in the coming weeks.
Grammar Suggestions in Google Docs uses a unique machine translation-based approach to recognize grammatical errors (simple and complex) and suggest corrections. It is available in an Early Adopter Program (“beta”) for G Suite customers today.
Voice Commands for Hangouts Meet hardware brings some of the same magic of the Google Assistant to the conference room so that teams can connect to video meetings quickly. Voice Commands will roll out to select Meet hardware customers later this year.
What our customers are saying
At Next ‘18 we’re joined by more than 290 customer speakers. Here are a few of our favorite quotes from day one:
“My guys love working with your team. We’ve learned a lot from Google about site reliability engineering. But more than that, I think it’s the commitment to open source—that made all the difference. At the end of the day, it wasn’t me who chose Google, it was my engineers. Google was important to the engineering team, so it mattered to me.” —Mike McNamara, Executive VP, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Target
“[Visiting your midwest data center] made us realize Google was operating at a totally different scale. I also came to appreciate how much security was involved at every single point. Security to get into the complex. Security for each server. And security for destroying drives that were no longer being used.” —Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board, Products & Innovation, SAP SE
"We have 95 years of innovation. As the world and consumers change, we have to change too. My job is to make sure over 40,000 associates in over 100 countries have the most robust tools to innovate and service our clients… [we needed] a collaboration platform that allows our employees to connect anytime, anywhere on any device. That led us to G Suite." —Kim Anstett, Chief Information Officer, Nielsen
“Standardizing monitoring signals lets us monitor across our systems, correlate logs, and do distributed tracing. But these monitoring concepts requires services to communicate in a standard way. With Istio…We have a uniform and transparent mechanism to collect metrics and logs…and are running it in production.” —Jeff White, Software Engineer, eBay
We’ll be updating this post all week as it happens at Next ‘18. Check back here tomorrow for the latest news from the event.
