Google Cloud Next’19 day 1: open-source partnerships, hybrid-cloud platform, Cloud Run, and more

Google Cloud’s new CEO is set to expand its sales team

Cloud Next’19 is the first event where the newly-appointed Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian took on stage to share his plans for Google Cloud. He plans to make Google Cloud "the best strategic partner" for organizations modernizing their IT infrastructure.

To step up its game in the Cloud industry, Google needs to put more focus on understanding its customers, providing them better support, and making it easier for them to conduct business. This is why Kurian is planning to expand the sales team and add more technical specialists. Kurian, who joined Google after working at Oracle for 22 years, also shared that the team is rolling out new contracts to make contracting easier and also promised simplified pricing.

Anthos, Google’s hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure

During the opening keynote, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO confirmed the rebranding of Cloud Services Platform, a platform for building and managing hybrid applications, as it enters general availability. This rebranded version named Anthos provides customers a single managed service, which is not limited to just Google-based environments and comes with extended support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure.

With this extended support, Google aims to provide organizations that have multi-cloud sourcing strategy a more consistent experience across all three clouds. Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure, shared in a press conference, “I can’t really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it’s not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three clouds — and actually on-premise environments, too — look the same.”

Along with this extended support, another plus point of Anthos is that it is hardware agnostic, which means customers can run the service on top of their current hardware without having to immediately invest in new servers. It is a subscription-based service, with prices starting at $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block.

Google also announced the first beta release of Anthos Migrate, a service that auto-migrates VMs from on-premises, or other clouds, directly into containers in Google Kubernetes Environment (GKE) with minimum effort. Explaining the advantage of this tool, Google wrote in a blog post, “Through this transformation, your IT team is free from managing infrastructure tasks like VM maintenance and OS patching, so it can focus on managing and developing applications.”

Google Cloud partners with top open-source projects challenging AWS

Google has partnered with several top open-source data management and analytics companies including Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs. The services and products provided by these companies will be deeply integrated into the Google Cloud Platform.

With this integration, Google aims to provide customers a seamless experience by allowing them to use these open source technologies at a single place, Google Cloud. These will be managed services and the invoicing and billing of these services will be handled by Google Cloud. Customer support will also be the responsibility of Google so that users manage and log tickets across all of these services via a single platform.

Google’s approach of partnering with these open source companies is quite different from that of other cloud providers. Over the past few years, we have come across cases where cloud providers sell open-source projects as service, often without giving any credits to the original project. This led to companies revisiting their open-source licenses to stop such behavior. For instance, Redis adopted the Common Clause license for its Redis Modules and later dropped its revised license in February. Similarly, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Confluent also embraced a similar strategy.

Kurian said, “In order to sustain the company behind the open-source technology, they need a monetization vehicle. If the cloud provider attacks them and takes that away, then they are not viable and it deteriorates the open-source community.”

Cloud Run for running stateless containers serverlessly

Google has combined serverless computing and containerization into a single product called Cloud Run. Yesterday, Oren Teich, Director Product Management for Serverless, announced the beta release of Cloud Run and also explained how it works.

Cloud Run is a managed compute platform for running stateless containers that can be invoked via HTTP requests. It is built on top of Knative, a Kubernetes-based platform for building, deploying, and managing serverless workloads. You get two options to choose from, either you can run your containers fully-managed with Cloud Run or in your Google Kubernetes Engine cluster with Cloud Run on GKE.

Announcing the release of Cloud Run, Teich wrote in a blog post, “Cloud Run is introducing a brand new product that takes Docker containers and instantly gives you a URL. This is completely unique in the industry. We’re taking care of everything from the top end of SSL provisioning and routing, all the way down to actually running the container for you. You pay only by the hundred milliseconds of what you need to use, and it’s end-to-end managed.”

Google releases closed source VS Code plugin

Google announced the beta release of “Cloud Code for VS Code” as a closed source library. It allows you to extend the VS Code to bring the convenience of IDEs to developing cloud-native Kubernetes applications. This extension aims to speed up the builds, deployment, and debugging cycles. You can deploy your applications to either local clusters or across multiple cloud providers.

Under the hood, Cloud Code for VS Code uses Google’s popular command-line tools such as skaffold and kubectl, to provide users continuous feedback as they build their projects. It also supports deployment profiles that lets you define different environments to make testing and debugging easier on your workstation or in the cloud.

Cloud SQL now supports PostgreSQL 11.1 Beta

Cloud SQL is Google’s fully-managed database service that makes it easier to set up, maintain, manage, and administer your relational databases on GCP. It now comes with support for PostgreSQL 11.1 Beta. Along with that, it supports the following relational databases:

• MySQL 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7
• PostgreSQL 9.6

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