Top Announcements from Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir - Week 1

Google Cloud Next is the most awaited annual event from Google, hosting keynotes from the top executives, a conference to share ideas and thoughts, industry insights, breakout sessions, hands-on trainings, connect with experts and networking opportunities. This year the event is organized completely online, spread across 9 weeks and made absolutely free of cost.

In this micro-blog I want to highlight some of the important announcements related to GCP made by Google.

Confidential Computing

Keeping data secured by encryption is utmost important. But just encrypting the data in transit and at rest is not enough for some of the compliances, as it still leaves room for hackers while processing the data inside the machines. Confidential VMs is the first step within confidential computing strategy to cross this major hurdle, by ensuring the data is encrypted while it’s in use and being processed. Google collaborated with AMD to develop hardware to support encrypted memory without affecting performance. These VMs will be available under N2D series. Here is the official demo of confidential VM.

BigQuery Omni

BigQuery already supports external data sources which means we can query the data even if is not stored inside big query. And this is supported for various GCP services like Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and Google Drive. With announcement of BigQuery Omni, it will be able to query data stored outside the GCP services like AWS S3 and Azure services. This means that Omni extends the analytics platform to other clouds without leaving BigQuery user interface and without having to import data into BigQuery. This is very efficient way as it avoids expensive egress cost of moving data between clouds. This has been possible due to BigQuery’s strategy of decoupling the compute and storage, where storage can reside within or outside GCP.

Assured Workloads for Government

GCP has come up with important updates for US government workloads. Customers can select the right security settings and the appropriate cloud controls will be in place, making it easier to meet security compliance requirements for processing government data. Till now other cloud providers have provided separate data centres to run government workloads but they are not equipped with all the latest technologies, eventually customers end up running multiple applications or parts of application in multiple clouds, which adds to complexity and cost. Assured workloads for government provides seamless platform compatibility between government and commercial cloud and also simplifies the compliance configuration process.

Google Cloud ISV/SaaS Center of Excellence

GCP has launched a new Centre of Excellence (CoE) service for independent software vendors (ISVs) to support them in evangelism. As a part of this service, GCP will provide them dedicated resources to accelerate their cloud transformation journey for their customers. The dedicated resources will include training, hands-on design workshops and field enablement with Google’s best practices and experience of delivering services at massive scale. As a part of this service, center will help ISV to get the products certified, provide necessary support and methodologies of building scalable applications, so they have repeatable way of doing deploying software or cloud transformation.

I am sure these announcements are enough for you to get started and tryout some of these new features. It would also be interesting to see what other 8 weeks of the conference offer.

Keep watching this space for announcements in the upcoming weeks at Google Cloud Next On Air.