5 Things Google Cloud Platform Didn’t Say Loud Enough at NEXT
Google has a great cloud, better or worse than other alternatives is a matter of great debate and perhaps a flamewar or two. One thing more people agree on is that Google is still figuring out how to best communicate about Google Cloud Platform. In an effort to help them out I’ve compiled a list of 5 things they should have said LOUDER at NEXT.
1) Spanner, Spanner, Spanner
MySQL shard hell is over!!! For those who missed the announcement Spanner is a GLOBALLY available ACID compliant relational database, queried with ANSII SQL with millisecond response times. Spanner is a game changer for scalable No-Ops development and is priced similarly to equivalent high availability database configurations. Did I mention globally consistent?
https://cloud.google.com/spanner/
2) FREE as in Beer (and speech)
Free, yes free, and yes this is a slightly late to the party offering. AWS has had a similar free offering limited to 12-months, the new GCP free tier has no similar time restriction. The more important implication is that now Smaller Dev Projects, Hobbyists, Students, and everyone can freely experiment and learn about how the cloud works without needing to spend from their own pocket.
https://cloud.google.com/free/
Google’s Day Three Keynote did a solid job of highlighting their giving back to the open source community and encouraging Free (as in speech) Software. Link to the Free Youtube video of the Keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9FSqVbdHis
For those looking for more concrete examples, check out Google’s list of open source projects, spoiler-alert you (or behind some software you used today) is on this list:
https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects
3) BigQuery is expanding
BigQuery is growing, both it’s features and echo-system received some massive announcements at Next ’17. For those who aren’t familiar with BigQuery it is a Massively Parallel Processing Columnar Storage Data Warehouse as a Service. In english this translates into an easy to use platform that scales to big data and can be leveraged by everyone in the organization.
New feature highlights include:
Commercial Datasets — Data wrangling is one of the largest tasks for Data Science and Data Analysis, if data is even able to be collected. Now access to curated datasets is a simple license away and easily integrated into existing BigQuery analysis. Additional companies with interesting datasets can more easily monetize their data assets by becoming a BigQuery partner.
https://cloud.google.com/commercial-datasets/
Federated BigTable Support — This is a big deal for enabling a single analysis and reporting stack. The popular lambda architecture for handling streaming and batch for realtime reporting is enabled easily with BigQuery and BigTable that can now be bridged in a single query through BigQuery. See this Next presentation for exactly what this means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HUB4uu7K2k
Cloud Dataprep — Power to the Analysts! Fully serverless data profiling and preparation. While still in private beta there is a ton of potential for this tool. A graphical way to explore and transform data inside of BigQuery already has a few options in the marketplace, but having this as an additional service completely baked into the existing IAM permissioning and useable by any analyst no coding required is a welcome addition to enterprise data platforms everywhere.
https://cloud.google.com/dataprep/
Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service—No this isn’t an update to Microsoft’s Data Transfer Service from SQL Server 2000, this is a fully managed data loading service for AdWords, DoubleClick (Managers and Publishers), and Youtube. These datasets then join the already existing transfer for Google Analytics 360 data that can be loaded automagically into BigQuery for analysis. With these offerings any marketing department leveraging Google for publishing, advertising, or tracking can enable all of their analysts while lessening burden on external ETL resources.
https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/transfer/
4) SQL Server, .NET, and Windows are fully supported on Google Cloud
Powershell, Visual Studio Tools, SQL Server, and Windows VMs there is a lot of support for Windows in the google cloud. While the main Windows announcement at Next was the general availability of SQL Server Enterprise, there was a dearth of additional coverage around Windows support. Google needs to talk about its Windows capabilities more as it tries to make inroads with traditional enterprises.
https://cloud.google.com/windows/
5) Per Day…
Yes I already have an item on here about free things, but this one is worth it’s own bullet point. Remember back to April 1st, 2004 when Google announced Gmail with 1 GB of free storage when most other offerings were in the single MB range? (https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-offer-gigabyte-of-free-e-mail/) Google showed that they were way ahead of the competition then, and now they have done it again.
Google’s Container Builder is free for 120 mins per day. There are now zero excuses for not fully automating container builds.
https://cloud.google.com/container-builder/
The larger implication here is that just like with Gmail, Google is providing a stepping stone to move to a more sophisticated, efficient, and trusted way of working. Their continuing contributions continue to lower the access bar to state of the art workflows.
Slightly Gratuitous XKCD graph comparing AWS CodeBuild, CircleCI Free Tier, and GCP Container Builder free build offerings.
So there you have it, 5 things that Google should have said louder. Note this isn’t a top 5 things at Next as there were a lot of great announcements. But a few gems to add more fuel to the raging debate on “best in class” clouds. Flame on!
