100 Must-Read Announcements from Google Cloud Next ‘19

We all know the cloud is where it’s at. The Google Cloud Next ’19 conference this month at the Moscone Center in San Francisco was no exception and didn’t disappoint. First, Google introduced customers to new Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for the first time since his hiring. And second, the annual event once again demonstrated that Google offers a value proposition very distinct from AWS and Microsoft.
It was a lot to digest, no doubt. But we’ve distilled everything you need to know into a handy list of major announcements across infrastructure, application development, data management, smart analytics, AI, productivity, partnerships, and more.
Below are the most critical key elements Google Cloud offers today. It’s very cool stuff, and may even keep AWS and Microsoft up at night.
- Anthos (the new name for Cloud Services Platform) is now generally available on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE On-Prem, so you can deploy, run and manage your applications on-premises or in the cloud.
- Cloud Run, the fully managed serverless execution environment, offers serverless agility for containerized apps.
- Knative, the open API and runtime environment, brings a serverless developer experience and workload portability to your existing Kubernetes cluster anywhere.
- The new Cloud Code makes it easy to develop and deploy cloud-native applications on Kubernetes, by extending your favorite local Integrated Development Environments (IDE) IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code.
- Apigee hybrid (beta) is a new deployment option for the Apigee API management platform that lets you host your runtime anywhere—in your data center or the public cloud of your choice.
- Cloud Bigtable multi-region replication is now generally available, giving you the flexibility to make your data available across a region or worldwide as demanded by your app.
- Cloud Filestore, our managed file storage system, is now generally available for high-performance storage needs.
- High Availability VPN, soon in beta, lets you connect your on-premises deployment to GCP Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with an industry-leading SLA of 99.99% service availability at general availability.
- Access Approval (beta) is a first-of-its-kind capability that allows you to explicitly approve access to your data or configurations on GCP before it happens.
- reCAPTCHA Enterprise (beta) helps you defend your website against fraudulent activity like scraping, credential stuffing, and automated account creation and help prevent costly exploits from automated software. WOOHOO!
- Android phone’s built-in security key—the strongest defense against phishing—is now available on your phone.
- Data Fusion (beta) is a fully managed and cloud-native data integration service that helps you easily ingest and integrate data from various sources into BigQuery.
- Cloud Composer (generally available) helps you orchestrate your workloads across multiple clouds with a managed Apache Airflow service.
- AI Platform (beta) helps teams prepare, build, run, and manage ML projects via the same shared interface.
- AutoML Natural Language custom entity extraction and sentiment analysis (beta) lets you identify and isolate custom fields from the input text and also train and serve industry-specific sentiment analysis models on your unstructured data.
- Document Understanding AI (beta) offers a scalable, serverless platform to automatically classify, extract, and digitize data within your scanned or digital documents.
- Recommendations AI (beta) helps retailers provide personalized 1:1 recommendation to drive customer engagement and growth.
- Third-party Cloud Search, now generally available for eligible customers, can help employees search—and find—digital assets and people in their company.
- Hangouts Meet updates, including automatic live captions (generally available), the ability to make live streams “public” (coming soon), and up to 250 people can join a single meeting (coming soon).
- Google Voice for G Suite, generally available, gives businesses a phone number that works from anywhere, on any device, that can also transcribe voicemails and block spam calls with the help of Google AI.
- Currents (the new name for the enterprise version of Google+), available in beta, helps employees share ideas and engage in meaningful discussions with others across their organization, regardless of title or geography.
You can read all others at Google Next ’19 HERE.
Founder, Editor-In-Chief // A native Angeleno. John studied engineering at UCLA; founded Schmoozd, an offline social tech networking event in LA with 30,000 subs; ran a startup accelerator (StartEngine). Worked for several major brands like Toyota, DIRECTV, Hitachi, ICANN, and Raytheon. A mentor at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Entrepreneur School, Dr. David Choi. And advises a dozen local LA startups building amazing tech in various industries; and invested in some. // Let's Connect: john@lastartups.com