ICYMI: We’ve Got All the News from Google Cloud Next ’19

For the past several years, Google Cloud has hosted an annual developer conference which is mostly focused on their growing enterprise business. Cloud Next ’19 kicked off on Tuesday and you may not be surprised to learn that the announcements are mostly focused on developer services and infrastructure. One of the ways that they’re doing this is by developing the concept of “open cloud”. You might be thinking what is “open cloud”, well, it is open source with a future focus on the cloud. But Google doesn’t just want its own projects to be open source, they also want to partner with companies that are building open source projects. With that in mind, let’s talk about what we heard at the conference today.

New Cloud Regions

When it comes to offering cloud services, physical proximity plays an important role, and as a result Google announced two new Cloud regions that are set to debut in 2020. A new facility in Seoul, South Korea will serve customers who game, as well as telecommunication and information companies. Not long after that is set to go live in early 2020, a new Salt Lake City region with three zones will also come online. The city is already a hub for data center infrastructure, with a focus on healthcare, financial services, and IT. This will be the sixth region in the continental United States (one is in Canada) and reflects Cloud’s incredible growth.

There are a total of 19 regions available worldwide. With Osaka, Japan going live within the next few weeks, and Jakarta, Indonesia scheduled for early next year. Google has opened 15 new regions and 45 zones across 13 countries in just three years. By 2020, the number of Google Cloud regions will be 23 throughout the world.

Open Source Partnerships

During the conference, Google announced a strategic partnership with “leading open source-centric companies” who are primarily focused on data management and analytics. This includes Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis Labs. The goal is to let customers “use open-source technology easily and in a cloud-native way”. These services will be integrated into the Google Cloud Platform for simplified management, billing with one invoice, and support through a single ticketing system. There will also be a single UI to manage apps, with services working to optimize performance.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a new “serverless compute platform for containerized apps with probability built-in”. This balances the benefits of both containers and serverless implementations. Right now, Cloud Run is available in beta, and users can “run stateless HTTP-driven containers, without working about the infrastructure”.

It takes care of all infrastructure management including provisioning, configuring, scaling, and managing servers. It automatically scales up or down within seconds, even down to zero depending on traffic, ensuring you pay only for the resources you actually use.

Anthos

Formerly known as Cloud Services Platform, Anthos allows developers to easily create, deploy, run and manage applications on both on-premise hardware and the public cloud. It’s not limited to just Google services, as developers will be able to manage workloads running on third-party clouds like Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure. Google did announce Anthos Migrate in beta, which will help move existing virtual machines from on-premise or other clouds directly into GKE containers.