Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day’s keynote and the major announcements.
How About Some AI?
“The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy)
Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI
Ok Google, did your phone go off?
For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week
From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next’s Descent into AI Madness
‘Next’ Up from Google – AI!
Have Some Conference with Your AI
We’re jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.
01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.
08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address
Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.
19:45 Ryan – “I got access to an early sort of hands – on lab and it was a really powerful way to look at your data, because you can pipe so much data into the security tools, and it becomes a little bit daunting to go and figure out what’s going on and to proactively monitor and feel like you’re actually catching things, to make certain patterns. And so the ability to sort of use prompt to query data, and have it generate certain query codes within to generate reports or building lists was very powerful, very cool. And it made it a lot of fun. It was probably the most fun hands – on lab I’ve ever done; just by seeing, you know, it’s all dummy data, but it was a fun way to track things through for forensic analysis and to understand patterns and life cycle. Super impressed.”
If you’re not keeping track – that was 41 items announced in a 90 minute keynote. And even with all that – Justin and Ryan struck out on their predictions. Jonathan and Matthew are tied at 1 correct prediction each.
Justin
Jonathan
Matt
Ryan
Google Next Tie Breaker:
How many times will they say AI/LLM on stage? 111
Number of main stage announcements? 41
Congratulations to Matthew, who wins Google Next ‘24 Predictions.
24:32 Ryan – “So the one thing I will say is they pushed a lot of things that weren’t AI product related into the sessions themselves.S o one thing I learned this year that I’ll take forward to other conferences is the what’s new in blah sessions. So, you know, I wanted to go, I tried to get in the one for VPC networking and I wasn’t able to get in, but I did manage to get into like IAM and a couple others. So there were a lot of announcements for enhancements done directly in those.”
25:20 Justin – “So other day one announcements that did not make main stage are still also pretty nice. They have new computing and networking capabilities, including a new C4 and N4 general purpose VMs powered by the fifth generation Intel Xeon processor, as well as those enhancements to Google Cloud we talked about earlier. There were a bunch of database enhancements that didn’t get to the main stage, including AlloyDB AI, Firestore enhancements for flexible natural language support, as well as vector capabilities for Firestore as well.”
25:20 Jonathan – “Yeah, I hope AI just becomes one of those features that everything has and they don’t devote a whole keynote to it again because I think it was a little much. It was really hard, you know, sitting listening at home. It was honestly too fast paced, too many announcements for keynote in, you know, in 90 minutes and everything was just AI, AI, AI the whole time. And I kind of tuned out honestly, because yes, I mean, once you’ve seen one AI integration with a tool, you can kind of guess what all the others are going to look like. So, you know, either have a separate AI conference to focus on the tech, but perhaps not the use cases for it all the time. But I’m kind of hoping they’ll go back to actually talking about the rest of the ecosystem and the work they’re doing there as well.”
30:38 Day 2 – Developer Keynote
32:44 Jonathan – “ the TPU support for GKE should have been a bit more… I mean, I think they mentioned it in the keynote, didn’t they? But it didn’t seem to get much attention, but that’s really useful. I mean, that’s sort of commoditizing training, which it hasn’t been before.”
34:25 Finops Announcements
Need some links? We have some for ‘ya!
Welcome to Google Cloud Next ‘24
Day 1 at Next ’24 recap: AI agents for everyone
Day 2 at Next ’24 recap: building AI agents
Cloud FinOps news from Next ‘24 April 11, 2024
Run AI anywhere with Google Distributed Cloud innovations
Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs
Make Google part of your security team anywhere you operate, with defenses supercharged by AI
What’s next for data analytics at Google Cloud Next ’24
What’s new and what’s next for Google Cloud databases
What’s new with Google Cloud Networking at Next ’24
What’s new in Google Cloud’s workload-optimized infrastructure
Powering Google Cloud with Gemini
What’s new with Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer architecture
Privacy-preserving data sharing now generally available with BigQuery data clean rooms
Ushering in a new era for app developers
Google Public Sector achieves Top Secret and Secret cloud authorization
Announcing Vertex AI Agent Builder: Helping developers easily build and deploy gen AI experiences
Introducing Chrome Enterprise Premium: The future of endpoint security
Google Cloud announces updates to Gemini, Imagen, Gemma and MLOps on Vertex AI
The container platform for the next decade of AI and beyond
Grounding generative AI in enterprise truth
Analyze images and videos in BigQuery using Gemini 1.0 Pro Vision
How Gemini in BigQuery accelerates data and analytics workflows with AI
Accelerate AI Inference with Google Cloud TPUs and GPUs
Gemini in Databases — supercharge database development and management
BigQuery is now your single, unified AI-ready data platform
Introducing Gemini in Looker to bring intelligent AI-powered BI to everyone
Get to know BigQuery data canvas: an AI-centric experience to reimagine data analytics
Celebrating 20 years of Bigtable with exciting announcements at Next
New Google Cloud Consulting programs designed to accelerate your cloud journey
Announcing Cloud Service Mesh – the evolution of service mesh for Google Cloud
Using Gemini Code Assist to build APIs, integrations, and automation flows
Introducing Shadow API detection for your Google Cloud environments
Natural language support in AlloyDB for building gen AI apps with real-time data
Expanded Confidential Computing portfolio and introducing Confidential Accelerators for AI workloads
Gemma on Google Kubernetes Engine deep dive: New innovations to serve open generative AI models
Powering generative AI with cloud storage innovations at Next ’24
App Hub – Manage your application, forget the toil
Performance deep dive of Gemma on Google Cloud
Introducing ML Productivity Goodput: a metric to measure AI system efficiency Your scannable list of our top migration announcements from Next ‘24
Eating our own dogfood: Building an AI-driven business at Google Cloud Consulting
Turbocharge applications with Memorystore’s persistence and flexible node types
Private, secure, and seamless connectivity to Cloud SQL using Private Service Connect
What’s new with Firestore at Next ‘24
Announcing the general availability of Next Gen Firewall Enterprise
Migrate your SQL Server workloads to Cloud SQL with Database Migration Service, now in preview
Accelerating database modernization with Gemini in Database Migration Service
Introducing Isolator: Enabling secure multi-party collaboration with healthcare data
Announcing Delta Lake support for BigQuery Build powerful gen AI applications with Firestore vector similarity search
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