This is the first Google Cloud Summit in Chicago and it will be in some ways a coming out event for Google Cloud. The keynote speaker is Scott McIntyre, Director Google Cloud. There have been 500+ releases in the past 6 months and 6.5 million businesses use GCP today. In addition to the customer base Google has build an ecosystem of business partners for their Cloud Platform. Google believes that all companies either are or will become data companies. The transportation industry provides a dramatic example of this.
The advantages of Google Cloud include optimizing business operations by hosting business infrastructure services in the cloud. Collaboration is another area that Google touts as an advantage of their cloud services. The acceleration of business is also one of their advantages. They follow a philosophy of openness, which goes beyond just open source software.
The focus of the Summit is to promote the Google Cloud Platform to the Chicago and larger Midwest business community.
Ulku Rowe, Technical Director, Financial Services Office
The 5 Drivers of cloud decision are:
- Reliability
- Security
- Excellent Support
- Performance
- Cost Effectiveness
Serve over 1 billion end users today. 40% of the world’s internet traffic goes through Google’s network.
Google also provides a private, ultra-fast backbone, which it touts as more secure than many public access points. Google provides a “Layered Defense in Depth Security”. They follow a security paradigm of least trust. Google introduced the Titan chip, which is used to secure hardware.
Security innovation
- Identity-aware proxy – application level security, which has more granular security than a corporate VPN
- Data loss prevention API
The security layer is built into every layer including:
- GCP
- G Suite
- Chrome and Android – scan 6 billion mobile apps to make sure they are not infected with malware
Roberto Bayardo, Distinguished Software Engineer
Worked on machine learning within Google. There is a myth of breakthroughs is that they happen in isolation. With G Suite, Google is dedicated to saving businesses time via collaboration. Files in G Suite act as conversations. Multiple people can collaborate on a single document in real time.
Smart reply in Gmail uses machine learning to automatically reply to emails based upon the user’s observed behavior. A demo was performed in which Google sheets used natural language processing to understand a question a user asked and provide an answer in real time.
Andrew Lewis, Whirlpool, Senior Manager
Whirlpool went live with G Suite about 3 or 4 years ago and that was their first foray into the cloud. They built a team called “winning workplace” made of several department representatives. Google Hangouts was one technology that made a huge difference at Whirlpool. Before the use of Hangouts, video conference capabilities were limited. Using the Google Cloud has changed the business conversation at Whirlpool.
Scott McIntyre – Summary
Scott McIntyre talked about the tools make available on Google Cloud Platform. The App Maker allows developers to write an app once and have it work across multiple platforms. Cloudsearch is a tool which allows users to search for content across all of their G Suite content. G Suite uses simple controls to allow for easy administration of the tools.
Miles Ward, Director, Solutions Google Cloud
There has been an acceleration of businesses trying to use the cloud to increase productivity. Google has worked to democratize data within organizations to increase collaboration and innovation. Google develops tools and platforms to facilitate this and open sources much of this technology.
Cloud Spanner
This is the first horizontally scalable relational database. Cost is calculated in real time as the database architecture is specified. Databases can be deployed within seconds. The database appears to be lightning fast. A query was done on several terabytes of data within less than a second.
Cloud AI
Google provides large vendor free datasets that companies can use. Google also provides machine learning training to allow customers to come up to speed rapidly. Google provides pre-trained models or allows customers to train their own models. Google has provided the open source TensorFlow machine learning platform.
Demo
Digital Intelligence API – can analyze a video and provide context and relevance data on the video. The API can also scan a video catalog and retrieve relevant video content.
The platform that Google provides allows developers to focus on just designing and developing code rather than getting distracted by provisioning and managing infrastructure.
Bradley Burke, CTO, Network Insights
They have a large streaming analytics platform as well as a large data platform. The platform is enabled by Google Cloud Platform. The Google Cloud Platform allowed the organization to scale their business. Their analysts can now write queries against Big Query and has brought data science to the masses.
Kris Baritt – Technical Director, Office of the CTO
Google spends significant resources on the partnerships it has with its customers. One goal of the relationship is “getting out of the software jail”. There should be a shared success model. The partnership should be a commitment, not a mandatory sentence. There should be flexible deployment models and flexible support models.
There are 10+ years of open source projects in:
- Linux
- Python
- C++
- Git
- Kubernetes – tool to manage containers
Google does not dictate VM configurations. Customers can configure their VM’s on the Google Cloud. Google has per second billing.
Google announced “committed-use discounts” yesterday. On average customers save 60% savings and 0$ startup costs vs. on-premise infrastructure.
Ratnakar Lavu, Kohl’s, CTO
Kohls is a brick and mortar retailer with a growing digital presence. They have two data centers with rack-and-stack servers. They are moving to the cloud in order to scale for peak periods such as the holiday season. Kohl’s selected Google Cloud Platform because their platform is secure, it is flexible, has low latency, and Google is innovative. The machine learning platform was attractive to Kohl’s.
Kohl’s developers can now spin up servers on the fly, although this has increased costs, so Koh’s is trying to manage that with Google.
Scott McIntyre – Closing
Scott reiterated the primary themes that were highlighted in the keynote. Overall this was a solid keynote for a technical crowd.
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