In previous years, Google’s Cloud was one of many products competing for attention at the company’s flagship developer conference, Google I/O. This year, the GCP team created a new event, GCP Next, to be a dedicated event for all things cloud. Though launched under the same name as a series of one- day seminars the company held last year, GCP Next 2016 was relaunched as a new flagship event recently held in San Francisco.
In parallel with the main event, the GCP team organized a series of panel discussions for analysts. Beside the keynotes, the majority of my time was spent in those sessions and various hallway-track conversations.
GCP Next News
#GCPNEXT about to get live! Looking forward to their announcements this morning! pic.twitter.com/iTmbakX1I4
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
There were several news announcements at GCP Next. If you’ve missed those, it probably makes sense to get caught up, but I won’t do that here. Rather, Brandon Butler has a nice piece along those lines over at Network World: “10 big announcements from Google’s Cloud Conference.” Check out his article if you need an overview.
GCP Strategy
A recent report by Synergy Research estimates the market for cloud infrastructure services (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) hit $23 billion in 2015, with Google garnering a 4% share of this market. With enterprises usage constituting a significant and growing portion of this revenue, it’s no surprise that Google’s key message at GCP Next was Enterprise, Enterprise, Enterprise. (Unfortunately, none of the GCP executives went Ballmer on us with this.)
I summed up the GCP team’s strategy in a couple of tweets from the event.
1/2 Here is GCP exec team's operating thesis: "Cloud's not done. The industry's just beginning the journey." #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
2/2 Google came fr behind to win in search, mail, maps, browser, mobile based on strength of tech/product. Still room to innovate. #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
The GCP Next keynotes supported this strategy insofar as they did a great job highlighting–literally from the bottom of the stack to the top–all of the innovation Google has brought to their cloud. Some areas specifically highlighted include GCP’s underlying data center infrastructure and connectivity, security and operations in the Google cloud, the new StackDriver multi-cloud operations console, Kubernetes, and GCP’s data services and machine learning capabilities. (See tweets below.)
One critique of the GCP team’s strategy/operating thesis is that the markets that Google has come from behind to win have been consumer markets. To address the company’s lack of enterprise DNA, the company has brought in executives such as Diane Greene, the founder and former CEO of VMware who now runs GCP, and Brian Stevens, former Red Hat CTO who runs product. Still, in the keynotes and executive panels I attended, I found their ability to craft a compelling enterprise narrative and articulate a solid go-to-market strategy to be not as far along as I expected.
I’m a fan of what Google is doing in the cloud and would love to see them close the gap with AWS. Unfortunately, as tech markets tilt towards winner-takes-all, they have their work cut out for them and a closing window within which to get it done.
More Via Twitter
Cloud is the future. @sundarpichai #GCPNEXT keynote pic.twitter.com/QTGJuK2DvX
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
"I was able to go into any enterprise and help them with VMware. Google Cloud is so much more." #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/65wxvaYkc7
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
"Our data centers are invisible to customers but underpin all we do. Our efficiency running them is key." #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/J4WDxMrE0Q
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
"We're committed to open source, exposing innovations as a service, & competing on quality of our implementations." pic.twitter.com/y01MVEiJ7z
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
#MachineLearning is revolutionizing every industry. Diane Green #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/Lf1At2fVHQ
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
GCP will be source of outsourced innovation for customers. #GCPNEXT focus on security #machinelearning #cloud. pic.twitter.com/yh8jsoyOBN
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Google has invested $9.9B into Google Cloud. Would be interesting to know how much of that is general Goog infra v. actually for #GCPNext
— Jake Kaldenbaugh (@Jakewk) March 23, 2016
Another of Google's big guns takes the stage at #GCPNEXT. Next: Alphabet Chairman @ericschmidt. pic.twitter.com/EG6mFtOvqu
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Strategy is a starting point, albeit important. Need to execute! But def not about "seriousness". https://t.co/ohvJ6NyWXE
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
#Machinelearning a fundamental change to the way we develop software. @ericschmidt #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/HyUAOXwVdw
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
.@ericschmidt Moment of honesty: "Im just a programmer that got lucky with Google. ... Sorry."
— Jake Kaldenbaugh (@Jakewk) March 23, 2016
The future of #innovation: 1 Rapidly deploy/evaluate. 2 Crowdsource. 3
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Refine w #ML. @ericschmidt #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/L5nF4Kl9dl
Urs Hoelze bringing the speeds and feeds to #GCPNEXT. "Innovation and platform quality key when choosing cloud provider."
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Urs Hoelze bringing the speeds & feeds to #GCPNEXT. "Innovation + platform quality key when choosing cloud provider" pic.twitter.com/7b1HnDiQQK
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
"We need immunizations for security, not band-aids or topical antiseptics" Urs Hoelze #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/6HfMPAl8sP
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Lots of work to be done for sure! https://t.co/5o54WoYtvh
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
GCP's Urs: We used to look like the enterprise (ie virtualized) until about 10 years ago. (We can relate!)
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
.@uhoelzle Third Wave of Cloud: Serverless - You care about your code, not servers. (The commoditization of infrastructure continues.)
— Jake Kaldenbaugh (@Jakewk) March 23, 2016
Serverless architectures at the heart of GCP cloud. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/etmGSD69dR
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
"We're a 130 yr old company. Working w Google helping to change our culture." @CocaCola CTO #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/suvE1WkBPC
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Serverless is a lie. https://t.co/cm2iG0e2Xp
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
.@addvin announcing Google StackDriver: Multicloud monitoring and logging w support for GCP and AWS #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/si3YtqVeNV
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
StackDriver available today in beta. #GCPNEXT https://t.co/7LaLqBezTu pic.twitter.com/AjxIEcnwlm
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Stackdriver is CloudWatch on steroids. Like the smart defaults. #GCPNEXT
— Janakiram MSV (@janakiramm) March 23, 2016
This. Automation not elimination. Still have #AppOps #DataOps etc #GCPNEXT https://t.co/esy3rJXsaM
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
And we see a #GCP Kubernetes app scale to 20k' parallel requests ... #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/Yf3auqmPSZ
— Holger Mueller (@holgermu) March 23, 2016
Bare-metal servers running #Kubernetes in tha house! #hybridcloud #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/yW1b2UH2wh
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
At #GCPNEXT @googlecloud had cool #Kubernetes demo for Hybrid cloud, scaling perf; @docker @coreoslinux @mesosphere pic.twitter.com/qJXCvGlOTc
— Muddu Sudhakar (@smuddu) March 23, 2016
Google #AppEngine devs now full participants in the container ecosystem. Build container apps w/o local or cloud Docker. #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
GCP Security Team reviewed datacenter walkthrough footage frame-by-frame for security info-leakage #GCPNEXT https://t.co/aCbiPM9EQf
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Google Cloud Vision API #machinelearning service highlighted in AppEngine demo. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/ftkKXGeSYy
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
"Being open isn't optional. This is about choosing your next platform." Brian Stevens @addvin #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/iwGY8LVXOR
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Google's Data Platform was key determinant in @Spotify decision to move from AWS to GCP. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/nIO2frDnaE
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Impressive! https://t.co/RNNHYzj9UZ
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Nice demo of Google Cloud DataLab. Just the insights please! #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/e2jLc6WZF9
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
#machinelearning as important as the pc, Internet. Google Brain lead Jeff Dean #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/ALOxv0qtjf
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Jeff Dean announcing Cloud Machine Learning, based on #TensorFlow & pretrained services #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/gv1VPJE9YX
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Build and run #TensorFlow #DeepLearning apps with #cloud magic and no lock-in. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/wMFeCYiRPO
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
Standing room only for Jeff Dean's press/analyst Q&A on Google's #machinelearning efforts #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/bPQXte05n5
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
My Q for Jeff: Does Google make use of #ML in managing cloud? A: Not much yet. Ripe, but greater impact now w vision, speech etc #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
#TensorFlow programs r graphs where flows are numerical arrays. It's a general programming model for lots of problems, domains. #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 23, 2016
#GCPNEXT #AMA with Diane Greene, Urs Hoelze & Brian Stevens. #Machinelearning came up quickly! pic.twitter.com/qtlHt00nXk
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Google’s Eric Schmidt: #Machinelearning will cause 'every successful huge #IPO win in 5 years' https://t.co/aeAygzRXVg #wealth
— Conor Cusack, M.P.A. (@ConorCusack) March 24, 2016
My PoV: Still room for GCP team to tighten up articulation of Go To Market/winning the enterprise strategy. #GCPNEXT #AnalystDay
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Oceans 15 is a movie about breaking into Google Data Centers #GCPNEXT
— . (@cloud_opinion) March 24, 2016
To ensure security, Google tracks every component that enters their cloud, down to individual drives. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/DN7aRB35jb
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
How Google engineers and operates the cloud #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/audcW8Kp2X
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Automation, design & highly skilled people help Google maintain much lower rates of human-caused incidents #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/HwWqbQf8Hh
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
So Google *does* apply #MachineLearning #DeepLearning to the data center. (Yesterday Jeff Dean said no. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/QG3PI5EELX
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Can they ensure the HW components aren't compromised by design (eg backdoors) or intercepted in route? https://t.co/jETC4eYtOv
— Mark Collier 柯理怀 (@sparkycollier) March 24, 2016
@sparkycollier They didn't mention explicitly wrt their cloud, but they build own kit & I imagine they take supply chain sec v seriously
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Layered approach to security for the Google Cloud #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/puAJmIDzKK
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
#CloudNative = Containers + Dynamic Ops + Microservices Eric Brewer #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/IUdrERtUdy
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Docker vs Kubernetes according to Google: "Production Container Operations" #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/iP1kRzIoRn
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
#Kubernetes 1.2 brings scale: 1k nodes, 30k pods @eric_brewer #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/QdqmQJUDwh
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
.@eric_brewer introducing Google Deployment Manager for #Kubernetes #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/ehgSmdb6Zj
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Note, though, that we're not seeing a lot of cloud deals won on price. In most situations, customers care about long-term market leadership.
— Lydia Leong (@cloudpundit) March 24, 2016
Triple #shoey with @robustcloud and @samcharrington #6 #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/em8ypASlcQ
— Holger Mueller (@holgermu) March 24, 2016
Google Cloud Platform customer panel getting kicked off. Any questions from my tweeps? #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/88wEteIJzE
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Spotify an AppEngine user from beginning. Now cost has become major issue. Google willing to work w them. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/CwlfHAArH7
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Spotify Nick Harteau: Amazon's strength is breadth, cost optimization. Google's is in the data platform. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/kWo3mcR5fi
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Snapchat an app to deliver video. Depends on solid network. Google's private net solid in that area. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/VoHhoytETr
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
As a legacy company @CocaCola, want to do more w #DeepLearning #Machinelearning but talent is challenge #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/lsweApdnB2
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Spotify uses lot of ad hoc analysis. #Hadoop to BigQuery has reduced query time fr hrs to mins/secs #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/rh3K5fyVlV
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
@brendandburns shared kubernetes development velocity -- 46 commits/day! That is pretty amazing! #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/q1kQmrQ0FH
— Micheal Benedict (@micheal) March 24, 2016
Spotify shifting control plane to GCP. Still uses a portfolio of providers for content delivery #CDN #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Having deep tech discussions around latency increasingly important. Need to have those w folks who know domain. Alan w Coca-Cola #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
As a CPG company, we don't have skillsets to deliver and can't attract talent. Lean heavily on Google for innovation. #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Spotify: By aligning w Google I'm stronger w data, but weaker b/c perceived privacy issues. GCP needs to drive thought leadership #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Coke: Natural intellectual curiousity a plus for Google. Come up w interesting problem and Googlers will dive in. #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Coke & Spotify agree: #Hybrid only exists for us in transition, in order to get to destination. #Cloud #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Looking back, success factor for Spotify was not having component teams. No one's ego tied up in Cassandra, etc. Focus on apps. #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
And even more than apps, focus on business outcomes. Then tech org willing to be nimble to achieve goal. https://t.co/MkBrOYfzLC
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Spotify benefits fr GCP platinum support, but even if not GCP way more approachable, better docs, reference implementations, etc #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
This is huge fr a transformation perspective. Also what's powerful about µsvcs from an org/culture perspective. https://t.co/zCUb2B9Pv8
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Google Cloud Platform partner panel starting. @AvereSystems @PwC_LLP @bitnami @fastly represented. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/EDRFSbvAaA
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
.@AvereSystems financial client needed to scale to 10k cores w/in a day. GCP was only cloud to deliver #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/oe9LQ7CqMS
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
IT needs to and will transition to service orchestration role, supporting ent innovation. @jamesbova #PWC #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/DZfMdchFGh
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Scalable container registry foundational to @bitnami & is hard. Getting from Google saved co months. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/lrtunrq8ul
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Consulting game changing. Cos want solutions with a SaaS wrapper. Now building with GCP. @jamesbova #PWC #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/3HGwaIVx1P
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Google individually doing security certifications/audits w movie studios in light of Sony breach. #VFX #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
"There are no exclusive deals in cloud space, but they bcome de facto exclusive bc we enjoy working w GCP team" @ebender @fastly #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Partners painting picture of Google Cloud Platform as Avis to AWS's Hertz. They try harder. #GCPNEXT pic.twitter.com/GtUldCFTzP
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
Every solution that PWCs building, we're contemplating role of #machinelearning #deeplearning #innovation. @jamesbova #GCPNEXT
— Sam Charrington (@samcharrington) March 24, 2016
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