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How Google is bringing cloud computing innovation to the enterprise

March 23, 2016
Brian Stevens

Vice President, Cloud Platforms

GCP NEXT 2016 — SAN FRANCISCO — Today is a big day for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We’re excited to welcome thousands of developers and IT pros from around the world to San Francisco for our annual cloud computing conference. During the event, we'll be announcing major enhancements to the platform as well as sharing important progress in how we’re putting the same infrastructure that powers Google, to work for your business.

In the last year, cloud has gone from being the untrusted option to being seen as a more secure option for many companies. We know that compliance, support and integration with existing IT investments is critical for businesses trying to use public cloud services to accelerate into new markets. So what is Google doing to help?

We’re combining the 15+ years of ground-breaking, applied computer science in distributed computing, data management and machine learning that powers Google with the capabilities businesses need to safely adopt cloud today.

This means exposing innovations like machine learning and big data analytics so that you can easily spot new trends and new markets early. Users are tapping into the power of Google BigQuery to process trillions of rows in seconds — building streaming data pipelines with Google Cloud Dataflow, and we’re bringing Google Data Studio 360 to our cloud customers for visualization and reporting. It means deploying globally and automating IT operations to remove organizational drag and doing all of these things in a way that protects the security of your systems, information, employees and customers.

Customer momentum

We couldn’t be prouder of the amazing set of customers that have chosen Cloud Platform to take advantage of this continuous innovation at Google. Best Buy, Disney Consumer Products & Interactive Media, Domino’s Pizza, FIS Global, Spotify, Macy’s, Pocket Gems, Wix, Atomic Fiction, JDA, Heineken and many more companies are using GCP because they believe that the key to staying in front is staying innovative.

For our customers, cloud means no longer having to think about data centers, servers, storage and networking. Instead, they're able to focus on creating amazing applications, products and services for their customers knowing that Google is taking care of the infrastructure powering their business.

Data center expansion

Customers around the world are quickly scaling up their applications on Cloud Platform, made possible by our global network. In addition to our network, we’re adding more regions as our customer base becomes larger, more diverse and accustomed to running their workloads on cloud.

This week we announced US Western region in Oregon and East Asia region in Tokyo, Japan, both operational later this year. These are the first two of more than 10 additional GCP regions we'll be adding to our network through 2017.

Hybrid cloud management and operational efficiency

Partners are a critical piece of our strategy to helping customers run their applications on Google Cloud. In the last year, we've rolled out a new partner program, our ecosystem has more than doubled in size and we're seeing innovations in terms of how partners build solutions on our platform to help customers adopt cloud.

Last week, we had over 300 GCP ecosystem partners join us at TeamWork 2016, our annual Global Partner Conference. We rolled out several new partner programs and incentives at the event, all designed to accelerate partner success and stimulate partner innovations on our platform. The energy coming out of the event was great to see, and we're excited for partners to be at the core of everything we do. Our goal is to build a partner economy, not just a channel and to put partners at the center of our strategy.

On that note, we’re happy to announce that BMC, Pivotal, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Tenable Network Security, Veritas and many other enterprise ISVs are working hard to integrate their software with GCP, enabling customers to leverage the skills and software they're already familiar with to manage and monitor their resources on Cloud Platform. System Integrators are also a key aspect of our partner strategy. Accenture, CI&T, Cloud Technology Partners, PA Consulting and PwC are important partners helping enterprises move to Google Cloud.

Enterprise feature enhancements

Moving on to features we know you care about, audits and compliance are big concerns for enterprise cloud buyers — beyond these are administration, setting policies and tracking and control of the environment.

Audit Logging
We'll be launching Audit Logging before the end of May, to enable you to answer the question of “who did what, where, and when?” on Cloud Platform. This launch provides the core infrastructure needed for individual Google Cloud services to provide immutable audit logs along with multiple initial service integrations, including Google App Engine, BigQuery, Dataflow, IAM for Projects and Service Accounts, as well as API Credentials. Audit logs are delivered to the Cloud Console Activity Stream as well as to Stackdriver Logging, from where they can easily be archived in Google Cloud Storage, streamed to BigQuery for analysis, or exported via Google Cloud Pub/Sub to a variety of partners, such as Splunk, for additional interrogation. This launch marks the beginning of an ongoing process in which we'll be continuously rolling out audit logs to the rest of Cloud Platform.

IAM Roles
Securely controlling access to Google Cloud resources is important to you. We know that the existing owner/editor/viewer roles are not granular enough for all your resource management needs. That’s why we’ve created a set of new IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles now launched to beta.

IAM allows you to assign permissions to your Google Cloud resources through IAM roles, which are defined as a collection of permissions —

owner/editor/viewer gave users permissions to all resources in a project. These new roles allow you to grant more granular permissions to specific types of resources in a project. This is the first of the many launches we have planned to enhance IAM capabilities on GCP. In the coming months, we'll add more roles and the ability to define your own custom roles.

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Customer Supplied Encryption Keys
The ability to control and manage your own encryption keys is another capability that you've asked us for. We announced customer supplied encryption in beta for Compute Engine last July and we'll be graduating to GA shortly. Cloud Storage also supports bringing your own encryption keys to secure storage resources, currently in beta.

Networking
On the cloud networking front, we've improved the flexibility of both cross-cloud interconnect and intra-cloud network segmentation options so that you can federate network transport and optimization services, as well as support workload portability across hybrid cloud environments. GCP delivery of Subnetworks, Cloud Router, Cloud VPN and IAM network roles take advantage of this flexibility and enforce dynamic network and security policies with programmatic control and real-time app/user context, eliminating low-level configuration complexity through intelligent automation. Our software-defined Cloud Load Balancer simplifies global cloud service delivery with a single Virtual IP (VIP), while delivering best-in-class auto-scaling and speed (see more here). This resilient BGP-enabled anycast network infrastructure also paves the way for services like Cloud CDN, which uses our distributed edge cache infrastructure to optimize user experience for rich media applications.

Commitment to openness and running containers at scale
Google and Cloud Platform are innovating in computer science in the open. We're fully committed to contributing our learnings back to the community, with some notable, revolutionary examples: Hadoop MapReduce, Spanner, Software-Defined Networking, Kubernetes, Dataflow and TensorFlow for machine learning, among hundreds more. We recently joined the Open Compute Project to drive standards in IT infrastructure; we're a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and would urge customers for whom openness is important to look at our long track record as a contributing member of the software community.

At the heart of our open source contributions in cloud is Kubernetes, an open source system for automating deployment, scaling and operations of containerized apps. Recently we announced Kubernetes 1.2, which includes two important updates for enterprises working with containers. The cluster size has been increased 400% to 1,000 nodes and 30,000 containers per cluster; and we added support for TLS for secure communication and L7 for http-based traffic routing, providing a straightforward way to integrate into custom networking environments. Because our fully managed container service, Google Container Engine (GKE) is built on Kubernetes, customers using this service automatically inherit all the latest functionality.


The future of cloud is just beginning

From advancements in machine learning and containers, to better ways to monitor, manage and secure cloud workloads, we’re taking big steps forward to change how businesses compute. But that’s just the start of this next wave of cloud innovation. More and more developers, startups and companies large and small are discovering the benefits of a different kind of cloud, one that challenges convention through continuous innovation, while protecting and leveraging existing IT investments.

We look forward to your feedback at GCP NEXT and hope you’ll join us on this exciting journey!

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