A community view: what’s top of mind at Google Cloud Next '17

Our annual ritual of inviting thousands of customers, partners, developers, IT pros, industry analysts and press to join us for three days of learning about Google Cloud has arrived. This week we'll open the doors to Google Cloud Next '17, and I can tell you, you're in for a tremendous show.

But instead of sharing what I’m excited about, here's a sampling of opinion from people in the community who are coming to Next.

"The market is moving so fast that keeping tabs on it is tough when there’s so much going on. Google popped up overnight and is doing some very innovative work. As far as sessions go, I want to hear what Vint Cerf and Marc Andreessen have to say in their fireside chat on the past and future of enterprise computing. They’ve had a little bit to do with the internet! My company’s focused on orchestration and managing the lifecycle of code, so I’ll be attending sessions on Kubernetes, Docker and anything on DevOps. It’s where everything is headed."

"I’m interested in finding out about enterprise companies adopting Google Cloud as well as the traction Google is seeing for machine learning. I want to see what’s in store to attract more devs to the service. Another trend I’m watching closely is serverless — I’ll be interested to learn how Google Cloud Functions stacks up against AWS Lambda."

"We’ve been gradually migrating our systems over to GCP from IBM Softlayer. We are big advocates of handing off management of infrastructure to Google’s cloud services instead of wrangling it ourselves. We recently migrated our time series database to Google Cloud Bigtable. I’ll be giving a talk on this migration on March 8. I’m looking forward to meeting other GCP customers and learning about new products. Providing feedback one to one with specific Google teams is also really valuable."

"I am looking forward to learning more about how how Google views the next generation of data centers in the context of software development across multiple cloud infrastructures . . . be they customer infrastructures or those offered by competitors. . . We are curious about the evolution of APIs as they become more important for companies as a way to reach more third-party developers. This larger story about APIs is particularly pertinent when considering new "serverless" style architectures. It's in this realm that we see the intersection of machine learning and connected systems evolving. We'll be looking for proof points of this evolution when speaking with Google developers and engineers as well as customers and conference attendees. I am also hoping to get a deeper understanding of the way Google views open source ecosystems."

"1) Kubernetes vs. everything else
2) Machine Learning tools"

Weird. Nobody mentioned the open bar and catching up with old friends!

See you there, or on the livestream!