Google Cloud Next '23: Our top takeaways.
Highlights of Google Cloud Next
This week’s Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco provided an exciting mix of new opportunities enabled by technology, while being mindful of current customer challenges with legacy systems. The “Living in Legacy Land” musical that kickstarted the keynote was an interesting and thought-provoking mirror to the audience. Not surprisingly, Google’s work on AI was a key part of the Cloud Next 2023 sessions.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai phrased it boldly: ‘AI will touch every sector, every industry, every business function, and significantly change the way we live and work” and “this isn’t just the future. We are already starting to experience the benefits right now. As a company, we’ve been preparing for this moment for some time”. Google’s deep and long-time investments in this domain was reflected in the impressive slew of product announcements during Cloud Next ‘23. And as of today already over 70% of generative AI startups rely on Google’s cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities.
Our top 3 selection of Google Cloud Next 2023 announcements that we felt very excited about:
1. Expansion of Duet AI features: Duet AI, showcased during Google I/O in May, initially offered developer features such as code and chat assistance. Google is now expanding it to include (legacy) code refactoring and translation, context-aware code generation, API management and application management.The company will also add Duet AI as generative AI-based assistant to most of its cloud services including data analytics, databases, and infrastructure and application management. General availability of Duet AI in Google Workspace was also announced, with general availability of Duet AI in Google Cloud coming later this year.
2. Vertex AI gains strength as a unified AI platform: Launched in 2023, Vertex AI combines data engineering, data science, and machine learning engineering workflows that enables teams to collaborate using a common toolset and scale applications using the benefits of Google Cloud. With Vertex AI, you can build ML models or deploy and scale them easily using pre-trained and custom tooling. Since March, tens of thousands of developers have embraced the use of more than 100 AI models on Vertex, building generative AI applications. At Cloud Next Google announced that it is also adding Meta’s Llama 2 and TII’s Falcon.This makes Google Cloud the only cloud provider to support first-party, open source and third-party models.
3. Next level, unified data capabilities: Data is the foundation for genative AI, so it was good to see that Google is releasing new capabilities to its Google’s Data and AI Cloud that will help unlock new insights from (legacy) systems and boost productivity for development teams. Announcements included amongst others BigQuery Studio, a single interface for data engineering, analytics, and predictive analysis. Allowing simplified analytics at scale with a unified data and AI foundation.
Key takeaways from the developer keynote
Our pre-sales consultant Vinsu Varghese was invited to join the developer keynote session at Google Cloud’s Amsterdam office.
This event proved to be both enlightening and engaging, offering a wealth of valuable information across various domains. The main themes revolved around Product, Platform, Security, and Data, shedding light on the ever-evolving landscape of technology and its implications for our work.
A major focal point of the event was about modernizing legacy systems through the power of AI. Throughout the keynote speeches, speakers explained the challenges associated with legacy systems and how modernization efforts can rectify these obstacles.
One noteworthy presentation was led by Alice Keeler, who demonstrated the creation of an Appsheet application through Google Chat and Duet AI. This innovative application facilitated the recording of safety incidents and subsequent root cause analysis through AI-driven data modeling.The application’s ability to automatically establish relationships between data tables showcased the potential of AI in streamlining complex processes.
Lukas Karlsson’s presentation tackled the crucial aspects of scalability, infrastructure maintenance, and personalized user experiences. The demonstration on implementing CPU boosts for cloud run applications and deploying to multiple environments simultaneously was very interesting. Of particular interest was the discussion on fully managed cloud run jobs, eliminating the need for extensive custom coding.
In the realm of security, Adrienne Walcer shared her experiences as part of the technical incident management team, detailing the successful mitigation of the Log4J vulnerability without disrupting customer operations. Mark Johnson’s insightful talk delved into security measures for cloud and applications, revealing how Binary Authorization build policies can fortify deployment security through AI-driven mechanisms.
Sudev Bohra’s presentation unveiled the impressive feat of migrating Gmail’s legacy storage system to cloud spanner without any noticeable disruptions. The zero-downtime migration process, managing both historical and new data, showcased the excellent planning and execution involved.
Miles Ward delivered the anticipated keynote, focusing on leveraging AI for data insights. He demonstrated the transformation of audio clips into structured data using Duet AI, offering actionable insights into incident patterns and training needs. This highlighted AI’s potential for extracting value from unstructured data.
In conclusion, the Google Next Developer Keynote event left an unerasable mark by showcasing the intersection of cutting-edge technology and practical application. We believe the insights gained from this event will prove invaluable as we continue to navigate the dynamic landscape of our industry.
In conclusion
It was encouraging to see how well Google Cloud’s vision on modernizing legacy systems and boosting developer productivity aligns to the approach that Vanenburg is taking with its products, solutions and services.
Google Cloud Next 2023 left us even more convinced about the power of Google Cloud & Vanenburg to differentiate from your competitors with next generation legacy modernization unleashing the power of AI.
Check the blog by Thomas Kurian for more on Google Cloud’s announcements during Cloud Next 2023.
See our earlier blogs for more background reading on our vision of AI-enabled applications and application development:
