Štěpán's top picks from Google Cloud NEXT '19

It's been a busy few days here in San Francisco. The Moscone Center is buzzing with people. I am really enjoying meeting other Cloud enthusiasts and exchanging experiences and ideas with them. Except for Tuesday's keynote, which in my personal opinion could have been a bit more interesting, all other speeches were full of inspiration and have filled me with fresh energy for my work in the upcoming months. You can find the detailed reports on the official Google blog, but I'd like to share with you some of the top announcements that I personally find very exciting:

Anthos and Cloud Run as the future of Cloud solutions

One of the two top news imho is Anthos previously known as Cloud Services Platform. Unified platform for deploy, run and manage your apps. It sounds great when used in a hybrid/multi- cloud environment and I personally think it will be just fab for big enterprises. There is no such thing on the market at the moment. If it really works the way that Google promises, it has the potential to become one of their key services. I can't wait to try it out with my team at Revolgy. Once we do that, I will make sure to let you know whether it met our expectations.

Even more exciting than Anthos for me was the announcements of Cloud Run Serverless container/Kubernetes platform is a step in the right direction. It makes me very enthusiastic about the future of Cloud technologies. It will significantly simplify the way of managing applications. I can't wait to introduce it to our clients. Btw, I wonder what will be the response from AWS and their Fargate?

New investments in the Open Source

Last but not least, the announcement of deepening the commitment to open source and integration of open source services to GCP (Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j a Redis Labs for now… more will follow soon) It proves that Google really believes in the open-source strategy and is willing to invest in it. It makes a lot of sense in the light of recent problems the AWS had with the open-source community. We will see what will the AWS answer be in December at Re:invent. :)

Wednesday keynote was much more interesting and brought a lot of news too. You can see the entire overview here. Some of the most interesting announcements in my opinion were:

ML project management platform and GCP for Windows Workloads

AI Platform, which is a complete end-to-end platform for designing, launching and managing ML projects. ML is a real buzzword these days and a lot of GCP users will surely welcome the possibility to have all their ML projects in one place.

A lot was said about Windows workloads. I'd like to pinpoint a new managed database on GCP - Microsoft SQL Server and Managed Active Directory. I think it was a smart choice to open the possibility of choosing GCP as the infrastructure for Windows Workloads. I truly think it will be tempting for a lot of companies.

New retail solution and future development of Google services

And finally a new solution for retail. What makes it interesting is, that it's a suite of tools aimed at a very specific industry. It's the first of a kind solution from Google and it might indicate a direction Google will take in the future.

Overall, NEXT '19 is great! One more day to go. Let me know what do you think about this year's announcements, or if I missed something important, that you think should be mentioned as well. Follow us on twitter to check out what else we're doing here.