Netpremacy’s final Google Cloud Next Highlights

11 September 2020

Netpremacy Next Insights

One Final Roundup – Netpremacy’s highlights

Netpremacy Next Highlights: Our highlights from the remaining weeks

We can’t quite believe how fast Google Cloud Next has whizzed past. Over the 9 weeks, we have seen so much exciting content, industry insights, and product updates. Although things have been slightly different for Google Cloud Next this year, we are glad that Google technology has still enabled us to stay connected, and to learn about the development in cloud technology whilst working from a remote environment. We have enjoyed learning throughout the weeks, and already we are looking forward to what 2021 will bring. 

Here are some highlights of the final leg of Google Cloud Next on Air, we have included links to our favorite bits, however access to the full Google Cloud Next on-air event can be found here. 

Week 5: Data Analytics 

The week began with a keynote on how the latest innovations in Google Cloud’s smart analytics platform can help strip out layers of complexity and analyze data in a multi-cloud environment. Google Cloud has now developed a comprehensive toolkit of data services and products, so we have listed some below.

  • Cloud Composer, a fully managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow
  • Cloud Data Fusion for fully managed, cloud-native data integration at any scale
  • Data Catalog, a fully managed and highly scalable data discovery, and metadata management service
  • Looker, an enterprise platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics

What’s New in BigQuery ML, Featuring Demandbase

This session demonstrated how to build and use machine learning models in BigQuery using SQL in a matter of minutes. Google is adding many exciting model types and new features to BigQuery ML. Watch the session here. 

New Big Query Features – Google announced new features on pricing, administration, and monitoring. Watch the full session here to learn more about the new features that have been released.

Data-Driven Responses to COVID-19 Using Looker & BigQuery

This session taught us how e-commerce companies are using BigQuery and Looker to leverage COVID datasets to adapt to radically-increased usage, how restaurant chains are retooling to focus on deliveries, and how governmental agencies are using it to plan so they can mitigate the impacts of COVID on their citizens. In addition the session talks around how organisations across the healthcare space — hospital systems, labs, and insurers — are using it to understand how to continue to help people and save lives. Watch the full session here. 

Week 6: Data management and databases

Week 6 of Next OnAir ‘20 focused on how to migrate and manage enterprise data with security, reliability, high availability, and fully managed data services.It started with a keynote that showed us a few new releases and showcases how customers are transforming their core business with innovative new database solutions. Watch the session here. 

Cloud SQL is a managed database service that makes it easy to set up and maintain your MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases in the cloud. The session “What’s new with Cloud SQL” looked at new features and enhancements that improve security, protect against disasters, and much more. Watch the session here. 

Connecting Cloud SQL from Kubernetes – In this session, Google explains the ins and outs of connecting to Cloud SQL from Google Kubernetes Engine. Learn from multiple scenarios how to make the most of your Cloud SQL instance: understand how to safely and securely connect to your Cloud SQL instance from a Kubernetes-based application, when to use public vs private IPs, recommended practices to deploy the Cloud SQL proxy, and how to structure for high availability. Watch the session here. 

Week 7: Application modernisation

Week 7 of Google Cloud Next focused on how to develop and run applications using open source and other software without needing operations staff. This is a very relevant topic considering all the massive changes and challenges businesses have faced since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The top highlights of this week were as follows: 

Hands-on Keynote: Building Trust for Speedy Innovation: This session focused on the basics—“what are you really trying to accomplish?”—by tying technology innovation back to business goals such as increasing trust and speed.

Getting Started with Anthos: With many businesses adopting hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies, they’re looking for tools that can help them create the best environments possible. Google explains how Anthos is a tool that has a lot to offer for this.

Mainframe Modernisation: Accelerating Legacy Transformation: More businesses are working to understand life beyond the mainframe. This session addresses challenges and solutions around mainframe-to-container modernisation.

Integrating VM Workloads into Anthos Service Mesh: This session addresses that VM solutions are still popular and sometimes the best tool for the job. It also talks around how popular technologies commonly associated with containers, like service mesh, can offer benefits to VM-based applications also. 

Evolve to Zero Trust Security Model‎ with Anthos Security: Google has a wealth of experience to draw on when it comes to modern, zero-trust application architectures and this session will share that expertise, and demonstrate the tools to implement it yourself.

Week 8: Cloud Ai

As usual, the week began with a keynote. Next OnAir solution keynote, Generating Value With AI, in this session we got to hear how customers across industries have used AI to navigate uncertain times – and how they’re innovating with AI to transform their organisations going forward, something very relevant for businesses all over the world. 

Operationalising machine learning workflows are critical to building repeatable, scalable processes. To improve the MLOps experience, Google announced: Prediction backend GA, Managed Pipelines, Metadata, Experiments, and Model Evaluation. These features—part of AI Platform—provide automation and monitoring at all steps of ML system construction, including integration, testing, releasing, deployment and infrastructure management. Read more here: Key requirements for an MLOps foundation.

Google also announced Dialogflow CX, designed to support complex (multi-turn) conversations. This can be built once and then deployed everywhere, both in contact centers and digital channels. 

Google also spoke around how enhancements are continuously being made to Contact Center AI. This includes Agent Assist for Chat, a new module that provides agents with continuous support over chat in addition to voice calls by identifying intent and providing real-time, and step-by-step assistance. Read more about the latest updates in Conversational AI drives better customer experiences.

Google announced several solutions that leverage AI to help with industry-specific challenges. Lending Document AI, a new, specialised solution powered by Document AI for the mortgage industry, automates many routine document reviews and speeds up loan applications. Procure-to-Pay Document AI, now in beta, helps companies automate the procurement cycle. And Media Translation API provides real-time speech translation from streaming audio data. 

Here is a video recap of the weeks content. 

Week 9: Business application platform

Week 9 of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir was about continued investments in the business application platform—how it’s helping organisations build and automate business processes, create and extend new applications, and connect and modernise legacy applications. 

Google introduced a new business application platform category, including API management, no-code app dev, and automation and data insights capabilities.

They also announced the beta release of API Gateway, this is a fully-managed service that lets developers build, secure, and monitor APIs for Google Cloud workloads and serverless backends.

AppSheet also unveiled two new capabilities. Apigee datasource for AppSheet connects AppSheet with Apigee APIs, opening up numerous new data sources for no-code apps. AppSheet Automation let users automate business processes through a natural language interface and contextual recommendations.

Finally, it was announced that new app templates from AppSheet extend G Suite capabilities further into no-code development of line-of-business apps.

These are just some of the sessions and highlights that we found useful, however there is a whole host of content available, on demand here. 

If you are interested in any of the updates we have posted around over the Google Cloud Next on Air series, and would like to know more, please contact us for a further discussion.