Today kicked off the first day of Google Cloud Next ’21! The annual conference is back in its fifth year to showcase what’s new and next for Google Cloud. Sessions are set to span from Oct. 12 to Oct. 14. The live opening keynote from the Google Cloud team was pack-full of announcements, and we couldn’t be more excited for the week ahead.
Without further ado, let’s break down day one with a look at key announcements and takeaways.
Looker Comes Together with Tableau to Make Data Visualization Easier
One of the most exciting — and, to some, surprising — announcements from today’s keynote that set Twitter abuzz is Tableau’s integration with Google’s Looker. The integration includes full access to Looker’s semantic model and support for LookML and Google Sheets.
Tableau + Looker? Yep. we’re bringing the power and flexibility of LookML to Tableau’s self-service analytics platform. https://t.co/FlX7ROaff1
— Francois Ajenstat (@Ajenstat) October 12, 2021
For our customers, Looker solves governance problems around business metrics. Ninety percent of all companies we encounter have 17+ different places where gross margin is calculated. LookML answers this problem and uses GitOps to manage changes. Google Cloud is seeing the strategic problem this solves for customers. By integrating Looker with Tableau and Sheets, they’re helping customers cleanly separate the analytics engineering and metrics definition processes from the visualizations, reporting, and ad hoc data analysis processes.
Google Launches Work Safer for Secure Collaboration
In today’s never-ending reports of ransomware and data breaches, it was exciting to see Google bundling their security approach into the Work Safer program and pledging $50B to help the rest of the IT supply chain become more secure. Our customers are reassured that there has never been a case of Ransomware on Google’s ChromeOS or Workspace.
Work Safer provides a safer way for organizations using Google Workspace (formerly GSuite) to work together and communicate in hybrid work environments. The solution combines the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with BeyondCorp Enterprise for secure access with integrated threat and data protection. Enhanced security extends to both internal users and third-party organizations, such as vendors and partners.
The Distributed Cloud Brings Google’s Infrastructure Closer to the Edge and Into Data Centers
The unveiling of Google Distributed Cloud reinforced the importance of “the Edge” and 5G for Google Cloud customers to run workloads at the location that optimizes their performance and total cost.
Distributed Cloud is a set of fully managed, Anthos-enabled hardware and software solutions that bring Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to customer locations (e.g., retail stores and factory floors) and into customer data centers.
We continuously hear from retail customers that having a completely managed hardware platform by Google will simplify store operations. It’ll also give them the flexibility to minimize cost per store and optimize their utilization of shared compute resources in regional or telco points of presence.
Google Distributed Cloud is ideal for local data processing, edge computing, and accelerating on-premises modernization. It addresses sovereignty, strict data security, and privacy requirements, too.
That’s all for today. Tell us your favorite sessions from day one in the comments below, and don’t forget to follow Qwinix | Cloudbakers on social for more updates and announcements. We’ll see you again tomorrow!
