Google Cloud Next: Week One Announcements

July 20th, 2020 | Tech

By Darshan Puttannaiah

Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir kicked off this past week with a lineup of on-demand content focused on fresh Google Cloud capabilities and industry insights, including dozens of industry-specific breakout sessions.

While week one brought endless “wow” moments to the table, there were a few announcements that seemed to top the charts. Here are some of the stand-out announcements the Google Cloud team unveiled.

Week One: Top Google Cloud Next Announcements

1. BigQuery Omni

Google Cloud announced the BigQuery Omni release this week. BigQuery Omni is a multi-cloud analytics solution that allows you to run Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse to analyze data across multiple cloud platforms without leaving the BigQuery user interface.

Moving data to other cloud providers has historically been expensive and time-consuming. However, with BigQuery Omni, users can use standard SQL and their existing BigQuery APIs to move data instantly without paying egress fee (AWS charges $0.09/GB, while Azure charges $0.087/GB for outbound data transfer).

Your BigQuery instances will run within the same region, availability zone, and virtual network as your AWS or Azure workloads.

This announcement is pivotal as it delivers a cost-effective and secure way to access and analyze data from other clouds — offering superior, simple business intelligence.

Benefits of BigQuery Omni:

• Better user experience with developers choice
• Reduction of data silos
• Avoid duplicate data across multiple environments
• Single pane of glass for business intelligence

2. Confidential VMs

Google Cloud’s commitment to cutting-edge security remained steadfast in its release of Confidential VMs. The Google Cloud environment already encrypts data while at rest and in transit, but this release provides memory encryption to keep workloads isolated while processing.

Confidential VMs use Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology that is supported by the recent second-generation AMD Epyc CPUs. The data remains encrypted when it is used, indexed, queried or trained. The encryption keys are created in the hardware — on a per VM basis — and cannot be exported.

Confidential VMs are the first product in Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio. This release aims to help highly-regulated industries capitalize on cloud computing capabilities that were previously impossible due to confidentiality requirements.

Thanks to Confidential VMs, highly-regulated organizations now can collaborate on confidential data sets in the cloud while preserving confidentiality and privacy.

When placed into the lens of healthcare, financial services, and public sector opportunities — confidential VMs are a game-changer.

Benefits of Confidential VMs:

• Encrypts data at rest, in transit, and while processing
• Opens new possibilities for highly-regulated industries
• Encryption keys are generated in hardware, per VM, and can’t be exported
• Confidential VMs can quickly be enabled to any existing Google Cloud VM

3. Anthos on Bare-Metal

If you wanted to modernize your legacy application with Anthos you’d traditionally need to do so on a virtualized infrastructure. However, some organizations felt the dependency of a hypervisor layer brought challenges. Why couldn’t there be a way to avoid this and modernize to reduce costs?

This week, Google Cloud announced a solution: Anthos on Bare-Metal. This deployment option allows you to run Anthos on physical servers, deployed on an operating system provided by you, without a hypervisor layer. 

This announcement further expands the realm of possibilities with Anthos. Today you can run Anthos on VMware, bare-metal, AWS, Azure (preview-only), edge environments.

Benefits of Anthos Bare-Metal:

• Deploy Anthos on your own operating system
• Avoid hypervisor dependencies
• Save time and reduce associated costs
• Unlock Antho’s “write once, run anywhere” capabilities faster

What Was Your Biggest “Wow” Moment?

Share what Google Cloud Next announcements were “wow” moments for you in the comments. Week two has just launched. There are a total of nine weeks in the lineup so be sure to keep up with all the Google Cloud action → build your session playlist.

Want to see the latest buzz on Google Cloud Next? View the current #GoogleCloudNext trending topics from Qwinix.