A partner's view of Google's Cloud Next conference

Cloudreach's Chris Bunch runs through the biggest themes and takeaways from San Francisco

Another week, another airport...this time it's San Francisco as I type this while waiting for a flight back to a Brexit-riddled Britain. I, along with 30 or so other Cloudreachers, have been at Google Next - Google's annual mega show for cloud computing.

Is this a big deal?

It is. There were about 35,000 attendees - a mark of how far Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has come. It's an interesting mix of partners, developers, and customers that you don't tend to get at other shows, which I find are typically more geared towards a single group. It depends on your perspective as to whether you think that's a good thing or not.

San Francisco and the Moscone centre handle big conferences all the time, and this felt manageable in size. It seems like a lifetime ago that I wrote about Google Next London and how we were seeing momentum building around GCP - actually it was 2017. I'd say the same rings true here: Google is betting big on cloud and people are taking notice. The energy here was palpable and the announcements were definitely interesting.

Come on then, what announcements?

This was Google's new CEO Tom Kurian's first big event, and he did a solid job - I'm always impressed by anyone who can speak for a long time without an autocue, so well done Thomas. He continued a theme set by Diane Greene of talking about Google being ready for enterprise customers, and confirming they are going to hire a mountain of sellers and supporting folks to make sure they do better here. The war on talent is not cooling down any time soon.

On the tech side, the big announcement was Anthos. I am only marginally exaggerating when I say that every other word in the first keynote was "hybrid" and the other alternating term was "multi-cloud". Google is taking a bold, differentiating step here around being the most "open" cloud and offering a hybrid solution for managing workloads that run on-premise, in GCP and on AWS and Azure. This is of course built on Kubernetes, something Google knows more about than anyone else does.

The Google team tend to build platforms well, so while I haven't seen the control plane properly, I would suspect once they get some user adoption, this will evolve quickly. The concept is sensible enough: a single platform to develop, control and secure your applications - regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

Google has also forged tight partnerships with a selection of vendors including Elastic and MongoDB - mainly those frustrated with the other vendors - as it looks to position itself as supportive of open ecosystems, partners and the open source movement.

So, the future is hybrid?

I think we have to concede that cloud adoption is still in its early stages and there is significant demand from the market for solutions that support hybrid deployments - see Azure Stack, AWS Outposts and VMware on AWS for other evidence here. While I am still not 100 per cent convinced of the payback of investing significantly in on-premise, I can see the lure here and I suspect we'll be working with clients on Anthos in the near future.

I don't think anyone has got any meaningful traction yet in this area, but perhaps Google will be the first.

Google will be pushing the "open" message hard and savaging AWS and Azure for lock-in I'm sure.

What else?

Vertical solutions. Not very exciting, right? Well, it could be, especially if you work in retail, as Google is going to bundle a host of things together in this area and bring it to market as an end-to-end offering. There were lots of interesting use cases, with IKEA highlighted.

For Container fans, Cloud Run also looks interesting - taking a Docker file as input, and handling everything else for you behind the scenes as a serverless deployment mechanism.

Anthos Migrate is brand new and in beta - this is technology to migrate from on-premise (or another cloud) directly into containers. This should work pretty well already as it will have been built on some awesome tech Google acquired when it bought Velostrata last year.

Cloud Data Fusion looks interesting for connecting many complex data sets together and building ETL pipelines, and spreadsheet jockeys will love that Google Sheets can now seamlessly handle billions of lines of data from BigQuery, which is pretty amazing.

There were many other announcements of course, but those are my top picks. For a full list of all the data and ML announcements, see this blog post from an awesome colleague. My favourite was basically a declaration of war on Teradata.

Sounds like a good trip?

It was. I'm glad I made the long flight from the UK. GCP knows it's not the market leader, but it is going all in to try to grow aggressively - and we're seeing all the signs of that happening. That doesn't mean AWS and Azure won't also be hugely successful - they are and will be. The market is so vast, and growing so quickly, all the major vendors are growing well. The concept of differentiating through an open hybrid platform is an interesting one and this will be a core theme for some years to come.

See you at Next London, later in the year.

P.S. Did I mention we bagged Security Partner of the Year?

Chris Bunch is head of Europe at Cloudreach

This article first appeared on LinkedIn