Google Cloud Next 2019
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Google Cloud unveils new identity tools based on Zero Trust framework
Google Cloud announced some new identity tools today at Google Cloud Next designed to simplify identity Access Management within the context of the BeyondCorp Zero Trust security model.
Zero Trust, as the name implies, means you have to assume you can’t trust anyone using your network. In the days before the cloud, you could set up a firewall and with some reasonable degree of certainty assume people inside had permission to be there. The cloud changed that, and Zero Trust was born to help provide a more modern security posture that took that into account.
The company wants to make it easier for developers to build identity into applications without a lot of heavy lifting. It sees identity as more than a way to access applications, but as an integral part of the security layer, especially in the context of the BeyondCorp approach. If you know who the person is, and can understand the context of how they are interacting with you, that can give strong clues as to whether the person is who they actually say they are.
This is about more than protecting your applications, it’s about making sure that your entire system from your virtual machine to your APIs are all similarly protected. “Over the past few months, we added context-aware access capabilities in Beta to Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) and VPC Service Controls to help protect web apps, VMs and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) APIs. Today, we are making these capabilities generally available in Cloud IAP, as well as extending them in Beta to Cloud Identity to help you protect access to G Suite apps,” the company wrote in an introductory blog post.
Diagram: Google
This context-aware access layer protects all of these areas across the cloud. “Context-aware access allows you to define and enforce granular access to apps and infrastructure based on a user’s identity and the context of their request. This can help increase your organization’s security posture while giving users an easy way to more securely access apps or infrastructure resources, from virtually any device, anywhere,” the company wrote.
The G Suite protection is in beta, but the rest is generally available starting today.
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Google extends its BeyondCorp security model to G Suite
BeyondCorp is Google’s model for securing networks not just through VPNs and other endpoint security techniques, but through a model that focuses on context-aware access policies that focus on the user’s identity, hardware and the context of the request. That has been Google’s internal security policy for a while now and over the last few months, it started bringing it to its own customers, too, starting with its Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy, which is now generally available, and its VPC Service Controls.
Today, the company is extending these context-aware access capabilities to its Cloud Identity user and device management service, as well as G Suite, its productivity suite. So while earlier implementation centered around protecting a company’s technical cloud infrastructure, this release focuses on devices and cloud-based apps like Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Calendar.
In this context, some devices, for example, may be more highly trusted because they have been enrolled in the Cloud Identity service and because a number of security policies are in place for it. That’s a different kind of security posture than a system that simply trusts users because they come through a specific VPN.
Context-aware access for G Suite apps is now in beta, but only for customers who subscribe to Cloud Identity Premium, G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education.
With today’s release, Google also announced the BeyondCorp Alliance, which brings together a number of security and management partners. These include Check Point, Lookout, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and VMware. According to Google, these companies are all working to bring device posture data to Google’s context-aware access engine.
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Google Cloud’s new CEO on gaining customers, startups, supporting open source and more
After Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s recently minted CEO, joined the company, he took hundreds of meetings to learn what the company’s prospective and current customers were looking for. The overarching theme of those conversations was always similar, he told me during an interview at Google’s Cloud Next conference: “Love the technology — amazed at it. [They] think that it’s the best of the best. But they want more people that can help them adopt it and improvements to how they do business with us.”
So that’s the first order of business at Google Cloud now. Kurian, who came to Google Cloud after 22 years at Oracle, said that the team is rolling out new contracts and plans to simplify pricing. Most importantly, though, Google will go on a hiring spree. “A number of customers told us ‘we just need more people from you to help us.’ So that’s what we’ll do,” Kurian said.
I asked Kurian whether he believes that his predecessors made a mistake by not doing all of this already. Always the diplomat, Kurian denied that (of course). “No, I think it’s just the natural evolution of every company. Growing up, understanding their business, seeing an opportunity,” he said. “When I look at it, isn’t it a great position to be in? When you have customers saying ‘please hire more people to help me’ rather than ‘please go away from me?’ ”
Enterprises want Google to figure out the enterprise, Kurian argues, because they want to use the company’s technology. “And so we’re trying to do that.”
No matter what he thinks about Diane Greene’s tenure at Google Cloud, though, Kurian undoubtedly has the opportunity to reshape the organization now. When I asked him about how his own philosophy is different from his predecessor, though, he argued that it’s all about listening to customers and giving them what they want. And what they want is more help, but also better collaboration tools, for example, as well as more industry-specific solutions.
Later on, though, he also noted that what Google Cloud will do going forward is to play to its strengths. “I think you will see us emphasizing our differentiators and strengthening the multi-cloud infrastructure,” he said, and highlighted today’s launch of Anthos as an example of what the company can do — and as a product that was developed in response to customer requests. “We’ve taken the area of security. We’ve taken the area of analytics. We’ve taken the area of AI — and we’ve invested a lot more in solutions there. And the reason is, that’s what customers want from us,” he added
It’s no secret that Google is definitely focusing on bringing more enterprises onto its platform. That’s not to say that Google Cloud doesn’t care about startups, though. “When we say we’re focused on enterprise, it doesn’t mean we’re stopping to focus on the small and medium companies — on the digital natives and the startups,” Kurian said. “Historically, the complaint has always been ‘Google doesn’t focus on enterprises, they focus on digital natives. […] The perception outside that Google doesn’t care about enterprises is not true. And the statement that we’re now going to focus exclusively on enterprises is also not true.”
Kurian argues that nine of the 10 largest media companies use Google Cloud, as well as seven of the 10 largest retailers and six of the top 10 enterprise companies. “Other cloud providers would have you believe that no one is using Google, which is not true,” he added.
Talking about other cloud providers, it’s also worth noting that Google is taking a very different approach to open source than some of its competitors, and especially AWS. That’s something that isn’t likely to change under Kurian’s leadership at Google Cloud. “The most important thing is that we believe that the platforms that win in the end are those that enable rather than destroy ecosystems. We really fundamentally believe that,” he told me. “Any platform that wins in the end is always about fostering rather than shutting down an ecosystem. If you look at open-source companies, we think they work hard to build technology and enable developers to use it.”
Kurian isn’t the kind of CEO who will directly attack his competitors in an interview, but he did come rather close to it in this context: “In order to sustain the company behind the open-source technology, they need a monetization vehicle. If the cloud provider attacks them and takes that away, then they are not viable and it deteriorates the open-source community.”
As for the future of Google Cloud, Kurian didn’t quite want to look at his crystal ball. Instead, he argued that as long as the company focuses on doing what its customers want — starting with hiring more employees to help those customers and making it easier to do business with Google — those customers will buy a lot more of their cloud technology from Google.
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Apigee jumps on hybrid bandwagon with new API for hybrid environments
This year at Google Cloud Next, the theme is all about supporting hybrid environments, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Apigee, the API company it bought in 2016 for $265 million, is also getting into the act. Today, Apigee announced the beta of Apigee Hybrid, a new product designed for hybrid environments.
Amit Zavery, who recently joined Google Cloud after many years at Oracle, and Nandan Sridhar, describe the new product in a joint blog post as “a new deployment option for the Apigee API management platform that lets you host your runtime anywhere—in your data center or the public cloud of your choice.”
As with Anthos, the company’s approach to hybrid management announced earlier today, the idea is to have a single way to manage your APIs no matter where you choose to run them.
“With Apigee hybrid, you get a single, full-featured API management solution across all your environments, while giving you control over your APIs and the data they expose and ensuring a unified strategy across all APIs in your enterprise,” Zavery and Sridhar wrote in the blog post announcing the new approach.
The announcement is part of an overall strategy by the company to support a customer’s approach to computing across a range of environments, often referred to as hybrid cloud. In the Cloud Native world, the idea is to present a single fabric to manage your deployments, regardless of location.
This appears to be an extension of that idea, which makes sense, given that Google was the first company to develop and open-source Kubernetes, which is at the forefront of containerization and Cloud Native computing. While this isn’t pure Cloud Native computing, it is keeping true to its ethos and it fits in the scope of Google Cloud’s approach to computing in general, especially as it is being defined at this year’s conference.
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Accenture announces intent to buy French cloud consulting firm
As Google Cloud Next opened today in San Francisco, Accenture announced its intent to acquire Cirruseo, a French cloud consulting firm that specializes in Google Cloud intelligence services. The companies did not share the terms of the deal.
Accenture says that Cirruseo’s strength and deep experience in Google’s cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions should help as Accenture expands its own AI practice. Google TensorFlow and other intelligence solutions are a popular approach to AI and machine learning, and the purchase should help give Accenture a leg up in this area, especially in the French market.
“The addition of Cirruseo would be a significant step forward in our growth strategy in France, bringing a strong team of Google Cloud specialists to Accenture,” Olivier Girard, Accenture’s geographic unit managing director for France and Benelux said in a statement.
With the acquisition, should it pass French regulatory muster, the company would add a team of 100 specialists trained in Google Cloud and G Suite to the an existing team of 2,600 Google specialists worldwide.
The company sees this as a way to enhance its artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise in general, while giving it a much stronger market placement in France in particular and the EU in general.
As the company stated, there are some hurdles before the deal becomes official. “The acquisition requires prior consultation with the relevant works councils and would be subject to customary closing conditions,” Accenture indicated in a statement. Should all that come to pass, then Cirruseo will become part of Accenture.
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Talk key takeaways from Google Cloud Next with TechCrunch writers
Google’s Cloud Next conference is taking over the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week and TechCrunch is on the scene covering all the latest announcements.
Google Cloud already powers some of the world’s premier companies and startups, and now it’s poised to put even more pressure on cloud competitors like AWS with its newly-released products and services. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois will be on the ground at the event, and Ron Miller will be covering from afar. Thursday at 10:00 am PT, Frederic and Ron will be sharing what they saw and what it all means with Extra Crunch members on a conference call.
Tune in to dig into what happened onstage and off and ask Frederic and Ron any and all things cloud or enterprise.
To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
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Watch Google Cloud Next developer conference live right here
If you can’t stop dreaming about NoSQL databases, Google’s Cloud Next conference is the closest thing to heaven that you’ll find today. At 9 AM PT, 12 PM ET, 5 PM GMT, some of the brightest minds in cloud computing are going to introduce the upcoming features of Google Cloud.
Along with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google is building the infrastructure of the web. Countless startups use Google Cloud as their only hosting provider. And there are now more and more specialized and niche services launching. So it’s going to be interesting to see what Google has in store to beat their competitors on the cloud front.
We’ll have a team on the ground covering all the announcements and explaining what it means.
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Google Cloud challenges AWS with new open-source integrations
Google today announced that it has partnered with a number of top open-source data management and analytics companies to integrate their products into its Google Cloud Platform and offer them as managed services operated by its partners. The partners here are Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs.
The idea here, Google says, is to provide users with a seamless user experience and the ability to easily leverage these open-source technologies in Google’s cloud. But there is a lot more at play here, even though Google never quite says so. That’s because Google’s move here is clearly meant to contrast its approach to open-source ecosystems with Amazon’s. It’s no secret that Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform has a reputation for taking some of the best open-source projects and then forking those and packaging them up under its own brand, often without giving back to the original project. There are some signs that this is changing, but a number of companies have recently taken action and changed their open-source licenses to explicitly prevent this from happening.
That’s where things get interesting, because those companies include Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs — and those are all partnering with Google on this new project, though it’s worth noting that InfluxData is not taking this new licensing approach and that while DataStax uses lots of open-source technologies, its focus is very much on its enterprise edition.
“As you are aware, there has been a lot of debate in the industry about the best way of delivering these open-source technologies as services in the cloud,” Manvinder Singh, the head of infrastructure partnerships at Google Cloud, said in a press briefing. “Given Google’s DNA and the belief that we have in the open-source model, which is demonstrated by projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Go and so forth, we believe the right way to solve this it to work closely together with companies that have invested their resources in developing these open-source technologies.”
So while AWS takes these projects and then makes them its own, Google has decided to partner with these companies. While Google and its partners declined to comment on the financial arrangements behind these deals, chances are we’re talking about some degree of profit-sharing here.
“Each of the major cloud players is trying to differentiate what it brings to the table for customers, and while we have a strong partnership with Microsoft and Amazon, it’s nice to see that Google has chosen to deepen its partnership with Atlas instead of launching an imitation service,” Sahir Azam, the senior VP of Cloud Products at MongoDB told me. “MongoDB and GCP have been working closely together for years, dating back to the development of Atlas on GCP in early 2017. Over the past two years running Atlas on GCP, our joint teams have developed a strong working relationship and support model for supporting our customers’ mission critical applications.”
As for the actual functionality, the core principle here is that Google will deeply integrate these services into its Cloud Console; for example, similar to what Microsoft did with Databricks on Azure. These will be managed services and Google Cloud will handle the invoicing and the billings will count toward a user’s Google Cloud spending commitments. Support will also run through Google, so users can use a single service to manage and log tickets across all of these services.
Redis Labs CEO and co-founder Ofer Bengal echoed this. “Through this partnership, Redis Labs and Google Cloud are bringing these innovations to enterprise customers, while giving them the choice of where to run their workloads in the cloud, he said. “Customers now have the flexibility to develop applications with Redis Enterprise using the fully integrated managed services on GCP. This will include the ability to manage Redis Enterprise from the GCP console, provisioning, billing, support, and other deep integrations with GCP.”
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Google’s hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure
Google’s Cloud Services Platform for managing hybrid clouds that span on-premise data centers and the Google cloud is coming out of beta today. The company is also changing the product’s name to Anthos, a name that either refers to a lost Greek tragedy, the name of an obscure god in the Marvel universe or rosemary. That by itself would be interesting, but minor news. What makes this interesting is that Google also today announced that Anthos will run on third-party clouds, as well, including AWS and Azure.
“We will support Anthos and AWS and Azure as well, so people get one way to manage their application and that one way works across their on-premise environments and all other clouds,” Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, explained in a press conference ahead of today’s announcement.
So with Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That’s a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google’s approach from its competitors’. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure.
“You can use one consistent approach — one open-source based approach — across all environments,” Hölzle said. “I can’t really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it’s not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three cloud — and actually on-premise environments, too — look the same.”
Anthos/Google Cloud Services Platform is based on the Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as other open-source projects like the Istio service mesh. It’s also hardware agnostic, meaning that users can take their current hardware and run the service on top of that without having to immediately invest in new servers.
Why is Google doing this? “We hear from our customers that multi-cloud and hybrid is really an acute pain point,” Hölzle said. He noted that containers are the enabling technology for this but that few enterprises have developed a unifying strategy to manage these deployments and that it takes expertise in all major clouds to get the most out of them.
Enterprises already have major investments in their infrastructure and created relationships with their vendors, though, so it’s no surprise that Google is launching Anthos with more than 30 major hardware and software partners that range from Cisco to Dell EMC, HPE and VMware, as well as application vendors like Confluent, Datastax, Elastic, Portworx, Tigera, Splunk, GitLab, MongoDB and others.
Robin.io, a data management service that offers a hyper-converged storage platform based on Kubernetes, also tells me that it worked closely with Google to develop the Anthos Storage API. “Robin Storage offers bare metal performance, powerful data management capabilities and Kubernetes-native management to support running enterprise applications on Google Cloud’s Anthos across on-premises data centers and the cloud,” said Premal Buch, CEO of Robin.io.
Anthos is a subscription-based service, with the list prices starting at $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block. Enterprise prices will then be up for negotiation, though, so many customers will likely pay less.
It’s one thing to use a service like this for new applications, but many enterprises already have plenty of line-of-business tools that they would like to bring to the cloud as well. For them, Google is launching the first beta of Anthos Migrate today. This service will auto-migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine. The promise here is that this is essentially an automatic process and once the container is on Google’s platform, you’ll be able to use all of the other features that come with the Anthos platform, too.
Google’s Hölzle noted that the emphasis here was on making this migration as easy as possible. “There’s no manual effort there,” he said.
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Google Cloud is bringing two new data centers online in 2020
At Google Cloud Next today, the company announced it is bringing two brand new data centers online in the 2020 time frame, with one in Seoul, South Korea and one in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The company, like many of its web scale peers, has had the data center building pedal to the metal over the last several years. It has grown to 15 regions, with each region hosting multiple zones for a total of 45 zones. In all, the company has a presence in 13 countries and says it has invested an impressive $47 billion (with a B) of CAPEX investment from 2016-2018.
Google Data Center Map. Photo: Google
“We’re going to be announcing the availability in early 2020 of Seoul, South Korea. So we are announcing a region there with three zones for customers to build their applications. Again, customers, either multinationals that are looking to serve their customers in that market or local customers that are looking to go global. This really helps address their needs and allows them to serve the customers in the way that they want to,” Dominic Preuss, director of product management said.
He added, “Similarly, Salt Lake City is our third region in the western United States along with Oregon and Los Angeles. And so it allows developers to build distributed applications across multiple regions in the western United States.”
In addition, the company announced that its new data center in Osaka, Japan is expected to come online some time in the coming weeks. One in Jakarta, Indonesia, currently under construction, is expected to come online the first half of next year.
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