A big announcement that came on the 1st day is Anthos, which is the new name of the Google Cloud platform. The decision to give the service a new name of Anthos also includes expanding support beyond what has traditionally been offered. The Anthos cloud platform allows customers to run applications in a hybrid cloud environment and with the other major cloud providers AWS and Azure. This will allow a single pane dashboard to manage applications through Kubernetes. Allowing users to run applications on other platforms is a very bold move by Google. Although this seems counterintuitive in some ways, this approach to cloud management will be seen as welcoming news to many administrators who are currently overwhelmed with cloud services. The flexibility and choice of moving workloads around to Google and other providers without major changes is a welcome solution. Another plus is being able to continue to run certain applications onsite such as legacy applications that are not ready to move to the cloud. This adds up to meeting the realistic demand of becoming the first choice for a hybrid, multi-cloud provider.
Another piece of the open strategy was the announcement of open source product integrations with Google Cloud. These integrations are mainly made up of database technologies such as Apache Cassandra, Confluent, DataStax and Mongo DB’s NoSQL database. Many customers are most likely using some of these open source technologies already. Having these strong partnerships in place will provide unified management and support. Chris DiBona, the director of open source at Google Cloud wrote, “Google’s belief in an open cloud stems from our deep commitment to open source. We believe that open source is the future of public cloud. It’s the foundation of IT infrastructure worldwide and has been a part of Google’s foundation since day one. This is reflected in our contributions to projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Go and many more.” The takeaway from this is how Google is approaching open source and framing partnerships with open source projects. AWS is not a favorite among many in the open source community. With these new partnerships, Google established itself as the cloud platform that welcomes and supports open source projects.
Finally, Google Cloud is focusing on creating industry specific packages of Google Cloud services. They are currently offering a package for retailers that include specific tools designed for the retail market. Google plans to continue this trend in creating solutions for specific verticals. Google’s focus with this is making the platform more attractive with each industry added and will definitely be a huge factor in growing the user base.