GCP – Infrastructure for all: What happened at Next OnAir this week

Week three of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir was all about our best-in-class cloud infrastructure, and how to use it to easily run your most demanding applications. From opening remarks from VP of Cloud Infrastructure Brad Calder, Networking GM Shailesh Shukla, and Compute GM June Yang, to deep dives from Google Cloud experts, to breakout sessions from customers, there was a lot to take in. 

Key announcements from the week

Google Cloud’s global footprint continues to expand. On Tuesday, we announced Grace Hopper, a private subsea cable connecting the U.S., U.K., and Spain. When it is commissioned in 2022, Grace Hopper will be one of the first new transatlantic cables to connect the U.S. and U.K. since 2003, with 16 fibre pairs and 340 Tbps of capacity for services like Gmail, Meet and of course Google Cloud.

Tapping into that networking infrastructure is getting easier, too. The new Private Service Connect takes a service-centric approach to networking and abstracting the underlying infrastructure, so you can easily connect services across different networks and organizations, and protect your network traffic. Read more here. 

Speaking of protecting your network, we made it easier to use Google Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Learn more here. 

Finally, we’re streamlining how to get your workloads onto Google Cloud infrastructure, with the new Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP). With a variety of templates, training, and tools, RAMP will help you craft a simple, repeatable and predictable cloud migration path with the help of Google Cloud Professional Services and our partners. 

For a full list of announcements from infrastructure week, see this roll-up blog.

Watch demos

A conference isn’t complete without demos, and Next OnAir is no different. For infrastructure week, we debuted nine interactive demos, plus three video demos, to educate you about infrastructure fundamentals, or to get you up to speed about Google Cloud’s latest products and features. To wit: go on a network journey and watch as your data passes through each of our data centers and travels back to you. Visualize your Cloud Storage traffic. Learn how to reduce complexity with Active Assist. Click here for the full list of interactive demo content from the week. 

Go deep 

Google Cloud experts went into nitty-gritty detail about our best-in-class infrastructure portfolio. In A Peek Behind the VM at the Google Storage Infrastructure, Googlers Dean Hildebrand and Denis Serenyi did a deep dive into Google storage infrastructure and architecture. In Build an Enterprise-Grade Service Mesh with Traffic Director, Kelsey Hightower and Stewart Reichling talk about how to use the next-generation managed networking service to scale your backends. And in Monitoring as Code, Google Cloud SRE Yuri Grinshteyn is accompanied by Schlumberger SRE Pardeep Sandhu to talk about how to automate your monitoring signals. These are just a few of the advanced infrastructure and operations topics you can delve into. 

Don’t just take our word for it

Perhaps the most important part of Next OnAir is hearing from your peers at companies that have adopted Google Cloud. Twitter took to the airwaves to talk about how it uses Google’s edge network to support millions of users every day. Schrodinger is using Google Cloud’s massive compute capacity for drug development. Fitbit migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud with zero downtime, and Viacom is migrating decades of old content to Google Cloud and giving it new life with AI/ML. Macy’s is reimagining traditional retail, and Etsy is protecting its next-generation marketplace with HA and data protection technologies. Check out all these customer stories and others from the infrastructure week session guide. 

Looking ahead: Security

Can’t get enough Next OnAir? Next week is all about security. On Tuesday, August 4, Security and VP & GM Sunil Potti is joined by none other than Vint Cerf to talk about the importance of security in the cloud era. 

Of course, we’ll also bring you live technical talks and learning opportunities, aligned with each week’s content. Click “Learn” on the Explore page to find each week’s schedule. Haven’t yet registered for Google Cloud ’20 Next: OnAir? Get started at g.co/cloudnext.