By Graham Zabel, Andy Pritchard, Roger O’Kelly, Devoteam UK
The Google Cloud Next ’18 Summit brought together the global Google community to explore the latest innovation from Google in a multi-cloud world. Over 40 Devoteam employees from across Europe attended this flagship event.
Here are some brief thoughts on the summit from UK colleagues.
DevOps – the DevOps world is changing fast. Google’s new CI/CD pipeline (like the AWS Code Pipeline) is true DevOps-as-a-Service. The demonstrator at the DevOps stand admitted it still lacked some functionality (like artefact repository functions such as Artifactory or Nexus provides), but missing functionality will be added quickly. Everything is built and run in containers. The role of DevOps engineer will change significantly.
Hybrid Cloud – Google’s announcement that GKE (Kubernetes Engine) is now available for on-prem workloads and hybrid on-prem/off-prem workloads is also a major game-changer and follows fast on AWS’s similar announcement for ECS and EKS. Many large enterprises that are not ready for off-prem cloud compute can now build on-prem. They may be held back on public cloud due to non-technical issues (mostly regulatory), but can begin their cloud journey on-prem using the same services as those available off-prem.
Microservices and the Service Mesh (aka Istio) – this is probably the hottest area of interest at the moment. The sessions were over-subscribed and the queues were long. Microservices as a pattern, containers and service meshes are definitely mainstream. There is an obvious trend in moving away from centralised integration solution patterns to a distributed, highly resilient and scalable solution in the form of containers and microservices. One speaker asked the audience how many were writing microservices and almost the entire audience raised a hand. Obviously this is a skewed sample but still took us by surprise. It still feels like large enterprises are several years away from adopting these architectural practices but they are coming. The service mesh hype is only beginning.
Collaboration – Google’s updated meeting solution, Google Meet, comprises Hangouts Meet, Meet hardware kit, Jamboard and Calendar. It is constantly adding room kits that are simple to use.
With its focus now on people and content and not on meeting logistics, Meet takes meetings to the next level with simple access, smart collaboration and scalable administration.
Google Meet offers three interesting enterprise features:
o Simple access – virtual whiteboarding access and live streaming included in G Suite, with 100k concurrent users and 21 countries supported for dial-in, across disparate / heterogeneous platforms;
o Smart collaboration – with smart scheduling, voice commands, automatic meeting notes, adaptive layouts and handwriting & drawing with ML (machine learning). The award-winning Jamboard has an app for all devices to enable virtual whiteboarding in every meeting. It even has handwriting and shape recognition; and
o Scalable administration – through optimised room utilisation, assisted room management and meeting analytics.
Diversity – with only 10-30% of attendees observed to be female, and hardly any of the speakers female, there is still a massive need for greater diversity issue in IT!
Google’s Global Certification Programme (GCP)
The first day (09 October) was dedicated purely to Google partners.
As a Google partner since 2011, Google acknowledges Devoteam’s ability to engage its many Google experts from across EMEA to collaborate on international, strategic projects.
In recognition of this, Simon Lebrun, Pre-sales Manager at Devoteam G Cloud, was invited to address the summit’s audience of C-level and developers about the benefits of investing in Google’s Global Certification Programme (GCP) and show how Devoteam’s learning journey through this programme has helped increased our business.
The Devoteam certification programme consists of assembling internal communities for ramp up on GCP skills through a combination of formal courses, onsite training, hands-on labs, peer expertise and mentor meetings.
Certification in Google of our employees in the second half of 2018 has increased by 90% over the first half, and during the first half of 2019 is set to grow hugely by 350% in comparison with the first half of 2018.
Simon explained that commitment to GCP has helped earn Devoteam the prestigious award, presented in San Francisco in July, of Google Cloud EMEA Services Partner of the year (EMEA) for 2018.
To discuss how Devoteam can help your organisation realise the benefits of the Google Cloud, please contact us at uk.info@devoteam.com.
