Podcast: Cloud, Innovation, and Updates from Google Next 2018

Ian Rae, CloudOps’ CEO and founder, discussed cloud innovation with Rob Hirschfeld on the most recent episode of ‘L8ist Sh9y Podcast’.

Recorded while Ian was at Google Next 2018, this episode explored how the cloud industry has not always evolved as predicted. It wasn’t believed early on that Google would emerge as a big player and cloud resources were expected to become commodities. Instead, we have seen the emergence of highly differentiated cloud platforms, and Google has staked a position as the ‘Engineer’s Cloud.’ Amidst such diversity and complexity, operational excellence is what defines successful companies today.

From a CloudOps perspective, the cloud can be defined as software-defined, API-networking that permits end-to-end engineering. Operational excellence will mean different things for different organizations, but it will probably involve leveraging a combination of regional clouds, edge infrastructure, and different public clouds.

Organizations can reap the benefits of building and then operating software across multiple clouds with open source toolings and containerization amongst others. Open source, in particular, is key for allowing things to be run in a similar manner across multiple infrastructures.

Ian spoke about some of the exciting things coming out of Google Next. In particular, GKE is now generally available for on-prem. This means that Google techniques can be used to manage Kubernetes clusters wherever they are, be they at the edge or in public clouds.

We don’t know how the autonomous edge will deal with this. But we can say that edge (all non-cloud instances) will offer a low cost as well as great capability from IoT and AI. It has traditionally been a pain operationally for organizations to build and operate the edge. This is one area that we can expect a lot of innovation in.

Listen to the podcast above for Ian and Rob’s exploration of cloud innovation.