Google showcased a series of old and new products and APIs at the GCP Next 2016 conference in San Francisco in this week. Here’s a quick look at some of them.
More GCP regions – One of the ways cloud companies differentiate is by having data centres in different locations across the world. Not only does this address latency issues which is an important criteria for high-performance applications, but many applications, especially ones that deal with government and financial data, require data be stored within the country.
Google Stackdriver – The company spent a lot of time at GCP 2016 talking about the openness of its offerings, insisting there’s no lock-in of any kind. In fact its new offering called Stackdriver even works with Amazon Web Services (AWS), offering dashboards, uptime monitoring, alerting, log analysis, tracing, error reporting, and production debugging, across GCP and AWS, in a single, unified offering.
New partnerships – Google said that BMC, Pivotal, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Tenable Network Security, Veritas and “many other enterprise ISVs are working hard to integrate their software with GCP”. Accenture, CI&T, Cloud Technology Partners, PA Consulting, and PwC are amongst companies helping enterprises move to its Cloud service.
Google Data Studio 360 – The company has announced the launch of Data Studio 360, a new reporting and data visualisation tool that lets you build reports based on different data sources like Google Analytics, BigQuery, and Google Sheets. You can combine data from all these sources in a single report, and make visualisations that may not have been possible before.
Other new features
In addition, Google Cloud Platform gets a host of new features including Audit Logging (coming before the end of May), Identity and Access Management roles (available now in beta), support for customer supplied encryption keys, and more.