Forrest Brazeal joins Stephanie Wong today on the second day of Google Cloud Next ‘22. We’re talking about all the exciting announcements, how the conference has changed in recent years, and what to expect in the days ahead.

The excitement and energy of the first in-person Next since 2019 was one of the best parts for Forrest. With 1300 releases in just half the year, a lot has happened in BigQuery, AI, Looker, and more. Next includes announcements in many of these areas as well, as Google Cloud expands and makes Cloud easier for all types of projects and clients. Strategic partnerships and development have allowed better use of Google Cloud for the virtual work world and advancements in sustainability have helped Google users feel better about their impact on the environment.

New announcements in compute include C3 VMs, the first VM in the cloud with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with Google’s custom Intel IPU. MediaCDN uses the YouTube infrastructure and the new Live Stream API optimizes streaming capabilities. Among many other announcements, Network Analyzer is now GA allowing for simplified network configuration monitoring and Google Cloud Armor has been extended to include ML-based Adaptive Protection capabilities. Software Delivery Shield and Cloud Workstations are recent offerings to help developers in each of the four areas of software supply chain management. Advancements in Cloud Build include added security benefits, and new GKE and Cloud Run logging and security alerts ensure projects remain secure through the final stages of development.

The best way to ensure secure, optimized work is with well-trained developers. And in that vein, Google Cloud is introducing Innovators Plus to provide a new suite of developer benefits under a fixed cost subscription. Forrest tells us about #GoogleClout and the challenges available in the Next portal for conference-goers. Assured Workloads helps with data sovereignty in different regions, Confidential Space in Confidential Computing provides trust guarantees when companies perform joint data analysis and machine learning training, and Chronicle Security Operations are some of the exciting security announcements we saw at Next.

On the show next week, we’ll go in depth on data announcements at Next, but Steph gives us a quick rundown of some of the biggest ones today. She talks briefly about announcements in AI, including Vertex AI Vision and Translation Hub. Forrest wraps up by talking about predictions for the future of tech and cloud.

Forrest Brazeal

Forrest Brazeal is a cloud educator, author, speaker, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He is the creator of the Cloud Resume Challenge initiative, which has helped thousands of non-traditional learners take their first steps into the cloud.

Cool things of the week

• Unlock biology & medicine potential with AlphaFold on Google Cloud video

Interview

• Google Cloud Next ‘22 site
• Google Cloud Innovators site
• What’s next for digital transformation in the cloud blog
• New cloud regions coming to a country near you blog
• The next wave of Google Cloud infrastructure innovation: New C3 VM and Hyperdisk blog
• 20+ Cloud Networking innovations unveiled at Google Cloud Next blog
• Introducing Software Delivery Shield for end-to-end software supply chain security blog
• Developers - Build, learn, and grow your career faster with Google Cloud blog
• Advancing digital sovereignty on Europe’s terms blog
• Introducing Confidential Space to help unlock the value of secure data collaboration blog
• Introducing Chronicle Security Operations: Detect, investigate, and respond to cyberthreats with the speed, scale, and intelligence of Google blog
• What’s new in Google Cloud databases: More unified. More open. More intelligent. blog
• Building the most open data cloud ecosystem: Unifying data across multiple sources and platforms blog
• Introducing the next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform blog
• Vertex AI Vision site
• New AI Agents can drive business results faster: Translation Hub, Document AI, and Contact Center AI blog
• Open source collaborations and key partnerships to help accelerate AI innovation blog
• Google Cloud Launches First-of-Its-Kind Service to Simplify Mainframe Modernization for Customers in Financial Services, Retail, Healthcare and Other Ind