Google Cloud IT Heroes Summit 2023: Recap

Introduction

At the IT Heroes Summit 2023 (Apr 19 Americas, Apr 20 EMEA), Google Cloud customers and key industry leaders (IT Heroes) shared their experiences, and thoughts about the future and gave insights into how they are unleashing their optimisation superpowers, making their companies smarter with AI, speeding up the development of products, and building solutions with strict security and data sovereignty guidelines, utilising Google Cloud offerings.

These IT Heroes have been able to weather the storm, overcoming uncertain macroeconomic challenges of conflicts, inflation, disruption in global supply chains and labour market changes, in keeping their teams and overall businesses afloat.

IT leaders across the world face many challenges and demands as they constantly innovate new products and services, optimize costs and keep data safe, generally keeping IT businesses running smoothly. Google Cloud understands these pain points and challenges and recently released the IT Heroes Playbook, an intuitive guide for IT leaders interested in leveraging cloud resources and unleashing their IT optimization superpowers towards meeting evolving needs of their organizations.

The IT Heroes Playbook served as a blueprint for the event and suggests ways IT Leaders can leverage Google Cloud resources to supercharge and balance their innovativeness with cost optimization capabilities, accelerate developer velocity, train talent, fine-tune security and sovereignty requirements and meet sustainability goals.

AI Innovation & Infrastructure

Google Cloud has fused pre-defined AI solutions into its entire portfolio and is available to all customers for a wide variety of existing use cases. For novel use cases, Google provides the latest infrastructure choices, optimised for a unique cost/performance ratio and can provide additional support where necessary through its team of experts.

Diverse ML workloads with varying hardware needs powered by scalable, high-performance AI are supported by CPUs, GPUs, and Google's own TPUs. Managed infrastructure platforms like Vertex AI, a fully managed data science and ML ops platform, help practitioners focus on innovating and deploying ML models into production, instead of managing clusters and nodes. Google Cloud also allows teams to easily access state-of-the-art AI solutions with optimized infrastructure and software out of the box, from Google Research, DeepMind, and other partners.

Cost Optimization

With ever-accelerating technology trends, companies across the world need to make serious efforts in doing more with less and balancing optimization of their costs with maintaining growth by utilising appropriate data from key metrics. Google is offering its Top Actionable Insights on cost optimization for its IT Heroes and other IT leaders to balance effective spending with keeping performance and scalability impacts to the barest minimum.

Cost Savings for GCP Customers

Three meaningful steps for GCP Customers to gain benefits from their cloud investments

• Manage peak demand by scaling: Infrastructure optimisation with flexibility and security can be done with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Auto-Scaling. This goes a long way in resource optimisation, improving the productivity of infrastructure and data teams, building the resiliency of systems and data loss avoidance.

• Maintain agility through aggregate data systems: Aggregating/Unifying disparate data breaks down data silos to provide a 360-degree view of what's happening in the business and makes it easier to accelerate time to value and gain insights.

• Utilise Cloud FinOps: Cloud FinOps, an operational framework for optimising the financial performance of cloud infrastructure, helps enterprises to drive financial accountability and maximize business value with in-house financial reporting tools and usage insights to monitor and forecast wastages and cost overruns.

With continuously shrinking budgets, Google Cloud customers are utilising ingenious ways of maintaining growth while cutting costs.

Google Cloud customers have been able to significantly optimise their costs, doing more with less, depending on specific use cases and effort requirements.

Cost Savings for Other IT Leaders

IT leaders across the world can optimise their costs by adopting FinOps practices, modernizing applications, and innovating their technology frameworks.

Sustainability

Google is a sustainability-focused company and seeks to unify its practices, partnerships, and products around fostering sustainability at scale. Google also boasts of the cleanest cloud service in the industry, matching 100% of its electricity consumption in cloud operations with renewable energy purchases, which it has done consistently for over 5 years and extends this sustainability drive in offerings for its customers and partners.

Sustainability-Focused Options for GCP Customers

GCP customers have access to the Carbon Sense Suite, a collection of tools that help accurately report the carbon emissions associated with Cloud usage and encourage them to take action on reducing their carbon footprint.

• The carbon footprint dashboard shows detailed C02 emissions data and energy usage on specific services and workloads in use.

• By default, GCP prompts all developers, and infrastructure teams to deploy their services in low-carbon regions across its infrastructure. Further options for low-carbon deployment can be made utilising the Region Picker tool.

• Active Assist is a holistic portfolio of intelligent tools for the optimization of cloud operations on sustainability, performance and costs.

Sustainability best practices for Leaders in Other Industries

Google encourages everyone to always consider the climatic impacts of whatever they do. Best practices would be to reduce C02 footprints as best as possible, invest in climate-focused technology services and sustainable supply chains, down to the sourced materials, and build healthy ESG scores.

Developer Velocity

Developer Velocity reflects how much work development teams can complete in specific timeframes. It is a human-focused metric which also considers the joy, focus and flow developers need in creating impact during their activities. Google Cloud understands the importance of this to IT leaders and organisations and makes specific provisions within its capacity for improving developer productivity in its offerings for this.

Velocity Provisions for GCP Customers

Google Cloud provides the best developer experience, highly efficient utilisation of resources, easy-to-use container tools, and the most automated Kubernetes platform.

Cloud Run enables developers to develop and deploy container-based applications in single commands. It boasts of having the best developer experience ahead of AWS's App Runner and Azure's Container Apps. Google's GKE also outperforms other Kubernetes services, notably AWS's EKS and Azure's AKS in automotive capabilities, which allows developers to solve problems at scale in standardized ways. Google Cloud allows developers easy and flexible portability between these platforms allowing efficient use of resources and optimisation for growth.

Velocity Optimisation Strategies for Other IT Leaders

When optimising processes and systems for developer velocity, top strategies IT leaders can utilise include, prioritization of standards and proven methodologies in developer velocity building across the organisation, encouraging as much horizontal collaboration as possible, providing the right resources and tools, and a focus on the quality of projects rather than speed, while optimising continuously.

Sovereignty

GCP provides a wide variety of options to fit the sovereignty and data sensitivity needs of its customers.

Sovereignty Solutions for GCP Customers

• Sovereign Controls allows for data residency enforcement and access and control over encryption keys.

• Hosted Cloud is Google's Distributed Cloud Hosted service, that supports regulated customers with strict data residency, security, and privacy requirements and allows for air-gapped fully disconnected operations.

• The Supervised Cloud will be fully managed and operated by a GCP partner, to support data and operational sovereignty needs for specialized and highly sensitive data.

Sovereignty Recommendations for Other IT Leaders

IT Leaders across the world focused on the expansion of their core businesses can be better prepared for sovereignty challenges by classifying and categorizing their workloads according to sensitivity levels, applying sovereign controls for most sensitive data, leveraging trusted partners and utilizing distributed hosted cloud options where necessary.

Skills & Resources

Google Cloud has a wide range of resources for IT resource persons to leverage and training programs through its Cloud Skills Boost for upskilling, in utilising Cloud resources for optimization of their operations.

GCP's managed services take away bottlenecks and allow IT teams to easily manage their cloud services while optimizing for performance, scale, reliability and cost. Autopilot finetunes efficiency and innovation, and Cloud Run allows for the deployment of scalable containers and a host of other resources. Of course, none of these would be possible without the requisite skills for working with these tools. This is why GCP offers the Innovator Plus learning package, for current and future customers, composed of on-demand training and certifications in these technologies as well as special access to GCP technical experts.

Special Insights from Google Cloud's IT Hereos

• Paypal makes faster decisions and enjoys 20% cost savings utilizing Google Cloud services.

• Etsy, a global marketplace for unique and creative goods, saves over 40% of its computing costs using Google FinOps while improving its sustainability targets.

• Carrefour, a pioneer retail and consumer goods company, utilizes GKE to provide scalability, flexibility, and stability for its e-commerce solutions. They also significantly lower their global carbon footprint by utilizing GCP services.

• Brain Corp, a leading automation and robotics company, improved their developer velocity significantly by migrating from AWS's EKS to GKE and enjoys accelerated development of its process, improved robotic performance and reduced costs.

• Palo Alto Networks, a leading cyber security and advanced security solutions company, manages its high-level, multi-region, multi-project ML infrastructure using Vertex AI. This has helped optimize for cost and performance at scale, without dedicated infra teams and autoscale its inference engines.

• AI21Labs, an Israeli AI lab & product company, depends on Google Cloud's cost-effective and auto-scaled GPUs to build and serve language models with up to 178 billion parameters. This powers its text generation and comprehension features in thousands of live applications and is integral to its mission of revolutionizing the way people read and write.

• ADT, America’s leading smart home security provider, enjoys 30x improvement in time to insights, accelerated disaster recovery cutover times and 76% savings on operational expenses using Google Cloud's VMWare Engine, BigQuery and VMWare Cloud Universal Program. Their partnership with Google and utilisation of its Cloud services have also helped them launch new offerings in home automation and security for their customers.

• AirAsia SuperApp, a digital one-stop travel, e-commerce and fintech platform, collaborated with Google Cloud and runs its containerized workloads with GKE and uses GKE Autopilot in deploying features quickly and efficiently which significantly increased its speed to market. Additional Google Cloud services are boosting the platform's performance to 2.1 million transactions and about 3.5 million USD in sales per month.

Summary

Google Cloud is always available through its dedicated teams and unique resources to help IT leaders, wherever they are on their Cloud journey, to optimise their resources and enjoy cost savings in developing solutions for their customers.

The keynote addresses and breakout sessions of the IT Heroes Summit 2023 are available on-demand here.

Learning & Resources