On 25th March, Google Cloud held its highly anticipated Born-Digital Summit event - and it didn’t disappoint. During the event, key speakers covered everything from containerisation, to machine learning, to data literacy, and everything in between.
Here’s a rundown of our top three takeaways to inspire your digital transformation on Google Cloud:
1. GKE Autopilot brings containers to life for developers
The summit featured several insightful discussions surrounding the benefits of Kubernetes: an open-source container-orchestration system built by Google for automating application development, scaling, and management.
Harnessing Kubernetes in your organisation can allow you to run containers serverless with zero configuration, enable CICD, logging and monitoring capability, and provide one consolidated view of alerts - resulting in greater efficiency and reduced costs.
During the summit Kaslin Fields, Developer Advocate at Google demonstrated how organisations, particularly startups, can leverage GKE Autopilot to reduce complexity and manage their entire cluster’s underlying infrastructure - including the control plane, nodes and node pools.
With Google Cloud Code, developers can leverage auto-sync and hot loading capability, which monitors source files while they work and redeploys them as necessary.
What does this mean for businesses?
Put simply, GKE Autopilot increases operational efficiency, provides a robust security framework from day one, and facilitates a hands-off approach to Kubernetes. This enables developers to focus on workloads and save time and money on additional resources.
In a separate session held by Diana Nanova, Cloud Customer Engineer at Google and Helge Rennicke, Director of Software Development at Market Logic Software, Helge likens Google Cloud to a school building:
“You don’t know how it’s built, you just assume it’s there. You only want to have your kid going there [...] and be sure it’s working.”
During the same session, Helge praises Google Cloud’s autonode capability as the unsung feature hero:
“For me the most important feature is the auto-repairing of nodes. I don’t think I have ever seen it on the website advertised!”
Missed the Born-Digital Summit? Don’t worry; you can still watch it on demand here.
2. The possibilities of machine learning are endless: Here’s how to bake them in
Sara Robinson, Developer Advocate at Google brought machine learning to life during her presentation, and demonstrated how ML can be applied to baking to create some truly tasty recipes.
Much like machine learning, Sara recognised that baking is an exact science with many unique patterns. With that in mind, Sara created a model that categorises baked goods based on patterns in ingredient volumes using Cloud AutoML Tables - leading to some surprising results!
During the summit, we got the opportunity to experience a live demo of Sara’s machine learning model in action, and even left with a new, ML-generated recipe! You could say it was a pretty sweet session.
‘Cakies’ aside (watch the video if you don’t know what we’re talking about!), Sara’s talk illustrated how machine learning can help your organisation automate a wide range of processes and make intelligent predictions to streamline operations, save time and reduce cost.
Machine learning plans half-baked? Watch Sara cook up a storm and be inspired.
3. Data literacy is paramount to survival in the digital age
Zara Hawkins, Head of Data Culture and Transformation at Google led a session on fostering a data-driven culture, which also left us with food for thought.
In this keynote, Zara delved into the subject of how to make data less daunting for non-technical employees. In particular, she demonstrated how to empower users and beginners to make the most of their data, and how to incorporate data into existing workflows so it doesn’t feel like a step change.
In this session, Zara provided practical tips to establish utilising the data you have available as the default option, and leveraging actionable insights by creating an immersive culture.
While analysing and using data to make decisions doesn’t come naturally to everyone, it’s not always efficient - nor scalable - to rely on a data analyst 24/7.
We couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of Zara’s session here at Appsbroker, and work with our customers daily to encourage users to take control of their data and use it to drive business growth and innovation.
Related Read: How a British Technology Retailer Harnessed Instant Data Insights to Boost Direct Sales
Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit: Final thoughts
The Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit was packed full of inspiring sessions - we’ve covered just a few. As a reminder, you can watch the event on demand here.
The event emphasised how Google Cloud can enhance your organisation’s ability to succeed in an increasingly digital and competitive marketplace. Whether your business needs to adapt, scale - or both - Google Cloud technology can help you get there.
The possibilities are expansive, and can arguably impact every single department within your organisation. Most significantly, Google Cloud reduces admin for developers, allowing them to have a laser-focus on delivering an outstanding customer experience.
GKE Autopilot provides a ‘hands off’ experience for Kubernetes service. For start-ups - or other businesses going through rapid periods of growth - this feature is invaluable.
At Appsbroker, we can help you deliver digital transformation in weeks, not years on Google Cloud. With years of knowledge and experience spanning Application Modernisation, Data Modernisation (including Machine Learning), Infrastructure Modernisation, and Collaboration, we’re dedicated to helping our customers achieve extraordinary business outcomes.
In addition, our exclusive Cloud Assure service can help you control your GCP billing, track return on investment and earn Professional Services vouchers to unlock innovation for free.
Want to find out more? Visit our website and discover how we can help you unlock the best of Google Cloud both now, and in years to come.