For the fourth consecutive year, Gartner has positioned Google as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (formerly titled as Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service upto 2014 Infrastructure as a Service, or (IaaS).

With our customers and communities adjusting to new ways of working and doing business, Google Cloud has remained focused on building services and platforms that help you be more resilient and derive even more value from your cloud infrastructure. We believe Gartner’s analysis and recognition gives our customers the confidence needed to choose Google as the platform for customer-centric innovation. Here are just a few recent examples.

Ready for the most demanding, mission-critical workloads

Our enterprise-ready cloud provides you the uptime, performance, and scale to run even your most demanding workloads. Examples of recent launches: 

• The largest single-node GPU-enabled VM in the industry with up to 16 NVIDIA A100 instances so that our customers can run their ML workloads 
• The only cloud to support scale-out out 96TB SAP HANA so that customers can confidently bring their most critical workloads to GCP
• Strategic partnerships with leading partners like SAP 
• Several regions and an expanded global network footprint including new subsea cables, Firmina, Dunant, Blue and Raman
• High bandwidth 50/75/100Gbps networking for VMs
• Persistent Disk Extreme (block storage) with 120K IOPS 
• Filestore High Scale scale-out NFS for HPC

Saves you money

Save money with a transparent and innovative approach to pricing and intelligent recommendations. In the past year, we’ve launched several innovations to help you save costs:

• Tau VMs, which offer the best price-performance among leading clouds for scale-out workloads 
• Machine-learning-driven predictive auto-scaling for VMs and GKE Autopilot, enabling infrastructure to scale up and down as needed with minimal waste 
• Standard network tier which routes traffic over the internet for cost optimization 

Open

We have a long history of leadership in open technologies—from projects like Kubernetes, the industry standard in container orchestration and interoperability, to TensorFlow, a platform to help anyone develop and train machine learning models. Here are a few recent improvements we’ve made to ensure your cloud is an open cloud: 

• Extended Anthos to bare metal and Microsoft Azure to support customers who want a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud posture. 
• Announced a new network dataplane for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos that supports eBPF, an open-source Linux kernel technology optimized for Kubernetes. 
• Google Kubernetes Engine (based on the Kubernetes standard) received the top overall score based on 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine.

Secure

Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure uses layers of security to protect your data with advanced technologies and operations, keeping your organization secure and compliant. For example, we offer:

• Confidential VMs and Confidential GKE with in-memory encryption and encryption keys controlled by you, with a single checkbox
• Enhanced security for Cloud Run
• Strong support against DDoS attacks. In 2017, our infrastructure absorbed the largest-known DDoS attack at 2.5Tbps with no impact to customers. 

Sustainable

Google Cloud helps customers transform their business sustainably. We operate the cleanest cloud in the industry to make sure your digital footprint doesn’t leave a carbon one. Here are a few proof points:

• Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and for the past four years has matched 100% of the electricity we consume globally with wind and solar purchases. Everything you run on Google Cloud is net carbon neutral. 
• We continue to innovate towards greater energy efficiency in our data centers, and compared with five years ago, now deliver around seven times as much computing power with the same amount of electrical power.
• Recently we announced new features to help customers reduce the carbon footprint of their applications and infrastructure, including a region picker to help with architecture decisions, and low carbon indicators in the Google Cloud Console.  

Supporting our customers

Most importantly, our field organizations and partner organizations work with a singular focus to ensure customer success. This has made Google Cloud the fastest growing hyperscaler, with a rapidly expanding customer base across all geos and industries.

Since launching Customer Care last year, we consolidated and simplified the post-sales engagement with customers, increased the support channels, created an API to allow programmatic case creation, and combined product specific support into a single package for all of Google Cloud. Enterprises with Customer Care continue to report high levels of satisfaction with their focused technical account managers (TAMs), helping them get the most business value out of Google Cloud.

We are committed to sustaining and accelerating the pace of customer-centric innovation. You can download a complimentary copy of the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services on our website. 

Join us to learn much more about Google Cloud at the upcoming Google Cloud Next ‘21 digital conference.  

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services,  Raj Bala | Bob Gill | Dennis Smith | Kevin Ji | David Wright, 27 July 2021
Gartner, Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine,  Tony Iams | Traverse Clayton | Megan Bain, 12 April 2021
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}

Meeting the rapidly growing demands of our customers’ high performance computing and data-intensive workloads requires deep innovation — at Google Cloud, we know we can’t rely on ever-faster CPUs alone, like Moore’s Law has enabled in the past. Customers can either optimize their workloads for a given platform, or we can offer them a platform that is optimized for their specific needs. At Google Cloud, we choose the latter.

Today, we have an exciting new release resulting from these efforts: the new C3 machine series powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and Google’s custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Along with the recently announced Hyperdisk block storage which offers 80% higher IOPS per vCPU for high-end database management system (DBMS) workloads when compared to other hyperscalers. C3 machine instances can deliver strong performance gains to enable high performance computing and data-intensive workloads. Customers such as Snap, for example, have seen approximately a 20% increase in performance for a key workload over the previous generation C2.

The C3 machine series is just the latest example of this architectural approach. For over two decades, Google has purpose-built and designed some of the world’s most efficient and scalable computing systems to meet the needs of our customers. We built the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) to power real-time voice search, photo object recognition, and interactive language translation; unveiled Titan, a secure, low-power microcontroller to help ensure that every machine boots from a trusted state; and launched Video Coding Units (VCUs) to enable video distribution that addresses a range of formats and client requirements. We engineer golden paths from silicon to the console, using a combination of purpose-built infrastructure, prescriptive architectures, and an open ecosystem to deliver what we term workload-optimized infrastructure.

Getting to know the C3 machine series

The Compute Engine C3 machine series, now available in Private Preview, is the first VM in the public cloud with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and with Google’s custom Intel IPU. C3 machine instances use offload hardware for more predictable and efficient compute, high-performance storage, and a programmable packet processing capability for low latency and accelerated, secure networking.

“We are pleased to have co-designed the first ASIC Infrastructure Processing Unit with Google Cloud, which has now launched in the new C3 machine series. A first of its kind in any public cloud, C3 VMs will run workloads on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors while they free up programmable packet processing to the IPUs securely at line rates of 200Gb/s. This Intel and Google collaboration enables customers through infrastructure that is more secure, flexible, and performant.” – Nick McKeown, Senior Vice President, Intel Fellow and General Manager of Network and Edge Group

The System on a Chip hardware architecture introduced in C3 VMs can enable better security, isolation, and performance. In the future, this purpose-built architecture will also allow us to offer a richer product portfolio, such as support for native bare-metal instances.

Hyperdisk block storage and 200 Gbps networking

Block storage and VMs go hand in hand. Last month, we announced the Preview release of Hyperdisk, our next-generation block storage. The new architecture decouples compute instance sizing from storage performance to deliver 80% higher IOPS per vCPU than other leading hyperscale cloud provider. And compared with the previous generation C2, C3 VMs with Hyperdisk deliver 4x higher throughput and 10x higher IOPS. Now, you don’t have to choose expensive, larger compute instances just to get the storage performance you need for data workloads such as Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server.

To enable high performance computing workloads, C3 VMs also feature 200 Gbps low-latency networking powered by our custom IPU, as well as line-rate encryption using the open source PSP protocol.

What our customers and partners are saying

“We were pleased to observe a 20% increase in performance over the current generation C2 VMs from Google Cloud in testing with one of our key workloads. These continued performance improvements enable better end user experience and application cost efficiency.” – Aaron Sheldon, Sr. Software Engineer, Snap Inc.

“Based on the initial performance data, running weather research and forecasting (WRF) on C3 clusters can deliver as much as 10x quicker time to results for about the same computational cost. This will significantly accelerate R&D for our customers in weather, environment, and engineering domains.” — Michael Wilde, CEO, Parallel Works Inc.

“In early testing with our flagship products, including Ansys Fluent, Mechanical and LS-DYNA, on the new Google Cloud C3 VM, we’re seeing up to 3x performance gains over C2 VMs due to higher memory bandwidth and lower network latency.” – Shane Emswiler, Senior Vice President of Products, Ansys

Where we are headed

With the exponential rise in the complexity of cloud infrastructure, we as an industry must turn to automation to manage these platforms efficiently at scale. Along with Infrastructure as Code, custom chips like the Titan, the TPU and the IPU, pave the way for a not-so-distant future where we’ll automate over half of all infrastructure decisions, configuring systems dynamically in response to usage patterns. At Google Cloud, we are committed to continuing our long history of hardware innovation with a focus on workload optimization and automation.

To learn more about C3 VMs and Hyperdisk, check out our session at NEXT ‘22, How Google Cloud optimizes infrastructure for your workloads. To request access to the C3 VMs or Hyperdisk, please reach out to your sales representative or account manager.

Indonesia is leading the way for digital transformation in Southeast Asia. According to Google’s e-Conomy South East Asia report, the country’s 2030 Gross Merchandise Value – the value of online retailing to consumers –  could be twice the value of the whole of Southeast Asia today.  

This growth means that many companies need more qualified IT graduates and employees with digital skills than they have today. Fast-growing tech companies need more qualified IT graduates, and employees with digital skills. According to the World Bank, Indonesia needs an additional nine million people with digital skills by 2030. The shortage of technical talent reiterates the need to invest in a reliable skills pipeline.

Following years of digital talent developments in Indonesia, Google has become a supporter of Bangkit, an academy designed to produce high-caliber technical talent for Indonesian technology companies and startups. Bangkit has facilitated a multi-stakeholder collaboration between Google, government, industry, and universities across Indonesia. 

Last year, the President of Indonesia and the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research, and Technology, acknowledged Bangkit’s significant impact, with 3,000 students completing nearly 15,000 courses and specialisations. 

Building on last year’s success, Bangkit started its 2022 program in February, offering three learning paths to students:

• Cloud computing with Google Cloud, preparing students for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Some of the course components are also available online 
• Mobile development with Android, preparing students for the Google Associate Android Developer exam. An online version is available here. 
• Machine learning with Tensorflow, getting students ready to take the Tensorflow Developer certification. Some of the online courses are available here for others.

Bangkit 2022 has enrolled 3,100 university students who will take a five month study course, obtaining university study credit, as well as industry certifications. The program accepts diverse cohorts of people who are passionate about preparing for a tech career in the near future, with support and encouragement for women, people with disabilities, and students from across Indonesia to apply. 

Since its pilot in 2019, Bangkit has been guided by three principles:  

• Industry-led: provides curriculum and instructors from industry experts, including Google, GoTo and Traveloka. Instructors include key figures such as Laurence Moroney (Google, Lead AI Advocate), Google Developer Experts, and other committed professionals. 
• Immersive: combines online learning methods conducted in both individual and group settings.  
• Interdisciplinary: contains knowledge and best practices in tech, soft skills, and English to provide complete career readiness. 

The program runs from February to July 2022, and has a 900-hour curriculum throughout the 18-week learning experience. 

Benefits for students participating in Bangkit include:

• Study credit conversion 
• Job opportunities at our career fair
• Google Cloud, TensorFlow and AAD exam vouchers
• Incubation funds and mentorship support from industry

Towards the end of Bangkit 2022, students will team up for the Capstone Project challenge to propose solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems, such as environmentalism, accessibility, and more. The top 15 teams will be selected to receive funding to incubate their capstone projects. These education and career-preparedness offerings are provided at no cost.

Google is partnering with industry, governments, universities, and employers to help meet the skill demands of today. From supporting the State of Ohio to offer tech skills to residents, to working with the University of Minnesota-Rochester to create a customized health sciences degree program, Google is here to help our partners prepare those they serve for a cloud-first world.

We’re excited to announce that Google Cloud Next returns on October 11–13, 2022. 

Join us for keynotes from industry luminaries and engage live with Google developers. Explore dynamic content across various learning levels, and dive deep into technologies and solutions spanning the Google Cloud and Google Workspace portfolios. Participate in breakout sessions, demos, and hands-on training. Hear from the world’s leading companies about their digital transformation journeys. You’ll have opportunities to connect with experts, get inspired, and boost your skills. We can’t wait to see you at Next ’22!

It’s too early to determine how the event experience will span the digital and physical worlds, so please stay tuned for updates as we plan with the health and safety of the attendees in mind. In the meantime, mark October 11–13 in your calendar, and visit our event site for updates. For more inspiration, rediscover Next ’21, now available on demand.