I began the trip to the Google Cloud Summit in Seattle with a summit of my own — enjoying a jam-packed weekend in Olympic National Park northwest of the city. My camping trip was packed into my carry-on bags — the only item I needed to rent was a bear canister with a lock (locks designed for the raccoons who are known to open canisters and steal food…and beer).
After visiting rainforests, a stormy beach and a soaked mountain top (yes, it rains a lot in Washington) I took a ferry ride into the city. Still caught some stunning views despite the weather!
Leading up to the city are small towns like, Forks — home of Stephanie Meyer’s hit novel series, Twilight. I so happened to arrive during the same weekend as “Vampfest” which occurs in the small town annually. Many signs like, “(No) Vampires beyond this point” were spotted along the way. I managed to survive any supernatural attacks and made my way to the ferry which provides a full view of the city and iconic space needle on the way in.
The Google Cloud Summit in Seattle kicked off on Tuesday bright and early. The 7:00am crowd were as excited about the waffles and free coffee as they were about the event!
Whether the arrivals came for free food or to hear about Big Query on the big stage, the event was full of curious individuals and teams with specific projects looking for solutions only GCP could deliver.
I spoke to many individuals ranging from the curious start-up entrepreneurs to veteran technologists of notable Seattle based enterprises, all looking to leverage the cloud to meet their business challenges.
So what did Google want to discuss? What did the attendees want to hear? The Keynote sessions that ran over the course of the day went as follows:
- Scalable and manageable: A deep-dive into GKE networking best practices
- Migrating and modernizing: A deeper look at migration strategies, crafting your cloud foundation, and migration solution architecture
- “Accelerating Cloud Adoption: Streaming Data Integration with Intelligence” Presented by Striim Anthos in the Real World Presented by SADA Systems
- Anthos – Bringing hybrid cloud to you
- Node management in GKE
The people of greater Seattle are embracing cloud computing, but they all have questions along the lines of, “”How can I get insights from my data into the cloud FAST? , “How can I leverage a multi-cloud strategy?”, “Can I migrate workloads efficiently?” “Is my data secure in the cloud? How do I protect it?” “Will I break the bank moving my business towards an IaaS model?”
There were a few dozen vendors at the event ready to give their Google cloud pitch. All ready to share how to make customers’ cloud experience, painless, fast, secure and inexpensive. Some of the vendors (like Actifio!) were ready to talk SaaS — giving users the predictable opex spending to match their monthly cloud bill giving users data protection and availability like they are used to on-premise.
The local attendees left the event well fed and well informed. Google Cloud held a fantastic one-day blowout that brought roughly 1000 curious technologists all looking for solutions, answers, and insights.
Thank you Seattle!
