GKE Enterprise—Go Fast and Be Secure
Last week at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, I got a chance to share a cup of coffee with Bobby Allen, MS, PMP , Group Product Manager, Google Cloud Runtimes
It’s been 10 months since Google introduced GKE Enterprise to help companies manage complex Kubernetes environments. I was curious what client feedback had been.
It seems that GKE Enterprise has turned out to be the Easier Button for some IT shops. IT teams can manage and monitor multiple Kubernetes clusters through a single pane of glass.
GKE Enterprise automatically applies all configuration changes to all the relevant Kubernetes clusters.
According to Bobby and not surprisingly, IT shops wants products that provide both innovation and security. “I’ve got to go fast and I’ve got to be secure.”, is a common theme among the clients he is chatting with.
Container security has proved murky for some shops. GKE Enterprise offers a cybersecurity feature called Advanced Vulnerability Insights. The feature automatically scans the open-source components installed in a Kubernetes cluster for security flaws. Advanced Vulnerability Insights can analyze open-source projects written in Java, Go, JavaScript and Python.
GKE Enterprise has produced some amazing results, with some customers improving their productivity by 45%, while reducing software deployment times by over 70%
I hadn’t been hearing as much about Anthos lately so I asked about whether Anthos had been retired, renamed or just folded in.
According to Bobby it’s none of the above. Turns out Anthos is working hard behind the scenes. Anthos is and will continue to core enterprise technology that empowers Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Google Distributed Cloud (GDC).
A part of GKE Enterprise is the concept of “fleets of clusters”. It has changed the container management game for some clients.
Fleets logically organize clusters and other resources, letting customers use and manage multi-cluster capabilities and apply consistent policies across systems.
Bobby likened the logical organization, consistent policy and security application across a client’s container environment as a seat belt for your container workloads and that analogy really resonated with me.
Fleets form a crucial part of how enterprise multi-cluster functionality works in Google Cloud. Its worth mentioning that Fleets can include clusters outside of Google Cloud making it great for hyrbid/multi-cloud management. Fleets lets platform engineers easily group similar workloads into dedicated clusters, apply custom configurations and policy guardrails per fleet, isolate sensitive workloads, and delegate cluster management to other specific teams.
Teams can run and manage their workloads, as well as view logs, resource utilization, error rates, and other metrics, all scoped to their own set of clusters and namespaces.
If you were thinking that GKE was just for cloud native startups, you’d be wrong.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, “more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 40% in 2021.”
GKE is being deployed by companies like HSBC, one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations. HSBC serves customers worldwide from offices in 64 countries and territories.
Way back in 2018, HSBC rewrote some of the rules of the business banking infrastructure playbook as decided to run core banking services on Kubernetes managed containers natively in Google Cloud.
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Over time HSBC has utilized a suite of Google Cloud products, including GKE, to deliver transformational results.
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The conversation moved on to Gemini Cloud Assist and Bobby’s face lit up. We’re early in the adventure but he is clearly excited about the possibilities. Gemini for Google Cloud is a new generation of AI assistants for developers, Google Cloud services, and applications. Using Google's Gemini family of models, Gemini for Google Cloud lets teams accomplish more in the cloud.
As an engineer and cloud architect, Bobby understands cloud infrastructure. But therein lies some of the excitement and magic. With Gemini Cloud Assist, the focus is on code not infrastructure. According to Bobby, “Gemini Cloud Assist translates engineering intent into real architecture. It’s fast and it works.”
Imagine for a minute, the time your team could save by letting AI figure out infrastructure, networking, security and compliance via a simple voice prompt? Oh and spoiler alert, your junior engineer building the workload doesn’t even need to know product names. That’s right! They can just say things like a need a server with a load balancer and a back end database. Gemini Cloud Assist figures it out for you and delivers it with the limited access. Yup, it figures out infrastructure, networking, load balancing, and applies best practice security.
Gemini Cloud Assist offers the following capabilities:
Gemini Cloud Assist is directly accessible through a chat interface in the Google Cloud console, and directly embedded into the interfaces where you manage different cloud products and resources
Yeah, I’m nerding out a little thinking of the possibilities myself!
As we all know, AI is moving quickly. I’m excited to catch up with Bobby again soon.
Co-Founder at TechMode.io
8moA great insight into GKE Enterprise, thanks for sharing Jo Peterson
Keynote Speaker | Host Our Connected Life podcast | CEO & CoFounder Dark Cryptonite | Top 30 Women in AI | Cyber Woman of the Year Finalist | Top Global Cybersecurity | Board Member | Fmr DIA Cyber Chief | AI security
8moThanks for sharing Jo Peterson
Passionate about sharing stories from across the global business world
8moThanks for sharing Jo Peterson
Create📝Publish🗞️Amplify📣 TechInfluencer, Analyst, Content Creator w/600K Social Media followers, Deep Expertise in Enterprise 💻 Cloud ☁️5G 📡AI 🤖Telecom ☎️ CX 🔑 Cyber 🏥 DigitalHealth. TwitterX @evankirstel
8moExciting to hear positive feedback from clients and the continued focus on cloud and container security. #GoogleCloudNext