Why Simplicity Sets Google Apart from Amazon and Azure

Most of the world's enterprise computing still happens "on-premise", according to Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. The issue isn't that people don't know the value of the cloud, or that they haven't got access to the right cloud technology. According to Pichai, the thing that's stopping people from genuinely making the most of the cloud is complexity.

Sundar's CEO announced at the Google Cloud Next Conference for 2019 that the path away from traditional tech is too "daunting." It's full of choices that today's business leaders don't know how to make. People don't want to jump completely into the cloud at once, which means they need to figure out how to bridge incompatible architectures and maintain flexibility moving forward. 

The fact that Google recognizes these issues is crucial to the company's ongoing strategy for development. In a world of competing platforms, Google is unique for one reason - it makes the cloud accessible to everyone. 

Bringing the Cloud to Everyone

When cloud technology first began to increase in popularity, it was presented to the public and enterprises as a vast transformational experience. However, there's no one-size-fits-all path to the cloud as other companies suggest. No enterprise has to "live" in the cloud or banish their own existing data centres - at least not with the Google Cloud Platform.

Google's business model for the cloud environment has been less focused on things like replicated servers or virtual machines, and more concentrated on transitional experiences. Google offers a range of database engines, data storage solutions, and automated application deployment services intended to help people place some of their experiences in the cloud, without ripping and replacing their entire structure.

Google shows the modern marketplace that digital transformation can take place on-premise, as well as through the cloud environment. Though it would be great for companies to have the freedom to just jump directly into he cloud whenever they like, Google knows that many more prominent companies just don't have that freedom. However, if the GCP can give companies the opportunities to build new applications into their existing experiences organically, then it can give companies more room to grow. You can combine your online services with your offline solutions - no questions asked. 

On the other hand, it's only recently that competitors like AWS have begun to offer hybrid services. Additionally, while Microsoft has had some success with its Azure stack, no-one has taken the same approach as Google. No other cloud provider on the market took the strategy of being hybrid, flexible, and open from scratch. 

Transitions without Compromise 

From the beginning of the Google Cloud Platform, the search engine team has been delivering a solution that doesn't replicate existing data centers but moves the tools that companies need into a more modern environment, in an automated and easy manner. The NoOPs operation model in the GCP allows cloud workloads to sustain themselves without constant monitoring from the customer. 

For years, Google has proven itself to be one step ahead from the rest of the cloud provider platforms by giving its customers access to flexibility like no other. That means that the only thing that competitors can say when their clients come to them looking for similar versatility is, "We don't have what Google has…" Ultimately, Google created tools that would allow it to address problems with scalability, evolution, and functionality in its own data centers. That meant that it needed to build strategies that would scale up and down according to changing needs. The Google team found something that worked for them, and then just rolled it out to the rest of the world. 

Now, Google is continuing to develop in the same innovative direction, with even more opportunities for flexibility and scalability specifically designed to suit the modern audience. For instance, in Google Cloud Next 2019, the Google team announced the arrival of a streamlined deployment platform for container applications. The new solution, named Cloud Run, takes serverless functionality into a brand new world for developers. 

Google Cloud Run is Google's forward-thinking solution to serverless development, giving companies a more modern way to run and stage applications without ever having to worry about managing and provisioning servers. You can just ignore that the server exists. Since the hardest part of running application code on the cloud is making the configuration work, you can simply build code on your own systems and run it on the cloud with no changes to the code itself. 

Years from its initial arrival on the cloud computing scene, Google is still showing that the best way forward for technology, can often be the simplest.