Google Cloud Next, the company’s three-day event dedicated to cloud technologies kicked off yesterday in San Francisco and immediately caused a splash with two announcements which will certainly ruffle feathers in the cloud computing space.

Firstly, in a subtle shift with massive implication, Google announced that it is making its Google Cloud Platform available as an integrated set of services that can be deployed on both in the cloud and on-premises.

Google Goes all in on Hybrid Cloud

In a move set to challenge other vendors such as Pivotal, Red Hat and others, Google has made a move into hybrid cloud computing recognising that organisations still prefer a mix of private and public cloud solutions in the face of regulatory and technological constraints which prevent a wholesale shift to the cloud completely. By announcing GKE On-Prem at Google Cloud Next they can now offer an integrated set of cloud services that can deploy the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) directly into the data centre.

According to Google Cloud engineering Director, Chen Goldberg, during yesterday’s press briefing ahead of the announcement this move behind the Cloud Services Platform is a shift in strategy bringing Google services to businesses and their data centres where they are, not the other way around. She also added enterprises want more – “Portability isn’t enough,” she added. “Users want consistent experiences so that they can train their team once and run anywhere — and have a single playbook for all environments.”

It’s All Go, Go, Go

On top of announcing a new hybrid option at Google Cloud Next, the company also made a push to make Go the defacto development language of choice for writing cloud apps with the launch of Go Cloud. Go is rapidly becoming one of the most widely used languages for cloud with around one million developers using it and Go Cloud, which gives developers a library and set of tools for open cloud development. Presently this is focused on Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services with Google planning to widen the support for other cloud vendors over time.

Google hopes Go Cloud will accelerate the adoption of the language as the go-to for developers writing cloud apps, and also wants to see the number of libraries in the open source repository rise through the initiative for others to take advantage of.

Google Cloud Next continues in the Moscone Centre until 26th July, 2018.