Google Distributed Cloud
What is Google’s newly announced Distributed Cloud?
Enterprises are currently accelerating their cloud adoption because of the massive benefits that come with it. Cloud computing offers faster innovation and easier development at an efficient scale to businesses while minimizing their technology risk. However, data sovereignty needs, region/industry-specific compliance, and local data processing needs prevent all workloads from immediately or completely moving to the cloud. This presents a barrier to complete cloud adoption. To deliver a flexible cloud strategy for enterprises moving to the cloud, Google announced Distributed Cloud in October 2021.
Distributed Cloud is Google’s solution to extend its infrastructure and services to the edge and your data centers. It has been built on Anthos, which provides consistent management at scale, and provides fully managed software and hardware solutions. Distributed cloud can be operated from four different location types depending on the organization’s needs. This include:
Google’s network edge – with over 140 edge locations globally.
Operator edge – for customers to run edge applications at low latency.
Customer edge – for customers to own edge, and even modernize their applications.
Customer data centers – to support customer data centers while meeting security, privacy, and regulatory compliance requirements.
Customers to build their solutions once and run them anywhere. There are two main products released as part of the Distributed Cloud portfolio: Google Distributed Cloud Edge and Google Distributed Cloud Hosted.
Distributed Cloud Edge
Distributed Cloud Edge is a product that brings Google Cloud’s architecture and services close to your data generation and consumption centers. To support mission-critical use cases, Distributed Cloud Edge allows you to run 5G core and radio access network functions at the edge. For this reason, it is well-suited for local data processing. Customers can leverage the robust capabilities of this product to process large quantities of data, analyze, and present results in real-time.
Distributed Cloud Edge extends Google cloud’s offering on telecommunication solutions to empower communication service providers to accelerate 5G adoption and deliver 5G experiences. To do this, Google cloud is working together with NVIDIA and Intel technologies. Distributed Cloud Edge can also be utilized by ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), app developers, etc. to quickly build new or add innovations to their solutions with maximum efficiency. In addition, customers can also use this solution to modernize on-premise environments.
Distributed Cloud Hosted
Distributed Cloud Hosted, on the other hand, was designed to enable public sector customers and commercial enterprises to securely run sensitive workloads. It is a consequence of Google’s data sovereignty vision, which lets customers operate it under strict data residency, security, and privacy requirements. In their data sovereignty vision, Google believes that enterprises must have complete authority over what happens to their data. With Distributed Cloud Hosted, you can securely modernize on-premise deployments regardless of whether it is you doing the deployment or a trusted partner. Distributed Cloud Hosted functions like your personal on-premise solution, not requiring connection to Google Cloud. Anthos avails everything needed for the service to function optimally, including APIs, services, infrastructure management, local control panel, etc.