This month, Google held its premier event, Cloud Next ’22, at several locations across the globe. Google began a 24-hour live stream broadcast with an opening keynote in New York City and then moved west to share the “Top 10 Cloud Predictions” developer keynote from Google Cloud headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. This keynote gave an overview of where we’re headed with its and other similar products.
Here are Google’s top 10 cloud technology predictions, which could come true by 2025.
Neuroinclusive design
💡 Developers who start with neuroinclusive design will see a 5x growth in user adoption in the first two years.
Jeanine Banks (Developer X & Head of DevRel, Google)
Neuroinclusive design is designed to be accessible to people with cognitive and sensory disabilities. As more of the world shifts to a virtual environment, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to value the neurodiversity of their employees and to implement inclusive digital practices for internal and external collaboration.
Neurodiversity refers to how people’s brains process information and interact with the world around them. It is estimated that up to 20% of the world’s population is neurodiverse, meaning that they think and learn in ways that are outside the “neurotypical” range.
Google Workspace’s design is inclusive of neurodivergent individuals, which not only improves accessibility for them but also enhances performance and collaboration for everyone. Enhancements in Google Meet, such as an automatic light adjuster, noise cancellation, the hand raise function, and closed captioning, help promote participation and structure for all attendees.
By the end of 2025, developers who prioritize neuro-inclusiveness while creating straightforward, unobtrusive architecture will experience a five-fold increase in user adoption, claims Jeanine. To achieve this level of accessibility, Banks said that seven principles would be critical: balance, proportion, unity, light, color, space, and patterns.
Curated Open Source
💡 4 out of 5 enterprise developers will use some form of curated open source.
Eric Brewer (VP of infrastructure and Google Fellow)
Open-source software is integrated into many critical infrastructure systems, such as electrical grids and power supplies, most cloud environments, and proprietary software. While open-source software is here to stay, it exposes everything it empowers to cybersecurity risks and regulations.
Google Cloud’s Curated Open Source with a layer of accountability allows developers to build more secure apps faster by finding and automatically fixing vulnerabilities. Before safely delivering code to production, the highly configurable Software Delivery Shield Cloud Workstation checks dependencies, detects changes, and scans for vulnerabilities within Google databases.
This end-to-end software supply chain security solution manages itself and improves development speed without sacrificing protection from the beginning stages to deployment.
Eric also added that curated open source will add a layer of accountability to today’s free or “as-is” open source and will see adoption from four out of five developers in some capacity. The internet giant already offers curated open source as part of its Assured Open Source Software (AOSS) service.
Security
💡 90% of security operations workflows will be automated and managed as code.
Iman Ghanizada (Google’s global head of autonomic security operations)
Cyber enemies are multiplying faster than ever, and security operations teams are finding it challenging to stay up. The current procedure is ineffective; to establish a sufficient detection and response workflow, one needs a linear increase in personnel to keep up with the volume of threats, and the problem will continue as long as there are over 700k open cybersecurity jobs.
To make security more accessible and nimble, Google will be collaborating with other organizations’ native cloud capabilities to develop Community Security Analytics (CSA). APIs will automate risk assessments, enabling a continuous feedback loop of detection and reaction, from absorbing data to analyzing it and responding to it.
Without any support from infrastructure or staff, the terminal can quickly read through petabytes of data. After a rule has been defined, it can run “retro searches” to identify dangers in a matter of minutes instead of the days or weeks they would have previously required.
AI
💡 Al is going to be the primary driver for moving to a 4-day work week.
Kamelia Aryafar (Senior director of engineering at Google Cloud AI)
The usage of AI in businesses has increased dramatically in recent years, and given that it can keep boosting worker productivity, 5 days’ worth of work may be finished in 4 days or less.Kamelia emphasized that Google Cloud Solutions like Contact Center AI (CCAI) and Vertex AI will automate routine tasks and allow workers to be more efficient with their time.
Data and Analytics
💡 90% of data will be actionable in real-time using ML.
Irina Farooq (Analytics product leader at Google Cloud)
Farooq stated that a recent study discovered that only one-third of all businesses can derive tangible value from their data. He added that to harness the power of data and make it actionable in real-time, you must have a vision of your data infrastructure, which entails seeing, trusting, and working with your data.
Google is making it possible with developments such as Dataplex which unifies distributed data and automates data management and governance. It also adds support for unstructured data, and Apache Spark on BigQuery.
Databases
💡 The barriers between transactional & analytical workloads will disappear.
Andi Gutmans (VP & GM of databases at Google)
Transactional and analytical database workloads have existed separately for a long time. While analytics databases are most suited to studying massive datasets, transactional databases are best built for quick codes, reads, and writes.
By using the example of eCommerce applications that need access to both datasets, he further clarified the requirement. But according to Andi Gutmans, these restrictions will vanish by the end of 2025. He claimed that Google Cloud services like BigTable, AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, Spanner, and Cloud SQL will all play a part in making it happen.
The Transactional and Analytics databases on the Google Cloud are designed on highly scalable systems on Google’s integrated network of solutions, enabling users to migrate existing data with improved speed (4x for transactional, 100x for analytical queries), quality, and with little to no downtime, resulting in more user-friendly data-driven applications on a single platform.
Cloud Infrastructure
💡 Over half of cloud infrastructure decisions will be automated based on an organization’s usage patterns.
Amin Vahdat (VP and GM of systems & services infrastructure at Google)
In the following three years, automation will play a major role in more than half of cloud infrastructure decisions. This change will be based on an organization’s usage patterns i.e., scale and performance needs.
Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Cloud Services have reimagined what’s possible for scale and performance. Google Cloud revealed their new world’s fastest supercomputer, TPU v4 Platform, which provides massive scalability to power high-performance applications and doubles performance at half the cost.
Developers will have the ability to concentrate on the delivery of solutions as the platform will use automation and ML to identify balance points that best support workloads and will recommend, configure, and offer the optimal alternative.
Sustainability
💡 3 out of 4 developers will lead with sustainability as their primary development principle.
Steren Giannini (Group product manager at Google, predicts)
Sustainability will soon take precedence over security, dependability, and performance, which have long been the main concerns of developers when creating projects and applications. According to Steren, 36% of executives lack the necessary tools to monitor their sustainability targets’ progress, while 65% of executives wish to improve their existing situation.
To achieve this goal, Google provides a carbon footprint calculator to assess how using the cloud affects sustainability. Users of the dashboard may view emissions measures from Google data centers by project, region, and product. These measurements can then be exported to BigQuery for additional analysis, which enables developers to create new apps in the greenest areas.
Multicloud
💡 Over half of all organizations using the public cloud will freely switch their primary cloud provider as a result of the multi-cloud capabilities available.
Richard Seroter (Director of DevRel and Outbound product management)
Most organizations are already on multi-cloud systems, and in the years ahead many will use a multi-cloud strategy to switch from their first cloud to the next.
According to Seroter, businesses will use new multi-cloud technologies that can “meet you where you are,” enable safe collaboration across various clouds, analyse data where it is already located without incurring moving costs, and manage many clusters from a single location.
Business Applications
💡 Over half of all business applications will be built by users who do not identify as professional developers today.
Jana Mandic (Engineering Manager at Google)
Low-code and no-code applications will rule the business world in the next three years. According to Mandic, this transition will have such an impact that more than half of all business apps will be created by users who do not consider themselves to be professional developers. This will help reduce the workload for developers and enable enterprises to produce their own solutions.
Notably, Gartner also expects that by 2025, more than 70% of new apps will be powered by low-code/no-code technologies.
