Google bolsters its Cloud Platform w/ Cloud Machine Learning, enterprise enhancements

Google today kicked off its GCP Next 2016 event in San Francisco, California, and with it comes — not surprisingly — the announcement of some new products that will bolster Google’s cloud offerings. The company announced plans to take machine learning mainstream with Cloud Machine Learning, many enterprise feature enhancements, a new unified monitoring, logging and diagnostics service called Stackdriver, new partners for cloud ops, and more…

First up, Google has announced Cloud Machine Learning, which the company hopes will “take machine learning mainstream,” and give data scientists and developers “a way to build a new class of intelligent applications.” As part of Cloud Machine Learning, you’ll have access to Google’s Machine Learning models like Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API, but Google announced today that those are being joined by Google Cloud Speech API.

“We’re on a journey to create applications that can see, hear and understand the world around them,” Google says.

Google also announced that Cloud Machine learning is “well integrated” with other Cloud Platform products that you might already be using, namely: Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud Datalab.

There are also many new enhancements to the platform for enterprise customers. The company is launching Audit Logging, “to enable you to answer the question of “who did what, where, and when?” on Cloud Platform,” before the end of May. There are also new IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles to expand upon the existing owner/editor/viewer roles and make them more granular. Alongside even more enhancements, Google says it’s adding “more than 10 additional GCP regions we’ll be adding to our network through 2017.”

Moreover, Google has introduced Google Stackdriver, a “unified monitoring, logging and diagnostics service that makes ops easier,” which — interestingly — works for applications running on either Google’s Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services (or both). Stackdriver is a single offering that includes “rich dashboards, uptime monitoring, alerting, log analysis, tracing, error reporting and production debugging,”

Alongside Stackdriver, Google has announced that it’s integrating with Splunk, BMC and Tenable to “significantly expand the IT ops, security and compliance capabilities available to GCP customers.”

Read more at the Google Cloud Platform blog.