Last week, more than 30,000 people flocked to the Google Cloud Next ’24 conference. Held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center in recent years, this year’s event was at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. As a Google Cloud Partner, Ternary was a proud Velocity sponsor of the conference. 

Google announced 218 enhancements throughout the week, ranging from infrastructure and data analytics to security, billing, and more. Read on to learn 3 key takeaways from Next ’24 that are most relevant to FinOps teams.

1.  AI (and GenAI) took center stage

Not surprisingly, AI dominated the conference across all keynotes, breakout sessions, and hallway signage. 

Gemini for Google Cloud was introduced as the unified brand for Google’s AI offerings. With the general availability of Gemini 1.0 and Gemini 1.5 Pro in public preview, Google demonstrated how 300+ customers and partners are leveraging the power of AI to boost efficiency. Google has already infused Gemini across its application development, data and analytics, infrastructure, workspace, and security. For example, Gemini Cloud Assist, helps teams generate architecture configurations, as well as troubleshoot and resolve incidents. It also identifies optimization opportunities as part of the application lifecycle. 

As organizations experiment with AI innovation, they need to manage the associated costs. That’s where Ternary comes in. As a FinOps Certified Platform, Ternary enables you to understand the impact of GenAI technology on your organization’s growth, factoring in cost as part of that analysis rather than as an afterthought. With our platform, you can:

  • Get visibility into GenAI costs, organized by application or the business grouping of your choice
  • Allocate those costs to perform accurate chargeback or showback to your teams
  • Define and track unit economics metrics to understand the impact of GenAI on your organization

2. Google celebrated 10 years of Kubernetes

Although infrastructure-related announcements took a backseat to AI at Next ’24, Google leaned into Kubernetes’ 10-year anniversary, sprinkling social media and breakout sessions with “#k8sturns10.” 

According to the breakout session “The past, present, and future of Google Kubernetes Engine,” GKE leads the industry in the size of clusters it supports, greatly surpassing the competition. A few noteworthy announcements for GKE included support for Cloud TPU v5p and TPU multi-host serving, along with Gemini Cloud Assist in GKE. The integration of AI capabilities into containerized environments is enabling organizations to improve efficiency while deploying and managing applications. 

Just as AI deployment requires considering new expenses, leveraging GKE requires cost optimization. With Ternary, you benefit from agentless Kubernetes monitoring. That means you can manage and optimize GKE costs and usage without the headache of deploying agents.

Source: Google Cloud Next ’24, “The past, present, and future of Google Kubernetes Engine.”

3. FinOps adoption among Google customers is on the rise

As a team of FinOps experts and early adopters, we were excited to see the increased interest in FinOps at this year’s event. From FinOps breakout sessions to exhibit hall shop talk and meetings with customers and partners, we enjoyed discussing the key challenges organizations are facing with regard to cloud costs—and how FinOps can help. 

Among the event announcements were several Google Cloud Billing enhancements. These included daily cost updates, visibility for cloud storage costs, and new spend-based Committed Use Discounts for Memorystore, AlloyDB, BigTable, and Dataflow. As a Google Cloud Partner, we complement and extend the capabilities of Google’s cost management toolset. Specifically, we provide greater customization and flexibility to visualize and optimize data across your Google Cloud, multi-cloud, and/or containerized environments.

Ternary greets partners, customers, and prospects at Google Cloud Next ’24.

Ready to learn more?

You may have been among the throngs of FinOps-fueled participants at
Next ’24. Or perhaps you’re just starting to consider how FinOps can further your GCP and multi-cloud goals. No matter where you are on your FinOps journey, we hope you found these Next ’24 takeaways helpful. 

Read more about why Ternary is the leading FinOps platform for GCP. Otherwise, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or would like to request a demo.