Google Cloud plans to bring more AI capabilities into the data center
Google Cloud on Thursday announced plans to update its Google Distributed Cloud Hosted portfolio, bringing a selection of AI, ML and database capabilities directly to customer data centers.
The announcement comes just about eight months after the cloud computing giant first introduced the Google Distributed Cloud Edge, and Google Distributed Cloud Hosted offerings. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted is still in preview, with general availability expected later this year. The new AI and database services found in Distributed Cloud Hosted will be available within the next year, Google Cloud said to ZDNet.
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Google's investments in the portfolios underscore how much cloud companies are chasing data -- following their customers inside of warehouses and retail space, from the network edge and into their own data centers. As Tony Baer noted last year for ZDNet, Google Distributed Cloud is comparable to hybrid cloud offerings from other providers, like Amazon Outposts, Amazon Wavelength, Oracle Cloud@Customer, IBM Cloud Satellite and HPE GreenLake.
These hybrid offerings are especially important for customers with highly-sensitive workloads that shouldn't leave dedicated facilities, customers that have to meet data residency requirements, or companies that want ultra-low latency.
On-premise offerings, however, are only as good as the services they provide. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted now promises to offer services Vertex AI features like the Translation API, Speech-to-Text and optical character recognition. Google released the Vertex AI platform last year to help data scientists and ML engineers build, deploy and manage ML projects.