At last week’s Google Cloud Next 2022, as developers and industry experts shared their vision of the future, Google executives also chimed in. Here’s a rundown of their top 10 cloud technology predictions that they believe will come true by 2025:
1. Neuro-inclusive design
Google Developer’s vice president (VP), Jeanine Banks, predicted that developers who start with neuro-inclusive design will see a 5x growth in user adoption in the first two years.
Innovation strategist and accessibility leader of Google Cloud, Jim Hogan explained that neuro-inclusive design is designed for sensory and cognitive accessibility, like the raise your hand feature in a virtual meeting.
Hogan offered tips to developers on how to create a neuro-inclusive platform: “Number one, design with simplicity and clarity. Number two, remove distractions or extra visualizations like popup windows. Three, avoid really bright colors, or too much of a single color. Four, stick with a predictable and intuitive user flow. Five, be thoughtful about the vibe you’re setting. Six, stay away from pressure points requiring a quick reaction from the users.”
“When you build simple, clear experiences with fewer distractions, your products will inherently drive greater user adoption,” Banks affirmed.
2. Curated open source
Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure and Google Fellow, predicted that four out of five enterprise developers will use some form of curated open source.
Curated open source, according to Brewer is “just open source as you know it, but with a layer of accountability”. A curator of open source provides support to developers by finding vulnerabilities and fixing them while updating and tracking dependencies, Brewer explained.
“Open source is everywhere. It helps power our electrical grids, water supplies, and oil pipelines. It’s fundamental to all clouds, most nations and even widely used and proprietary software. Open source is public infrastructure and a substantial part of our everyday lives.” Brewer said. He added that curated open source is, therefore, designed to empower and protect open source.
Software delivery shield, announced at Google Next 2022 and which includes Assured Open Source Software Service, will help further this philosophy, Brewer said.
3. Security Operations
Iman Ghanizada, Global Head of Autonomic Security Operations of Google Cloud, predicted that by the end of 2025, 90 per cent of security operations and workflows will be automated and managed as code.
There is not enough talent to keep up with the growing and evolving cyberattacks, Ghanizada explained. “And these jobs, they’re high stress, they’re overloaded with toil based work, and a lot of folks are, quite frankly, just burnt out. So there’s just no way that this issue is going to get solved if we keep doing things the way that we’re doing them today”.
Security can be made more agile and accessible through code by transforming a “traditional assembly line security operations workflows into a codified continuous feedback model we call continuous detection, continuous response or CDCR, for short”, Ghanizada said.
4. Four day work week
Kamelia Aryafar, engineering director of Google Cloud, predicted that, by the end of 2025, AI (artificial intelligence) will be the primary driver for moving to a four day work week.
Efficiencies gained through AI can largely improve employees’ productivity and allow them to comfortably complete a work week in four days rather than five, Aryafar said.
Announced at Next 2022, Vertex AI, a new service that seeks to make computer vision and image recognition AI more accessible to data practitioners, is an example on how AI can help drive operational efficiency, Aryafar said.
5. Actionable data
Irina Farooq, director of smart analytics at Google Cloud, predicted that 90 per cent of data will be actionable in real time using machine learning (ML).
Farooq explained that exploiting the power of data and making data actionable in real time requires a data infrastructure vision, and that means being able to see, trust, and work on your data.
She recommended the use of newly announced tools, including Dataplex, which combines intelligence and automation to understand data lineage and transformation, and Big Query’ support for unstructured data to safely analyze data.
6.Databases
Andi Gutmans, VP and general manager (GM) of databases at Google Cloud, predicted that by the end of 2025, the barriers between transactional and analytical workloads will disappear.
While transactional databases are made for “fast reads and writes”, analytical databases are built for “aggregating large datasets”, making the two systems largely decoupled and impeding the design of intelligent data driven apps, Gutmans said
7. Cloud infrastructure
Amin Vahdat, VP and GM of systems and services infrastructure at Google Cloud, predicted that by the end of 2025, over half of cloud infrastructure decisions will be automated, based on organizations’ usage patterns, to meet performance and reliability needs.
“We’re seeing incredible demand on the industry’s infrastructure, yet simultaneous plateaus and efficiency. You and your companies continue to push the boundaries of what infrastructure can provide,” Vahdat said. “Yet the burden of picking the just right combination of components continues to fall on you.”
“To address this, we’ve engineered golden paths from silicon to the console. These paths combined purpose built infrastructure, prescriptive architectures, and an ecosystem to deliver workload optimized, ultra reliable infrastructure.” Vahdat said.
8.Sustainability
Steren Giannini, group product manager at Google Cloud, predicted that by the end of 2025, three out of four developers will lead with sustainability as their primary development principle.
“For the longest time the focus was elsewhere: we needed to build it fast, build it securely, build it at the lowest cost, build it reliably. Now it’s also time to build it sustainably. We can’t ignore the urgency required from all of us to meet climate targets, and while organizations are moving in the right direction, they struggle to take action.” Giannini said.
Google Cloud Carbon Footprint can bring organizations closer to finding the tools to measure and track sustainability efforts, Giannini concluded.
9. Multi-cloud
Richard Seroter, director of developer relations and outbound product management at Google Cloud, predicted that over half of all organizations using public cloud will freely switch their primary cloud as a result of new multi-cloud capabilities available.
Seroter said that research shows that most companies use multi-cloud, or more than one hyperscale cloud, as a way to shift and distribute their workloads.
Companies will hence leverage new multi-cloud technologies that can “meet you where you are”, facilitate safe collaboration across multiple clouds, analyze data where it resides, without the costs of moving it, and run multiple clusters from one place, Seroter said.
10. Business applications
Jana Mandic, engineering manager at Google Cloud, predicted that over half of all business applications will be built by users who do not identify as professional developers today.
The adoption of no code and low code tools will see non-IT professionals take up development work, which can help ease the workloads on developers and see organizations deliver their own solutions, Mandic said.
