A cloud built for developers — join our Innovators community!

November 15, 2024: The Cloud Innovators Plus program has evolved and is now the premium tier of the Google Developer Program.

Ten years from now, where will your company be? We believe that to be a leader in your industry, you need to be a technology leader in your industry, too. And no one plays a bigger role in that than developers. 

Today’s Google Cloud Next ‘21 keynote, “A Cloud Built For Developers,” focused on two areas to help developers support your organizational transformation: (1) making it easier for you to get your job done; and (2) investing in the developer community to learn and grow from each other.

Making it easier for you to get your job done

From transformational infrastructure like Tau VMs to innovations in data and AI and security, every feature we release begins making it easier for developers everywhere to do what they love. Whether that’s by natively embedding key security or sustainability features into Google Cloud or featuring partner solutions right within our console, we’re focused on one thing: giving you the best developer experience of any cloud provider.

Here’s how we’re helping you get your job done easier.

Providing the industry’s best Kubernetes experience

Kubernetes deployments can involve a fair bit of manual configuration, but with Google Cloud, you get the most automated and secure Kubernetes experience available. GKE Autopilot makes it much easier for you to use Kubernetes by provisioning and managing the entire cluster’s underlying infrastructure, including the control plane, node pools, and worker nodes, letting you focus on higher-level applications and services. With GKE Autopilot, you get a sophisticated cluster that uses the best practices brought to you by the team who developed Kubernetes itself. You’re always up to date and get the same results as the experts, without having to be an expert yourself. No other cloud provider offers anything like this.

Helping you build secure, modern applications right from your laptop

With Google Cloud, we make it super easy to create modern applications.

• Easy to write - with Cloud Shell Editor, a context-aware, remote development environment, you can develop and manage applications securely from any browser. There’s nothing to download or install locally. It comes with an integrated debugger, source control, API explorer, and if you want to test locally on your laptop, it has local emulators for Kubernetes and serverless APIs. You can also run command-line instructions directly in Google Cloud documentation, so you can have a better learning experience within the context of where you’re already working.
• Easy to deploy - Cloud Build lets you build, test, and deploy on our serverless CI/CD platform across multiple environments such as VMs, serverless, Kubernetes, or Firebase. Cloud Run combines the best of serverless and containers. It allows you to deploy containers into production in seconds because there is no cluster to configure. And with Cloud Build fully integrated with Cloud Run, you can build and deploy your app with just one command. We also recently launched Cloud Deploy to make scaling deployment pipelines across your organization seamless. When it comes to secure deployment, Binary Authorization ensures only trusted container images are deployed on GKE or Cloud Run.
• Easy to extend - Cloud Functions is a scalable “pay-as-you-go” service that allows you to run your code without any server management. You can extend your application and scale up or down based on load.
• Easy to operate - with Google Cloud’s operations suite, we make it easy to monitor, troubleshoot, and improve application performance in production. You get one integrated view of alerts, events, metrics, and logs. You don’t have to jump between multiple tools while you are troubleshooting issues.

Keeping you ahead of tomorrow’s threats

Recent cyber threats have stemmed from malicious actors who are compromising the software supply chain. To address these growing threats, we have been building security natively into the developer toolchain, anticipating and preventing issues ahead of time—not when you are most at risk.

Cloud Build offers the first and only cloud CI/CD service with verifiable build provenance built in. This provenance lets you trace a binary to the source code to prevent tampering and prove that the code you’re running is really the code you think you’re running. And with new build integrity capabilities, another Google Cloud first, you can prevent anyone in your organization from deploying code that has not been built by your legitimate build system.

Anthos Service Mesh uses a zero-trust security model where once your application is deployed, you can manage authentication, authorization, and encryption between services, with little to no changes to your applications. 

Both Anthos Service Mesh and Cloud Build Hybrid are available across Google Cloud and your on-premises environment. They work with VPC Service Controls and VPC Peering to automate developer security for your enterprise and allow you to build and manage your applications with assurance. 

We also believe that by helping create industry standards, we can provide safer and simpler services for developers. This is why we co-founded the Open Source Security Foundation with other technology leaders to create security standards in open source. We also proposed an industry-wide standard called SLSA (“salsa”), or Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts. It’s a security framework that provides common criteria for increasing levels of software security through automation and cryptographic signing at each stage of the software supply chain. Cloud Build now offers SLSA Level 1 compliance by default. 

No other cloud provider protects your software supply chain to this level. Because we started working on software supply-chain security long before it was in the headlines, you benefit from our years of investment in security.

Encouraging you to redefine what’s possible

In the world of data and AI, we’re bringing you the leading data cloud products in the industry, designed for optimal performance, reliability and immense scale. They are backed by new AI capabilities that help you more easily redefine older, less efficient ways of operating and demonstrate what only developers can make possible.

Contract DocAI, a new capability within DocAI that automates data capture to reduce document processing costs. It’s based on AI templates and fully managed services that help you quickly build smarter applications and create more meaningful insights for your organization. This is just one of the many ways you can use data and AI to redefine what’s possible for your users.

Making it easier to build more sustainably 

We’re also making it easier for developers to do the right thing, even when it’s hard. For too long, doing the right thing for the environment came at a high financial cost for organizations. By wrapping carbon reduction goals into your IT initiatives from the beginning, you become the transformation leader executing against board-level sustainability mandates.

Many cloud providers have a vision for a sustainable future, and many aim to match their electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy by 2025 or 2030. Google accomplished 100% renewable energy in 2017 and we’re the only hyperscale cloud to do this today. Our data centers are twice as energy efficient as the average data center and we’re embedding tools right into our platform to help you build more sustainably. 

Here are just a few of our recent releases to support you:

• Google Cloud Carbon Footprint - gives you access to the energy-related emissions data you need for external carbon disclosures in just one click.
• Region Picker - lets you choose the data center region with the lowest gross carbon cost. On an annualized basis, we match all your usage with renewable energy so your net impact is zero no matter what region you pick. This tool helps you become carbon-free, not just carbon-neutral. 
• Google Earth Engine and its integration with Google Cloud - with over 700 datasets and more than 50 petabytes of data today, Earth Engine gives developers access to the world’s largest catalog of satellite image data and tools for driving sustainable impact.
• “Sustainable IT - Decoded” masterclass - learn from some of the top global sustainability experts on how to build more sustainably.

We’re excited to share this new portfolio of sustainability tools and resources with you to help make the greener choice easy, and make every day safer and more sustainable with Google.

Investing in our developer community

Community building is one of the most effective ways to support developers, which is why we created Google Cloud Innovators.

This new community program is designed for developers and technical practitioners using Google Cloud and we welcome everyone, from enterprise developers and data scientists to student developers and hobbyists. Through this program, you get deeper access to early technology previews, the latest roadmaps and content, and front-line engineers. You’ll get exclusive invitations to all our cloud developer community events and opportunities to partner with us to design and improve Google Cloud services. We’ll also recognize your expertise as community influencers by promoting your contributions and working closely with you to solve the world’s toughest problems. 

At the top of the Innovators program is the invite-only tier of top community thought leaders—our Champion Innovators. These individuals go above and beyond to inspire and encourage other developers in the community and help set the pace of innovation in the Google Cloud ecosystem. You can read about them in our Champion Innovators Directory.

We also plan to integrate the Innovators program much more deeply into the Google Cloud user experience, so consider this just the beginning! We look forward to giving you the tools and resources you need along the road to make it easier to do the things you care about most. Join Innovators today!