Developer research deep dive: Let’s build faster together

We like hearing feedback, and you’re not shy about giving it to us. Excellent! Each day, you reach us through our Twitter account, Innovator’s Program forums, and even when we meet in person at industry events. Your feedback helps us better understand what you need, what’s not working right, and how we can make your cloud experience better. 

Another way we hear from our customers? Independent research. Third-party research allows us to get a better understanding of how our products stack up against the competition. We just finished some new research that I want to tell you about. What did we find? Google Cloud is making it easier for developers everywhere to do what they love, faster.

Developer experience research

We partnered with User Research International to conduct research with the goal of quantifying how fast you can do things in Google Cloud compared to using our major competitors in the cloud industry. We ran 45, two-hour sessions to gather more information on how customers are using products like GKE Autopilot, Cloud Run Jobs, and Cloud Deploy against that of equivalent competitor services offered by AWS and Azure. Of the 45 participants, there was a nearly even distribution between those who identified themselves as Google Cloud, AWS or Azure experts — meaning that was the main cloud provider they perform daily tasks on. Being able to understand how developers, who are not native to our platform perform, was crucial to getting a real world understanding of what customers need and how well cloud products address those needs.

Nowadays developers get dragged into so many activities like operations, security, and managing infrastructure, when all they want to focus on is coding. All these distractions reduce developer productivity and increase the need to learn yet another skill. That is why we chose to focus on three of our products that abstract away much of the complexity of cloud development.

Build fast with GKE Autopilot

With tools like GKE Autopilot, you no longer have to be an expert at Kubernetes or containers to be successful. Autopilot mode is a hands-off, fully managed service that manages your entire cluster’s infrastructure without you worrying about configuring and monitoring, while still delivering a complete Kubernetes experience. With GKE Autopilot, deploying a containerized application on Google Cloud is up to 2.6x faster than competing managed Kubernetes offerings¹. 

The Kubernetes learning curve can be a bit steep, but GKE Autopilot makes it easier. To learn a bit more about containers and Kubernetes, here are two of my favorite tutorials that can help kick of the journey to deploy your first GKE application:

• Deploy a containerized web application. This is a full-fledged tutorial you can walk through.

• Interactive tutorial: GKE Autopilot. Here’s one of dozens of in-console tutorials that walk you through GKE, step by step.

Build fast with Cloud Run Jobs

While many of us like using Kubernetes to run containerized workloads, serverless options offer another outstanding host for our apps. You can go from source to deploy in one command with Cloud Run — and that’s just one of the tools that speed up your development. 

Unlike Cloud Run services that run continuously to respond to web requests or events, Cloud Run jobs run code that performs some work and quits when the work is done. In fact, with tools like Cloud Run jobs, developers deploy and execute serverless jobs 50% faster than the nearest competition¹. Cloud Run jobs are a good fit for administrative tasks such as database migrations, scheduled work like nightly reports, or doing batch data transformation.

Looking to get started with Cloud Run Jobs today? Check out this simple tutorial the team built to enable you to create and execute a job.

Build fast with Cloud Deploy

Administrative tasks are automated by Cloud Runs job, but Cloud Deploy helps to automate DevOps-style continuous delivery tasks like release promotion and approval; our research showed that these tasks are 2.4x faster on Google Cloud than with competing cloud services¹. Cloud Deploy is a managed and opinionated continuous delivery service that makes continuous delivery to GKE easier, faster, and more reliable. 

Whether you’re using GKE or Cloud Run, Cloud Deploy simplifies the continuous delivery journey by providing a fully managed service that includes easy one-step promotion and rollback of releases via the web console, CLI, or API. Get started today with Cloud Deploy by checking out these tutorials that I’ve found helpful:

• Deploy an app to GKE using Google Cloud Deploy. This complete walkthrough helps you deploy an app to GKE.

• Interactive Tutorial: Cloud Deploy End-to-End. This guided experience helps you complete every step.

Connect with us

Our goal is to make it easier to build, deploy, and run apps that matter. Our independent research helped show that many of our cloud services help you deliver value faster, while giving you more time to focus on the fun parts of app development.

Never hesitate to give us feedback on what you need to be even more inspired and successful with the cloud, and, don’t forget to join our Innovator’s program to stay up to date on all the latest events and connect with other learners!

^{1. Google Developer Experience - Competitive Benchmark Report 2022 by User Research International}