What to expect from Active Assist at Google Cloud Next’21

Google Cloud Active Assist is a portfolio of tools that use data, intelligence, and machine learning designed to reduce cloud complexity and administrative toil, making it simple to optimize your cloud's security, performance, and cost. Under the Active Assist Portfolio, we have tools like Policy Intelligence, Network Intelligence Center, Predictive Autoscaler, and a collection of Recommendations for various Google Cloud services. 

In this blog, we’ll touch on the following topics:

• New Active Assist tools and use cases

• How Active Assist has simplified Google Cloud for customers since Next’20

• Where to learn more about Active Assist at Next’21

Top Active Assist features launched since Next’20

Throughout 2021, Active Assist customers saw major reductions in time required to manage their Google Cloud deployments as well as meaningful reductions to their monthly cloud costs. After closely listening to your feedback, we have launched a set of new features and capabilities to help you to reduce your cost, elevate your security postures, optimize your workload performance and minimize your operational complexity by providing automated solutions. 

Below are a few examples of what we have heard from our customers with Active Assist:

Groupe Renault is a French-based automotive manufacturer, who teamed up with Google Cloud to accelerate the digitization of its production facilities and supply chain.

“Not only did these [Cloud SQL] recommendations help us reduce waste, but they also saved us significant effort in the writing and maintaining of custom scripts.” —Renault

Veolia is one of the world’s largest water, waste and energy management companies and collaborates with Google Cloud to empower its employees to solve business problems faster with technological solutions.

“This feature [Unattended Project Recommender] allows us to reduce our costs and security debt on assets that are no longer in use, and is also fully in line with Veolia's philosophy of limiting its carbon footprint.” —Veolia

Below are a sample of the new features we’ve released so far throughout 2021:

• Committed Use Discount recommender (optimize your resource costs)

• Google Compute Engine (GCE) Predictive Autoscaler (blog, ML-powered automation) 

• Unattended Project recommender (blog, reclaim or remove unattended projects)

• Firewall Insights (blog, optimize your firewall rules with increased accuracy with ML)

• Account Security recommender (blog, up your security game)

• IAM Lateral Movement Insights (understand insider attack risk)

• Cloud SQL Out-of-disk recommender (monitor your SQL disk availability)

• Cloud SQL cost optimization (blog, detect idle and over-provisioned instances)

• Cloud Asset Insights (blog, detect risks in your asset configs)

• Cloud Run Service Security recommender (blog, identify the least-privileged service account to run Cloud Run)

In addition, we released the following tools to make it easier for you to consume and leverage all your recommendations:

• BigQuery export for recommendations and insights (blog, access all your recommendations faster)

• Cloud Architectures Center references:

• Patterns for using Active Assist at scale ("how to" guide)

• Using serverless pipelines with Active Assist ("how to" guide)

What to expect in Google Next’21 for Active Assist 

The best part is that, this year, the entire conference is free. So what are you waiting for? Here they are:

• SEC202 (by Vandhana Ramadurai & Nicole Liang): Policy Intelligence

• Policy Intelligence, as part of Active Assist solution portfolio, provides IAM recommendations and insights that help customers reduce security vulnerability, elevate their security postures and improve operational efficiency.

• INF204 (by Dan Sheppard & Sergey Maximov): Dramatically simplify Day 2 Ops with GCP infrastructure

• Several Active Assist VM recommenders and predictive autoscaler are featured in this talk to help customers drastically improve their operational efficiency while balancing their cost.

• INF201 (by Jess Killips & Yasmin Mowafy): Best practices for cost optimization on Google Compute Engine

• Active Assist cost optimization recommendations were featured in this talk to help our customers to accomplish more with less and make their cost management experience on Google Cloud a breeze.

• INF105 (by Wendy Cartee & Shailesh Shukla): What’s New and What’s Next in Cloud Networking & SEC211 (by Peter Blum & Emil Kiner): Innovations in DDoS, WAF, Firewall & Network Threat Detection

• Newly released Firewall Insights powered by Active Assist will be featured in this session on how customers can leverage these automated and intelligent services to optimize their firewall rules and improve their security postures.

By the way, here is a pre-made playlist for all Active Assist related sessions at Google Cloud Next’21 for your ease of tracking.

What’s next?

We’d love to hear your feedback about our latest Active Assist features, recommenders, your Recommendation Hub experiences, or those Next’21 sessions. Please reach out to active-assist-feedback@google.com and we’d be delighted to speak with you about your experiences and suggestions.

Want to learn more about Active Assist and all our portfolio products and solutions? Check out our solutions home page here. You can also follow us at our Twitter handle here. Thanks for reading and “see” you virtually at Next ’21!