Shining a light on Anthos at Next OnAir application modernization week

Welcome to Week 7 of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir! This week’s app modernization track goes live Tuesday, August 25 at 9:00am PT, and is all about containers, serverless, app development—and my personal favorite, Anthos.

App modernization is such a relevant and timely topic. Now more than ever, companies across the globe are looking at their existing applications, and considering how new technologies could help modernize them to make their businesses more efficient and streamlined. This week is all about that very challenge. As a Developer Advocate who strives to help businesses understand what app modernization can look like, I’m blocking lots of time on my calendar to watch these sessions this week!

Here are some breakout talks at the top of my watch list:

1. Hands-on Keynote: Building Trust for Speedy Innovation: I always love a good keynote to help dig into what this week in Next is all about. And a hands-on keynote sounds even better! As with any app modernization effort, this session focuses on the basics—“what are you really trying to accomplish?”—by tying technology innovation back to business goals such as increasing trust and speed.

2. Getting Started with Anthos: Containers are at the core of many app modernization journeys. With many businesses adopting hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies, they’re looking for tools that can help them create the best environments for their applications, wherever they may be. Anthos is a tool with a lot to offer in these modern, distributed environments.

3. Modernizing Texas’ Best Retail Chain with Anthos: There’s nothing like a customer story to understand how to use a new tool or technology in practice. Many viewers will be able to relate to how H-E-B grappled with the challenges of transforming traditional systems into modern microservice-style architectures. I’ll be looking to learn about what specific challenges H-E-B faced, why they chose the solutions they did, and what they’re planning to do next.

4. Mainframe Modernization: Accelerating Legacy Transformation: Mainframes are everywhere, but more and more businesses are working to understand life beyond the mainframe. A whole session addressing challenges and solutions around mainframe-to-container modernization sounds like just what this app modernization expert ordered.

5. Integrating VM Workloads into Anthos Service Mesh: While containers are a cornerstone of many app modernization efforts, “app modernization” is really all about the apps—and not every app belongs in a container! VM solutions are still popular and sometimes the best tool for the job. But did you know that popular technologies commonly associated with containers, like service mesh, can offer benefits to VM-based applications too?

6. Evolve to Zero Trust Security Model‎ with Anthos Security: No app modernization journey would be complete without incorporating security. And a key component of modernizing security postures is evolving closer to a zero-trust security model. Google has a wealth of experience to draw on when it comes to modern, zero-trust application architectures and this session will share that expertise with you, and show you the tools to implement it yourself.

These are just a few of the exciting sessions I have on my playlist. Looking through the schedule, I know I’ll be checking out a lot more as the week goes on! Let’s not forget that Next OnAir is also offering more than just the typical breakout sessions:

• Check out the Explore Anthos Demo for a technical demonstration of the tools Anthos uses to support modernized applications.

• Get hands-on practice managing traffic routing with Istio and Envoy and how to implement continuous delivery with Jenkins in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) during this week’s Cloud Study Jam workshops. You’ll also learn more about Google Cloud’s Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification. 

• Take your app modernization skills to the next level and compete with peers for prizes in this week’s Cloud Hero game.

• Recap what you’ve learned, learn about some great content you might have missed, and take the opportunity to ask experts your questions at Cloud Talks by DevRel live on Friday, August 28th.

We hope you have fun at Next OnAir this week! Don’t forget to check out our other breakout talks and register at g.co/cloudnext.