The blind dash to adopt public cloud computing technology has passed, leaving a trail of security blunders and abandoned transformations. As the dust settles, hybrid approaches are coming to the fore and enterprises are modernizing existing assets alongside introducing cutting-edge technology. Seamlessly blending public cloud and on-premises assets can be a challenge, but Google LLC is pitching its own solution.

“There are large portions of enterprise IT that have to remain on-premise,” said Aparna Sinha (pictured, left), Google’s group product manager of Kubernetes. “[Google is] very sensitive and knowledgeable about that. That’s why we introduced Cloud Services Platform as Google’s technology in your environment on-prem, so you can modernize where you are at your own pace.”

Sinha and Chen Goldberg (right), director of engineering at Google, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. Discussion topics included product announcements, such as Google Kubernetes Engine for on-prem data centers, the benefits of Istio and the challenges of developing new products in an open-source culture. (* Disclosure below.)

The rising importance of operations management

As microservices management tools, such as the open platform Istio, become more sophisticated, operators that previously worked at the container or network port level are now working at the services level, and developers are freed to focus on higher-priority tasks.

“[Istio has] decoupled the service development from the service operations, so developers are free — they don’t need to take care of monitoring, audit logging network traffic, for example,” Goldberg said. “Instead the operation team has really sophisticated tools to manage all of that on behalf of the developers in a consistent way.”

One example of using Istio comes from e-commerce marketplace eBay Inc. A longtime user of GKE and a contributor to the Kubernetes open-source project, eBay has hundreds of microservices, written in many different languages.

Sinha recounts a recent conversation with eBay software engineer Jeff White, whom she asked, “As an operator, how do you figure out how the services are communicating with each other? How do you know which ones are healthy? How do you solve that complexity problem?” His answer: “Boom: Istio!”

Openness and collaboration are central to the Google corporate culture, but working on open-source projects can be challenging. “Managing and investing and building something like Kubernetes requires a lot of effort,” Goldberg said. She explained how her engineering team selects functions that they value the most, such as portability (which was incorporated into GKE on-prem), or that they would like to see become a standard, such as Knative’s serverless workload management.

“Those are the kind of things that we really want to bring to the industry as open-source technologies, because we want to make sure that they will work for customers everywhere,” she said. “We know that not all the innovation will come from Google, and we want to make sure that we empower our partners and the ecosystem to build new solutions.”

Here’s the complete interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s three-day coverage of Google Cloud Next. (* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE