Google Cloud Next ’24 is better than last year’s event in every way but one

Conferences aren’t cheap to attend. Forget the financial commitment—although that’s far from trivial—it’s expensive with regards to your time. You’re likely traveling out of town and spend time commuting. Then there’s the event itself, which takes you away from work and life for at least a few days. All of this in the hope of getting equal or greater value than what you spent. Risky bet? No doubt. I’ve been attending and organizing conferences for many years, and I’ll honestly say that this year’s Google Cloud Next ’24 is one of the surer bets I’ve seen. Even if you’re not a Google Cloud user (yet), I’m confident that you’d get a lot out of attending.

The last edition of the event was terrific, but this one is better; except for one aspect, which I’ll mention at the end. This might be your best 2024 investment to learn about AI, modern app architectures and development, best practices for data access and analysis, and operations at scale. But why do I think it’s better than last year?

There’s much more technical content

We had too much introductory material in our breakout sessions last year. Level 100 content is super valuable, but you can get that anywhere. Many of us attend events to hear stories and go deeper than we can someplace else. This year, well over half of the breakouts are Level 200 or 300 content, and there’s a proper mix of introductory and in-depth material.

There are breakouts for everybody. If you want to learn about AI, this is maybe the best event of the year. Go deep on GPUs and TPUs, learn about AI and serverless, study ML and streaming, build LLM apps with a RAG architecture, building AI apps with Go, creating gen AI apps with LangChain, using Gemini through Vertex AI, understanding vector searching, and 175+ more sessions.

Are you a database enthusiast? Learn about high availability for relational databases, picking the right cloud database, non-relational database design patterns, how Yahoo! uses Cloud Spanner, managing databases with AI, and more.

This is a terrific event for data scientists with dozens of breakouts. Learn about natural language analytics queries, continuous queries, using LLMs in BigQuery, vector search and multimodal embeddings, and lots more.

Ops folks get a ton of content this year. Whether you’re building an internal developer platform on GKE, managing edge retail experiences at scale, embracing observability, setting up continuous deployment of AI models, migrating legacy workloads, securing multi-tenant Kubernetes, building a global service mesh, or advancing your logging infrastructure, you’ll leave the event smarter.

And don’t forget about developers! We didn’t. With over 100 breakouts, we amped up the deep developer content. Learn about Java on serverless platforms, deploying apps to cloud, testing apps with testcontainers, building apps from scratch using AI assistance, pushing JavaScript apps to cloud, app troubleshooting, and tons more.

Notice a better focus on developers and onsite learning

Historically, Cloud Next was focused heavily on cloud services, but we also wanted to expand our usefulness for folks who are actually coding!

For breakouts, we’ve got content for Android developers, those building Firebase apps, devs using Flutter, game developers, devs building with Angular, builders extending Workspace through APIs, and even those running training for Llama2!

Our Innovator’s Hive is where you have 10s of thousands of square feet worth of demo stations featuring creative and educational examples of technology. And our first-time Community Hub offers education on Google-sponsored open tech like Android, Flutter, and more.

Also, come for the dedicated tech training and certification options. This is more of a developer-centric program than I’ve ever seen from us.

See more “now” technology to accompany “next” technology

Last year’s event had lots of exciting previews, but much the tech wasn’t ready yet. We showed off AI developer assistance, previewed some new AI models, and talked about many things that were coming up soon.

That’s all good, but now we have a better mix of “now” and “next.” You’ll continue seeing cutting edge tech that’s coming in the future, but you also will see more products, services, and frameworks that you can use RIGHT NOW.

Hear from more industry expert voices

Our developer keynote last year was so much fun, and we heard from awesome Google Champion Innovators. I loved it.

We thought we’d mix it up this year and invite folks to our main stage that aren’t directly associated with Google. Our developer keynote features Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel; Josh Long, Spring advocate at Broadcom; and Charity Majors co-founder at Honeycomb. I’m a fan of all three people, which is why I’m amped that they accepted my invitation to join us on stage.

And the breakouts themselves feature an absolute ton of customers and independent experts. A quick scan through our program gave me a list of speakers from companies like AMD, ANZ Bank, ASML, Accenture, Alaska Airlines, American Express, Anthropic, Anyscale, Apple, BMW AG, Bayer, Bayer Corporation, Belk, Bombardier, Boston Consulting Group, Box, CME Group, Carrefour, Charles Schwab, Chicago CTA, Citadel, Commerzbank AG, Core Logic, Covered California, Cox Communication, DZ Bank, Databricks, Deloitte, Deutsche Telekom, Devoteam G Cloud, Dialpad, DoIT International, Docker, Fiserv, Ford Motor Company, GitLab, Glean, Globe Telecom, Goldman Sachs, GrowthLoop, HCA Healthcare, HCL, HSBC, Harness, Hashicorp, Illinois Department of Human Services, Intel, KPMG, Lloyds Banking Group, Logitech, L’Oreal, Macquarie Bank, Major League Baseball, Mayo Clinic, Mercado Libre, Moloco, MongoDB, NJ Cybersecurity and Communications Cell, Nuro, Onix, OpenText, Palo Alto Networks, Paramount, Paypal, Pfizer, PwC, Quantiphi, Red Hat, Reddit, Rent the Runway, Roche, Roku, SADA, Sabre, Salesforce, Scotia Bank, Shopify, Snap, Spotify, Stability AI, Stagwell, Stanford, Symphony, Synk, TD Securities, Telus corporation, TransUnion, Trendyol, Typeface, UC Riverside, UPS, US News and World Report, Uber, Ubie, Inc, Unilever, Unity Technologies, Verizon, Walmart, Wayfair, Weights & Biases, Wells Fargo, Yahoo, and apree health. So many folks to learn from!

Enjoy a bigger overall event

This version of Next is going to be significantly larger than the last one, and that’s a good thing. I don’t want the conference to ever be festival-sized like Dreamforce or re:Invent, but having tens of thousands of folks in one place means a bigger breakout program, more learning opportunities, more serendipitous meetups, and a unique energy for attendees.

We don’t have any musical numbers 😦

The one thing that’s not better than last year? We couldn’t top our last keynote intro, and I didn’t try. There’s no musical tune featuring a sousaphone. That said, I genuinely think our developer keynote itself is even better overall this time, and the whole event should be memorable.

There’s still time to register, and I’d love to bump into you if you attend. Let me know if you’ll be there!