Recap: Google Cloud Next ‘23 in San Francisco

After wrapping at the 2023 Google Cloud Next conference, our team took some time to reflect as we made our way back across the country or north of the border. The show was one of the first big in-person events that our NetOps team had done since “the before times” and it was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

While we often talk to network folks, it was interesting to see how much of the audience cared about the network even though they were cloud-first people. An obvious assumption for a Google Cloud show is that we have mostly developers, architects, and SREs. What surprised us, however, was how many of them were actively seeking and engaging with solutions that could tell them more about the environment around their cloud infrastructure.

Broadcom was asked to do several presentations at Google Cloud Next ‘23. With a focus on cloud visibility, we had Mike Melillo, Head of Network Management Software and Mike Hustler, Head of Engineering tackle the issue of end-user experience across hybrid clouds. Brian Smith, Product Management spoke about ensuring end-to-end quality for networks, and I talked about the role of active network monitoring in cloud environments.

Breakout session: Three ways to enhance end-user experience across hybrid and multicloud environments

This session discussed the consequences of modern IT teams being tasked with managing networks that are constantly in a state of transformation.

In essence, the IT Operations role has expanded to require visibility into the network delivery paths between end users, managed infrastructure, and business-critical applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Due to the primarily passive types of visibility we’ve had in the past (SNMP, NetFlow), new forms of visibility are required in the cloud to maintain good end-user experience by providing visibility into applications, network traffic, distributed locations, and cloud workflows.

To fully capture the benefits of cloud environments for hosting business-critical applications, IT should:

• Embrace the reality of dynamic networks by actively monitoring them
• Gather as much contextual information as they can to aid in troubleshooting
• Monitor from multiple perspectives– the end-user at the edge and the app in the cloud

As a result, Broadcom is excited to be partnering with Google to help isolate issues faster for our collective customer bases.

To view the presentation slides, click here.

Booth session 1: How to assure end-to-end network quality for cloud networks

The landscape of corporate networks has changed, with even the most conservative companies shifting workloads to the cloud. However, this shift likewise moves increasingly more of the control of network delivery away from IT.

In order to assure network quality, we first have to define it. Once we know what metrics we need and how we will measure them we can begin to isolate the scope of problems within the end-to-end picture.

Broadcom is able to provide visibility into the end-to-end delivery path between apps and users by first analyzing devices and user performance behind the firewall in LAN environments. Then, AppNeta by Broadcom actively monitors out to ISP and transit networks in order to understand the dynamic paths that traffic takes.

Finally, AppNeta provides insight into the application service provider environment - in many cases Google Cloud itself - before identifying where the issue originates. In monitoring this way, we can provide actionable information for any link in the chain and roll up insights to executive dashboards for reporting on network and application health.

To view presentation slides, click here.

Booth session 2: How active network performance monitoring can be applied to hybrid cloud

Many organizations make decisions to move apps and workloads to the cloud without fully accounting for the impact on end-user experience. IT is still responsible for performance even though hybrid infrastructures introduce more physical and logical distance between users and apps. Our customers know that traditional monitoring approaches can’t provide the insights required to isolate issues for the cloud apps and networks that run their businesses.

Instead, the introduction of active monitoring – both web and network– allows IT teams to reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) by collecting continuous insight into networks they own (LAN) as well as ones they don’t (WAN/ISP, Cloud). AppNeta helps teams identify what is degrading performance, where the root cause is, and when the software started to help meaningfully reduce MTTR and MTTI.

To view the presentation slides, click here.