Google extends its reach from cloud to the edge and on-Premise cloud offerings

Google Cloud is extending its reach into customers’ data centers and out to the edge under its new Distributed Cloud banner, primarily aimed at customers with unique data sovereignty, latency, or local data-processing requirements. It has announced Google Distributed Cloud portfolio.

The two new options announced this week are Google Distributed Cloud Edge and Google Distributed Cloud Hosted. Both are underpinned by Google Cloud’s Anthos product, which allows customers to deploy and manage Kubernetes workloads across a variety of environments.

Distributed Cloud Edge is a fully managed product the company said suits running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads. Google said Cloud Edge allows companies to run 5G Core and radio access network (RAN) functions at the Edge, alongside enterprise applications, to support mission-critical use cases. It is available in preview.

“CSPs are looking for faster ways to deploy cloud-native network architecture that can bring flexibility and agility to their Edge solutions,” said Dan Rodriguez, VP & GM Network Platforms Group at Intel, “Google Distributed Cloud Edge will help accelerate the delivery of 5G Telco Cloud and services at the Edge leveraging Intel Smart Edge Open, Intel’s FlexRAN reference software, and Intel Xeon Scalable processors.”

“We are excited to partner with Google Cloud on Google Distributed Cloud Edge,” added Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President of Telecom at Nvidia. The hardware will come from a set of launch partners such as Cisco, Dell, HPE, and NetApp, and the software is underpinned by the open source container orchestration tool Kubernetes, which originally emerged out of Google in 2014.

Together, this brings Google Cloud further in line with its rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure in offering customers more choice over how and where they run and manage enterprise workloads.