A partner's view of Google's Cloud Next conference

It is. There were about 35,000 attendees - a mark of how far Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has come. It's an interesting mix of partners, developers, and customers that you don't tend to get at other shows, which I find are typically more geared towards a single group. It depends on your perspective as to whether you think that's a good thing or not. San Francisco and the Moscone centre handle big conferences all the time, and this felt manageable in size. It seems like a lifetime ago that I wrote about Google Next London and how we were seeing momentum building around GCP - actually it was 2017. I'd say the same rings true here: Google is betting big on cloud and people are taking notice. The energy here was palpable and the announcements were definitely interesting.Come on then, what announcements This was Google's new CEO Tom Kurian's first big event, and he did a solid job - I'm always impressed by anyone who can speak for a long time without an autocue, so well done Thomas. He continued a theme set by Diane Greene of talking about Google being ready for enterprise customers, and confirming they are going to hire a mountain of sellers and supporting folks to make sure they do better here. The war on talent is not cooling down any time soon.On the tech side, the big announcement was Anthos. I am only marginally exaggerating when I say that every other word in the first keynote was "hybrid" and the other alternating term was "multi-cloud". Google is taking a bold, differentiating step here around being the most "open" cloud and offering a hybrid solution for managing workloads that run on-premise, in GCP and on AWS and Azure. This is of course built on Kubernetes, something Google knows more about than anyone else does.