Google Cloud Next in Tokyo 2018

Last month I took a day off from work to attend Google Cloud Next 2018 in Tokyo. Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are two topics that I love, and this event was great to catch up with the latest developments.

The event was divided into two physically separated areas: one for developers and another one for business. I only attended the former. The stages were pleasantly illuminated, and in general, everything was well organized.

There were numerous technical sessions during the event. Thankfully, Google released an Android application that made it easy to reserve a seat and receive notifications in real-time. Talks were videotaped and published a few weeks ago on Google Cloud Japan's Youtube channel (see the sessions playlist). Unfortunately for non-japanese speakers, the videos are all dubbed into Japanese, and there is no option to select the original audio track :(

Apart from the sessions, there was a spacious booth area for attendants to learn about Google Cloud services through demos (e.g., JapanTaxi's demo) and example architectures (e.g., architectures for game backends).

The next day, I attended another event, organized by GCPUG (Google Cloud Platform User Group) Yokohama, that hosted 2 great presentations by Mete Atamel (Dialogflow) and Felipe Hoffa (BigQuery).

Conclusions: Google Cloud Next was exciting, and I learned a lot about cloud architectures and recent developments in machine learning services such as BigQuery ML. Check out other reviews here and here.