Google Cloud's Anthos on-prem platform is getting a new home under the search giant’s recently announced Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) portfolio, where it will live on as a software-based competitor to AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack.

Introduced last fall, GDC enables customers to deploy managed servers and software in private datacenters and at communication service provider or on the edge.

Its latest update sees Google reposition Anthos on-prem, introduced back in 2020, as the bring-your-own-server edition of GDC. Using the service, customers can extend Google Cloud-style management and services to applications running on-prem.

For example, customers can use the service to provision and manage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters on virtual machines or bare-metal servers in their own datacenters, and do it all from the Google Cloud Console.

GDC Virtual doesn’t appear to introduce any new functionality not already found in Anthos on-prem.

“Customers of Anthos on-premises… will continue to enjoy the consistent management and developer experience they have come to know and expect, with no changes to current capabilities, pricing structure, or look and feel across user interfaces,” Chen Goldberg, GM and VP of engineering for cloud-native runtimes at Google, said in a statement.

The announcement marks the latest evolution to the Anthos hybrid cloud platform, which launched in early 2019 following Thomas Kurian's appointment as CEO of Google Cloud.

Anthos was initially conceived as a way to extend a consistent management plane to applications running in multiple clouds — GCP, AWS, Azure, etc — or workloads that customers weren’t ready to see leave the corporate datacenter.

The idea was that customers could manage their workloads wherever they were deployed and migrate them to GCP with minimal retooling. The platform quickly picked up additional features, including integration with VMware's vSphere VM management suite, and a migration tool designed to re-wrap virtual machines to run in containers on GKE.

Google’s motivations don’t appear to have changed much in that regard. The company cites customers with “significant investment in their own VM environments” or those wishing to “migrate their applications to the cloud” as the target market for GDC Virtual.

Despite the emphasis on GDC, we’re told the platform isn’t so much the spiritual successor to Anthos, but rather a consolidation of SKUs powered by the platform aimed at simplifying customer journeys. Or put another way, making Anthos a little less confusing for customers.

Only time will tell whether we’ll see Anthos subjected to the same fate as so many of Google’s products. I’m looking at you Google Talk, I mean Hangouts, or wait, is it Chat now? ®

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) roped the Lone Star State into its cloud empire this week with the launch of its Dallas, Texas region.

The $600 million datacenter campus, which broke ground in 2019, is located approximately 25 miles south of the Dallas metro. The site, Google’s 11th in the US and 34th globally, is the latest in an ongoing effort to expand the cloud provider’s reach to new markets.

“We’ve heard from many of you that the availability of your workloads and business continuity are increasingly top priorities," Stacy Trackey Meagher managing director for Google’s central region, said in a statement. “The Dallas region gives you added capacity and the flexibility to distribute your workloads across the US.”

The major hyperscalers and cloud providers are forecast to spend 25 percent more on datacenter infrastructure this year to $18 billion following record investments in the opening three months of 2022.

This is according to Dell’Oro Group research, which found new cloud deployments and higher per-unit infrastructure costs underpinned capex spending in Q1, which grew at its fastest pace in nearly three years, the report found.

Datacenter spending is expected to receive an additional boost later this year as the top four cloud providers expand their services to as many as 30 new regions and memory prices trend upward ahead of Intel and AMD’s next-gen processor families, Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung told The Register

Special report Seven months from now, assuming all goes as planned, Google Chrome will drop support for its legacy extension platform, known as Manifest v2 (Mv2). This is significant if you use a browser extension to, for instance, filter out certain kinds of content and safeguard your privacy.

Google's Chrome Web Store is supposed to stop accepting Mv2 extension submissions sometime this month. As of January 2023, Chrome will stop running extensions created using Mv2, with limited exceptions for enterprise versions of Chrome operating under corporate policy. And by June 2023, even enterprise versions of Chrome will prevent Mv2 extensions from running.

The anticipated result will be fewer extensions and less innovation, according to several extension developers.

Google has a fresh list of reasons why it opposes tech antitrust legislation making its way through Congress but, like others who've expressed discontent, the ad giant's complaints leave out mention of portions of the proposed law that address said gripes.

The law bill in question is S.2992, the Senate version of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which is closer than ever to getting votes in the House and Senate, which could see it advanced to President Biden's desk.

AICOA prohibits tech companies above a certain size from favoring their own products and services over their competitors. It applies to businesses considered "critical trading partners," meaning the company controls access to a platform through which business users reach their customers. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta in one way or another seemingly fall under the scope of this US legislation. 

Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.

The company unveiled the latest addition to its datacenter-focused Nexus portfolio at Cisco Live this week, where the product set got a software-as-a-service (SaaS) revamp.

"It's targeted at network operations teams that need to manage, or want to manage, their Nexus infrastructure as well as their public-cloud network infrastructure in one spot," Cisco's Thomas Scheibe – VP product management, cloud networking for Nexus & ACI product lines – told The Register.

A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit. 

The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for "religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action." It alleges Peter Lubbers, director of the Google Developer Studio (GDS) film group in which 34-year-old plaintiff Kevin Lloyd worked, is not only a member of The Fellowship of Friends, the exec was influential in growing the studio into a team that, in essence, funneled money back to the fellowship.

In his complaint [PDF], filed in a California Superior Court in Silicon Valley, Lloyd lays down a case that he was fired for expressing concerns over the fellowship's influence at Google, specifically in the GDS. When these concerns were reported to a manager, Lloyd was told to drop the issue or risk losing his job, it is claimed. 

The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.

"When it comes to how people use mobile phones, Apple and Google hold all the cards," said Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, in a statement. "As good as many of their services and products are, their strong grip on mobile ecosystems allows them to shut out competitors, holding back the British tech sector and limiting choice."

The decision to open a formal investigation follows the CMA's year-long study of the mobile ecosystem. The competition watchdog's findings have been published in a report that concludes Apple and Google have a duopoly that limits competition.

Even in the waning days of the pandemic, extended lead times and delayed packages are an inescapable reality. Logistics giant XPO this week picked Google Cloud to try to change that.

XPO is among the largest freight-transport brokers with more than 42,000 employees operating in 731 global locations. In a collaborative effort with Google, the company plans to deploy workloads on Google Cloud Platforms’s (GCP) AI/ML and data analytics platforms to mitigate supply-chain disruptions and improve package delivery and tracking services.

“We’re bringing out innovative AI/ML and data analytics solutions to XPO to help it transform supply chain management, ensure its deliveries are on time, and give its customers an accurate, up-to-date view on the location of their freight," Hans Thalbauer, managing director for global supply chain logistics at Google Cloud, said in a statement Monday.

Why build a cloud datacenter yourself, when you can rent one from Hewlett Packard Enterprise? It may seem unorthodox, but That’s exactly the approach Singapore-based private cloud provider Taeknizon is using to extend its private cloud offering to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Founded in 2012, Taeknizon offers a menagerie of services ranging from IoT, robotics, and AI to colocation and private cloud services, primarily in the Middle East and Asia. The company’s latest expansion in the UAE will see it lean on HPE GreenLake’s anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform to meet growing demand from small-to-midsize enterprises for cloud services in the region.

“Today, 94% of companies operating in the UAE are SMEs," Ahmad AlKhallafi, UAE managing director at HPE, said in a statement. "Taeknizon’s as-a-service model caters to the requirements of SMEs and aligns with our vision to empower youth and the local startup community.”

Google has promised to cough up $118 million to settle a years-long gender-discrimination class-action lawsuit that alleged the internet giant unfairly pays men more than women.

The case, launched in 2017, was led by three women, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, and Kelli Wisuri, who filed a complaint alleging the search giant hires women in lower-paying positions compared to men despite them having the same qualifications. Female staff are also less likely to get promoted, it was claimed.

Gender discrimination also exists within the same job tier, too, the complaint stated. Google was accused of paying women less than their male counterparts despite them doing the same work. The lawsuit was later upgraded to a class-action status when a fourth woman, Heidi Lamar, joined as a plaintiff. The class is said to cover more than 15,000 people.

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