Developer research deep dive: Let’s build faster together

16/03/2023

Google likes hearing feedback, and you’re not shy about giving it to them. Excellent! Each day, you reach Google through their Twitter account, Innovator's Program and even when both meet in person at industry events. Your feedback helps them better understand what you need, what’s not working right, and how they can make your cloud experience better.

Another way Google hears from their customers? Independent research. Third-party research allows them to get a better understanding of how their products stack up against the competition. Google just finished some new research that I want to tell you about. What did they find? Google Cloud is making it easier for developers everywhere to do what they love, faster.

Table of contents

Developer experience research

Google partnered with User Research International to conduct research with the goal of quantifying how quickly you can get things done in Google Cloud compared to using Google's main competitors in the cloud industry. Google held 45 two-hour sessions to gather more information about how customers are using products like GKE Autopilot, Cloud Run Jobs, and Cloud Deploy against that of equivalent competitor services offered by AWS and Azure. Of the 45 participants, there was a nearly even distribution between those who identified themselves as Google Cloud, AWS or Azure experts — meaning that was the main cloud provider they perform daily tasks on. Being able to understand how developers, who are not native to their platform perform, was crucial to getting a real world understanding of what customers need and how well cloud products address those needs.

Nowadays developers get dragged into so many activities like operations, security, and managing infrastructure, when all they want to focus on is coding. All these distractions reduce developer productivity and increase the need to learn yet another skill. That is why Google chose to focus on three of their products that abstract away much of the complexity of cloud development.

Build fast with GKE Autopilot

With tools like GKE Autopilot, you no longer have to be an expert at Kubernetes or containers to be successful. Autopilot mode is a hands-off, fully managed service that manages your entire cluster’s infrastructure without you worrying about configuring and monitoring, while still delivering a complete Kubernetes experience. With GKE Autopilot, deploying a containerized application on Google Cloud is up to 2.6x faster than competing managed Kubernetes offerings.

The Kubernetes learning curve can be a bit steep, but GKE Autopilot makes it easier. To learn a bit more about containers and Kubernetes, here are two of our favorite tutorials that can help kick of the journey to deploy your first GKE application:

Deploy a containerized web application. This is a full-fledged tutorial you can walk through.
Interactive tutorial: GKE Autopilot. Here’s one of dozens of in-console tutorials that walk you through GKE, step by step.

Build fast with Cloud Run Jobs

While many of us like using Kubernetes to run containerized workloads, serverless options offer another outstanding host for our apps. You can go from source to deploy in one order with Cloud Run — and that’s just one of the tools that speed up your development.

Unlike Cloud Run services that run continuously to respond to web requests or events, Run jobs run code that performs some work and quits when the work is done. In fact, with tools like Cloud Run jobs, developers deploy and execute serverless jobs 50% faster than the nearest competition. Cloud Run jobs are a good fit for administrative tasks such as database migrations, scheduled work like nightly reports, or doing batch data transformation.

Looking to get started with Cloud Run Jobs today? Check out this simple tutorial the team built to enable you to create and execute a job.

Build fast with Cloud Deploy

Administrative tasks are automated by Cloud Runs job, but Cloud Deploy helps to automate DevOps-style continuous delivery tasks like release promotion and approval; our research showed that these tasks are 2.4x faster on Google Cloud than with competing cloud services. Cloud Deploy is a managed and opinionated continuous delivery service that makes continuous delivery to GKE easier, faster, and more reliable.

Whether you are using GKE or Cloud Run, Cloud Deploy simplifies the continuous delivery journey by providing a fully managed service that includes easy one-step promotion and release rollback via web console, CLI or API . Get started today with Cloud Deploy by checking out these tutorials that I found helpful:

Deploy an app to GKE using Google Cloud Deploy. This complete walkthrough helps you deploy an app to GKE.
Interactive Tutorial: Cloud Deploy End-to-End. This guided experience helps you complete every step.

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