Yo! I’m Glen. I’m a Consultant at Sourced Group, a premier Google partner with 10 years experience helping highly regulated and security conscious enterprises achieve cloud adoption at scale. In a few weeks time, Google Next '21 will be kicking off and like Next '20, it will again be virtual due to the on-going pandemic 
But unlike last year’s Google Next, this one only lasts 3 days and will run from Oct 12-14, so if you haven’t registered yet, you can do so here.
I’ve attended conferences virtually and in-person before and the most important piece is scouting and getting the lay of the land. When it’s in-person, you want to see where the bathrooms are, how to get to the other buildings, where coffee is at, whether there’s already a line up for swag at certain vendors/sponsors, etc. You may think that since it’s virtual, you won’t have to do that anymore but most event sites are flooded with links and virtual neon signs to get your attention so make sure you poke around the site and perhaps bookmark some pages that interest you, and who knows…maybe you’ll find links that will lead you down a path to swag!
Keep your eyes peeled in the days leading up to the big event as there tend to be a flurry of announcements or games/contests. Speaking of games, I recommend Games for Good – you get to learn for free while supporting a charity: win-win!
Here’s my playlist. Now let me break it down for you:
Let’s start at the top with the “Opening Keynote” and “Developer Keynote” – a no-brainer – it’s usually where the biggest product (read as: surprise!) announcements will be made so it’s sure to be exciting.
“What’s new and what’s next for Compute Engine”, “What’s new and what’s next for networking”, “Simplifying hybrid networking and services”, “What’s next in Kubernetes”, and “Applying Kubernetes app development best practices” are the ones I would hit up next. As a cloud consultant whose job is to help enterprises migrate to the cloud, staying up-to-date on the key foundational pieces like networking, the often used compute engine and Kubernetes is vital to my role and in helping our customers get the best bang for their buck.
Adopting a cloud strategy is more than just deploying to the cloud – you also have to keep it secure! So take some time to catch up on the latest “Innovations in DDoS, WAF, cloud firewalls, and network-based threat detection” followed by a couple of hands-on labs.
I’m planning on taking the Professional Data Engineer certification exam shortly after Google Next '21, so for me, “Under the hood of Google Cloud data technologies” will provide greater understanding and appreciation of the decisions made that led to such performant, reliable and scalable products.
Finally I chose 4 real world use cases to explore, starting with “Take me into the ballgame” and “The Evolution of MLB: Expanding Google Cloud footprint to on premise with Anthos” to look at how MLB leverages Google Cloud products to speed up their data analytics and how Anthos has helped MLB expanded their Google Cloud footprint to their on premise infrastructure.
The last 2 real world examples has to do with gaming. Developing for gaming has its own unique set of challenges that many players take for granted; there are a many things that need to run and scale seamlessly in order to provide the players with an enjoyable experience. This is why I chose “10 billion games, play-by-play insights” and “Gaming at Planet-scale with Google Cloud”. Online games today are more than just about minimizing latency for the players, but also having the bandwidth and compute to perform real-time analytics as well. Chess.com and Pokemon GO are 2 games out there that best exemplify how to operate an online gaming service at a global scale.
I hope you found my curated playlist interesting and hope to see you virtually at Google Next '21!
-GY