Is Google Making a Comeback With its AI Integrations in Cloud?
Google claims that nearly 90% of generative AI unicorns and more than 60% of funded GenAI startups are Google Cloud customers. While Google might be a little late to the party with AI breakthroughs, it may be on to something with its AI integrations being available on Google Cloud. As part of the Google Cloud Next Conference 2025, the company announced that it is integrating AI-powered assistance throughout the entire application lifecycle. With this development, Google is trying to address the inherent complexities of traditional, infrastructure-centric cloud models. Developers using Google Cloud should benefit the most. How are they trying to empower developers using Google Cloud? Is it a big threat to competitors? Is it making a comeback this year after Microsoft Azure crushed both AWS and Google Cloud in revenue last year? Moving to Application Level From Infrastructure Level When building an application using the cloud, developers often focus on optimising and securing the infrastructure to protect their apps. Google, with its new AI capabilities, aims to put applications at the centre of the cloud experience, keeping the complex nature of infrastructure as an abstract layer away from it. A developer can now observe, secure, and optimise at the application level. Brad Calder, VP and GM of Google Cloud Platform, stated in a blog post, “Application components are spread across many systems and dashboards, making it hard to track performance, understand costs, and troubleshoot issues. Our application-centric approach helps you address these challenges, with a number of new services and expanded features.” Application Design Centre and Hubs To begin with, Google has introduced an Application Design Centre service in public preview, which aims to assist administrators and developers in streamlining the design, deployment, and evolution of cloud applications. In the process, the service also ensures that the apps are secure, reliable, and follow the best practices. Not just limited to APIs and the Google Cloud command line interface, Application Design Centre enables developers to interact with a visual, canvas-style format to design and tweak application templates. Complementing this service, Google has added a Cloud Hub, which is a control centre for the app, and improvements to the App Hub. The Cloud Hub service provides a complete view of the application landscape. It provides essential insights into deployments, application health, troubleshooting, resource optimisation, maintenance schedules, quota management, and support cases. This integrated perspective streamlines management and speeds up issue resolution by emphasising the critical elements of applications and their related workloads. The App Hub integrates with over 20 Google Cloud products like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and AlloyDB, enabling better modelling of interconnected applications. Alongside this, new observability features are improving application-centric insights. Taking AI Assistance for Everything To accelerate everything involved in the application development process, Google is integrating Gemini Code Assist and Cloud Assist. When it comes to Gemini Code Assist, the new AI agents possess the capability to create applications from specifications in Google Docs, translate code between language versions, create code for new features, review, test, and generate documentation. Gemini Code Assist can be found in Android Studio and Firebase Studio, in the form of prototyping and testing agents. “CME Group, which runs the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, states that Code Assist provides most of its developers more than 10.5 hours of productivity gain per month,” the company shared. It is not just code; Google’s Gemini Cloud Assist aims to help developers streamline cloud operations. It can generate architectural diagrams and application templates based on natural language descriptions, which can then be iteratively refined and readily deployed. Furthermore, Gemini Cloud Assist provides AI-driven insights into application cost and resource utilisation, identifying inefficiencies and offering personalised recommendations for optimisation. Differentiator Factors to Drive Google’s Comeback Google Cloud’s implementation with GenAI startups potentially gives an edge to Google over competitors like AWS and Azure. Not to forget, startups like Mistral AI and Anthropic have partnered with Google Cloud to offer a range of models on their platforms, using Google’s Cloud TPU chips. This should become more pronounced with Google’s Ironwood TPU chips, which are designed specifically for inference. The app-centric approach could also bring in more developers to the platforms. However, can they migrate to a different platform when necessary? How easy is that process? This may help developers make more informed decisions. AIM reached out to Google to understand how easily users can migrate to other platforms. No response was received before publication. The article will be updated accordingly if the company responds.
Developers using Google Cloud should benefit the most.
Developers using Google Cloud should benefit the most.
["Google"]
["Anthropic", "GenAI", "TPU", "AWS", "AI", "ML", "Aim", "generative AI", "Google", "Azure", "kubernetes"]
["AI", "ML", "generative AI", "GenAI", "Anthropic", "Aim", "AWS", "Azure", "kubernetes", "TPU"]
I am a tech aficionado and a computer science graduate with a keen interest in AI, Coding, Open Source, and Cloud. Have a tip? Reach out to ankush.das@aimmediahouse.com