Google Cloud announced on Wednesday its Network Intelligence Center, which is an AI-based platform designed to reduce network complexities.
Organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud implementations and hybrid deployments as a part of their cloud strategy, but this has resulted in a sprawl of premise-based and virtual applications. The promise of cloud compute creates efficiencies while enabling new revenue-generating services, but they can also put pressure on network operations teams.
"Unfortunately, today’s fragmented networking tools don’t make their lives any easier, leading to a lack of visibility, long troubleshooting times to resolve connectivity and performance issues, configuration errors being discovered too late in production, and no centralized way to holistically understand and remedy network health, said Shailesh Shukla, vice president of product management for Google Cloud Platform Networking (GCP), in a blog posted Wednesday. "Adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud is absolutely critical for organizations to remain agile. However, this underscores the need for intelligent and continuous network operations—the promise that the network is doing what it needs to do, in line with business intent. "
Google's Intelligence Network Center enables more automation through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to be more proactive in predicting and healing network issues.
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"These systems also need to maintain an equilibrium between automation and control, to support customers who are at different points in their journey from reactive towards proactive network operations," according to Shukla.
While Google's Intelligence Network Center has been in beta, it's now publicly available across four modules that are in different stages of development:
• Connectivity Tests: This module, which is currently in beta, enables users to self-diagnose connectivity issues within GCP or GCP to an external IP address that could be on-premise or another cloud, helping them to isolate whether the issue is in GCP or not.
• Network Topology: Currently in beta, this module visualizes all of the network elements and they how interact with each interact with each other in order to simplify network monitoring and troubleshooting while also helping organizations fulfill their compliance requirements.
Performance Dashboard: Performance Dashboard, which is in alpha, provides real-time network performance visibility into packet loss and latency at a per-project level, which allows users to find application performance issues and monitor the overall health of the network.
• Firewall Metrics & Insights: This module, which is in alpha, provides visibility into firewall rules usage, helping organizations optimize firewall rules by revealing insights into shadowed firewall rules.