Cloud hyperscalers are laser-focused on leveraging Generative AI (GenAI) to quicken software coding and development. They have rightly determined that coding, which involves massive amounts of data and manual effort, is among the low-hanging GenAI use cases that can create real productivity and efficiency benefits on an accelerated timeline.
For more than a year, hyperscalers have raced to create new tools and produce a steady stream of announcements related to GenAI-powered coding, hoping that faster coding leads to a torrent of new applications built on their scalable cloud platforms. With Google Cloud unveiling its latest coding offering at Google Cloud Next ’24, the drumbeat around GenAI’s coding prowess at every point of the development lifecycle grows a bit louder.
At the Next developer keynote, Google Cloud leaders and developer advocates showcased Gemini Code Assist, its new GenAI-powered coding tool that utilizes Gemini 1.5 Pro, the latest version of Google’s GenAI solution. Technically, this is an upgraded rather than a brand new product, as Google evolved its previously released Duet AI for Developers platform with Gemini and made additional enhancements.
With Gemini in the mix, the tool is enabled with a one-million context window, allowing developers to make in-depth and complex queries and code reviews across an entire codebase, and receive more comprehensive suggestions about code issues and fixes. Google Cloud leaders took keynote attendees through an impressive Gemini Code Assist demo about a hypothetical online shop going down, with the tool quickly analyzing the problem via dependencies, alert logs, and audit trails, tracing the issue back to a firewall command line, and recommending an appropriate fix – all in the span of a few minutes. Although it was a demo, it highlighted the productivity and time-saving gains the tool could produce for enterprise coders.
If the new coding tool enables faster software development, there’s the still the issue of managing and optimizing applications once they are deployed on the Goole Cloud Platform. In tandem with the code tool announcement, Google Cloud also unveiled Gemini Cloud Assist, a GenAI-powered tool that gives enterprises the power to deploy, configure, and troubleshoot deployed applications. The tool, which is now available in private preview, can provide suggestions on architecture configurations based on desired outcomes, and optimize application workloads based on cost, performance, and availability priorities.
These announcements are welcome news for Google Cloud partners, like Persistent, as enterprises are eager to move aspirations for faster software development into concrete use cases and deployments. Google Cloud’s positioning of the importance of GenAI in software development aligns with how Persistent views the technology’s coding impact. In fact, for more than a year, we have worked with major hyperscalers, often as first movers, to utilize coding assistants (such as AWS CodeWhisperer and Microsoft Copilot) to accelerate software development. We have also trained more than 16,000 employees internally on GenAI to leverage the technology in our application development efforts across hyperscaler platforms.
For Google Cloud specifically, we have leveraged our positioning as a Google Cloud Premier Partner to build out our expertise, with more than 1,600 certifications and seven partner specializations leveraged in more than 550 Google Cloud engagements. AI and data migration and modernization engagements are a top priority for us across our key vertical industries, and both new tools announced at the event will allow us to show that GenAI in coding and application management can be truly transformative.
Gemini Code Assist and Gemini Cloud Assist provide Google Cloud’s user base with important tools that have the potential to free up precious developer time and resources that can be applied to higher-value tasks. As developer usage of GenAI grows more prevalent, additional announcements and releases centered on GenAI-powered coding are sure to come from all hyperscalers. Enterprises should take this as a sign that embracing GenAI’s potential to fundamentally change modern software development, regardless of what cloud architectures they employ, must be a strategic priority.
