This post serves as a developer's guide to Google Cloud Next '26, taking place in Las Vegas on April 22-24, 2026, making the case for attending in person over watching streams.
- •The conference focuses on agentic AI, modern infrastructure, and hands-on problem-solving as core themes.
- •A spotlight session (SPTL008) will feature live-coding of a modern application atop a legacy system using AI agents to expand developer autonomy.
- •Key breakout sessions cover Gemini multimodal APIs, production-ready agent architecture on Vertex AI, zero-trust security with Cloud Run, Go runtime performance, and OpenTelemetry observability.
- •A Citibank case study session will detail infrastructure challenges behind running observability at global engineering scale.
- •Over 20 developer meetups are scheduled, providing structured opportunities for peer-to-peer and Googler expert discussions.
This summary was automatically generated by AI based on the original article and may not be fully accurate.