It’s all about enterprises and containers (and a few container jokes) at Google Cloud Next this year.

“Diane [Greene] told me Google’s containers were getting bigger — I just didn’t realize how big,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai joked on stage, flanked by massive cubes (or containers).

The company kicked off its annual cloud conference today with keynotes from Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene, both of whom touted Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the best public cloud for businesses.

“Google is an enterprise company,” Greene said, after emerging from a giant container to give her keynote. “Google’s business is information. We have a cloud that’s built to efficiently take in the information, organize it, and put it back out with a lot of intelligence and this is what every company needs today.”

A big reason why enterprise customers choose Google Cloud is because of its artificial intelligence (AI) and security capabilities, she said. “AI and security: these are the areas where Google is heavily investing, but why? Security is the No. 1 worry and AI is the No. 1 opportunity, and that is the way for every company.”

Google announced 20 new security advances in March, “and there will be another 10 at this conference,” she said. Greene cited Forrester Research, which recently named Google Cloud a “leader” in public cloud security in its second quarter 2018 report.

When it comes to AI, “today it’s built into everything Google does,” Greene said. “From our data center energy usage to BigQuery to Gmail, AI is applied throughout our business.”

Greene also cited Google Cloud’s DevOps and open source efforts as two other key selling points for enterprises. “We want Google Cloud to be the best place for software development and deployment," she said. "Google has long supported open source. It is what lets you avoid vendor lock in with a given vendor and lets you avoid expensive operating systems.”

Google has more than 2,000 open source projects including its machine learning framework TensorFlow and container orchestration system Kubernetes.

“We’re proud of being cutting edge and we’re also proud of having the table stakes that an enterprise needs,” Greene said.

Google open sourced Kubernetes in 2014, after about a decade of using versions of the container orchestration platform in house.

Today, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of engineering at Google, announced new services including an on-premises version of its managed Kubernetes platform, GKE, and a managed version of Istio, which gives developers visibility into microservices without the need to change application code.

Google launched Istio last year with partners IBM, Cisco, Pivotal, Lyft, and RedHat.

“This year [Istio] will go 1.0 and is ready for production use,” Hölzle said.

Both of these new services are part of the new the Cloud Services Platform, an integrated portfolio of cloud services that combines open source projects with Google’s cloud infrastructure and security services. These include:

• Managed Istio, which is a fully managed implementation of Istio.
• GKE On-Prem, a Google-licensed Kubernetes distribution and extensions that you can deploy in the environment of your choice.
• GKE Policy Management to provide a single source of data for managing policies across Kubernetes clusters.
• Stackdriver Service Monitoring is now available for workloads running on opinionated Istio infrastructure and Google App Engine.
• Apigee API Management for Istio extends Google Cloud's Apigee API management platform natively into the microservices stack.
• Cloud Build, which is a fully managed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
• GKE Serverless add-on to allow developers to run serverless workloads on Kubernetes Engine with a one-step deploy.
• Knative, an open source serverless framework.

Google Cloud Next kicked off a day after parent company Alphabet released its second quarter 2018 earnings.

Alphabet reported revenue of $26.2 billion, up 26 percent from last year. And while Google’s net income fell short compared to last year’s second quarter, largely because of the $5 billion fine imposed on the company by the European Commission, it received a boost from cloud revenue.

The company lumps its cloud earnings into “other revenue,” and said this grew to $4.4 billion, a 37-percent year-over-year increase fueled by Google Cloud, Play, and hardware.

On a call with investors, Pichai also touted the uptick in enterprise customers using Google Cloud. “It can definitely serve the needs of a large enterprise,” he said, according to transcripts from Seeking Alpha, citing Domino’s Pizza, SoundCloud, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Target as key customer wins. “Increasingly, we are seeing big companies take on the migration.”