Google Cloud’s Agent Ops Stack: Why Deployment Is No Longer the Hard Part

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform slide that opened Google Cloud Next '26 has four layers: Build, Scale, Govern, Optimise. Look at what is missing: Deploy. That omission is not an oversight. It is the point. Deploy has not disappeared — in the platform's lifecycle it is handled as an automated background step via Agent CLI and Agent Runtime, part of Build and Scale. Google has made it a standardised process precisely so it stops