Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Sharat Shroff and Morgan McLean, Product Managers at Google Cloud, cover with your cohosts Francesc and Mark some of the Stackdriver tools at your disposal when you're investigating an issue on your application.

About Sharat

Sharat is a product manager working on developer infrastructure for Google Cloud. He works on application monitoring and diagnostics.

About Morgan

Morgan is the product manager for Stackdriver Trace, and has spent much of his career working on web services and web frameworks prior to his recent arrival at Google. Morgan works out of the Kirkland, Washington office, and enjoys mountain biking and hiking in his free time.

Cool thing of the week Adventures in SRE-land: Welcome to Google Mission Control blog post Inside Google's Cloud solutions with Miles Ward | The Apps Show YouTube Interview Stackdriver docs Stackdriver Error Reporting docs Stackdriver Trace docs Stackdriver Debugger docs Stackdriver Logging docs Cloud Source Repositories docs Installing the Stackdriver Monitoring Agent (for GCE and AWS) docs Stackdriver Trace Analysis Reports docs GCPNext: Spend Less Time Diagnosing And More Time Developing YouTube Question of the week

What are all the ways you can set environment variables?

App Engine Environment Variables Go, Python, Java, and PHP Kubernetes ConfigMap docs Kubernetes Secrets user guide Storing and Retrieving Instance Metadata docs

Aja Hammerly, Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, discusses with your cohosts Francesc and Mark what monitoring is and how Stackdriver makes it easy on Google Cloud, other cloud providers, and even on premise.

About Aja

Aja lives in Seattle where she is a developer advocate at Google and a member of the Seattle Ruby Brigade. Her favorite languages are Ruby and Prolog. She also loves working with large piles of data. In her free time she enjoys skiing, cooking, knitting, and long coding sessions on the beach.

Cool thing of the week Kubernetes moves onwards and upwards Kubernetes 1.3 on tap for Google Container Engine Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes - Udacity Interview Stackdriver Monitoring Documentation Stackdriver Introducing Google Stackdriver: unified monitoring and logging for GCP and AWS Using metrics Stackdriver pricing Uptime checks Six things Stackdriver brings to the DevOps table Question of the week How to keep data in sync while limiting bandwidth? gsutil rsync

Mathias Meyer, CEO of Travis CI, discusses with your cohosts Francesc and Mark what are Continuous Integration and Deployment, and how Travis CI makes them easy and accessible to all.

Did you know Travis CI ran on Google Cloud Platform?

About Mathias

Mathias Meyer is the CEO and core member of the team running Travis CI, a hosted continuous integration and deployment platform, and the author of the Riak Handbook. His interests include coffee, photography, studies of human error and distributed systems.

Cool thing of the week GitHub Making open source data more available blog post GitHub on BigQuery: Analyze all the code blog post All the open source code in GitHub now shared within BigQuery: Analyze all the code! medium Analyzing Go code with BigQuery medium Interview Travis CI homepage Continuous Integration wikipedia Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction page Free Travis CI for Open Source travis-ci.org Google Compute Engine to run builds docs Google Cloud Storage to cache images docs

Travis the Tractor, from Bob the Builder.

Question of the week Where do I go if I want to get involved with specific parts of the Kubernetes community? Kubernetes Special Interest Groups Correction

Francesc will be in GopherCon next week, not this one. Clearly he doesn't know how calendars work.

Emily Melhuish and Lester Litchfield share with your cohosts Francesc and Mark how Trade Me, the second most visited page in New Zealand, integrates Google Analytics and BigQuery to understand their traffic and provide statistics to their users.

About Emily

Emily Melhuish is an Electrical Engineering student by day and a software developer by night. She works at Trade Me as a Full Stack developer in between studying at the University of Auckland where she learns how to blow circuits up. At Trade Me, her latest project was one surrounding Big Data and how to make the website data useful for their clients. They use Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics and BigQuery to provide business insights to our customers, these include real estate agents and car dealers. Her work was for car dealers.

About Lester

Lester Litchfield is a data scientist and web analyst for Trade Me with a background in Marketing. He's responsible for implementing Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 360 across their sites and apps, and using that data to tell the story of how their users behave. He uses BigQuery most weeks to answer tough questions, and for AB testing. He's also exploring Google Cloud Platform for text analysis, image analysis and machine learning applications.

Cool thing of the week Custom encoding: Go implementation in net/rpc vs grpc and why we switched post The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes adorable Interview Trade Me homepage Google Analytics docs Google Analytics 360 docs Google Tag Manager docs BigQuery docs Question of the week Three Simple Steps to Save Costs when Prototyping with App Engine Flexible Environment medium

Eli Bixby, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, tells your cohosts Francesc and Mark all about TensorFlow and its applications. Do you want to know what neural networks are? Why does TensorFlow exists? How to get started with it? We cover that and more in our thirsty first episode.

About Eli

Eli is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He joined in 2014 and currently develops on Google Cloud Platform's machine learning and big data offerings, Tensorflow in particular. Eli is an all-purpose nerd, having dabbled in several research areas, including biophysics, algorithmic game theory, and computational biology, before a recent dive into machine learning.

Cool thing of the week New Google Cloud Platform Education Grants offer free credits to students announcement Interview TensorFlow homepage Artificial Neural Network wikipedia Tensors wikipedia Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip blog TensorFlow Serving GitHub Diving into Machine Learning through TensorFlow - PyCon 2016 video TensorFlow workshop materials GitHub TensorFlow tutorials docs Generative Adversarial Networks research paper DCGAN in Tensorflow GitHub Question of the week Offline Media Import to Google Cloud Storage docs Google Cloud Interconnect docs

Analytics is an essential part of many platforms, but it is specially important for gaming. Today we discuss how Google Cloud makes analytics simpler and super powerful. Kir Titievsky from Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Eric Anderson from Google Cloud Dataflow, and Tino Tereshko from Google BigQuery will tell your co-hosts Francesc and Mark how those three products get together to power an amazing analytics solution for gaming.

About Kir

Kir Titievsky is product manager on Google Cloud Pub/Sub which helps users build analytics pipelines & integrate services, massive and small. He has come to GCP after building mobile enterprise apps for Googlers as well as products for advertising & media agencies at DoubleClick. Before Google, Kir designed advertising recommendation engines as a data scientist. Kir once took a detour to get a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT.

About Eric

Eric Anderson is a product manager on Dataflow, a stream and batch data processing service. Before Dataflow, he started a growth analytics team in Google Cloud. Previously he worked at AWS and GE. Eric holds an engineering degree from the University of Utah and MBA from Harvard.

About Tino

Tino Tereshko is a Technical Program Manager for BigQuery, the world's only serverless analytics Data Warehouse. Before joining the BigQuery team, Tino worked with strategic cloud customers as a Solutions Architect. Prior to Google, Tino worked in stream processing, financial analytics, and even spent some time as a quant developer.

Cool thing of the week BigQuery 1.11, now with Standard SQL, IAM, and partitioned tables! post Interview Building a Mobile Gaming Analytics Platform - a Reference Architecture docs

Google Cloud Pub/Sub docs Google Cloud Dataflow docs Google BigQuery docs ETL: Extract, transform, load Wikipedia Apache Beam Project docs MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters research paper The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing research paper Pushing the Limits of BigQuery video Question of the week Google BigQuery Public Datasets docs The first TB is free! pricing

Fresh off the press from Google I/O 2016, Francesc and Mark talk to Abe Haskins and Doug Stevenson about all the new features and improvements that have recently been announced for Firebase!

About Abe

Abe is a Developer Programs Engineer on the Firebase team who works closely with the Database team and contributes to many of Firebase's open-source projects.

About Doug

Doug is Developer Advocate on the Firebase team, Android development specialist, and works very closely with the Crash Reporting and Test Lab components of Firebase.

Cool thing of the week Introducing Google Container Engine (GKE) node pools post Interviews Firebase site Firebase Realtime Database docs Adding Firebase to your C++ Project docs Firebase Analytics docs Firebase Remote Config docs Firebase Authentication docs Firebase Cloud Messaging docs Firebase Notifications docs Firebase Test Lab for Android docs Firebase Crash Reporting docs Firebase Storage docs Google Cloud Storage docs Firebase YouTube Playlist videos Question of the week StackDriver Monitoring docs StackDriver Logging docs StackDriver Error Reporting docs StackDriver Debugging docs StackDriver Trace docs Google Cloud Intellij Plugin (ALPHA!) github Diagnostics - Spend less time diagnosing and more time developing video

Virtual Machines, that old technology that powers the cloud! Today Scott Van Woudenberg tells your cohosts Francesc and Mark about virtual machines and you can use them with Google Cloud Platform.

About Scott

Scott Van Woudenberg spent sixteen years as a software engineer and engineering lead/manager before moving over to product management. He joined Google in 2012 as a Product Manager on Google Compute Engine, mere weeks before its public alpha launch at I/O.

He's remained a PM on GCE, helping to guide and build the service into a GA product which has seen exponential growth every year since going public.

Cool thing of the week Kubernetes class on Udacity post Interviews Google Compute Engine docs Virtual Machine wikipedia Google Cloud Spin: Stopping time with the power of the Cloud - Google I/O 2016 video Google Cloud Functions docs Compute Engine Pricing docs Custom Machine Types docs Resize a Persistent Disk docs Autoresizing Persistent Disks in Compute Engine blog Google Compute Engine uses Live Migration technology to service infrastructure without application downtime post Google Cloud Platform Locations map Question of the week Creating Datastore Backups docs Scheduled Backups docs Creating a Cloud Datastore backup in BigQuery docs Where can you find us next? Mark will then be at Change the Game SF on Friday! Francesc will be riding the AIDS/Lifecycle and if you want you can donate.

John Feminella, Technical Advisor at Pivotal, tells your cohosts Francesc and Mark about unikernels: what they are, how they relate to containers, and why they are all the hype in cloud computing.

About John

John Feminella is an avid technologist, occasional public speaker, and curiosity advocate. He serves as an advisor to Pivotal, where he works on helping enterprises transform the way they write, operate, and deploy software. He's also the cofounder of a tiny analytics monitoring and reporting startup named UpHex.

He works with unikernels experimentally and is very interested in their application to platforms of the future.

John lives in Charlottesville, VA and likes meta-jokes, milkshakes, and referring to himself in the third person in speaker bios.

Cool thing of the week Firebase expands to become a unified app platform blog Open source demos from Instrument: Query It! and Emotobooth Google Cloud I/O talks playlist Firebase I/O talks playlist Interviews container.camp SF: Unikernels: Practical Advice for Juggling Chainsaws video Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System ACM http://unikernel.org Amir Chaudhry talk at Craft Conf notes Unikernel on Google Compute Engine: Running an OSv Unikernel Tomcat Server medium MirageOS, a unikernel for OCaml RumpRun supports other languages like C, C++, Go, Javascript, Python, etc. Unikernels are unfit for production blog Question of the week How can I generate Google Cloud Deployment Manager files from my current architecture? GitHub Where can you find us next? Mark will then be at Change the Game SF Francesc will be riding the AIDS/Lifecycle and if you want you can donate.

Gustavo Ambrozio, from Pocket Gems, tells us about how they implemented and how they run War Dragons with the power of Google Cloud Platform.

Learn how an incredibly popular mobile game can scale and provide social features, analytics, while keeping high throughput that enables low latency.

About Gustavo

Gustavo is a software engineer from Brazil with over 20 years experience, almost 8 years of iOS experience (basically since the first iOS SDK was released) and founder of CodeCrop Software. Gustavo has worked on everything from server software, corporate systems and now is having fun living in sunny California developing mobile games for Pocket Gems.

Cool thing of the week How to get your ASP.NET app up on Google Cloud the easy way blog post Interviews War Dragons is a game by PocketGems Google App Engine docs Scaling mobile games to a global audience using App Engine and Cloud Datastore GCPNext video Google Cloud Datastore docs Google Cloud Memcache docs Splitting Traffic over App Engine versions docs Google Task Queue Overview docs Question of the week Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Go Web Apps (But were afraid to ask) by Mark Bates video A Survey of 5 Go Web Frameworks blog post Where can you find us next? We are both be speaking at Google I/O next week! Mark will then be at Change the Game SF Francesc will speak at goto; Chicago next week and then will be riding the AIDS/Lifecycle and if you want you can donate.

Join us today for a conversation with Andrew Gerrand and Chris Broadfoot from the Go team. They will discuss with your hosts Francesc Campoy and Mark Mandel why Go is so successful for all the things cloud and how you can use it with Google Cloud Platform.

About Andrew

Andrew has worked on Go at Google since almost the beginning, and has written tons of blog posts and talks on Go. He spends most of his time making Go easier to use.

About Chris

Chris joined the Go and Cloud teams last year to improve the experience of writing Go applications for Google Cloud Platform. Before that, he worked at Google on the Maps APIs for around five years.

Cool thing of the week EVE Fanfest 2016 - Kubernetes and Google Cloud video Interviews The Go programming language web Go on Google App Engine docs Google Santa Tracker web Tweak The Turkey with a Go powered Doodle doodle gofmt command docs goimports command docs Rails Conf 2012 Keynote: Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey YouTube Bookshelf tutorial for Go on App Engine tutorial The Go Tour Go Samples repo Question of the week Google Cloud Dataflow docs Google BigQuery docs MapReduce wikipedia Where can you find us next? We'll both be speaking at Google I/O next week! Mark will then be at Change the Game SF Francesc will be riding the AIDS/Lifecycle and if you want you can donate.

The Go gopher, by Renee French

Today our guest star host, Brian Dorsey, and Mark interview Terrance Shepherd about his role as Technical Solutions Engineer working for Google Cloud Platform's Support Team.

About Terrance

Terrance is a Technical Solutions Engineer working for Google Cloud Platform's Support Team. He has been working to help customers from single person developers to Enterprises with 100's of Developers for the last 16 months. Terrance also leads the Cloud Platform Support new product review process, where the Support team has input on usability, reliability and supportability of few product or features released. All new features and product received the Support Team's approval before available to customers.

Cool thing of the week You can now configure Pub Sub with Deployment Manager docs ISO and privacy certifications blog post More on security at cloud.google.com/security Interviews Google Cloud Platform Support: cloud.google.com/support Google Cloud SQL docs Google Cloud SQL General Log tips docs Question of the week

How can I connect my application running on Google Cloud Platform to other Google services like Google Docs?

Google Apps APIs docs Google API Explorer console

Andy Oxfeld, Engineering Manager at Humble Bundle, tells your hosts Francesc and Mark all the details about how Google Cloud Platform powers Humble Bundle.

About Andy

Andy Oxfeld manages the engineering department at Humble Bundle. He's been with the company for four years and worked on almost every part of our codebase at some point. Prior to being at Humble Bundle, he worked at Electronic Arts for four years on games such as Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

Cool thing of the week An independent organization just ranked Google as the best cloud, beating Amazon news Interviews Humble Bundle has raised over $70 Million for charity. App Engine to handle spiky traffic. Codebase written in Python. Google Cloud Datastore to store data. Task Queues to be able to retry tasks (payments) and to schedule events. Memcache to reduce latency and increase throughput. Dedicated Memcache for heavy users and more predictable performance. Best Practices for App Engine Memcache article. Datastore Backups into a Cloud Storage bucket. BigQuery to analyze huge datasets in seconds. Using only managed services removes their need for DevOps team. Google Cloud Storage to store static images. Stackdriver for monitoring and alerts. PubNub for real time communication - we also discuss Channels API and Firebase. Join Humble Bundle and work with Google Cloud Platform! Question of the week

Kubernetes 1.2 doesn't have a concept of schedule tasks, how do you handle them?

Kubernetes jobs docs. Cron jobs on Compute Engine. Scheduled tasks with Cron on App Engine docs.

In the twenty second episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Rae Wang, a Product Manager at Google, about IAM on the Google Cloud Platform.

About Rae

Rae is a product manager at Google and looks after IAM (Identity and Access Management) on GCP. She has been at Google for 3 years and is based in the Seattle office. Before Google she worked in other software companies for over a decade.

Cool thing of the week

Bonus interview with Brendan Burns, lead engineer on Kubernetes: Google's open source cluster manager for containers.

Latte vs. Kubernetes setup - which is faster? YouTube Kubernetes Config Maps docs Adding custom resources to the Kubernetes API server docs Kubernetes Cluster Federation (a.k.a. "Ubernetes") docs Scaling neural network image classification using Kubernetes with TensorFlow Serving docs Episode #16, a Product Manager at Google that works amongh other projects on IAM GCPPodcast Interviews Google Cloud Identity & Access Management docs GCPNext - Identity and Access Management on Google Cloud Platform YouTube Google Cloud Platform Auth Guide guide Connecting to Other Google Cloud Platform Services guide Granting Access with IAM Roles guide OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts docs Question of the week Google Cloud CDN docs Google Container Engine docs

In the twenty first episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview three of the engineers at Instrument, responsible for some of the amazing demos at GCP Next.

Cool thing of the week Monitor your application errors with Stackdriver Error Reporting blog post Stackdriver Error Reporting docs Interviews

We interviewed three engineers working at Instrument, an independent digital creative agency in Portland, Oregon. They're on GitHub.

Take a tour of GCP Next playground on YouTube:

John Brown Technical Director at Instrument Overview of "Emotobooth", "360 datacenter tour", and "Query It" Emotobooth tweet for the GCPPodcast hosts tweet Emotobooth gist with all photos and JSON data gist

Violet Peña Engineer working on Emotobooth Cloud Vision API Face Detection tutorial Landmark Detection Using Google Cloud Storage docs

Nick Tzaperas Backend Developer at Instrument working on QueryIt! Query Plan Explanation docs

Freebase: a community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things docs

Google Data Center 360° Tour YouTube

Question of the week

How do you use variables in Deployment Manager

Cloud Deployment Manager docs Passing variables to templates docs

In the twentieth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Justin Beckwith, a Product Manager at Google Cloud Platform, about how Node.js and the cloud work together.

About Justin

Justin is a Product Manager, web developer, and geek dad working on the developer experience for Google App Engine. He writes code, speaks at events, and rocks out on the ukulele. Before joining Google, he filled various developer and architect roles with startups, healthcare companies, and universities.

He blogs at jbeckwith.com and twitters as @justinbeckwith.

Cool thing of the week Google Cloud Datastore simplifies pricing, cuts cost dramatically for most use-cases blog post Google Cloud Datastore gets faster cross-platform API blog post Interview Node.js on Google Cloud docs Node.js on Google App Engine goes beta blog post The Node.js Docker image used by Google App Engine Managed VMs repo Google Cloud Client Library for Node.js repo and npm Experimental Node.js support for Google Cloud Trace repo Cloud Debug support for Node.js applications repo Building Node.js applications on Google Cloud Platform video Google's officially supported Node.js client library for accessing Google APIs repo Run Parse-server on Google Cloud Platform docs NodeSource Partners with Google to Offer N|Solid as Enterprise Node.js Platform on Google Cloud Platform blog post Google Cloud Platform joins the Node.js foundation blog post Question of the week

Michael McKenzie asks about Bigtable and how to get started.

Research Paper on Bigtable pdf Bigtable samples on github Bigtable Quickstart on github cbt tool to interact with Cloud Bigtable godoc

In the nineteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview some of the speakers at GCP Next 2016 from the conference floor.

Cool thing of the week

Most videos from GCP Next 2016 are already available on YouTube.

The talks are organized in the following playlists:

Keynotes Solutions Showcase Sessions Infrastructure & Operations Sessions App Development Sessions Data & Analytics Sessions Interviews Mike Kavis from Cloud Technology Partners

Mike Kavis is a VP/Principal Architect at CloudTP, and his current areas of focus are IoT, Big Data, and containers. He was part of the GCP partner panel: Learnings from real world cloud migration. Mike also wrote a very interesting article about GCP Next for Forbes.

Mike discusses how people migrate to Google Cloud Platform and how they evolve once on it.

Niels Provos from Google

Niels Provos is a distinguished engineer working on security/privacy at Google. He was part of the Day 2 Keynote where he discusses what Google Cloud Platform keeps your data and applications safe.

You can learn more about Google Cloud Platform security here.

Niels also talks about Project Shield which provides DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack protection to independent news, human rights, and election monitoring sites for free.

Frances Perry and James Malone from Google

Frances Perry is a a Software Engineer and a data processing infrastructure geek at Google working in the Cloud Dataflow team.

James Malone is a Product Manager and an Open Source Software advocate working in the Cloud Big Data team at Google.

They both spoke about the evolution of big data processing in the open source software world with Data Processing & OSS: The NEXT Generation.

Julia Ferraioli from Google

Julia Ferraioli is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform (like Mark and I!) and she told us how to use machine learning to figure out if the object in a picture should be hugged or not.

She covers the continuum of machine learning tools on Google Cloud Platform with David Zuckerman Head of Developer Experience at wix.com during the session Build smart applications with your new superpower: cloud machine learning.

Neil Palmer and Todd Ricker from FIS

Neil Palmer is the CTO at FIS and Todd Ricker is a Principal Engineer at FIS.

Their talk covers how FIS & Google are working to build a next-generation stock market reconstruction system that aims to bring transparency to the US financial markets and drive innovation across financial services. In this video we dive into the proposed system architecture and show how products like Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Dataflow and BigQuery enable this process.

Watch their talk Analyzing market events at 34M reads/sec and 22M writes/sec with NoOps on GCP.

Question of the week

Romin Irani asked when to use App Engine with Go.

Go on Google Cloud Platform docs Go on App Engine docs

In the eighteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Ian Lewis, a Google Cloud Platform Developer Advocate based in Tokyo about Bigtable.

About Ian

Ian is a Developer Advocate on the Google Cloud Platform team working out of Tokyo. Ian loves Python and Go and helps run the largest Python event in Japan, PyCon JP. Ian is also interested in Docker and Kubernetes and hopes to help Google Cloud Platform users achieve their highest potential.

Cool thing of the week

We're live at GCPNext with our mics! If you're around come say hi, and if not follow the event from one of the many local viewing parties or via the live stream.

Interview

Resources:

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data pdf Google Cloud Bigtable docs Differences between the HBase and Cloud Bigtable APIs docs Cloud Bigtable Pricing Question of the week

How to limit what users can do on the resources of your project?

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management docs

In the seventeenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Hiren Patel and Dale Humby, two Google Developer Experts who live and work in South Africa.

About Hiren

DevOps engineer with a long history of system administration. Currently spending all my time doing a mix of backend development on GCP with python, web frontend development, and some android mobile work.

About Dale

Electro-Mechanical engineer turned software developer, now leading the product development team at Nomanini, building point of sale terminals and a financial backend to provide low cost access to payment for emerging markets.

Cool thing of the week

We will be at GCP Next, with our mics! So come by and say hello. We'll be doing short interviews with people, and talking to them about the podcast.

Also, make sure to check out GCP Next Extended, if you can't get to San Francisco for the event.

Interview

Resources:

The Save-Data client hint request header docs The data trap: affordable smartphones, expensive data blog Internet in Africa wikipedia Introduction to Service Worker blog A collection of tools for service workers github Material Design Lite docs YouTube Red offline for free in South Africa blog IPv4 usage around the world image Question of the week Firebase Announcing Mobile Offline Support blog Firebase iOS Offline Capabilities docs Firebase Android Offline Capabilities docs

In the sixteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Kelsey Hightower. Kelsey is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform and will tell us what is coming up with the next Kubernetes version.

About Kelsey

Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from Programming, System Administration, and his favorite Linux distro of the month (CoreOS).

Cool thing of the week

Google Cloud Platform Community Slack Team

Join using http://bit.ly/gcp-slack Interview

Resources:

Kubernetes homepage Kubernetes 1.2 release notes etcd: Distributed Key Value store by CoreOS repo The Raft Consensus Algorithm docs GKE: Google Container Engine docs Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi cluster post The Twelve-Factor App Question of the week Google App Engine Documents and Indexes docs Google App Engine Managed VMs docs Google Cloud Platform Podcast: Compute as a Continuum post

In the fifteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Varun Talwar. Varun is a product manager in charge of gRPC, an open source project created at Google that helps you build distributed systems like we do internally at Google.

About Varun

Varun is a product manager in Google Cloud team and has recently taken on gRPC. Prior to this he was responsible for Google Cloud Launcher, a launchpad to easily spin up popular software images on Google Compute Engine. He is a long time Googler who has previously worked on YouTube, Maps and Adsense.

Follow Varun on Twitter @varungyan.

Cool thing of the week

Spotify is now on Google Cloud Platform:

Spotify chooses Google Cloud Platform to power data infrastructure blog Announcing Spotify Infrastructure's Googley Future blog Google's BigQuery is da bomb - I can start with 2.2Billion 'things' and compute/summarize down to 20K in tweet Interview

Resources:

grpc.io gRPC on GitHub Mailing list for gRPC: grpc-io@googlegroups.com Take a REST with HTTP/2, Protobufs, and Swagger blog Protocol Buffers docs etcd: distributed key-value store with grpc/http2 blog Flatbuffers docs Game on! Flatbuffers video thrift docs Question of the week

Special guests Sara Robinson and David East.

Firebase authentication with email and password docs Firebase authData for iOS docs Firebase UI for Android and iOS

In the fourteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Paul Newson. Paul is now a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform but was a Software Engineer in the Cloud Storage team. Together they discuss the multiple options available for data storage on the cloud and the trade offs to be taken into account while choosing one.

About Paul

Paul currently focuses on helping developers harness the power of Google Cloud Platform to solve their big data problems. Previously, he was an engineer on Google Cloud Storage. Before joining Google, Paul founded a startup which was acquired by Microsoft, where he worked on DirectX, Xbox, Xbox Live, and Forza Motorsport, before spending time working on machine learning problems at Microsoft Research.

Follow Paul on Twitter @newsons_nybbles.

Cool thing of the week Opinionated Deployment Tools & Kubernetes blog post and Github repository Interview When to Pick Google Bigtable vs Other Cloud Platform Databases blog post. Where Should I Store My Stuff? - slightly outdated video. Choosing a Storage Option docs. Google Drive docs. Google Cloud Storage docs. Google Cloud Datastore docs. Google Cloud SQL docs. Google Cloud Bigtable docs. Google BigQuery docs. Google Cloud Dataflow docs Question of the week

Question from Jeff Schnitzer: Can you use Java 8 features in Standard App Engine?

Google App Engine Standard Environment docs. Google App Engine Managed VMs docs. Retrolambda Github repo.

In the thirteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar. Sara is now a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform but was part of Firebase until recently, and Vikrum - Firebase employee #1 - works as a Site Reliance Engineer (SRE) for Firebase. Together they discuss the origins, features, and future of Firebase.

About Sara

Sara is a Developer Advocate on Google's Cloud Platform team, where she helps with developer relations through online content, outreach and events. She has a bachelor's degree in Business and International Studies from Brandeis University. When she's not programming, she can be found running, listening to country music, or finding the best ice cream in SF.

Follow Sara on Twitter @SRobTweets.

About Vikrum

Vikrum is a Bay Area native and SWE-SRE on the Firebase team. He started out with startups in the 90s with Speedera and has been with Firebase as employee #1 as they were going through YCombinator during the summer of 2011. He has a degree in CS from UC San Diego and enjoys a deep conspiracy with his boba tea.

Follow Vikrum on Twitter at @Vikrum5000.

Cool thing of the week CP100A: Google Cloud Platform Foundations courses. Interview Firebase. Firebase Documentation. Warby Parker Pneumatic Tubes blog. Roll 20 and their case study. Netty.io. Firebase plugin for Unity blog and github. Firebase pricing doc. Parse moving on blog. Use Firebase and Google App Engine in an Android App tutorial. Firebase - Almost 1.5 years with Google blog. Question of the week Google Cloud Console on Android and iOS.

In the eleventh episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Jen Tong, a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform, about the Internet of Things.

About Jen

Jenny is a Developer Advocate on Cloud at Google. In this role she helps developers build cool stuff on all sorts of platforms. Previously she worked in a wide variety of software roles from robotics at NASA, to developer advocacy for Google Glass.

She is passionate about education, especially on the subjects of technology and science. If she's away from her laptop, she's probably skating around a roller derby track, or hanging from aerial silk.

You can contact Jen through Twitter and her home page.

Cool thing of the week Deep Learning at Udacity Google Research blost post. Interview Arduino starter kit NodeBots: Robots powered by JavaScript Raspberry Pi Arduino Uno Node.JS Firmata for Arduino Johnny Five Firebase ESP8266 WiFi Module Question of the week Google Cloud Platform training page

In the tenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Graham Polley and Pablo Caif, who are both Google Developer Experts who work at Shine Technologies.

About Graham

Graham is a senior software engineer based out of Melbourne Australia. He's passionate about promoting the adoption of cloud technologies into software development, and regularly blogs and gives presentations. Graham has extensive experience in building big data solutions for clients using the Google technology stack, and in particular with BigQuery & Dataflow. Graham works very closely with the GCP engineering team in the US, where he is a member of their cloud platform trusted tester program, and the solutions he helps build are used as internal exemplars of developer use cases. Graham is also a GDE on the GCP.

You can contact Graham through Twitter, blog and Google Developer Expert Profile.

About Pablo

Pablo is a passionate software engineer who enjoys solving complex problems, and devising simple solutions. He works at Shine Technologies and he is part of a team that uses BigQuery and Dataflow to solve challenging and complex data processing business requirements. Pablo considers that scalability and performance are paramount to developing a great solution, and that is why he has been using Dataflow and BigQuery to bring these solutions to reality. Pablo is also a GDE on GCP.

You can contact Pablo through Twitter, and blog.

Cool thing of the week Google Cloud Platform Next Join the largest gathering of the Google Cloud Platform community to explore the latest developments in cloud technology. Come meet the people that help build Google Cloud Platform, such as engineers and product managers as well as network with experienced cloud architects, managers and engineers who have deployed GCP in their organizations. Interview Shine Technologies homepage Google Developer Experts about page BigQuery docs Cloud DataFlow docs Cloud Dataproc docs Google Cloud Dataproc and the 17 minute train challenge blog post A week in the life of a Google Developer Expert blog post Messages in the sky blog post Shine with BigQuery: The 30 Terabyte challenge video Question of the week The Google App Engine Admin API doc

In the ninth episode of this podcast and first of 2016, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Ram Ramanathan. Ram is the product manager for Google Cloud Vision API.

About Ram

Ram Ramanathan joined Google in 2014 where he's been working on leading the machine learning efforts for Google Cloud Platform, and has been a large part of launching the new Google Cloud Vision API. He comes with a great deal of experience in the industry after working for other big players such as GE Healthcare and Microsoft.

You can follow him on twitter at @ramramanathan1.

Cool thing of the week

Top 5 Power Features of the Google Cloud CLI (blog post)

Get your current project id using gcloud: gcloud config list core/project | awk '{print \$3}'

After the recording we were informed that there's a better way using formats: gcloud config list --format="value(core.project)"

Interview Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images blog Google Cloud Vision API docs Google Cloud Vision robot demo video Tensorflow homepage Mobile Vision SDK docs Question of the week Google Cloud Storage Access Control docs Google Cloud Storage Signed URLs docs

In the eighth episode of this podcast and last of 2015, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Felipe Hoffa. Felipe is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform and he specializes in Big Data.

About Felipe

In 2011 Felipe Hoffa moved from Chile to San Francisco to join Google as a Software Engineer. Since 2013 he's been a Developer Advocate on Big Data - to inspire developers around the world to leverage the Google Cloud Platform tools to analyze and understand their data in ways they could never before. You can find him in several YouTube videos, blog posts, and conferences around the world.

Cool thing of the week Cloud SQL second generation docs and announcement blog post

Interview BigQuery docs MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters research paper Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets research paper Cloud DataFlow docs FlumeJava: Easy, Efficient Data-Parallel Pipelines research paper MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale research paper Cloud Datalab docs Jupyter project homepage Cloud BigTable docs Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data research paper Google Cloud Genomics docs and 23andme homepage Hey I just met you ... tweet BigQuery subreddit Question of the week App Engine environment variables docs Kubernetes secrets docs Google Compute Engine metadata docs App Engine example code to access project metadata Google Cloud Storage Security and Privacy considerations docs

In the seventh episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark discuss the different ways messaging can be done on Google Cloud Platform, covering Pub/Sub and Task Queues and when to choose what.

Links:

Google Cloud Vision API blog post Photo Scavenger Hunt app Google Task Queues documentation Google Cloud Pub/Sub documentation Exporting logs documentation Feature comparison Feature Task Queues Pub/Sub Pull via API Yes Yes Push via Webhooks Yes Yes Max size of message 100K 10MB At least once delivery guarantee Yes Yes Batch Insert Only in App Engine Yes Multiple receivers No Yes Datastore Transactions Yes No Maximum Messages/s 1B (with billing) 250 msg/q/s Unlimited (after request) Throttling Yes No (if needed → pull) Performance median 5ms (99%ile 300ms) Sub-second even when tested at over 1M msg/s Cloud Monitoring No Yes

In the sixth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Ilya Grigorik, Developer Advocate at Google. About Ilya: Ilya is a web performance engineer at Google; co-chair of W3C Webperf WG and in short, an internet plumber.

Links:

Kubecraft: kubernetes visualizer on minecraft video and code HTTP/2 home page HTTP/2 on Google Cloud Platform blog post HTTP/2 demo with Go: gophertiles Making the web faster with SPDY and HTTP/2 blog post A QUIC update on Google's experimental transport blog post QUIC protocol draft Preemptible machine documentations

In the fifth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Chris Sells, Product Manager at Google. About Chris:

Chris Sells has been a software engineer of one kind or another since he was 14 years old. He's worked at Intel and Microsoft, has started his own companies, has written a dozen books, given countless conference talks and has done everything from QA to developer, consultant to VP, technical support to CTO, chief architect to conference organizer. Currently, Chris is a Product Manager at Google focused on tools for cloud developers.

You can contact Chris at:

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/csells Twitter: @csells Blog: http://sellsbrothers.com

Links:

Custom Machine Types documentation Cloud Source Repositories Deploy a sample application using Node.js gcloud-intellij on GitHub Language-specific getting started pages for Node.js, Python, Ruby and Go. Horizontal podcast autoscaling for Kubernetes documentation

In the fourth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Jessie Frazelle, Container Hacker at the Docker Engine team. About Jessie: Jessie Frazelle is a Docker core maintainer and she's know for running all the things in a container.

Links:

Cloud Debugger for Go and how to set it up on Compute Engine Go data race detector LXC Linux Containers Seccomp - secure computing mode Bane: apparmour profile generator My slow internet vs Docker by Ray Tsang Jessie running Steam in a container Docker Container on the Desktop by Jessie Docker issue: How to use -e DISPLAY flag on osx? Honey Pots Docker exec Connecting to other Google Cloud Services Google Cloud Shell DevFest CA Demo of Physical Kubernetes Cluster

In the third episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Brian Dorsey, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform about Kubernetes and Google Container Engine.

About Brian: Brian Dorsey aims to help you build and run your apps. Brian focuses on Cloud Platform, especially Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and lately Kubernetes & Container Engine. He loves Python and taught it at the University of Washington. He's spoken at both PyCon & PyCon Japan. Brian is currently learning Go and enjoying it.

Links:

New Cloud Management Console Kubernetes Kubernetes on Github Kubernetes Slack Team Google Container Engine Presentation: John Wilkes - Cluster management at Google with Borg BigQuery

In the second episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark go from Infrastructure as a Service to Platform as a Service, as they discuss the concept of "Compute as a Continuum".

Links:

Google Compute Engine App Engine Managed VMs Google Container Engine Full Speed Ahead with HTTP/2 on Google Cloud Platform HTTP/HTTPS Load Balancing SSHGuard

In this first episode your hosts, Francesc and Mark, discuss how this podcast was built and deployed to Google Cloud Platform.

Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:

web: gcppodcast.com mail: hello@gcppodcast.com twitter: @gcppodcast reddit: /r/gcppodcast google+: Google+

Links:

Google Cloud Storage Google App Engine and Access Control Lists Hugo Google Analytics library for Go: go-ogle-analytics HIPAA compliance: Google Cloud Platform compliance page.

Errata:

Mark says HTTP status 503 for redirect, when he should have said either 302 or 307.

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. In Australia, every employee is required to select their superannuation fund of choice to help them invest a portion of their income. Having celebrated its 40th anniversary recently, UniSuper, one of Australia's largest superannuation funds, is committed to delivering value and efficiency for its members. Started as a fund for the higher education and research sector, it has now opened its platform to all industries across the country.

Today, UniSuper invests more than $120 billion on behalf of more than 620,000 members. With the new Treasury Laws Amendment Act 2021, Your Future, Your Super, that aims to improve the outcome of superannuation funds for Australians, UniSuper decided to undergo a data centre transformation, taking on an 80/20 rule on cloud hosting and adopting the right digital technologies to improve its performance and portfolio.

In this episode, Angelo talks about how Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) underpins UniSuper's shift to the cloud as it moves existing VMware-based workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud. This enables the organization to quickly scale up while having the flexibility and agility it needs to drive operational efficiencies as it continues to deliver the best returns for its customers. He also shares how the COVID-19 pandemic presented him with some crucial moments of thought that have resulted in some of the changes in best practices across the organization today.

Angelo Furina, Head of Enterprise Infrastructure & Cloud

Angelo is the Head of Enterprise Infrastructure and Cloud at UniSuper and is passionate about business transformation and bridging the gap between technology and business strategy. With more than a decade of industry experience, Angelo has delivered technology solutions across manufacturing, telecommunications, media and finance.

Theo Davies

Theo is the Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud. He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. As the electric vehicles (EV) sector accelerates, drivers are finding it a challenge to conveniently access charging points. This has become one of the biggest concerns for EV drivers around the world. Intending to solve this problem, Taiwan-born company ChargesSmith offers EV users an end-to-end charging solution by developing a map for drivers, with the most updated information on location and availability of charging points around the country.

Today, ChargeSmith serves more than 70% of EV users in Taiwan, partnering with various charging point operators to give users a high level of accessibility. Their vision and goal is to organize and share energy with communities, countries, and the earth.

In this episode, ChargeSmith CEO Andy Chen talks about sustainability in the EV market and the growth of EV adoption. As an EV driver himself, Chen shares the issues he faces first-hand, and how ChargeSmith is leveraging data to solve the challenges of today while paving a future for EV drivers of tomorrow. In this episode, we also hear from Alex Kuo of GAIA, who shares how his team collaborates with ChargeSmith to use cloud technology as an enabler in this evolving landscape. Are you ready for a cleaner driving experience? Tune in to find out.

Andy Chen, CEO of ChargeSmith

Andy is one of the earliest EV adaptors in Taiwan. With enthusiasm for the EV community, he has led ChargeSmith to build up Taiwan's largest EV charging roaming network. Andy enjoys observing the market's pain points and using data-driven strategies to accelerate the adoption of the product.

Alex Kuo, Sr. Account Manager of GAIA

An accomplished sales professional, Alex has led sales teams across the IT industry to success, helping SMB and enterprise clients achieve impressive business growth. With a passion for blockchain technology, Alex enjoys innovating and developing new products and services for clients that ultimately contribute to the growth of the industry.

Theo Davies

Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.

Interview

ChargeSmith: https://www.chargesmith.com/ev/

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. AI is seen as a powerful tool and enabler for businesses around the world. At the same time, more organizations are looking for ways to operate more sustainably. To combine the two, Recursive AI was established in 2020, formalizing the way AI can be used for sustainability. Whether it's through innovation, improving productivity, providing better education, or using AI for prevention and mitigation efforts in managing climate change, Recursive AI is changing the sustainability landscape one project at a time.

In this episode, Recursive AI co-founder Tiago Ramalho puts on a new lens to the way we think about AI. He tells us how neural networks, which form the core infrastructure of AI, can simulate systems quickly, finding new and improved solutions to existing problems. He also shares how the company is predicting the future of natural disasters so that organizations can take action before it is too late.

When it comes to sustainability, no action is too small. Listen in to find out how the organization is innovating by leveraging AI technology to solve the sustainability problems of today and tomorrow.

Dr. Tiago Ramalho, Recursive Co-founder and CEO

Tiago is the co-founder and CEO of Recursive AI, a company focused on building AI tools to help companies grow their sustainability impact. Tiago is a physicist and former Googler at Google DeepMMind with a passion for technology and sustainability. Through Recursive, Tiago is able to marry the two to help others create a greener tomorrow.

Theo Davies

Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.

Interview

Recursive AI: https://recursiveai.co.jp/en/

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. In the Philippines, class sizes in schools are often quite large with an average of 30 students per class. This makes keeping track of individual students' progress a challenge. To solve this problem, John and Chris Fiel, co-founders of Wela School Systems developed a digital solution for schools, teachers, and parents to keep track of basic administrative tasks like daily attendance-taking and keeping record of grades, among other things to keep paperwork at bay.

Starting with just three schools upon launch, Wela now serves more than 200 schools on its platform. To make sure it meets the needs of users, the duo constantly asks for feedback from customers, and pick out the most common needs to address and build around. The startup also follows a freemium model so that schools can test and discover if the product is really adding value for them, before deciding to purchase it.

Listen in to hear how Wela continues to win the hearts of educators, and the impact they are making on the Philippine education system. In this podcast, they also share their views on the future of education and how data can be used to improve teaching processes and the learning environment.

John Fiel, CEO, Wela School Systems

John's interest in the startup industry brought him to establish his own game development startup after college, which lasted for two years. Now, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wela School System. Wela is one of the Pioneering DOST Funded Startups in the Philippines. Wela is now running for five years and serving over 190 schools both national and international.

Chris Fiel, CTO, Wela School Systems

Chris is a serial technopreneur with the aim of creating disruptive and useful apps using the latest technology trends. His heart and inclination is into programming where his 25 years of experience as a freelance developer can speak of. He is currently into ERP, IoT and blockchain and looking for consulting and development projects along these areas.

Theo Davies

Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.

Interview

Wela School System: https://wela.online/

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. Theo Davies and Stephanie Wong speak to Sartaj Singh, Head of Technology at GoJek, who shares inside knowledge on GoJek's explosive growth, from being a ride hailing app, to a multi-platform one that is a now a major eCommerce player in Indonesia, especially in last mile delivery.

Sartaj shares GoJek's focus on three pillars, customer incentive, driver rewards and pricing, to ensure consistency in service delivery quality. He also discusses how he looks to improve platformization with his team through innovation, by putting people over processes, and helping engineers address challenges in order to stay agile and scalable.

From sitting at the side of the street to solve production issues, to managing and growing a team of over 1,000 in just a few years, listen in as Sartaj shares interesting personal excerpts on GoJek's journey in shifting from a startup "hustler" mindset, to a more corporate way of working, and everything that it entails.

Sartaj Singh

Sartaj Singh is the Head of Engineering Platforms at Gojek. Sartaj is one of the few engineers who has been with GOJEK since the early days. As a literary enthusiast, he never thought that he would end up working in tech. Sartaj is responsible for driving growth, standardizing and improving Indonesia's multi-service platform.

Theo Davies

Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.

Cool things of the week

5 GKE features to help you optimize your clusters blog

Interview

Gojek site

Gojek: Using Machine Learning for forecasting and dynamic pricing blog

Introducing Firehose: An open source tool from Gojek blog

Meet Optimus, Gojek's open-source cloud data transformation tool blog

Gojek: Helping drivers reach their pickup points up to 20% more quickly with Google Maps Platform blog

What's something cool you're working on?

Theo is trying out Snapchat and is excited about Snap partnering with Google Cloud

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Theo Davies

Happy Holidays from all of us at Google! This week, hosts Carter Morgan, Stephanie Wong, and Max Saltonstall are sharing their favorite moments from the year! From great partnerships with national companies, new releases in some of your favorite Google software tools, and a trillion digits of pi, we're breaking down some 2022 highlights and introducing special guest Podcast Producer Kevin McCormack to help with a fun podcast trivia game!

Carter Morgan

Carter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google's Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course "Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes" he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who's approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft.

Stephanie Wong

Stephanie Wong is a Developer Advocate focusing on online content across all Google Cloud products. She's a host of the GCP Podcast and the Where the Internet Lives podcast, along with many GCP Youtube video series. She is the winner of a 2021 Webby Award for her content about data centers. Previously she was a Customer Engineer at Google and at Oracle. Outside of her tech life she is a former pageant queen and hip hop dancer and has an unhealthy obsession with dogs.

Max Saltonstall

Max Saltonstall is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud. He is a father, teacher, storyteller, speaker, educator, nefarious villain, game designer, juggler, and is only part zombie.

Cool things of the week Boost medical discoveries with AlphaFold on Vertex AI blog 6 common mistakes to avoid in RESTful web API Design blog Marketing Analytics With Google Cloud blog Our Favorite Episodes of 2022 Stephanie's Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 290: Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson podcast GCP Podcast Episode 315: Cloud Functions (2nd gen) with Jaisen Mathai and Sara Ford podcast GCP Podcast Episode 307: FinOps with Joe Daly podcast Carter's Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 308: New Pi World Record with Emma Haruka Iwao and Sara Ford podcast GCP Podcast Episode 327: ML/AI Data Science for Data Analytics with Jed Dougherty and Dan Darnell podcast GCP Podcast Episode 289: Cloud Security Megatrends with Phil Venables podcast Max's Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 316: Google Cloud for Higher Education with Laurie White and Aaron Yeats podcast GCP Podcast Episode 317: Launching Products at Google Cloud with Anita Kibunguchy-Grant and Gabe Weiss podcast GCP Podcast Episode 325: Digital Sovereignty with Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez podcast Stephanie's Honorable Mentions GCP Podcast Episode 323: Next 2022 with Forrest Brazeal and Stephanie Wong podcast GCP Podcast Episode 298: Celebrating Women's History Month with Vidya Nagarajan Raman podcast Carter's Honorable Mentions GCP Podcast Episode 312: Managed Service for Prometheus with Lee Yanco and Ashish Kumar podcast GCP Podcast Episode 290: Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson podcast Max's Honorable Mentions GCP Podcast Episode 326: Assured Workloads with Key Access Justifications with Bryce Buffaloe and Seth Denney | Google Cloud Platform Podcast podcast Hosts

Stephanie Wong, Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall

Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong welcome fellow Googler Marcos Grappeggia and Antoine Castex of L'Oreal to talk about Cloud Workstations, Google's software that provides managed development environments.

Marcos elaborates on the power of Cloud Workstations and all the features and offerings this software provides. The preconfigured nature of Cloud Workstations means developers simply press a button and get an IDE so they're ready to code quickly. Other teams benefit as well, with templates created by Cloud Workstations that specify options to be preinstalled. Marcos talks more about the benefits of Workstations over local environments, especially in the areas of security and productivity. L'Oreal chose Google Cloud years ago when they began their transition to the cloud, Antoine tells us, and we hear how L'Oreal offered Marcos suggestions and feedback as Workstations was developed. Working with Cloud Workstations today, L'Oreal's teams spread across the globe are able to begin realizing the dream of creating environments with parameters specific to different regions and areas.

While Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell are similar solutions in some ways, Marcos helps us understand the differences as well. For example, Cloud Shell is less flexible while Workstations is highly customizable. Antoine talks more about the adoption process of Workstations at L'Oreal and how they plan to continue using the software with more teams in the future. He offers advice for other companies looking to introduce it.

Workstations works with the Software Delivery Shield suite to build and maintain a secure software supply chain. Security features developers are used to in productions services are easily applied to development environments in Workstations as well. Marcos talks about the future of Cloud Workstations, including deeper security integration.

Marcos Grappeggia

Marcos is a Product Manager at Google Cloud, leading Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell. Marcos is an engineer from University of Campinas (Brazil) and École Centrale Paris (France). Prior to joining Google, he led product at Appurify (acquired by Google, now Firebase Test Lab), enabling mobile test automation on real devices for mobile developers.

Antoine Castex

Antoine is a curious French man, a Serverless Guru multiple times GCP Certified and C2C French Club Co-President & Co-Founder.

Cool things of the week Introduction to custom org policy video How to configure rules and policies in Google Cloud Armor video 1:03 - What this video covers 2:03 - How to create a new rule from scratch 4:54 - How to clone an existing out-of-the-box rule and modify it to create a new rule 7:44 - How to copy a rule or policy and apply it to multiple backends / Rate limiting feature 12:46 - How to use a Rule in Preview mode and test a new rule before enabling it / Threat intelligence feature 17:35 - Wrap up Interview Cloud Workstations site Cloud Shell site Software Delivery Shield site Cloud IDE site Google Cloud Console site C2C site How to increase developer productivity with Cloud Workstations video What's something cool you're working on?

Max is teaching his cats to do silly tricks!

Stephanie is planning a vacation!

Hosts

Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong

Guests Sharon Fang and Michael Sudakovitch are here this week to talk with Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme about Google's Active Assist optimization portfolio and managing cloud projects efficiently.

Michael, tech lead at Uber, first employed Active Assist for the company in their security department, but they have since realized how useful Active Assist is in many areas of the resource management space. Responsible architects, Michael points out, continually evaluate their resources and patch, update, or remove as necessary to ensure proper security and optimize spending. Sharon helps us understand resource management further and how Active Assist helps teams find resources that can be changed or even removed for better spending, tighter security, and smaller carbon footprint.

Active Assist will even recommend the removal of entire projects that have become dormant. Michael talks in detail about Uber's use of Active Assist and how it helped them find vulnerable projects that could be removed for better security. Sharon highlights the effects of Active Assist on reducing CO2 emissions as well, as discontinued projects keep hardware running needlessly. As Michael and his team at Uber began taking advantage of all Active Assist had to offer, Google worked with him to answer questions, tailor resources, and take feedback to improve offerings. The future includes a portfolio expansion of resource life cycle management tools to identify more idol systems like GKE clusters and helping larger customers take advantage of Active Assist at scale automatically.

Together, Sharon and Michael tell us stories about the partnership and interesting findings and results of Uber's carbon footprint reduction journey.

Sharon Fang

Sharon Fang is a Product Manager for Google Cloud's Active Assist, which aims to help users optimize their cloud operations with recommendations.

Michael Sudakovitch

Michael is a Tech Lead at Uber's Engineering Security organization, focusing on securing and optimizing Uber's Multi-Cloud infrastructure.

Cool things of the week Solving internal search problems with Dialogflow blog Automating self-service tech support with Tensorflow blog Introducing IAM Deny, a simple way to harden your security posture at scale blog Supporting healthcare delivery with cloud-native medical imaging blog Interview Active Assist site Uber site Uber Engineering Blog site How ML-fueled recommendations help developers optimize security, price-performance, and carbon reduction blog Introducing Unattended Project Recommender: discover, reclaim, or deprecate abandoned projects under your organization blog Reduce your cloud carbon footprint with new Active Assist recommendations blog What's something cool you're working on?

Max is sorting out the final blog posts of the year, planning some secret Santa holiday festivities for the team, and prepping cranberry sauces.

Daryl is planning videos for the new year, including a video to help celebrate our 1 millionth subscriber on the Google Cloud Tech YouTube channel and several videos to help people get the most out of Google Cloud IAM features.

Hosts

Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme

Stephanie Wong talks with guests Shachar Guz, Inna Weiner, and Gabe Weiss about Google's Database Migration Service and how it helps companies move data to Google Cloud. What typically is a complicated process, DMS simplifies everything from planning to security to validating database migrations.

DMS has undergone some changes since last we spoke with Shachar and Gabe. It's gone GA and helped thousands of customers benefit from the service. Migrations are possible from any PostgreSQL database source to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, which is designed to support HTAP data (transactional and analytical). One of the most exciting updates is the introduction of the DMS modernization journey, which allows customers to change database type during migration (heterogenous). In addition, migrations with DMS can be set up to continuously replicate data between the old and new database. With this feature, developers can compare the application performance against the old vs. new database.

Inna talks about the benefits of keeping your data in the cloud, like secure, reliable, and scalable data storage. Google Cloud takes care of the maintenance work for you as well. DMS takes security seriously and supports multiple security methods to keep your data safe as it migrates. We talk about the different customers using DMS and how the process works for homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations. Before you even start, Gabe tells us, DMS helps you prepare for the migration. And tools like Dataflow can help when customers decide full migration would be too difficult. We talk about the difference between Datastream and DMS and use cases for each.

We wrap up the show with a look at the future of DMS.

Shachar Guz

Shachar is a product manager at Google Cloud, he works on the Cloud Database Migration Service. Shachar worked in various product and engineering roles and shares a true passion about data and helping customers get the most out of their data. Shachar is passionate about building products that make cumbersome processes simple and straightforward and helping companies adopt Cloud technologies to accelerate their business.

Inna Weiner

Inna is a senior technical leader with 20+ years of global experience. She is a big data expert, specializing in deriving insights from data, product and user analytics. Currently, she leads engineering for Cloud DMS. Inna enjoys building diverse engineering organizations, with common vision, growth strategy and inclusive culture.

Gabe Weiss

Gabe leads the database advocacy team for the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can make awesome things, both inside and outside of Google. That could mean speaking at conferences, writing example code, running bootcamps, writing technical blogs or just doing some hand holding. Prior to Google he's worked in virtual reality production and distribution, source control, the games industry and professional acting.

Cool things of the week Flexible committed use discounts — a simple new way to discount Compute Engine instances blog Understanding transactional locking in Cloud Spanner blog Interactive In-console Tutorial site Interview Database Migration Service site GCP Podcast Episode 262: Database Migration Service with Shachar Guz and Gabe Weiss podcast AlloyDB for PostgreSQL site PostgreSQL site Datastream site Dataflow site CloudSQL site Spanner site What's something cool you're working on?

Gabe has been tinkering with new Google Cloud databases and managing a new team.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong

On the show this week, Carter Morgan and Anu Srivastava talk about AI and ML data analytics with Dataiku VP of Platform Strategy, Jed Dougherty, and Head of Product Marketing, Dan Darnell. Dataiku is an AI platform targeted for business team collaboration. The low and no code environments make it easy for developers and not so tech savvy employees to work together on analytics projects. It strives for everyday AI, making these normally highly technical data processes more accessible.

Our guests detail the tools Dataiku provides customers, including ML Ops features for efficient models. Dataiku's managed offering allows businesses to concentrate on the model while Dataiku takes care of things like the deployment processes behind the scenes. We hear about the partnership between Dataiku and Google Cloud and Dataiku's integration with AlloyDB. Through a real example, our guests run us through the use of these two tools together. Jed talks about why Google Cloud works so well with Dataiku, especially for businesses looking for cutting edge technology.

Jed Dougherty

Jed is the VP of Platform Strategy at Dataiku. In this role he acts as a strategic technical advisor to Dataiku customers and prospects. He also works tightly with Engineering and Product stakeholders in order to ensure that all technical platform requests are properly followed, scoped and implemented.

Dan Darnell

Dan has over 20 years of experience in the analytics industry at established software companies, hyper-growth technology companies, and small technology start-ups. As the Head of Product Marketing at Dataiku, he owns positioning, evangelism, and content creation for product offerings and education on products for customers and partners.

Cool things of the week Google Cloud supercharges NLP with large language models blog Practicing the principle of least privilege with Cloud Build and Artifact Registry blog Interview Dataiku site Dataiku YouTube videos BigQuery site Kubernetes site GKE site AlloyDB for PostgreSQL site Accelerate AI Adoption: 3 Steps to Deploy Dataiku for Google Cloud Platform blog Implementing Dataiku with BigQuery docs GCP Podcast Episode 238: ASML with Arnaud Hubaux podcast GCP Podcast Episode 229: Lucidworks with Radu Miclaus podcast What's something cool you're working on?

Anu is working on interesting speech use cases and Google's Speech to Text. Join in with this tutorial!

Carter is working on getting organized and working on something super cool!

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Anu Srivastava

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme are joined by Bryce Buffaloe and Seth Denney to chat about Assured Workloads and the sovereignty control Key Access Justifications so customers can see how their data is used and control who can see what.

Assured Workloads with Google is a security and compliance engine that allows users to control their data with the help of Google. With the expansion of data use around the globe, data sovereignty has become more important as well, and Google Cloud products offer myriad tools to maintain control, privacy, and compliance no matter the location. Seth talks more about sovereignty and how it's changing data storage and management. Our guests talk about how Google has tackled the sovereignty issues, difficult decisions that had to be made, and the process of working with clients to optimize tools for different security and sovereignty scenarios.

With Key Access Justifications, Google has bolstered its offerings to provide clients with trustworthy controls to keep data secure and sovereign, from Compute Engine VMs to BigQuery. We learn what Key Access Justifications look like for users and how the encryption keys work in different Google Cloud services. Customer managed key material is stored outside of Google and the key manager must give permission for access for an added layer of trust and security. Seth and Bryce explain why this is important and describe how KAJ are used with some examples. These features may also be used to improve security in the future by preventing data from being decrypted and stolen should someone ever get access to your system. We hear more about the future of data security and sovereignty, including simplifying the process with managed services and easier onboarding. Strategic European partnerships are helping Google tackle these important issues overseas so clients can focus on their businesses and worry less about data security.

The catalyst for KAJ was a large German bank that recognized the sovereignty changes coming, and we hear more about the origins of KAJ and the path to where it is today. When paired with Assured Workloads, clients get maximum sovereignty coverage. Seth talks a little about the Sovereignty Access Controls done internally as well. Bryce walks us through using these Google services with a European example.

Bryce Buffaloe

Bryce is Product manager for Google Cloud Security managing the portfolio of the Assured Workload's solution suite.

Seth Denney

Seth is KAJ Tech Lead, responsible for ensuring the integrity and usefulness of KAJs to support customer data sovereignty

Cool things of the week DevFests site Best Kept Security Secrets: Tap into the power of Organization Policy Service podcast Interview Assured Workloads site Assured Workloads Playlist videos Key Access Justifications docs Compute Engine site BigQuery site GCP Podcast Episode 325: Digital Sovereignty with Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez podcast T Systems site What's something cool you're working on?

Daryl just released a video about using Workflows' new parallel step.

Max is working on crossover episodes across our various podcast streams, so we can have SRE guests on to the GCP podcast to talk reliability, for example, or bring some of the Kubernetes hosts to the Cloud Security podcast to discuss securing Kubernetes workloads.

Hosts

Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme

This week, Max Saltonstall and Chloe Condon welcome guests Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez to talk about digital sovereignty and what goes into a technical strategy for dealing with this complicated facet of web projects.

Our guests start the show with a thorough explanation of digital sovereignty, explaining that it typically involves a state or regulatory agency exerting control over data and technology. As more and more data is taken into the cloud, countries are understandably concerned about a loss of control over this data, and nations are enacting laws and regulations to help manage security of data in the cloud. Standardization has been a human issue for a long time, from trains to international travel and more, Archana reminds us, and this challenge is now moving to the management of cloud data out in the world. As sovereign nations implement their own standards, cloud providers must adapt to help developers create projects that follow these laws.

Julien talks about the discussions around digital sovereignty in Europe, especially as it affects data security. Lawmakers, cloud providers, and companies have been working together to think through effective laws and strategies for digital security around the world. Googlers across the globe are working locally to make sure Google's suite of products are compatible with government regulations and the needs of developers. Archana and Julien talk about the three important action segments Google employs to make sure tools allow for control over who has access to data when and how, and we hear the journey Google has trekked from the very beginning to now as the company has worked for strong security and versatile data management. Local partnerships are a big part of the advancements made in the sovereignty space, Julien tells us, increasing trust with developers in the area and leveraging local knowledge.

With offerings like Cloud Key Management, Google provides unique options for developers to control and secure data. To keep things easy, especially in the case of hybrid solutions, this portfolio of sovereignty products uses the same APIs, streamlined onboarding setups, and familiar interfaces Google product users are accustomed to.

Archana Ramamoorthy

Archana is the Director of Cloud Security Product Management. She has spent a lot of her career building security products for enterprise organizations.

Julien Blanchez

Julien looks after the coordination of Google's local digital sovereignty partnerships and how to position them in the market, after many years helping regulators and highly regulated customers in EMEA on their Google Cloud adoption journey worldwide.

Cool things of the week Google Cloud Podcasts site Cloud Security Podcast podcast Google Cloud SRE Podcast podcast Developer Community Keynote: The thing about burnout video Interview Google Cloud Next '22: Meet digital sovereignty requirements site Announcing Sovereign Controls for Google Workspace blog Cloud Key Management site Confidential Computing site What's something cool you're working on?

Max is working on expanding Google's podcast platform, giving it some more visibility. He's also working on Halloween and LARP costumes and teaching new board games.

Chloe is working on her Halloween costume, too, and working on Google Cloud Reader.

Hosts

Max Saltonstall and Chloe Condon

Debi Cabrera and Stephanie Wong have more great Next content this week as we focus on launches specifically related to data and analytics with guests Bruno Aziza and Maire Newton.

We start the episode with a look at current customer trends in data, including tools for increasing efficiency when working with many different types of data. Data governance and security is another area where Bruno sees advances in satisfying customer needs. Maire talks about the steps Google is taking to help customers implement knowledge gained with data, including Looker and new integrations with tools like Looker Studio to easily connect tools for better data access and use. Strategic partnerships with companies like Tableau help accomplish these goals as well.

With 21 data and analytics launches at Next, exciting solutions are out there for customers. Bruno and Maire highlight their five favorites, like BigQuery support for unstructured data, allowing analysts working with SQL to do more with more data. To simplify workflows, BigQuery integration with Spark is a new feature that Maire tells us about, and we hear more about BigLake and it's increased format support. Data reaches more people easier now with Connected Sheets available for anyone using Google Workspace, and finally we talk more about Looker. Bruno details the four use cases of business intelligence customers and how Google's suite of data products satisfy their needs for a reasonable price.

Bruno Aziza

Bruno is head of data and analytics for Google Cloud and leads the outbound product management team. He has more than two decades' of Silicon Valley experience, specializing in scaling businesses, and has written two books on Data Analytics and Enterprise Performance Management.

Maire Newton

Maire is an Outbound Product Manager at Google Cloud with almost 15 years of experience partnering with organizations to develop data solutions and drive digital transformation. She's passionate about helping customers develop data-driven cultures by using technology to meet users where they are.

Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next for data professionals: analytics, databases and business intelligence blog ANA104 How Boeing overcame their on-premises implementation challenges with data & AI site ANA100 What's new in Looker and Data Studio site ANA101 What's new in BigQuery site ANA106 How leading organizations are making open source their super power site Google Cloud Next: top AI and ML sessions blog Interview Building the most open data cloud ecosystem post Data Journeys videos Google Cloud Next '22 site Looker site Looker Studio site Tableau site BigLake ste BigQuery site Use the BigQuery connector with Spark docs Connected Sheets docs What's something cool you're working on?

Debi is getting married and working on Dataflow Prime.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

Forrest Brazeal joins Stephanie Wong today on the second day of Google Cloud Next '22. We're talking about all the exciting announcements, how the conference has changed in recent years, and what to expect in the days ahead.

The excitement and energy of the first in-person Next since 2019 was one of the best parts for Forrest. With 1300 releases in just half the year, a lot has happened in BigQuery, AI, Looker, and more. Next includes announcements in many of these areas as well, as Google Cloud expands and makes Cloud easier for all types of projects and clients. Strategic partnerships and development have allowed better use of Google Cloud for the virtual work world and advancements in sustainability have helped Google users feel better about their impact on the environment.

New announcements in compute include C3 VMs, the first VM in the cloud with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with Google's custom Intel IPU. MediaCDN uses the YouTube infrastructure and the new Live Stream API optimizes streaming capabilities. Among many other announcements, Network Analyzer is now GA allowing for simplified network configuration monitoring and Google Cloud Armor has been extended to include ML-based Adaptive Protection capabilities. Software Delivery Shield and Cloud Workstations are recent offerings to help developers in each of the four areas of software supply chain management. Advancements in Cloud Build include added security benefits, and new GKE and Cloud Run logging and security alerts ensure projects remain secure through the final stages of development.

The best way to ensure secure, optimized work is with well-trained developers. And in that vein, Google Cloud is introducing Innovators Plus to provide a new suite of developer benefits under a fixed cost subscription. Forrest tells us about #GoogleClout and the challenges available in the Next portal for conference-goers. Assured Workloads helps with data sovereignty in different regions, Confidential Space in Confidential Computing provides trust guarantees when companies perform joint data analysis and machine learning training, and Chronicle Security Operations are some of the exciting security announcements we saw at Next.

On the show next week, we'll go in depth on data announcements at Next, but Steph gives us a quick rundown of some of the biggest ones today. She talks briefly about announcements in AI, including Vertex AI Vision and Translation Hub. Forrest wraps up by talking about predictions for the future of tech and cloud.

Forrest Brazeal

Forrest Brazeal is a cloud educator, author, speaker, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He is the creator of the Cloud Resume Challenge initiative, which has helped thousands of non-traditional learners take their first steps into the cloud.

Cool things of the week Unlock biology & medicine potential with AlphaFold on Google Cloud video Interview Google Cloud Next '22 site Google Cloud Innovators site What's next for digital transformation in the cloud blog New cloud regions coming to a country near you blog The next wave of Google Cloud infrastructure innovation: New C3 VM and Hyperdisk blog 20+ Cloud Networking innovations unveiled at Google Cloud Next blog Introducing Software Delivery Shield for end-to-end software supply chain security blog Developers - Build, learn, and grow your career faster with Google Cloud blog Advancing digital sovereignty on Europe's terms blog Introducing Confidential Space to help unlock the value of secure data collaboration blog Introducing Chronicle Security Operations: Detect, investigate, and respond to cyberthreats with the speed, scale, and intelligence of Google blog What's new in Google Cloud databases: More unified. More open. More intelligent. blog Building the most open data cloud ecosystem: Unifying data across multiple sources and platforms blog Introducing the next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform blog Vertex AI Vision site New AI Agents can drive business results faster: Translation Hub, Document AI, and Contact Center AI blog Open source collaborations and key partnerships to help accelerate AI innovation blog Google Cloud Launches First-of-Its-Kind Service to Simplify Mainframe Modernization for Customers in Financial Services, Retail, Healthcare and Other Industries article Project Starline expands testing through an early access program blog What's something cool you're working on?

Steph is working on the developer keynote and DevFest and UKI Google Cloud Next Developer Day. Check out her Next talk "Simplify and secure your network for all workloads".

Hosts

Stephanie Wong

On the show this week, we're talking updated DevOps practices for 2022 with hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon and our guests Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis.

Nathen and Derek start the show with a thorough discussion of DORA, the research program dedicated to helping organizations improve software delivery and operations, and the state of DevOps report that Google publishes every year. This year, the DevOps research team strengthened their focus on security and discovered that one of the biggest predictors in security practice adoption is company culture. Open, communicative, and trustful company cultures are some of the best for accepting and implementing optimized security practices. Derek tells us how company cultures are measured and scored for this purpose and Nathen talks about team and individual burnout and its affects on culture.

Low, medium, high, and elite teams are another indicator of culture, and Nathen explains how teams earn their label through four keys of software delivery performance. Each year, they let the data show these four clusters of team performance. But this year there were only three, and Derek talks more about this phenomenon and why the elite cluster seems to have disappeared. When operational performance analysis was added, the four clusters reemerged and were renamed to better suit the new analysis metrics. Nathen details these four new clusters: starting, which performs neither well nor poorly and may be just starting out; flowing, teams that are performing well across throughput, stability, and operational performance; slowing teams, which don't have high throughput but excel in other areas; and retiring teams, which are reliable but not actively developing projects. We discuss how companies may shift from one cluster to another and how much context can affect this shift.

We talk about key findings in the 2022 DevOps report, especially in the security space. Some of the most notable include the adoption of DevOps security practices and the decreased incidence of burnout on teams who leverage security practices. Nathen and Derek elaborate on how this year's research changed from last year and what remained the same.

Nathen Harvey

Nathen works with teams helping them learn about and apply the findings of our research into high performing teams. He's been involved in the DevOps community for more than a decade.

Derek DeBellis

Derek is a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google, where Derek focuses on survey research, logs analysis, and figuring out ways to measure concepts central to product development. Derek has published on Human-AI interaction, the impact of Covid-19's onset on smoking cessation, designing for NLP errors and the role of UX in ensuring privacy.

Cool things of the week Try out Cloud Spanner databases at no cost with new free trial instances blog Chipotle Is Testing More Artificial Intelligence Solutions To Improve Operations article Gyfted uses Google Cloud AI/ML tools to match tech workers with the best jobs blog Interview 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report blog DevOps site 2022 State of the DevOps Report Report site DORA site DORA Community site SLSA site Security Software Development Framework site Westrum organizational culture site Google finds culture, not tech, is the biggest predictor of DevOps security outcomes article GCP Podcast Episode 205: DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble podcast GCP Podcast Episode 284: State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith podcast GCP Podcast Episode 290: Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson podcast What's something cool you're working on?

Steph is working on talks for DevFest Nantes and a Google Cloud dev conference in London. She'll be talking about subsea fiber optics and Google Cloud networking products.

Chloe is a Noogler, so she's been working on learning as much as she can! She is excited to make her podcast debut this week!

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon

Jason Smith, founder of the Mixed Googlers group here at Google, joins Stephanie Wong to talk about DEI and the importance of belonging in tech.

Jason helps us better understand what the concepts diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging mean to him. It's more than just including different types of people, Jason tells us, companies must also give them equal opportunities and say in their jobs. We talk about the difference between DEI and belonging. Belonging means feeling comfortable and accepted and conveys a more concrete, real-life sense of community that brings DEI to life. While DEI is easy enough for a company to measure, it's sometimes tricky to get a clear picture of belonging in a company. Jason talks about possible solutions to this problem.

Growing up as the child of both a white and a black parent, Jason understands the importance of feeling a sense of belonging as a mixed race individual. In that vein, he founded Mixed Googlers, and he tells us more about how this group supports other mixed individuals at Google. He talks about the events they have hosted, including talks with famous mixed race speakers, and how the grassroots efforts to form and grow Mixed Googlers has created a great community.

Later, Jason talks about DEI and belonging in tech companies and cloud specifically. He introduces us to some fun ways to incorporate DEI principles into company culture in a way that encourages all individuals to contribute their personal perspectives. He stresses the importance of allowing mistakes, especially when discussing diversity issues with your coworkers, so the conversation can be about growth and not about confrontation.

Jason Smith

Jason Smith is a Customer Engineer supporting application modernization and the founder of Mixed Googlers, an ERG dedicated to mixed race individuals.

Cool things of the week Sign up for the Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge blog Google Cloud Firewall introduces Network Firewall Policies, IAM-governed Tags and more blog Building trust in the data with Dataplex blog Interview Google Belonging site Google 2022 Diversity Annual Report site Sugi Dakks: Not the Only One | Talks at Google video Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Keynote site BigQuery site What's something cool you're working on?

Stephanie is working on content for Next and the Drone Racing League.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong

Vertex AI Experiments with Ivan Nardini and Karthik Ramachandran

Hosts Anu Srivastava and Nikita Namjoshi are joined by guests Ivan Nardini and Karthik Ramachandran in a conversation about Vertex AI Experiments this week on the podcast. Vertex AI Experiments allows for easy, thorough ML experimentation and analysis of ML strategies.

Our guests start the show with a brief introduction to Vertex AI and go on to help us understand where Experiments fits in. Because building ML models takes trial and error as we figure out what architecture and data management will work best, Experiments is a handy tool that helps developers try different variations. With extensive tracking capabilities and analysis tools, developers can see what is working, what's not, and get ideas for other things to try. Ivan tells us about the two concepts to keep in mind before using Experiments: runs, which are training configurations, and experiments, adjustments you make as you look for the best solution.

Vertex ML Metadata, a managed ML metadata tool, helps analyze Experiment runs in a graph, Ivan tells us. He takes us through an example ML model build and training using Vertex AI Experiments and other tools. He and Karthik also elaborate on the relationship between Vertex AI Experiments and Pipelines. We talk about the future of AI, including the foundational model, and some cool examples of what's happening in the real world with Vertex AI Experiments.

Ivan Nardini

Ivan Nardini is a customer engineer specialized in ML and passionate about Developer Advocacy and MLE. He is currently collaborating and enabling Data Science developers and practitioners to define and implement MLOps on Vertex AI. He is an active contributor in Google Cloud.

Karthik Ramachandran

Karthik Ramachandran is a Product Managed on the VertexAI team. He's been focused on developing MLOps tools like Vertex Pipelines and Experiments.

Cool things of the week Expanding the Google Cloud Ready - Sustainability initiative with 12 new partners blog Large Language Models and how they are used with Natural Language Understanding. pdf Interview Vertex AI site Vertex AI Experiments docs Vertex AI SDK for Python docs Vertex ML Metedata docs Vertex AI Pipelines docs Vertex AI Workbench docs Vertex AI Tensorboard docs Track, compare, manage experiments with Vertex AI Experiments blog Vertex AI Experiments Notebooks site What's something cool you're working on?

Anu is working on demos for Next.

Nikita is testing new features for Vertex AI.

Hosts

Nikita and Anu Srivastava

Host Stephanie Wong chats with storage pros Sean Derrington and Nishant Kohli this week to learn more about cost optimization with storage projects and exciting new launches in the Google Cloud storage space!

To start, we talk about the Storage Spotlight of years past and the cool Google Cloud products that Google is unveiling this year. Optimization is a huge theme this year, with a focus not only on cost optimization but also performance and resource use as well. Enterprise readiness and storage everywhere, Sean tells us, are the most important pillars as Google continues to improve offerings. We learn about Hyperdisk and the three customizable attributes users can control and the benefits of Filestore Enterprise for GKE for large client systems.

Nishant talks about Cloud Storage and how clients are using it at scale for their huge data projects. Specifically, Google Storage has been working to help clients with large-scale data storage needs to optimize costs with Autoclass. Storage Insights is another new tool launching late this year or early next year that empowers better decision-making through increased knowledge and analytics of storage usage.

GKE storage is getting a revamp as well with Backup for GKE to help clients recover applications and data easily. Google Cloud for Backup and DR helps keep projects secure as well. This managed service is easy to use and integrate into all cloud projects and can be used with on prem projects and then backed up into the cloud. This is ideal for clients as they shift to cloud or hybrid systems. Companies like Redivis take advantage of some of these new data features, and Nishant talks more about how Autoclass and other tools have helped them save money and improve their business.

Sean Derrington

Sean is the Group Product Manager for the storage team. He is a long time storage industry PM veteran; he's worked on Veritas, Symantec, Exablox (storage startup).

Nishant Kohli

Nishant has a decade plus of Object Storage experience at Dell/EMC and Hitachi. He's currently Senior Product Manager on the storage team.

Cool things of the week Cloud Next 2022 site Integrating ML models into production pipelines with Dataflow blog Four non-traditional paths to a cloud career (and how to navigate them) blog Interview What's New & Next: A Spotlight on Storage site Google Cloud Online Storage Products site GCP Podcast Episode 277: Storage Launches with Brian Schwarz and Sean Derrington podcast GKE site Filestore site Filestore Enterprise site Filestore Enterprise for fully managed, fault tolerant persistent storage on GKE blog Cloud Storage site Cloud Storage Autoclass docs GCP Episode 307: FinOps with Joe Daly podcast Storage Insights docs GCP Podcast Episode 318: GKE Turns 7 with Tim Hockin podcast Backup for GKE docs Backup and DR Service site Redivis site What's something cool you're working on?

Stephanie is working on new video content and two Next sessions: one teaching how to simplify and secure your network for all workloads and one talking about how our infrastructure partner ecosystem helps customers.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong

Tim Hockin joins Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong to celebrate GKE's seventh birthday! Tim starts with a brief background on GKE from its beginnings in 2015 and its relationship to Borg to the visions Google developers had for the software. GKE is meant to help companies focus on what they're good at and leave the rest to Google's managed Kubernetes service.

Tim talks about his acting gig in a Kubernetes documentary, including some fun facts about Kubernetes' early days and the significance of the number seven. Over time, the teams working on open source Kubernetes and GKE have worked together, with advances in the open source software influencing updates in GKE. Kubernetes 1.25 was released the day this episode was recorded, and Tim describes how much work and thought goes into building these updates.

GKE offers GCP users unique ways to leverage Kubernetes tools like scaling, and Tim shares stories about the evolution of some of these tools and his experiences with networking. Talking with the Kubernetes community has helped refine GKE mult-icluster tools to help companies solve real problems, and Tim tells us more about other features and updates coming with future iterations of GKE. KubeCon is in October, so come by and learn more!

Tim Hockin

Tim Hockin is Principal Software Engineer working with Kubernetes at Google Cloud.

Cool things of the week What's new with Google Cloud blog Power Your Business with Modern Cloud Apps: Strategies and Best Practices site Securing apps for Googlers using Anthos Service Mesh blog Interview GKE site Kubernetes site Anthos site Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes blog Enabling multi-cluster Gateways docs Cloud Load Balancing site Multi-cluster Services docs Keynote: From One to Many, the Road to Multicluster- Kaslin Fields, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud video GCP Podcast Episode 272: GKE Turns Six with Anthony Bushong, Gari Singh, and Kaslin Fields podcast What's something cool you're working on?

Kaslin is working on NEXT and KubeCon stuff.

Anthony is working on GKE Essentials and getting ready to go on leave.

Hosts

Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong

This week, Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong go behind the scenes at Google Cloud with Gabe Weiss and Anita Kibunguchy-Grant to learn how new products move from idea to market.

To start, our guests walk us through a typical end-to-end life cycle as Google creates new and exciting products for users. Starting with a problem sometimes brought to light by users, a solution is workshopped, and a team is brought together to tackle the issue. Once the product is workable, Gabe and his team step in to evaluate and pass it on to Anita for market launch. With examples like BigQuery Omni and AlloyDB, Anita and Gabe walk us through a real launch scenario, from naming the product to promotion and observing the satisfying impacts of a product solving real-world problems.

Anita details the three phases of a product launch and which teams are involved. The phases are pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch. In pre-launch, things like naming and messaging are crafted, priority is assigned via tier assignment, and plans are made to interact with various promotional and other teams who may need to be involved with the launch. Launch day activities are coordinated next as various marketing avenues are leveraged for maximum visibility and development teams work together to make the technical side successful. Post-Launch involves some debriefing on the success of the marketing as well as analysis of use, press coverage, page views, revenue, sentiment among users, and enabling sales teams for success.

Gabe talks about the importance of his team in the process as they test products for customer usability and QA before launch as well. He and Anita elaborate on the differences with Google launches versus other companies, including the stages involved in launch and the naming of these stages. Many launches are done at big Google Cloud events, like Google I/O, Anita points out as a unique feature of Google, which can be a gift and a curse. Challenges are addressed as our guests talk us through possible problems and the ways launch teams address them. Anita and Gabe emphasize empathy and communication in product launching and the importance of clear, productive feedback.

Anita Kibunguchy-Grant

Anita Kibunguchy-Grant is a Product Marketing Lead at Google with extensive experience across Data Analytics and Databases products and solutions. Before Google, she led awareness and go-to-market programs at VMware.

She has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and is passionate about helping customers use data and technology to transform their businesses.

Gabe Weiss

Gabe leads the database advocacy team for the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can make awesome things, both inside and outside of Google. Prior to Google he's worked in virtual reality production and distribution, source control, the games industry, and professional acting.

Cool things of the week Leveling up your data analysis skills as a student blog Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude site How Google Cloud blocked the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack at 46 million rps blog Interview BigQuery site Datastream site Database Migration Services site Cloud SQL site AlloyDB site PostgreSQL site Google I/O site Qwiklabs site Agones site Databases blog What's something cool you're working on?

Max is wrapping up his hosting of summer interns and getting ready for vacation! He plans to play a lot of board games and video games!

Steph also enjoyed hosting interns this summer!

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Max Saltonstall

On the podcast this week, our guests Laurie White and Aaron Yeats talk with Stephanie Wong and Kelci Mensah about higher education and how Google Cloud is helping students realize their potential. As a former educator, Laurie has seen the holes in tech education and, with the help of Google, is determined to aid faculty and students in expanding learning to include cloud education as well as the standard on prem curriculum. Aaron and Laurie work together toward this goal with programs like their Speaker Series.

Laurie's approach involves supporting faculty as they design courses that incorporate cloud technologies. With the busy lives of students today, she recognizes that the best way to get the information into the hands of students is through regular coursework, not just through elective activities outside the regular classroom.

Aaron's work with students and student organizations rounds out their support of higher education learning. He facilitates the creation of student clubs that use Cloud Skills Boost, a program in which students navigate full pathways as they learn the skills they need to create and manage cloud builds. Soon, Aaron will offer hack-a-thons that encourage students to attend weekend events to work together on passion projects outside of regular classwork.

Our guests talk more about the specifics of Google Cloud Higher Education Programs and the importance of incorporating certifications into the higher education learning process. Aaron talks about expanding the program and his hopes for reaching out to more schools and students and Laurie talks about the funding for students and how Google Cloud's system of credits for students enables them to use real cloud tools without a credit card. Laurie and Aaron tell us fun stories about past student successes, conference interactions, and hack-a-thon projects that went well.

Laurie White

Laurie taught CS in higher ed for over 30 years where her biggest frustration was trying to keep the curriculum up with the field. She thought she was retiring seven years ago but got the call from Google to a job where she could help faculty around the world keep their curriculum up with cloud computing, so here she is.

Aaron Yeats

Aaron Yeats has been working in education outreach for two decades. His work in education has included Texas government education programs including public health, non-profit advocacy, and education.

Cool things of the week How Wayfair is reaching MLOps excellence with Vertex AI blog Hidden gems of Google BigQuery blog Google Cloud Innovators site Google Cloud and Apollo24|7: Building Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) together blog Interview Google Cloud Higher Education Programs site Google Cloud Speaker Series site Google Cloud Skills Boost site CSSI site Tech Equity Collective site GDSC site What's something cool you're working on?

Steph has been working on an AlphaFold video. You can learn more here.

Kelci is working on developing a Neos tutorial for introductory Google Cloud developers to learn how to write HTTP functions in Python all within the Google Cloud environment and wrapping up her summer internship with Google!

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Kelci Mensah

Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey are joined today by fellow Googlers Jaisen Mathai and Sara Ford to hear all about Cloud Functions (2nd gen) and how it differs from the original.

Jaisen gives us some background on Cloud Functions and why it was built. Supporting seven languages, this tool allows clients to write a function without worrying about scaling, devops, and a number of other things that are handled by Cloud Functions automatically. Customer feedback led to new features, and that's how the second evolution of Cloud Functions came about. Don't worry, first gen users! This will continue to be available and supported.

Features in the 2nd gen fit into three categories: performance, cost, and control. Among other benefits, costs stay low or may even be reduced with some of the new features, larger instances and longer processing times mean better performance, and traffic splitting means better control over projects. Sara details an example illustrating the power of the new concurrency features, and Jaisen helps us understand when Cloud Functions is the right choice for your project and when it's not. Our guests walk us through getting started with Cloud Functions and using the 2nd gen additions.

Companies like Lucille Games are using Cloud Functions, and our guests talk more about how specific users are leveraging the new features of the 2nd gen.

Jaisen Mathai

Jaisen is a product manager for Cloud Functions. He's been at Google for about six years and before joining Google was both a developer and product manager.

Sara Ford

Sara is a Cloud Developer Advocate focusing on Cloud Functions and enjoys working on serverless.

Cool things of the week No pipelines needed. Stream data with Pub/Sub direct to BigQuery blog Cloud IAM Google Cloud blog The Diversity Annual Report is now a BigQuery public dataset blog Interview Cloud Functions site Cloud Functions 2nd gen walkthrough video Cloud Functions version comparison docs Lucille Games: Playing to win with Google Cloud Platform site BigQuery site Cloud Run site Eventarc docs Cloud Shell site GCP Podcast Episode 261: Full Stack Dart with Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore podcast Working with Remote Functions docs Cloud Console site Where should I run my stuff? Choosing compute options video What's something cool you're working on?

Stephanie has been working on GCP Support Shorts.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey

Max Saltonstall and new host Anu Srivastava are in the studio today talking about Vertex Explainable AI with guests Irina Sigler and Ivan Nardini. Vertex Explainable AI was born from a need for developers to better understand how their models determine classifications. Trusting the operation of models for business decision making and easier debugging are two reasons this classification understanding is so important.

Explainable models help developers understand and describe how their trained models are making decisions. Google's managed service, Vertex Explainable AI, offers Feature Attribution and Example Based Explanations to provide better understanding of model decision making. Irina describes these two services and how each works to foster better decision-making based on AI models. One or both services can be used in every stage of model building and to create a more precise model with better results. Example Based Explanations, Irina tells us, also makes it easier to explain the model to those who may not have strong technical backgrounds.

Ivan runs us through a sample build of a model taking advantage of the Vertex Explainable AI tools. Presets provide easier setup and use as well. We talk more about the benefits of being able to easily explain your models. When decision-makers understand the importance of your AI tool, it's more likely to be cleared for production, for example. When you understand why your model is making certain choices, you can trust the model's outcomes as part of your decision-making process.

Irina Sigler

Irina Sigler is a Product Manager on the Vertex Explainable AI team. Before joining Google, Irina worked at McKinsey and did her Ph.D. in Explainable AI. She graduated from the Freie Universität Berlin and HEC Paris.

Ivan Nardini

Ivan Nardini is a customer engineer specialized in ML and passionate about Developer Advocacy and MLE. He is currently collaborating and enabling Data Science developers and practitioners to define and implement MLOps on Vertex AI. He also leads a worldwide hackathon community initiative and he is an active contributor in Google Cloud.

Cool things of the week Unify data lakes and warehouses with BigLake, now generally available blog What it's like to have a hybrid internship at Google blog Interview Vertex AI site Explainable AI site Vertex Explainable AI docs Vertex Explainable AI Notebooks docs Feature Attribution docs AI Explanations Whitepaper site Explainable AI with Google Cloud Vertex AI article Why you need to explain machine learning models blog What's something cool you're working on?

Anu just got back from a nice vacation and is picking back up on how to use our AI APIs with Serverless workflows. She's working on some exciting tutorials for our AI backed Translation API.

Max just got back from family dance camp and is working to make excellent intern experiences.

Hosts

Max Saltonstall and Anu Srivastava

We're learning all about Arm servers on Google Cloud Platform this week. Hosts Brian Dorsey and Stephanie Wong welcome fellow Googlers Jon Masters and Emma Haruka Iwao to talk about the newest VMs on GCP.

To start, our guests dive in to Arm, explaining what it is and how it's grown over the years. Nowadays, Arm-based chips dominate the mobile market and this volume has allowed them to build both advanced chips for supercomputers and beneficial partnerships. Emma explains how having the Arm architecture available in the cloud helps keep projects efficient and walks us through example setups of an Arm projects, illustrating the ease of setup in Google Cloud. Jon and Emma talk about the T2A VMs running Arm workloads at Google, including their balance of performance and cost.

Emma and Jon bust some myths about Arm, emphasizing how performant it is despite its humble beginnings.

Jon Masters

Jon Masters is a compute architect focused on Arm server architecture, platform standards, and ecosystem with almost a dozen years of experience working on Arm.

Emma Haruka Iwao

Emma Haruka Iwao is a DevRel engineer focused on Compute products and a computer architecture enthusiast.

Cool things of the week Introducing Batch, a new managed service for scheduling batch jobs at any scale blog Examples of Batch for Transcoding site Using Google Kubernetes Engine's GPU sharing to search for neutrinos blog Interview Arm site Arm Documentation docs Arm VMs on Computer docs Expanding the Tau VM family with Arm-based processors blog Run your Arm workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine with Tau T2A VMs blog Compute Engine site GKE site What's something cool you're working on?

Brian is switching his focus from VMs to developer tooling.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey

Hosts Carter Morgan and Anthony Bushong are in the studio this week! We're talking about Prometheus with guests Lee Yanco and Ashish Kumar and learning about the build process for Google Cloud's Managed Service for Prometheus and how Home Depot uses this tool to power their business.

To begin with, Lee helps us understand what Managed Service for Prometheus is. Prometheus, a popular monitoring solution for Kubernetes, lets you know that your project is up and running and in the event of a failure, Prometheus lets you know what happened. But as Kubernetes projects scale and spread across the globe, Prometheus becomes a challenge to manage, and that's where Google Cloud's Managed Service for Prometheus comes in. Lee describes why Prometheus is so great for Kubernetes, and Ashish talks about CNCF's involvement helps open source tools integrate easily. With the help of Monarch, Google's Managed Service stands above the competition, and Lee explains what Monarch is and how it works with Prometheus to benefit users.

Ashish talks about Home Depot's use of Google Cloud and the Managed Service for Prometheus, and how Home Depot's multiple data centers make data monitoring both trickier and more important. With Google Cloud, Home Depot is able to easily ensure everything is healthy and running across data centers, around the world, at an immense scale. He describes how Home Depot uses Managed Service for Prometheus in each of these data center environments from the point of view of a developer and talks about how easy Prometheus and the Managed Service are to integrate and use.

Lee and Ashish wrap up the show with a look at how Home Depot and Google have worked together to create and adjust tools for increased efficiency. In the future, tighter integration into the rest of Google Cloud's suite of products is the focus.

Lee Yanco

Lee Yanco is the Product Management lead for Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. He also works on Monarch, Google's planet-scale in-memory time series database, and on Cloud Monitoring's Kubernetes observability experience.

Ashish Kumar

Ashish Kumar is Senior Manager for Site Reliability and Production Engineering for The Home Depot.

Cool things of the week Cloud Next registration is open site Introducing Parallel Steps for Workflows: Speed up workflow executions by running steps concurrently blog How to think about threat detection in the cloud blog GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniak podcast Interview Prometheus site PromQL site Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus docs Kubernetes site CNCF site Monarch: Google's Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database research Cloud Monitoring site Cloud Logging site Google Cloud's operations suite site What's something cool you're working on?

Carter is focusing on getting organized, managing overwhelm, and comedy festivals.

Anthony is testing a few new exciting features, working with build provenance in Cloud Build, jobs and network file systems in Cloud Run.

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Anthony Bushong

Stephanie Wong and Carter Morgan are back this week learning about Google's Distributed Cloud Edge for telcos with guests Krishna Garimella and DP Ayyadevara. Launched last year, Google Distributed Cloud Edge has benefited companies across many industries. Today, our guests are here to elaborate on how telecommunications companies specifically are leveraging this powerful tool.

Because telcos deliver essential services, they tend to create detailed plans for their infrastructure in advance and stick with this setup for many years, DP tells us. Identifying the right tools for their project is vital, and Google has created and improved on many services to aid the telecommunications sector. Contact Center AI, for example, helps with customer service needs. Specifically, our guests elaborate on the modernization of telco networks through managed infrastructure offerings.

We learn more about Google Distributed Cloud Edge and the managed hardware and software stack that's included. Container as a service for optimal network function is the first focus of Google in supporting telcos companies with Distributed Cloud and has been used for 5G rollouts. Google has been working behind the scenes to make Kubernetes more telco friendly as well, so that projects are more portable, scalable, and able to leverage Kubernetes benefits easily. Krishna gives us some great real-life examples of telecommunications companies using GDC Edge in areas like virtual broadband networks. In order to dedicate maximum resources to customer workloads, the team chose to keep the Kubernetes control plane in the cloud while worker nodes are at the edge. With superior security protection, minimal service disruption, and more, GDC Edge boasts fleet management as a core capability.

In order to continue satisfying telco's needs, Google collaborates with many businesses to grow with changing customer needs.

Krishna Garimella

Krishna is a technology evangelist who has worked with service providers across the globe in the network and media areas.

DP Ayyadevara

DP is the Product Group Product Manager leading Telco Network Modernization products and solutions at Google Cloud.

Cool things of the week Cloud TPU v4 records fastest training times on five MLPerf 2.0 benchmarks blog Show off your cloud skills by completing the #GoogleClout weekly challenge blog Interview Distributed Cloud site Distributed Cloud Edge Documentation docs Contact Center AI site Kubernetes site Anthos site Nephio site BigQuery site Vertex AI site What's something cool you're working on?

Carter made a test for a video recap version of the recent pi episode.

Stephanie recently made a pi video as well and is working on an Alphafold video and the Cloud client library new reference docs homepage rollout.

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong

Your hosts Max Saltonstall and Carter Morgan talk with guests Cody Ault and Jo-Anne Bourne of Veeam. Veeam is revolutionizing the data space by minimizing data loss impacts and project downtime with easy backups and user-friendly disaster recovery solutions.

As a software company, Veeam is able to stay flexible with its solutions, helping customers keep any project safe. Cody explains what is meant by disaster recovery and how different systems might require different levels of fail-safe protection. Jo-Anne talks about the financial cost of downtime and how Veeam can help save money by planning for and preventing downtime. Veeam backup and replication is the main offering that can be customized depending on workloads, Cody tells us. He gives examples of how this works for different types of projects. Businesses can easily make plans for recovery and data backups then implement them with the help of Veeam. Cody talks about cloud migration and how Veeam can streamline this process with its replication services, and Jo-Anne emphasizes the importance of these recovery processes for data in the cloud.

The journey from fledgling Veeam to their current suite of offerings was an interesting one, and Cody talks about this evolution, starting with the simple VM backups of version 5. As companies have brought new recovery challenges, Veeam has grown to provide these services. Their partnership with Google has grown as well, as they continue to leverage Google offerings and support Google Cloud customers. We hear examples of Veeam customers and how they use the software, and Cody tells us a little about the future of Veeam.

Cody Ault

Cody has been at Veeam for over 11 years in various roles and departments including Technical Lead for US Support team, Advisory Architect for Presales Solutions Architect and Staff Solutions Architect for Product Management Alliances. He has acted as the performance, databases, security, and monitoring specialist for North America for the Presales team and has helped develop the Veeam Design Methodology and Architecture Documentation template. Cody is currently working with the Alliances team focusing on Google Cloud, Kubernetes and Red Hat.

Jo-Anne Bourne

Jo-Anne is a Partner Marketing Strategist who works with global companies to support them in positioning company products with their customer base. She is effective in developing strategic partnerships with International Resellers, CCaaS partners, Systems Integrators, OEM partners and ISV partnerships like Amazon, Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, BT to develop strategies to enable sales teams to generate significant revenue and in turn, build profitability for the company. Jo-Anne is a brand steward successful in using analytics to create results-driven campaigns that increase brand awareness, generate sales leads, improve customer engagement and strengthen partner relationships.

Cool things of the week Announcing general availability of reCAPTCHA Enterprise password leak detection blog Cloud Podcasts site Bio-pharma organizations can now leverage the groundbreaking protein folding system, AlphaFold, with Vertex AI blog Interview Veeam site Veeam for Google Cloud site VeeamHub site Google Cloud VMware Engine site Cloud SQL site Kasten site Kubernetes site GKE site What's something cool you're working on?

Carter is working on the new Cloud Podcasts website.

Max is working on research papers about how we built and deployed Google's Zero Trust system for employees, BeyondCorp.

Kelci is working on creating a series of blog posts highlighting the benefits of having access to public data sets embedded within BigQuery.

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall

This week on the GCP Podcast, Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall are joined by Amit Kumar and Vasili Triant. Our guests are here to talk about new features in Contact Center AI.

Amit starts the show helping us understand what Contact Center as a Service is and what makes this unified platform so useful for enterprise companies. The scalability helps keep costs down and overall satisfaction up while leveraging advances in cloud. UJET and Google Cloud have worked together to bring this AI advancement, and our guests describe the partnership and evolution CCAI. CCAI has streamlined the Contact Center as a Service space, helping businesses work efficiently and while putting an emphasis on positive experiences for the end customer.

CCAI users can use the platform straight out of the box or customize it to build specific experiences with tools like Dialogflow. Amit further describes the tools available like Interactive Voice Response and for which circumstances each tool would be most useful. The journey to CCAI can be easily managed by a team who knows the business well. We learn more about the onboarding experience and the skills required to transition.

Vasili talks about the past and future of Contact Center and how customer information is used not just for sales purposes but for bettering the customer service experience. Our guests share success stories from companies like FitBit and how CCAI is used to handle customer interactions through the app. Things like the call back feature save customers the time and frustration of waiting on hold and save businesses money.

Amit Kumar

Amit is responsible for bringing GCP's native CCaaS offering to market and helps enterprise customers modernize their contact centers. Previously, Amit worked as a Cloud AI Incubator lead where he helped customers in adopting Google's conversational AI technology. He also has an extensive background in large scale cloud transformational efforts and have worked with enterprise software companies mainly Salesforce and TIBCO Software.

Vasili Triant

As UJET's Chief Operating Officer, Vasili Triant oversees all Go To Market activities including Sales, Channel, Alliances, and Customer Success. Triant brings more than 20 years of experience in Telecoms, Unified Communications (UC), and Contact Center industries, having previously served as VP/GM of Contact Center at Cisco, where he achieved the fastest growth in over a decade through a focus on global alliances and enterprise cloud-readiness.

Cool things of the week DALL-E mini site EbSynth site Announcing general availability of Confidential GKE Nodes blog Interview Contact Center AI Platform site Contact Center AI reimagines the customer experience through full end-to-end platform expansion blog UJET site Dialogflow site Google Assistant site One United Bank site FitBit site What's something cool you're working on?

Max is working on expanding the podcast platform by collecting and adding more content.Carter is working on his Google Project Management: Professional Certificate.Kelci has been working on Google Cloud Skills Boost.

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall

Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey are working on their math skills today with guests Emma Haruka Iwao and Sara Ford. What kind of computing power does it take to break the world record for pi computations? Emma and Sara are here to tell us.

Emma tells us how she started with pi and how she and Sara came to work together to break the record. In 2019, Emma was on the show with her previous world record, and with the advancements in technology and Google products since, she knew she could do even more this year. Her 100 trillion digit goal wasn't enough to scare people away, and Sara, along with other partners, joined Emma on the pi computation journey. Together, Sara and Emma talk about the hardware required, building the algorithm, how it's run, and where the data is stored. Running on a personal computer was cheaper and easier than a super computer, and Emma explains why. Performing these immense calculations can also help illustrate just how far computers have come.

The storage required for this project was immense, and Emma tells us how they worked around some of the storage limitations. We hear more about Ycruncher and how it was used to help with calculations. Our guests talk about how things might change for computing and specifically for pi computations in the next few years, and Sara tells us about the storage journey from the perspective of a mathematician, and gives us some interesting facts about the algorithms involved, and we learn how world records are verified.

Emma Haruka Iwao

Emma is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform, focusing on application developers' experience and high performance computing. She has been a C++ developer for 15 years and worked on embedded systems and the Chromium Project. Emma is passionate about learning and explaining the most fundamental technologies such as operating systems, distributed systems, and internet protocols. Besides software engineering, she likes games, traveling, and eating delicious food.

Sara Ford

Sara Ford is a Developer Advocate on Google Cloud focusing on Serverless. She received a Masters degree in Human Factors (UX) because she wants to make dev tools more usable. Her lifelong dream is to be a 97-year old weightlifter so she can be featured on the local news.

Cool things of the week New Cloud Podcasts Website site Even more pi in the sky: Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast pi.delivery 100 Trillion Digits site pi.delivery Github site A History of Pi book Distributing historically linear calculations of Pi with serverless video Ycruncher site Compute Engine site Cloud Functions site SRE site Terraform site What's something cool you're working on?

Carter and Brian are working on a new season of VM End to End

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey

On the podcast this week, guest Joe Daly tells Stephanie Wong, Mark "Money" Mirchandani, and our listeners all about FinOps principles and how they're helping companies take advantage of the cloud while saving their bottom lines. He describes FinOps as financial DevOps, making financial decisions in an effective and optimized way. With his experience in finance and tax accounting, Joe has developed a special knack for navigating the sometimes confusing world of cloud finance policies, and his contributions to the FinOps Foundation have been many.

For starters, collaboration with various business departments is important for developing a plan that leverages the benefits of the cloud but keeps the company using resources wisely, Joe explains. He talks about the FinOps Foundation and their focus on creating community for knowledge sharing. By fostering collaboration among different company roles and promoting financial education, companies are better able to determine financial goals while making sure each facet of the company reaps all the benefits of cloud participation.

Following the FinOps cycle is the easiest way for community members to get started. The three steps, Joe tells us, are inform, optimize, and operate. The inform phase involves clarity in spending so teams understand how much money is being spent. In the optimize phase, benefits of spending are matched with expenditures to ensure resources are being used to their full potential. Finally, in the operate phase, engineers and finance managers come together to understand why solutions were chosen and understand if these tools are offering the right answers for the company.

Every company is different but the sooner it's possible to start the FinOps journey the easier it will be to maintain in the future. Joe gives us examples of how companies are using the principles for successful strategies and the challenges that some of them have faced. The Foundation has monthly summits that offer perspectives from these companies as well as partner presentations. The FinOpsX conference is coming up soon as well. To wrap up, Joe offers other resources from the FinOps Foundation, including his podcast.

Joe Daly

Joe set up two FinOps teams at Fortune 100 companies. He joined the FinOps Foundation and has been setting up the ambassador program, supporting meetup groups, and producing FinOpsPod.

Cool things of the week AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Columnar engine blog GCP Podcast Episode 304: AlloyDB with Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet "GG" Goindi podcast How Google Cloud is helping more startups build, grow, and scale their businesses blog Automate identity document processing with Document AI blog Interview FinOps Foundation site FinOpsX site FinOpsPod podcast Cloud FinOps: The Secret To Unlocking The Economic Potential Of Public Cloud whitepaper Maximize Business Value with Cloud FinOps whitepaper Unlocking the value of cloud FinOps with a new operating model whitepaper Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani

Stephanie Wong and Lorin Price welcome guests Zach Seils and Manasa Chalasani to talk about networking and the newly released Network Analyzer. Google Cloud's Network Intelligence Center is described as a one-stop shop that simplifies network monitoring, troubleshooting, workload expansion, security, and more. Manasa tells us about the four modules of Network Intelligence Center and how they work together.

As part of Network Intelligence Center, the new Network Analyzer monitors and proactively runs tests and detects issues on the network automatically, taking the guesswork out of network troubleshooting. Network Analyzer checks the entire network ecosystem, finding any connectivity issues and extrapolating them to other similar situations as well. Zach tells us more about the specific features of Analyzer, like its ability to check for overlapping or shadowed routes and validating network configurations in relation to any managed services being used.

Zach walks us through the set up of Network Analyzer and how to navigate results. Manasa expands on the development of Network Analyzer, including how customer feedback really shaped the project, and we hear about challenges along the way. Through examples, Zach describes different types of Analyzer customers and how they're using the product. More analyzers will be available soon, and the team is open to suggestions for future projects.

Zach Seils

Zach Seils is a Networking Specialist with Google Cloud, where he works with customers to accelerate their adoption of cloud networking.

Manasa Chalasani

Manasa is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Networking team with a focus on network observability.

Cool things of the week The new Google Cloud region in Columbus, Ohio is open blog Assembling and managing distributed applications using Google Cloud Networking solutions blog Interview Network Intelligence Center site Network Analyzer Documentation docs Introducing Network Analyzer: One stop shop to detect service and network issues blog CloudSQL site GKE site Cloud Monitoring site Contact the Network Analyzer team email GCP Podcast Episode 270: Traditional vs. Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast What's something cool you're working on?

Lorin is working on a new video series called Concepts of Networking on the Networking End to End Playlist

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Lorin Price

Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani learn how GKE manages their releases and how customers can take advantage of the GKE release channels for smooth transitions. Guests Abdelfettah Sghiouar and Kobi Magnezi of the Google Cloud GKE team are here to explain.

With releases every four months or so, Kobi tells us that Kubernetes requires two pieces to be managed with each release: the control plane and the nodes. Both are managed for the customer in GKE. The new addition of release channels allows flexibility with release updating so customers can adjust to their specific project needs. Each channel offers a different updating mix and speed, and clients choose the channel that's right for their project. The idea for release channels isn't a new one, Kobi explains. In fact, Google's frequent project releases, while keeping things secure and running well, also can be customized by choosing from an assortment of channels in other Google offerings like Chrome.

Our guests talk us through the process of releasing through channels and how each release marinates in the Rapid channel to be sure the version is supported and secure before being pushed to customers through other channels. We hear how release channels differ from no-channel releases, the benefits of specialized channels, and recommendations for customers as far as which channels to use with different development environments. Abdel describes real-world use cases for the Rapid, Regular, and Stable channels, the Surge Upgrade feature, and how GKE notifications with Pub/Sub helps in the updating process. Kobi talks about maintenance and exclusion windows to help customers further customize when and how their projects will update.

Kobi and Abdel wrap up with a discussion of the future of GKE release channels.

Kobi Magnezi

Kobi is the Product Manager for GKE at Google Cloud.

Abdelfettah Sghiouar

Abdel is a Cloud Dev Advocate with a focus on Cloud native, GKE, and Service Mesh technologies.

Cool things of the week GKE Essentials videos KubeCon EU 2023 site KubeCon Call for Proposals site Kubernetes 1.24: Stargazer site GCP Podcast Episode 292: Pulumi and Kubernetes Releases with Kat Cosgrove podcast Optimize and scale your startup on Google Cloud: Introducing the Build Series blog Interview Kubernetes site GKE site Autoscaling with GKE: Overview and pods video GKE release schedule dcos Release channels docs Upgrade-scope maintenance windows docs Configure cluster notifications for third-party services docs Cluster notifications docs Pub/Sub site Agones site What's something cool you're working on?

Kaslin is working on KubeCon and new episodes of GKE Essentials.

Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Kaslin Fields

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL has launched and hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabe Weiss are here this week to talk about it with guests Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet Goindi. This fully managed, Postgres compatible database for enterprise use combines the power of Google Cloud and the best features of Postgres for superior data management.

AlloyDB began years ago as a solution to help manage huge data migrations to the cloud. Customers needed a way to take advantage of the benefits of cloud, modernizing their databases as they migrated in an easy, flexible, and scalable way. Databases had to maintain performance and availability while offering enterprise customers optimal security features and more. We learn why PostgreSQL is important in the equation and how AlloyDB is built with Google scaling abilities and ML while supporting open source compatibility.

We talk about data analytics workloads and how AlloyDB handles in-the-moment analytics needs. Our guests describe and compare different database offerings at Google, emphasizing the solutions that set AlloyDB apart. We chat about the types of projects each database is best suited for and how AlloyDB fits into the Google database portfolio. We hear examples of customers moving to AlloyDB and how they're using this new service. Clients have been leveraging the embedded ML features for better data management.

Sandy Ghai

Sandy is a product manager on GCP Databases and has been working on the AlloyDB team since the beginning.

Gurmeet "GG" Goindi

GG is a product manager at Google, where he focuses on databases and attends meetings. Prior to joining Google, GG led product management for Exadata at Oracle, where he also worked on databases and attended meetings. GG has had various product management, management, and engineering roles for the last 20 years in Silicon Valley, but his favorite meetings have been at Google. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Cool things of the week Google I/O site Introducing "Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects" blog Meet the people of Google Cloud: Priyanka Vergadia, bringing Google Cloud to life in illustrations blog Working with Remote Functions docs Interview AlloyDB for PostgreSQL site AlloyDB Documentation docs AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Intelligent, database-aware storage blog PostgreSQL site Introducing AlloyDB for PostgreSQL video Introducing AlloyDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible cloud database service video BigQuery site Spanner site CloudSQL site What's something cool you're working on?

Gabe is working on some exciting content to support landing the AlloyDB launch.

Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Gabe Weiss

This week, Googler Denise Pearl and NGIS Executive Director Nathan Eaton join hosts Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Donna Schut to talk about how modern technology and data collection can significantly enhance environmental protection practices.

Denise starts the show with a thorough explanation of geospatial awakening and how Google is making its backend geo services like Google Earth Engine more usable for Google Cloud customers. With better data, easier access, and substantially more cloud compute power, companies are awakening to the possibilities of geospatial driven projects that analyze not just text but photographic data as well. Thousands of satellites collect information about Earth every day, and companies are realizing just how much of this data is available for their own sustainability, geo-centric, and location-based projects. Geospatial, Nathan explains, can help combine layers of text and photo data based on one location for a richer, more robust view of a particular location in real time.

As a geospatial partner with Google for a decade, NGIS has had experience using Earth Engine, Google Maps, and more to help Google Cloud customers use this data in meaningful ways. Because most projects involve analyzing locations as they change over time, companies need massive storage and processing power for their data. This is only made possible with the recent advances in infrastructure afforded by the cloud. With these amazing advances in technology, Denise and Nathan are seeing more and more exciting use cases. Companies are taking this data and making meaningful decisions for their future and the future of the planet. Sustainability goals like limiting deforestation in the supply chain can be made and measured. Climate change models can be created and applied. And all of this can be done quickly.

Nathan and Denise talk about TraceMark, the sustainable sourcing solution built by NGIS and made to integrate flexibly with customer projects. Consumers are increasingly aware of their affect on the environment and are pushing for change. With TraceMark, companies are able to see the environmental impact of their supply chain partners and make changes in line with customer values. These decisions can influence the growth of the company as well, as suppliers are vetted and chosen based on sustainability and availability. We hear about the building of TraceMark and the challenges the team overcame. Denise runs through some features of the software and how users can take advantage of them. Our guests give some great tips for organizations to get started with their data-driven sustainability goals, and Nathan talks about what's next with NGIS and TraceMark.

Nathan Eaton

As Executive Director at NGIS, Nathan has worked with hundreds of clients to deliver fit for purpose, innovative solutions. Nathan leads our GIS capabilities and stakeholder management including consulting with a range of large multinational companies and federal government departments. Most recently, Nathan has led the development, build and launch of TraceMark, a SaaS sustainable sourcing solution from NGIS, Google Cloud and partners Planet and CARTO.

Denise Pearl

Denise Pearl leads strategic ISV efforts for Google Cloud's Geospatial, Earth Observation and Sustainability vertical. Her primary focus is to align engineering, marketing and sales teams within Google around the issues that matter to enterprise customers and government agencies enabling the use of technology to better solve sustainability challenges communities face across the globe.

Cool things of the week Planet and People AI Series videos Planet and People AI: Mapping carbon pollution globally with satellites video Geobeam site Interview GCP Podcast Episode 282: Geospatial Cloud and Earth Engine with Chad Jennings and Joel Conkling podcast Google Earth Engine site NGIS site NGIS and TraceMark site TraceMark site EO Data Science site EO Data Science GEE Impact site The technology and climate science helping CPG brands with sustainable sourcing blog Adopting real-world sustainability solutions with Google Cloud's ecosystem blog Achieve Your Sustainability Goals with the Google Cloud Ecosystem site The data-driven path to real-world sustainability solutions whitepaper It takes an ecosystem: How the Google Cloud Partner Initiative speeds the transition to enterprise sustainability article Google Cloud Sustainability Summit site BigQuery site What's something cool you're working on?

Dana is focusing on geospatial analytics, helping customers achieve their sustainability goals. She's building solutions that solve repeatable problems.

AGV is getting ready for the Cloud Sustainability Summit on June 28th.

Hosts

Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Donna Schut

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera are learning all about BigLake from guests Gaurav Saxena and Justin Levandoski of the BigQuery team.

BigLake offers unified data management from both data warehouses and data lakes. What exactly is the difference between a data warehouse and a data lake? Justin explains what a data lake is, how they came to be, and the benefits. Each data option has its cons too, like the limitations of data lakes for enterprise use. Enter BigLake built on BigQuery, which helps enterprise clients manage and analyze their data from both data warehouses and data lakes. The best features of BigQuery are now available for Google Cloud Storage and across multi-cloud solutions.

Guarav describes BigLake behind the scenes and how the principles of BigQuery's data management can now be used for open file formats in BigLake. It's BigQuery for more data formats, Justin explains. BigLake solves many data problems quickly with a special emphasis on improving security. Our guests talk specifically about clients who gain the most from using BigLake, especially those looking to analyze distributed data and those who need easy and fast security and compliance solutions. With tightened security, BigLake offers access delegation and secure APIs that work over object storage. We hear about the user experience and how easy it is to get started, especially for customers already familiar with and using other GCP products.

Google's advocacy of open source projects means many clients are coming in with workloads built with open source software. BigLake supports multi-cloud projects so that tables can be built on top of any data system. No matter the format of your data, you can run analytics with BigLake. We talk more about the security features of BigLake and how easy it is to unify data warehouses and data lakes with optimal data security.

The customers have helped shape BigLake, and Gaurav describes how these clients are using this data software. We hear about integration with BigQuery Omni and Dataplex and how BigLake is different. In the future, Google will continue to make simple, effective solutions for data management and analytics, building further off of BigQuery.

Gaurav Saxena

Gaurav Saxena is a product management lead at Google BigQuery. He has 12+ years of experience building products at the intersection of cloud, data and AI. Before Google, Gaurav led product management at Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for some of the most widely used cloud offerings in storage and data.

Justin Levandoski

Justin is a tech lead/manager in BigQuery leading BigLake and other projects pushing the frontier of BigQuery. Prior to Google, just worked on Amazon Aurora and was part of the Database research group at Microsoft Research.

Cool things of the week Your ultimate guide to Speech on Google Cloud blog Announcing the Climate Innovation Challenge—grants to support cutting-edge earth research blog Interview BigLake site BigQuery site Cloud Storage site Spark site Apache Ranger site BigQuery Omni docs Apache Iceberg site Delta Lake site Presto site TensorFlow site Dataplex site What's something cool you're working on?

Debi is working on a series about automatic DLP. Cloud Data Loss Prevention is now automatic and allows you to scan data across your whole org with the click of one button!

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

This week, we're busting myths around Cloud Spanner with our guests Pritam Shah and Vaibhav Govil. Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall host this episode and learn about the fantastic capabilities of Cloud Spanner. Our guests give us a quick run-down of Spanner database software and its fully-managed offerings.

Spanner's unique take on the relational database has sparked some myths. We start by addressing cost and the idea that Spanner is expensive. With its high availability achieved through synchronously replicating data, failures are virtually a non-issue, making the cost well worth it. Our guests describe other features that add to the value of Spanner as well. Workloads of any size are a good fit for Spanner because of its scalability and pricing based on use.

Despite rumors, Spanner is now very easy to start using. New additions like the PostgreSQL interface and ORM support have made the usability of Spanner much more familiar. Regional and multi-regional instances are supported, busting the myth that Spanner is only good for global workloads. Our guests offer examples of projects using local and global configurations with Spanner.

In the database world, Vaibhav sees trends like the convergence of non-relational and relational databases as well as convergence in the OLTP and OLAP database semantics, and he tells us how Spanner is adapting and growing with these trends. Pritam points out that customers are paying more attention to total cost of ownership, the importance of scalable and reliable database solutions, and the peace of mind that comes with a managed database system. Spanner helps customers with these, freeing up business resources for other things.

This year, Spanner has made many announcements about new capabilities coming soon, like PostgreSQL interface on spanner GA, Query Insights visualization tools, cross-regional backups GA, and more. We hear all about these awesome updates.

Pritam Shah

Pritam is the Director of Engineering for Cloud Spanner. He has been with Google for about four and a half years. Before Spanner, he was the Engineering Lead for observability libraries at Google. That included Distributed Tracing and Metrics at Google scale. His mission was to democratize the instrumentation libraries. That is when he launched Open Census and then took on Cloud Spanner.

Vaibhav Govil

Vaibhav is the Product lead for Spanner. He has been in this role for the past three years, and before this he was a Product Manager in Google Cloud Storage in Google. Overall, he has spent close to four years at Google, and it has been a great experience.

Cool things of the week Our plans to invest $9.5 billion in the U.S. in 2022 blog A policy roadmap for 24⁄7 carbon-free energy blog SRE Prodcast site Meet the people of Google Cloud: Grace Mollison, solutions architect and professional problem solver blog GCP Podcast Episode 224: Solutions Engineering with Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace podcast Interview Spanner site Cloud Spanner myths busted blog PostgreSQL interface docs Cloud Spanner Ecosystem site Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database white paper Spanner Docs docs Spanner Qwiklabs site Using the Cloud Spanner Emulator docs GCP Podcast Episode 62: Cloud Spanner with Deepti Srivastava podcast GCP Podcast Episode 248: Cloud Spanner Revisited with Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler podcast Cloud Spanner federated queries docs What's something cool you're working on?

Max is working on a new podcast platform and some spring break projects.

Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall

Hosts Anthony Bushong and Kaslin Fields welcome Bowei Du and Abdelfettah Sghiouar to talk about the Gateway Controller, a tool that helps developers use the Gateway API in GKE.

Bowei starts the show with a thorough explanation of how and why the Gateway Controller was developed. Compared to tools like Ingress, Gateway Controller allows engineers to implement more expressive solutions. While providing developers with portability has been an important part of Gateway Controller, it also gives developers freedom to use non-portable features in a structured, consistent environment and helps manage tenancy across different teams. Bowei and Abdel describe the difference between Ingress and Service and how these tools fit in with Gateway Controller. Abdel walks us through how a company would use the Gateway Controller for optimal tenancy management across name spaces and how this is an improvement over Ingress and Service. He gives examples of how companies are using this new tool.

We hear more about the GKE Gateway Controller and how its fully-managed deployments and integration with other Google APIs make it so easy to use. Bowei tells us how Gateway helps with the unification of mesh and non mesh environments through the standardization of noun describers in both instances. A handy edge to mesh tutorial is available to help developers.

Abdelfettah Sghiouar

Abdel is a Cloud Dev Advocate with a focus on Cloud native, GKE, and Service Mesh technologies.

Bowei Du

Bowei is tech lead on Gateway Controller and a specialist in distributed systems and networking.

Cool things of the week Strengthening your DevOps muscle site Interview Kubernetes site GKE site GKE Gateway API docs Kubernetes Gateway API site Ingress docs Service docs From edge to mesh: Exposing service mesh applications through GKE Ingress docs Google Cloud Armor site Kubernetes Slack site Slack channel: #sig-network-gateway-api GKE Networking Recipes GitHub repo site The evolution of Kubernetes networking with the GKE Gateway controller blog What's something cool you're working on?

Kaslin is working on KubeCon EU.

Anthony is working on software supply chain security with Cloud Build.

Kaslin and Anthony are working together on the GKE Essentials Series

Hosts

Anthony Bushong and Kaslin Fields

On the podcast this week, your hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani talk about the data processing tool Apache Beam with guests Pablo Estrada and Kenneth Knowles.

Kenn starts us off with an overview of how Apache Beam began and how Cloud Dataflow was involved. The unique batch and stream method and emphasis on correctness garnered support from developers early on and continues to attract users. Pablo helps us understand why Beam is a better option for certain projects looking to process large amounts of data. Our guests describe how Beam may be a better fit than microservices that could become obsolete as company needs change.

Next, we step back and take a look at why batch and stream is the gold standard of data processing because of its balance between low latency and ease of "being done" with data collection. Beam's focus on the correctness of data and correctness in processing that data is a core component. With good data, processing becomes easier, more reliable, and cheaper. Kenn gives examples of how things can go wrong with bad data processing. Beam strives for the perfect combination of low latency, correct data, and affordability. Users can choose where to run Beam pipelines, from other Apache software offerings to Dataflow, which means excellent flexibility. Our guests talk about the pros and cons of some of these options and we hear examples of how companies are using Beam along with supporting software to solve data processing challenges.

To get started with Beam, check out Beam College or attend Beam Summit 2022.

Kenneth Knowles

Kenn Knowles is chair of the Apache Beam Project Management Committee. Kenn has been working on Google Cloud Dataflow—Google's Beam backend—since 2014. Kenn holds a PhD in programming languages from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Pablo Estrada

Pablo is a Software Engineer at Google, and a management committee member for Apache Beam. Pablo is big into working on an open source project, and has worked all across the Apache Beam stack.

Cool things of the week Under the sea: Building the world's fiber optic internet video Discovering Data Centers videos Google Data Cloud Summit site It's official—Google Distributed Cloud Edge is generally available blog GCP Podcast Episode 228: Fastly with Tyler McMullen podcast Save big by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs—now GA blog Interview Apache Beam site Apache Beam Documentation site Dataflow site Apache Flink site Apache Spark site Apache Samza site Apache Nemo site Spanner site BigQuery site Beam College site Beam College on Github site Beam Developer Mailing List email Beam User Mailing List email Beam Summit site What's something cool you're working on?

Mark is working on a new Apache Beam video series Getting Started Wtih Apache Beam

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera host a special episode highlighting the amazing accomplishments of our guest Vidya Nagarajan Raman as we celebrate Women's History Month! With her more than 20 years of experience fostering growth and monetization in enterprise and education platforms, investing and working in the holistic lifestyle space, and earning her MBA while raising her two children, Vidya has certainly done a lot!

Vidya tells us about her latest blog post stressing the importance of being an event-driven organization. In this business structure, reactions to events are planned in advance and developers consider how services are integrated for maximum efficiency. With synchronous extensions, projects retain flexibility in existing applications as they work with Cloud Functions to extend to new areas. Vidya gives our listeners examples of how this works.

The journey from engineer to Head of Product Management was an interesting one for Vidya, and she describes how she got started in computer engineering. Her passion for connecting with users later pushed her to product management. She tells us about her contributions to Chromebooks for Education as well as other milestones during her time with Google. Vidya talks about the support system she credits with helping her along the way and gives our listeners advice for finding mentors in their fields. She touches on the challenges she faced, describes what it was like for a woman in the industry when she first started, and offers encouragement to women getting started now. Balancing work, continuing her education, and raising children was tough, but Vidya says that, along with her incredible professional and personal support systems, defining priorities is vital.

Vidya offers our listeners the insights she's gained as she's watched Google and workplace teams change and adapt over the years. Building an inclusive team, encouraging diverse perspectives, and defining a framework for settling disagreements are some of the pieces of advice she shares. Don't be afraid to fail and be a risk-taker, Vidya says, because that promotes growth and learning. If you learn something new every day and have fun doing it, then you will be successful.

In her spare time, Vidya leads a charitable foundation that partners with organizations in countries like India and Peru to further education, build orphanages and libraries, and provide medical care for women. She is an angel investor and runs workshops on creating a holistic lifestyle to help others lead well-rounded, fulfilling lives.

Vidya Nagarajan Raman

Vidya Nagarajan Raman is the Head of Product Management for Serverless at Google Cloud. She is also an angel investor, advisor, and co-founder of a holistic lifestyle platform that empowers people to grow and transform their lives.

Cool things of the week Ready to solve for the future? Data Cloud Summit '22 is coming April 6 blog Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects site Interview Evolving to a programmable cloud blog Cloud Functions site Cloud Run site Eventarc docs Work Flows site Chromebook site What's something cool you're working on?

Debi is working on Apache Beam series with Mark Mirchandani.

Stephanie is working on scripts for a series about getting into a career in cloud.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

This week, Stephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong introduce a special podcast of the Gtalk at Airbus speaker series where prestigious Googlers have been invited to talk with Airbus. In this episode, Vint Cerf, who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, talks with Rhys Phillips of Airbus and fellow Googler Rafael Lami Dozo.

Vint tells us about his journey to Google, including his interest in science which stemmed from a chemistry set he received as a child. After high school, he got a job writing data analyzation software on the Apollo project. His graduate work at UCLA led him to the ARPANet project where he developed host protocols, and eventually to his work on the original Internet with Bob Kahn. Vint tells us about the security surrounding this project and the importance of internet security still today.

The open architecture of the internet then and now excites Vint because it allows new, interesting projects to contribute without barriers. Vint is also passionate about accessibility. At Google, he and his team continue to make systems more accessible by listening to clients and adapting software to make it usable. He sees an opportunity to train developers to optimize software to work with common accessibility tools like screen readers to ensure better usability.

Later, Vint tells us about the Interplanetary Internet, describing how this system is being built to provide fast, effective Internet to every part of the planet. Along with groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force, this new Internet is being deployed and tested now to ensure it works as expected. He talks about his work with NASA and other space agencies to grow the Interplanetary Internet.

Digital obsolescence is another type of accessibility that concerns Vint. Over time, the loads of data we store and their various storage devices could become unreadable. Software needed to use or see this media could no longer be supported as well, making the data inaccessible. Vint hopes we will begin practicing ways to perpetuate the existence of this data through copying and making software more backward compatible. He addresses the issues with this, including funding.

Vint Cerf

While at UCLA, Vint Cerf worked on ARPANet - the very beginnings of what we know as the internet today and is now, fittingly, Chief Internet Evangelist & VP at Google. He is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn.

Rhys Phillips

Rhys Phillips is Change and Adoption Leader, Digital Workplace at Airbus.

Rafael Lami Dozo

Rafael Lami Dozo is Customer Success Manager, Google Cloud Workspace for Airbus.

Cool things of the week Celebrating Pi Day with Cloud Functions blog Apollo Scales GraphQL Platform using GKE blog Interview Vinton G. Cerf Profile site ARPANet on Wikipedia site To Boldly Go Where No Internet Protocol Has Gone Before article Building the backbone of an interplanetary internet video IETF site CCSDS site IPNSIG site The Internet Society site NASA site What's something cool you're working on?

Stephanie is working on new Discovering Data Centers videos.

Anthony is working on content for building scalable GKE clusters.

Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong

First time co-host Jan Kleinert joins Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about database observability and the cool tools that make it possible. Morgan McLean and Nimesh Bhagat describe database observability, which uses metrics, logs, and other tools to help users understand the health of your database.

We talk about Object Relational Mappers and the challenges with using these for debugging database performance. SQL Commenter helps database observability in two ways: it is both a library and a standard, Nimesh tells us. He describes the process for us, detailing exactly how SQL Commenter effects projects. Recently, SQL Commenter was donated to OpenTelemetry to augment the observability offerings, create an application standard, and make it easier for developers to use a variety of different tools and languages. Engineers can get end-to-end traces no matter which database technologies they use.

Morgan tells us about Splunk and how information from SQL Commenter is taken into Splunk and used. Backend data like metrics from Cloud Monitoring and client libraries can be correlated together with SQL Commenter and brought into Splunk for full stack observability. Nimesh offers client examples to help us understand how these useful tools integrate for optimal observability. He tells us about the databases and ORMs supported by SQL Commenter. Our guests and co-host Jan give tips to help our listeners get started with SQL Commenter and talk about what they're looking forward to in the future of observability.

Nimesh Bhagat

Nimesh is a product manager at Google Cloud, he leads Database Observability. He has worked across engineering and product roles, building highly available and high performance enterprise infrastructure used by Fortune 500 companies. His passion lies in combining powerful infrastructure with simple user experience so that every business and developer can build software at scale and velocity.

Morgan McLean

Morgan is ​​Director of Product Management at Splunk and co-creator of OpenCensus / OpenTelemetry.

Cool things of the week Google Cloud Innovators site Redesigning the Cloud SDK + CLI for easier development blog GCP Podcast Episode 291: Redesigning the Cloud SDK and CLI with Wael Manasra and Cody Oss podcast What is Active Assist? video GCP Podcast Episode 235: Active Assist with Chris Law + MariaDB SkySQL with Robert Hedgepeth podcast Interview SQL Commenter site Sequelize site SQL Alchemy site ADO.net site GCP Podcast Episode 247: Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat podcast OpenTelemetry site Splunk site Cloud Monitoring site Cloud Spanner site Cloud SQL site Cloud Trace site Sqlcommenter now extending the vision of OpenTelemetry to databases blog Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Jan Kleinert

On the show this week, we're talking about Google Cloud Reader, a nifty podcast we created to narrate Google Tech blog posts. Host Jenny Brown tells us her inspiration for creating Google Cloud Reader and she and cohost Stephanie Wong walk us through a series of published episodes.

First up, we learn what Cloud SQL Maintenance is and how customers can customize maintenance schedules to limit the impacts of downtime. Region picker is the topic of our next segment, and we hear how it helps projects stay cost efficient while conserving resources. Using three inputs, companies can decide quickly which region offers the best balance between cost, latency, and carbon footprint for them. Next, we learn about search abandonment's effect on brand loyalty and how important it is for the right products to show in search results.

We tackle the working environment with the next piece, redefining productivity to make it more personal and less robotic and offering advice on being productive while maintaining a good work-life balance. Making learning more personalized is the subject of our next segment. We hear how Google is using AI to aid the instruction of students no matter their learning style. Building diversity, equity, and inclusion into companies is important for success, and our last segment offers advice on how to incorporate DEI initiatives to ensure employees feel valued.

Cool things of the week Build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex, now generally available blog From watersheds to Koala habitats - tackling ecosystem restoration with data blog Interview Understanding Cloud SQL Maintenance: why is it needed? blog Cloud SQL site Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that's right for you blog Google Cloud Region Picker on GitHub site Reduce your cloud carbon footprint with new Active Assist recommendations blog Research: Search abandonment has a lasting impact on brand loyalty blog Why Search Abandonment Is the Metric That Matters video The Google Workspace guide to productivity and wellbeing blog New Google Cloud Student Success Services help educators scale individualized learning blog Why representation matters: 6 tips on how to build DEI into your business blog Why representation matters blog Hosts

Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown

Guests Leigha Jarett and Debi Cabrera from the Looker team join Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about this powerful tool. Looker, Google's data analytics platform, was built to provide enterprise companies with customizable analytics tools that allow anyone to get the data they need when they need it. This facilitates better business decisions.

Leigha talks about how Looker and LookML keep data consistent among data analysts no matter where they pull data from or what they do with it. Data is more trustworthy, fostering a positive data-driven business. She details how LookML works, from database connection to metric creation, and tells us how easy it is for non-data engineers to work with as well.

Robust data analysis based on trusted data points used to drive decision making is how Looker builds an environment of business intelligence rather than simple reporting. By offering easy integration into other Google tools like Data Studio and BigQuery, Looker is easy to set up, learn, and use. Our guests help listeners navigate Looker's Explore From Here functionality and explain how it could help them answer important business questions. With advanced admin permissioning, Looker also helps limit the chaos that comes with multiple people accessing the same data.

Later, we hear real-world examples of companies taking the Looker journey. Our guests offer advice based on these experiences with clients and talk about how client feedback has influenced new Looker tools, like the Looker Tableau Connector that's coming soon. We hear about the relationship between BigQuery and Looker and suggestions for companies newly embarking on their data journey.

Leigha Jarett

Leigha is a Product Manager for Looker's application platform. She focuses on making Looker both simple and powerful for developers.

Debi Cabrera

Debi recently became a Developer Advocate after being at Looker for three years as an Engagement Manager and StratOps PgM. You can find her on Linkedin

Cool things of the week Introducing a Google Cloud architecture diagramming tool blog Black History Month: Celebrating the success of Black founders with Google Cloud: DOSS blog Interview Looker site LookML site Data Studio site Looker Connect site Looker Documentation docs Looker Products Page site Tableau site Google Cloud Training site Google Cloud Skills Boost site Looker and BigQuery Important Considerations whitepaper BigQuery Playlist videos Data Analytics Playlist videos Looker Channel videos Contact Google Cloud Support site Request a Free Trial site What's something cool you're working on?

Debi is planning her wedding!

Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Debi Cabrera

On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong share two popular episodes of Bruno Aziza's YouTube series Data Journeys.

First up, Bruno talks with Aaron Biller of Postmates about their triangle of complex data that includes customer, courier, and merchant. He details their data storage and analytics structure, describing it as a reverse pyramid of tons of data with few engineers to manage and analyze it. To handle this, Postmates takes a stay-out-of-the-way approach by providing good data and letting the analysts do what they do best without micromanaging. Aaron talks about this data architecture, including the use of BigQuery as data lakes to keep data storage simple, and how Google collaboration tools streamline access and authorization tasks. Communication and flexibility are important, Aaron tells us, and he offers other advice for companies designing data systems. Feedback loops, dedicated training, and an open environment with no silos also help foster a productive, healthy data workplace.

Matteo of Delivery Hero speaks to Bruno next. With the goal of increasing their global reach and offerings, it's important that Delivery Hero has a smooth data system. Matteo outlines the new data structure they've built to ease onboarding of new companies and territories and describes different use cases for their data. From determining the number of delivery people necessary in each area to offering personalized customer recommendations, Delivery Hero uses Google offerings like Google Analytics and BigQuery to interpret collected data. Matteo details how they tailor data infrastructures for each use case and offers tips to help companies think through their data infrastructure design. Don't work in a bubble, Matteo stresses, and focus on thorough onboarding of team members and clear communication with colleagues and customers.

Bruno Aziza

Bruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud. He specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence. Before working at Google, he worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led a big turnarounds in the business analytics industry. Bruno also had the opportunity to help launch startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco). Sisense and AtScale and helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. He has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany and has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management. In his spare time, Bruno writes a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics.

Aaron Biller

Aaron is the Manager of Data Engineering at Postmates.

Matteo Fava

Matteo is Senior Director of Global Data Products and Analytics at Delivery Hero.

Cool things of the week Celebrating National Muffin Day with machine learning blog Managed Istio-based service mesh on our managed GKE clusters: Anthos Service Mesh comes to GKE Autopilot blog Interview Data Journeys videos Episode 12: How Postmates delivers on data needs with just six data engineers video Episode 5: How Delivery Hero uses data to deliver meals video BigQuery site Google Workspace site Dataproc site Pub/Sub site Google Analytics site Looker site Tableau site Data Studio site GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast GCP Podcast Episode 281: Google Cloud Next Data, Analytics, and AI Launches with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza podcast What's something cool you're working on?

Steph is working on the next Ask Google Cloud event and she wants your Kubernetes questions!

Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong

Brian Dorsey and Kaslin Fields welcome Kat Cosgrove of Pulumi this week to talk about what's new with Kubernetes 1.24. Pulumi is infrastructure as code, allowing developers to use whatever language they are comfortable with to create and test infrastructure. Kat walks us through typical Pulumi infrastructure test scenarios to demonstrate the benefits of this software, especially with GCP.

In the new Kubernetes release, one of the biggest updates is the removal of Dockershim. If you're using a managed Kubernetes service through GCP, this update should not affect you, Kat tells us. She clears up some common Docker misconceptions and tells us how Kubernetes and Docker still work together. Kat describes the situations where this update might affect certain projects and how to tell if you're one of the unlucky few.

Later, we talk about the future of tech conferences. Kat is excited to get back to some in-person learning and networking, but at the same time, is hopeful that conferences will continue a hybrid model and allow some online interaction. Pulumi will be at KubeCon, Devlopsdays, and Jfokus in the next few months with some cool new free merchandise.

Kat Cosgrove

Kat is Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi.

Cool things of the week Find products faster with the new All products page blog Introducing Ephemeral Containers blog Open sourcing the App Engine Standard Java runtime blog Interview Pulumi site Kubernetes site Docker site Kubernetes 1.24 Release Notes site GKE site We Didn't Start the Fire: Communication Breakdowns and How to Prevent Them - Ian Coldwater, Twilio & Kat Cosgrove, JFrog video Jfokus site Devopsdays Chicago site KubeCon EU Valencia site What's something cool you're working on?

Brian just started releasing the next six episodes of VMs End-to-end. It's a video series all about Compute Engine, starting with a discussion of building reliable systems from unreliable components.

Kaslin is working on the GKE/OSS K8s Events.

Cloud OnAir Webinar - February 24th Innovators Hive - March 29-30 Google Cloud Innovators Program OSPO Panel on Dockershim Deprecation - March 31st Hosts

Brian Dorsey and Kaslin Fields

This week on the podcast, Wael Manasra and Cody Oss join hosts Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani to chat about new branding in Cloud SDK and gcloud CLI. Google Cloud SDK was built and designed to take over mundane development tasks, allowing engineers to focus on specialized features and solutions. The SDK documentation and tutorials are an important part of this as well. With clear instructions, developers can easily make use of Cloud SDK.

Software Development Kits have evolved so much over the years that recently, Cody, Wael, and their teams have found it necessary to redefine and rethink SDKs. The popularity of cloud projects and distributed systems, for example, means changes to kit requirements. The update is meant to reevaluate the software included in SDKs and CLIs and to more accurately represent what the products offer. Giving developers the tools they need in the place they work means giving developers code language options, providing thorough instruction, and listening to feedback. These are the goals of this redesign.

The Google Cloud SDK contains downloadable parts and web publications. Our guests explain the types of software and documentation in each group and highlight the importance of documentation and supporting materials like tutorials. The Cloud Console is a great place for developers to start building solutions using the convenient point-and-click tools that are available. When these actions need to be repeated, the downloadable Command Line Interface tool can do the work. Cody talks about authentication and gcloud, including its relationship to client libraries. He walks us through the steps a typical developer might take when using Google products and how they relate to the SDK and CLI. Through examples, Wael helps us further understand client libraries and how they can interact with the CLI.

The Cloud SDK is a work in progress. Our guests welcome your feedback for future updates!

Wael Manasra

Wael manages the gcloud CLI, the client libraries for all GCP services, and the general Cloud SDK developer experience.

Cody Oss

Cody works on the Go Cloud Client libraries where he strives to provide an delightful and idiomatic experience to all the Gophers on Google Cloud.

Cool things of the week Google Tau VMs deliver over 40% price-performance advantage to customers blog Find products faster with the new All products page blog Interview Cloud SDK site Cloud SDK Documentation docs Go site Google Cloud site Cloud Storage site Cloud Storage Documentation docs Cloud Code site Cloud Run site GKE site Cloud Functions site Cloud Client Libraries docs Cloud Shell site Cloud Shell Editor docs What's something cool you're working on?

Carter is working on his comedy.

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani

Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong host Shopify guests Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson this week. Shopify streamlines the online purchasing process so merchants and customers can transact with confidence.

Camilo and Tai talk in-depth about Shopify's tech stack and why the choices made are so important to performance. Shopify engineers use a combination of Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Google products like Kubernetes. Resiliency systems like active-active configurations, chat ops for quick solutions, and bot and overload protection are worked in. By leveraging these tools and staying flexible in their resiliency efforts, Shopify is able to adjust to new merchant requirements and teams are able to work efficiently.

While tech continues to progress and change, the Shopify culture remains a driving force for advancement, Camilo tells us. The company ideals and axioms help steer the brand and dictate which technologies they'll use to solve new and changing client demands. The 2014 outage shaped the future of these cultural ideals, emphasizing the need for quick action and resiliency components like constraints to ensure system safety. Shopify engineers also built enhanced testing tools like Toxiproxy to simulate poor network conditions and account for potential issues.

The 2021 Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping season was Shopify's biggest yet. Camilo and Tai describe how Shopify's resiliency culture and intense prep work made the biggest shopping weekend of the year so successful. By offering educational tools and a support network that values good communication, their company culture continues to grow, and Tai tells us how it's not just the software that should be resilient. Building a resilient, flexible company culture is just as important.

Camilo talks about Shopify's recent shift to a completely remote work place and the new challenges and opportunities it presents.

Camilo Lopez

Camilo has worked at Shopify for more than 10 years, he has been an IC and a manager leading teams that take care of Shopify's scalability and resiliency.

Tai Dickerson

Tai is a production engineer at Shopify, where she shares her passion for resilience engineering with others via paper discussions and as a leader in Shopify's Resiliency SIG.

Cool things of the week Machine images is GA docs New Cloud Logging and Monitoring capabilities Monitoring third-party applications: MariaDB docs Monitoring third-party applications: MySQL docs Monitoring third-party applications: Memcached docs Starting with version 2.8.0, the Ops Agent supports Ubuntu 21.10. For more information, see Linux operating systems docs Interview Shopify site Kubernetes site GKE site Kafka site Redis site Elastic Search site Memcached docs Toxiproxy site Shopify Engineering site Shopify Careers site BFCM Twitter Thread site Shopify engineers deliver on peak performance during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021 blog Cloud, Load, and Modular Code: What 2022 Looks Like for Shopify blog Terri Haber on Resiliency at Scale site Terri Haber on Enforced Pacing site Bart Jedrocha on Load Testing site Bart Jedrocha on Tooling for Load Testing site Bart Jedrocha on The Future of Load Testing site Ryan McIlmoyl on Code Red site Ryan McIlmoyl on Working with IMOC site Camilo Lopez on The 2014 Outage site Camilo Lopez on Holiday Season Learnings site Tai Dickerson on Doing Things Differently site Tai Dickerson on Learning & Community site What's something cool you're working on?

Stephanie is working on season 2 of the Where the Internet Lives podcast.

Carter is working on season 2 of VM End to End.

Hosts

Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong

We're back for a new, exciting year of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast! Mark Mirchandani and Carter Morgan start 2022 with a jointly hosted interview with Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock of the Cloud Security Podcast team. Our guest, Phil Venables, is here to tell us about the driving trends in cloud security today.

Phil starts the show with a discussion on the advances in cloud security in general and how it compares with on-prem security. Megatrends like economies of scale and competition between cloud providers benefit cloud users by allowing better security for less money. Cloud environments tend to be simpler and therefore easier to manage, and with scaling and geographic location options, cloud projects allow more flexibility to reach security and sustainability goals.

Phil talks about the iteration process of advances in security based on customer requirements and how this builds client trust. The Shared Responsibility Model, where the cloud provider runs a secure infrastructure and the customer configures their project securely in the cloud, is a great start, Phil tells us. But with Shared Fate, he sees the provider crossing the responsibility barrier to work together with the client towards a secure project through actions like analyzation of security defaults. Customer feedback helps Google Cloud make a better product, which in turn helps customers, creating an environment of reliability and shared trust.

We talk about how the Shared Fate model and shared incentives work together to create a closer partnership between cloud providers and customers, and Phil elaborates on the idea of project security as an immune system. We tackle the idea of security diversity and whether it benefits clients to expand their security outside of cloud provider offerings. Phil helps security novices understand valuable feature-add security services and what to look for in the future.

Phil Venables

Phil leads the risk, security, compliance, and privacy teams for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google Cloud, Phil was a Partner at Goldman Sachs where he held multiple roles over a long career, initially as their first Chief Information Security Officer, a role he held for 17 years. Before Goldman Sachs, Phil held multiple CISO roles as well as senior engineering roles across a range of finance, energy and technology companies.

Cool things of the week 2022 Resolution: Learn Google Cloud, free of charge blog How to build a virtual employment center on Google Cloud & Workspace video Interview Cloud Security Podcast podcast IT Leaders: Pay Attention To These 8 Security Megatrends In 2022 article GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniak podcast What's something cool you're working on?

Mark and Carter are working on some cool new changes to the podcast.

Hosts

Carter Morgan, Mark Mirchandani, Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock

We're finishing out 2021 with a celebration of our favorite episodes and topics from the year! From new tools for Cost Optimization in GKE and advances in AI to tips for improving feelings of imposter syndrome, Carter Morgan, Stephanie Wong, and Mark Mirchandani share memorable moments from 2021 and look forward to future episodes.

Carter Morgan

Carter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google's Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course "Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes" he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who's approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft.

Stephanie Wong

Stephanie Wong is a Developer Advocate focusing on online content across all Google Cloud products. She's a host of the GCP Podcast and the Where the Internet Lives podcast, along with many GCP Youtube video series. She is the winner of a 2021 Webby Award for her content about data centers. Previously she was a Customer Engineer at Google and at Oracle. Outside of her tech life she is a former pageant queen and hip hop dancer and has an unhealthy obsession with dogs.

Mark Mirchandani

Mark Mirchandani is a developer advocate for Google Cloud, occasional host of the Google Cloud Platform podcast, and helps create content for users.

Cool things of the week Anthos Multi-Cloud v2 is generally available docs Machine learning, Google Kubernetes Engine, and more: 10 free training offers to take advantage of before 2022 blog The past, present, and future of Kubernetes with Eric Brewer blog GCP Podcast Episode 124: VP of Infrastructure Eric Brewer podcast Our Favorite Episodes of 2021 Mark's Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast GCP Podcast Episode 267: Cloud Firestore for Users who are new to Firestore podcast GKE Essentials videos Beyond Your Bill vidoes Stephanie's Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 270: Traditional vs. Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast GCP Podcast Episode 271: The Future of Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast GCP Podcast Episode 279: MLB with Perry Pierce and JoAnn Brereton podcast Carter's Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 284: State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith podcast GCP Podcast Episode 287: Imposter Syndrome with Carter Morgan podcast Most Popular Episodes of 2021 GCP Podcast Episode Episode 264: SRE III with Steve McGhee and Yuri Grinshtey podcast GCP Podcast Episode 258: The Power of Serverless with Aparna Sinha and Philip Beevers podcast GCP Podcast Episode 253: Data Governance with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad podcast GCP Podcast Episode 263: SAP + Apigee: The Power of APIs with Benjamin Schuler and Dave Feuer podcast GCP Podcast Episode 271: The Future of Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast Sound Effects Attribution "Dun Dun Duuun" by Divenorth of Freesound.org "Cash Register" by Kiddpark of Freesound.org "Jingles and Pings" by BristolStories of HDInteractive.com "Time – Inception Theme" Composed by Hanz Zimmer (super-low-budget midi version) Hosts

Stephanie Wong, Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani

Carter Morgan takes the guest seat today to chat with host Stephanie Wong about imposter syndrome in tech. The technology ecosystem is constantly changing, with new advances every day. To keep up, tech workers are learning and developing new skills so frequently that at times it can feel as though they don't actually know everything they need to know. Here is where self-doubt can really take hold.

Imposter syndrome is most prevalent around transition points, Carter tells us. A new job or new responsibility, for example, opens tech workers to feelings of inadequacy. But there's hope, and he explains how we can learn and develop skills to overcome this difficulty. Through tales of his own experiences, Carter offers supportive tips he's learned, including how important it is to communicate with your manager and seek help rather than isolating.

Unhealthy comparisons can foster self-doubt as well. Depth and breadth of knowledge are important factors to consider as well, and Carter points out that each has its benefits. Knowing when to go deep into a subject and when to obtain surface level knowledge can foster a sense of ease and adequacy in knowledge workers. Stephanie shares her experiences with imposter syndrome, highlighting the difference between self-perception and audience perception and why it's important to give yourself credit for what you've accomplished. Breaking into a new space can be intimidating. Carter walks us through important steps to take to start tackling imposter syndrome from the beginning, including the effects of positive mentorships.

This month, Carter is giving a presentation at Cloud Learn (Dec 8-9, 2021), and he wraps up this episode with a sneak peak.

Carter Morgan

Carter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google's Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course "Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes" he co-created with Kelsey Hightower.

Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who's approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft.

Cool things of the week Cloud Learn site 5 things not to do with Cloud Functions, and 5 things you absolutely should do instead blog Interview Cloud Learn site What do I really need to know to succeed at work? blog Hosts

Stephanie Wong

This week on the podcast, Yuri Litvinovich of Scotiabank was able to join Mark Mirchandani and Michelle Casbon to talk about migration from on-prem and their partnership with Google Cloud. Mark Mandel stops in with some cool things of the week and the question of the week, too!

With Yuri's help, Scotiabank is working to become a modern financial services technology company. Their transition from working mostly on-prem to working in the cloud was exciting for him as he discovered how much cheaper, faster, and more secure large enterprise projects can be in the public cloud. Three years ago, Scotiabank's CEO began encouraging this shift to keep the company up-to-date, with funds allocated to moving all their thousands of applications and products to a more efficient system.

To accomplish this, Yuri turned to Kubernetes to make use of containers. Because they are light and homogenous in different environments, the modernization at Scotiabank went much more smoothly with Kubernetes and GKE. They also use a mix of managed systems like BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub, as well as made-from-scratch applications that help the Google products to be compatible with Scotiabank's existing software. Yuri believes this was a key to their success in the migration from on-prem to the cloud.

In the process of migration, Yuri experienced some pushback from developers who were concerned about the move. He encouraged them not to "lift and shift" their projects, but to completely re-build them with cloud dev ops principles in mind. Yuri's goal was to convince developers that doing this would result in projects that were much easier, cheaper, and more secure in the long run. By outlining the benefits and goals of migration and sharing success stories of other businesses who have transferred to Kubernetes and the cloud, Scotiabank was able to help convince developers of the importance of it. Yuri also encourages trust and cooperation between teams.

Yuri Litvinovich

Yuri is a Senior Cloud Engineer and Kubernetes Tech Lead at Scotiabank. He's currently part of Platform Organization (PLATO) within Scotiabank, which performs enterprise modernization program to transform the Bank into a modern technology company in financial services. Yuri has extensive experience in Cloud technologies, Kubernetes, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Automation, CI/CD, Linux, networking, and system administration. His pursuit of excellence led him to work on implementing cutting-edge technologies in both startups, and large enterprise environments making them vital part of organization's digital transformation journey.

Cool things of the week Introducing Deep Learning Containers: Consistent and portable environments blog How to implement document tagging with AutoML blog Analyze BigQuery data with Kaggle Kernels notebooks blog GCP Podcast Episode 84: Kaggle with Wendy Kan podcast Introducing the Jenkins GKE Plugin—deploy software to your Kubernetes clusters blog Interview Scotiabank site Kubernetes site Kubernetes Engine site Cloud SQL site BigQuery site Dataflow site Pub/Sub site Stackdriver site Anthos site GKE On-Prem site Istio site Autoscaling Streaming Applications in Cloud Dataflow with Scotiabank video Google Cloud Next '19: Day 2 Product Innovation Keynote video Kubeflow site Question of the week

Rather than using the standard Cloud Shell image - what if I want to add my own "by default" installed tooling?

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirch is working on This Week in Cloud.

Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit.

Sound Effect Attribution "crowd laugh.wav" by tom_woysky of Freesound.org

Happy Independence Day to our American listeners! Mark Mandel is back today as he and Gabi Ferrara interview Bill Creekbaum of Informatica to learn how they work with Google Cloud for a better big data user experience. Mark Mirchandani is hanging around the studio as well, bringing some cool things of the week and helping with the question of the week!

Informatica provides data managing products that offer complete solutions focusing on metadata management, integration, governance, security, data quality, and discoverability. Bill's job at Informatica is to ensure these products really take advantage of the strengths of Google Cloud Platform. One such example is a product that allows customers to design in Informatica and push their projects to Cloud Dataproc. Informatica also offers similar capabilities in BigQuery. When moving data from on-prem to the cloud, customers can use Informatica and Google Cloud together for a seamless transition, cost savings, and easier data control.

Together, Informatica and Google Cloud can also facilitate the acquisition of high quality data. To have better, more trustworthy output, data inputed needs to be safe to access, have few or no duplicates and null values, and be complete. To achieve this, developers usually use a combination of the Informatica tools Intelligent Cloud Services, Enterprise Data Catalog, and Big Data Management, and the Google tools BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Analytics, Dataproc, and Pub/Sub.

Bill's closing advice for companies comes in three parts: take stock of the data you've got, set goals, and develop a well-rounded team.

Bill Creekbaum

Bill Creekbaum is Sr. Director of Product Management for Cloud, Big Data, and Analytic Ecosystems at Informatica. He is focused on delivering market leading unified data management platforms and services that help customers take advantage of their greatest assets, data. Bill has been in product management and product marketing for more than 20 years and for the past 10 has been focused on successfully delivering SaaS and Cloud Applications to the market. Prior to joining Informatica, Bill has worked at SnapLogic, GoodData, Oracle, Microsoft, Mindjet, and more. See more of Bill's experience on LinkedIn.

Cool things of the week Google Cloud + Chronicle: The security moonshot joins Google Cloud blog GCP Podcast Episode 135: VirusTotal with Emi Martinez podcast Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa blog Kubernetes 1.15: Extensibility and Continuous Improvement blog Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas blog See how your code actually executes with Stackdriver Profiler, now GA blog Interview Informatica site Informatica for GCP site BigQuery site Cloud Storage site Cloud Dataproc site Intelligent Cloud Services site Enterprise Data Catalog site Big Data Management site Google Analytics site Pub/Sub site Google Cloud & Informatica: Accelerate your Data-Driven Digital Transformation webinar Informatica for Google BigQuery data sheet Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for Google BigQuery site Question of the week

If I want to have my App Engine Application serve any subdomain on my custom domain, how do I do that?

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is done traveling.

Mark Mirch' is working on Stack Chat.

Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit.

Sound Effect Attribution "small group laugh 6.flac" by tim.kahn of Freesound.org "Chewing, Carrot, A" by Inspector J of Freesound.org "Testtone1000hz" by Jobro of Freesound.org

On this episode, our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabi Ferrara dive into Google Cloud Platform UX with guest and Google Product Designer Michael Kleinerman. Michael's path to Product Designer started with "ancient" tech designing with Flash and 3D motion graphics and progressed from there through interaction designer to his place now with Google. His experience has helped him appreciate the many different kinds of designers needed for projects and how they have to work together for a good product.

At Google, Michael's team builds design systems that create a balance between what Google uses and what the products built on Google use. He adopted Material Design, which offers guidelines for patterns and components of design, to Google Cloud. Material Design spans across multiple devices and screen sizes to help simplify design across devices. When Cloud reached the enterprise space, where components can be more complex, Michael's team worked to adjust Cloud using Material Design so that features like tables would work correctly.

Accessibility is also a top priority for Cloud and the design team. To begin the process of designing for accessibility, the team finds the top three or so reasons that a user would come to their product and ensures those are accessible to all. The next step is to create easier usability in the second tier features of the product, and then all features beyond. Using a screen reader, they go through the product to see if it's usable, and really try to make the experience better. The team also makes sure there are a lot of guidance pages as well.

The goal in product design is to make things simple and consistent for everyone.

Michael Kleinerman

Michael is a Product Designer at Google. He worked on Android and YouTube in the Bay Area before joining Cloud in NYC, where he started by leading the UX for Firestore until it launched in both Firebase and GCP. This work evolved into his current role on the core platform team, responsible for the design direction of the main design system used by producer teams to build and launch products on GCP.

Cool things of the week Committed use discounts at a glance blog Networking in depth blog Chatbots with Dialog Flow blog and video Turn it up to eleven: Java 11 runtime comes to App Engine blog App Engine second generation runtimes now get double the memory; plus Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 now generally available blog Interview Material.io site Material Design site Firebase site Cloud Firestore site Question of the week

How do I work with my containers locally and then get them into the cloud?

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is done traveling.

Mark Mirch' is filming for customers in the Bay area.

Everyone else is just laying low for now!

Sound Effect Attribution "alert.wav" by danielnieto7 of Freesound.org "cell phone vibraion.wav" by MrAuralization of Freesound.org "laugh crowd 2.wav" by MrAuralizationFunWithSound of Freesound.org

This week, Jon Foust and Michelle Casbon bring you another fascinating interview from our time at Next! Michelle and special guest Amanda were able to catch up with Paco Nathan of Derwen AI to talk about his experience at Next and learn what Derwen is doing to advance AI.

Paco and Derwen have been working extensively on ways developer relations can be enhanced by machine learning. Along with O'Reilly Media, Derwen just completed three surveys, called ABC (AI, Big Data, and Cloud), to look at the adoption of AI and the cloud around the world. The particular interest in these studies is a comparison between countries who have been using AI, Big Data, and Cloud for years and countries who are just beginning to get involved. One of the most interesting things they learned is how much budget companies are allocating to machine learning projects. They also noticed that more and more large enterprises are moving, at least partially, to the cloud.

One of the challenges Paco noticed was the difference between machine learning projects in testing versus how they act once they go live. Here, developers come across bias, ethical, and safety issues. Good data governance polices can help minimize these problems. Developing good data governance policies is complex, especially with security issues, but it's an important conversation to have. In the process of computing the survey data, Paco discovered many big companies spend a lot of time with this issue and even employ checklists of requirements before projects can be made live.

In his research, Paco also discovered that about 54% of companies are non-starters. Usually, their problems stem from tech debt and issues with company personnel who do not recognize the need for machine learning. The companies working toward integrating machine learning tend to have issues finding good staff. Berkeley is working to solve this problem by requiring data science classes of all students. But as Paco says, data science is a team sport that works well with a team of people from different disciplines. Paco is an advocate of mentoring, to help the next generation of data scientists learn and grow, and of unbundling corporate decision making to help advance AI.

Amanda, Michelle, and Paco wrap up their discussion with a look toward how to change ML biases. People tend to blame ML for bias outcomes, but models are subject to data we feed in. Humans have to make decisions to work around that by looking at things from a different perspective and taking steps to avoid as much bias as we can. ML and humans can work together to find these biases and help remove them.

Paco Nathan

Paco Nathan is the Managing Parter at Derwen. He has 35+ years tech industry experience, ranging from Bell Labs to early-stage start-ups. Paco is also the Co-chair Rev. Advisor for Amplify Partners, Recognai, Primer AI, and Data Spartan. He was formerly the Director of Community Evangelism for Databricks and Apache Spark.

Cool things of the week CERN recreated the Higgs discovery on GCP video To discover the Higgs yourself, check out the CERN open data portal site Fun facts from Michelle's visit: Seven total, four main experiments ATLAS (largest, general-purpose) site CMS (prettiest, general-purpose) site ALICE (heavy-ion) site LHCb (interactions of b-hadrons, matter/antimatter asymmetry) site The French/Swiss border runs across the CERN property Streetview of CERN control center site CERN is the birthplace of the web Where the protons come from site Watch Particle Fever movie Interview Derwen, Inc. site Derwen, Inc. Blog blog Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing paper Apache Spark site Google Cloud Storage site Datastore site Kubeflow site Quicksilver site O'Reilly Media site Google Knowledge Graph site Jupyter site JupyterCon site The Economics of Artificial Intelligence site "Why Do Businesses Fail At Machine Learning?" by Cassie Kozyrkov video The Gutenberg Galaxy site Programmed Inequality site Question of the week

Stadia Connect occurred last Thursday. What are some of the biggest announcements that came out of it?

Where can you find us next?

Jon is in New York for Games for Change.

Michelle and Mark Mirchandani are back in San Francisco.

Brian & Aja are at home in Seattle.

Gabi is in Brazil.

Sound Effect Attribution "Crowd laugh.wav" by tom_woysky of Freesound.org

Your favorite Marks Mirchandani and Mandel are back hosting this week to touch base with Angela Yu about recent updates in Google Maps. As Angela describes Google Maps at a high level, it is your window into the real world, with coverage of Earth's land and oceans. Google works hard to keep that information updated with satellite pictures, street view Google vehicles, and even backpacks for hikers to record hard to reach areas.

The Google Maps API makes it easy for developers to use Maps data in their own projects. It can be used for something as simple as showing location to something more complicated, for example showing the user specific things around them to help them make decisions. Game developers can create rich experiences by building real-world gaming situations with Maps and augmented reality. Using the Places API can display parks, government buildings, and other interesting places beyond streets. And the Routes API can expand the user experience by providing directions, tracking drivers in real time, etc. Maps and Google Cloud together work well with BigQuery to search huge amounts of data and visualize them on a map.

In the future, Angela is particularly excited about how ridesharing apps will continue to use Maps and Routes to optimize their businesses. She also looks forward to more augmented reality projects beyond gaming, where data, directions, and more are overlaid on the physical world.

Angela Yu

Angela Yu is a developer advocate for Google Maps Platform. Throughout her career, she has geeked out on voice recognition, mobile app development, and IoT. You can find her trapped in escape rooms or on Twitter.

Cool things of the week Google to acquire Looker blog New Translate API capabilities can help localization experts and global enterprises blog Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud CDN blog Save money by stopping and starting Compute Engine instances on schedule blog An update on Sunday's service disruption blog Interview Google Maps Platform site blog docs Google Maps Places site Google Maps Routes site Google Maps Treks site Visualizing data from Firebase on a Google Map site Google Maps Platform Codelabs site BigQuery site BigQuery Public Datasets docs Deck.GL site Google Maps SDK for Android Beta site Popular Antipodes on Google Maps site The True Size of countries site Google Maps on Github site Google Maps Client Libraries site StreetView Gallery site Earth Engine site xkcd: Map Projections site Beautiful data visualizations using deck.gl on Google Maps demo and docs Question of the week

What is helm, and how do I use it?

GCP Podcast Episode 50: Helm with Michelle Noorali and Matthew Butcher podcast

Kubernetes Podcast podcast and twitter Kuberenetes twitter Where can you find us next?

Angela will be at the Chrome Dev Summit.

Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next.

Mark Mirch will be customer filming for Stack Chat in NYC.

Sound Effect Attribution "Striking a Match" by Nebulousflynn of Freesound.org "Bad Beep" by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org "Correct" by Tristan_Lohengrin of Freesound.org "Spaceship Atmosphere 02" by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org "At the jazz concert Crowd laugh.wav" by Ftom_woysky of Freesound.org

Google Developer Advocate Jen Person talks with Mark Mandel and Mark Mirchandani today about developments in Firebase. Firebase is a suite of products that helps developers build apps. According to Jen, it's equivalent to the client-side of Google Cloud. Firebase works across platforms, including Android, web, iOS and offers many growth features, setting it apart from other Google products. It helps site and app owners interact with and reach customers with services like notifications, remote configurations to optimize the app, testing, and more.

Cloud Firestore has come out of beta, and it is available both through Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, making it easy for developers to move from one to the other if their needs change.

Recently, the Firebase team has been working to refine their products based on user feedback. Firebase Authentication has been upgraded with the additions of phone authentication, email link authentication, and multiple email actions. They've also added a generic authentication option so developers can use any provider they choose.

ML Kit makes machine learning much easier for client apps or on the server. With on-device ML features, users can continue using the app without internet service. Things like face recognition can still be done quickly without a wifi connection. ML Kit is adding new features all the time, including smart reply and translation, image labeling , facial feature detection, etc.

Cloud Functions for Firebase is also out of beta. It includes new features like a crash-litics trigger that can notify you if your site or app crashes and scheduled functions. An emulator is new as well, so you can test without touching your live code.

Jen Person

Jen is a Developer Advocate at Google. She worked with Firebase for 2.5 years prior to recently joining Google Cloud. She loves building iOS apps with Swift and planning the ideal data structures for various apps using Cloud Firestore. Jen is currently co-starring with JavaScript in a buddy cop comedy where the two don't see eye to eye but are forced to work together, eventually forming a strong loving bond through a series of hilarious misadventures.

Cool things of the week Uploading images directly to Cloud Storage using Signed URL blog Build your own event-sourced system using Cloud Spanner blog Cloud Shell on the Cloud Console app site Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud Load Balancing deconstructed blog Interview Firebase site Firestore site Cloud Storage site Firebase Authentication site ML Kit site TensorFlow Lite site Cloud Functions for Firebase site Cloud Functions Samples site I/O 2019 Talk: Zero to App video Guide - Cloud Firestore collection group queries docs Guide - Scheduled Cloud Functions docs YouTube - #AskFirebase Playlist videos Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: iOS site Codelab - Train and deploy on-device image classification model with AutoML Vision in ML Kit site Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site Codelab - Identify objects in images using custom machine learning models with ML Kit for Firebase site Codelab - Detect objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site Previous episodes on Firebase: GCP Podcast Episode 13: Firebase with Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar podcast GCP Podcast Episode 29: The New Firebase with Abe Haskins and Doug Stevenson podcast GCP Podcast Episode 78: Firebase at I/O 2017 with James Tamplin and Andrew Lee podcast GCP Podcast Episode 97: Cloud Firestore with Dan McGrath and Alex Dufetel podcast GCP Podcast Episode 99: Cloud Functions and Firebase Hosting with David East podcast Question of the week

How do I save money on my GCP resources?

Where can you find us next?

Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next! Watch him live code on Twitch.

Mark Mirch is going on vacation!

Jon Foust is back this week, joining Mark Mirchandani for an in-depth look at Stackdriver with fellow Googler, Rory Petty. To start, Product Manager Rory explains that Stackdriver is a full observability solution for Google Cloud (as well as other clouds). We touch on how monitoring, logging, and APM tools allow developers and operators to fully understand how a website is performing. In addition to Monitoring and Logging, the suite of Stackdriver tools also includes Debugger, Trace, and Profiler to help users not only monitor their sites, but to solve problems that occur.

Stackdriver Monitoring and Logging support Google Cloud services out of the box. Users can use Monitoring to set up alerts, so if something goes awry, they are notified immediately and can address the problem. Alerts can also be custom designed to inform developers of things like number of checkouts on your e-commerce site, the amount of time between checkouts, and more. Stackdriver Monitoring allows blackbox monitoring, too, to make sure your service is healthy. The Monitoring dashboard makes it really easy to get started, with a resources section that has pre-made dashboards for developers to use. Developers don't have to do a lot of configuration out of the box. However, if you need a more customized dashboard, that is also possible in Stackdriver Monitoring.

At Cloud Next earlier this year, Stackdriver announced Service Monitoring in alpha, which shows users a map of their microservices architecture. Public beta will hopefully be later this year. Stackdriver Sandbox, another recent project currently in the alpha stage, gives people an easy way to configure a test Stackdriver environment. This way, developers can play with Stackdriver tools without effecting their websites. Stackdriver Profiler, a great tool to understand the performance of your system, went GA at Cloud Next as well.

Stackdriver's tools are all meant to work together to help you maintain and perfect development projects on many different cloud services and on-prem.

Rory Petty

Rory Petty is Product Manager for the Stackdriver Monitoring Platform. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and is a vinyl record enthusiast. Rory is a midwest transplant living in Brooklyn.

Cool things of the week Commute just got easier with Google Pay and Google Assistant blog 5 year anniversary of Kubernetes and KubeCon content videos Kubernetes Podcast podcast Early Preview of AR in Google Maps video Interview Stackdriver site Stackdriver with Kubernetes video Stackdriver Monitoring site Stackdriver Logging site Stackdriver Debugger site Stackdriver Trace site Stackdriver Profiler site App Engine site Compute Engine site GKE site Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Book site Istio site Stackdriver Service Monitoring site Stackdriver Sandbox site Cloud Next '19 DevOps & SRE Sessions videos Cloud On Air site Stack Doctor Playlist videos Implementing GCP Stackdriver and Adapting SRE Practices to Samsung's AI System video Stackdriver Documentation site Question of the week

How do I decide between Apps Script and App Maker?

Where can you find us next?

Jon is going to Games for Change.

Mark is going to be in NYC right before Games for Change.

Sound Effect Attribution "Spaceship Fly-by, A" by InspectorJ of Freesound.org "Teleport" by Sergenious of Freesound.org "Moretube.wav" by NoiseCollector of Freesound.org "Mystery Peak2.wav" by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org

Today on the podcast, we're speaking with Chris Aniszczyk about the Linux Foundation and the important work they do to further the advancement of technology through open source initiatives. Mark and Mark are your hosts this week, and they begin by speaking with Chris about what the Linux Foundation is and how it's unique.

The Linux Foundation, while seeking to support open source projects, sets itself apart by also providing professional services such as marketing, technical writing, legal help, and running events. It acts as a parent foundation for smaller open source foundations like Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Node.js Foundation, and the Automotive Linux Foundation, which strives to bring open source to the automotive industry.

Though typically companies can be leery of working with competitors, The Linux Foundation has been successful bringing companies together to create useful software that benefits everyone. Collaboration can be easier when done through the foundation. Chris also actively reaches out to companies in industries that don't typically engage in open source practices and encourages them to consider working together to make their industry better. Specifically, Chris works with companies within CNCF and the Open Container Initiative.

Chris Aniszczyk

Chris Aniszczyk is an open source executive and engineer with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He's currently a VP at the Linux Foundation where he co-founded the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and currently serves as CTO. Furthermore, he's a partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups. Throughout his career he has worked at the intersection of open source, internet scale organizations and the enterprise; at Twitter he created their open source program/strategy and led their open source efforts to change the infrastructure industry. In a previous life, he bootstrapped an open source startup, was a Gentoo maintainer, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many developer tooling and Linux related projects.

Cool things of the week Uber datasets in BigQuery: Driving times around SF (and your city too) blog Topping the tower: the Obstacle Tower Challenge AI Contest with Unity and Google Cloud blog Querying the Stars with BigQuery GIS blog GKE Sandbox: Bring defense in depth to your pods blog Google Cloud launches new Osaka region to support growing customer base in Japan blog Interview Linux Foundation site OpenJS Foundation site CNCF site Automotive Linux Foundation site Let's Encrypt site How to start a project with the Linux Foundation site Community Bridge site Academy Software Foundation site Open Container Initiative site CNCF Cloud Native Definition site CNCF Annual Report site GraphQL site Linux Foundation Events site Question of the week

How do I connect Cloud SQL to my serverless?

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirchandani will be working on more film projects.

Mark Mandel will be at Tokyo Next in July and will be at Open Source in Gaming the day before the Open Source North America Summit in August.

Michelle and Mark are together again this week to talk with John Bohannon about AI startup, Primer. His goal is to build systems that continuously read documents and write about what they discover. He discusses his recent work building a self-updating knowledge base and the research his team just published.

Perhaps most interesting is the circuitous path he took to get to Primer. Hear about his adventures along the way to becoming a data scientist specializing in natural language processing. How does a microbiologist who developed a pregnancy test for fish get distracted by Python? What does contemporary dance have to do with establishing AI policy? Join us as he weaves a common thread along his career path: encountering interesting problems and discovering creative ways to solve them.

John Bohannon

John Bohannon is the Director of Science at Primer, an AI startup in San Francisco. Until 2017 he was an investigative journalist and data scientist writing mainly for Science magazine and Wired. He spent the first half of his career as a foreign correspondent, including as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin. His reporting from Gaza won the Reuters-IUCN Media Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting from Europe. While embedded with military forces in Afghanistan he engineered the first voluntary release of civilian casualty data by NATO and the United Nations. As a visiting scholar in the Program in Ethics and Health at Harvard University he focused on the involvement of doctors and social scientists in the US government's torture program. He was also the scientific advisor to Isabella Rosselini for "Green Porno" (winner of 4 Webby awards) and "Animals Distract Me" (official selection, 2011 Sundance Film Festival). He is the author of a peer-reviewed study of people's inability to distinguish pet food from paté, which inspired Stephen Colbert to eat cat food on television. He has a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Oxford.

Cool things of the week Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone book Next '19 Recap video I/O '19 Recap video All I/O Sessions videos Michelle's Favorites: Session: Taylor Wilson interviewing Michio Kaku on the future of humanity video Sandbox: AI on the Edge by Gabe Weiss, Noah Negrey, Yu-Han Liu, and Luiz Gustavo Martins TensorFlow Lite site OSS site Codelab: AI on a microcontroller with TFLite and SparkFun Edge site Interview Primer site Primer Blog blog Headline Generation: Learning from Decomposable Document Titles paper BERT site Ngram Viewer site Google Books site Dance Your PhD 2018 WINNER - Superconductivity: The Musical! video Kinetech Arts site John Bohannon's Website site Question of the week

How can we be like John?

Where can you find us next?

Michelle will be at Kubecon Europe and CERN. Mark Mirchandani will be hanging around the bay area. Mark Mandel is in Tokyo. Gabi is in France. John is in NYC. Brian will be in Boulder, Colorado.

Mark Mirchandani and Michelle Casbon take over the show this week to discuss AI and the PAIR Guidebook to Human-Centered AI. Mark Mandel pops in on the interview, and Di Dang, Design Advocate at Google, talks about her role in designing and building the guidebook with the intent of helping others create quality AI projects.

Di describes human-centered AI as a practice of not only being conscious of the project being built, but also considering how this AI project will impact us as humans at the end of the day. We influence machine learning so much, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it's our job to look at the project and results as a whole.

In the guidebook, topics like data bias in machine learning, what design patterns work, how to establish trust with the user, and more are addressed. Di explains that the guidebook is a work in progress that will develop with input from users and advances in technology.

Di Dang

Di Dang recently joined Google's Design Relations team as a Design Advocate supporting emerging technologies such as augmented reality and machine learning. Previously, she worked as a Senior UX Designer and led the Emerging Tech group at Seattle-based digital agency POP, advising clients on how VR/AR, web/mobile, conversational UI, and machine learning could benefit their end users. With a degree in Philosophy and Religion, she considers herself an optimistic realist who is passionate about ethical design. You can find Di onstage doing improv or on Twitter @dqpdang.

Cool things of the week Bringing the best of open source to Google Cloud customers blog James Ward's Cloud Run button site Michelle's favorite codelabs from I/O TPU-speed data pipelines site Your first Keras model site Convolutional neural networks site Modern convnets, squeezenet, with Keras with TPUs site Interview People + AI Guidebook site PAIR site GCP Podcast Episode 114: Machine Learning Bias and Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell podcast Machine Learning Crash Course site Google Clips site Google Brain Team site Question of the week How do I get started with practical AI? Build an Appointment Scheduler Chatbot with Dialogflow Where can you find us next?

Michelle will be at Google I/O and Kubecon Europe.

No I/O event in your area? You can host one!

On the podcast today we have a fascinating interview from our time at Cloud Next '19! Mark and Jon went in-depth with Andrew Davidson about MongoDB to find out what they do and how they do it.

MongoDB is a document database that stores JSON natively, making it super easy for developers to work with data in a way that's similar to how they think about building applications. The database is scalable, highly available by default with built-in replication, has an intuitive query language, and can be run anywhere.

MongoDB Atlas is a global database service that runs on Google Cloud; it automates deployment and provisioning, and ongoing operations such as maintenance, upgrades, and scaling with no downtime. Atlas is a declarative model to manage your databases easily, is easy to migrate to, and offers advanced features such as global clusters for low latency read and write access anywhere in the world.

In the future, Andrew sees a world where we think in terms of JSON-style documents instead of just tables. MongoDB can help make that happen.

Andrew Davidson

Andrew Davidson, a Silicon Valley native who lives in NYC, is the Director of Cloud Products at MongoDB with a focus on MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB's global database as a service. He previously worked on scaling global mapping operations at Google, has a background in physics, and has lived extensively in South Asia.

Cool things of the week Level up on Android with Indie Games Accelerator blog Berglas site American Cancer Society uses Google Cloud machine learning to power cancer research blog Efficiently scale ML and other compute workloads on NVIDIA's T4 GPU, now generally available blog GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast After school, this teen tracks climate change with NASA blog Interview MongoDB site MongoDB Atlas site JSON site Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) site Kubernetes site MongoDB Charts site MondgoDB Stitch site MongoDB University site MongoDB.local site MongoDB World site Question of the week

How can I access Google Cloud Shell from any terminal?

Introducing the ability to connect to Cloud Shell from any terminal blog gcloud alpha cloud-shell ssh site gcloud alpha cloud-shell scp site gcloud alpha cloud-shell get-mount-command site Where can you find us next?

Jon and Mark will be at IO.

Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman are here today to teach Aja and Mark about Professional Services Organization (PSO) at Google Cloud. PSO is the "post sales" department, helping clients come up with solutions for security, data migration, AI, ML, and more. Listen in to this episode to learn more about the specifics of the PSO!

Ann Wallace

Ann Wallace is the Global Security Practice Lead for Google PSO. She has spent the last 6 months building out the security practice. Ann is passionate about inclusion in tech. She is the West regional lead for Google Cloud EDII and a volunteer with Women Who Code Portland. Before Google Ann spent 14 years at Nike in various engineering and architecture roles. CloudNOW named her one of the top 10 Women in Cloud in 2015. When not working, Ann can be found ultra-trail running around the world.

Michael Wallman

Michael Wallman is a TPM, working on Cloud Migration for internal Alphabet companies and acquisitions. He also serves as the America's infrastructure practice lead. He is in his 3rd year at Google. Prior to Google, Michael is Cloud "OG", and spent almost 5 years growing the AWS Professional Services organization from 5 to 700+. Before sticking his head in the clouds, Michael helped found 2 start-ups: Aspera and SensysNetworks. Outside of work Michael spends his time chasing his 2 toddlers and mountain lions around the Berkeley Hills.

Ann and Michael actually met 5 years ago, working on Nike's first cloud migration project. This encompassed reverse engineering a custom Perl configuration management system. (Who doesn't love Perl?) It's a small cloud world.

Cool things of the week Amy built an app that uses Cloud Vision to identify key features of images texted to it link Want to Change the Game? Design your own with Google Play blog Change the Game site The team based game of life app we demoed during the keynote is still up site How we search for bow wows and meows blog Why do cats and dogs…? site Interview G Suite site Chrome site GKE site Kubernetes site Anthos (the new Cloud Services Platform) site Pub/Sub site GCS site GCS Dual-Region Buckets site Grafeas site CRDS site Exploring container security: Digging into Grafeas container image metadata blog CRE site SRE site Cloud Consulting Services site Question of the week

How do I cache files between builds in Cloud Build?

Cloud Builders Community site Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at IO, Open Source in Gaming Day which is co-located with Open Source North America Summit, and CFP.

Aja will be online! She has blog posts coming on assessing coding during interviews, using Ruby + GCP for weird stuff, and many other things.

Our guests will be at Kubecon EU.

Mark Mirchandani is our Mark this week, joining new host Michelle Casbon in a recap of their favorite things at Next! The main story this episode is Cloud Run, and Gabi and Mark met up with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg at Cloud Next to learn more about it.

Announced at Next, Cloud Run brings serverless to containers! It offers great options and security, and the client only pays for what they use. With containers, developers can use any language, any library, any software, anything!

Two versions of Cloud Run were released last week. Cloud Run is the fully managed, hosted service for running serverless containers. The second version, Cloud Run GKE, provides a lot of the same benefits, but runs the compute inside your Kubernetes container. It's easy to move between the two if your needs change as well.

Steren Giannini

Steren is a Product Manager in the Google Cloud Platform serverless team. He graduated from École Centrale Lyon, France and then was CTO of a startup that created mobile and multi-device solutions. After joining Google, Steren managed Stackdriver Error Reporting, Node.js on App Engine, and Cloud Run.

Ryan Gregg

Ryan is a product manager at Google, working on Knative and Cloud Run. He has over 15 years experience working with developers on building and extending platforms and is passionate about great documentation and reducing developer toil. After more than a decade of working on enterprise software platforms and cloud solutions at Microsoft, he joined Google to work on Knative and building great new experiences for serverless and Kubernetes.

Cool things of the week News to build on: 122+ announcements from Google Cloud Next '19 blog Mark's Favorite Announcement: Network service tiers site Michelle's Favorite Announcements: Cloud Code site Cloud SQL for Postgres now supports v11 release notes Cloud Data Fusion for visual code-free ETL pipelines site Cloud AI Platform site AutoML Natural Language site Google Voice for G Suite blog Hangouts Chat in Gmail site Kubeflow v0.5.0 release site Interview Cloud Run site Knative site Knative Docs site Firestore site App Engine site Cloud Functions site GKE site Cloud Run on GKE site Understanding cluster resource usage site Docker site Cloud Build site Gitlab site Buildpacks site Jib (Java Image Builder) site Pub/Sub site Cloud VPC site Google Cloud Next '19 All Sessions videos Question of the week

If I want to try out Cloud Run, how do I get started?

Get started with the beta version by logging in site Quicklinks site Codelab site Where can you find us next?

Gabi is at PyTexas

Jon and Mark Mandel are at East Coast Game Conference

Michelle & Mark Mirchandani will be at Google IO in May

Michelle will be at Kubecon Barcelona in May

Welcome to day three of Next! More awesome interviews await in this episode, as hosts Mark Mirchandani, Aja Hammerly, Mark Mandel, Jon Foust and their guests explore more of Next.

To start, Dan of Viacom joins Mark and Jon to talk about his job in the TV business and why he loves Istio.

Host-turned-guest Aja and Lauren of the Developer Relations team sat in the booth to talk with the Marks about the developer keynote at Next. Aja and Lauren elaborate on how they work to promote Next and put together content inclusive of all aspects of Google Cloud.

Mark and Mark hear how Yuri from Scotiabank is using Kubernetes to help advance Scotiabank's latest projects. Anthony from Google joins the conversation, too.

And lastly, we tease you with a short interview with Andrew of MongoDB to speak more on the partnership between MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud. Andrew will be joining us for a full interview on the podcast later this year!

Interviews Cloud Next site Next On Air site Google Cloud Next '19: Day 3 Run Channel video Google Cloud Next '19: Day 3 Build Channel video Google Cloud Next '19: Day 3 Collaborate Channel video Day 3 at Next '19: A look back at an amazing week blog Playlist: All Sessions - Google Cloud Next '19 videos Viacom site How Viacom modernized its Intelligent Content Discovery Platform with Google Cloud blog GKE site Anthos site Istio site Developer Keynote: Get to the Fun Part (Cloud Next '19) video Jenkins site Slack site Cloud Run site Announcing Cloud Run, the newest member of our serverless compute stack blog GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast Dev Zone Walkthrough (Cloud Next '19) video Dev Zone Experiment Pizza Authenticator (Cloud Next '19) video Scotiabank site Kubernetes site Google Cloud Next '19: Day 2 Product Innovation Keynote (Justin Arbuckle at 25:23) video Securing Kubernetes Secrets (Cloud Next '19) video MongoDB site MongoDB Atlas site Where can you find us next?

The GCP Podcast will be back to its regular schedule next week!

The podcast celebrates day two of Next as our hosts speak with some more conference attendees. Andre came by to talk with Aja and Jon about his work with Stackdriver IRM and their mission for fewer, shorter, and smaller outages.

We had three hosts in the booth with guest, Anne, who works for the GCP Trust and Security Product Team. Brian, Mark, and Aja find out exactly what Anne does at GCP and how she's enjoying Next!

Brian and Mark also met up with Mario who came all the way from Munich, Germany. Mario runs the Cloud Community in his hometown, and he shared his thoughts on Anthos and what he's excited about at Next.

Last but not least, Valentin stopped by to talk with Mark and Jon about Go and the presentation he's giving at Next on site performance.

Interviews Cloud Next site Next On Air site Google Cloud Next '19: Day 2 Run Channel video Google Cloud Next '19: Day 2 Build Channel video Stackdriver site Stackdriver Incident Response and Management site Stackdriver Incident Response and Management documentation docs Data Management: The New Best Practice for Incident Response (Cloud Next '19) video Stackdriver Profiler site GKE site Increasing trust in Google Cloud: visibility, control and automation blog GKE Sandbox site gVisor site Hybrid Cloud Sessions - Google Cloud Next '19 videos Google Cloud Next '19: Day 1 Secure Channel video Google Cloud Next '19: Day 2 Secure Channel video Anthos site Meet Anthos! (Cloud Next '19) video Introducing Anthos: An entirely new platform for managing applications in today's multi-cloud world blog Cloud SQL site Making Google Cloud the best place to run your Microsoft Windows applications blog How to Migrate Windows Workloads to Google Cloud (Cloud Next '19) video Qwiklabs site Dev.to site Go site Go Tools site Cloud Run site Announcing Cloud Run, the newest member of our serverless compute stack blog Where can you find us next?

We're at Next this week! Stop by and say hi!