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 episode, 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

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

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

Guest Jason Polites joins Stephanie Wong and Bukola Ayodele this week to talk about advances in serverless computing with Cloud Run and how developers and wallets are benefiting. Cloud Run, a managed service which allows developers to run containers, is now available in all GCP regions, offers increased resource access, global load balancing, and more. Jason tells us how this evolution of Cloud Run has led to the support of bigger, more complicated, and even legacy software fully and efficiently functioning in a serverless environment. The team at Google continues to expand offerings in order to afford the benefits of auto-scaling and other managed services to all workloads. Always On CPU, for example, supports projects with running background functions. Later, Jason gives us examples of projects that best fit a serverless infrastructure and the cost benefits of using Cloud Run. He offers cost-saving tips for projects, like committed use discounts and auto-scaling limits. Balancing cost efficiency with global reliability is important, and Jason tells us how this is easily achieved with Cloud Run features like scaling to zero. To limit the barrier to entry for new Cloud Run and container users, Jason and his team have been working on open source build packs. Developers can turn code into a container without creating Docker files. The containers running in Cloud Run are highly portable as well, giving companies the freedom to move their containers freely. Jason Polites Jason leads the Serverless Compute product team in Google Cloud, including products like Cloud Run and App Engine. Cool things of the week Illicit coin mining, ransomware, APTs target cloud users in first Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons report blog Microservices architecture on Google Cloud blog Interview Cloud Run site Cloud Run CPU Allocation docs Run more workloads on Cloud Run with new CPU allocation controls blog Docker site Google Cloud Buildpacks site App Engine site Cloud Functions site GCP Podcast Episode 173: Cloud Run with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg podcast GCP Podcast Episode 203: Cloud Run GKE with Donna Malayeri podcast GCP Podcast Episode 261: Full Stack Dart with Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore podcast What’s something cool you’re working on? Bukola just finished Season 2 of the Click to Deploy series.

We’re learning all about Vertex AI this week as Carter Morgan and Jay Jenkins host guest Erwin Huizenga. He helps us understand what is meant by Asia Pacific and how Machine Learning is growing there. APAC’s Machine Learning scene is exciting for its enterprise companies leveraging ML for innovative projects at scale. The ML journey of many of these customers revealed challenges with things like efficiency that Vertex AI was built to solve. The Vertex AI platform boasts tools that help with everything from the beginning stages of data collection to analysis, validation, transformation, model training, evaluation, serving the model, and metadata tracking. Erwin offers detailed examples of this pipeline process and describes how Feature Store helps clients manage their projects. Using Vertex AI not only simplifies the initial development process but streamlines the iteration process as the model is adjusted over time. Pipelines offers automation options that help with this, Erwin explains. ML Operations are also built into Vertex AI to ensure everything is done in compliance with industry standards, even at scale. Using customer recommendations as an example, Erwin walks us through how Vertex AI can employ embedding to enhance customer experiences through ML. By using Vertex AI in combination with other Google offerings like AutoML, companies can effectively build working ML projects without data science experience. We talk about the Vertex AI user interface and the other tools and APIS that are available there. Erwin tells us how Digits Financial uses Vertex AI and Pipeline to bring models to production in days rather than months, and how others can get started with Vertex AI, too. Erwin Huizenga Erwin Huizenga is a Data Scientist at Google specializing in TensorFLow, Python, and ML. Cool things of the week Announcing Spot Pods for GKE Autopilot—save on fault tolerant workloads blog Indosat Ooredoo and Google Launch Strategic Partnership to Accelerate Digitalization Across SMBs and Enterprises in Indonesia site Indosat Ooredoo dan Google Luncurkan Kemitraan Strategis untuk Percepatan Digitalisasi UMKM dan Perusahaan di Indonesia site Interview Vertex AI site Google Cloud in Asia Pacific blog Introduction to Vertex AI docs What Is a Machine Learning Pipeline? site TensorFlow site PyTorch site Vertex AI Feature Store docs AutoML site BigQuery ML site Vertex AI Matching Engine docs ScaNN site Announcing ScaNN: Efficient Vector Similarity Search blog Vertex AI Workbench site Vertex Pipeline Case Study: Digits Financial site Intro to Vertex Pipelines Codelab site Vertex AI: Training and serving a custom model Codelab site Vertex AI Workbench: Build an image classification model with transfer learning and the notebook executor Codelab site APAC Best of Next 2021 site TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform site Rules of Machine Learning site Google Cloud Skills Boost: Build and Deploy Machine Learning Solutions on Vertex AI site Monitoring feature attributions: How Google saved one of the largest ML services in trouble blog What’s something cool you’re working on? Jay is working on APAC Best of Next and will be doing a session on sustainability! Carter is working on transitioning the GCP Podcast to a video format!

This week, Stephanie Wong and Carter Morgan are talking about the recently released State of DevOps Report. Guests Dustin Smith and Nathen Harvey tell us all about DORA, the research group working to study DevOps, and the findings of their years-long study aimed at improving workplace environments, fostering sustainable increased productivity, and ensuring quality output across industries. During their years of research, the DORA team has developed ways to measure team results and workplace culture. Our guests tell us about the five measures they use, including deployment frequency and reliability. The shared responsibility and collaboration of teams at a company to optimize these five metrics is what makes good DevOps performance. Through a real-life example, we hear how the coordination of goals and incentives across departments can improve results of the DevOps metrics, thus improving the speed and stability of finished products. Once businesses identify problems, they need realistic expectations of the time and energy required to solve these issues. Learning from each change made and growing during the process is an important part of optimization, and our guests talk about the best practices their research has identified for facilitating smoother transitions. High quality documentation is a vital part of optimizing DevOps, and this year’s report examined internal documentation for the first time. Nathan describes what makes good documentation, like clear ownership of the documents and docs that are regularly updated for easy sharing and scaling of up-to-date material across the company. Dustin elaborates, explaining other factors that make quality, reliable documents. Later, we talk SRE and how companies can measure and optimize Site Reliability Engineering. A supportive team culture and ensuring a secure product and supply chain are some important factors in optimal SRE, the DORA study found. Our guests offer advice for companies looking to get started with DevOps practices. Nathen Harvey Nathen Harvey is a developer relations engineer at Google who has built a career on helping teams realize their potential while aligning technology to business outcomes. Nathen has had the privilege of working with some of the best teams and open source communities, helping them apply the principles and practices of DevOps and SRE. Dustin Smith Dustin Smith is a UX Research Manager and the DORA research lead. He studies the factors that influence a team’s ability to deliver software quickly and reliably. Cool things of the week Email is 50 years old, and still where it’s @ blog Make the most of hybrid work with Google Workspace blog We analyzed 80 million ransomware samples – here’s what we learned blog Interview DevOps site DORA site SRE site 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report addresses burnout, team performance report

Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall are back this week to learn everything there is to know about Assured Workloads with Bryce Buffaloe and Mikaela Misaka. Google’s Assured Workloads helps companies and governments ensure secure projects and privacy protection in sectors with extensive compliance requirements while taking advantage of Cloud capabilities. Bryce and Mikaela start the show talking about the challenges faced when using a public cloud for projects with very specific regulations and how Assured Workloads was developed to help solve these issues. The easy setup steps and uncomplicated UI help customers move from their on-prem infrastructure to Google Cloud where scaling, local customer support, and other advantages can be easily leveraged while maintaining a secure, compliant environment. With so many compliance standards in sectors like finance and healthcare, our guests walk us through the process Assured Workloads clients go through from identifying the regulations of markets they participate in to planning their data security, keeping customer support local to maintain privacy, and using Google Cloud to put these plans into practice with their projects across the world. On the Google Cloud side, the team works to create regulation maps that organize the rules of potential markets so customers can click a button and rest easy knowing their projects are compliant. Bryce details what goes into making Google Services like GKE compliant for customers as well. Assured Workloads continues to grow as new client challenges are presented. In the future, monitoring support, audit management, and other features will be introduced. Global expansion and sovereign cloud capabilities are coming soon, and our guests tell us more. Bryce Buffaloe Bryce is the Assured Workloads Product Manager at Google. Mikaela Misaka Mikaela is a Customer Care Offer Lead at Google Cloud, focused on creating new customer care offerings and value-added services tailored to the needs of regulated customer segments. Cool things of the week Run your fault-tolerant workloads cost-effectively with Google Cloud Spot VMs blog 8 more things to love about the new Pixel phones blog Government and Education Summit site Interview Assured Workloads site Assured Workloads Documentation site New capabilities for Assured Workloads for Government blog GKE site New data sovereignty controls for EU customers blog T-Systems and Google Cloud partner to deliver sovereign cloud for Germany article What’s something cool you’re working on? Max has been sharing AI use cases from inside Google IT and tech support and was working on red panda and sith warrior Halloween costumes for his kids. Mark is planning some cool podcast updates for next year.

On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Carter Morgan host guests Chad Jennings and Joel Conkling in a fascinating discussion about Earth Engine and performing geospatial processing to help companies become more environmentally conscious. Google’s geospatial functionality is some of the most advanced in the world, and with the Next announcements, commercial companies can now take advantage of this with tools like Earth Engine and in Cloud analytics offerings like BigQuery. Together, these tools make the three pillars of geospatial cloud: analysis of vector data with tools like CloudSQL or BigQuery, analysis of image data with Earth Engine, and taking advantage of the data assets. This geospatial analysis helps us understand the world and how it’s changing, then apply this information to make important, environmentally friendly decisions. As a key part of this system, Earth Engine is a geospatial data-processing platform specializing in the analysis of satellite images and other image data. It provides access to over 800 datasets and processing software that scales to planetary-scale analysis. At Next, Google announced Earth Engine availability for commercial use. Our guests talk about the applications of this in the real world, from the effect of climate risk on a financial portfolio to locations most susceptible to forest fire. Chad and Joel tell us about the sources of Earth Engine’s data, the pre-processing work done to the images collected, and the ease of data sharing between platforms. By working with BigQuery, users have access to additional datasets and analytics tools as well. Google clients are taking this data and creatively using the information to make meaningful decisions. Insurance companies, for example, analyze data to assess flood risk, while the U.S. Forest Service uses the platform to advance their mission of sustainable forest management. Unilever uses Earth Engine in their commitment to zero additional deforestation in their supply chain, and our guests talk more about the Next presentation with Unilever. Additional BigQuery announcements at Next can be leveraged in Earth Engine as well, and new features such as Analytics Hub make accessing datasets even easier. Google works to meet users where they are and make tools easy to use from day one. Earth Engine’s data processing, scalability, and more make it easy for users to focus on the analysis rather than the prep work. Our guests offer advice for getting started with Earth Engine and BigQuery and share a little about Climate Engine. Chad Jennings Chad came to Google from the startup world doing big data navigation processing and research. Working at the intersection of geospatial and big data at Google Cloud is a marvelous place to work. Joel Conkling Joel is the Product Manager for both Earth Engine and Environmental Insights Explorer and has worked at Google since 2010. Cool things of the week BigQuery Omni now available for AWS and Azure, for cross cloud data analytics blog How geospatial insights can help meet business goals blog 9 things I freakin’ love about Google Cloud identity and environments blog Interview Earth Engine site Earth Engine Development Guides site Big Query site CloudSQL site Climate Engine site Geospatial analytics and AI site Analytics Hub site Monitoring air quality with S5P TROPOMI data blog Visualizing geospatial data with pydeck and Earth Engine blog More accurate and flexible cloud masking for Sentinel-2 images blog NICFI’s satellite imagery of the global tropics now available in Earth Engine for analysis blog Earth Engine for Commercial Use: Now in Preview with Google Cloud site Next Session: Geospatial Innovation at Unilever video Next Developer Keynote: technology trends video What is Google Earth Engine? video Helping companies tackle climate change with Earth Engine blog Google has the cleanest cloud. Now it’s helping other companies go green article

Mark Mirchandani is back this week with cohost Bukola Ayodele. We’re talking with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza about all the awesome new analytics, data, and AI launches from last week’s Google Cloud Next conference. Our guests start the show outlining the challenges clients face when storing, organizing, and analyzing data in the cloud. These needs have inspired Google solutions that focus on simplifying data management for customers. Next announcements like BigQuery Omni, which helps customers achieve full data visibility with cross-cloud analytics, and DataPlex, which facilitates data management at scale, will change the way companies think about their data. BigQuery integration with AppSheets and the new Cloud Looker LookML let customers build once and access from anywhere. The new Looker and Tableau integration revolutionizes the use of the semantic model in Tableau, allowing things like company-established data governance and the Looker Blocks ecosystem to pull into Tableau analysis. New Looker Blocks specifically targeted to the healthcare industry were also introduced at Next. We talk about the ML announcements including Vertex AI Workbench, a fully-managed service used for data exploration aimed at simplifying the workloads of data engineers. Serverless Spark on Google Cloud shares these goals by making performance tuning, scaling, infrastructure provisioning, and other tasks fully-managed. The new PostgreSQL interface for Spanner lets clients use tools already developed in PostgreSQL while leveraging the global scaling and other benefits of Spanner. Bruno and Eric share some favorite customer stories as we wrap up this week’s episode. Albertson’s, Renault, and others have interesting data journeys on Google Cloud and our listeners can learn more in the YouTube series hosted by Bruno. Eric Schmidt Eric is the the Head of Advocacy for Data Analytics at Google and has been at Google for almost eight years. Previously, he was with Microsoft, where he led Advocacy and Evangelism there, too. He focuses on products like BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and leads a team of advocates who help customers turn data into value. In his downtime, Eric is a DJ at 90.3 KEXP here in Seattle or online at kexp.org where he focuses on global music culture. You can find Eric on Twitter. His handle is “not that eric” - not to be confused with the ‘other Eric Schmidt’ here at Google. In fact, internally, people affectionately call him “cloud E”. 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. Cool things of the week Next Reaction: Security and zero-trust announcements blog Next Reaction: New Data Cloud launches blog Next Reaction: Making multicloud easier for all blog Next Reaction: Features to reduce IT carbon emissions and build climate-related solutions blog Next Reaction: Monitor your conversations, get started with CCAI Insights blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast BigQuery site Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog Google Cloud Next—Day 1 livestream - WalMart video Dataplex site AppSheet site Cloud Looker LookML site Tableau site Vertex AI site Vertex AI Workbench site TensorFlow site Apache Spark on Google Cloud site New PostgreSQL Interface makes Cloud Spanner’s scalability and availability more open and accessible blog PostgreSQL site Cloud Spanner site Google Earth Engine site Google Maps Platform site Inside Industry Data Management 4.0 at Renault site Chess.com site Google Next Opening Keynote site Data Journeys with Bruno Aziza videos Cloud Next Catalog site Bruno’s Cloud Next Playlist videos Cloud Next Data Analytics Playlist videos Bruno on Linkedin site Lak on Twitter site What’s something cool you’re working on? Bukola is working on the Click to Deploy video series.

On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong hear all about the cool stuff happening at Cloud Next 2021. Brian Hall and Forrest Brazeal join the show to outline exciting announcements, fun partnerships, and what the future holds for Google Cloud. The immense prep and planning that went into Next shows through in the intentional and unified strategy of announcements and offerings at the conference. Our guests talk about this process and the challenges and decisions that went into the content choices and scheduling. The addition of Community Day, for example, was implemented to create a sense of in-person participation in an online-only event. Next kicked off this week with a Keynote presentation talking about the momentum of production and infrastructure innovation at Google Cloud, new product announcements across data cloud and open cloud infrastructure, security advancements, sustainability, and more. Our guests talk about important partnerships Google Cloud has fostered this year with clients like Ford, Univision, and GE using AI and other technologies to advance innovative ideas in their businesses. Announcements around AI and analytics at Google Cloud were plentiful, including Spark on Google Cloud that offers managed serverless data processing. Brian details the work Tableau and Google Cloud are doing to advance data visualization. Our guests talk about the work Google has done to embrace the multi-cloud culture with advancements in Anthos and BigQuery Omni. The newly announced Google Distributed Cloud lets clients use their multi-cloud infrastructures across edge locations. Forrest talks about the pragmatic evolution to the Google Distributed Cloud offering and how other announcements like security advancements through strategic European partnerships have positively affected multi-cloud customers. We talk more about the importance of the new security announcements, like the Google Cyber Security Action Team. The changing landscape of work brought on by the pandemic has lead to more and more remote work. Workspace is adapting to this new environment, and our guests tell us about the new features available to workers at home. As Google works to revolutionize technologies for clients, they also keep sustainability in mind. Next saw announcements in the clean cloud space and Google’s continued commitment to a carbon-free existence. New carbon reporting for clients and new features in Google Earth Engine and Active Assist help Google clients with their sustainability goals, too. Brian Hall Brian is the VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud. He was formerly a VP at AWS, CEO of Doppler Labs, and VP for Microsoft Surface with 20+ years at Microsoft. Forrest Brazeal Forrest is a cloud educator, author, speaker, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter based in Charlotte, NC. Cool things of the week Cloud Next site Solving for What’s Next blog Training more than 40 million new people on Google Cloud skills blog Interview Cloud Next site Next Catalog site Opening Keynote site Solving for What’s Next blog GKE Autopilot site Workspace site Vertex AI site Apache Spark on Google Cloud site Tableau site Fivetran site HVR site Informatica site Trifacta site Anthos site Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog Google Distributed Cloud site NetApp site T-Systems and Google Cloud Partner to Deliver Sovereign Cloud for Germany press release Thales and Google Cloud Announce Strategic Partnership to Jointly Develop a Trusted Cloud Offering in France press release Google Cybersecurity Action Team site AppSheet site BeyondCorp site Google Earth Engine site Active Assist site Data Cloud Keynote site What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie is working on a video series with Eric Brewer.

This week, Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey welcome Perry Pierce and JoAnn Brereton of Major League Baseball to the show to talk sports and cloud. Baseball teams are independently owned franchises, Perry explains, with MLB acting as the oversight corporation. This keeps game play fair and consistent. Like most large corporations these days, technology has become a vital business tool for MLB. Their partnership with Google facilitated a shift from on-prem to the cloud, allowing MLB to take advantage of advanced capabilities like scaling and managed services in a safe environment. JoAnn talks about the process of this shift and the teams at Google that helped make it happen. She details the systems that MLB has moved to GCP, like game scheduling, umpire management, backend systems, and especially the draft. The amateur draft, a multi-day event, has a special set of challenges that MLB and Google had to overcome. Analyzing player statistics and updating which players have been picked and who is still available are important information for teams. These stats must update quickly and accurately. On the backend, the Electronic Baseball Information System (EBIS) is the MLB software making this all happen, and JoAnn helps us understand the technical side of this Kubernetes-built platform. Google monitoring and EBIS-specific tools keep the draft running smoothly. Our guests take us through this list of tools employed and why they were chosen. We hear more about the process of moving such a complicated system to the cloud and what MLB did to make the shift easier. Perry and JoAnn talk about the testing done before draft days to ensure a smooth experience for all and important lessons they learned. To wrap up the show, our guests offer advice, stressing the importance of observability and starting small. Major League Baseball trademarks used with permission. Perry Pierce Baseball is what Perry Pierce loves and tech is what he does. Living at the intersection of sports and tech is a cool place to be! JoAnn Brereton JoAnn loves baseball and tech, so she’s happy to be working at a job where she gets to do both. Cool things of the week Cloud NAT explained! blog Build your data analytics skills with the latest no cost BigQuery trainings blog Introducing Workflows callbacks blog Interview MLB site MLB Draft site Kubernetes site Grafana site Inside Baseball: How MLB Transactions Actually Get Done blog LBi Software site What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian has been working on a YouTube series on VMs with Carter Morgan. Next week is Google Cloud Next!

Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Stephanie Wong host this week’s episode all about managing non-REST APIs. Guests Nandan Sridhar and Dave Feuer start the show introducing our listeners to Apigee, a full life cycle API management tool, and the three tenets of Apigee that streamline the relationship between producers of APIs and their users. APIs have come a long way as technologies have changed, and David explains the evolution of API development and how it relates to the newer non-REST APIs. The consumption of applications has significantly changed, but Nandan points out that developer strategies and experiences have also changed. These advances have led to the popularity of non-REST APIs. APIs are being used in new ways David tells us, and through examples, we hear how Apigee is helping these companies realize their cutting-edge API goals. Nandan helps our listeners understand the difference between REST and non-REST APIs and the advantages of the latter in today’s technological environments. Each of the four main types of non-REST APIs have their specialities, he explains, like GraphQL which is great for experiences, and gRPC, which has special communication features that increase efficiency. Our guests elaborate on the exciting features of these two protocols and how their uses will continue to innovate business and consumer interactions into the future. Our guests offer advice for companies and developers looking to take advantage of these non-REST APIs and help us understand the role Apigee plays in protecting the quality of all types of APIs. Dave Feuer Dave Feuer is Senior Product Manager at Apigee, a part of Google Cloud Platform. Previously, Dave ran the Platforms & Strategies practice at a boutique consulting firm, designing and implementing developer programs for Fortune 100 companies. Prior to that, Dave ran enterprise product development and software engineering at IDT and Net2Phone, a telecommunications and payments company. Dave started his career as an embedded software development engineer, and frequently questions how he ended up spending so much time in Google Slides. Nandan Sridhar Nandan Sridhar works in the Product Management team at Google Cloud, Apigee. Nandan’s expertise includes API design standards, API security and microservices. Cool things of the week What’s your org’s reliability mindset? Insights from Google SREs blog Climate TRACE site Interview Apigee API Management site GraphQL site GraphQL Documentation docs Announcing Apigee’s native support for managing lifecycle of GraphQL APIs blog Getting started with Apigee API management using Apigee videos gRPC site What’s something cool you’re working on? Alexandrina has been working on the Getting Started with Apigee API Management YouTube series. Next is coming up soon, too!

On the podcast this week, our guests Brian Schwarz and Sean Derrington discuss the ins and outs of the new storage launches with your hosts Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown. Brian gives light introductions to the five facets of Google’s data storage portfolio, like the primary storage solutions for files, storage of backups of data, and data transfer software and hardware. Lately, the Google team has been enhancing existing data solutions and building new ones. Cloud Storage’s multi-region and custom dual-region options easily let customers keep data safe and accessible. Our guests explain what happens behind the scenes to make these features so effective. Brian and Sean describe the user experience, including how clients can see when data is being replicated and where. New capabilities like Turbo Replication allow more modernization for clients moving to the cloud as well. Sean talks about the new Filestore Enterprise, which allows companies to move critical apps to the cloud quickly and securely, and we learn why accurate, fast file and data replication is so important for these large customers. If there is corruption or accidental deletion of a file, Brian and Sean tell us about the fail-safes that are in place and the process for recovery. Filestore Enterprise, Filestore Basic, and GKE working together offer a more customized approach for large clients, allowing them to allocate their critical projects to Enterprise and other less important applications to Basic. Stateful applications in containers are becoming more popular as well, and our guests tell us how Backup for GKE is the easiest way to protect GKE workloads. Brian Schwarz Brian has had 20 years in product management in data center infrastructure. Before Google, he spent time at Veritas, Cisco, and most recently Pure Storage. Sean Derrington Sean has spent 20 years in storage product management. Before Google, he spent time at Veritas, Exablox, and StorageCraft. Cool things of the week Run code samples directly in the Google Cloud documentation blog Why representation matters: 6 tips on how to build DEI into your business blog Google Cloud announces new Cloud Digital Leader training and certification blog Google Cloud Next site Interview GKE site Google Cloud Storage site Filestore site Filestore Enterprise docs New storage features help ensure data is never lost blog Announcing Filestore Enterprise, for your most demanding apps blog Announcing Backup for GKE: the easiest way to protect GKE workloads blog Webinar: What’s New with Storage at Google Cloud site What’s something cool you’re working on? Jenny is working on Google Cloud Reader and further audio formats for all your favorite cloud content.

Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey are together again this week for an episode all about cloud migration using Txture and Accenture. Our guests Matthias Farwick of Txture, Patrick Niesel of Accenture, and Jason Purvor of Google help us understand their roles in cloud migration with some formal introductions to start the show. Txture helps companies assess their migration capabilities, providing insights to what will be necessary in the process and how viable cloud migration is as an option. Accenture works with Txture to augment the planning of migration strategies for clients. Jason helps us understand how Google uses the information gleaned from these assessments to help customers understand what the journey to Google Cloud will look like for their business. Txture provides good data which helps Google and clients make better decisions, not just in migration, but for the future health of the project while operating in the cloud. Our guests share the challenges of cloud migration and detail how these three powerhouse companies work together to overcome hurdles. From information gathering and budgeting to security and implementation, Txture, Accenture, and Google help companies understand their specific obstacles and develop a plan. Matthias uses a large banking client as an example to walk our listeners through a typical cloud migration process that takes advantage of Txture, Accenture, and Google. Jason details the process customers go through with Google as they establish their cloud environments and make decisions about the future of their projects. Through the analysis of four layers, Google helps customers think through this highly technical and involved migration process. Matthias describes the three assessment steps Txture applies to the process as well, and how these multiple-company analyses work together to create a solid cloud project now and continue to improve the project in the future. Matthias, Patrick, and Jason offer advice for companies considering a shift to the cloud, stressing the importance of preparing good data and keeping time predictions realistic. Company-wide cooperation is an important tool in the success of a cloud migration as well. Matthias Farwick Matthias Farwick co-founded Txture, a software for large scale cloud application assessments and modernization programs that is currently expanding to the US. Matthias is an avid mountaineer and skier. Patrick Niesel Patrick Niesel has been working within Accenture focusing on cloud transformations and in particular on application assessments. Jason Purvor Jason Purvor is a data centre exit strategist engaged in large scale migrations and “all in” transformations. He formerly ran CloudPhysics EMEA supporting Googlers with high resolution data center assessments. Cool things of the week What is Cloud SQL? blog Save money and time with automated VM management and suspend/resume blog Cost optimization using automated VM management docs Interview Txture site Accenture site Cloud Insider site Txture Cloud Transformation site Data Centre Transformation with Google site Cloud Maturity Assessment site Google Cloud Adoption Framework whitepaper Accenture-Google Business Group site The Txture Cloud Transformation Platform site Cloud Center of Excellence blog The 6Rs of Cloud Transformation blog Cloud-to-Cloud Assessment blog What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is working on a video series called VM End to End with Carter Morgan.

Carter Morgan and Guillaume Laforge co-host this week’s episode about what it took to develop the Google I/O Adventure Game. Our guest Valentin Deleplace and Guillaume introduce us to the game designed to encourage interaction with I/O attendees at the virtual conference held this year. Adventure takes the look of a 90s role-playing game. The online world facilitates the meeting of hundreds of conference attendees and presenters to mimic the in-person conference setting and facilitate meaningful conversations. With avatars, text chatting capabilities, and mini games, attendees’ experiences go beyond simply watching online technical presentations. The development of Adventure Game required scalability to handle varying attendee numbers. It takes advantage of many GCP products, including Compute Engine and Cloud Run. Valentin describes why he and the team chose Cloud Run and how they used it to to stress test the game. He talks about challenges the team faced and how they overcame them to produce a smooth, enjoyable experience for conference-goers. Being a game that’s live for specific periods of time rather than indefinitely presented different challenges as well. Valentin explains that scaling down, for example, is treated differently for this type of game. Adventure will be available at future conferences. Valentin Deleplace Valentin Deleplace is a developer advocate at Google. He’s also a senior cloud backend engineer, interested in performance and UX, and an enthusiast Gopher. Cool things of the week New Cloud Functions min instances reduces serverless cold starts blog What’s the key to a more secure Cloud Function? It’s a secret! blog Shift security left with on-demand vulnerability scanning blog All you need to know about Cloud Storage blog Interview Google I/O site Chrome Dev Summit site Join the Adventure at Google I/O video Google’s I/O Adventure was almost as good as being there article Set Snail site Compute Engine site Cloud Run site Using WebSockets docs App Engine site Agones site What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is working VM End to End. Guillaume is working on new features for Cloud Workflows and helping with the Serverless Expeditions videos.

Your hosts Stephanie Wong and Alicia Williams talk about BigQuery Admin Reference Guides with guest Leigha Jarett. Leigha tells us a bit about the origins of the Admin Reference Guide, which was developed to address frequent customer questions. The series of guides and videos covers onboarding topics from resource hierarchy and APIs to BigQuery tables and storage in an effort to help new admins get started. The team’s Reference Guide on tables helps admins understand the difference between federated and native tables, and Leigha tells our listeners some tips for using each type. Slots and reservations for workload management in BigQuery can be challenging to understand, but these Reference Guides and accompanying videos offer clear explanations. Optimizing projects for speed and monetary efficiency are important topics for any client, and Leigha and the optimization team have addressed these concerns as well. Tips for monitoring, data governance, and the secure sharing of data are also included in their video series, BigQuery Spotlight. We wrap up with a discussion on BigQuery APIs and how easy it is to integrate BigQuery and other Google products. Leigha Jarett Leigha is a developer advocate on the Google Cloud Data & Analytics team. She focuses on making sure developers using tools like BigQuery and Looker are getting the most possible value from their data. Cool things of the week Analyze Cloud Spanner data in BigQuery with federated queries docs Release notes dataset in BigQuery docs and XML feed Google Cloud release notes docs and XML feed Release notes in Cloud Console site Top 25 Google Search terms, now in BigQuery blog Interview BigQuery Admin Reference Guide Blog Recap site BigQuery Admin Reference Guide blog posts site BigQuery Spotlight Video Series videos BigQuery site BigQuery Documentation docs Cloud Spanner site Data Catalog site Apps Script site Looker site What’s something cool you’re working on? Alicia is building new BigQuery architectures in order to understand the journey and identify potential pain areas that may need more support.

This week on the podcast, we welcome guest Megan O’Keefe to talk about KRM and Kubernetes with your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Anthony Bushong. To start the show, Megan gives us a quick rundown of Kubernetes, an open-source tool to orchestrate containers and manage other GCP resources. She explains the difference between declarative and imperative to help us better understand the basics of Kubernetes. We tackle the challenges people face when beginning their Kubernetes journey and how it works with other open-source projects, like Anthos. This year, Megan and her team have been working to help developers understand the Kubernetes Resource Model, a concept that helps define how companies can organize and run clusters, enforce policies, and more for improved standardization across multiple teams. Megan explains GitOps, a deployment model for Kubernetes focusing on Git, and takes us through examples of implementation. We learn about Config Sync and how it helps with optimizing and automating GitOps. Megan goes over some other valuable tools, including Open Policy Agent and Gatekeeper, which help developers specify not just which resources are allowed, but also what kinds of things are allowed within each resource. We wrap up the show with a discussion on streamlining the development process with strategic use of Kubernetes and the help of open-source tools like Skaffold. Megan also talks about controllers like Config Connector that help with deploying to a GCP project and the things she finds most exciting about this space. Megan O’Keefe Megan O’Keefe is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud, helping developers build platforms with Kubernetes and Anthos. Cool things of the week Listen up! Google Cloud Reader reaches 50 episodes blog Private Pools Overview docs Interview Kubernetes site GKE site KRM site KRM Tutorial Demos site Build a platform with KRM: Part 1 - What’s in a platform? blog Build a platform with KRM: Part 2 - How the Kubernetes resource model works blog Build a platform with KRM: Part 3 - Simplifying Kubernetes app development blog Build a platform with KRM: Part 4 - Administering a multi-cluster environment blog Build a platform with KRM: Part 5 - Manage hosted resources from Kubernetes blog I do declare! Infrastructure automation with Configuration as Data blog Multi-cluster Use Cases docs CNCF Kubernetes Overview site Anthos site Anthos Technical Overview docs Anthos Config Management site Config Sync Overview docs Guide To GitOps site Policy Controller Overview docs Kustomize site Cloud Code site Config Connector Overview docs Crossplane site Skaffold site Open Policy Agent site Backstage site What’s something cool you’re working on? Anthony shared info about GKE on the podcast last week and he’s been working on his video series on GKE cost optimization. The solutions guide and white paper are great resources for this topic.

Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani host this week’s episode of the podcast as we celebrate one of our favorite Google products, Google Kubernetes Engine! Anthony Bushong and Gari Singh join the party to talk about GKE’s life journey, what’s new, and what’s coming up for the service. Each guest brings their unique perspective to the show starting with their definitions of Kubernetes and GKE, tailored to a six year old. How does Kubernetes relate to cookies, Disney World, and Pokemon? Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari break it down. Next, each guest talks their favorite GKE features and what makes the service different. Kaslin loves the persistent storage feature, among others. Anthony appreciates the evolution of GKE to a place where it supports many different workloads and situations for clients and how easy it is to get started with GKE. GKE’s ability to connect easily to other GCP products and features and GKE Autopilot are some of Gari’s favorite things about the service. Best practices and advice for new users are shared by our guests. From practical tips for project planning to encouragement with long-term problem solving, our guests offer listeners resources and ideas for a successful GKE project. Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari share their favorite customer stories with us and talk about the fun, interesting events Google has hosted for GKE customers. The future of GKE looks bright, with new options for Windows containers, expanded Autopilot uses, and multicluster support. KubeCon is coming up soon, so keep an eye out for more Kubernetes and GKE news! Anthony Bushong Anthony Bushong has been working in the field with production GKE users, both large and small, for almost 5 years now. In Kubernetes time, since Kubernetes v1.3! Gari Singh Gari Singh is an Outbound Product Manager focused on GKE and Anthos. In this role, he has the opportunity to work with many customers and help align their needs with overall product direction. Kaslin Fields Kaslin Fields is a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador, and a contributor to Open Source Kubernetes. As a Developer Advocate, she engages with Open Source communities both as a member, and as an advocate for their needs as users (or potential users) of Google Cloud’s products. She is passionate about making technology accessible to a broad audience through making the information available in many forms, such as videos, blogs, documentation, and even comics which she illustrates herself! Cool things of the week Try a tutorial in the Google Cloud Console blog GCP Podcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast Migrate, Manage & Modernize: Windows Workloads Powered by GKE and Anthos site Interview GKE site Kubernetes site Explain Like I’m 5: Containers VS VMs blog Introducing GKE Autopilot: a revolution in managed Kubernetes blog Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs Discover and invoke services across clusters with GKE multi-cluster services blog The evolution of Kubernetes networking with the GKE Gateway controller blog Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud blog Bayer Crop Science seeds the future with 15000-node GKE clusters blog Helping researchers at CERN to analyze powerful data and uncover the secrets of our universe blog Optimize costs in GKE with monitoring systems video Monitoring for efficient cluster binpacking in GKE video Monitoring for app right-sizing in GKE video Cloud Next 2021 site KubeCon site GCP Podcast Episode 210: Kubernetes Config Connector with Emily Cai podcast GCP Podcast Episode 234: GKE Turns Five with Alex Zakonov and Drew Bradstock podcast GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast GCP Podcast Episode 257: GKE Autopilot with Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss podcast What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin is working on a ton of things, including Kube Essentials and GKE Essentials (coming soon), KubeCon panel and keynote addresses, and Fields Tested - CNCF Twitch - CTF.

Guest Ryan Przybyl is back this week to tell hosts Lorin Price and Stephanie Wong more about service networking and what the future holds for the networking field. Picking up from last week, Ryan starts by detailing the products and features Google has developed to help enterprise customers shift to a service networking architecture. He walks us through an example scenario and explains how a company might work with Google to gradually shift. Google continues to grow in the service networking space. As client requirements are identified or changed, Google continually develops products to satisfy the varying networking needs. Ryan talks about tools like Network Intelligence Center, which allows network visibility and aims to ease the transition for traditional networking specialists. He talks about the Grow with Google Model, a term he coined to describe the step-by-step path his team helps enterprises take in the journey to full service networking. The process can take years and Ryan encourages clients to revisit their models periodically to take full advantage of new Google product offerings. He addresses the financial aspects of the networking shift as well. Ryan offers advice for companies looking to move to the cloud and tells our listeners his thoughts on the future of networking. Ryan Przybyl Ryan Przybyl is a Networking Specialist at Google Chicago, and has held roles in both Cloud Customer Engineering and Google’s Network Operations. Prior to Google, Ryan was the Senior Director of Sales Engineering for Level 3 Communications. Ryan’s focus is on helping customers understand Google Cloud’s networking technologies while ensuring customers make use of Google Cloud best practices. When not talking with customers, Ryan is usually working with product and engineering teams to ensure Google Cloud is developing the right networking products for the future. Cool things of the week Consume services faster, privately and securely - Private Service Connect now in GA blog Elevate your security with new Secret Manager features and integrations blog Google named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services again blog Interview Google Cloud Networking Products site Private Service Connect docs Private Service Connect and Service Directory: A revolution to connect your application in Cloud video Migration to Google Cloud: Getting Started docs What’s New in Networking videos The future of service networking video Traffic Director site Envoy Proxy site Network Intelligence Center site What’s something cool you’re working on? Lorin is working on Private Service Connect docs. Stephanie is working on new episodes of What’s New in Networking.

This week on the show, Lorin Price and Stephanie talk about the differences between traditional and service networking with guest Ryan Przybyl. Ryan starts the show telling us how customer needs and advancing cloud technologies have shifted the conversations he has with customers from a traditional networking focus to an emphasis on cloud services. Ryan describes how he helps different sized companies approach networking, whether they’re cloud native or shifting to a cloud approach from a traditional background. For example, companies that take advantage of Google Cloud and its services can deploy environments quickly, allowing developers to work without infrastructure constraints. Enterprise companies using more traditional networking that move into the cloud will need to make some changes, Ryan says, comparing apples to oranges. They want to move in a way that takes advantage of the cloud without negatively impacting performance. Later, Ryan tells us all about service-oriented networking and how it’s possible for companies to choose pieces to shift to a service-oriented architecture without re-doing the entire project. We learn about Google’s Private Service Connect which handles things like routing for companies connecting to third party services. Ryan offers some advice for companies considering this move and regales us with interesting anecdotes from his time helping clients. Ryan Przybyl Ryan Przybyl is a Networking Specialist at Google Chicago, and has held roles in both Cloud Customer Engineering and Google’s Network Operations. Prior to Google, Ryan was the Senior Director of Sales Engineering for Level 3 Communications. Ryan’s focus is on helping customers understand Google Cloud’s networking technologies while ensuring customers make use of Google Cloud best practices. When not talking with customers, Ryan is usually working with product and engineering teams to ensure Google Cloud is developing the right networking products for the future. Cool things of the week Private Service Connect is GA blog Securing the software development lifecycle with Cloud Build and SLSA blog Container Security: Building trust in your software supply chain site Introducing Cloud Build private pools: Secure CI/CD for private networks blog Interview Google Cloud Networking Products site Private Service Connect docs Private Service Connect and Service Directory: A revolution to connect your application in Cloud video Migration to Google Cloud: Getting Started docs What’s New in Networking videos What’s something cool you’re working on? Lorin is working on Private Service Connect docs.

Philip O’Toole and Reed Taylor talk with Stephanie and guest host Terry Ryan all about the new features in Google Cloud Logging on this episode of the podcast. Cloud Logging provides users with management and analyzation of project logs, the reports that describe the state of every system in a project. Reed walks us through Cloud Logging, including a list of features and how other GCP products integrate well with Logging. Once logs are sorted, Cloud Logging also provides tools for detailed query and analysis of log data. But storage and management of logs is as important as sorting and analyzing, and Reed tells us why this third component is vital. New features in storage and management promise to streamline the process. Log Buckets, for example, allow the separation of routing and storage, while Log Views make secure field-level access possible. Log Retention means users can dictate how long different types of logs are stored. These new features help users comply with standards and regulations in the data space. Our guests give more examples of how these tools improve logging tasks. Philip O’Toole Philip O’Toole is an Engineering Manager at Google Pittsburgh, leading development teams working on GCP’s Cloud Logging Platform. Prior to Google he led development teams at InfluxDB, Loggly, and Riverbed Technology. You can find him on the web at https://www.philipotoole.com. Reed Taylor Reed Taylor is a Senior Product Manager at Google Pittsburgh, just last week marked his 10th “Googleversary” since starting at the office. In that time he’s worked on a range of products including Google Search, Google Shopping, and AdWords. Reed joined GCP just this Spring, and is now focused on Logging products within the Cloud Operations suite. Cool things of the week Grow your ML skills with free offer from Coursera blog Advancing our trusted cloud with engineered-in, invisible security blog Interview Google Cloud Logging site Google Cloud Logging Documentation docs Managing log buckets docs Managing log views on your log buckets docs Data Governance for Log Data Whitepaper site Principles for Security and Managing Logs Whitepaper site What’s something cool you’re working on? Terry has been working on tutorials for the Cloud Ops team. His recent Cloud Logging tutorial is available now.

This week on the podcast, hosts Stephanie Wong and Bukola Ayodele speak with Nikhil Kaul and Victor Szalvay about security in the software supply chain. Cloud OnAir will be offering a virtual event on supply chain software security on July 29th, and our guests start the show by telling us more about it. The recent cyber attacks on US companies have brought to light the importance of cyber security. A new set of guidelines for securing these components and software as a whole will be released soon, impacting not just software developers but the users as well. The Cloud OnAir event will breakdown these new guidelines and educate attendees on steps to take to ensure more secure software and software components. Internally, Google has been optimizing their software supply chain security for years with solutions like BeyondCorp and internally developed solutions that Google has since adapted for their clients. These solutions will be discussed in detail in the Cloud OnAir event. Victor goes on to explain the three areas of supply chain security and how they fit into the overall security of online platforms. Software projects are often built using many small pieces of software sourced from third parties, which can create vulnerabilities. The new guidelines will help ensure quality and security at all levels of development for software and its pieces, thus strengthening security at every level of the supply chain. Nikhil and Victor talk about issues that contribute to supply chain security, including the risks that a microservices architecture can introduce and the use of open source software and their dependencies. We hear about Google’s contributions to the supply chain security effort, like OpenSSF that strives to bring the open source community together toward the goal of cyber security. Our guests give listeners tips on starting the supply chain security journey. Join the Cloud OnAir talk to learn more! Nikhil Kaul Nikhil leads a team of product marketers focused on driving and building messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategy for Google Cloud’s DevOps portfolio. Victor Szalvay Victor is an Outbound Product Manager with Google Cloud focused on helping customers get the most from the cloud. Previously he has been a tech entrepreneur and leader, with a concentration on DevOps and app dev team productivity. Cool things of the week Helping you pick the greenest region for your Google Cloud resources blog Optimizing your Google Cloud spend with BigQuery and Looker blog Interview Container Security: Building trust in your software supply chain site OpenSSF site Deps site SLSA site Cloud Build site BeyondCorp site Binary Authorization for Borg docs GKE Autopilot docs GCP Podcast Episode 251: BeyondCorp with Kiran Nair and Ameet Jani podcast What’s something cool you’re working on? Bukola is working on the new season of Security Command Center set to be released next month!

Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani are talking intro to Firestore this week with fellow Googler Allison Kornher. Allison, a Cloud Technical Resident, starts the show telling us about the program and how it brought her to Firestore. Allison takes us through the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases and describes the four categories of NoSQL databases: family, document, key value, and graph. Firestore is a scalable, flexible NoSQL document database. To illustrate the uses and benefits of Firestore, Allison walks us through a delicious pizza example. Each document in the database belongs to a collection, which is used to organize these documents. Firestore documents are assigned an identifier and can be quickly changed and called within their collections. Because these documents are stored in an implicit schema in key value pairs, developers have control over the details of database organization and data change and growth are easy to manage. The availability of subcollections further adds to the flexibility of Firestore database design. Choosing a database type will depend on the situation, and Allison suggests this starts with a look at CAP theorem. If a document database is your database of choice, Allison gives our listeners tips for getting started with Firestore and clearing any hurdles along the way. Allison Kornher Allison is a Cloud Technical Resident and has worked helping startups looking to join GCP and in the Premium Tier Cloud Support organization with a focus on Storage. Cool things of the week BigQuery admin reference guide: Tables & routines blog Top 25 Google Search terms, now in BigQuery blog Three security and scalability improvements for Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog GCP Podcast Episode 247: Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat podcast GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast Interview Cloud Firestore site Cloud Firestore Documentation docs Cloud Firestore explained: for users who never used Firestore before blog Gabi on Twitter site Datastore site BigTable site Firebase Realtime Database site Memorystore site Cloud Spanner site GCP Podcast Episode 248: Cloud Spanner Revisited with Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler podcast All you need to know about Firestore: A cheatsheet blog What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian has been working on sharing a persistent disk between Google Compute Engine VMs. Cloud Storage site Cloud Filestore site Cloud SQL site

Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown are your hosts this week, discussing data analytics with the yin and yang of the field, Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt. Our guests introduce us to three new Google offerings, BigQuery Omni, Dataplex, and the Analytics Hub, and discuss the uses and implications of each and how they work together to achieve goals. Bruno and Eric describe challenges in data analytics and how Google uses these as opportunities to create problem-solving systems that solve real client problems. Through real-world examples from companies like Equifax, we see how companies are getting more information from their data in a way that creates actionable opportunities to improve customer experiences. For multi-cloud companies, BigQuery Omni gets the most out of data that exists in multiple clouds. To accomplish this, Google takes the analytics to the data and is able to reach all appropriate data across clouds without having to move it. This allows for cheaper analysis with much less system downtime. Support for Azure was added this year. The new Dataplex software helps customers intelligently manage data assets, especially in distributed systems. Dataplex lets companies automatically discover data, make data secure without having to move it, and apply governance and policies centrally so the data is accessible. Rather than sit unused, data can now be found easily, analyzed securely, and put to work for companies no matter where their data lives. For analytic asset sharing, Analytics Hub lets companies coordinate with others to get the most use out of their data efficiently. Analytics Hub gets to data value as quickly and easily as possible. Companies can publish, discover, and subscribe to shared assets, create exchanges that combine data sets, and curate exchanges of data and insights for full information sharing. Eric Schmidt Eric is the Head of Advocacy for Data Analytics at Google and has been with us for almost 8 years. He comes to us from Microsoft, where he led Advocacy and Evangelism there, too. Eric is an expert in products like BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and leads a team of leaders who help customers turn data into value. In his downtime, Eric is also a Dj at KEXP 90.3 Seattel - KEPX.ORG where he guest hosts a modern global music show. You can find Eric on Twitter. His handle is @notthateric - not to be confused with the ‘other Eric Schmidt’ here at Google. In fact, internally, we affectionately call him “cloude”. Bruno Aziza Bruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud and specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence. Before working at Google, Bruno worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led one of the fastest turnarounds in the business analytics industry. He led the launch of startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco), Sisense and AtScale and he helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. Bruno has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany. He has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management. And he has a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics. Cool things of the week BigQuery row-level security enables more granular access to data blog Expanding access to quantum today for a better tomorrow blog Expanding partner solutions at the network edge blog Interview Data Cloud Summit site Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog Dataplex site Analytics Hub site Intelligent Data and Analytics Fabric video GCP Podcast Episode 253: Data Governance with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad podcast Public Data Sets site Smart analytics reference patterns site Data and Analytics Sharing at Equifax: Immediate, Interconnected, Scalable, and Secure video BigQuery ML site Learn more about these launches site What’s something cool you’re working on? Jenny has been working on Google Cloud Reader episodes on BigQuery Explained.

On the podcast this week, Stephanie Wong and Abdel Sghiouar are joined by guest Jan Harasym of Sharkmob Games, who starts the interview describing how he and his team designed the infrastructure for The Division. With the game’s sequel, The Division II, in development, Jan and his team made the decision to use a cloud provider. Jan describes the differences between on-prem and cloud, outlining the benefits of GCP for game development and hosting, including better reliability and development environments. Scaling a cloud project can be much more efficient, and Jan tells us some tricks for doing it well. We talk about the process of migrating this large game to Google Cloud and how they choose the software and development tools they used. When Sharkmob migrated to the cloud, Jan worked to convince the company that GCP was the way to go. He tells us more about how he persuaded the team, how they planned the migration, and the overall success of the process. Sharkmob is working on two new projects for the future and soon will be releasing a new game, Vampire Masquerade Blood Hunt. Jan Harasym Jan has helped make online games work for eight years. Most recently, he helped release Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 with online infrastructure on top of GCP. Cool things of the week New Tau VMs deliver leading price-performance for scale-out workloads blog Introducing container-native Cloud DNS: Global DNS for Kubernetes blog Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 site Interview Sharkmob site The Division 1 site The Division 2 site Massive site Unreal site Zookeeper site Agones site Kubernetes site GKE site Blood Hunt site What’s something cool you’re working on? Abdel is working on GKE Network Recipes.

Our old pal Mark Mirchandani is back this week, joining Stephanie Wong and our guests Steve McGhee and Yuri Grinshteyn to talk about Site Reliability Engineering. SRE is Google’s way of helping companies of all sizes create consistent, predictable, and functional projects. It helps clients approach operations from a software engineering stand point so that growing systems can be managed efficiently. We talk about the challenges of implementing best SRE practices and how companies can overcome these. Though the benefits of SRE are many, it can be difficult for clients to grasp. Steve and Yuri tell us the process they go through with customers to help them set realistic goals and work to make reliable, scalable projects with little downtime. By starting small and taking wins early, Steve says clients reap the rewards of SRE and are encouraged to push forward. Yuri’s customer-centric approach encourages companies to prioritize alerts that affect the user experience, thus limiting inbox mayhem and keeping customers happy. Alerts based on symptoms, Steve says, help accomplish this goal. Later, Yuri and Steve describe the best ways for companies to get started with SRE. Realistic goals and specific detailed plans can make the journey less bumpy for clients, and Google’s SRE team can help. Steve McGhee Steve was an SRE at Google for about 10 years, then left to help a company build reliable systems on the Cloud. Now he’s back at Google, helping more companies do that. Yuri Grinshteyn Yuri works with Google Cloud Platform customers to help them design, architect, build, and operate reliable applications and services. He also advocates for SRE principles and practices on YouTube and elsewhere. Cool things of the week Fresh updates: Google Cloud 2021 Summits blog Why you need to explain machine learning models blog GCP Podcast Episode 260: Responsible AI with Craig Wiley and Tracy Frey podcast GCP Podcast Episode 249: ML Lifecycle with Dale Markowitz and Craig Wiley podcast GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz podcast Interview Site Reliability Engineering site Reliability Architecture Framework site Site Reliability Engineering: Measuring and Managing Reliability on Coursera site Developing a Google SRE Culture on Coursera site How Lowe’s meets customer demand with Google SRE practices blog GCP Podcast Episode 68: The Home Depot with William Bonnell podcast GCP Podcast Episode 213: The Art of SLOs with Alex Bramley podcast GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast GCP Podcast Episode 72: Customer Reliability Engineering with Luke Stone podcast GCP Podcast Episode 38: Site Reliability Engineering with Paul Newson podcast GCP Podcast Episode 59: SRE II with Paul Newson podcast What’s something cool you’re working on? Yuri has been working on Engineering for Reliability. Stephanie has been working on her new series What’s New in Networking.

Max Saltonstall and Carter Morgan co-host the podcast this week and talk APIs with our guests, Dave Feuer and Benjamin Schuler. Apigee, an API management platform that is a part of Google Cloud, focuses on all steps of the digital product life cycle to make API management easy for clients. The software company SAP provides data storage and other business support for different types of companies across the world. Together, Apigee and SAP allow data to be collected, stored, organized, and securely accessed and shared with other applications. The shift to e-commerce and the desire for tailored experiences has driven the need for more API usage and therefore better API management. SAP and Apigee, with their myriad features, allow businesses to keep up with these increasing demands efficiently. We hear examples of how companies are leveraging these tools and use cases where the power of SAP and Apigee benefit customers most. Our guests describe the developer experience as well. We talk about the process of creating a project with both SAP and Apigee and why both tools working together makes the developer’s job easier. Planning your project with an “API first” mindset means choosing APIs and SAP software early in the planning process to better align your project with your business goals. Apigee can help you manage these APIs securely, letting you choose the data that is shared. The use of both SAP and Apigee helps companies to realize long-term efficiency and streamlined operations as development becomes easier with each additional API. Benjamin Schuler Benjamin Schuler is a Solution Manager for SAP at Google Cloud with a focus on topics around application modernization. Prior to joining Google, he was working directly for SAP’s consulting unit and helped companies move parts of their SAP landscape to the cloud. When he is not busy populating spreadsheets or adding yet another //TODO: to his demo apps, he likes to get out onto the water for some freeride kitesurfing. Dave Feuer Dave Feuer is Senior Product Manager at Apigee, a part of Google Cloud Platform. Previously, Dave ran the Platforms & Strategies practice at a boutique consulting firm, designing and implementing developer programs for Fortune 100 companies. Prior to that, Dave ran enterprise telecommunications product development and software engineering at IDT and Net2Phone, a telecommunications and payments company. Dave started his career as an embedded software development engineer, and frequently questions how he ended up spending so much time in Google Slides. Cool things of the week AI Simplified: Managing ML data sets with Vertex AI blog Create your own journaling app without writing code blog AppSheet Journal site Interview Apigee site Apigee Setup site SAP site Apigee: Your gateway to more manageable APIs for SAP blog Accelerate the time to value of your SAP data with Apigee video GCP Podcast Episode 54: API Lifecycle with Alan Ho podcast GCP Podcast Episode 219: Spotify with Josh Brown podcast Conrad Electronic: Powering next-gen retail with BigQuery and Apigee API management site Schlumberger chooses GCP to deliver new oil and gas technology platform blog Schlumberger Selects Google Cloud for its Enterprise-Wide SAP Migration and Modernization site What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is documenting how Google & Alphabet made the move to SAP. He’s also working on a Discord bot on Google Cloud and ITRP series launch. Carter is working on a SAP content video series and teaching in the Equity Through Technology program.

Stephanie Wong and cohost Gabi Ferrara talk about the exciting launch of Database Migration Service at Google. Our guests this week, Shachar Guz and Gabe Weiss, start the show explaining DMS, focusing on the ease of infrastructure management for cloud users. Migration is made simpler with DMS, and Shachar and Gabe walk us through the process of using this powerful new service. Our guests outline some hurdles to migration and how DMS and the DMS documentation help developers overcome them. Shacher tells us the steps companies should take before and after running DMS to ensure projects run correctly and business logic is preserved as well, and Gabe stresses the importance of testing. Database Migration Service focuses on open source, and we talk about why this is an important benefit. In addition, the thorough explanations embedded in DMS help users navigate easily, serverless technology means projects are fast and efficient, and native applications are leveraged for better transparency. And it’s free. 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. Gabe Weiss Gabe works on 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 Unlock the power of change data capture and replication with new, serverless Datastream blog Introducing Dataplex—an intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale blog Data Cloud Summit site Google Cloud’s New 2021 Analytics Launches video Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog Applied ML Summit site Interview Database Migration Service site DMS Documentation docs Cloud SQL site Network Intelligence Center site Introducing Database Migration Service video Best practices for homogeneous database migrations blog Database Migration Service Connectivity—A technical introspective blog Migrating MySQL data to Cloud SQL using Database Migration Service Qwiklab site What’s something cool you’re working on? Gabbi is going to CrimeCon for fun!

On the podcast this week, we’re diving into what full stack development looks like on Google Cloud. Guests Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore join your hosts Stephanie Wong and Grant Timmerman to help us understand how developers can leverage Dart and Google Cloud to create powerful and effective front end and back end systems for their projects. Kevin takes us through the evolution of Dart and Flutter and how they have become a way to allow developers an experience-first solution. Developers can focus on the experience they want to create, then decide which platforms to run on. With Dart, Google provides business logic that allows developers to provide the front end and back end experience for users in one programming language. Our guests talk about the types of projects that will benefit most from the use of Dart and how Dart is expanding to offer more features and better usability. Flutter offers a high fidelity, rich framework that supports mobile and can be deployed on any platform. When paired with Dart on Docker Hub, developers can easily build optimized front and back end systems. Tony and Kevin tell us about the new Functions Framework for Dart and how it helps developers handle deploying to serverless technologies. We hear more about how Dart, Flutter, and Cloud Run working together can make any project easy to build and easy to deploy and use. Tony Pujals Tony is a career engineer who’s now on the serverless developer relations team and focused on helping full stack developers succeed building their app backends. Kevin Moore Kevin is the Product Manager of Dart & Flutter at Google. Cool things of the week What is Vertex AI? Developer advocates share more blog Google Cloud launches from Google I/O 2021 blog Secure and reliable development with Go | Q&A video Google CloudEvents - Go site Interview Flutter site Dart site Go site Datastore site Dart on Docker site Functions Framework for Dart on GitHub site Cloud Run site Dart Documentation docs Google APIs with Dart docs App Engine site Dart Functions Qwiklab site Flutter Startup Namer Qwiklab site Cloud, Dart, and full-stack Flutter | Q&A video Go full-stack with Kotlin or Dart on Google Cloud | Session video What’s something cool you’re working on? Grant has been working on libraries for CloudEvents.

Stephanie Wong and Priyanka Vergadia host the podcast this week as we talk responsible AI with guests Craig Wiley and Tracy Frey. Vertex AI, the newly released AI platform from Google, is where Craig starts, telling us that it helps seamlessly integrate AI best practices into AI projects. When designing and building machine learning projects, it’s important to plan and integrate functions that support a responsible model as well. Tracy and Craig help us understand the process of designing and building these responsible, efficient projects, from problem identification and data set collection and refinement to ethical model considerations and finally project construction. Part of Responsible AI is considering all the stakeholders of a project and how they will be impacted. Through examples, Tracy demonstrates how businesses can decide if the software solution affects stakeholders in a way the business would be proud of. Starting in the planning stages and continuing through data collection and model training, companies employing responsible AI techniques will consider input from groups that may use or be affected by the model, from social scientist who specialize in human behavior, and others. Craig elaborates on these principles in the context of Vertex AI and how the time savings of Vertex could be used to make thoughtful, responsible AI decisions. Craig teaches us more about Vertex as we wrap up the interview. Its ability to analyze data and perform ongoing model monitoring make for richer, more accurate projects. Tracy talks about the future of Responsible AI and how the marriage of tech and humanity will continue to produce ethical, effective AI projects. Craig Wiley Craig is the Director of Product for Google Cloud’s AI Platform. Previous to Google, Craig spent nine years at Amazon as the General Manager of Amazon SageMaker, AWS’ machine learning platform as well as in Amazon’s 3rd Party Seller Business. Craig has a deep belief in democratizing the power of data, and he pushes to improve the tooling for experienced users while seeking to simplify it for the growing set of less experienced users. Outside of work he enjoys spending time with his family, eating delicious meals, and enthusiastically struggling through small home improvement projects. Tracy Frey Tracy Frey is Google Cloud AI & Industry Solution’s Managing Director of Outbound Product Management, Incubation and Responsible AI and is dedicated to ensuring Google Cloud AI & Industry Solutions is responsible, thoughtful, and collaborative as it continues to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning. She has been at Google for more than 10 years where she has worked on many different products and areas. Before joining Google she worked at multiple early-stage tech startups where she held multiple functions including product management, developer relations, product marketing, business development and strategy. Prior to her life in tech she taught children traditional wilderness survival skills, taught in a traditional classroom, studied private reserves in Costa Rica and has been a professional hip hop dancer. Cool things of the week Cloud CISO Perspectives: May 2021 blog The cloud developer’s guide to Google I/O 2021 blog Interview Vertex AI site Responsible AI site Staying ahead of the curve – The business case for responsible AI article Building responsible AI for everyone site Cloud Storage site BigQuery site Data Cloud Summit site Applied ML Summit site GCP Podcast Episode 249: ML Lifecycle with Dale Markowitz and Craig Wiley podcast AI Edition Google’s Tracy Frey: Creating Responsible AI podcast TensorFlow Responsible AI Toolkit site What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on the Vertex AI video series. Episode 1 and episode 2 are available now!

This week on the show, our guests Anu Srivastava and Sudheera Vanguri talk about Document AI with hosts Stephanie Wong and Dale Markowitz. Document AI uses artificial intelligence to improve the way businesses create and manage things like paystubs, tax forms, contracts, and virtually any other business document. Data normally stored on paper can be parsed, enriched, and structured, then stored securely with the use of Document AI. Data becomes more accessible and more manageable. Our guests go on to describe the process of using this powerful tool and instances where developers and enterprise companies could benefit. We talk about Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI and how offerings like Google Vision and Knowledge Graph enhance these powerful tools. Users of Document AI can take advantage of these tools as well as bring their own expertise to create custom models. Later, we learn about the developer experience when using the Document AI Platform. Our guests talk specifically about the use of Knowledge Graph and how the advanced search capabilities allow Document AI users to collect data from myriad sources, filling in missing information and enhancing the search with other useful data to make your results more usable. To demonstrate the use of the platform and integrated Google AI tools, we hear about the real-world examples of Workday and Mr. Cooper and their document processing and model training. Sudheera Vanguri Sudheera Vanguri is the head of Product Management at Google Cloud Document AI. Anu Srivastava Anu Srivastava is an Applied AI Engineer for ML on Google Cloud. Before that, she was a software engineer in Android Google Cloud Infrastructure. Cool things of the week A handy new Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure product map blog Compare AWS and Azure services to Google Cloud docs Google Cloud and Seagate: Transforming hard-disk drive maintenance with predictive ML blog Interview Document AI site BigQuery site Lending DocAI site Procurement DocAI site Cloud Natural Language site Google Vision AI site Google Knowledge Graph site Cloud Translation site Workday site Mr. Cooper site AODocs site Processors overview site Python Codelab site Getting started with the Document AI platform video What’s something cool you’re working on? We’ve been working hard on Google I/O.

On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani joins Stephanie Wong to talk about serverless computing and the Cloud OnAir Serverless event with our guests. Aparna Sinha and Philip Beevers start the show giving us a thorough definition of serverless infrastructures and how this setup can help clients run efficient and cost-effective projects with easy scalability and observability. Serverless has grown exponentially over the last decade, and Aparna talks about how that trajectory will continue in the future. At its core, the serverless structure allows large enterprise companies to do what they need to do, from analyzing real time information to ensuring dinner is delivered piping hot. Aparna describes the three aspects of next generation serverless, developer centricity, versatility, and built-in best practices, and how Google is using these to empower developers and company employees to create robust projects efficiently and economically. Phil tells us about the experience of using serverless products and the success of the three pillars in Google serverless offerings. Enterprise customers like MediaMarktSaturn and Ikea are taking advantage of the serverless system for e-commerce, data processing, machine learning, and more. Our guests describe client experiences and how customer feedback is used to help improve Google serverless tools. With so many serverless tools available, our guests offer advice on choosing the right products for your project. We also hear all about the upcoming Cloud On Air event and what participants can expect, from product announcements and live demos to thorough reviews of recently added serverless features. Aparna Sinha Aparna Sinha is Director of Product at Google Cloud and the product leader for Serverless Application Development and DevOps. She is passionate about transforming businesses through faster, safer software delivery. Previously, Aparna helped grow Kubernetes into a widely adopted platform across industries. Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. She is Chair of the Governing Board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). She lives in Palo Alto with her husband and two kids. Philip Beevers Phil has been at Google for seven years. He currently leads the Serverless Engineering teams and previously ran the Site Reliability Engineering team for Google Cloud and Google’s internal Technical Infrastructure. Phil holds a BA in Mathematics from Oxford University. Cool things of the week The evolution of Kubernetes networking with the GKE Gateway controller blog Network Performance for all of Google Cloud in Performance Dashboard site Go from Database to Dashboard with BigQuery and Looker blog Introducing Open Saves: Open-source cloud-native storage for games blog Interview Cloud Run site Cloud Functions site Serverless Computing site The power of Serverless: Get more done easily site App Engine site Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run book MediaMarktSaturn site Ikea site Airbus site Veolia site Sound Effects Attribution “Fanfare1” by N2P5 of Freesound.org “Banjo Opener” by Simanays of Freesound.org

Kaslin Fields joins Stephanie Wong hosting the podcast this week as we talk all about GKE Autopilot with our guests Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss. GKE Autopilot manages tasks like quantity and size of nodes so deploying workloads is faster and machines are used efficiently. Autopilot also offers cluster management options, including monitoring the health of nodes and other components. William and Yochay explain that GKE Autopilot was built to aid companies in the efficient use of resources and give clients more time to focus on their projects. Important efficiency features that are optional in GKE, like multidimensional pod autoscaling, are employed automatically for clients in Autopilot, giving clients peace of mind. Kubernetes best practices are auto-deployed for projects so clients can rest assured things will run as quickly and smoothly as possible without extra work. Kubernetes is a great way to manage containers, and our guests describe cases where this tool is best suited. We compare GKE standard mode and Autopilot, and Yochay tells us when developers might choose standard mode to allow for more specific customization. He talks about migrating between standard and Autopilot clusters with the goal of easy migration by the end of this year. Security is important for GKE, and we talk about the Autopilot security configurations and why they were chosen. Later, our guests walk us through the process of a Kubernetes project on Autopilot, highlighting decisions this tool makes automatically for you and why. Though Autopilot sounds very much like a serverless offering, William explains the differences between tools like Cloud Run and GKE Autopilot. We also hear about the future of Autopilot, including some exciting new features coming soon. Yochay Kiriaty Yochay is a Product Manager for GKE responsible for security. William Denniss William is a Product Manager for GKE Autopilot. He’s currently writing a book called Kubernetes Quickly. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Region Picker site Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that’s right for you blog 5 resources to help you get started with SRE blog Interview Kubernetes site GKE site Autopilot Overview docs GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast Multidimensional Pod Autoscaling docs Docker site Cloud Run site Introducing GKE Autopilot: a revolution in managed Kubernetes blog Creating an Autopilot cluster docs What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin has been working on KubeCon EU as a volunteer and will be presenting there as well.

This week on the podcast, Stephanie Wong and Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin are diving into an important topic for our global community: sustainability and carbon aware computing. Kendal Smith, program manager for Carbon Intelligent Computing, and Chris Talbott, leader of the sustainability product marketing efforts at Google Cloud, start the show telling us why sustainability is so important in the tech world. Environmentally conscious data centers are an important part of Google Cloud sustainability efforts. Using computing in the smartest way possible, Kendall tells us, is the root of green computing. Wind, solar, and other low or carbon-free energy sources are employed at Google Cloud data centers to accomplish this goal. Kendall and Chris detail the green goals Google has met or exceeded, including carbon neutrality in 2007, and future goals for Google. Chris explains how Google Cloud customers have taken advantage of Google’s sustainability practices and been inspired in their own businesses. Kendall details the Carbon Intelligent Computing Platform and how they adjust compute times to align with available carbon-free energy. We hear about Google’s sustainability metrics, including the Carbon Free Energy Percentage, and how these measurements can help Google and its customers run environmentally friendly applications. Chris describes the process he and his team go through when helping Google clients design their carbon aware strategy. To wrap up the show, our guests talk about the future of de-carbonized computing at Google. Kendal Smith Kendal is the Program Manager for Carbon Intelligent Computing at Google, which reduces the carbon footprint of Data Centers by exploiting flexibility in compute workloads. She also helps Google engineers build products efficiently, as well as advise other Bets on carbon measurement and tracking. Chris Talbott Chris leads sustainability product marketing and customer engagement efforts for Google Cloud, and works on opening new Google Cloud data centers throughout the globe. He helps customers improve the environmental impact of their IT operations and identify new opportunities to tackle climate change challenges with cloud technology. Cool things of the week Active Assist’s new feature, predictive autoscaling, helps improve response times for your applications site Maximizing developer productivity video Interview Google Carbon Aware Computing Workshop 2021 site Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows blog How carbon-free is your cloud? New data lets you know blog Google Cloud Region Picker site What’s something cool you’re working on? Alexandrina is working on a new series called People & Planet AI. The first episode, Recovering global wildlife populations using ML is out now. She’s also been working on internal websites to share climate information. Stephanie has been working on a blog post about AppSheet Automation, which we talked about in-depth last week on the podcast.

Stephanie Wong and co-host Carter Morgan learn all about the no-code experience of AppSheet Automation this week. Guests Jennifer Cadence and Prithpal Bhogill introduce us to AppSheet, a platform that empowers anyone to build applications without code. The strong focus on openness means AppSheet offers support for all manner of APIs and services, making it easy to use and customize. Jennifer starts by telling us how AppSheet increases productivity and satisfaction at work. She describes how people’s individual characteristics and use of time affect productivity and explains that tasks that can be automated free people up to work on higher value tasks or focus on important issues. Employees are not only more productive but happier in their jobs when mundane or frustrating tasks are automated. Later, Prithpal describes using the software. The AppSheet Unified Platform supports any application creator so users can build their apps and automations without ever leaving the AppSheet dashboard. Data stays where it is, with no upload requirements, further easing the build process. We hear some real-world uses of AppSheet Automation, including employee onboarding, customer support, and more. Prithpal takes us behind the scenes, using examples to explain the inner workings of AppSheet and walks us through the steps of using this powerful tool. Jennifer tells us how the AppSheet Community helps shape the platform and talks about the future of AppSheet Automation. Jennifer Cadence Jennifer is the Product Marketing Manager for AppSheet. She’s also a dog lover, community builder, and curious human. Prithpal Bhogill Prithpal is the Lead Product Manager for AppSheet, frequent blogger, and featured speaker on several tech conferences. Cool things of the week Choose your own cloud adventure video Recovering global wildlife populations using ML blog Introduction to AI Platform (Unified) docs Interview AppSheet site AppSheet Community site Invisible Woman book Apps Script site Workspace site What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie and Carter are working on some new features for the podcast! Stephanie will be speaking at CTC. Sound Effects Attribution “Applause 1” by Ichapman1980 of Freesound.org

Brian Dorsey joins Stephanie Wong this week for an in-depth discussion on Workflows. Guests Kris Braun and Guillaume Laforge introduce us to Google Cloud Workflows, explaining that this fully managed serverless product helps connect services in the cloud. By facilitating the creation of an end-to-end schema, Workflows lets developers specify what microservices or other software respond when certain events occur in a detailed, visual format. Kris and Guillaume list the benefits of using Workflows and detail the many uses for this powerful tool. The ability to add detailed descriptors, for example, helps companies avoid errors in calling up other pieces of software. New employees have an easier time getting acquainted when the steps are clearly defined as well. Our guests use real-world examples to illustrate the three main uses for Workflows: event-driven, batch, and infrastructure automation. Workflows are flexible and customizable. Later, we hear about Cloud Composer and its relation to Workflows, and our guests help us understand which product is right for each client type. The Workflows team continues to expand offerings. More connectors are being added to allow developers to call other GCP services. Working with lists will soon be easier, allowing Workflows to run steps in parallel. And Kris details other exciting updates coming soon, including Eventarc. Kris Braun Kris Braun is the Product Manager for three Google Cloud products that connect services to build applications: Workflows, Tasks, and Scheduler. Before Google, Kris’ adventures include founding and growing startups, leading a team of network security researchers investigating threats like Stuxnet, and writing the original BlackBerry simulator for app development. He’s a passionate advocate for opening job opportunities to skilled refugees displaced by war and disaster. Guillaume Laforge Guillaume Laforge is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, focusing on serverless technologies. More recently, he dived head first in Workflows, and started presenting the product at online events, wrote articles, tips and tricks, and videos on the topic. Cool things of the week How sweet it is: Using Cloud AI to whip up new treats with Mars Maltesers blog Turbo boost your Compute Engine workloads with new 100 Gbps networking blog Benchmarking higher bandwidth VM instances docs Interview Workflows site Spanner site Cloud SQL site Cloud Composer site Pub/Sub site Cloud Run site Eventarc site Eventarc Documentation docs Workflows Insiders site Quickstarts site How-To Guides site Syntax Reference site Guillaume’s Workflow Tips and Tricks blog A first look at serverless orchestration with Workflows blog Orchestrating the Pic-a-Daily serverless app with Workflows blog Better service orchestration with Workflows blog Get to know Workflows, Google Cloud’s serverless orchestration engine blog 3 common serverless patterns to build with Workflows blog Introduction to serverless orchestration with Workflows codelab Pic-a-Daily Serverless Workshop codelab Pic-a-daily: Lab 6—Orchestration with Workflows codelab What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is working on use cases around VMs. Stephanie has been writing about database migration.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Priyanka Vergadia learn about data governance this week in an interesting chat with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad. While data governance includes security measures, the overarching term also means knowing your data, where it is, and how to use it. In their book, Jessi, Uri, and their co-authors hope to make data governance more accessible by sharing the knowledge Google has developed over twenty plus years. We talk about the challenges companies of all sizes face implementing data governance frameworks and Uri shares a few tips for streamlining the process. Communication and prioritization are important no matter the size of your team. Companies must also understand the sensitivity of the data, how it’s protected and managed, and why it’s collected. Having a thoughtful, thorough understanding of what data gives you the most bang for your buck can help companies prioritize certain data collection, make better decisions, scale efficiently, and save money. When communicating with team members, it’s important to share vital information about the data. Knowing who’s in charge of what data, for example, makes accessing that data faster. With proper communication and thorough prioritization, teams can begin to think about how developing automated tools can increase functional data utilization. Later, we discuss the ways companies can support employees on the data governance journey by clearly communicating the best practice rules. Uri describes how Google uses data governance principles and shares resources Google has published that detail these steps further. Tools like BigQuery and Data Catalog are Google-built products meant to provide companies with more automated data governance solutions. Jessi and Uri wrap up the show with some more best practices in the data governance sphere, like proper metadata to increase the trustworthiness of data. And Uri details the tools Google Cloud has developed to make your data life easier, giving examples of companies putting these tools into practice. Jessi Ashdown Jessi Ashdown is a User Experience Researcher for Google Cloud who conducts user studies with customers from all over the world and uses the findings and feedback from these studies to help inform and shape Google’s data governance products to best serve those users’ needs. Uri Gilad Uri is leading the Data Governance efforts, within the Data Analytics area in Google Cloud. As part of his role, Uri is spearheading a cross-functional effort to create the relevant controls, management tools and workflows that enable a GCP customer to apply Data Governance policies in a unified fashion wherever your data may be in your GCP deployment. Prior to Google, Uri served as an executive in multiple Data Security companies: most recently as the VP of product in MobileIron, a public Zero Trust/Endpoint security platform. Uri was an early employee and a manager in CheckPoint and Forescout - two well known Security brands. Uri holds an M.sc from Tel Aviv University and a B.sc from the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology. You can find him on Linkedin. Cool things of the week Batter up! Anthos on bare metal helps MLB gear up for upcoming season blog Introducing Network Connectivity Center: A revolution in simplifying on-prem and cloud networking blog Interview Data Governance: The Definitive Guide: People, Processes, and Tools to Operationalize Data Trustworthiness book Goods White Paper doc Dremel White Paper doc BigQuery site Data Catalog site Identity and Access Management site Strata Data Superstream Series event What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and new GCPSketchnotes. Stephanie is working on an animated series about data centers.

This week on the podcast, fellow Googlers Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong chat with hosts Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong about how to optimize your spending with Google Kubernetes Engine. Cost optimization doesn’t necessarily mean lower costs, Kaslin explains. It means running your application the best possible way and accommodating things like traffic spikes while keeping costs as low as possible. As our guests tell us, standard best practices can aid in optimization, but when it comes to efficiently running on a budget, there are more tips and tricks available in GKE. One of GKE’s newest operation modes, Autopilot, means Kubernetes nodes are now managed by Google. Customers pay by the pod so the focus can be on the application rather than the details of clusters and their optimization. Best practices for resource utilization and autoscaling are included with Autopilot. Kaslin and Anthony break up Google’s GKE cost optimization tips into four categories: multi-tenancy, autoscaling, infrastructure choice, and workload best practices and tell us how company culture effects these decisions. Proper education around Kubernetes and GKE specifically is the first step to using resources the most efficiently, Anthony tells us. Keeping tenants separate and resources well managed on multi-tenant clusters is made easier with Namespaces. Scaling pods and the infrastructure around them is an important part of optimization as well, and Anthony helps us understand the best practices for fine tuning the autoscaling features in GKE. Scaling infrastructure to handle spikes or lulls is an automatic feature with Autopilot, helping projects run smoothly. To control workloads efficiency, GKE now offers a host of features, including horizontal, vertical, and multidimensional pod autoscaling. Later, we walk through the steps for implementing some of these optimizations decisions while keeping your application running. GKE Usage Metering is a useful tool for measuring tenant usage in a cluster so resource distribution can be managed easier. Kaslin Fields Kaslin is a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud where she focuses on Google Kubernetes Engine. Anthony Bushong Anthony is a Specialist Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, where he focuses on Kubernetes. Cool things of the week A2 VMs now GA—the largest GPU cloud instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs blog How carbon-free is your cloud? New data lets you know blog Our third decade of climate action: Realizing a carbon-free future blog Interview Kubernetes site GKE site Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs Docker site Autopilot overview docs Namespaces docs Kubernetes best practices: Organizing with Namespaces blog Optimize cost to performance on Google Kubernetes Engine video Using node auto-provisioning docs Scaling workloads across multiple dimensions in GKE blog Enabling GKE usage metering docs Kubernetes in Google Cloud Qwiklabs site Kubernetes Engine Qwiklabs site Cloud Operations for GKE Qwiklabs site Earn the new Google Kubernetes Engine skill badge for free blog Beyond Your Bill videos Cloud On Air Webinar: Hands-on Lab: Optimizing Your Costs on Google Kubernetes Engine site Cloud OnBoard site Adopting Kubernetes with Spotify video

Stephanie Wong joins our old pal Mark Mirchandani this week to chat about BeyondCorp Enterprise and the way enterprise companies are using this security software. Ameet starts the show explaining BeyondCorp’s three pillars of security, including how detailed customer and client knowledge aid in security. Kiran elaborates, stressing the importance of the web browser’s contribution to a secure experience. With BeyondCorp Enterprise offerings, companies can layer additional protections in the cloud, supplementing the often lacking network model and adding better security protections across devices. BeyondCorp offers a simpler implementation structure as well. Things like monitoring can be switched on with a click. We hear about the features of BeyondCorp, including how users help shape the way BeyondCorp protects their projects. Ameet walks us through how a client could add BeyondCorp to their current security infrastructure and the specific benefits of doing so. BeyondCorp Enterprise, an easy off-the-shelf offering, was inspired by Google’s own security measures. With automatic added protections in Chrome, BeyondCorp Enterprise takes the most secure browser in the world and ups the game for enterprise employees working from any device. Kiran describes these additional measures and why they’re important for enterprise users. Ameet and Kiran tell us the steps required to set up the software and the customizations available. Enterprise customers should think through groups of users and what will be allowed by each. On the browser side, the three tiers of security features, including invisible features, can be implemented and changed easily. With the new BeyondCorp Enterprise, enterprise clients are now able to take advantage of the advanced security of the cloud. Through real company examples, Ameet and Kiran share with us the ways this software is already changing the enterprise security game. Kiran Nair Kiran Nair is a product manager on Google Chrome. His focus area is security, and keeping Chrome users safe from web based threats. Besides spending the last 12 years building software and hardware products, Kiran is a certified yoga trainer and enjoys a casual game of tennis in the evening Ameet Jani Ameet is the product manager for BeyondCorp Enterprise. Cool things of the week Introducing #AskGoogleCloud: A community driven YouTube live series blog Cloud On Air: Build the future with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) event Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit: Inspiring the next generation of technology leaders blog Interview BeyondCorp site BeyondCorp Enterprise on Google site GCP Podcast Episode 221: BeyondCorp with Robert Sadowski podcast An overview: “A New Approach to Enterprise Security” research paper How Google did it: “Design to Deployment at Google” research paper Google’s frontend infrastructure: “The Access Proxy” research paper Migrating to BeyondCorp: “Maintaining Productivity while Improving Security” research paper The human element: “The User Experience” research paper Secure your endpoints: “Building a Healthy Fleet” research paper Question of the week Can you clearly explain GCP policy resource inheritance? What does it mean when the policy is effectively a union or additive? Resource Manager Understanding hierarchy evaluation Guide to Cloud Billing Resource Organization & Access Management

Jenny Brown and Mark Mirchandani are back this week to celebrate a special anniversary! This year marks ten years since the launch of the first Chromebooks, and our guests, Angela Gosz and Courtney Harrison, are here to reflect on the past and talk about the future Chrome OS. Chromebooks powered by Intel allow users to get the most out of their endpoints, serving as a secure and stable entrypoint to the Cloud. Our guests describe the key groups of Chromebook users and how the security, ease of use, and portability of Chrome OS benefits each group. The Google Admin Console allows more than 500 customizable security features to tailor the experience for employees or end customers, Angela explains. The changes brought on by the pandemic meant more companies had to support a distributed business, and Chrome OS has been able to facilitate this transition easily. With zero-touch enrollment, Chromebooks can be sent directly to employees, bypassing IT. Chromebooks can be configured through the Google Admin Console without any physical contact. Courtney tells us about her experiences with Chrome OS at Intel and how the automatic updates, computing speed, and other features have made her job easier. She explains the process of working with Google to develop Chromebook hardware and how the cloud comes into play for maximum performance. We talk about the many Chromebook options offered and what options will be available in the future. Angela Gosz Angela Gosz is a Customer Success Manager on the Chrome Enterprise Team, based out of Google Chicago. With 17 years of experience in the IT Industry, Angela has been on the leading edge of digital transformation implementations, supporting Enterprise organizations and partners to adopt and optimize their endpoint computing strategy - especially in Healthcare. Today she ensures customers realize the full potential of their investment in Chrome OS as a cloud-first endpoint. Outside of work, she has been meditating daily for 5 years, teaches yoga and is a certified Reiki practitioner. Angela holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Courtney Harrison Courtney is an Account Director with Intel Corporation based in the San Francisco Bay area. Currently Courtney leads a team that supports all of the Intel business interactions with Alphabet and Google. A twenty-one year Intel veteran, Courtney has spent the past fifteen years in field sales working with top multi-national customers and local OEMs. Courtney began her career at Intel in CPU operations. Courtney has both a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree from Stanford University in Industrial Engineering. Cool things of the week A new podcast explores the unseen world of data centers blog Back by popular demand: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less (2021 edition) blog Save the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12-14, 2021 blog Interview Intel site Chromebook site Chrome OS site Chromebook turns 10 site Building the future of business computing: 10 years of Chrome OS blog Form Factor Portfolio site Deploy devices with zero-touch enrollment site Thunderbolt site WiFi 6 site CloudReady site MCA site What’s something cool you’re working on? Mark is working on Costs meet code with programmatic budget notifications. Sound Effects Attribution “LeDancing” by Frankum of Freesound.org “Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Jenny Brown co-hosts with Mark Mirchandani this week for a great conversation about the ML lifecycle with our guests Craig Wiley and Dale Markowitz. Using a real-life example of bus cameras detecting potholes, Dale and Craig walk us through the steps of designing, building, implementing, and improving on a piece of machine learning software. The first step, Craig tells us, is to identify the data collected and determine its viability in an ML model. He describes how to get the best data for your project and how to keep the data, code, and libraries consistent to allow better analysis by your ML models. He talks about the importance of a Feature Store to aid in data consistency. Craig explains how machine learning pipelines like TensorFlow are great tools to improve consistency in the ML environment as well, making it easier to improve your model and even to build new ones using the same data. Keeping this consistency from data scientist analyzation to ML developer to model deployment means a more efficient process and product. Evaluating models after production is an important step in the lifecycle as well to ensure accuracy, validity, and performance of the model. Craig gives us some examples and tips on monitoring models after they’ve been deployed. We talk about the challenges of scaling ML projects and Craig offers advice for developers and companies looking to build ML projects. Dale Markowitz Dale Markowitz is an Applied AI Engineer for ML on Google Cloud. Before that, she was a software engineer in Google Research and an engineer at the online dating site OkCupid. Craig Wiley Craig is the Director of Product for Google Cloud’s AI Platform. Previous to Google, Craig spent nine years at Amazon, as the General Manager of Amazon SageMaker, AWS’ machine learning platform as well as in Amazon’s 3rd Party Seller Business. Craig has a deep belief in democratizing the power of data, he pushes to improve the tooling for experienced users while seeking to simplifying it for the growing set of less experienced users. Outside of work he enjoys spending time with his family, eating delicious meals, and enthusiastically struggling through small home improvement projects. Cool things of the week Introducing GKE Autopilot: a revolution in managed Kubernetes blog At your service! With schedule-based autoscaling, VMs are at the ready blog Interview Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning Products site GCP Podcast Episode 240: reCAPTCHA Enterprise with Kelly Anderson + Spring ML Potholes with Eric Clark podcast Using machine learning to improve road maintenance blog Key requirements for an MLOps foundation blog TensorFLow site Kubeflow Pipelines site TensorBoard site How to dub a video with AI video Can AI make a good baking recipe? video Machine learning without code in the browser video What’s something cool you’re working on? Jenny started a new podcast that reads interesting Google blog posts over at Google Cloud Reader. Our friend Dr. Anton Chuvakin started the Cloud Security Podcast by Google. Read more about it and listen here. Follow the show and hosts on Twitter Cloud Security Podcast Anton and Tim And listen to Anton on the GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniak.

Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong are back this week as we learn about all the new things happening with Google Cloud Spanner. Our guests this week, Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler, describe Cloud Spanner as a fully managed relational database that boasts unlimited scaling and advanced consistency and availability. Unlimited scaling truly means unlimited, and Chris explains why Cloud Spanner offers this feature and how it’s making database design and development easier. Dilraj and Chris tell us all about the cool new features Spanner has developed, like generated columns and foreign keys, and how customer needs influenced these developments. Chris walks us through the process of using some of these new features, including how developers can monitor their database systems. Managed backups and multi-region configuration are additional recent additions to Cloud Spanner, and our guests explain how these are used by current enterprise clients. Dilraj and Chris explain the automatically managed features of Spanner versus the customer managed features and how people set up and manage database projects. We hear examples of companies using Cloud Spanner and how it has improved their businesses. Dilraj Kaur Dilraj Kaur is an Enterprise Customer Engineer with specialization in Data Management. She has been with Google for about 2.5 years and is based in Atlanta. Christoph Bussler As a Solutions Architect Chris is focusing on databases, data migration and data integration in enterprise customer settings. See his professional work and background on his website. Cool things of the week New to Google Cloud? Here are a few free trainings to help you get started blog Start your skills challenge today site Service Directory is generally available: Simplify your service inventory blog Interview Google Cloud Spanner site GCP Podcast Episode 62: Cloud Spanner with Deepti Srivastava podcast Using the Cloud Spanner Emulator docs Cloud Spanner Ecosystem site Cloud Spanner Qwiklabs site Google Cloud Platform Community On Slack site Creating and managing generated columns docs WITH Clause docs Foreign Keys docs Numeric Data Type docs Information schema docs Overview of introspection tools docs Backup and Restore docs Multi-region configurations docs ShareChat: Building a scalable data-driven social network for non-English speakers globally site Blockchain.com: Streamlining infrastructure for the world’s most dynamic financial market site What is Cloud Spanner? video What’s something cool you’re working on? Mark has been working on budgeting blog posts, including Protect your Google Cloud spending with budgets. Stephanie is working on her data center animation series

This week on the podcast, Mark Mirchandani and Gabi Ferrara talk with Nimesh Bhagat about Cloud SQL Insights. This powerful tool enables developers to diagnose database issues for faster, smoother performance. Nimesh tells us the inspiration for Cloud SQL Insight’s development and describes its biggest benefits. One of the important aspects of Insights is the ability for developers to gain an application-centric view by allowing them to tag database queries with SQL comments. These tags are aggregated in Insights and give developers a visual of the database queries. Here, developers can see load patterns and use that information to improve database efficiency. Cloud SQL Insights offers managed database analysis that helps developers understand the past and predict the future. Simplifying the journey of database debugging, Nimesh explains, was the goal of creating Cloud SQL Insights. He takes us through the process of using the software, pointing out the improvements Insights makes over the old way. Cloud SQL Insights only launched in January, but it’s already helping numerous clients with their projects. Nimesh describes these real-world uses, including Major League Baseball experience as part of Insights Early Access Program. Nimesh Bhagat Nimesh is a product manager at Google Cloud, he leads Cloud SQL Insights. 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. Cool things of the week A new collaboration with Google Cloud blog Don’t fear the authentication: Google Drive edition blog Interview Cloud SQL Insights docs Cloud SQL Documentation docs GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast Google Cloud Monitoring site Database observability for developers: introducing Cloud SQL Insights blog Introduction to Cloud SQL Insights codelab Boost your query performance troubleshooting skills with Cloud SQL Insights blog Introducing Sqlcommenter: An open source ORM auto-instrumentation library blog Introducing Cloud SQL Insights video Cloud SQL Github site What’s something cool you’re working on? Gabi is working on several things, including Schema Migrations with CI/CD pipelines. She is always available on Twitter and she offers free office hours! Sound Effects Attribution “Small Audience Laugh” by Tim Kahn of Freesound.org

Former GCP Podcast host Mark Mandel is our guest this week. He’s talking Google Cloud Game Servers, Agones, and more with Mark Mirchandani and guest host Stephanie Wong. Mark explains how dedicated game servers work and why gaming has embraced the idea of dedicated servers. Online multiplayer gaming with its need for fast, consistent state sharing among players benefits from dedicated servers and offers cheating mitigation and reduced latency, as well as development flexibility. He tells us a little about the history of the open source project, Agones, and how it has helped Kubernetes run memory-state games efficiently on these dedicated servers. Google Cloud Game Servers work with layers of products to create a seamless multiplayer environment. Mark details this process and how Kubernetes, GKE, and Agones work together with these servers to accomplish this goal at scale. This situation is ideal for developers looking for the customizability and flexibility of a self-controlled system rather than a fully managed lift and shift model. Mark talks about the features of GCGS, including the versioning configuration system that allows you to create multiple configurations, and roll outs that give you control over distribution. We also learn a little about game building best practices and how Mark and his team advise and educate other game developers. Mark Mandel Mark Mandel is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform. Hailing from Australia, Mark built his career developing backend web applications which included several widely adopted open source projects, and running an international conference in Melbourne for several years. Since then he has focused on becoming a polyglot developer, building systems in Go, JRuby and Clojure on a variety of infrastructures. In his spare time he plays with his dog, trains martial arts, and reads too much fantasy literature. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Docs Samples docs Limiting public IPs on Google Cloud blog Interview Google Cloud Game Servers site Agones site Agones Prerequisite Knowledge docs Kubernetes site GKE site Online Game Technology, Drawn Badly videos GCP Podcast Episode 142: Agones with Mark Mandel and Cyril Tovena podcast GCP Podcast Episode 202: Supersolid with Kami May podcast Multiplay site Accelbyte site Improbable site Find the right Google Cloud partner site Game Developers Conference site Agones on Slack site Agones on Twitter site Mark Mandel on Twitch site Mark Mandel on YouTube site What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie is working on Season of Scale season 5 and a data center animated series that will launch in a few weeks! Sound Effects Attribution “TrumpetBrassFanfare.wav” by ohforheavensake of Freesound.org “8-bit Video Game Sounds.wav” by ProjectsU012 of Freesound.org “music elevator.wav” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Dustin Dye and Alex Seegers of Botcopy are on the show today, chatting with hosts Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia. Botcopy uses advanced AI technology along with excellent copy writing to create better chat bots. The software works directly on a company website and doesn’t require a login, allowing chats to stay anonymous. Our guests explain that their chat bots are treated like virtual employees, built and trained to function and speak appropriately for their specific job. Copy writing is an important part of this, as the conversational AI should continue to support the brand being represented and conversations should flow naturally. The bot personalities are developed through written copy and interactions with customers in instances like customer service, lead generation, and even some internal employee management needs. Later, we talk about how Dialogflow and Botcopy work together, including how Botcopy adds important user context to the conversation to facilitate more accurate bot responses. We hear more about Dialogflow CX and how the modular builder makes designing and controlling bot conversations easier. CX has also made managing multiple bots on a single account easier and team collaboration more efficient. The visual builder available in CX offers a better chatbot design experience, especially when multiple teams are working on the same bot. We hear examples of great use-cases for Botcopy, like restaurant menus, clinical trials, and more. Alex and Dustin give developers valuable advice about working with clients to build their bots. Test early and often to build a robust bot capable of handling many situations. It’s important to have an analytics system in place to identify possible improvement areas as well. Dustin Dye Dustin Dye is co-founder and CEO of Botcopy. After developing branded character and dialogue content for the #1 business bots on Messenger and Slack, Dustin launched Botcopy in 2017. Before co-founding Botcopy, Dustin had co-founded Expert Dojo, one of Silicon Beach’s largest startup incubator, serving, mentoring, and securing funding for some of the most exciting businesses coming out of LA. Dustin is a frequent keynote speaker at leading Chatbot conferences in the US and abroad. Alexander Seegers Alexander Seegers is a co-founder and COO of Botcopy and heads up the product team. He holds a Business degree from Northeastern and UX certification from General Assembly. Alex has consulted tech leaders at Fortune 500 companies worldwide, spearheading their forays into conversational AI for multiple use cases at the enterprise level. In addition to big-picture leadership and vision, Alex is adept at numerous coding languages and complex systems architecture. Cool things of the week Introducing WebSockets, HTTP/2 and gRPC bidirectional streams for Cloud Run blog Take the first step toward SRE with Cloud Operations Sandbox blog Interview Botcopy site Botcopy Blog blog Contact Botcopy email Dialogflow site Miro site What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka is working on Dialogflow CX episodes for the Deconstructing Chatbots series.

Welcome back to a new year of Google Cloud Platform Podcasts! Mark Mirchandani and Emma Iwao host the first show of 2021 with special guest Rebecca Weekly of Intel. She joins us to talk about the partnership between Google Cloud and Intel. Describing the company’s goals of gathering, storing, managing, and analyzing data in all its forms to unlock the power of technology and information, Rebecca points out how well these align with Google’s own goals and why the partnership is such a natural fit. Rebecca explains the four pillars of the Google-Intel partnership, including the focus on infrastructure and app modernization to elevate the user experience. Through their work with Google, Intel has been able to optimize the move from on prem to cloud for those clients who choose to make the shift, using their thorough client knowledge and Google Cloud expertise to facilitate a smooth transition. Rebecca walks us through the process of crafting this client experience, from choosing products and tools to identifying and solving any bottlenecks and optimizing the configuration using benchmarks. Later, we talk about the value of open source software in both the hardware and software worlds and why Intel believes so strongly in open source projects. Rebecca offers examples of clients successfully using Intel hardware and Google Cloud software, including Climacell and Kinsta. We get the inside scoop on future projects at Intel, like the next generation of scalable Xeon processors, and Rebecca talks about the future of data analyzation and computing. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Rebecca Weekly Rebecca leads the team that influences nearly every aspect of our cloud platform solutions across strategic planning, hardware and software enabling, marketing and sales. Together they shape the development, production, and business strategy of Intel’s cloud platforms to ensure differentiation and platforms that enable TAM expansion with enthusiasm, collaboration, and urgency. She drives strategic collaborations with key partners including top cloud service providers, OxMs, ISVs & OSVs to ensure platform requirements meet our customer needs. In her “spare” time, she’s the lead singer of a funk & soul band, Sinister Dexter, was professionally trained in dance (tap, modern, and jazz), and is an experienced choreographer. She has two amazing little boys and loves to run (after them, and on her own). Rebecca graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Cool things of the week 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know Book Introducing Google Cloud Workflows video Interview Intel site Google Cloud withe Intel site TensorFlow site Anthos site Intel Select Solutions site PerfKit Benchmarker site Google Cloud Functions site Climacell site Blue Skies Ahead: ClimaCell Delivers Innovative Weather Prediction Solutions doc Kinsta site Benchmarking GCP’s Compute-Optimized VMs (C2) blog Arcules site Descartes Labs site DAOS site Optane site What’s something cool you’re working on? Emma was a guest on GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao. Emma is working on the Ruby 3.0 support and release and deprecation policy. Ruby is now available on Google Cloud Functions! Sound Effects Attribution “Partyhorn” by Milton of Freesound.org “ToiletFlush” by EminYildirim of Freesound.org

This week, four of the podcast’s greatest hosts come together to celebrate all of the fun and informative episodes we’ve been privileged to do this year! Join Mark Mirchandani, Jon Foust, Priyanka Vergadia, and Brian Dorsey as we talk about our favorite guests and shows, some cool things that happened this year, and what we’re looking forward to in 2021! Cool things of the week A Giant List of Google Cloud Resources blog Google Cloud 4 Words site Our favorite episodes Jon’s Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 212: Data Management with Amy Krishnamohan podcast GCP Podcast Episode 237: NVIDIA with Bryan Catanzaro podcast Priyanka’s Favorite GCP Podcast Episode 240: reCAPTCHA Enterprise with Kelly Anderson + Spring ML Potholes with Eric Clark podcast Mark’s Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 242: NASA and FDL with James Parr and Madhulika Guhathakurta podcast GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast GCP Podcast Episode 228: Fastly with Tyler McMullen podcast Brian’s Favorites GCP Podcast Episode 223: Voice Coding with Emily Shea and Ryan Hileman podcast GCP Podcast Episode 233: Bare Metal Solution with James Harding and Gurmeet Goindi podcast GCP Podcast Episode 212: Data Management with Amy Krishnamohan podcast Sound Effects Attribution “Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “It’s Always Night in Space” by JamesSilvera of HDInteractive.com “Easy Cheesy” by LoboLoco of FreeMusicArchive.org

Guest host Sara Ford joins our old favorite Mark Mirchandani this week for a special interview with NASA and FDL. Our guests, James Parr and Madhulika Guhathakurta, give us a super cool, in-depth look at how NASA and FDL do what they do. Lika explains the important scientific studies she has worked on during her years at NASA and how she came to understand and appreciate Machine Learning. James introduces us to the Frontier Development Lab, a project collaborated on by private and public companies to leverage AI and Machine Learning in the research of science, exploration, and many other disciplines. From saving Earth from asteroids to conducting research on our sun, James describes the process of solving these solar system sized problems, starting with creating a solid team. Machine Learning is a team sport, he says, and like making a Hollywood film, it takes many people from different backgrounds to find these solutions. The cloud has been integral in facilitating this meeting of the minds and the analyzing of data at FDL. Later, we talk about the process of astronomical research before the current technological age and how techniques have advanced into the 21st century. James tells us the origin story of FDL and how they were tasked with applying Machine Learning to complex problems like planetary defense and space weather. Lika describes space weather and details how it impacts our planet. We talk about the role of data engineers in the team sport of astro-research and how data is collected and analyzed. Lika emphasizes the benefits of building a working system and how the processes can be applied to many other disciplines. James and Lika wrap up the show with a look at what cool things they expect in the future. James Parr James is Director of the Frontier Development Lab, in partnership with NASA ARC and the SETI Institute. FDL has successfully demonstrated that structured interdisciplinary problem solving, sprint methodologies, radical collaboration methods and partnering with leaders in commercial AI, such as Google Cloud, are powerful amplifiers in applying AI to the science and technology goals of space agencies. Madhulika(Lika) Guhathakurta, PhD For the past two decades, Lika has led the development of Heliophysics as an integrated scientific discipline from which fundamental discoveries about our universe provide direct societal benefits. As the Lead for the Living With a Star (LWS) program for 16 years (2001-2016), she made possible the flagship missions (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Van Allen Probes, Solar Orbiter Collaboration and Parker Solar Probe) including STEREO that would revolutionize our understanding of how the Sun shapes space weather in the solar system. To accelerate innovation and scientific discovery she created funding mechanisms to shepherd traditional domain scientists out of their comfort zones to create LWS system science known as Targeted Research & Technology program and Focused Science Teams that foster competitive, yet collaborative environments that promote the crosspollination of ideas and technology. To nurture the next generation of leaders in Heliophysics, she created the Jack Eddy Fellowship Program which has become an important channel for the professional growth of promising researchers and has been successful at promoting the careers of many women scientists reaching 50% parity with men. Since 2017, she was the driving force at NASA Headquarters and at NASA Ames behind the growth of Frontier Development Laboratory, both in terms of the breadth of problem areas tackled as well as in the number of agency and industry partners (e.g. Google, Nvidia, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Planet). The types of innovative solutions include virtual telescopes, data fusion, edge computing, and autonomy and this approach will have an enduring imprint on the way science and exploration is carried out by future generations. Cool things of the week Prepare for Google Cloud certification with one free month of new Professional Certificates on Coursera blog GCP Podcast Episode 239: Cloud Learning Services with Nandhini Rangan and Magda Jary podcast NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Collects Significant Amount of Asteroid site Interview NASA site Frontier Development Lab (FDL) site Oort Information site Sound Effects Attribution “Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org

Mark and Brian are together this week, hosting our guests Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis as we discuss High Performance Computing with Google. HPC uses powerful computers to solve problems that would otherwise be too large or take too long for standard machines. Innovation and advances in cloud technology have made this resource more accessible, more scalable, and more affordable. Senanu lists some great use cases for HPC, including vehicle manufacturing and the medical field and describes how these markets benefit from the extra power HPC offers. Ilias talks tech and helps us understand the evolution of the Google HPC offering and the architecture most often used with HPC. He explains the benefits of HPC on the cloud over the old way, emphasizing the flexibility of choosing machines based on your code rather than forcing your code onto small machines. Storage of data is flexible, scalable, and secure as well. Diminishing VM to VM latency has been an important advancement in HPC, and Ilias describes how Google has decreased latency. Google Cloud customers are using the HPC offering for all kinds of large computing jobs, and Senanu details some of these real world instances. From Covid vaccine research to disaster evacuation planning, HPC on the cloud is changing the way we process data. Later, Ilias tells our listeners how to get started with their HPC project. Senanu Aggor Senanu Aggor is the Product Marketing Manager for Google Cloud’s High Performance Computing (HPC) solution. Ilias Katsardis Ilias Katsardis is the HPC Solution Lead for the Customer Engineering team (EMEA) at Google. In this role, Ilias brings over 14 years of experience in the cloud computing and high-performance computing industries to promote Google Cloud’s state-of-the-art infrastructure for complex HPC workloads. Previously, he worked as an applications analyst at Cray Inc., where he was a dedicated analyst to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and, prior to that, was an HPC application specialist at ClusterVision. Ilias also founded two startups Airwire Networks in 2006 and Performance Hive in 2017. Cool things of the week What’s happening in BigQuery: Time unit partitioning, Table ACLs and more blog BigQuery explained: Blog series blog BigQuery Spotlight videos Cloud Functions vs. Cloud Run video Interview High Performance Computing site GCP Podcast Episode 237: NVIDIA with Bryan Catanzaro podcasdt GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast Compute Engine site Compute Engine Machine Types site Cloud Storage site Cloud Firestore site Google Cloud with Intel site Cloud GPUs site Best practices for running tightly coupled HPC applications on Compute Engine site Super Computing Event site Stackchat at home This week, Max Saltonstall is talking cyber analytics with Eric Dull from Deloitte.

This week, your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia are joined by Google Product Marketing Lead for Online Fraud Protection, Kelly Anderson, to talk about reCAPTCHA Enterprise. Kelly’s main focus at Google, reCAPTCHA, is a service that helps online companies determine if a user is a human or an automated system. With an advanced risk analysis engine, Google’s reCAPTCHA system has been defending sites from fraud for more than a decade. We talk about the evolution of reCAPTCHA and learn about the specific attributes of each version. Later, we focus on reCAPTCHA Enterprise which caters this security software to enterprise companies. Like version three, Enterprise boasts detailed risk analysis and actions. Companies can also expect reason codes for high risk scores and the ability to use the risk analysis engine customized to their company. They are able to find bots impersonating users and neutralize them easily. reCAPTCHA Enterprise is easy to use, whether you’re a Google Cloud customer or not. With the handy API, any company can take advantage of this security feature. Kelly leads us through the steps of deploying the API and details instances where this software plays a vital role in the protection of your website across multiple devices. Kelly takes us through the reCAPTCHA Enterprise dashboard and talks about the future as we conclude the show. reCAPTCHA hopes to move beyond behavioral protection to continue to stay ahead of malicious actors online. As Kelly explains, Machine Learning will become more and more important as fraud detection continues to grow and change. Kelly Anderson Kelly Anderson currently leads product marketing for Google Cloud’s online fraud protection business. She devotes most of her time to working on reCAPTCHA Enterprise and Web Risk and is passionate about helping businesses and their customers stay protected from fraud and abuse. Prior to Google, she worked in product marketing for Microsoft in Azure, where she marketed a variety of security products and business continuity products. For more information about Kelly Anderson and her leather jacket, you can follow her on Twitter. Cool things of the week Introducing HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Cloud Run blog Introducing Google Workspace blog Interview reCAPTCHA Enterprise site reCAPTCHA enterprise product demo video Top 10 use cases for reCAPTCHA Enterprise to defend against OWASP Web-Automated Attacks site Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise: Frictionless, Flexible, and Effective Web App Security site Stackchat at home This week, Max Saltonstall is fixing potholes in Memphis with Eric Clark of SpringML. What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on Google Cloud Whiteboard episodes Operations and CDN. She’s been working on new comic strips for zero trust and new GCPSketchnotes as well!

Jon Foust joins Mark this week as we talk with Nandhini Rangan and Magda Jary about Cloud Learning Services. The Cloud Learning Services team is passionate about helping technical practitioners elevate their careers and transform businesses by building and validating in-demand Google Cloud skills. Nandhini explains that a lack of technical practitioners with skills in the cloud is one of the biggest barriers to entry for companies considering the shift. But with the right knowledge, companies that take full advantage of cloud environments are proven to be more efficient, reach more of their goals, and overall, be more successful. Cloud Learning Services offerings empower technical practitioners and companies to learn new skills, put these skills into practice, and achieve their objectives. Magda tells us that these training courses focus around job roles in the cloud. The cloud has necessitated a shift in the idea of development learning, she tells us, explaining that nowadays, the focus is on job roles, like Data Scientist, and the technological requirements of that job rather than learning one coding language. We talk later about the specific offerings Cloud Learning Services provides. With a focus on hands-on learning, technical practitioners are put into the real Google Cloud environment with Qwiklabs, while videos and lectures accompany the material. Job-specific skill badges and certifications are earned as courses are completed, allowing technical practitioners and employers to better understand what proficiency in each job role looks like. Our guests tell us more about Qwiklabs and how its sandbox environment facilitates better learning without the added cost and commitment of services that they may not be ready to use. When the time for real-world development comes, this hands-on approach means no disconnect between learning and applying. We talk more about the Challenge Labs used to test learning and the skill badges earned on completion. To wrap up, we discuss the future of Cloud Learning Services and how the team stays on top of new technologies and job roles to keep learning materials updated and fun. The team is working on new material for badging and certifying business professionals as well. Resources to check out to learn more about Google Cloud training and certifications: https://cloud.google.com/training https://cloud.google.com/certification Follow a learning path designed to help you prepare for the certification most suited to your role: https://g.co/cloud/getcertified Nandhini Rangan Nandhini Rangan works at Google Cloud Learning and is very passionate about the topic of upskilling, reskilling, and especially for cloud roles that are needed in organizations today, but also defining the roles and jobs of the future. She is based in Canada and works out of Toronto. She started her career as a Software Engineer, went on and got her MBA and then spent many years in operations and strategy including a stint as a management consultant. Learning was always top of mind for her and she decided to make the jump to join a learning organization full time in 2018 with Google Cloud. She launched the Google Cloud Technical Residency program, worked in the Higher Education learning space bringing programs to faculty and students globally, and currently works as a learning portfolio manager helping bring cloud training content closer to its audiences. Magda Jary Magda Jary is responsible for all aspects of Google Cloud Certification and Digital Badges go-to market and her mission is to grow Cloud skill sets. She joined Google in 2008 after graduating with two Masters degrees: Media and Communications at Warsaw School of Economics and International Management at Rotterdam School of Management. Currently based in San Francisco, she has been leading global learning and engagement programs for Google Cloud customers and partners. Magda is a frequent guest speaker at events dedicated to skills development, diversity, and women in tech. She is a certified yoga teacher and has completed a mindfulness teacher certification. She teaches the Search Inside Yourself training at Google, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course for leaders. Cool things of the week Announcing Google Cloud Public Sector Summit, a free global digital event: Dec. 8-9 blog 5 tips for more interactive meetings with Q&A and Polls, rolling out to Google Meet blog Add a more accurate sense of place to your applications using these five YouTube tutorials blog GCP Podcast Episode 181: Google Maps Platform with Angela Yu podcast Interview Google Cloud Training site Google Cloud Skill Badges site Qwiklabs site Deploy to Kubernetes in Google Cloud site Professional Machine Learning Engineer Certification site Coursera site Codelabs site TSIA Star Awards site Question of the week I’ve been interested in the Cloud Architect Certification and after listening to the interview, I’ve be inspired to look into taking it. What training material is available for preparing for the exam? Check out the Google Cloud certification, Professional Cloud Architect certification, and the Preparing for the Professional Cloud Architect Examination Qwiklab. What’s something cool you’re working on? Jon finished Game Summit last week and is back to creating Open Match content, specifically on submitting request from games and writing a match function in a language you may be familiar with!

ML in machinery is our main topic this week as Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey talk with Arnaud Hubaux, development lead for ASML. Our good friend, fellow Googler, and ML specialist Dale Markowitz joins the conversation as well! With a potent combination of physics and Machine Learning, ASML develops machines that build the chips powering our essential devices. These highly refined machines optimize production for each specific customer, detect defects, and make corrections quickly and accurately by harnessing the power of Machine Learning. The machines also effectively train themselves to ensure the intense accuracy required is sustained over time. Arnaud describes the process these machines go through in order to accomplish these goals, including how they build and train their ML models with the help of physics. Arnaud tells us how the machine’s closed ML system works from zero to train the particular job it will do. By taking a minimum spec chip that has already been created, the machine learns the process for creating that chip and continues to improve that process. These machines are not only able to detect problems but can figure out why these issues are occurring, decreasing production downtime. Recently, ASML moved to Google Cloud. We talk about the products they use, why they chose Google Cloud, and their journey to the cloud. Arnaud Hubaux Arnaud Hubaux is development lead for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning products at ASML. He works with the world’s biggest chip manufacturers on AI-driven solutions to solve problems like optimizing production yield. As a trailblazer, Arnaud and his team implemented the first ASML AI application development pipeline on Google Cloud. With a PhD on applied constraint solving, Arnaud has deep experience as an architect of software platforms and product lifecycle management. Cool things of the week Cloud migration: What you need to know (and where to find it) blog All together now: Fleet-wide monitoring for your Compute Engine VMs blog SRE Classroom: exercises for non-abstract large systems design blog gVisor: Protecting GKE and serverless users in the real world blog Interview ASML site ASML in One Minute video Zoom in on the chip in your smartphone video KubeFlow site BigQuery site AI Platform Notebooks site Cloud Build site Introduction to Kubeflow video Intro to Kubeflow Pipelines video How to Build a Kubeflow Pipeline video Tip of the week We have a super cool tip on combining AI and WTH with meetings and webcams! Check out the Level Up - AI Director and Level Up - Real-Time Video Translation with AR Subtitles videos! What’s something cool you’re working on? Mark is working on some upcoming Kubernetes content. Brian is working on an upcoming series of GCE videos with Carter Morgan.

Mark Mirchandani and Jon Foust are together again this week, speaking with NVIDIA VP of Applied Deep Learning Research Bryan Catanzaro. Bryan and his team focus on using deep learning to enhance NVIDIA’s offerings. Since Bryan was last a guest on the show, NVIDIA has been doing some amazing things. We talk about the A100 Tensor Core GPU and the massive effort it took to create, the new RTX graphics cards great for gaming, and the differences between them. Bryan explains how the new A100 chips compare to the previous versions, saying the new chips are larger, but with almost three times the power, making them ideal for things like precise calculations. And, as Bryan says, with better computation and more insight, we can make discoveries that benefit humanity. While the new RTX graphic cards are cheaper than previous versions, they are faster and more powerful, making gaming and video streaming much more enjoyable. Background noises and objects can even be removed with the help of deep learning. Jon and Bryan talk about The Black Box at NVIDIA and what demos Jon hopes to see on his next visit. With this as the catalyst, Bryan talks more about how the NVIDIA architecture and the deep learning they employ have created efficient 8k graphics rendering for truly powerful gaming experiences. Outside of gaming, DLSS could have farther reaching benefits as the model learns new purposes, and Bryan talks us through some fun examples. With the acquisitions of Mellanox and ARM, Bryan explains that NVIDIA has been able to streamline networking and really take advantage of powerful performance at all stages. The future of AI and HPC is about the data center, Bryan explains, and NVIDIA is hoping to push the boundaries on latency reduction and more. Bryan Catanzaro Bryan Catanzaro is VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, where he leads a team finding new ways to use deep learning for graphics, speech, audio, and system design. His research led to the creation of the CUDNN library. Cool things of the week Introducing interactive code samples in Google Cloud documentation blog GCP Podcast Episode 228: Fastly with Tyler McMullen podcast Fastly Offers First Partner Edge Cloud-Based Content Delivery Solution on Google Cloud Marketplace press release and marketplace Interview NVIDIA site NVIDIA A100 site NVIDIA RTX 30 Series site Mellanox site ARM site Cuda site GCP Podcast Episode 119: NVIDIA and Deep Learning Research with Bryan Catanzaro podcast GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast Digital GTC site Tip of the week Zack Akil is here this week with a tip about ML on the edge with Teachable Machine and AutoML. What’s something cool you’re working on? Jon has been working on Open Match which went 1.0 recently! He’s been working on samples for matchfunctions, sending requests from game clients, and putting all that content out for the world to play with!

Matthew Lawson of IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) joins Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia today, telling us all about IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s move to the cloud. Engineering Manager Matt and his team primarily focus on the early stages of development at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), helping the company with research and planning as well as development. Lately, they have been focused on incrementally moving IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s digital presence to the cloud. Matt explains the digital shift process for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) and why they chose to modernize and move pieces to the cloud over time. By illustrating through examples, he details projects the team worked on during this digital transformation. Matt also talks about the changes to the IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) Digital DNA, emphasizing progress made in their digital culture to allow for the drastic change from on-prem to the cloud. Using managed services like Google Cloud Run, IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) has been able to adapt and grow in the cloud. Because IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s culture is developer-supportive, Matt and his team were able to research and convince the company that managed services in the cloud was the way to go, and developers were allowed some autonomy to choose things like GKE to create an effective cloud environment for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group). Next year, Matt and his engineering team are hoping to run some online hackathons and other events. Matthew Lawson Matthew Lawson is responsible for leading a small innovation team at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) in southern Sweden. He has worked within the IT/Digital industry for 13 years and has deep experience and knowledge in application development, automation, DevOps and cloud technologies - especially serverless. He has a deep passion for enabling teams to quickly provide business value across the entire digital and physical customer journey. Cool things of the week Next OnAir as it happens: All the announcements in one place blog A developer’s take: Get the most out of Cloud AI Week at Next OnAir blog BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. brings PAC-MAN to the real world in PAC-MAN GEO blog Interview IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) site Matt’s Next Session: Serverless Functions (FaaS): Secure, Scalable, Resilient, Anywhere site ML Kit site Compute Engine site Cloud Run site Google Cloud Functions site Pub/Sub site BigQuery site GKE site Firestore site IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) is hiring! site Tip of the week This week, we get a great tip from our friend Grant on using Google Cloud Functions! github What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka is working on sketches like this summary of Google Cloud Next and more GCP Comics!

Max Saltonstall is back in the co-host seat, joining Mark for a fun chat about Active Assist. Chris Law is our guest this week, and he starts with the story of his arrival at Google and his path to the Active Assist team. Active Assist is Google’s way of helping clients learn about and take advantage of all the cloud features available. Chris describes the main ways Active Assist helps customers in the real world, from troubleshooting tools that identify problems to analysis software that helps clients determine how changes will effect the project. Active Assist also provides recommendations for cost savings, better security, and performance boosters to help clients proactively build better projects. As companies scale, these features become even more important, Chris tells us, citing examples from real users. Later, we talk about how machine learning is employed to create these recommendations. We talk transparency and learn how Chris and his team keep open communication with clients as they design and improve client security structures. In the future, the Active Assist team will continue to work with departments across Google Cloud and build more recommendations tools for customers. DataFlow and BigQuery are some of the recommendations projects coming soon. More automation will be introduced as well, helping clients do things like scale automatically based on machine learning analysis done behind the scenes. Chris Law Chris has helped to start several companies in the past, everything from Social Networking (Tribe.net) to Aggregate Knowledge, which started out as a Recommendations company and moved into Data Management Platform in the Ads space. He joined Google to see what it’s like to build things at scale. Cool things of the week Cloud Next Week 9: Business Application Platform site From One to More: Why Sharing Our Narrative Matters site The 2020 Doodle for Google national finalists are here blog Explore Kids Space: A way to nurture your kid’s curiosity blog Interview Active Assist site IAM Recommender Documentation site IAM Recommender Service Account Insights site Committed Use Discounts site Stack Chat at Home This week, we talk to Rob Hedgepeth about SkySQL. What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is working on quite a few things, from fixing his dishwasher and teaching his family new board games to a new animated Google series with Jen Person.

This week on the podcast, we’re celebrating GKE’s fifth birthday! Mark Mirchandani is joined by special guest host Carter Morgan to talk all things Kubernetes and GKE with fellow Googlers and GKE experts Alex and Drew. Drew starts the show with a thorough explanation of Kubernetes, telling our hosts that its a great way to manage containers as you scale. Because it is an open source offering, Kubernetes has grown and adapted quickly. Alex elaborates, pointing out that Kubernetes has helped redefine how people create cloud native applications. A year after Kubernetes was born, Google introduced Google Kubernetes Engine to help simplify things for developers while optimizing scalability and efficiency. Our guests talk about the progression of GKE over its short life, what’s new with the latest version, and why reliability and scalability have become the focus for year six. Later, we hear examples of companies taking advantage of everything GKE has to offer and how the symbiotic relationship between Google and its customers has helped GKE grow. In the world of gaming, GKE’s global scaling capabilities have been vital. Drew talks about Anthos, explaining that it helps businesses run Kubernetes in their controlled on-prem system while leaving the option for an easy cloud migration in the future. We wrap up the show with a look into the Kubernetes crystal ball where Drew sees a more adaptive Kubernetes and GKE. Alex hopes to continue to simplify GKE, making it easier and easier to use anywhere in the world. Alex Zakonov Alex Zakonov leads Google Kubernetes Engine team being responsible for operations of Google K8S fleet and for driving innovation in the K8S management. Prior to Google, Alex led a portfolio of products for Azure Monitoring at Microsoft enabling Azure customers to reliably operate and scale their applications. Alex has co-founded two successful start-ups, one of which, AVIcode, was acquired by Microsoft. Alex brings experience and passion in building and operating large scale systems and enabling engineering teams to deliver innovation at scale. Drew Bradstock Drew Bradstock leads product management for Google Kubernetes Engine. He previously worked on Google Ad Exchange and is based in Waterloo, Ontario in the Great White North of Canada. Cool things of the week New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers blog Week 8 of Cloud Next: Cloud AI site Interpreting ML Models with Explainable AI site How I Launched This: A SaaS Story podcast Interview Kubernetes site GKE site Bare Metal Solution site Optimize cost to performance on Google Kubernetes Engine video Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs Anthos site Start your K8s learning journey with hands-on training at no cost site Kubernetes Podcast podcast Tip of the week Anthony gives us a GKE tip on NodeLocal DNSCache this week! What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is working on the SaaS podcast. Mark and Carter are working on a Kubernetes series! Sound Effect Attribution A wonky midi version of the Superman Theme was used comedically at the end of this episode. The powerful and moving original symphonic music composed by John Williams can be found here.

Mark and Brian Dorsey are together again this week as we learn all about Google’s Bare Metal Solution with our guests James Harding and Gurmeet “GG” Goindi. To start the show, GG introduces us to Bare Metal Solution, explaining that it allows client projects built on specialized, often outdated software to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud environment. Using Bare Metal Solution, clients can choose to migrate all or part of their projects for a fully customized experience. We learn how Bare Metal Solution is able to support a partial or full native solution for clients and go through the steps to getting a project from completely on-prem to the cloud where latency is decreased, security is increased, and other cloud benefits can be leveraged. GG gives examples of situations where Bare Metal is a great option for clients, for instance an established company with an early 90s database that recently branched out into apps built in cloud native software. James outlines the benefits of Bare Metal Solution over other options, including real world examples of industries that have been able to modernize their offerings and adapt with the Bare Metal. GG and James wrap up the show explaining why the open source aspect of Bare Metal is so important to the evolution and flexibility of the product, and we talk about the recent developments at Bare Metal. James Harding James Harding leads the Data Management Practice for North America, with responsibility for the go-to-market strategy for all products and services data mangement. He also oversees marketing campaigns and sales field enablement. Gurmeet “GG” Goindi Gurmeet 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 Cloud Next Week 7: Application Modernization site Brian’s Cloud Next Presentation: Where Should I Run My Stuff? Choosing Compute Options site Mark’s Cloud Next Presentation: What’s New in Google Cloud Cost Management site Announcing the general availability of Google Cloud Game Servers blog Interview Bare Metal Solution site Bare Metal Solution Next Presentation site Bare Metal Solution on GitHub site Oracle site Oracle Rack Cabinets site Stack Chat Segment of the Week Max talks to Deloitte about how they built their system to help groups collect and respond to COVID-19 data on our Stack Chat Segment this week! What’s something cool you’re working on? NCAA bracket predictions on QwikLabs Here’s a hint for next week’s episode! GKE Turns 5: What’s New?

This week on the podcast, Mark and Max Saltonstall talk with Simen Svale Skogsrud and Knut Melvær of Sanity.io. Sanity.io started as a consulting company but organically morphed into a software company when they realized their content management solutions worked across many industries. By providing a managed system that includes search indexing and data hosting, Sanity.io allows customers to analyze and deliver content all over the world with ease. They also offer an open source kit that facilitates complete customization of the program to each client’s particular needs. Simen explains headless CMS as compared to the conventional systems and how it benefits Sanity.io clients. Data is separate and much more flexible, allowing it to be used in any way on any platform. Knut tells us about the developer experience using Sanity, describing the dashboard of useful APIs and other features that make using the program a breeze. We talk about how real clients have influenced and built on the product and why customer service is so important to Sanity. Later in the show, our guests go in-depth about specific features of Sanity, including how the system handles different types of data and data relationships. We get technical, talking about the importance of scaling and how Sanity is accomplishing this with Google Cloud and Kubernetes. Simen and Knut offer our listeners some valuable advice on product launching, time management, and more. Knut Melvær Knut Melvær is the Head of Developer Relations and Support at Sanity.io. Simen Svale Skogsrud Simen Svale Skogsrud is Co-founder and CTO of Sanity.io. Cool things of the week The Anywhere School: 50+ Google for Education updates blog It’s Week 6 of Next site Google Cloud and Spotify Demo at Next site Bare Metal Solution talk from GG site Interview Sanity.io site Get Started with Sanity.io site Get Started with Sanity CLI site Sanity.io Careers site Sanity.io Docs site OMA site Bengler site Kubernetes site Tip of the week Roger gives us a tip about Google Cloud’s Data Loss Prevention. Check out the demo here! What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is blogging about identity and security and access control. Here’s his latest post with Jen Person, Zero Trust for Enterprise : Cooking up some access controls. Mark and Max have been working on turning their popular YouTube Series, Stack Chat, into a new addition to the podcast! Join us next week to hear the first installment!

Priyanka is back this week, joining Mark as we talk big data with our guests Prabhu Palanisamy and Jarrett Garcia. Iron Mountain, a data management company, securely stores hard-copy and online data for enterprise customers. SpringML aides enterprises in the use of data analytics and machine learning to transform their projects. With the help of SpringML and Google Cloud, Iron Mountain migrated much of their data to datalakes and cloud storage for easier access and manipulation of the data. Jarrett and Prabhu talk about the process of migrating so much data, including the main goals of their partnership. First, they established systems that could be repeated and help Iron Mountain understand when data is moved, destroyed, migrated, and more. We discuss the next steps taken, learning how Iron Mountain moved so much data to the cloud. Using Google products like DataFlow, BigQuery, and Cloud Composer, SpringML was able to take the data from Iron Mountain’s landing zone and transform it. Prior planning meant that the system was optimized and ready from the beginning, complete with automation and tools to make a fast, effective migration of data without any restructuring. Later, the data visualization is done by GSuite, Google Data Studio, and Looker so Iron Mountain and their customers can use the data for analysis. Later in the show, Jarrett describes real-life situations in which Iron Mountain has helped manage, migrate, and store data for customers. Prabhu details the lessons SpringML learned while working on this project and offers advice to other developers. He talks about the future of the project, explaining that now that the data has been migrated, more detailed analytics can be performed and machine learning projects added on to augment Iron Mountain’s offerings. Jarrett Garcia Jarrett Garcia recently joined Iron Mountain as the Director of Enterprise Data. At Iron Mountain, Jarrett is working closely with the executive leadership team to build a robust Enterprise Data Platform in the cloud. His partnership with Google Cloud is a critical component to the transformation journey. Before coming to Iron Mountain, Jarrett worked as a Lead Architect at Nielsen within their Technology R&D team to create an AI/ML platform in the cloud. Jarrett has been at the forefront in introducing modern technologies into the organization such as Docker, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes. Before that, he lead the Data Science technology team where he spent over a decade building analytic tools and ushering in new technology. Prabhu Palanisamy Prabhu Palanisamy is co-founder of SpringML. He has a long history of running data-driven consulting organizations from Software AG to Appirio. Building on relationships he created leading integration and analytics services, Prabhu co-founded SpringML, a next generation data analytics company that serves data intensive industries. Prabhu constantly questions the conventional way of doing things and finds ways to be creative and innovative for customer business problems. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next Week 5: Data Analytics site Best practices for performance and cost optimization for machine learning site Building smarter games with Machine Learning video Anthos in a Minute video What is BigQuery? video Interview SpringML site Iron Mountain site BigQuery site Google Cloud Storage site Dataflow site Cloud Composer site GSuite site Data Studio site Looker site Scaling Data-Driven Insights Across a Complex Global Organization with Looker and BigQuery site Tip of the week Nick Orlove tells us a bit more about what to think about when optimizing BigQuery: What is BigQuery? video Visualizing query results video What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and Sketchnote.

On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey talk with fellow Googlers John Laham and Stewart Reichling about Traffic Director, a managed control plane for service mesh. Traffic Director solves many common networking problems developers face when breaking apart monoliths into multiple, manageable microservices. We start the conversation with some helpful definitions of terms like data plane (the plane that data passes through when one service calls on another) and service mesh (the art of helping these microservices speak with each other) and how Traffic Director and the Envoy Proxy use these concepts to streamline distributed services. Envoy Proxy can handle all sorts of networking solutions, from policy enforcement to routing, without adding hundreds of lines of code to each project piece. The proxy can receive a request, process it, and pass it on to the next correct piece, speeding up your distributed system processes. But Envoy can do more than the regular proxy. With its xDS APIs, services can configure proxies automatically, making the process much more efficient. In some instances, the same benefits developers see with a distributed system can be gained from distributed proxies as well. To make distributed proxy configuration easy and manageable, a managed control plane system like Traffic Director is the solution. Traffic Director not only helps you facilitate communication between microservices, it also syncs distributed states across regions, monitors your infrastructure, and more. Stewart Reichling Stewart is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stewart leads Product Management for Traffic Director (Google’s managed control plane for open service mesh) and Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing (Google’s managed, Envoy-based Layer 7 load balancer). He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across strategy, Marketing and Product Management at Google. John Laham John is an infrastructure architect and cloud solutions architect that works with customers to help them build their applications and platforms on Google Cloud. Currently, he leads a team of consultants and engineers as part of the Google Cloud Professional Services organization, aligned to the telco, media, entertainment and gaming verticals. Cool things of the week Week four sessions of Cloud Next: Security site Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel Week 2 site Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel Week 3 site Cost optimization on Google Cloud for developers and operators site GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast Interview Traffic Director site Envoy Proxy site NGINX site HAProxy site Kubernetes site Cloud Run site Service Mesh with Traffic Director site Traffic Director Documentation site gRPC site Traffic Director and gRPC—proxyless services for your service mesh blog Tip of the week This week, we’re talking about IAM Policy Troubleshooter. What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is working on the Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel we mentioned in the cool things this week and continuing his Terraform studies. Check out the Immutable Infrastructure video we talked about last week. Sound Effect Attribution “Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Mark Mirchandani is joined again by Priyanka Vergadia this week for an ML-filled interview with Radu Miclaus of Lucidworks. Lucidworks, a company specializing in information retrieval, strives to make data searching easier for developers and users. Building off Solr, Lucidworks created Fusion, an environment more conducive to easy AI-enhanced query capabilities, better scalability, and more. With Fusion, developers can take advantage of the highly advanced relevance tuning tools such as query rewrites, which analyze user behavior and automatically rewrite queries based on that information. On the tech side, Fusion was built with a combination of Java, Kubernetes to increase scalability, Solr management tools, and logging and reporting tools. The engineers at Lucidworks have created Fusion-specific system-enhancing pieces as well, including a machine learning service that allows data scientists to train their models elsewhere and plug them in for a completely customized experience. The team also created Smart Answers, which is a Q-And-A system built on a search engine that can connect to chatbots, virtual assistants, and others. Radu goes into detail explaining the Smart Answers system and how the layers of the project work together. We also learn about the customization capabilities and integration of Smart Answers. Radu wraps up the show with interesting use-case stories and how Fusion is working in the real world. In the future, Lucidworks will be available right in the GCP marketplace! Radu Miclaus Radu has over 12 years of experience in the data science space with applications in general machine learning architecture, search, customer analytics, risk and financial analysis. At Lucidworks, Radu focuses on low-code AI for search developers, pluggable machine learning for data scientists, and cloud managed services that offload the burden of operating search applications. Cool things of the week Week 2 sessions on productivity and collaboration site Online shopping gets more personal with Recommendations AI blog Using new traffic control features in External HTTP(S) load balancer blog Optimizing your costs on Compute Engine video Google Cloud Talks by DevRel site Giving you better cost analytics capabilities—and a simpler invoice blog GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast Interview Lucidworks site Solr site Lucene site Fusion site Try Fusion site Smart Answers site Spark site Kubernetes site GKE site Dialogflow site Webinar: Smart Answers for Employee and Customer Support After COVID-19 site Deconstructing Chatbots video GCP Podcast Episode 227: Pandium with Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn podcast GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast GCP Podcast Episode 195: Conversational AI Best Practices with Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha podcast Tip of the week We’re talking to Dale Markowitz about Prototyping Machine Learning projects. You can also hear more from Dale in GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz and GCP Podcast Episode 194: ML with Dale Markowitz. What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and Sketchnote.

Tyler McMullen of Fastly is with us today, telling our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey all about the company, CDNs, and more. Fastly is an edge cloud platform, focusing on ways to improve the more customer-focused side of the cloud with things like latency reduction, efficient scaling, and more. Content Delivery Networks can be a part of this, due to their proximity to customers and better caching. Edge cloud takes pieces of normal cloud setups and moves them to the edge of the cloud, closer to the customer, to achieve better speed. Tyler explains what pieces make sense to move out to the edge and what he sees as the future of edge cloud platforms. Later in the show, Tyler tells us how to analyze projects and make decisions on the use of edge cloud, CDNs, and microservices. He explains the technical process of using an edge cloud platform too, giving examples of situations that might benefit from a more edge cloud approach. WebAssembly, technology originally created for web browsers, actually plays a role in Fastly’s edge platforms, Tyler explains, going further into the technical side of how the engineers at Fastly have created this system to run smoothly while also being easy to build on. In the future, Tyler hopes to see WebAssembly support more languages so compiling and distributing can be even easier. Tyler McMullen Tyler McMullen is CTO at Fastly, a global edge cloud platform, where he is responsible for evolving the company’s system architecture and technology vision. He leads a team of experienced technology innovators focused on internet scale, and working on future-facing, ambitious projects and standards. As part of the founding team at Fastly, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. Prior to joining Fastly, Tyler worked on large scale web applications, text analysis, and performance. He can be found debating about edge computing, networking, and distributed systems all over the world. Cool things of the week Week 1 recap of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir blog Introducing Google Cloud Confidential Computing with Confidential VMs blog Next OnAir Sessions (Week 2) site Introducing your new home for work in G Suite blog Interview Fastly site Reaching 100 Tbps of Capacity blog Fastly’s investment in WASM ecosystem blog Fastly’s Developer Hub site Fastly’s Developer Hub: Everything you need to build on Fastly is now in one place blog Bytecode Alliance site WebAssembly site BigQuery site Fastly Labs site Altitude site Tip of the week We’re talking to Stephanie Wong about the Network Intelligence Center and her video series, GCP Networking End to End What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is learning Terraform! Mark is working on more video content and his Next talk, CST103.

This week is all about business-to-business marketplace software with Pandium as Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall talk with our guests Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn. The Pandium platform helps companies build and support in-app marketplaces with a focus on software integration and flexibility. Kelly and Cristina start by explaining how Pandium deals with scalability for clients with multiple users and partners. Cristina elaborates on Pandium’s role in facilitating integrations, helping customers build customized, flexible solutions. We discuss how APIs are handled and the way Pandium takes care of authentication, security, and other standard pieces. We continue with a thorough discussion of ‘yes code’, ‘low code’, and ‘no code’ approaches, and the benefits and drawbacks of each system. With a combination approach of some ‘no code’ tools and other ‘yes code’ pieces, Pandium allows better customization in any code language, while keeping some functions easy for non-engineers. Cristina Flaschen Cristina Flaschen is the CEO and co-founder of Pandium. She has managed integration projects and technical implementation teams for over a decade, including at Handshake and Booker. Kelly Sarabyn Kelly Sarabyn is a senior product marketer at Pandium. Previously, she was a partner at Woden and 2K North, where she crafted the positioning for dozens of SaaS companies. Cool things of the week Choose the right Google Compute Engine machine type for you blog New gcloud cheat sheet available as free printable download blog Search for Racial Equity video Interview Pandium site GKE site Google Sheets site Improving marketplace integrations with Pandium blog Scaling and support on GKE with Pandium video What’s Wrong with Low and No Code Platforms? blog “No Code”​ is great. But here’s why we need Yes Code blog Tip of the week Alicia Williams is here to tell us about connecting Sheets to BigQuery. What’s something cool you’re working on? A new video series called Season of Scale started just last week! Max’s latest blog post is all about Pandium! The Stack Chat series! Sound Effect Attribution “Laser Wrath 4.wav” by Marcuslee of Freesound.org

Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia are here this week to talk about some cool things that are going on. Then, Mark brings us an interesting interview all about documentation in development with Technical Writing Manager Riona Macnamara. Riona specializes in technical documentation for DevOps at Google. Having written technical documentation for both external and internal audiences, Riona starts the show comparing the two, explaining how the process can be very different. In external writing, she stresses the importance of engineers and technical writers working together. She details the challenges of documentation in code development culture and offers some solutions. Laying out goals can create better quality documents, while providing a simple documentation process for engineers can help bolster a culture of documenting. She talks about open source projects, stressing that documentation is possibly more necessary because of the diverse contributor base. We wrap up the interview learning how to get started creating and maintaining useful documentation. Better trumps best with documentation; a lot of decent documentation is better than very few documents no one can find or use! Riona Macnamara Riona is a 13-year Google veteran, and a documentation manager in Google Cloud. Previously at Google, she drove Google’s open source documentation strategy, led the team that developed Google’s internal engineering doc platform used by more than 20,000 projects, and supported Google’s Webmaster Tools (now Search Console). Before Google, she was a product manager at Amazon, and spent ten years at Microsoft as an editor on Encarta and mapping products, and a technical writer. She is a frequent speaker on documentation, open source, and diversity and inclusion, and is based in New York City. Cool things of the week Google Cloud VMware Engine is now generally available blog I built an AI-powered moderation bot for Discord video Interview Berlin Buzzwords 2019: Aizhamal Nurmamat Kyzy & Riona MacNamara - From User to Contributor video Documentation for Good: Knowledge as a tool for equity and inclusion video SREcon18 Asia/Australia - Do Docs Better: Practical Tips on Delivering Value to your Business video DevOps Days Galway videos Write the Docs Portland 2019 videos Write the Docs Australia 2019 videos Technical Writing Courses at Google site Docs Like Code on Amazon site Tip of the week This week, we learn how to authenticate a REST API. What’s something cool you’re working on? Riona will be the Keynote speaker for TCWorld India Priyanka’s been working on new episodes of Cloud Bytes. App Engine in a Minute is now up! She’s also working on her series GCP Comics.

This week, Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia learn all about Cloud Audit Logging with fellow Googlers Philip O’Toole and Oscar Guerrero. Our guests explain the importance of Cloud Audit Logs to keep track of your GCP resources so you know who, what, where, and when things were done. Our guests explain the types of logs GCP offers and why each is important for security. The interview continues with a discussion the various other benefits of audit logging, including proof of compliance and measuring of risk. Because audit logs have the ability to create more data than some businesses can use, Philip and Oscar help our listeners understand how to choose the correct logging services for their needs, and we learn how Cloud Logging can help users digest their data. Philip describes how audit logs and event driven systems can benefit businesses, explaining how event driven systems can be built and pushed with GCP. Oscar continues the conversation with audit logging in G Suite. The Cloud Logging team is continuing to expand offerings, so be on the lookout! Philip O’Toole Philip O’Toole is an Engineering Manager at Google Pittsburgh, leading development teams working on GCP’s Cloud Logging Platform, including Audit Logging. Prior to Google, he led development teams at InfluxDB, Loggly, and Riverbed Technology. You can find him on the web. Oscar Guerrero Oscar Guerrero is a Product Manager at Google New York, focused on Data Privacy and Compliance, in particular Audit Logging. Prior to Google, he consulted on Cloud based Financial Risk systems and was a Program Manager at Microsoft in Commerce, Xbox, and Cloud Recommendations. Cool things of the week The new Google Cloud region in Jakarta is now open blog Cloud SQL database instances now discounted blog Beyond Your Bill videos Understanding and analyzing your committed use discounts video Now available: Next OnAir ‘20 schedule, sessions, learning, and resources blog Interview Cloud Audit Logs site Cloud Audit Logs Documentation site Cloud Logging site Cloud Logging Documentation site BigQuery site Google Cloud Storage site Operations (formerly Stackdriver) site Chronicle site Splunk site G Suite audit logging information guide Google G Suite to Splunk HEC Configuration blog Anthos site Tip of the week This week, we have a tip from our Customer Engineering friend, Anthony Bushong, about audit logging in Kubernetes. You can find great documentation on this here and here. What’s something cool you’re working on? Cloud Bytes launched on Sunday and the 2nd episode of the Drawing Board launched late last week! Continuing to work on these.

Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia host this week’s episode of the podcast, with a thorough discussion of Solutions Engineering at Google. Our guests, Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace, explain that the Solutions Engineering team is there to help customers choose appropriate products for things like security, analytics, data management, and more. The products are laid out in guides and blueprints so the client can easily understand why products are chosen and how to use them. Grace and Ann talk later in the podcast about the Solutions Engineering blueprints that Solutions Engineering Architects have begun creating. They describe how the idea came about, how they’re built, as well as the types of blueprints that are available and how to use them. The team is still working to create more blueprints and make them even easier to use. Grace Mollison Based in London, UK, Grace Mollison leads the Cloud Solutions Architect team in EMEA, where she helps customers to understand how to architect and deploy applications “safely” on the Google Cloud platform. In her spare time she spends time attempting to teach her international team how to speak the Queen’s English! Before Google, Grace was a Solutions Architect at AWS where she worked with the AWS ecosystem and customers to ensure well architected solutions. Ann Wallace Ann Wallace (she/her) is Security Solutions Manager for Google Cloud where she develops, designs, and packages security solutions for Enterprise Customers. She co-wrote Google’s guidance for running PCI compliant workloads on GKE. Before Google, Ann spent 14 years at Nike in various engineering and architecture roles. She volunteers and leads workshops with Women Who Code Portland. When not working, Ann can be found traveling and ultra-trail running with her dog, Cedar. Cool things of the week Father’s Day present of the past: 30 years of family videos in an AI archive blog GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz podcast Open Match is now 1.0 and ready for deployment in production blog Google Data Center Security: 6 Layers Deep video Interview Cloud Solutions site Security blueprint: PCI on GKE site PCI and GKE Blueprint on GitHub site GCP Podcast Episode 116: Solution Architects with Miles Ward and Grace Mollison podcast GCP Podcast Episode 174: Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman podcast Terraform site Kubernetes site Anthos site Anthos security blueprint: Auditing and monitoring for deviation from policy site Anthos security blueprint: Enforcing policies site Anthos security blueprint: Enforcing locality restrictions for clusters on Google Cloud site OnlineBoutique on GitHub site Tip of the week How can I get introduced to key products? With Priyanka’s new video series! What’s something cool you’re working on? Our guests will be giving talks at virtual summits, including KubeCon and CISO Forum. Priyanka has been working on a new video series called Google Cloud Drawing Board, as well as a new animation series that will launch next week!

Mark Mirchandani is back this week as he and co-host Brian Dorsey learn all about voice coding with some great guests! Emily Shea, senior software engineer at Fastly and user of Talon Voice, and Ryan Hileman, developer of Talon Voice, tell us about Repetitive Strain Injury and how it led to the design and use of Talon Voice. Talon allows not only straight voice input but includes eye tracking, noise recognition, and user customization to perform complex actions like moving windows, selecting text, and user-specific workflow customizations without touching any hardware. Emily describes her experiences with Talon, including the process to get started and how she looked past voice recognition stereotypes to find how useful the product could be. She demos Talon for us, explaining how the alphabet system works. Ryan types a sentence using his voice then explains the process of developing the alphabet and other parts of Talon. Later, Ryan and Emily tell us how they write code using Talon and the logistics of using the software at home or in the office. We end the show talking about how Talon and voice recognition software have helped people with and without debilitating injuries and given hope to those spending hours on computers every day. Emily stresses the importance of adding accessibility to websites to accommodate Talon users and others with disabilities. Emily Shea Emily is a Senior Software Engineer at Fastly, where she works on the platform for delivering core Edge Cloud configurations. Because of a Repetitive Strain Injury, she develops using Talon’s speech recognition. Ryan Hileman Ryan was a software engineer for over a decade and in 2017 quit his job due to hand pain. He has since worked full time on Talon with a mission of enabling anyone to be equally productive for any and all tasks on a computer without their hands. Cool things of the week How to find—and use—your GKE logs with Cloud Logging blog The Stack Doctor videos Using Recommenders to keep your cloud running optimally blog Interview Talon Voice site Talon Slack site Talon Patreon site Hammerspoon site AutoHotkey site Whale Quench site The Accessibility Project site Web Content Accessibility Guidelines site Perl Conference video Demo from The Perl Conf video Strange Loop video Demo from Strange Loop video Ryan’s demo video Street Fighter video

We’re discussing security operations on the podcast this week with your hosts Priyanka Vergadia and Mark Mirchandani. They’re joined by Elliott Abraham and Jason Bisson who start the interview explaining that they created the CLAM framework to help customers use Google Cloud security features to their fullest potential to create safe projects and relaxed clients. The CLAM (Cloud Logging Alerting and Monitoring) framework came about specifically to help customers transition products to, and run products securely in, the cloud. Using the Mitre GCP Matrix, the security team addressed each element with GCP product solutions, from initial access to persistence and beyond. CLAM is GCP specific, taking into account the default security measures GCP already provides and supplementing these measures with appropriate procedures for each client. Once the framework is in place and things are secure, clients can build on that with operational controls, such as SRE best practices. Elliott explains the shared security model and how clients can shift more of the security responsibility to the cloud service provider by employing more managed services. Jason tells us about VPC Service Controls and how they allow clients to set specific security rules such as from where data can be accessed. They go on to describe the GCP Security Command Center and the tools available there. We wrap up the interview with some tips from our guests, including what to do if you are compromised. Elliott Abraham Elliott Abraham is a Security and Compliance Specialist based in Atlanta. Elliott works with Financial Services, Healthcare and Life Sciences and other Select Accounts migrating to or expanding their footprint on the Google Cloud Platform. Elliott has helped many customers to operationalize GCP Security solutions in alignment with their security, compliance, and regulatory requirements. Jason Bisson Jason Bisson is a Security and Compliance Specialist based in NYC. He works with Financial Services, Healthcare, Government, and Retail customers to explain the security, compliance, and regulatory abilities of Google Cloud Platform. Cool things of the week Announcing Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir blog Celebrating a decade of data: BigQuery turns 10 blog A very special BigQuery Day (The Data Show, w/ Felipe Hoffa & Yufeng Guo) video Interview CLAM Framework pdf Mitre site Mitre ATT&CK site Mitre GCP Matrix site SRE Handbook site VPC Service Controls site Cloud Audit Logs site Cloud Data Loss Prevention site GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniakpodcast GCP Podcast Episode 221: BeyondCorp with Robert Sadowski podcast Tip of the week Yuri Grinshteyn talks about the new logging feature. What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka is working on Building an Unbreakable DevOps Pipeline with Google Cloud. Mark is working on more videos and will be speaking at Next.

On this episode of the podcast, our old pal Mark Mirchandani is joined by special guest host Max Saltonstall to talk trust and security with fellow Googler Rob Sadowski. BeyondCorp is Google’s answer to allowing employees to use company networks on any device while outside the building in a way that is both secure and efficient. Users are authenticated per session and per device to give access only to the specific person, on the specific device, for the specific job each time. In addition to the thorough authentication process, BeyondCorp continues to monitor device metadata during use as part of the system’s decision to continue to trust (or not trust) a user. With this information, if a user accidentally exposes the system to malware, for example, access can be revoked quickly. Max and Rob explain the steps Google went through to create such a state-of-the-art security program and give tips on how companies can build something similar. Codifying your employees’ needs and preferences, detailing the levels of trust you’ll allow, and thinking ahead about where in the world your employees will be when they access the system are some of their tips. Rob stresses how complicated the system was to build from scratch and emphasizes that with BeyondCorp Remote Access, companies don’t have to build a whole new system. BeyondCorp Remote Access offers automatic scaling and world-wide points of presence for a fast user experience anywhere in the world. Companies can define access rules for each user, setting trust levels and parameters for who can access what parts of the network. Rob points out that this is a great solution, not only for employees who find themselves working from home due to the current global climate, but also for freelance or contract workers who only need access to parts of the internal system. Rob Sadowski Rob Sadowski is the Trust & Security Product Lead for Google Cloud at Google. He is responsible for creating and delivering Google Cloud’s security message, spanning platforms, applications, and connected devices. Cool things of the week Using Bigtable’s monitoring tools, meant for a petabyte-scale database, to… make art blog GCP Podcast Episode 192: Cloud Bigtable with Billy Jacobson podcast A simple, secure way for teams to meet and work: G Suite Essentials is here blog Interview BeyondCorp site BeyondCorp Remote Access site BeyondCorp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security paper BeyondCorp: Design to Deployment at Google paper BeyondCorp: The Access Proxy paper Migrating to BeyondCorp: Maintaining Productivity While Improving Security paper BeyondCorp: The User Experience paper BeyondCorp 6: Building a Healthy Fleet paper NYC Cyber Command site Tip of the week This week, Max talks about 2-step verification, security keys, and why you need them! What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is working on Stack Chat at Home (coming soon!), BeyondCorp in a Bottle, as well as Ring Fit Adventure and Just Dance video games. Sound Effect Attribution “Clarinet Multiphonics” by jfcharles of Freesound.org

Priyanka Vergadia hops back into the host seat this week, joining Mark Mirchandani to talk to Marit Rødevand of Strise. Strise is an AI-driven enterprise company using knowledge graphs to gather and analyze massive amounts of information, depositing it into a web-based interface to help large clients such as banks solve data-driven problems. Strise’s web-based data platform is customizable, flexible, and capable of keeping up with the fast-paced world of technology so enterprise companies aren’t constantly putting time and resources into reworking old or building new software. To do this, Strise uses knowledge graphs rather than typical databases to create what Marit calls a future-proof data model. Marit explains knowledge graphs in detail, emphasizing that they can reduce training of machine models, allow new data to be input easily, and make analyzing unstructured data much easier. Knowledge graphs take data that would normally only make sense to humans and in effect translate it for computers. Using banking as an example, she details how information about customers can be collected and analyzed thoroughly to help the bank come to conclusions about credit-worthiness or possible criminal activity. On Strise’s platform, Marit tells us that the information is now available to the end user who provides feedback to the system, marking things as relevant or irrelevant, rather than leaving those decisions to a data scientist outside of the client’s field. This means that massive amounts of information could be stored in the knowledge graph, across many industries, and each user only gets the data he or she needs. Google Cloud tools such as Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, and Pub/Sub have played an integral roll in the creation of the Strise data pipeline. Marit explains how Strise gets their data, how it’s input into the knowledge graph, and how these Google tools help to keep Strise running. Marit Rødevand Marit Rødevand is the CEO & co-founder of Strise, an AI startup from Norway who is signaling a new era of enterprise software. Strise makes the world’s information useful across the enterprise. Their novel approach by utilizing a knowledge graph to power their data platform, allows Strise to break data silos, end customization projects, and bring new insights from unstructured data. Strise is currently helping leading Nordic banks and financial institutions to solve their hardest data-driven problems within KYC/AML, risk, and sales. Strise recently announced their Seed round from Maki.vc, the leading Nordic early stage investor, who invests in deep tech & brand-led startups. Marit has a background from Cybernetics & Robotics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). In university, she co-founded Rendra, a construction SaaS, who was later acquired. Marit started as Entrepreneur in Residence at NTNU where she spun Strise out of a research project that focused on new data models as a foundation for better AI. Cool things of the week BakeML site David East’s Firebase Podcast podcast Automating BigQuery exports to an email blog Cloud OnBoard site Interview Strise site A world in text — Strise blog GKE site Helm sote Dataproc site Operations site Cloud Run site Cloud Pub/Sub site Cloud DNS site Cloud Storage site GCP Podcast Episode 198: SeMI Technologies with Laura Ham podcast Building on Google Cloud with SeMI Technologies - Stack Chat video Knowledge graphs with Weaviate - Stack Chat video Natural Language Data Processing with Mito.ai - Stack Chat video Question of the week Zach answers the question “What’s a cool thing in Cloud that many people may not have thought about?” GSuite and Apps Script What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka wrote this post on 13 Most Common Google Cloud Reference Architectures and her parents were on the news for the vegetable garden they’ve been working on. She’s also been working with material design components and firebase hosting. And The Data Show with Yufeng and Felipe is going strong!

Josh Brown, Developer Advocate at Spotify, is on the podcast this week with your hosts Mark and Brian. Working in the Open Developer Platform department, Josh supports third-party developers as they create music experiences for users using the Spotify APIs and SDKs. The most popular of these, the Spotify Web API, lets developers access metadata about music and facilitates library management for users. We talk later in the episode about the types of applications developers are creating using the Spotify Web API and how it’s changing the way people listen. Using developer feedback, Spotify has continued to improve on the API, now offering podcast support, for example. With the new podcast support, hobby developers especially are developing apps that make podcast listening easier and more social. To create these open platform APIs, Josh tells us they relied heavily on Google Cloud products like GKE and Cloud Storage. To manage the GCP products they use, Spotify created an internal portal called Backstage. Independent developers are encouraged to make use of Backstage to help with their Spotify projects as well. Josh wraps up the episode explaining the lessons learned in creating these APIs and how developer feedback became so important for them. Josh Brown Josh Brown is a developer advocate for Spotify, focusing on APIs. In his spare time, Josh enjoys running and writing. Cool things of the week Google Cloud training available at no cost for 30 days blog Cost optimization for serverless workloads blog Understanding forwarding, peering, and private zones in Cloud DNS blog Stephanie Wong’s video series on networking videos Stephanie Wong’s blog on Medium blog Interview Spotify site Backstage site Spotify for Developers site Spotify Community site Spotify Web API site Search, browse and follow podcasts using the new Podcast APIs news Kubernetes site GKE site Cloud SQL site Google Cloud Storage site Spotify Platform Documentation site Adopting Kubernetes with Spotify - Stack Chat video Updates on future Spotify events twitter Question of the week Podcasts and hosting static files: how does the GC Podcast do it? Cloud Storage of course! GC Podcast on GitHub. What’s something cool you’re working on? The Google Cloud livestreams we talked about a few weeks ago have expanded into a new Meetup group!

It’s cyber security week on the podcast as Priyanka Vergadia joins Mark Mirchandani to talk with the folks of the Chronicle Security Team. Our guests Ansh Patniak and Dr. Anton Chuvakin start the show off with a brief explanation of Chronicle, which is a security analytics platform that can identify threats and correct them. Anton details the threats facing clients today and why it’s important to continue to guard against old threats as well. Cyber security developers must constantly examine the landscape, adjust tools used, and think ahead to try to predict possible future problems. Ansh elaborates, pointing out that sometimes, all the security needed to protect against old, current, and potentially new threats can create a data overload that causes some threats to be lost in a jungle of notifications. Analyzing this data to gain insights about the health of a company’s cyber security is an important part of the process, and Chronicle can help with that. We discuss other challenges in the security analytics world and learn tips and tricks to help overcome them. Our guests wrap up the show explaining how Chronicle, as part of GCP, benefits Google Cloud customers. Dr. Anton Chuvakin Dr. Anton Chuvakin is now involved with security solution strategy at Google Cloud, where he arrived via Chronicle Security (an Alphabet company) acquisition in July 2019. Anton was, until recently, a Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) Security and Risk Management Strategies team. Anton is a recognized security expert in the field of log management, SIEM and PCI DSS compliance. Ansh Patniak Ansh Patnaik is responsible for product marketing at Chronicle. Previously, he was VP of Product Management at Oracle where he defined and launched their Security Analytics Cloud service. Ansh has held product management, marketing and sales engineering roles at several cybersecurity and data segment market leaders including Delphix, ArcSight (acquired by HP), and BindView (acquired by Symantec). Cool things of the week UEFI, Shielded VM now the default for Google Compute Engine customers—no additional charge blog Anthos—driving business agility and efficiency blog Anthos 101 videos Interview Chronicle Security site Chronicle Security Blog blog Chronicle Security Resources site Why Your Security Data Lake Project Will FAIL! blog Question of the week Whats one thing you have seen users ask about security on Google Cloud? What’s something cool you’re working on? Our guests be doing the SANS Webinar on April 30th. 13 days of GCP Architecture series! We’re on day nine now, but you can catch up on Twitter with posts like Day 6 on Data Lake and join us for the next few!

Our guests Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma join Brian and Mark this week to talk cost optimization techniques for internet projects. Justin and Pathik, both of the Professional Services Organization, work to help customers get the most out of GCP while maintaining their project budgets. They help customers take business success metrics and track them from a cost perspective, allowing the client to get an understanding of how much each business goal actually costs, rather than an aggregate of how much has been spent in total. This information is used to tailor GCP product usage and cost optimization to each client project. Pathik explains how the Recommender API can help with VM usage by suggesting shrinking or removing a VM altogether for cost savings. With thorough analysis, clients can also benefit from cost savings by paying for longterm usage of GCP products rather than month-to-month. For storage and analysis, BigQuery can offer better performance at a lower cost with partitioning and clustering. Throughout the episode, Justin and Pathik offer up other tips and tricks to help our listeners save money with GCP, as well as suggested reading materials, videos, and labs to get you started on your cost optimization adventure. Pathik Sharma Pathik Sharma is a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud, focusing on proactively guiding enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud. He loves helping customers to maximize their business value by optimizing their cloud spend.  Justin Lerma Justin Lerma is a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud. He has a passion for sharing best practices in operational efficiency as it allows for the proliferation of more experimentation and breeds new ideas. Cool things of the week Get started with Google Cloud Training & Certification site Interview Compute Engine site BigQuery site BigQuery Reservations docs Cloud Storage site Operations site Recommenders docs Google Cloud Support Plans site Cloud SQL site Use labels to gain visibility into GCP resource usage and spending blog GCP Advanced Billing Dashboard site Stack Doctor Series videos Cost Management Playlist videos Best practices for Cloud Storage cost optimization blog Best practices for optimizing your cloud costs blog Cost optimization best practices for BigQuery blog Networking cost optimization best practices: an overview blog 5 best practices for Compute Engine Cost Optimization blog Cloud Logging and Monitoring Cost Optimization Strategies docs Codelabs: BigQuery Pricing site Qwiklabs: Business Transformation with Google Cloud site Qwiklabs: Understand Your Google Cloud Costs site Qwiklabs: Optimizing Your GCP Costs site Business Learning Path site Cloud Platform Resource Hierarchy docs Cleaning up unused IP addresses docs Cleaning up unused and orphaned persistent disks docs Schedule VMs to auto start/stop with Cloud Scheduler docs Question of the week What is the metadata server?

Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani are back this week with guests from Capgemini as we learn all about ML in the rugby industry. Priscilla Li, Head of Applied Innovation, and Aishwarya Kandukuri, Data Scientist, start the interview explaining what they do at Capgemini and how the company uses new technologies to enhance projects with their partners. When Capgemini became the official global innovation partner of the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series, they were tasked with creating new ways for fans to use technology to further their experience. Priscilla and Aishwarya explain how they created a series of digital projects to accomplish this goal, and how the experience inspired them to use AI to automate aspects of the actual rugby games, such as identifying a scrum. They explain the challenges of these projects and how they conquered those challenges, as well as ways it has benefited the rugby commentators, players, and fans. Later, they talk specifics regarding the process of tagging images and audio to use in AI projects and things they learned along the way. Priscilla and Aishwarya wrap up the interview with advice for others who may want to tackle a similar project. Priscilla Li Priscilla Li is a leader of Applied Innovation Exchange in the UK.  Her purpose is to apply innovation in ways that advance humanity with a team that is diverse in gender, thought, discipline and experience.  Together, they shape ideas and breathe life into them through the application of emerging technologies with a human perspective.  Priscilla has held leadership roles in innovation and technology, advising and implementing innovative solutions across industries in telecommunications, transport, public sector, and media.  As a founding member of Artfinder, funded by Silicon Valley and UK Venture Capitalists, she delivered the first image recognition technology to discover, share and sell art. In 2012, she was selected by Business Weekly as one of the top Cambridge entrepreneurs and received the Chairman’s Award for excellence at American Airlines. In the Applied Innovation Exchange, she continues to bring to life the art of the possible, collaborating with start-ups, academia, and the wider community to unlock new opportunities for growth and meaningful transformation.  Grateful for her journey, she hopes to inspire women to be pioneers, unencumbered by the reality of today, but energised by the promise of tomorrow.   Aishwarya Kandukuri Aishwarya Kandukuri is a Data Scientist in Capgemini’s Insights & Data Practice. Her role involves testing ideas and concepts by analysing data and building machine learning models using emerging technology. Aishwarya works with an interdisciplinary team to drive business solutions. She worked on various projects across the industries to apply Machine Learning concepts to solve complex business problems to meet the needs of the customers. She continues to seek innovative approaches and explore new technologies to achieve long lasting solutions. Cool things of the week From raw data to machine learning model, no coding required blog Helping contact centers respond rapidly to customer concerns about COVID-19 blog How can Chatbots help during global pandemic (COVID-19)? blog Verily COVID-19 Pathfinder virtual agent site COVID-19 Rapid Response Demo on GitHub site Deconstructing Chatbots video Recent Podcasts with Priyanka: GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast GCP Podcast Episode 195: Conversational AI Best Practices with Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha podcast Interview Capgemini site Altran site Rugby sevens partnership and technology site AWS Kinesis site AWS Fargate site Applied Innovations Exchange on Medium blog Emerging technologies in sports site Applied AI within a Pop-Up store: a collaboration between Action for Children and Capgemini AIE video To get the Quarterly Applied Innovation UK newsletter email TensorFlow site Firebase site Question of the week We talk to our friend Zack about how we could build something similar with ML! AutoML might be the way to go! Where can you find us next? Capgemini will be at more What’s Now London Events with topics like Disrupting The Field Brian has been working on videos like Rethinking VMs - Eyes on Enterprise. He’s also been live streaming with Yufeng in Adventures with Yufeng on VMs. Mark will be making more videos like Kubeflow 101.

Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani team up this week to speak with Thomas Jung and Lucia Subatin about SAP. SAP, the company that builds software and other technology components, is probably best known for their Enterprise Resource Planning software that helps businesses with everything from accounting to order management. Their Customer Relationship Management software helps companies with things like marketing campaign management and sales, while SAP’s Supplier Relationship Management software helps clients manage large supply chains. Thomas explains how companies can get started with SAP products and integrate them into their current systems. Once SAP products are employed, clients benefit from a better understanding of their complete business and a more efficient company. SAP developers must have great communication skills, as they take SAP products and tailor them to each individual company, whether on-prem or in the cloud. Later, Lucia and Thomas describe instances when clients may want to take their core businesses and enhance them with technologies like AI and how this is possible. To wrap up the episode, Thomas and Lucia introduce us to SAP products like HANA, their Cloud Application Programming Model, and security measures. Thomas Jung Thomas Jung is Head of Developer Advocacy - a team within the SAP Developer & Community Relations organization. The Developer Advocates inform and educate about SAP and related development technologies and also act as the voice of external developers within the SAP organization. Lucia Subatin Chocolate, cats, computers. Lucia spends a lot of time with the computer, either solving problems or starting trouble. She likes to architect technology solutions to help enterprises run more efficiently. Her cats and chocolate help her bring innovations. Cool things of the week Google Cloud learning resources at no cost for 30 days blog Powering up caching with Memorystore for Memcached blog Interview SAP site OData site Pub/Sub site Cloud Knative site SAP TechEd site Cloud Run site Google Cloud Platform Podcast Episode 166: SAP HANA with Lucia Subatin and Kevin Nelson podcast Qwiklabs site Question of the week How do I get started with caching? Why should I cache? Brian tells us more about caching, Memcached, and Redis. Where can you find us next? Brian is taking it day by day right now. Mark will be making more videos!

Gabi Ferrara joins Mark Mirchandani today for an in-depth interview with Dale Markowitz about machine learning in the healthcare and medical fields. Dale talks about the coolest ways ML is transforming the healthcare field with advances in imaging and more accurate diagnoses of cancers. Later, Dale talks about how the cloud is used in healthcare to make data collection and sharing more efficient. The Google For Healthcare API, for example, makes working with common medical data types such as FHIR easier and more consistent. It helps with things like anonymizing of data and works with BigQuery for data analyzation. When data is collected and stored in the right format, it can be used to track healing progress, make health predictions, and more. Dale Markowitz Dale Markowitz is an Applied AI Engineer and Developer Advocate at Google. Cool things of the week Google Game Developer Summit on Youtube videos Simplifying Google Drive’s folder structure and sharing models blog PostgreSQL 12 is in Beta on Google Cloud docs New 96-core machine types for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server Interview Google’s lung cancer detection AI outperforms 6 human radiologists article BigQuery site Cloud Healthcare API site Google FHIR docs Google Games Dev Summit Playlist videos Building Contact Center AI Solutions with Quantiphi - Stack Chat video Verily site DeepMind site AlphaFold: Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning research Computational predictions of protein structures associated with COVID-19 research How Machine Learning is Transforming Healthcare at Google and Beyond blog How to develop machine learning models for healthcare article Question of the week Where do I get started debugging performance for my MySQL database? Diagnose and Slow-Query Log Where can you find us next? Gabi will be working Office Hours. Mark will be making more videos like KubeFlow 101 Series and Stack Chat.

Today on the podcast, Jon Foust is back with Mark Mirchandani as we talk about SLOs and the importance of measuring service reliability with Alex Bramley. As a member of the Google SRE team, Alex and his coworkers help customers optimally run their services on Google Cloud. They collaborate with the client, weighing client needs and user needs to develop a plan that is affordable, efficient, and has the highest reliability for the user. Recently, they’ve been working to automate functions such as detection of outages, so that Google and the customer can work together quickly to get everything working smoothly again. Later, Alex, describes the steps developers go through at his workshop, The Art of SLOs, which was designed to help companies measure and improve reliability. At this workshop, attendees are encouraged to set SLO targets and error budgets. They are given theoretical reliability problems to solve, allowing them to practice without the added pressure of messy, real-world problems. The Art of SLOs helps developers understand what measurements are beneficial and why and the best way to implement projects that can take those measurements accurately. Alex was able to make the materials for the workshop free online! Alex Bramley Alex Bramley joined Google in January 2010 as the first Mobile SRE in London, after IBM bought the startup he enjoyed working for and made it much less fun. He spent around 7½ years in various reincarnations of Mobile/Android/Play SRE, looking after the infrastructure that makes phones smart, keeps them up to date, and provides them with countless distracting apps. CRE offered an interesting opportunity to do something different and learn from a bunch of very smart senior people, and Alex has not regretted taking the leap into the unknown. Much of his time recently has been spent rethinking how people teach customers, partners and the general public about SLOs. He helped create the Coursera course on measuring and managing reliability and developed what became the Art of SLOs for Liz Fong-Jones to deliver with other Google SREs at SREcon EMEA’18. Alex works four days a week so he can (suffer) enjoy looking after his children on Wednesdays, listen to cheerful music, and waste a lot of time playing computer games and occasionally writing code. Cool things of the week Postponing Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect blog New research: How effective is basic account hygiene at preventing hijacking blog Simplified global game management: Introducing Game Servers blog Interview The Art of SLOs site CRE Life Lessons blog Putting customers first with SLIs and SLOs blog Putting customers first with SLIs and SLOs (Part 2) blog Measuring and Managing Reliability course Site Reliability Engineering books Question of the week How do I get started with GCGS? docs Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote video Google for Games Developer Summit Playlists videos Where can you find us next? Jon will be working on an Open Match sample project for the developer community. Mark will be making more videos like Error Reporting and error logging - Stack Doctor.

It’s all about data management this week on the podcast as Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani talk to Google Cloud Product Marketing Manager, Amy Krishnamohan. Amy starts the show by explaining that Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that recently added Microsoft SQL Server to its repertoire. We talk about SQL Server’s migration from 2008R2 to a newer version, the process involved, and how it’s effecting customers. Luckily, Cloud SQL for SQL Server is very backwards compatible, making the process easy for Google Cloud customers! Cloud SQL also offers other tools to make using Microsoft SQL Server easier with Google Cloud, including shortcuts to set up the high availability function. Amy talks later in the show about what companies are a good fit for Microsoft SQL Servers on Google Cloud. She explains the steps to set up and tear down, how licensing works, and what the best use cases are for Microsoft SQL Servers on Google Cloud. In the future, Cloud SQL will have a managed AD service available. A multi-cloud strategy is important, according to Amy. It is up to each company to research cloud services and pick the best vendors and products for themselves and their clients. Cloud SQL for SQL Server is a way to bring two great products together for the benefit of consumers. Amy Krishnamohan Amy Krishnamohan is Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud responsible for databases. She has diverse experience across product marketing, marketing strategy and product management from leading enterprise software companies such as MariaDB, Teradata, SAP, Accenture, Cisco and Intuit. Amy received her Masters in Software Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Cool things of the week Introducing Cloud AI Platform Pipelines blog Finding a problem at the bottom of the Google stack blog Larger local SSD storage available now blog Compute Engine gets machine images blog Google Cloud Next Update site Interview Microsoft SQL Server site Google Cloud SQL site BigQuery site GCE site Question of the week Lift and shift, move and improve, or re-architect: How do we “move and improve”? GCP Podcast Episode 211: Digital Services with xMatters podcast Importing virtual disks docs Create machine image from virtual appliance file (OVA/OVF) docs Tutorial: Getting started with Migrate for Compute Engine docs Whitepaper: Velostrata technology for mass migrations into Google Cloud Platform whitepaper Where can you find us next? We’re working from home for a while! Brian will be looking at getting a kind of weekly “reading group” of people who work with VMs and want to get better. Ping him on Twitter if you’re interested! Mark will be working on more video content and a cool nickname for Brian!

Priyanka Vergadia joins Mark Mirchandani today to talk shop with Travis DePuy about all things digital services. Travis is a product evangelist for xMatters, a company that provides digital services for clients in a way that makes it easy for them to “limit the blast radius” as they build and use their projects. At xMatters, customers can build an incident management workflow for their custom services and integrate the tools of their choice. Travis talks about service degradation and how xMatters helps clients optimize and manage their services to control instances of degradation. With programs like Google Stackdriver, xMatters can set limits and get alerts when thresholds are met, then use that information to fix performance. Later in the show, Travis talks about moving a large enterprise like xMatters to the cloud. Travis DePuy Travis DePuy is a Tinkerer of Things, Master of Hats and Father of Kitties. He is currently Head Product Evangelist at xMatters where he gets to talk to people about how they are doing Incident Management, DevOps notifications and anything else involving humans, processes and tools. Travis balances the stationary computer work with the fluid moving of Chen Taichi and is often found in the sun flowing the forms of the old ways. Cool things of the week Join us for Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect blog Connecting businesses and educators with advanced Hangouts Meet capabilities blog Interview xMatters site Site Reliability Engineering Book site Stackdriver site Migrating a monolith to GKE - Customer Story (Get Cooking in Cloud) video Question of the week How can I improve reliability/availability with the least amount of work? Codelabs site Migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine article Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine — An Overview blog Where can you find us next? You can find Priyanka online in her video series Get Cooking in Cloud and her series on Pub/Sub. You can see Mark in recently released Stack Chat videos.

Emily Cai of Google is on the podcast today with hosts Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani to talk about Kubernetes Config Connector, which went GA last month. The program helps users manage their Google Cloud resources in a way that is familiar for Kubernetes developers. Emily explains that it’s a great tool for Kubernetes developers looking to easily manage their infrastructure in one place. A platform team managing other teams is a perfect example of large-scale companies who could benefit from this tool, Emily explains. Walking listeners through the development cycle before and after Kubernetes Config Connector, Emily shines some light on specific instances when this powerful tool could streamline the process of building your project, making it faster and more efficient. She elaborates on the ways Config Connector and Anthos can work together as well. In the future, the Config Connector team hopes to cover all GCP resources, to create a more clear end-to-end experience for Kubernetes developers, and to allow Config Connector to be enabled straight onto a cluster. Emily Cai Emily is an engineer on Google Cloud’s Config Connector team focused on creating a declarative way for users to manage their non-Kubernetes resources. She has been with Google since November 2018 after interning twice (once in Irvine, once in Zurich). Currently living in Seattle, she is an avid frisbee player and winter sports enthusiast who is always open to new experiences. Cool things of the week SQL Server, managed in the cloud blog Now, you can explore Google Cloud APIs with Cloud Code blog Interview Kubernetes site Kubernetes Docs site Kubernetes Config Connector on Github site Kubernetes Config Connector Docs site Unify Kubernetes and GCP resources for simpler and faster deployments blog keeprunning.io blog Cloud SQL site Compute Engine site Pub/Sub site Terraform site Anthos site Question of the week How can I improve reliability/availability with the least amount of work? Regional Persistent Disks site High Availability Regional Persistent Disks site Where can you find us next? Our guest will be at Kubecon Europe and speaking at Next Mark and Brian will also be at Next!

Jon Foust and Mark Mirchandani are joined today by Domile Janenaite and Chris Stephenson of Humanitec. Humanitec, a German startup, helps developers run their code easily and smoothly in various environments. Chris and Domile start off by explaining why Humanitec was founded and what sets it apart from competitors, especially in the way it streamlines devops integration. Later, we learn how Humanitec is helping developers get the most out of cloud development by not only easily running deployments but also aiding in environment management. Developers can spend more time writing code and less time worrying about how they’ll get it to run. Chris also expands on how they built Humanitec, the reasoning behind their development decisions, and the challenges they faced. Domile goes on to describe the types of teams and companies that Humanitec is best suited for and why. Domile Janenaite Domile Janenaite is a product manager at Humanitec, focusing on developer experience in cloud-native development. Her team’s goal is to help developers escape scripting hell and smoothly enter the world of continuous delivery. In 2014 while studying she dove into Lithuania’s tech hub seeking to promote IT education nationwide. After finishing her studies she landed in Berlin’s tech scene and began working with 200+ dev teams across Europe analysing their processes and helping to improve workflows. During this period Domile became fascinated by the struggles that tech teams face working with cloud technologies. She envisioned building a product that helps developers optimize their workflows and reduce cognitive load. In 2018 she joined Humanitec in its early stages and currently she is working on an Internal Developer Platform which is pushing the industry to live in a “you-build-it, you-run-it” mindset. Chris Stephenson Chris Stephenson is VP of Product at Humanitec. He has worked in Engineering or Product across industries as diverse as Waste Management, HR-tech and Insurance but in recent years has been focusing on building platforms that enable development teams to implement and quickly scale applications. This has included running the High Performance Computing Group at Lloyd’s of London focusing on designing and implementing a platform to allow Engineers and Actuaries to quickly iterate on internal models at Lloyd’s of London, building a platform to allow for very fast development of “Partner Front-End” applications at Google (think the partner facing admin interfaces for Google Transit search or managing inventory for Google Play Movies) and currently at Humanitec building an Internal Developer Platform that can be used by all engineering teams to speed up their development of Cloud Native Apps. Cool things of the week Showing the C++ developer love with new client libraries blog New GCP Essentials video “GCP vs. Firebase — Part 1” blog GCPodcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast Here to serve Korea’s businesses with a new GCP region in Seoul blog Interview Humanitec site CNCF site GKE site Cloud SQL site Weaveworks site Harness site Question of the week How do you prevent exposing API keys in source code? Where can you find us next? Mark will be traveling and working on a video series for the Google Cloud YouTube Channel. Jon will be at GDC in March.

Aja Hammerly and Brian Dorsey are here this week to start off a new year of podcasts! In an interview with Google Developer Advocate Katie McLaughlin, we talk about the advantages of Python 3 and why version 2 has been retired, as well as the cool things you can do with Django. Later, Katie discusses the complexities of deployment and how she makes it work smoothly with GCP, and we have some fun with emojis! Katie McLaughlin Katie has worn many different hats over the years. She is currently a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, and a Director of the Python Software Foundation. When she’s not changing the world, she enjoys making tapestries, cooking, and seeing just how well various application stacks handle emoji. Cool things of the week Running workloads on dedicated hardware just got better blog Container security summit is going on as we record this site Easily upgrade Windows Server 2008 R2 while migrating to Google Cloud blog Launch of the BigQuery Weekly Data Challenge! site New data engineering learning path site Interview Python Software Foundation site PyCascades site Django Demo site Emojipedia site App Engine site Compute Engine site Cloud Run site Cloud Build site Secrets Manager site Kakapo Mountain Parrot site The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility 😓 of Unicode Adoption ✨ video Question of the week I need to run something later, but Cron isn’t a good fit. What do I do? Where can you find us next? We’ll be at Cloud Next in San Francisco in April! Katie will also be at PyCon US in April! Sound Effects Attribution “African Gray” by Jmagiera of Freesound.org

Hosts new and old gather together for this special episode of the podcast! We’ll talk about our favorite episodes of the year, the coolest things from 2019, and wrap up another great year together doing what we love! Happy Holidays to all of our listeners, and we’ll see you in the new year! Top episodes of the year GCP Podcast Episode 173: Cloud Run with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg podcast GCP Podcast Episode 165: Python with Dustin Ingram podcast GCP Podcast Episode 175: MongoDB with Andrew Davidson podcast GCP Podcast Episode 160: Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas podcast GCP Podcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast GCP Podcast Episode 164: Node.js with Myles Borins podcast GCP Podcast Episode 174: Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman podcast GCP Podcast Episode 176: Human-Centered AI with Di Dang podcast GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast Favorite episodes of the year Mark Mirchandani’s Favorites: GCP Podcast Episode 193: Devoted Health and Data Science with Chris Albon podcast GCP Podcast Episode 177: Primer with John Bohannon podcast GCP Podcast Episode 202: Supersolid with Kami May podcast Mark Mandel’s Favorites: GCP Podcast Episode 186: Blockchain with Allen Day podcast GCP Podcast Episode 196: Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston podcast Jon’s Favorites: GCP Podcast Episode 199: Data Visualization with Manuel Lima podcast GCP Podcast Episode 196: Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston podcast GCP Podcast Episode 206: ML/AI with Zack Akil podcast GCP Podcast Episode 201: FACEIT with Maria Laura Scuri podcast Gabi’s Favorites: GCP Podcast Episode 199: Data Visualization with Manuel Lima podcast GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast GCP Podcast Episode 206: ML/AI with Zack Akil podcast GCP Podcast Episode 198: SeMI Technologies with Laura Ham podcast Favorite things of the year Mark Mirchandani’s Favorites: Cloud Run Mark Mandel’s Favorites: Stadia Samurai Shodown available on Stadia All the new podcast hosts! Jon’s Favorites: First time doing the podcast at NEXT and it was quite the experience. Going to Nvidia offices to do an episode Getting to talk to guests in the gaming industry and hear how passionate they are about the things they are building Joining the podcast Podcast outtakes! Gabi’s Favorites: Visited a bunch of offices! Joining the podcast Cloud NEXT talk, where my demo failed but I recovered! Spreading the love and joy of databases Where can you find us next? Mark Mirch’ will be sleeping as much as possible! Mandel will be working on plans for Next, GDC, and I/O 2020! Gabi will be running away to warm weather for her winter vacation! Jon will be home! He’ll also be planning gaming content for next year and wrapping up this year with some deep dives into multiplayer games and some possible content! Sound Effects Attribution “Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Incorrect” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org “Correct” by Epon of Freesound.org “Fireworks 3 Bursts” by AtomWrath of Freesound.org “Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org “Dark Cinematic” by Michael-DB of Freesound.org “Bossa Loop” by Reinsamba of Freesound.org

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are joined today by fellow Googler Zack Akil to discuss machine learning and AI advances at Google. First up, Zack explains some of the ways AutoML Vision and Video can be used to make life easier. One example is how Google Photos are automatically tagged, allowing them to be searchable thanks to AutoML. Developers can also train their own AutoML to detect specific scenarios, such as laughing in a video. We also talk Cloud Next 2019 and learn how Zack comes up with ideas for his cool demos. His goal is to inspire people to incorporate machine learning into their projects, so he tries to combine hardware and exciting technology to think of fun, creative ways developers can use ML. Recently, he made a smart AI bicycle that alerts riders of possible danger behind them through a system of lights and a project to track and photograph balls as they fly through the air after being kicked. To wrap it all up, Zack tells us about some cool projects he’s heard people use AutoML for (like bleeping out tv show spoilers in online videos!) and the future of the software. Zack Akil When he’s not teaching machine learning at Google, Zack likes to teach machine learning at his hands-on data science meetup, Central London Data Science Project Nights. Although he works in the cloud, most of his hobby projects look at different ways you can embed machine learning into low-power devices like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. He also likes to have a bit of banter with his mixed tag rugby teams. Cool things of the week Stackdriver Logging comes to Cloud Code in Visual Studio Code blog Open Match v0.8 was released last month site Cloud Spanner now supports the WITH clause blog Interview Zack’s Website site Cloud AutoML site AutoML Video docs AutoML Vision site AutoML Vision Object Detection docs Coral site TensorFlow.js site Central London Data Science Meetup site Question of the week How do I run Cloud Functions in a local environment? Where can you find us next? Zack will be at DevRelCon. Gabi will be taking time to recharge after conference season, then visiting family. Jon will be attending several baby showers. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Sparkling Effect A” by CetSoundCrew of Freesound.org

Happy Thanksgiving! This week, Aja and Brian are talking DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble. Our guests thoroughly explain what DevOps is and why it’s important. DevOps purposely has no official definition but can be thought of as a community of practice that aims to make large-scale systems reliable and secure. It’s also a way to get developers and operations to work together to focus on the needs of the customer. Nathen later tells us all about DevOpsDays, a series of locally organized conferences occurring in cities around the world. The main goal is to bring a cross-functional group of people together to talk about how they can improve IT, DevOps, business strategy, and consider cultural changes the organization might benefit from. DevOpsDays supports this by only planning content for half the conference, then turning over the other half to attendees via Open Spaces. At this time, conference-goers are welcome to propose a topic and start a conversation. Jez then describes the Accelerate State of DevOps Report, how it came to be, and why it’s so useful. It includes items like building security into the software, testing continuously, ideal management practices, product development practices, and more. With the help of the DevOps Quick Check, you can discover the places your company could use some help and then refer back to the report for suggestions of improvements in those areas. Nathen Harvey Nathen Harvey helps the community understand and apply DevOps and SRE practices in the cloud. He is part of the global organizing committee for the DevOpsDays conferences and was a technical reviewer for the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. Jez Humble Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner “Accelerate” and Jolt Award winner “Continuous Delivery”. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He works for Google Cloud as a technology advocate and teaches at UC Berkeley. Cool things of the week It’s a wrap: Key announcements from Next ‘19 UK blog Explainable AI site Hand-drawn Graphviz diagrams blog Add one line to plot in XKCD comic sketchy style site Interview DevOps insights from Google site DevOps Quick Check site DevOpsDays site Agile Alliance site Velocity Conference site DevOps Enterprise Summit site Question of the week Why do you need the Cloud SQL Proxy? Where can you find us next? DevOpsDays has events coming up across the globe, including Galway, Warsaw, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Nathen and Jez will be at Delivery Conf. Aja will be home drinking tea! Brian will also be home drinking tea!

Mark Mirchandani hosts solo today but is later joined by fellow Googler and Developer Advocate Ray Tsang to talk Java! Ray tells us what’s new with Java 11, including more memory and fewer restrictions for developers. One of the greatest things for Ray is using Java 11 in App Engine because of the management support that it provides. Later, we talk about Spring Boot on GCP. Ray explains the many benefits of using this framework. Developers can get their projects started much more quickly, for example, and with Spring Cloud GCP, it’s easy to integrate GCP services like Spanner and run your project in the cloud. For users looking to containerize their Java projects, JIB can help you do this without having to write a Dockerfile. At the end of the show, Ray and Mark pull it all together by explaining how Spring Boot, Cloud Code, Skaffold, and proper dev-ops can work together for a seamless Java project. Ray Tsang Ray is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform and a Java Champion. Ray works with engineering and product teams to improve Java developer productivity on GCP. He also helps Alphabet companies migrate and adopt cloud native architecture. Prior to Google, Ray worked at Red Hat, Accenture, and other consulting companies, where he focused on enterprise architecture, managed solutions delivery, and contributed to open source projects. Aside from technology, Ray enjoys traveling and adventures. Cool things of the week Cloud Run is now GA blog Budget API in Beta blog Interview App Engine site Micronaut site Quarkus site Java 11 on App Engine blog and docs Spring Boot and Spring Cloud site Spring Cloud GCP Projects site Cloud Spanner site Spring Cloud Sleuth site Stackdriver site Bootiful GCP: To Production! blog Effective Cloud Native Spring Boot on Kubernetes & Google Cloud Platform blog JDBC drivers site Hibernate ORM with Cloud Spanner docs Effective Cloud Native Spring Boot on Kubernetes & Google Cloud Platform blog Dev to Prod with Spring on GCP in 20 Minutes (Cloud Next ‘19) video Cloud Code site JIB site Skaffold site Debugger site Troubleshooting & Debugging Microservices in Kubernetes blog Cloud Code Quickstart docs Spring (or Java) to Kubernetes Faster and Easier blog GCP Podcast Episode 58: Java with Ray Tsang and Rajeev Dayal podcast Question of the week How do I dockerize my Java app? video github Where can you find us next? Ray is taking a break for the holidays, but in the future, you can find him at Java and JUG conferences. Mark is hanging out in the Bay Area, but Google Cloud Next in London and KubeCon and CloudNativeCon are happening now! Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Tre-Loco1” by Sonipro of Freesound.org “Mens Sincere Laughter” by Urupin of Freesound.org “Party Pack” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org “DrumRoll” by HolyGhostParty of Freesound.org “Tension” by ERH of Freesound.org

Jon and Aja host our guest Donna Malayeri this week to learn all about Cloud Run and Anthos! Designed to provide serverless containers, Cloud Run has two versions: fully managed and Cloud Run for Anthos. Donna’s passion for serverless projects and containers shows as we discuss how these options benefit developers and customers. With containers, developers are able to go serverless without a lot of the typical restrictions, and because they are a standard format, containers are fairly easy to learn to use. Tools such as Ko can even do the work of generating docker containers for you. One of Cloud Run’s most unique features is that it allows developers to bring existing applications. You don’t have to rewrite your entire app to make it serverless! Developers can also reuse instances, making the process more efficient and cost effective. Cloud Run for Anthos allows projects to stay on-prem while still enjoying the benefits of containers and the Cloud Run platform. Later in the show, Donna tells us about Knative, which is the API Cloud Run is based on that helps create portability between Cloud Run versions, as well as portability to other vendors. We also get to hear the weirdest things she’s seen put in a container and run in Cloud Run! Donna Malayeri Donna Malayeri is a product manager for Cloud Run for Anthos. She’s worked in the serverless space since 2016 and is bullish on the future of serverless. Prior to joining Google, she was the first product manager at the Seattle startup, Pulumi. She was also a product manager on the Azure Functions team at Microsoft, guiding the developer experience from its beta through the first year of general availability. Donna is passionate about creating products that developers love and has worked on programming languages such as F# and Scala. Cool things of the week Bringing Google AutoML to 3.5 million data scientists on Kaggle blog GCP Podcast has a website on dev site Command and control now easier in BigQuery with scripting and stored procedures bog Skaffold now GA blog Interview Cloud Run site Cloud Run for Anthos site Anthos site Ko site Buildpacks site Google Cloud Functions site Kubernetes site Knative site Serverless: An ops experience of a programming model? video Question of the week How do I write a Matchmaking function in OpenMatch? OpenMatch 0.8RC OpenMatch Slack OpenMatch Twitter Jon’s Twitter Where can you find us next? Donna will be at Google Cloud Next in London. Aja will also be attending Google Cloud Next in London. Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Anime Cat Girl” by KurireeVA of Freesound.org “Anime Sword Hit” by Syna-Max of Freesound.org “Wedding Bells” by Maurice_J_K of Freesound.org “Big Dinosaur Whirrs” by RobinHood76 of Freesound.org “Cat Purring & Meow” by SkyMary of Freesound.org

This week, Mark and Jon bring us a fascinating interview with Kami May of Supersolid, a gaming company in London. With the help of Kami May, Supersolid recently launched their first multiplayer game, Snake Rivals. This session-based game puts players in an arena where they can choose from three modes: endless, gold rush, or battle royale. To produce the game, Supersolid makes use of many GCP products. Snake Rivals is powered by Kubernetes and Agones, which Kami chose because it offers functionality that works well with gaming. It provides server allocation which allows players to continue play even during an update, has the ability to scale, allows labeling, allows for different gaming modes, and more. To reduce latency, Supersolid operates in nine regions. Supersolid uses BigQuery and continuously gathers data so they can make adjustments to make sure game play is efficient, fun, and functional. Kami explains that navigating the world of multiplayer gaming for the first time was tricky, but the Google support team has been very helpful! Kami May Kami May is a Senior Server Developer at London-based mobile games studio, Supersolid. Her lifetime passion for video games drove her to join the games industry soon after graduating from university in 2016. Since then, Kami has worked on multiple titles for mobile, PC, and console. Most recently, she’s been bringing Supersolid’s most ambitious project to date - Snake Rivals - to life, powered by Agones on GCP. In her free time she can be found at the top of the ladder on Path of Exile, chasing the 6k MMR dream on Dota 2, or searching for London’s best fried chicken. Cool things of the week Keep Parquet and ORC from the data graveyard with new BigQuery features blog Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI site Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly’s shortened cloud migration blog Interview Supersolid site Snake Rivals site Agones site Kuberentes site Go site Cloud Load Balancing site BigQuery site Stackdriver site Supersolid Careers site Snake Rivals on Google Play site Snake Rivals on iTunes site Question of the week What are best practices for setting up user accounts in Cloud IAM? Quickstart Guide Service Accounts Docs Using IAM Securely Where can you find us next? Mark will be working on blogs and videos at home. Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Human has been Nutralised” by cityrocker of Freesound.org “Laser Automatic Heavy” by dpren of Freesound.org “Gong Sabi” by Veiler of Freesound.org

Happy Halloween! Today, Jon Foust and Brian Dorsey chat with Maria Laura Scuri of FACEIT about ways they are reducing toxicity in gaming. FACEIT is a competitive gaming platform that helps connect gamers and game competition and tournament organizers. In order to do this well, FACEIT has put a lot of energy into finding ways to keep the experience positive for everyone. Because gaming toxicity can involve anything from verbal jabs to throwing a game, FACEIT uses a combination of data collecting programs and input from players to help identify toxic behavior. In identifying this behavior, FACEIT has to consider not only the literal words spoken or actions made, but the context around them. Is that player being rude to strangers or is he egging on a friend? The answer to this question could change the behavior from unacceptable to friendly banter. Using their own machine learning model, interactions are then given a score to determine how toxic the player was in that match. The toxicity scores along with their program, Minerva, determine if any bans should be put on a player. FACEIT focuses on punishing player behavior, rather than the player themselves, in an effort to help players learn from the experience and change the way they interact with others in the future. Maria’s advice to other companies looking to help reduce toxicity on their platforms is to know the context of the toxic event. Know how toxicity can express itself on your platform and find ways to deal with all of them. She also suggests tackling the issues of toxicity in small portions and celebrating the small wins! Her final piece of advice is to focus on criticizing the behavior of the user rather than attacking them personally. Maria Laura Scuri Maria is the Director of Business Intelligence at FACEIT, the leading competitive platform for online multiplayer games with over 15 million users. She joined FACEIT as part of the core team in 2013 as an intern assisting with everything from customer support to event management. Her passion for data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence saw her quickly rise through the ranks to her current position, leading the Business Intelligence and Data Science teams. Maria works side by side with some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Google Cloud. She is the main lead on a number of projects including the inception of an Artificial Intelligence Admin to fight toxicity on the platform. Maria is responsible for implementing best practices around data visualization and tools that allow the FACEIT team to thrive, as well as sourcing and training new talent. Maria is a huge video games fan. You can find her on League of Legends as “FACEIT Lulu” and on Steam as “Sephariel”. Cool things of the week What can Google Cloud do for you? New trainings for business professionals blog Leave no database behind with Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog How to orchestrate Cloud Dataprep jobs using Cloud Composer blog Updates make Cloud AI platform faster and more flexible blog Use GKE usage metering to combat over-provisioning blog Interview FACEIT site FACEIT blog FACEIT on Medium site Steam site Perspective API site BigQuery site Looker site Cloud Datalab site Jupyter Notebook site Cloud AI Platform site TensorFlow site Google Cloud Data Labeling site Google Translation site] Dealing with CS:GO Free to Play and Addressing Toxicity in Matches blog Revealing Minerva and addressing toxicity and abusive behaviour in matches blog One of Europe’s Largest Gaming Platforms is Tackling Toxicity with Machine Learning blog FACEIT And Google Partner To Use AI To Tackle In Game Toxicity article FACEIT implement Minerva, an AI to punish toxicity in CSGO blog FACEIT Takes On Toxicity With Machine Learning article Exploring Cyberbullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games whitepaper Toxic Behavior in Online Games whitepaper A Look at Gaming Culture and Gaming Related Problems: From a Gamer’s Perspective whitepaper An Analysis of (Bad) Behavior in Online Video Games whitepaper Toxicity detection in multiplayer online games whitepaper Jon’s gaming info steam BattleNet: Syntax#11906 Question of the week When I SSH into my VM via different methods (Cloud Console, GCloud, terminal/command prompt) I get a different username… What can I do to make that static? OS Login Where can you find us next? FACEIT will be at Next London and GDC Brian will be at Super Computing in Denver. Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland and Montreal in December.

We’re sad to say goodbye to Mark Mandel this week but excited to bring you an interview he and guest host Robert Martin did with Björn Lindberg of Massive Entertainment. The gaming studio is located in Sweden and owned by Ubisoft. Their most recent game, The Division 2, is a “looter shooter” game that was released in March. It can be played solo or users can be matched up to play with or against others. To keep the game running smoothly, Massive employs a micro-service architecture to divide and conquer the trials of creating and running such a large, intense game. The Division 2 was launched with Google Cloud, a process Björn says was a bit easier than launching on physical hardware. Autoscaling in the cloud has created a simpler, more trustworthy gaming process as well, and by connecting to data centers in multiple regions, they’re able to decrease latency. Björn Lindberg Björn Lindberg is working as On-Line technical director at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft owned and operated game studio in Malmö Sweden. He does design and implementation of on-line backend systems for large AAA on-line games such as The Division series of games and World in Conflict. Interview Massive Entertainment site The Division 2 site Ubisoft site Terraform site Grafana site Compute Engine site Thank You Mark! Thank you Mark for everything you’ve done to make this podcast a success! We’ll miss you!

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are back today and joined by fellow Googler Manuel Lima. In this episode, Manuel tells us all about data visualization, what it means, why it’s important, and the best ways to do it effectively. For Google and its mission, data visualization is especially necessary in facilitating the accessibility of information. It “makes the invisible visible” because of the way it can decode meaningful data patterns. Working across multiple GCP products, Manuel and his team build advanced visualization models that go beyond graphs and bar charts to things like sophisticated time lines that aid in the progression from data to usable knowledge. They have also created guidelines for things like what kind of graphical language to use, what type of charts users might need, and more. These guidelines, originally used only internally, have now been adjusted and released for use by developers outside Google with the help of the Material.io team. The guidelines are based around the six data visualization principles that help users get started. They can be employed to plan and inspire an entire project or to evaluate a specific data visualization chart. Some of the most important principles are to be honest and to lend a helping hand. You can read more in their Medium article, Six Principles for Designing Any Chart. Manuel Lima A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009,” Manuel Lima is the founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Google, and a regular teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design. Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various publications and media outlets, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Fast Company, Forbes, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Design Observer, Creative Review, Eye, Grafik, étapes, and El País. His first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His latest, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, covers 1,000 hundred years of humanity’s long-lasting obsession with all things circular. With more than twelve years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. During the course of his MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Cool things of the week Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine? New trainings teach you the basics of architecting on Google Cloud blog Stadia comes next month site Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for the fourth consecutive time blog Google Hardware Event Pixel 4 is here to help blog Meet the new Google Pixel Buds blog Nest Mini brings twice the bass and an upgraded Assistant blog More affordable and portable: let’s Pixelbook Go blog Interview Material.io site Data Visualization Guides site Six Principles for Designing Any Chart article Google’s six rules for great data design article BigQuery site Stackdriver site Google Analytics site Question of the week What are the most common products used in cloud gaming? Cloud Spanner for storing player authentication and inventory or long-term state storage site Redis is used in Open Match VM’s have been the most commonly used product for game servers but there has been a shift to Kubernetes Pub/Sub Where can you find us next? Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe. Jon will be at Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Today on the podcast, Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust share a great interview with Laura Ham, Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies. At SeMI Technologies, Laura works with their project Weaviate, an open-source knowledge graph program that allows users to do a contextualized search based on inputted data. However, unlike traditional databases, Weaviate attaches meanings and links within the data. Laura details what knowledge graphs are and how they can be useful for both small and large projects. Explaining that ontology is the meaning of words, she tells us how Weaviate is able to use this concept to make more specific data entries and links, allowing users to perform better and more informative searches. Weaviate is able to do this with the help of Kubernetes. Later, Laura tells Gabi and Jon the ways Weaviate helps developers and users with thorough documentation, assistance with troubleshooting, and support from solution engineers. Laura Ham Laura is the Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies, where she takes care of building and supporting a community around their open source software product, Weaviate. She also takes care of the developer and user experience within the business, which means she writes documentation to support both developers and users, as well as researches and evaluates new software implementations on user experience. She has a user-centered approach in the work that she develops and designs. Laura is a full-time graduate student in Human Computer Interaction and Design with a special focus on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at EIT Digital Master School. Here, she learns about how to develop and design technology from a user perspective, and how to apply this with an entrepreneurial mindset. Cool things of the week Use G Suite to make documents (and other tools) more accessible to people with disabilities blog 4 steps to stop data exfiltration with Google Cloud blog Using Colab to get more out of BigQuery blog Updates to AutoML Vision Edge, Auto ML Video, & AutoML Intelligence API blog Interview SeMI Technologies site Weaviate site Weaviate GitHub github Weaviate documentation site GraphQL API github Kubernetes site GKE site Cloud BigTable site SeMI Technologies Meetups site Question of the week When will Python 2 reach the end of its life, and what does that mean for GCP? Python Google Cloud Client Libraries only support Python 3 github Countdown to end of life site Where can you find us next? Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe. Jon will be at his twin’s wedding! Then Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match. SeMI Technologies will be hosting meetups in NYC on October 24th, the Bay Area on October 25th, and Amsterdam on November 7th. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Small Group Laugh 2” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “02 Storm Orage” by ArnaudCoutancier of Freesound.org “Harry Potter Theme”, a clunky midi file rendition of music originally composed by John Williams. Purchase the soundtrack on Amazon

Our guests Matthew Tamsett and Ravi Upreti join Gabi Ferrara and Aja Hammerly to talk about data science and their project, Qubit. Qubit helps web companies by measuring different user experiences, analyzing that information, and using it to improve the website. They also use the collected data along with ML to predict things, such as which products users will prefer, in order to provide a customized website experience. Matthew talks a little about his time at CERN and his transition from working in academia to industry. It’s actually fairly common for physicists to branch out into data science and high performance computing, Matthew explains. Later, Ravi and Matthew talk GCP shop with us, explaining how they moved Qubit to GCP and why. Using PubSub, BigQuery, and BigQuery ML, they can provide their customers with real-time solutions, which allows for more reactive personalization. Data can be analyzed and updates can be created and pushed much faster with GCP. Autoscaling and cloud management services provided by GCP have given the data scientists at Qubit back their sleep! Matthew Tamsett Matthew was trained in experimental particle physics at Royal Holloway University of London, and did his Ph.D. on the use of leptonic triggers for the detection of super symmetric signals at the ATLAS detector at CERN. Following this, he completed three post doctoral positions at CERN and on the neutrino experiment NOvA at Louisiana Tech University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and the University of Sussex UK, culminating in a EU Marie Curie fellowship. During this time, Matt co-authored many papers including playing a minor part in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Since leaving academia in 2016, he’s worked at Qubit as a data scientist and later as lead data scientist where he lead a team working to improve the online shopping experience via the use of personalization, statistics and predictive modeling. Ravi Upreti Ravi has been working with Qubit for almost 4 years now and leads the platform engineering team there. He learned distributed computing, parallel algorithms and extreme computing at Edinburgh University. His four year stint at Ocado helped developed a strong domain knowledge for e-commerce, along with deep technical knowledge. Now it has all come together, as he gets to apply all these learnings to Qubit, at scale. Cool things of the week A developer goes to a DevOps conference blog Cloud Build brings advanced CI/CD capabilities to GitHub blog Cloud Build called out in Forrester Wave twitter 6 strategies for scaling your serverless applications blog Interview Qubit site Qubit Blog blog Pub/Sub site BigQuery site BigQuery ML site Cloud Datastore site Cloud Memorystore site Cloud Bigtable site Cloud SQL site Cloud AutoML site Goodbye Hadoop. Building a streaming data processing pipeline on Google Cloud blog Question of the week How do you deploy a Windows container on GKE? Where can you find us next? Gabi will be at the Google Cloud Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Aja will be at Cloud Next London. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org

Mark Mandel and Jon Foust return this week to host Jesse Houston, CEO of Phoenix Labs. Jesse goes into detail about their online, multiplayer game Dauntless, a hunting action game that brings friends together from every platform to fight giant monsters. Users can even switch platforms, say from Xbox to Playstation, and pick up right where they left off. Later in the show, Jesse describes the hurdles of building such a huge game and how Phoenix Labs overcame them. Late nights and holiday hours helped them create “no downtime deploys”, so users can continue to play even as the game updates. Because big projects sometimes come with big problems, Jesse also emphasized the importance of developing crisis management skills to help get through tough times. We talk more specifically about what it takes to build and run Dauntless, from GCP products such as GKE, Bigtable, and BigQuery, to tricks with scaling and management. In the future, Dauntless will be available on the Switch, new expansions will be released, and more. Jesse Houston Jesse Houston is a games industry veteran with over 18 years experience in the gaming space. Houston fell in love with games at an early age and found his footing in the games industry by applying to a QA position in a local paper. Previously, Houston has held lead producer roles at both Riot Games on League of Legends, and BioWare on the Mass Effect series. He also served as Production Director at Ubisoft, overseeing Technical Project Management, Pipeline Planning, Development and Design, among other responsibilities. Houston formed Phoenix Labs with Sean Bender and Robin Mayne to create deep multiplayer games that bring players together. Cool things of the week Virtual display devices for Compute Engine are now GA blog Container-native load balancing on GKE are now GA blog How to deploy a Windows container on Google Compute Engine blog Agones 1.0 site Interview Phoenix Labs site Dauntless site Dauntless Updates site Dauntless on Twitter twitter Cloud Bigtable site Kubernetes site BigQuery site GKE site Redis site Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering blog Cloud SQL site Question of the week What is the difference between Premium vs Standard network? Where can you find us next? Jesse will be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit. You can see Phoenix Labs at many other gaming conferences, including Pax, TwitchCon, and GDC. Mark is taking some vacation time, then he’ll be at Kubecon. Jon will also be at Kubecon, as well as taking some personal time to attend several weddings. Sound Effect Attribution “Fantasy Orchestra” by BigManJoe of Freesound.org

Conversational AI is our topic this week as your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia are joined by Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha. Cathy explains what conversation AI is, describing it as people teaching computers to communicate the way humans do, rather than forcing humans to communicate like computers. Later, we talk best practices in design and development, including how a good conversation design and sample dialogues before building can create a better product. This prep work helps anticipate the ways different users could respond to the same question and how the program should react. In multi-modal programming, planning is also important. Our guests suggest starting with the spoken portions of the design and then planning visual components that would augment the experience. Working together as a team is one of the most important parts of the planning process. We also talk best use-cases for conversation AI. Does performing this task via voice make the experience better? Does it make the task easier or more accessible? If so, that could be a great application. In the future, the conversation may be a silent communication with the help of MIT’s Alter Ego. Cathy Pearl Cathy Pearl is head of conversation design outreach and author of the O’Reilly book, “Designing Voice User Interfaces”. She’s been creating Voice User Interfaces for 20 years and has worked on everything from programming NASA helicopter pilot simulators to a conversational app in which Esquire’s style columnist advises what to wear on a first date. She earned an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University and a BS in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego. You can find Cathy on Twitter, or check out her latest Medium article “A Conversation With My 35-year-old Chatbot”. Jessica Dene Earley-Cha Jessica Dene Earley-Cha is a Developer Advocate for Actions on Google. She loves to connect with developers and explore VUI (voice user interface) to add another dimension to how users interact with technology. Jessica is part of the leadership team for @WomenInVoice. You’ll find her either spending time with her dog, collecting strawberry knick knack or biking around town. Stay up-to-date on her ventures on Twitter. Cool things of the week How Google and Mayo Clinic will transform the future of healthcare blog Announcing the general availability of 6 and 12 TB VMs for SAP HANA instances on Google Cloud Platform blog Understanding your GCP Costs site and videos Coupon code for qwiklabs is: 1q-costs-626 Interview GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast Google’s Conversation Design Best Practices site Actions on Google site Interactive Canvas docs Dialogflow site Deconstructing Chatbots videos Behind the Actions videos Assistant On Air videos MIT’s Alter Ego site Google Developers on Medium site Actions Codelabs site Actions Code Samples site Actions on Google Twitter site Google Assistant Dev on Reddit site Cathy’s Book: Designing Voice User Interfaces site How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation site Talk: The Science of Conversation site Question of the week How to integrate Dialogflow with BigQuery Where can you find us next? Cathy will be at Project Voice. Mark will be on vacation soon! Priyanka will be at GOTO Berlin, Codemotion Milan, and GOTO Copenhagen

On the podcast this week, we have a great interview with Google Developer Advocate, Dale Markowitz. Aja Hammerly and Jon Foust are your hosts, as we talk about machine learning, its best use cases, and how developers can break into machine learning and data science. Dale talks about natural language processing as well, explaining that it’s basically the intersection of machine learning and text processing. It can be used for anything from aggregating and sorting Twitter posts about your company to sentiment analysis. For developers looking to enter the machine learning space, Dale suggests starting with non life-threatening applications, such as labeling pictures. Next, consider the possible mistakes the application can make ahead of time to help mitigate issues. To help prevent the introduction of bias into the model, Dale suggests introducing it to as many different types of project-appropriate data sets as possible. It’s also important to continually monitor your model. Later in the show, we talk Google shop, learning about all the new features in Google Translate and AutoML. Dale Markowitz Dale Markowitz is an Applied AI Engineer and Developer Advocate for ML on Google Cloud. Before that she was a software engineer in Google Research and an engineer at the online dating site OkCupid. Cool things of the week Build a dev workflow with Cloud Code on a Pixelbook blog Feminism & Agile blog New homepage and improved collaboration features for AI Hub blog Interview TensorFlow site Natural Language API site AutoML Natural Language site Content Classification site Sentiment Analysis site Analyzing Entities site Translation API site AutoML Translate site Google Translate Glossary Documentation docs Google News Lab site AI Platform’s Data Labeling Service docs Question of the week How many different ways can you run a container on GCP? GKE Cloud Run App Engine Flexible Environment Compute Engine VM as a computer Where can you find us next? Dale will be at DevFest Minneapolis, DevFest Madison, and London NEXT. Jon will be at the internal Google Game Summit and visiting Montreal. Aja will be holding down the fort at home. Sound Effect Attribution “Mystery Peak2” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org “Collect Point 00” by LittleRobotSoundFactory of Freesound.org “Cinematic Piano” by Ellary of Freesound.org

Michelle Casbon is back in the host seat with Mark Mirchandani this week as we talk data science with Devoted Health Director of Data Science, Chris Albon. Chris talks with us about what it takes to be a data scientist at Devoted Health and how Devoted Health and machine learning are advancing the healthcare field. Later, Chris talks about the future of Devoted Health and how they plan to grow. They’re hiring! At Devoted Health, they emphasize knowledge, supporting a culture of not just machine learning but people learning as well. Questions are encouraged and assumptions are discouraged in a field where a tiny mistake can change the care a person receives. Because of this, their team members not only have a strong data science background, they also learn the specific nuances of the healthcare system in America, combined with knowledge of the legal and privacy regulations in that space. How did Chris go from Political Science Ph.D. to non-profit data science wizard? Listen in to find out his storied past. Chris Albon Chris Albon is the Director of Data Science at Devoted Health, using data science and machine learning to help fix America’s health care system. Previously, he was Chief Data Scientist at the Kenyan startup BRCK, cofounded the anti-fake news company New Knowledge, created the data science podcast Partially Derivative, led the data team at the humanitarian non-profit Ushahidi’s, and was the director of the low-resource technology governance project at FrontlineSMS. Chris also wrote Machine Learning For Python Cookbook (O’Reilly 2018) and created Machine Learning Flashcards. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis researching the quantitative impact of civil wars on health care systems. Chris earned a B.A. from the University of Miami, where he triple majored in political science, international studies, and religious studies. Cool things of the week How Itaú Unibanco built a CI/CD pipeline for ML using Kubeflow blog Why TPUs are so high-performance BFloat16: The secret to high performance on Cloud TPUs blog TPU Codelabs site Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU Platforms for Deep Learning paper Machine Learning Flashcards site Interview Devoted Health site Devoted Health is hiring! site Ushahidi site FrontlineSMS site New Knowledge site Joel Grus: Fizz Buzz in TensorFlow site Snowflake site Periscope Data site Airflow site Kubernetes site Chris Albon’s Website site Partially Derivative podcast Partially Derivative Back Episodes podcast Question of the week Chris Albon To paraphrase: A computer program is said to learn if its performance at specific tasks improves with experience. To find out more, including the definition of a partial derivative, buy a pack of Chris’s flashcards. Who knows, they might help you land your next job. Where can you find us next? Michelle is planning the ML for Developers track for QCon SF on Nov. 13. Mark is staying in San Francisco and just launched two Beyond Your Bill videos: Organizing your GCP resources and Managing billing permissions. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh 5” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org “Crowd Laugh” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org “Transformers Type SFX 2” by HykenFreak of Freesound.org “Approx 800 Laugh” by LoneMonk of Freesound.org “Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org “C-ClassicalSuspense” by DuckSingle of Freesound.org

Google’s own Billy Jacobson joins hosts Mark Mandel and Mark Mirchandani this week to dive deeper into Cloud Bigtable. Bigtable is Google’s petabyte scale, fully managed, NoSQL database. Billy elaborates on what projects Bigtable works best with, like time-series data user analytics, and why it’s such a great tool. It offers huge scalability with the benefits of a managed system, and it’s flexible and easily customized so users can turn on and off the pieces they need. Later, we learn about other programs that are compatible with Bigtable, such as JanusGraph, Open TSDB, and GeoMesa. Bigtable also supports the API for HBase, an open-source project similar to Bigtable. Because of this, it’s easy for HBase users to move to Bigtable, and the Bigtable community has access to many open source libraries. Billy also talks more about the nine clients available, and when customers might want to use Bigtable instead of, or in conjunction with, other Google services such as Spanner and BigQuery. Billy Jacobson Billy Jacobson is a developer programs engineer focusing on Cloud Bigtable. Cool things of the week Introducing Cloud Run Button: Click-to-deploy your git repos to Google Cloud blog Firebase Unity Solutions: Update game behavior without deploying with Remote Config blog Introducing the BigQuery Terraform module blog Macy’s uses Google Cloud to streamline retail operations blog Interview Cloud Bigtable site GCP Podcast Episode 18: Bigtable with Ian Lewis podcast BigQuery site Bigtable Documentation docs Codelab: Introduction to Cloud Bigtable site Key Visualizer docs Bigtable Replication Documentation docs Bigtable and HBase Documentation docs HBase site JanusGraph site Open TSDB site GeoMesa site Bigtable Client Libraries docs Cloud Spanner site Managing IoT Storage with Google’s Cloud Platform (Google I/O’19) video Cloud Datastore site Cloud Firestore site Mapping the invisible: Street View cars add air pollution sensors site Breathing Easy with Bigtable article Question of the week If I have an organization, how do I break down my billing data by folder? Where can you find us next? Mark Mirch is working around town but will be headed to LA soon. Mark Mandel will be at Pax Dev, Pax West, Kubecon, and the GDC Online Games Technology Summit.

Mark Mirchandani is back this week with guest host Gabe Weiss to learn about HerdX. Our guests, Ron Hicks and Austin Adams, describe how this idea came about, the mechanics of the system, and how it could change the world of livestock. HerdX is an environmentally friendly, humane way to improve the system of livestock management and sales. It uses monitoring systems to follow animals as they move about the field, then employs algorithms to identify any problems that may need attention. This allows for treatment of specific animals, rather than mass treatment of both healthy and unhealthy livestock. When pitted against humans, HerdX’s AI system could pinpoint the problem livestock much faster and more accurately than people. Once problem livestock are found, the rancher can use that information to devise and implement a treatment plan. Consumers benefit from HerdX as well, through better quality meat and better transparency of rancher practices. The players in the supply chain are recorded and meat is monitored through the entire process, from farm, to feed lot, to the dinner table. Because bad animals can be removed or cured and the supply chain is run much more efficiently, meat spoilage and food poisoning can be mitigated. Ron Hicks As the CEO & Founder of HerdX, Inc., a global AgTech company based in the Texas Hill Country, Ron is filling the void in ag data with IoT devices designed for livestock herds. In a nutshell, HerdX is using tags, water, and data to connect farmers around the world with families around the dinner table. Before his time with HerdX, Ron had a number of immensely successful career paths and achievements as a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and a strong visionary who loves disruptive technologies that can change the world. He was distinguished with Business Week’s top industrial design award in Medical Technologies, which recognized him along with other leaders and companies throughout the world, including BMW, Sony, Logitech, and Ford Motor Company. Ron is also a dynamic speaker who is passionate about solving problems rather than just talking about them and has spoken at conferences as a keynote speaker at Google headquarters in the United States and Singapore. He was also the keynote speaker at Texas Governor Rick Perry’s program titled “Technology Excellence for Rural America” which served as a springboard for the formation of HerdX. Austin Adams Austin Adams holds over a decade of experience in leading innovative software teams. At his previous employer Adams took multiple greenfield projects from initial scoping, to research and development, to proof of concept, and ultimately to market-leading products. Adams is an early adopter, leader, and contributor to the Kubernetes open source platform. He has used Kubernetes to create automation systems to help drive more than a billion dollars of product sales. Cool things of the week Press play: Find and listen to podcast episodes on Search blog Japanese researchers build robotic tail to keep elderly upright site Shining a light on your costs: New billing features from Google Cloud blog Interview HerdX site New Zealand Innovator of the Year Awards site Question of the week How do I connect an IoT device to a trigger event in the cloud? Cloud IoT step-by-step: Cloud to device communication blog Cloud IoT Core site Gabe’s blog blog Where can you find us next? Mark will be hanging out locally and working on training content. Gabe will be at Next London. Sound Effect Attribution “radio t3 SW bleep.wav” by ERH of Freesound.org

On the show today, we speak with Developer Advocate and fellow Googler, Sherol Chen about machine learning and AI. Jon Foust and Aja Hammerly learn about the history and impact of AI and ML on technology and gaming. What does it mean to be human? What can machines do better than humans, and what can humans do better than machines? These are the large questions that we aim to solve in order to understand and use AI. Sherol goes on to explain the types of deep learning machines can achieve, from neural networks to decision trees. Sherol also went into depth about the potential social impact of AI as it assists doctors parsing through medical records and plans agricultural endeavors to maximize food production and safety. Sherol also elaborates on the ethical responsibilities we must realize when developing AI projects. For developers looking to build a new AI project, Sherol outlines the pros and cons of using existing tools like Cloud Speech-to-Text, AutoML and AutoML Tables. Sherol Chen Sherol advocates for Machine Learning for Google Cloud, and works in Research at Google Brain for Machine Learning in Music and Creativity for the Magenta team. She’s taught Artificial Intelligence at Stanford and around the world in six different countries. Her PhD work is in Computer Science, researching storytelling and Artificial Intelligence at the Expressive Intelligence Studio. Cool things of the week AMD EPYC processors come to Google—and to Google Cloud blog Kaggle Petfinder Dataset site Streaming data from Cloud Storage into BigQuery using Cloud Functions blog App Engine Standard Ruby site Thagomizer blog Interview AutoML Tables site AutoML Tables Promo Video video Can Machines Think? article AI Impact Challenge site NeurIPS site ICLR site ICML site Machine Learning Crash Course site TensorFlow site Project Magenta site Cloud Speech-to-Text site Cloud AutoML site Sherol’s Blog blog Question of the week You mentioned that you can run App Engine + Rails, how do you handle migrations? Where can you find us next? Jon will be at PAX Dev and PAX West, the internal game summit at Google in Sunnyvale, and taking some personal time to travel to Montreal. Aja will be hanging around at home, on the internet, and at Seattle.rb. Sound Effect Attribution “Coins 1.wav” by ProjectsU012 of Freesound.org “Wedding Bells.wav” by Maurice_J_K of Freesound.org “Small Group Laugh.wav” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org

Jon Foust joins Mark Mirchandani this week as we meet up with Alim Karim from NetApp and Technical Director in OCTO Dean Hildebrand of Google. NetApp has been in data management for 20 years, focusing on providing on-prem, high-performance storage solutions for large industry clients. Their recent partnership with Google Cloud has allowed them to expand their services, offering the same great data management and storage in the cloud. Dean and Alim elaborate on the best uses for NetApp, explaining that lifting and shifting an existing project to the cloud is only one way NetApp can be useful. New projects can be built right in Google Cloud with NetApp as well. Our guests discuss the other pros of the NetApp service, including faster data retrieval, better monitoring, and predictability. We also talk about how NetApp takes customer feedback into consideration to make sure their service is the best it can be for every client. What’s in store for the future of NetApp? Listen in to find out! Alim Karim Alim Karim is a Product Manager in the Cloud Data Services BU at NetApp. He started his career as a software developer and joined NetApp in 2011. At NetApp Alim has held several customer-facing positions and is passionate about solving business problems with technology. He holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and an MBA from Queen’s University. Dean Hildebrand Dean Hildebrand is a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Google Cloud focusing on enterprise and HPC storage systems. He has authored over 100 scientific publications and patents, and been the technical program chair and sat on the program committee of numerous conferences. He received a B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 1998 and M.S. and PhD. degrees in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2003 and 2007, respectively. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Game Servers site VMware Cloud Foundation comes to Google Cloud blog Using GCP NuGet Packages in Unity article Interview NetApp on Google Cloud site Cloud Volumes Service site BigQuery site TensorFlow site Google Cloud Storage site Anthos site Question of the week How do I authenticate my Google Kubernetes Engine cluster in a CI/CD pipeline? Where can you find us next? Our guests will be at Google Cloud Summit Seattle and Next London. Jon will be at PAX Dev, doing some Google Game stuff in Sunnyvale, and taking some personal time to travel to Montreal. After Austin, Mark will be staying local to work on some stuff, and he’s about to launch the next few episodes of Stack Doctor. Sound Effect Attribution “Small Audience Laughs.wav” by Oniwe of Freesound.org “MysteryPeak1.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org “Small Group Laugh.wav” by TimKahn of Freesound.org

The podcast today is all about conversational AI and Dialogflow with our Google guest, Priyanka Vergadia. Priyanka explains to Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey that conversational AI includes anything with a conversational component, such as chatbots, in anything from apps, to websites, to messenger programs. If it uses natural language understanding and processing to help humans and machines communicate, it can be classified as conversational AI. These programs work as translators so humans and computers can chat seamlessly. We discuss how people interact with conversational AI, maybe without even realizing it. From asking Google Home to set your alarm to getting customer service support at your favorite online store, AI is probably working behind the scenes to help. Priyanka also tells us all about Google’s natural language understanding and processing program, Dialogflow. Designed to simplify the process, Dialogflow allows you to input a simple idea like asking for coffee, and watch as the program automatically includes many of the different ways people would naturally ask for coffee. Coffee would be great right now! Listen in to find out the best (and worst) use cases and practices for this powerful tool! Priyanka Vergadia Priyanka Vergadia is a Developer Advocate at Google. She worked directly with customers for 1.5 years prior to recently joining Google Cloud Developer Relations team. She loves architecting cloud solutions and enjoys building conversational experiences. Her interest in Conversational AI led to the Deconstructing Chatbots YouTube series. Priyanka is currently starring in a new show called “Get Cooking in Cloud” where she will be sharing recipes to cook various business solutions on Google Cloud. Cool things of the week Least privilege for Cloud Functions using Cloud IAM blog Containerizing in the real world … of Minecraft blog Introducing the What-If Tool for Cloud AI Platform models blog Interview Chatbot Fail site Dialogflow site and docs Deconstructing Chatbots videos Codelab: Build your first Chatbot with Dialogflow site Question of the week How do you run a recurring python script? Where can you find us next? Priyanka will be at Codemotion Milan in October and GOTO Copenhagen in November. Brian will be at the office in Seattle, thinking about Compute Engine. Mark will be in Austin and the Bay Area working on new training content! Sound Effect Attribution “Small Group Laugh Set.wav” by Tim Kahn of Freesound.org “Whip Crack 01.wav” by CGEffex of Freesound.org

Jon Foust and Mark Mirchandani are joined by Adé Mochtar to discuss the IT learning platform, Instruqt and how they create and manage the platform with the help of Google Cloud. Sandeep of Google stops in with the info on the Instruqt arcade games we saw at Google Next ‘19. Instruqt’s main philosophy is that people learn best by doing, and their courses encourage immersion right off the bat. Developers are asked coding questions and allowed to work in sandbox environments to fully expose them to the subject. Instruqt checks the student’s work as they continue through the program to ensure the material is being properly learned. But learning should be fun, too! By putting developer challenges on old-style arcade machines, developers can test their coding skills, learn new things, and have fun at the same time. At conferences, this has been a great way to engage their target audience. Google Cloud games were run on the Instruqt platform at Next ‘19, and conference attendees came back day after day to try to get on the high score leaderboard. It was a super fun way to get people using Google Cloud technologies! Adé Mochtar Adé is Co-Founder and CTO of Instruqt, a hands-on learning platform for IT technology. Before starting Instruqt, he was an engineer and consultant in Cloud and DevOps-related topics. A big part of that job was to educate organizations on how to adopt new technology. With Instruqt, he tries to achieve the same but on a larger scale. His mission is to make learning DevOps and Cloud more effective and fun. At Instruqt, Adé mainly focuses on back-end and infrastructure engineering using Terraform, Go, and (probably too much) Bash. Cool things of the week Step up your interviewing game with Byteboard blog Gartner names Google Cloud a leader in its IaaS Magic Quadrant blog Real-time bikeshare information in Google Maps rolls out to 24 cities blog Run Visual Studio Code in Cloud Shell blog Interview Instruqt site Instruqt on Slack site Kubernetes site Cloud Functions site Hashi Corp site Instruqt Arcade at Next ‘19 video Google Developer Advocate - Sandeep Dinesh on Instruqt video Go site React site Terraform site GKE site Cloud SQL site Cloud Build site Firebase site Question of the week I want to be more familiar with Google Cloud, how do I navigate the space for material? Learn more with Qwiklabs and Coursera. Get Certified. Where can you find us next? Instruqt arcade games will be at GopherCon and Cloud Summits! Jon will be speaking at Pax Dev and Pax West. Mark will be hanging on the East Coast, then meeting with customers in Austin. Sound Effect Attribution “Red Arrows Flyby.wav” by Figowitz of Freesound.org “crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org “Alien_Scream.wav” by Syna-Max of Freesound.org “Laser Gun7.wav” by Burkay of Freesound.org “Scratch2.mp3” by Feveran of Freesound.org “BumbleBeeShort.mp3” by CGEffex of Freesound.org “ComedyRimshot.wav” by XTRgamr of Freesound.org

Blockchain takes the spotlight as new host Carter Morgan joins veteran Mark Mandel in a fascinating interview with Allen Day. Allen is a developer advocate with Google, specializing in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. This week Allen reveals how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be applied to a variety of applications like distributed file storage and video services. We also discuss the hype and merits of blockchain + projects that Allen has worked on to analyze cryptocurrency transactions using Google Cloud’s big data platforms. The results may just surprise you. Allen Day Allen Day is a developer advocate with Google in Singapore. He specializes in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. Allen studied at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine and earned his PhD in Human Genetics. Allen’s blockchain work is focused on interoperability between smart contract platforms and cloud platforms. He created Google Cloud’s blockchain public datasets program, which allows non-specialist engineers and data scientists to search and analyze public blockchain data. Cool things of the week Blockchain.com, scaling and saving with Cloud Spanner blog Cloud TPU Pods break AI training records blog Cloud Memorystore adds import-export and Redis 4.0 blog To run or not to run a database on Kubernetes: What to consider blog Google to acquire Elastifile blog Interview Blockchain site Bitcoin site Coinbase site Ethereum site $24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200% news article Blockchain ETL project on GitHub site BigQuery site Kubernetes site Cloud Composer site Pub/Sub site Bigtable site Tensorflow site Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog BigQuery public blockchain datasets on GCP site Ethereum in BigQuery: how we built this dataset blog Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics blog Introducing six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets—and how to analyze them blog Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud blog Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog Unchained Podcast podcast Off the Chain Podcast podcast Question of the week What are the four (or six?) types of VMs that exist on Google Cloud Platform? blog and docs Where can you find us next? Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit, as well as Pax Dev and Pax West. Carter will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and working on new videos. Allen will be at Strike Two Summit (Amsterdam), Singularity Festival (Heraklion), and Ethereum Devcon (Osaka). Sound Effect Attribution “mysterypeak1.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org “crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org

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!

We’re at Cloud Next this week with special guests, special hosts, and more! On day one, Gabi and new host Mark Mirchandani were able to speak with Jonathan Cham, Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, about his experiences with Google Next. Ori of the Cloud SQL team shared exciting news about Cloud SQL Server. Later, Aja was joined by co-host Brian Dorsey who elaborated on his Next talk, as well as his favorite things at Next. They were able to get a quick interview with Matt and Nate about Skuid and what they’re looking forward to at Cloud Next. Jose and Bryan of Onix stopped by as well to talk about their company and their experiences in comedy! Interviews Cloud Next site Next On Air site Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 1 Run Channel video Cloud Next Opening Keynote video Anthos site Cloud SQL site SQL Server on Google Cloud site Skuid site Firebase site Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL site Google Compute Engine site Onix site Cloud Search site OnSpend site GSuite site Onix Outreach site Where can you find us next? We’re at Next this week! Stop by and say hi!

Gabi is back with Mark this week in an interview with Connor Gilbert of StackRox, a Kubernetes security company. StackRox uses Kubernetes and containers to maximize security for customers across the container lifecycle. Connor explains how they monitor your containers through building, deploying, and finally the running of the application, and keep your project secure through all stages. StackRox identifies risks and weak areas, then responds in real time. Connor’s advice for our listeners is to understand what’s going on with your containers and your application. Look at the data, the specs, and your options and then, if-needed, adjust the defaults to optimize the security of your app. Connor Gilbert Connor Gilbert is a product manager at StackRox, a Kubernetes security company, where he contributes to product vision and advocates for customer needs. Connor previously worked in architecture and engineering roles at StackRox. Before that, as Security Research Scientist at Qadium, he built tools to uncover network perimeter exposures and conducted DARPA Internet security research. He first discovered Kubernetes in 2015 and has been using it on GCP ever since. Cool things of the week Simplify reporting with the Sheets data connector for BigQuery, and voila: automated content updates for G Suite blog 6 standout serverless sessions at Google Cloud Next ‘19 blog 9 mustn’t-miss machine learning sessions at Next ‘19 blog Don’t miss these must-see G Suite sessions at Google Cloud Next ‘19 blog Next On Air live show Interview StackRox site StackRox Overview site StackRox Data Sheet data sheet Kubernetes site GKE site Google Container Registry site Google Cloud Security Command Center site Go site Istio site Kubernetes Documentation site Kubernetes Blog blog Kubernetes Blog: A Guide to Kubernetes Admission Controllers blog CNCF site CNCF Webinar: Operationalizing Kubernetes Security Best Practices video BSidesSF 2019 Talk: “Containers: Your Ally in Improving Security” video Nine Kubernetes Security Best Practices Everyone Should Follow site Top 5 Kubernetes RBAC Mistakes to Avoid white paper Question of the week How do I migrate my traditional data warehouse platform to BigQuery? Migrating your traditional data warehouse platform to BigQuery: announcing the data warehouse migration offer Warehouse Migration Where can you find us next? Mark will be at Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO. Gabi will be at Cloud NEXT and PyTexas StackRox will be at Cloud NEXT, KubeCon, FS-ISAC, DockerCon, Red Hat Summit, and Black Hat.

Today on the podcast, we speak with Ian Buck and Kari Briski of NVIDIA about new updates and achievements in deep learning. Ian begins by telling hosts Jon and Mark about his first project at NVIDIA, CUDA, and how it has helped expand and pave the way for future projects in super computing, AI, and gaming. CUDA is used extensively in computer vision, speech and audio applications, and machine comprehension, Kari elaborates. NVIDIA recently announced their new Tensor Cores, which maximize their GPUs and make it easier for users to achieve peak performance. Working with the Tensor Cores, TensorFlow AMP is an acceleration into the TensorFlow Framework. It automatically makes the right choices for neural networks and maximizes performance, while still maintaining accuracy, with only a two line change in Tensor Flow script. Just last year, NVIDIA announced their T4 GPU with Google Cloud Platform. This product is designed for inferences, the other side of AI. Because AI is becoming so advanced, complicated, and fast, the GPUs on the inference side have to be able to handle the workload and produce inferences just as quickly. T4 and Google Cloud accomplish this together. Along with T4, NVIDIA has introduced TensorRT, a software framework for AI inference that’s integrated into TensorFlow. Ian Buck Ian Buck is general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. He is responsible for the company’s worldwide datacenter business, including server GPUs and the enabling NVIDIA computing software for AI and HPC used by millions of developers, researchers and scientists. Buck joined NVIDIA in 2004 after completing his PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where he was development lead for Brook, the forerunner to generalized computing on GPUs. He is also the creator of CUDA, which has become the world’s leading platform for accelerated parallel computing. Buck has testified before the U.S. Congress on artificial intelligence and has advised the White House on the topic. Buck also received a BSE degree in computer science from Princeton University. Kari Briski Kari Briski is a Senior Director of Accelerated Computing Software Product Management at NVIDIA. Her talents and interests include Deep Learning, Accelerated Computing, Design Thinking, and supporting women in technology. Kari is also a huge Steelers fan. Cool things of the week Kubernetes 1.14: Production-level support for Windows Nodes, Kubectl Updates, Persistent Local Volumes GA blog Stadia blog How Google Cloud helped Multiplay power a record-breaking Apex Legends launch blog Massive Entertainment hosts Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 on Google Cloud Platform blog Interview NVIDIA site NVIDIA Catalog site CUDA site Tensor Cores site TensorFlow sote Automatic Mixed Precision for Deep Learning site Automatic Mixed Precision for NVIDIA Tensor Core Architecture in TensorFlow blog TensorFlow 2.0 on NVIDIA GPU video NVIDIA Volta site NVIDIA T4 site WaveNet blog BERT blog Compute Engine site T4 on GCP site Webinar On Demand: Accelerate Your AI Models with Automatic Mixed-Precision Training in PyTorch site PyTorch site NVIDIA TensorRT site TensorRT 5.1 site Kubernetes site Rapids site NVIDIA GTC site Deep Learning Institute site KubeFlow Pipeline Docs site KubeFlow Pipelines on GitHub site NVIDIA RTX site Question of the week Where can we learn more about Stadia? general info developer access Where can you find us next? Mark will be at Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO. Jon may be going to Unite Shanghai and will definitely be at Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO. NVIDIA will be at Cloud NEXT and KubeCon, as well as International Conference on Machine Learning, The International Conference on Learning Representations, and CVPR

World Pi Day is behind us, but our guest today, Emma Iwao, joins hosts Gabi and Mark to teach us all about pi. Pi is the constant of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Anytime you see a circle on a computer, pi has been used. It’s vital for everything from gaming to calculating rocket trajectories! Emma crushed the world record for calculating digits of pi using Google Cloud over four months! Listen in to hear more about how she did it! 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. Cool things of the week The Next OnAir site is live today and provides many of the details viewers could be looking for ahead of the event site Get Google Cloud Certified at Next ‘19: What you need to know blog Game Playing on Google Maps (see more at GDC) blog Your mission, gumshoe: Catch Carmen San Diego in Google Earth blog Interview Y-cruncher site Join the pi-31415926535897 Google Group group Fetching pi digits site Pi digit snapshots site Question of the week How do I track what is happening to my containers? Who has access to them, changes, etc? Where can you find us next? Mark will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO. Gabi will be at Cloud NEXT, PyTexas 2019, and she will be conducting a Cloud on Air Webinar on Migrating to Cloud SQL

Jon Foust is back with Mark this week as we talk about SAP HANA, a data and application platform. Lucia Subatin and Kevin Nelson elaborate, explaining that SAP HANA is engineered for running SAP business applications. It is capable of handling large transactions very quickly and with great flexibility. With HANA, you don’t move data around, so you can run transaction workloads, as well as analytics, etc. in the same platform. By teaming up with GCP, SAP HANA ensures that their enterprise users will have scalability and storage no matter how their businesses grow. GCP and SAP HANA developers have been working together to continue to make the products better. Lucia Subatin Lucia, Developer Advocate for SAP, is a proud geek. Her mission is to bring developers closer to SAP HANA and optimal enterprise solutions. Her contribution towards the community is based on enabling content and facilitating adoption by exploring and sharing more and better ways to capitalize the power of the platform. Kevin Nelson Kevin is a Google Cloud Developer Advocate focused on enterprise strategic partners. In his free time, Kevin is an avid sailor, brewer, and history buff who loves stargazing and studying the Age of Exploration. Cool things of the week Take your mobile games business to the next level with Google AdMob and Google Ads at GDC blog Gaming developer hub site Go global with Cloud Bigtable blog Announcing Knative v0.4 Release article Build with Classroom G Suite blog Interview SAP site SAP HANA site SAP S/4HANA site SAP C/4HANA site BigQuery site Cloud Foundry site SAP HANA Express site Compute Engine site GCP Marketplace site Kubernetes site Ubuntu site Elephants, Rhinos, and People site Request an SAP CodeJam site Information for Developers site SAP TechEd site Question of the week If I want to programmatically search for links to an image that I have, how can I do that? Web detection tutorial Detecting Web Entities and Pages Where can you find us next? Mark will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, and ECGC in April. Jon will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and Vector Conf 2019. Our guests will be at SAP CodeJam Venice, CA March 7, 2019, SAP CodeJam Mannheim, Germany March 18, 2019 and at Cloud NEXT.

Mark and Brian Dorsey spend today talking Python with Dustin Ingram. Python is an interpreted, dynamically typed language, which encourages very readable code. Python is popular for web applications, data science, and much more! Python works great on Google Cloud, especially with App Engine, Compute Engine, and Cloud Functions. To learn more about best (and worst) use cases, listen in! Dustin Ingram Dustin Ingram is a Developer Advocate at Google, focused on supporting the Python community on Google Cloud. He’s also a member of the Python Packaging Authority, maintainer of PyPI, and organizer for the PyTexas conference. Cool things of the week Machine learning can boost the value of wind energy blog Compute Engine Guest Attributes site Colopl open sourced a Cloud Spanner driver for Laravel framework site Running Redis on GCP: four deployment scenarios blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 3: Kubernetes and Google Container Engine podcast Python site Extending Python with C or C++ docs PyPy site PyPI site App Engine site Compute Engine site Cloud Functions site Ubuntu site Flask site Flask documentation docs Docker site Python documentation docs PyCon site PyCaribbean site Question of the week How can I manipulate images with Cloud Functions? Where can you find us next? Mark will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, and ECGC in April. Dustin will be at Cloud Next and PyCon. Brian will be lecturing at Cloud Next: ‘Where should I run my code?’

Node.js is our topic this week as Mark and first-time host, Jon Foust, pick the brain of Myles Borins. Myles updates us on all the new things happening with Node.js, including the new .dev site that holds a ton of documentation to help people get started. Node.js now integrates with Cloud Build, the Node.js foundation has some new developments, and Google App Engine supports Node.js. The group has also been working on serverless containers. Myles Borins Myles Borins is a developer, musician, artist, and maker. They work for Google as a developer advocate serving the Node.js ecosystem. Myles cares about the open web and healthy communities. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next ‘19 session guide now available blog Introducing scheduled snapshots for Compute Engine persistent disk blog Reliable task scheduling on Compute Engine with Cloud Scheduler site How to make a self-destructing VM on Google Cloud Platform article Making AI-powered speech more accessible—now with more options, lower prices, and new languages and voices blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 105: Node.js with Myles Borins podcast Node.js site Introduction to Node.js site Nodejs.dev on Github site Cloud Build site Firebase site Node.js Foundation site JS Foundation site Linux Foundation site Foundation Bootstrap Team on Github site App Engine site G Suite site Apps Script site BigQuery site JSON site The hilarious misadventures of being a platform downstream from your language video Node.js Versions - How Do They Work? video Open Source Leadership Summit site Black Girls Code site Scripted site Girls Who Code site Question of the week How do I get google cloud APIs to work within Unity? Add packages from NuGet to a Unity project and read more in the Unity docs here Where can you find us next? Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April. Jon will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, ECG, and Vector 2019.

We’re learning all about Cloud SQL this week with our guest, Amy Krishnamohan. Amy’s main job is to teach customers about the products she represents. Today, she explains to Mark and Gabi that Cloud SQL manages services for open source databases, and she spends a little time elaborating on the other database management services Google has to offer. Cloud SQL is a relational data storage solution. Relational data storage is very structured, almost like a table or spreadsheet, making it easier to analyze the data. Cloud SQL is capable of scaling out and up, meaning it can scale for traffic patterns and for storage. In comparison, NoSQL databases are very unstructured. If you’re not sure what kind of data is coming in, you can sort the data first and analyze it later. Each approach has its pros and cons and each is suitable for different types of projects. Recently, Cloud SQL released a feature making it easy to move from on-prem to the cloud. In the future, they will continue to streamline the process of moving between the two spaces. Amy Krishnamohan Amy is Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud responsible for Databases. She has diverse experience across product marketing, marketing strategy and product management from leading enterprise software companies such as MariaDB, Teradata, SAP, Accenture, Cisco and Intuit. Amy received her Masters in Software Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Cool things of the week Process Workflows with the new Google Docs API blog Jib 1.0.0 is GA—building Java Docker images has never been easier blog GCP Podcast Episode 151: Java & Jib with Patrick Flynn and Mike Eltsufin podcast A guided tour in Google Earth that explores Black history blog Author: Gabe Weiss - Publishing series: Cloud IoT step-by-step Cloud IoT step-by-step: Connecting Raspberry PI + Python site Cloud IoT step-by-step: Cloud to device communication site Cloud IoT step-by-step: Quality of life tip - The command line site Interview Cloud SQL site Cloud SQL Features site MySQL site PostgreSQLsite Cloud MemoryStore site Cloud Bigtable site Cloud Firestore site Cloud Spanner site GCP Podcast Episode 62: Cloud Spanner with Deepti Srivastava podcast Mongo site Getting to know Google Cloud SQL video Question of the week What is a virtual column in a database? Generated columns blog and docs Where can you find us next? Amy will be at the Postgres Conference in New York on March 19. Gabi will be at PHP UK in London and Cloud NEXT in April. Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April. Diamond Partner Q&A: Google’s Mark Mandel Has The Tools To Help You Make Great Games article

Today, Mohamed El-Geish joins us to talk about the voice AI technology powering Voicea. Gabi is back on the host bench with Mark as we learn how Voicea can improve productivity. EVA, the voice assistant, will record important information for you so you can focus on your meeting and will create tasks lists to help you stay organized. Voicea integrates well with multiple platforms to help accomplish your goals as well. You can send messages to Slack, add tasks to your Basecamp list, and more. Mohamed explains the process of building Voicea and how machine learning techniques and user feedback have helped make it such a useful tool. Now, Voicea is working to incorporate video, allowing users to play back things like important meeting slides. Mohamed El-Geish Mohamed El-Geish is the Chief Architect and co-founder at Voicea (formerly Voicera), a voice AI technology company based in Menlo Park, Calif. Voicea leverages AI technology to harness voice in the workplace to increase productivity through EVA, Voicea’s Enterprise Voice Assistant. EVA listens, takes notes, and automatically provides highlights, actions, and recaps so your meetings can be activated. Voicea can turn talk into action from any conversation with in-person chats, meetings, conference calls, or video conferences. Cool things of the week Query without a credit card: introducing BigQuery sandbox blog Exploring container security: Encrypting Kubernetes secrets with Cloud KMS blog Golden State Warriors power data analytics and fan experiences with Google Cloud blog Seven steps to making DevOps a reality blog GCP Podcast Episode 158: VP of Engineering - Melody Meckfessel podcast The Telegraph UK: Reimagining media with the help of Google Cloud blog Interview Voicea site Voicea Integrations site Kubernetes site GKE site Stackdriver site Docker site Voicea on LinkedIn site Mohamed El-Geish site Question of the week What if I’m working in a terminal in Cloud shell, and I want to move to another computer? How can I continue my work? Where can you find us next? Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April. Gabi will be at the Museum of Natural History for their Brown Scholars program giving a workshop on ML APIs and Cloud Functions. She’ll also be at Cloud NEXT.

First-time host, Aja, joins Mark today to talk Go Cloud Functions with two Google colleagues! Stewart, lead Product Manager on Google Cloud Functions, and Tyler, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, start the show by explaining the purpose of Cloud Functions. It is a serverless compute product that supports many programming languages, scales automatically, and only charges for what you use. It works best as event-driven computing, in other words, when something happens, you want something else to happen in response. Cloud Functions also works well between clouds or even Google Cloud services, acting as the glue between them. Go Cloud Functions works specifically for Go. Google makes a huge effort to make Cloud Functions easy to use for all developers, so that no matter what language you’re familiar with, Cloud Functions works for you. Stewart Reichling Stewart Reichling is the lead Product Manager on Google Cloud Functions. He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across Strategy, Marketing, and Product Management at Google. Tyler Bui-Palsulich Tyler is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He graduated with his Master’s in Computer Science from NYU and loves detailed documentation, random trivia, and homemade bread. You can find his blog at buipalsulich.com Cool things of the week Actually cool thing of the week twitter NoSQL for the serverless age: Announcing Cloud Firestore general availability and updates blog Site Reliability Workbook now available in HTML site Building a serverless online game: Cloud Hero on Google Cloud Platform blog The tech industry is failing people with disabilities and chronic illnesses article Interview GCP Podcast Episode 34: Stackdriver monitoring with Aja Hammerly podcast GCP Podcast Episode 53: Ruby with Aja Hammerly podcast Cloud Functions site Cloud Scheduler site Firestore site Pub/Sub site Go Mod site App Engine site Open Census site GCP Podcast Episode 118: OpenCensus with Morgan McLean and JBD podcast Google Stackdriver site Launch/overview video video The Go Runtime site Cloud Functions Quickstarts site Question of the week How many ways can you run containers on GCP? Where can you find us next? Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April. Agones has a new website agones.dev! And he’s also back to Twitch streaming! Aja will be at Cloud NEXT in April.

We’re back! This week, Mark welcomes Gabi as his new co-host! Listen in as they discuss Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas. So what is Knative? Mark and Ville explain that Knative is basically a way to simplify Kubernetes for developers. This way, developers can focus on writing good code without worrying about all the aspects of Kubernetes, such as deploying and autoscaling. Knative helps with these functions automatically. Knative also supports many languages which allows developers to bring their own stack. The day-to-day of developing doesn’t change, which is the beautiful thing about Knative! Knative is open source and easy to deploy. Developers can find installation guides online for any Kubernetes certified instance of service. A link to the installation guide for Knative on GKE is in our show notes. Mark Chmarny Mark is a Technical Program Manager for Serverless focusing on enabling customers to be successful with our serverless portfolio on GCP, and driving community awareness of our serverless products on GKE. Prior to that Mark lead the Partner Engineering team for Data, Analytics and ML at Google. Before Google, Mark was the Sr. Director of Datacenter Solutions Group at Intel. Ville Aikas Ville is a member of the Technical Oversight Committee for Knative, leads Knative Eventing, and (with Matt) conceived ducks for K8s. Previously, Ville worked on Helm, K8s Service Catalog and Kubernetes (before it was Kubernetes). Before the OSS stint Ville was a TL for Google Cloud Storage. Cool things of the week Let the sunshine in: opening the market for more renewable energy in Asia blog Get Go-ing with Cloud Functions: Go 1.11 is now a supported language blog Building Google’s Game of the Year with Cloud Text-to-Speech and App Engine blog Welcome to the service mesh era: Introducing a new Istio blog post series blog Interview Knative site Knative Blog blog Knative on GitHub site Kubernetes site MiniKube site GKE site Pub/Sub site Cloudevents site Knative Install on Google Kubernetes Engine site Knative Slack site Question of the week How long does it take for Cloud SQL to detect an outage and trigger High Availability failover? Where can you find us next? Gabi will be discussing the awesome new features of MySQL 8.0 at PHP UK - London and you will be also able to find her at Cloud NEXT Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April Our guests will be at Cloud NEXT and KubeCon Barcelona

Happy Holidays, everyone! Melanie and Mark wrap up a great year by reminiscing about some of their favorite episodes! We also talk about the big news of the year, our favorite articles, and what’s coming up for the GCP Podcast in 2019. Cool things of the week Kubernetes and GKE for developers: a year of Cloud Console blog Reducing gender bias in Google Translate blog Cloud Security Command Center is now in beta and ready to use blog Main content Podcast accomplishments! We have awesome new intro and outro music, new website, new YouTube videos! We hit 1 million and then 2 million downloads! Mark and the podcast are celebrating their three year anniversary! Top 10 most downloaded episodes of all time! GCP Podcast Episode 111: Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji podcast GCP Podcast Episode 112: Percy.io with Mike Fotinakis podcast GCP Podcast Episode 146: Google AI with Jeff Dean podcast GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast GCP Podcast Episode 128: Decision Intelligence with Cassie Kozyrkov podcast GCP Podcast Episode 113: Open Source TensorFlow with Yifei Feng podcast GCP Podcast Episode 88: Kubernetes 1.7 with Tim Hockin podcast GCP Podcast Episode 108: Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig podcast GCP Podcast Episode 130: Data Science with Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon podcast GCP Podcast Episode 125: Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny podcast Top 10 most downloaded episodes for 2018! Exact same list except Tim Hockin is not #7. Following episodes go up a number and we added to #10 spot. GCP Podcast Episode 122: Project Jupyter with Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf podcast Mark’s favorite episodes GCP Podcast Episode 129: Developer Relations with Mandy Waite podcast GCP Podcast Episode 121: Kontributing to Kubernetes with Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues podcast GCP Podcast Episode 131: Actions on Google with Mandy Chan podcast GCP Podcast Episode 148: Wellio with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko podcast GCP Podcast Episode 110: CPU Vulnerability with Matt Linton and Paul Turner podcast GCP Podcast Episode 125: Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny podcast GCP Podcast Episode 140: Container Security with Maya Kaczorowski podcast Melanie’s favorite episodes GCP Podcast Episode 117: Cloud AI Fei-Fei Li was the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google podcast GCP Podcast Episode 114: ML Bias & Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell podcast GCP Podcast Episode 141: Accessibility in Tech podcast GCP Podcast Episode 136: Robotics with Raia podcast GCP Podcast Episode 150: Strange Loop, Remote Working, and Distributed Systems with KF podcast DL Indaba GCP Podcast Episode 147: DL Indaba: AI Investments in Africa podcast GCP Podcast Episode 149: Deep Learning Research in Africa with Yabebal Fantaye & Jessica Phalafala podcast GCP Podcast Episode 152: AI Corporations and Communities in Africa with Karim Beguir & Muthoni Wanyoike podcast GCP Podcast Episode 157: NeurIPS and AI Research with Anima Anandkumar podcast Favorite announcements, products, and more at Google Cloud Unity and Google Cloud Strategic Alliance blog Open Match blog Cloud TPU site Google Dataset Search is in beta site No tricks, just treats: Globally scaling the Halloween multiplayer Doodle with Open Match on Google Cloud blog GKE On-Prem site Open Source - Knative release, Skaffold, Istio updates, gVisor, etc. Google in Ghana blog Cloud NEXT blog GCP Podcast Episode 137: Next Day 1 podcast GCP Podcast Episode 138: Next Day 2 podcast GCP Podcast Episode 139: Next Day 3 podcast Unity and DeepMind partner to advance AI research blog Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog Question of the week What were your personal highlights for 2018? Mark Agones Introducing Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting built on Kubernetes blog github The new website Having Melanie join me on the podcast Melanie Bringing Francesc back Meeting Grace GCP Podcast Episode 142: Agones With Mark Mandel and Cyril Tovena podcast Where can you find us next? It’s the holidays! Special thanks! Thank you guests Thank you Jennifer Thank you HD Interactive: James, Trae, Sabrina, and Sean Thank you Greg Thank you Neil, Chuck, and Shana Thank you MBooth for the website overhaul and social media support Thank you Francesc Thank you listeners!

Melanie and Mark talk with Google Cloud’s VP of Engineering, Melody Meckfessel, this week. In her time with Google Cloud, she and her team have worked to uncover what makes developers more productive. The main focus of their work is DevOps, defined by Melody as automation around the developer workflow and culture. In other words, Melody and her team are discovering new ways for developers to interact and how those interactions can encourage their productive peak. Melody and her team have used their internal research and expanded it to collaborate with Google Cloud partners and open source projects. The sharing of research and products has created even faster innovation as Google learns from these outside projects and vice versa. In the future, Melody sees amazing engagement with the community and even better experiences with containers on GCP. She is excited to see the Go community growing and evolving as more people use it and give feedback. Melody also speaks about diversity, encouraging everyone to be open-minded and try to build diverse teams to create products that are useful for all. Melody Meckfessel Melody Meckfessel is a hands-on technology leader with more than 20 years experience building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale. As VP of Engineering, she leads the team building DevOps tools and sharing DevOps best practices across Google and with software development and operations teams around the world. Her team powers the world’s most advanced continuously delivered software, enabling development teams to turn ideas into reliable, scalable production systems. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Melody programmed for startups and enterprise companies. Since joining Google in 2004, Melody has led teams in Google’s core search systems, search quality and cluster management. Melody is passionate about making software development fast, scalable, and fun. Cool things of the week Mark is back from vacation! We are at 2 million downloads! tweet Greg Wilson twitter and github Open source gaming: Agones - 0.6.0 - site Open Match - 0.2.0 RC - site What’s new at Firebase Summit 2018 blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 137: Next Day 1 podcast Stackdriver site GitLab site Google SRE site Borg site Cloud Spanner site Go site GKE On-Prem site Skaffold site Minikube site DORA site Cloud Build site Bazel site Question of the week If I want to configure third party notifications (such as Slack or Github) into my Cloud Build configuration - how can I do that? Sending build notifications Configuring notifications for third-party services Where can you find us next? Mark will be at KubeCon next week. Melanie will be at NeurIPS this week. She’ll be attending Queer in AI, Black in AI, and LatinX this week as well.

Melanie is solo this week talking with Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech Bren professor and director of ML research at NVIDIA. We touch on tensors, their use, and how they relate to TensorFlow. Anima also details the work she does with NVIDIA and how they are helping to advance machine learning through hardware and software. Our main discussion centers around AI and machine learning research conferences, specifically the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (commonly referred to as NIPS) and the reason they have rebranded. NIPS originally started as a small conference at Caltech. As deep learning became more and more popular, it grew exponentially. With the higher attendance and interest, the acronym became center stage. Sexual innuendos and harassing puns surrounded the conference, sparking a call for a name change. At first, conference organizers were reluctant to rebrand and they used recent survey results as a reason to keep NIPS. Anima discusses her personal experience protesting the acronym, opening up about the hate speech and threats of which she and others received. Despite the harassment, Anima and others continued to protest, petition, and share stories of mistreatment within the community which helped lead to the name/acronym change to NeurIPS. The rebranding hopes to reestablish an inclusive academic community and move the focus back to machine learning research and away from unprofessional attention. Anima Anandkumar Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. Her research spans both theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning. In particular, she has spearheaded research in tensor-algebraic methods, large-scale learning, deep learning, probabilistic models, and non-convex optimization. Anima is the recipient of several awards such as the Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Young investigator awards from the Air Force and Army research offices, Faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google and Adobe, and several best paper awards. She is the youngest named professor at Caltech, the highest honor bestowed to an individual faculty. She is part of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network consisting of leading experts from academia, business, government, and the media. She has been featured in documentaries by PBS, KPCC, wired magazine, and in articles by MIT Technology review, Forbes, Yourstory, O’Reilly media, and so on. Anima received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2009 to 2010, visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England in 2012 and 2014, assistant professor at U.C. Irvine between 2010 and 2016, associate professor at U.C. Irvine between 2016 and 2017, and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services between 2016 and 2018. Cool things of the week Taking charge of your data: using Cloud DLP to de-identify and obfuscate sensitive information blog Unlocking what’s possible with medical imaging data in the cloud blog Google makes dataset of 50 million drawings available on its cloud blog Machine learning on machines: building a model to evaluate CPU performance blog Interview Anima at TensorLab site NeurIPS site Petition site Name Change (results of the poll) letter Johns Hopkins University letter letter AI Researchers Fight Over Four Letters article From the Board: Changing our Acronym letter TensorFlow site NVIDIA site Question of the week What are some actions I can take if I’m being trolled, harassed and/or bullied online or I want to be proactive about my safety? If you are experiencing harassment, tell someone who can support you, document it, and assess escalating to authorities depending on the severity. Surveillance Self-Defense Preventing Doxxing Where can you find us next? Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML this week and NeurIPS next week. She’ll be attending WIML, Black in AI, and LatinX.

Happy Thanksgiving! On this episode, Mark and Melanie learn about Grace.health with co-founders Therese Mannheimer and Roman Jasins. Grace.health’s goal is to give women control of information about their own bodies, allowing them to make informed healthcare decisions. Grace.health is a female health companion that lets women track and plan their periods, fertility, and ask questions. It is a global undertaking, hoping to reach not just the tech savvy woman, but all women in all markets worldwide. Stigmas and taboos around the world portray periods as dirty and contagious, preventing women from being able to work, go to school, or even sleep in the house. Grace.health’s goal is to educate people to help limit these superstitions and allow women to live fuller lives. With Grace.health, women know when their periods are coming or when the are ovulating so they can make the proper plans. In the longterm, Grace.health hopes to be a tool to not only help women identify any health concerns but also find a healthcare professional and get the treatment necessary. Therese Mannheimer Therese, one of the founders of Grace.health, is an experienced business developer and product person who believes that the best way to solve problems is to put relevant solutions into the hands of people. She is also co-founder of the Allbright Foundation that works with driving opinion around meritocracy. Roman Jasins Roman is CTO and co-founder of Grace.health. Cool things of the week Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video Getting started with Kubeflow Pipelines blog Subatomic particles and big data: Google joins CERN openlab blog GCP Podcast Episode 145: ATLAS with Dr. Mario Lassnig podcast Istio Routing Basics site Interview Grace Health site Google Cloud Startup site Dialogflow site FEM International site UN site Doctors Without Borders site The Hunger Project site Question of the week With background cloud functions - how can I set them up to retry on failure? Background functions Retrying Background Functions Where can you find us next? Mark and will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML in November and Black in AI and LatinX in December.

Viktor Gamov is on the podcast today to discuss Confluent and Kafka with Mark and special first-time guest host, Michelle. Viktor spends time with Mark and Melanie explaining how Kafka allows you to stream and process data in real-time, and how Kafka helps Confluent with its advanced streaming capabilities. Confluent Cloud helps connect Confluent and cloud platforms such as Google Cloud so customers don’t have to manage anything - Confluent takes care of it for you! To wrap up the show, Michelle answers our question of the week about Next 2019. Viktor Gamov Viktor Gamov is a Developer Advocate at Confluent, the company that makes a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Working in the field, Viktor developed comprehensive expertise in building enterprise application architectures using open source technologies. He enjoys helping different organizations design and develop low latency, scalable, and highly available distributed systems. Back in his consultancy days, he co-authored O’Reilly’s «Enterprise Web Development». He is a professional conference speaker on distributed systems, Java, and JavaScript topics, and is a regular at events, including JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon, and others. He blogs and produces the podcasts Razbor Poletov (in Russian) and co-hosts DevRelRad.io. Follow Viktor on Twitter, where he posts about gym life, food, open source, and, of course, Kafka and Confluent! Cool things of the week Kubeflow published a leadership guide to inclusivity site Picture what the cloud can do: How the New York Times is using Google Cloud to find untold stories in millions of archived photos blog Click-to-deploy on Kubeflow site Containerd available for beta testing in Google Kubernetes Engine blog Introducing AI Hub and Kubeflow Pipelines: Making AI simpler, faster, and more useful for businesses blog Announcing Cloud Scheduler: a modern, managed cron service for automated batch jobs blog Interview Kafka site Kafka Connect site Kafka Streams site KSQL site Confluent site Confluent Hub site Confluent Schema Registry site Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace site Confluent Enterprise site Confluent Cloud site Confluent on Github site Confluent Blog blog How to choose the number of topics/partitions in a Kafka cluster? blog Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times blog Google Cloud Platform and Confluent partner to deliver a managed Apache Kafka service blog Viktor’s Presentations site Confluent Community site Question of the week If I wanted to submit a CFP for Next 2019, how would I do it? Where can you find us next? Mark and Michelle will be at KubeCon in December. Michelle will be at Scale by the Bay on Friday. She’ll also be at YOW! Sydney, Brisbane, & Melbourne in Nov & December.

Joanna Smith and Alicia Williams talk G Suite with Mark and Melanie this week! G Suite is Google’s collection of apps to help make working easier. It includes things like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and more and is designed to be collaborative. It’s customizable, allowing users to adjust the programs to their needs and be more effective – including integrating it with Google Cloud! G Suite has an active community of developers building add-ons to increase functionality as well. Joanna Smith Joanna is a Developer Advocate for G Suite, working to make sure that anyone can extend G Suite with clever solutions to make Google work for them. Alicia Williams Alicia is an advocate for Google Cloud, trying to help data analysts solve problems. She uses machine learning, SQL, and visualizations to help solve problems and tell stories. Cool things of the week A dataset of congressional bills and built a text classification model with AutoML Natural Language by Sara Robinson tweet and blog Serverless from the ground up: Connecting Cloud Functions with a database (Part 3) blog How 20th Century Fox uses ML to predict a movie audience blog Kick off developer projects with improved G Suite Developer Hub blog This multiplayer game integrates Open Match, a highly-scalable, open source matchmaking framework from Google Cloud, Unity tweet, and Google Doodle Happy Anniversary, Melanie! Interview G Suite site Google Sheets site G Suite on Google Plus site G Suite Marketplace site G Suite on Github site G Suite APIs site G Suite App Maker site Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video Firestore Google Apps Script Library site Build on G Suite site Advanced Services Documentation site BigQuery site New Google Sheets enterprise data integrations with BigQuery and SAP blog Analyze big data within Google Sheets site Analyzing text in a Google Sheet using Cloud Natural Language API and Apps Script blog Entity sentiment analysis on text data in a Google sheet using Cloud Natural Language Github site Question of the week What if I want to write a code sample with a link that opens the Cloud Console and automatically clones a Git repository into Cloud Shell? Where can you find us next? Alicia will be at DevFest. Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML this month.

Happy Halloween! On this not-so-spooky episode of the Google Cloud Podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Tony Aiuto of Bazel. Bazel grew from Google’s internal build system, Blaze, to become the open source Bazel that it is today. The aim of the project is to quickly make very large builds across multiple languages. Tony Aiuto Tony is the tech-lead/manager for Bazel Product Excellence. He works on removing what enterprise users see as barriers to adoption. Tony’s efforts are on bridging the gap between the piece of open source code that the developers see and the product that users want to see. Commentary of the week Where can I donate if I’m angry or sad by last week’s news? Time’s Up Now site Project Alloy site MeToo Stem site HIAS site ADL site Protest NIPS conference name site Interview Bazel site BazelCon site Bazel on GitHub site Bazel Discuss on Google Groups site Bazel on Slack site Tweag site Tweag Haskell Rules site Cool things of the week It’s Halloween! And it’s the 3rd anniversary of the podcast! Gain insights about your GCP resources with asset inventory blog Introducing the Cloud KMS plugin for HashiCorp Vault blog Serverless from the ground up: Adding a user interface with Google Sheets (Part 2) blog Cyber Security for the Previous Generation blog The Red Sox won the World Series! Where can you find us next? Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML in November.

On the podcast today, we have two more fascinating interviews from Melanie’s time at Deep Learning Indaba! Mark helps host this episode as we speak with Karim Beguir and Muthoni Wanyoike about their company, Instadeep, the wonderful Indaba conference, and the growing AI community in Africa. Instadeep helps large enterprises understand how AI can benefit them. Karim stresses that it is possible to build advanced AI and machine learning programs in Africa because of the growing community of passionate developers and mentors for the new generation. Muthoni tells us about Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, a community she is heavily involved with in Nairobi. The group runs workshops and classes for AI developers and encourages volunteers to participate by sharing their knowledge and skills. Karim Beguir Karim Beguir helps companies get a grip on the latest AI advancements and how to implement them. A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products. Karim is also the founder of the TensorFlow Tunis Meetup. He regularly organises educational events and workshops to share his experience with the community. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience. Muthoni Wanyoike Muthoni Wanyoike is the team lead at Instadeep in Kenya. She is Passionate about bridging the skills gap in AI in Africa and does this by co-organizing the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning community. The community enables learning, mentorship, networking, and job opportunities for people interested in working in AI. She is experienced in research, data analytics, community and project management, and community growth hacking. Cool things of the week Is there life on other planets? Google Cloud is working with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to find out blog In this Codelab, you will learn about StarCraft II Learning Environment project and to train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent. You will also get familiar some of the concepts and frameworks to get to train a machine learning agent. site A new course to teach people about fairness in ML blog Serverless from the ground up: Building a simple microservice with Cloud Functions (Part 1) blog Superposition Podcast from Deep Learning Indaba with Omoju Miller and Nando de Freitas tweet and video Interview Instadeep site Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science site Neural Information Processing Systems site Google Launchpad Accelerator site TensorFlow site Google Assistant site Cloud AutoML site Hackathon Lagos site Deep Learning Book book Ranked Reward: Enabling Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization research paper Lessons learned on building a tech community blog Kenya Open Data Initiative site R for Data Science GitHub site and book TWIML Presents Deep Learning Indaba site Question of the week If I want to create a GKE cluster with a specific major kubernetes version (or even just the latest) using the command line tools, how do I do that? GCloud container clusters create site Specifying cluster version site Where can you find us next? Our guests will be at Indaba 2019 in Kenya. Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML in November.

Mark and Melanie speak with Patrick Flynn and Mike Eltsufin about their exciting new Java products for Google Cloud. Mike tells us all about the new Spring Cloud GCP, a helpful tool that integrates Google Cloud Platform APIs and the Spring Framework. Patrick elaborates on his team’s new tool, Jib, a Java container image builder, and how it helps Java developers. Patrick Flynn Patrick Flynn is a long time Java developer who spent many years in Google Ads, and is now four years into being the tech lead of the Google Cloud Java Tools team. Mike Eltsufin Mike Eltsufin has been an enterprise Java application developer in the banking sector for over a decade before joining Google. Currently, he’s the tech lead of the Cloud Java Frameworks team, focusing on bringing the goodness of Spring Boot to Google Cloud Java developers. Cool things of the week Introducing container-native load balancing on Google Kubernetes Engine blog Simplifying cloud networking for enterprises: announcing Cloud NAT and more blog Store it, analyze it, back it up: Cloud Storage updates bring new replication options blog Postmortems and Retrospectives with Liz and Seth video GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast Interview App Engine site Kubernetes Engine site Spring Framework site Spring Boot site Spring Cloud GCP site Spring Cloud GCP on GitHub site Cloud Pub/Sub site Spanner site Cloud Sql site Cloud Datastore site Docker site Jib on GitHub site Cloud Tools for IntelliJ Documentation site Introducing Jib — build Java Docker images better blog Bazel site Skaffold on GitHub site Netty site SpringOne site Knative and riff for Spring Developers video Jib Gitter site Sig Apps site Kubernetes Slack site Codelabs site Question of the week What if we have an object in Google Cloud Storage, and I want to automatically change an aspect of it – such as: Downgrade the storage class of objects older than 365 days to Coldline Storage. Delete objects created before January 1, 2013. Keep only the 3 most recent versions of each object in a bucket with versioning enabled. Managing Object Lifecycles docs and guide Where can you find us next? Patrick’s team will be at KubeCon Shanghai and Oracle Code One and he will be at KubeCon Seattle Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at Twilio Signal $BASH event on Thursday and SOCML in November.

Melanie and Mark celebrate their 150th episode this week with a high-energy interview of mutual friend, KF, at Strange Loop. KF gives her perspective on Strange Loop, working remotely, and distributed systems. She compliments Strange Loop for the diversity it has achieved as the conference has grown. She laments the lack of introductory material for distributed systems learners, saying it’s not as complicated as everyone thinks but needs more educational material for beginners! In general, she believes everyone could benefit from some code study, especially if you can find a good mentor. KF also gives us some great tips for working remotely and staying effective and social. Katherine Fellows KF is a senior engineer focusing on backend, infrastructure, and data engineering. She has worked remotely for companies at all stages of growth in San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and Philadelphia. Most recently, she’s been a Senior Software Engineer at Turbine Labs, developing tools that leverage a service mesh to make collaboration more effective for engineering teams. KF currently lives with her cat in Portland, OR. Cool things of the week Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog Is that a device driver, golf driver, or taxi driver? Building custom translation models with AutoML Translate blog A developer onramp to Kubernetes with GKE blog Network controls in GCP vs. on-premises: Not so different after all blog Interview Strange Loop site Kubernetes site Docker site SRE site GCP Podcast Episode 102: Smart Parking and IoT Core with Brian Granatir podcast Question of the week How do I encrypt and decrypt data with Cloud KMS? Symmetric and Asymmetric Where can you find us next? Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December. Mark streams on Twitch streaming. Melanie will be at CAMLIS. Get in touch! Website Email us! Ask us a question Reddit Google Plus Twitter

Today, Melanie brings you another great interview from her time at Deep Learning Indaba in South Africa. She was joined by Yabebal Fantaye and Jessica Phalafala for an in-depth look at the deep learning research that’s going on in the continent. At the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the aim is to gather together minds from all over Africa and the world to not only learn but to use their distinct perspectives to contribute to research that furthers the sciences. Our guests are both part of this initiative, using their specialized skills to expand the abilities of the group and stretch the boundaries of machine learning, mathematics, and other sciences. Yabebal elaborates on the importance of AIMS and Deep Learning Indaba, noting that the more people can connect with each other, the more confidence they will gain. Jessica points out how this research in Africa can do more than just advance science. By focusing on African problems and solutions, machine learning research can help increase the GDP and economic standards of a continent thought to be “behind”. Jessica Phalafala Jessica Phalafala is a PhD Applied Mathematics student at Stellenbosch University and currently affiliated with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In her mid-twenties, she finds herself with four qualifications all obtained with distinction, including a Master of Science in Pure Mathematics degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. Jessica is interested in using her functional analysis background together with a number of newly developed skills to contribute towards developing rigorous mathematical theory to support some existing deep learning methods and algorithms for her PhD research. Outside of research she takes great interest in fast-tracking the level of accessibility of higher education in South Africa as co-founder of the Sego Sa Lesedi Foundation, a platform created to inform underprivileged high school learners of career and funding opportunities in science as well as provide them with mentorship as they transition into undergraduate studies. Yabebal Fantaye Dr. Fantaye is an AIMS-ARETE Research Chair based in South Africa. His research is in applying artificial intelligence and advanced statistical methods to cosmological data sets in order to understand the nature of the universe and to satellite images of the Earth in order to find alternative ways to monitor African development progress. Dr. Fantaye is a fellow of the World Economic Forum Young Scientists community, and a fellow and a Chair of the Next Einstein Forum Community of Scientists. Cool things of the week A Kubernetes FAQ for the C-suite blog BigQuery and surrogate keys: a practical approach blog Adding custom intelligence to Gmail with serverless on GCP blog Announcing Cloud Tasks, a task queue service for App Engine flex and second generation runtimes blog Unity and DeepMind partner to advance AI research blog Interview African Institute for Mathematical Sciences site Provable approximation properties for deep neural networks research Next Einstein Initiative site Square Kilometer Array (SKA) site University of the Witwatersrand site Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) site South African National Space Agency (SANSA) site National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP)site IndabaX site Coursera site Andrej Karpathy research Andrej Karpathy Blog blog Question of the week If I’m using the Cluster Autoscaler for Kubernetes (or GKE), how can I prevent it from removing specific nodes from the cluster when scaling down? How can I prevent Cluster Autoscaler from scaling down a particular node? github What types of pods can prevent CA from removing a node? github Where can you find us next? Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December and will probably be at Unite L.A. this month. Melanie is speaking at Monktoberfest Oct 4th in Portland, Maine and will be at CAMLIS the following week.

In our last (but not least!) interview from NEXT, Mark and Melanie talked with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko about Wellio, an awesome new platform that combines AI and healthy eating. Wellio was developed as a way to not only educate users on the importance of proper nutrition for well-being but to give them their own personal nutritionist. The data scientists at Wellio started from scratch (pun intended) to create their own food-related database and then began training models so the data could be organized and personalized. Using a combination of human power and machine learning techniques, Wellio learns your preferences, allergies, diets, etc. and will make healthy decisions for you based on these key facts. It chooses recipes, populates a grocery list, and even has the ingredients delivered to your door in time for dinner! Sivan Aldor-Noiman Sivan heads Data Science for Wellio, an early stage startup in the FoodTech space that is helping people eat better. In Wellio, her team delivers models that help inspire, empower and adapt to people’s eating needs, cooking abilities and health constraints. She began her career in the Israeli military serving as an instructor for an anti-tank missile unit (please don’t think Rambo, think more like a classroom teacher). Sivan then transitioned to school and received her undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a Master in Statistics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She moved to the U.S. to complete a Ph.D. degree in Statistics from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In her previous job, Sivan ended up leading several Data Science teams and learned that she really liked leading technical people since she got to learn a lot from them. Ultimately, she missed the smaller company mentality, so she is back in the startup world. Sivan was once asked to define herself so here goes: “I am an enthusiastic disagreeable giver and a constant empirical driven learner”. Erik Andrejko Erik has spent his career making a positive impact on the world through mathematics. He is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Wellio - an early stage startup applying AI to the intersection of food and human health. Previously, Erik lead the data science and research organization at The Climate Corporation, which applies data science to solve challenging problems in numerous domains including climatology, agronomic modeling and geospatial applications. When not analyzing interesting datasets, Erik can often be found riding up some incline on a bicycle or cooking. Cool things of the week Summary of Google Cloud Next Tokyo site Deep Learning Indaba GCP Credit Awards site Data Studio and Dataprep are now generally available blog DS: BI analyze more than 500 other data sources via more than 100 partner-built connectors and used by over a million people globally DP: new look, team collab and more analytics features blog Announcing general availability of Cloud Memorystore for Redis blog Coursera Advanced Machine Learning with TensorFlow with GCP blog Webinar on October 9th at 9AM PST to learn more Simplifying ML predictions with Google Cloud Functions blog 50 Best Cloud Security Podcasts site GCP Podcast Episode #100: Vint Cerf: past, present, and future of the internet podcast Interview Wellio site GKE site Cloud Storage site Pub/Sub site Cloud Composer site Cloud ML Engine site Stackdriver site Cloud Functions site TensorFlow site Keras site Scikit Learn site Cloud TPU site Cloud AutoML site Cloud Vision site DevOps201 for Application Developers video Cloud Firestore site Day 3 Keynote: Made Here Together video Spinnaker site Contact Wellio email Questions of the week Is Inbox going away? Inbox is signing off: find your favorite features in the new Gmail blog 5 ways the new Gmail can help you get more done blog Where can you find us next? We’ll both be at Strangeloop. Mark will probably be at Unite L.A. in October. Melanie speaking at Monktoberfest Oct 4th in Portland, Maine.

This week we are bringing you a couple of interviews from last week’s Deep Learning Indaba conference. Dr. Vukosi Marivate, Andrea Bohmert and Yasin(i) Musa Ayami talk about the burgeoning machine learning community, research, companies and AI investment landscape in Africa. While Mark is at Google Cloud Next in Tokyo, Melanie is joined by special guest co-hosts Nyalleng Moorosi and Willie Brink. Vukosi and Yasin(i) share how Deep Learning Indaba is playing an important role to recognize and grow machine learning research and companies on the African continent. We also discuss Yasin(i)’s prototyped app, Tukuka, and how it won the Maathai Award which is given to individuals who are a positive force for change. Tukuka is being built to aid economically disadvantaged women in Zambia get access to financial resources that are currently unavailable. Andrea rounds up the interviews by giving us a VC perspective on the AI start-up landscape in Africa and how that compares to other parts of the world. As Nyalleng says at the end, AI is happening in Africa and has great potential for impact. Willie Brink Willie Brink is a senior lecturer of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He teaches various courses in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, at all levels, and his research interests fall mainly in the broad fields of computer vision and machine learning. He has worked on multi-view geometry, visual odometry, recognition and tracking, probabilistic graphical models, as well as deep learning. Recent research directions include visual knowledge representation and reasoning. Willie is also one of the founders and organisers of the Deep Learning Indaba, an exciting initiative working to celebrate and strengthen machine learning and artificial intelligence research in Africa, and to promote diversity and transformation in these fields. Nyalleng Moorosi Nyalleng is a Software Engineer and Researcher with the Google AI team in Ghana. Before joining Google, Nyalleng was a senior Data Science researcher at South Africa’s national science lab, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with the Modeling and Digital Sciences Unit. In her capacity at CSIR, she works on projects ranging from: rhino poaching prevention with park rangers, working with news outlets to understand social media sentiments, and searching for Biomarkers in African cancer proteomes. Before getting into ML research at CSIR, she was a computer science lecturer at Fort Hare University and a software engineer at Thomson Reuters. Moorosi is an active member of Women in Machine Learning, Black in Artificial Intelligence, and an organising member of the Deep Learning Indaba - a yearly workshop that gathers African researchers in one space to share ideas and grow machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. Dr. Vukosi Marivate Dr. Vukosi Marivate holds a PhD in Computer Science (Rutgers University) and MSc & BSc in Electrical Engineering (Wits University). He has recently started at the University of Pretoria as the ABSA Chair of Data Science. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (due to the abundance of text data and need to extract insights). As part of his vision for the ABSA Data Science chair, Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is an organizer of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He is passionate about developing young talent, supervising MSc and PhD students, and mentoring budding Data Scientists. Yasin(i) Musa Ayami Yasin(i) Musa Ayami is Team Lead at TsogoloTech and a certified Oracle Associate. Mr. Ayami recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in Information Technology at the prestigious Durban University of Technology (DUT) were his study mainly focused on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Prior to him enrolling for his Master’s Degree, Mr Ayami served as an Intern Software Engineer at DUT’s App Factory where he also served as Team Lead before deciding to further his studies. He also worked as a Part-Time Student Instructor at the DUT. In 2017, he co-founded TsogoloTech. His vision has always been to leverage technology for social good. Andrea Bohmert Andrea Bohmert is a Co-Managing Partner at Knife Capital. Before joining Knife Capital, she was the Founder and Co-Managing Partner of Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa. Passionate about strategizing how to scale businesses and meeting the entrepreneurs responsible for creating them, she has been actively involved in numerous initiatives aiming to accelerate the African entrepreneurial ecosystem. What are you looking forward to this week? AlphaGo Movie site WiML: Women in Machine Learning site Deep Learning Indaba Poster Sessions site Neural Information Processing Systems site Interview Deep Learning Indaba site Deep Learning Indaba GitHub site Deep Learning Indaba Tutorials site Deep Learning Indaba 2018 Slides site Deep Learning Indaba 2017 Presentations videos Deep Learning Indaba X site Yasin(i) Musa Ayami on GitHub site and LinkedIn site Deep Learning Indaba Award Winners site and tweet Maathai Award site Xamarin site SuperPosition at The Deep Learning Indaba with Dr. Vukosi Marivate podcast Knife Capital site Investing in AI by Andrea Bohmert article 10 Defining Moments that shaped the 2016 SA startup ecosystem article Data Science Africa site International Data Week site Google Cloud Platform Credits award winners tweet Question of the week The co-hosts weigh in on our question of the week: What have you taken away from this week and will take forward? Where can you find us next? Mark and Melanie will be at Strangeloop. Willie will be teaching Machine Learning at Stellenbosch University this summer. Nyalleng will be at the Women in Machine Learning Workshop and the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Montreal in December.

Jeff Dean, the lead of Google AI, is on the podcast this week to talk with Melanie and Mark about AI and machine learning research, his upcoming talk at Deep Learning Indaba and his educational pursuit of parallel processing and computer systems was how his career path got him into AI. We covered topics from his team’s work with TPUs and TensorFlow, the impact computer vision and speech recognition is having on AI advancements and how simulations are being used to help advance science in areas like quantum chemistry. We also discussed his passion for the development of AI talent in the content of Africa and the opening of Google AI Ghana. It’s a full episode where we cover a lot of ground. One piece of advice he left us with, “the way to do interesting things is to partner with people who know things you don’t.” Listen for the end of the podcast where our colleague, Gabe Weiss, helps us answer the question of the week about how to get data from IoT core to display in real time on a web front end. Jeff Dean Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Senior Fellow, leading Google AI and related research efforts. His teams are working on systems for speech recognition, computer vision, language understanding, and various other machine learning tasks. He has co-designed/implemented many generations of Google’s crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, and co-designed/implemented major pieces of Google’s initial advertising and AdSense for Content systems. He is also a co-designer and co-implementor of Google’s distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner systems, protocol buffers, the open-source TensorFlow system for machine learning, and a variety of internal and external libraries and developer tools. Jeff received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1996, working with Craig Chambers on whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented languages. He received a B.S. in computer science & economics from the University of Minnesota in 1990. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), and a winner of the ACM Prize in Computing. Cool things of the week Google Dataset Search is in beta site Expanding our Public Datasets for geospatial and ML-based analytics blog Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) site Google AI and Kaggle Inclusive Images Challenge site We are rated in the top 100 technology podcasts on iTunes site What makes TPUs fine-tuned for deep learning? blog Interview Jeff Dean on Google AI profile Deep Learning Indaba site Google AI site Google AI in Ghana blog Google Brain site Google Cloud site DeepMind site Cloud TPU site Google I/O Effective ML with Cloud TPUs video Liquid cooling system article DAWNBench Results site Waymo (Alphabet’s Autonomous Car) site DeepMind AlphaGo site Open AI Dota 2 blog Moustapha Cisse profile Sanjay Ghemawat profile Neural Information Processing Systems Conference site Previous Podcasts GCP Podcast Episode 117: Cloud AI with Dr. Fei-Fei Li podcast GCP Podcast Episode 136: Robotics, Navigation, and Reinforcement Learning with Raia Hadsell podcast TWiML & AI Systems and Software for ML at Scale with Jeff Dean podcast Additional Resources arXiv.org site Chris Olah blog Distill Journal site Google’s Machine Learning Crash Course site Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville book and site NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering site Senior Thesis Parallel Implementations of Neural Network Training: Two Back-Propagation Approaches by Jeff Dean paper and tweet Machine Learning for Systems and Systems for Machine Learning slides Question of the week How do I get data from IoT core to display in real time on a web front end? Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video MQTT site Cloud Pub/Sub site Cloud Functions site Cloud Firestore site Where can you find us next? Melanie is at Deep Learning Indaba and Mark is at Tokyo NEXT. We’ll both be at Strangeloop end of the month. Gabe will be at Cloud Next London and the IoT World Congress.

Our guest today is Dr. Mario Lassnig, a software engineer working on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN! Melanie and Mark put on their physics hats as they learn all about what it takes to manage the petabytes of data involved in such a large research project. Dr. Mario Lassnig Dr. Mario Lassnig has been working as a Software Engineer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) since 2006. Within the ATLAS Experiment, he is responsible for all aspects of its large-scale distributed data, including management, storage, network, and access. He is also one of the principal developers of the Rucio system for scientific data management. In his previous life, he developed mobile navigation software for multi-modal transportation in Vienna at Seibersdorf Research, as well as cryptographic smart-card applications for access control at the University of Klagenfurt. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Klagenfurt, and a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck. Cool things of the week The Machines Can Do the Work, a Story of Kubernetes Testing, CI, and Automating the Contributor Experience blog Google Cloud grants $9M in credits for the operation of the Kubernetes project blog Improving job searches for veterans with Google Cloud’s Talent Solution blog Unity For Beginners… From a Beginner blog GCP Podcast Episode 134: Connected Games with Unity and Google Cloud with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker podcast Neural Information Processing Systems Conference site Interview Rucio - Scientific Data Management site CERN site ATLAS site Google Cloud Storage site Google Compute Engine site G Suite site GKE On-Prem site Rucio on GitHub site University of Oslo site University of Innsbruck site Brookhaven National Laboratory site University of Texas at Arlington site Square Kilometer Array site DUNE site LIGO Lab site Scientific Computing with Google Cloud Platform: Experiences from the Trenches in Particle Physics and Earth Sciences video GCP Podcast Episode 122: Project Jupyter with Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf podcast Rucio Workshop site ACM/IEEE Supercomputing 2018 site Question of the week I am not familiar with Docker or Kubernetes - where can I get started? Docker Docker’s official “Getting Started” guide Katacoda’s free, interactive Docker course Kubernetes You should totally read this comic and interactive tutorial Katacoda’s free, interactive Kubernetes course Where can you find us next? Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba. Mark will be at Tokyo NEXT. We’ll both be at Strange Loop.

This week we learn about how Mercari is handling migrating from an on-prem monolithic infrastructure to cloud microservices architecture with GKE. Terry and Taichi share with Melanie and Mark what drove the decision for the change, the challenges and what the team has learned from the transition. The real value for this change has been about making the platform more scalable as they grow to meet the needs of their millions of daily active users. It’s another great interview we captured out of Google NEXT. Taichi Nakashima Taichi is a tech lead for the microservices platform at Mercari. Prior to Mercari, he was a backend engineer at Rakuten, building internal Platform as a Service. Mercari chose microservice architecture as their next development platform, and built two teams to proceed with the migration. One is the microservice platform team that is building a platform that can deploy any microservices, and the other is the microservice development team that are focusing on migrating the current monolithic API to microservices. Mercari use GKE as a platform and GCP as the main infrastructure for microservices. Tonghui (Terry) Li Tonghui joined Mercari in April 2018 and is responsible for migrating the monolithic backend API to a microservice architecture. Prior to Mercari, he was a tech lead of Indeed, working on different components of the job search engine including Title Normalization, Location system, Job Search API, and more. Cool things of the week How to call the Cloud AutoML API from a web app site GCPPodcast Episode 108: Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig site Who is this street artist? Building a graffiti artist classifier using AutoML blog Datastore Transactions, Batches and Perf! video and twitter Deploy only what you trust: introducing Binary Authorization for Google Kubernetes Engine blog Interview Mercari site Microservices on GKE at Mercari site Continuous Delivery for Microservices with Spinnaker at Mercari site Microservices site GKE site Terraform site Spinnaker site GKE On-Prem site GKE On-Prem - Managing Across Hybrid IT Environments with Open Architectures (Cloud Next ‘18) video Mercari on GitHub site BigQuery site Mercari Engineering Blog blog kubectl site Google Cloud AutoML site Photo credit: Taichi Nakashima Question of the week How do I use my existing identity management system with Google Cloud Platform? site and blog Where can you find us next? Mark is at Pax Dev and Pax West. Find him and say hi. In September, Mark will be at Tokyo NEXT and Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba. You can find both of us at Strangeloop.

Mark and Melanie are your hosts again this week as we talk with Steren Giannini and Stewart Reichling discussing what’s new with App Engine. Particularly its new second generation runtime, allowing headless Chrome, and better language support! And automatic scalability to make your life easier, too. App Engine also has an interesting way of inspiring new Google products. Tune in to learn more! Steren Giannini Steren Giannini is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 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 launched Stackdriver Error Reporting and now focuses on GCP’s serverless offering. Recently, Steren has been working on upgrading App Engine’s auto scaling system and bringing Node.js to App Engine standard environment. Stewart Reichling Stewart Reichling is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across Strategy, Marketing and Product Management at Google. He currently works on bringing new runtimes (Python, Node.js, +more to come!) to App Engine and Cloud Functions. Cool things of the week Robot dance party: How we created an entire animated short at Next ‘18 blog What’s happening in BigQuery: integrated machine learning, maps, and more blog Protecting against the new “L1TF” speculative vulnerabilities blog Interview App Engine site Deploying Node.js on App Engine standard environment video Introducing headless Chrome support in Cloud Functions and App Engine blog Node 8 site Python 3.7.0 site App Engine PHP 7.2 Runtime Environment Beta site Headless Chrome site GCPPodcast Episode 23: Humble Bundle with Andy Oxfeld podcast Google Cloud Datastore site App Engine Task Queue site Ubuntu site gVisor site Open-sourcing gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime blog App Engine Documentation site gcloud app deploy site To send feedback, email [email protected] or [email protected] App Engine Google Group forum Operating Serverless Apps with Google Stackdriver video App Engine’s new auto scaling system - scheduler blog Question of the week What does it mean when the recommendation is to update your image? Getting Image Vulnerabilities site Updating Managed Instance Groups site Node Images site Where can you find us next? Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba and Strangeloop. Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. In September, he’ll be at Tokyo NEXT and Strangeloop.

Mark Mandel is in the guest seat today as Melanie and our old pal Francesc interview Cyril Tovena of Ubisoft and Mark about Agones. We discuss dedicated game servers and their importance in game performance, how Agones can make hosting and scaling dedicated game servers easier to manage, and the future of Agones. Cyril and Mark elaborate on Ubisoft’s relationship with Google and how it’s progressing the world of gaming. Listen in! Mark Mandel Mark Mandel is a Developer Advocate for Games for Google Cloud Platform, founder of the open source, multiplayer dedicated game server scaling project Agones, and one half of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Hailing from Australia, Mark built his career developing backend systems for over 15 years, writing open source software, and building infrastructure in the cloud. Cyril Tovena Cyril Tovena is a Technical Lead for the online group for Ubisoft Montreal, helping game productions to build online features in the last four years. Cyril started his career eight years ago, building web services in London. He is currently designing and implementing scalable microservices in the cloud. Cool things of the week Introducing App Engine Second Generation runtimes and Python 3.7 blog Cloud Functions serverless platform is generally available blog GOTO 2018 • The Robustness of Go • Francesc Campoy video Simple backup and replay of streaming events using Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Dataflow blog Calling Java developers: Spring Cloud GCP 1.0 is now generally available blog Interview Agones Github site Agones on Twitter twitter Agones: Scaling Multiplayer Dedicated Game Servers with Kubernetes talk from NEXT 2018 video Ubisoft site Kubernetes site GKE site Go site dep site Agones Contributing Guide site Developing, Testing, and Building Agones site Agones Slack Channel site Agones Google Group site Question of the week Francesc answers our question of the week, “Should you do ML in Go?”. Short answer? Probably not. Python may be the better choice. If you do want to experiment with Go and ML, try Gonum, Gorgonia, or TensorFlow for Go. Where can you find us next? Francesc will be at GopherCon, GoSF, and Velocity. Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba and Strangeloop. Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. In September, he’ll be at Tokyo NEXT and Strangeloop.

On this episode of the podcast we continue a conversation we started with Haben Girma, an advocate for equal rights for people with disabilities, regarding the value of tech accessibility. Melanie and Mark talk with her about common challenges and best practices when considering accessibility in technology design and development. Bottom line - we need one solution that works for all. Haben Girma The first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities. President Obama named her a White House Champion of Change, and Forbes recognized her in Forbes 30 Under 30. Haben travels the world consulting and public speaking, teaching clients the benefits of fully accessible products and services. Haben is a talented storyteller who helps people frame difference as an asset. She resisted society’s low expectations, choosing to create her own pioneering story. Because of her disability rights advocacy she has been honored by President Obama, President Clinton, and many others. Haben is also writing a memoir that will be published by Grand Central Publishing in 2019. Learn more at habengirma.com. Cool things of the week Istio reaches 1.0: ready for prod blog Google for Nigeria: Making the internet more useful for more people blog GCPPodcast Episode 17: The Cloud In Africa with Hiren Patel and Dale Humby podcast Access Google Cloud services, right from IntelliJ IDEA blog Interview Haben Girma’s website site Haben Girma’s presentation at NEXT video GCPPodcast Episode 100: Vint Cerf: past, present, and future of the internet podcast Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) site Android Accessibility Guidelines site Apple Developer Accessibility Guidelines site Black in AI site Google Accessibility site San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind site National Federation of the Blind site National Association of the Deaf site Question of the week How do I perform large scale mutations in BigQuery? blog and site Where can you find us next? Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. In September, he’ll be at Tokyo NEXT. Melanie is at Def Con, Black Hat, and BSides Las Vegas. In September, she will be at Deep Learning Indaba.

Let’s talk container security! This week, Melanie and Mark learn all about the three main pillars of container security and more with our guest, Maya Kaczorowski. Maya Kaczorowski Maya is a Product Manager in Security & Privacy at Google, focused on container security. She previously worked on encryption at rest and encryption key management. Prior to Google, she was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, working in IT security for large enterprises and before that, completed her Master’s in mathematics focusing on cryptography and game theory. She is bilingual in English and French. Cool things of the week What a week! 105 announcements from Google Cloud Next ‘18 blog Keynotes, Keynote Fireside Chats, & Spotlight Sessions: Google Cloud Next ‘18 videos All Sessions: Google Cloud Next ‘18 videos Sign up for NEXT ‘19 updates site GKE On-Prem site Edge TPU site Interview Def Con site Black Hat site BSides Las Vegas site Cloud KMS site Kubernetes site GCPPodcast Episode 46: Borg and Kubernetes with John Wilkes podcast Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg research Open-sourcing gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime blog Kata Containers site Nabla Containers site Google Container Registry site GKE security overview doc KubeCon site Container security blog series blog GKE hardening guide doc Seccompsandbox wiki Docker seccomp profile site Using RBAC in Kubernetes blog Terraform site Helm site Google Container Registry: Getting Image Vulnerabilities doc Container security overview site GCPPodcast Episode 110: CPU Vulnerability Security with Matt Linton and Paul Turner podcast Question of the week How do I setup SSL termination on Kubernetes with Let’s Encrypt? GitHub: Tutorial for installing cert-manager to get HTTPS certificates from Let’s Encrypt site Ahmet Alp Balkan, DPE on Google Cloud Where can you find us next? Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. Melanie will be at the 2018 Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp at Berkeley on August 6th.

It’s the third and final day for us at NEXT, and Mark and Melanie are wrapping up with some great interviews! First, we spoke with Stephanie Cueto and Vivian San of Techtonica, a San Francisco non-profit. Next, Liz Fong-Jones and Nikhita Raghunath joined us for a quick discussion about open source and Stackdriver and last but not least, Robert Kubis helped us close things sharing what it means to do DevRel at this event. Stephanie Cueto and Vivian San Stephanie Cueto is a Software Engineer and advocate for the Latinx & women community. She has been involved in the Tech community since 2016. Playing with code at an early age and working in education led to my interest in becoming a Software Engineer. Currently she is a Software Engineer Apprentice at Techtonica, where she has gained the skills to build projects in MongoDb, MySQL, Express.js, React, and Node.js. During the program, she created Salient Alert, a platform for reporting ICE Raids and Checkpoints. Vivian San is a highly analytical full-stack software engineer with an educational background in the hard sciences. She is strongly motivated by writing clean, efficient code, and passionate about teaching and giving back to underrepresented individuals and communities. Liz Fong-Jones and Nikhita Raghunath Liz Fong-Jones is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google and works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team in New York. In her 10+ years at Google she has worked across eight different teams spanning the stack from Google Flights to Cloud Bigtable. She lives with her wife, Metamour, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix in Brooklyn. In her spare time she plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights. Nikhita Raghunath is an intern at Red Hat and works on the extensibility of Kubernetes. Previously, she was a Google Summer of Code (2017) student for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and also worked on Kubernetes. She is interested in backend applications, distributed systems and Linux. Nikhita likes programming in Go, C++, C, and Python. She also likes to give talks at conferences and speak about her work. Robert Kubis Robert Kubis is a developer advocate for the Google Cloud Platform based in London, UK, specializing in container, storage, and scalable technologies. Before joining Google, Robert collected over 10 years of experience in software development and architecture. He has driven multiple full-stack application developments at SAP with a passion for distributed systems, containers, and databases. In his spare time he enjoys following tech trends, trying new restaurants, traveling, and improving his photography skills. Interviews Made Here Together: NEXT Developer Keynote video Techtonica site I am Remarkable Workshop site Haben Girma’s accessibility presentation at NEXT video GCPPodcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast Red Hat site Kubernetes site Introducing Agones blog Stackdriver site OpenCensus site GCPPodcast Episode 118: OpenCensus with Morgan McLean and JBD podcast Edge TPU site GCPPodcast Episode 135: VirusTotal with Emi Martínez podcast Cloud Spanner site

Day two of NEXT was another day full of interesting interviews! Melanie and Mark sat down for quick chats with Haben Girma about accessibility in tech and Paresh Kharya to talk about NVIDIA. Next, we touched base with Amruta Gulanikar and Simon Zeltser to learn more about Windows SQL Server and .NET workloads on Google Cloud. The interviews wrap up with Henry Hsu & Isaac Wong of Holberton. Haben Girma The first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities. President Obama named her a White House Champion of Change. She received the Helen Keller Achievement Award, and a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30. Haben travels the world consulting and public speaking, teaching clients the benefits of fully accessible products and services. She’s a talented storyteller who helps people frame difference as an asset. She resisted society’s low expectations, choosing to create her own pioneering story. Haben is working on a book that will be published by Hachette in 2019. Paresh Kharya Paresh Kharya is Group Product Marketing Manager for data center products at NVIDIA responsible for product marketing of NVIDIA’s Tesla accelerated computing platform. Previously, Paresh held a variety of business roles in the high-tech industry, including group product manager at Adobe and business development manager at Tech Mahindra. Paresh has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and a bachelors of computer science and engineering from the National Institute of Technology, India. Amruta Gulanikar & Simon Zeltser Prior to joining Google Amruta spent 5+ years as a PM in the Office division at Microsoft working on many different products. Just before she left, she worked on launching a new service and supporting apps - “O365 Planner” which offers people a simple and visual way to organize teamwork. At Google, Amruta owns Windows on GCE which includes support for premium OS & Microsoft Server product images, platform improvements to support Windows workloads on GCE. Simon Zeltser is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, working with .NET and Windows on Google Cloud Platform. Henry Hsu & Isaac Wong Henry Hsu is a software engineer trained at Holberton School. He has experience with C, C++, Python, Ruby/Rails, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, MySQL/Postgres, Unity, Game Maker Studio, Linux, Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, systems design, algorithms, and devops. Isaac Wong attends the Holberton School. He has a degree in horticulture from Texas A&M. Interviews Edge TPU site Cloud IoT Edge site Cloud Armor site Titan Security Key site Building on our cloud security leadership to help keep businesses protected blog Google Cloud Container Registry site Haben Girma’s website site Haben Girma’s presentation at NEXT video San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind site National Federation of the Blind site National Association of the Deaf site NVIDIA site NVIDIA and Google Cloud Platform site Google Cloud Platform Podcast Episode 119 podcast Velostrata site GKE site Google App Engine site Stackdriver Debugger site Windows on Google Cloud Platform site SQL Server on Google Cloud Platform site .NET on Google Cloud Platform site Holberton School site Unity site GKE On-Prem site TensorFlow site Where can you find us next? We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT in Moscone West on the first floor, so come by and say hi! We have chocolate!

On this very special episode of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast, we have live interviews from the first day of NEXT! Melanie and Mark had the chance to chat with Melody MeckFessel, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud and Pavan Srivastava of Deloitte. Next we spoke with Sandeep Dinesh about Open Service Broker and Raejeanne Skillern of Intel. Melody Meckfessel Melody Meckfessel is a hands-on technology leader with more than 20 years experience building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale. As VP of Engineering, she leads the team building DevOps tools and sharing DevOps best practices across Google and with software development and operations teams around the world. Her team powers the world’s most advanced continuously delivered software, enabling development teams to turn ideas into reliable, scalable production systems. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Melody programmed for startups and enterprise companies. Since joining Google in 2004, Melody has led teams in