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 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 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 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. 

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 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.

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

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

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

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

• DevFests site
• Best Kept Security Secrets: Tap into the power of Organization Policy Service podcast

• 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

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.

Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme

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 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.

• 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

• 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

This week, we get a great tip from our friend Grant on using Google Cloud Functions! github

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 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.

• 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

• Active Assist site
• IAM Recommender Documentation site
• IAM Recommender Service Account Insights site
• Committed Use Discounts site

This week, we talk to Rob Hedgepeth about SkySQL.

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

Anthony gives us a GKE tip on NodeLocal DNSCache this week!

Carter is working on the SaaS podcast. Mark and Carter are working on a Kubernetes series!

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 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 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.

• 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

• Bare Metal Solution site
• Bare Metal Solution Next Presentation site
• Bare Metal Solution on GitHub site
• Oracle site
• Oracle Rack Cabinets site

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!

• 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 is the Head of Developer Relations and Support at Sanity.io.

Simen Svale Skogsrud is Co-founder and CTO of Sanity.io.

• 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

• 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

Roger gives us a tip about Google Cloud’s Data Loss Prevention. Check out the demo here!

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

Nick Orlove tells us a bit more about what to think about when optimizing BigQuery:

• What is BigQuery? video
• Visualizing query results video

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

This week, we’re talking about IAM Policy Troubleshooter.

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.

• “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 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.

• 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

• 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

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.

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 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.

• 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

• 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

We’re talking to Stephanie Wong about the Network Intelligence Center and her video series, GCP Networking End to End

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

Alicia Williams is here to tell us about connecting Sheets to BigQuery.

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!

• “Laser Wrath 4.wav” by Marcuslee of Freesound.org

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

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.

• Google Cloud Podcasts site
• • Cloud Security Podcast podcast
  • Google Cloud SRE Podcast podcast
• Developer Community Keynote: The thing about burnout video

• Google Cloud Next ‘22: Meet digital sovereignty requirements site
• Announcing Sovereign Controls for Google Workspace blog
• Cloud Key Management site
• Confidential Computing site

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.

Max Saltonstall and Chloe Condon

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 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.

• Google Cloud VMware Engine is now generally available blog
• I built an AI-powered moderation bot for Discord video

• 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

This week, we learn how to authenticate a REST API.

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

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.

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.

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 (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.

• 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

• 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

How can I get introduced to key products? With Priyanka’s new video series!

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

Yuri Grinshteyn talks about the new logging feature.

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 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.

• 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

• 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

This week, Max talks about 2-step verification, security keys, and why you need them!

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.

• “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 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.

• BakeML site
  • David East’s Firebase Podcast podcast
• Automating BigQuery exports to an email blog
• Cloud OnBoard site

• 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

Zach answers the question “What’s a cool thing in Cloud that many people may not have thought about?” GSuite and Apps Script

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 is a developer advocate for Spotify, focusing on APIs. In his spare time, Josh enjoys running and writing.

• 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

• 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

Podcasts and hosting static files: how does the GC Podcast do it? Cloud Storage of course! GC Podcast on GitHub.

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 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 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).

• 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

• Chronicle Security site
• Chronicle Security Blog blog
• Chronicle Security Resources site
• Why Your Security Data Lake Project Will FAIL! blog

Whats one thing you have seen users ask about security on Google Cloud?

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 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 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.

• Get started with Google Cloud Training & Certification site

• 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

What is the metadata server?

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

Debi is getting married and working on Dataflow Prime.

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

We talk to our friend Zack about how we could build something similar with ML! AutoML might be the way to go!

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 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.

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.

• Google Cloud learning resources at no cost for 30 days blog
• Powering up caching with Memorystore for Memcached blog

• 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

How do I get started with caching? Why should I cache? Brian tells us more about caching, Memcached, and Redis.

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 is an Applied AI Engineer and Developer Advocate at Google.

• 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

• 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

Where do I get started debugging performance for my MySQL database?

• Diagnose and Slow-Query Log
  

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 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.

• 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

• 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

How do I get started with GCGS? docs

• Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote video
• Google for Games Developer Summit Playlists videos
  

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 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.

• 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

• Microsoft SQL Server site
• Google Cloud SQL site
• BigQuery site
• GCE site

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
  

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 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.

• Join us for Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect blog
• Connecting businesses and educators with advanced Hangouts Meet capabilities blog

• xMatters site
• Site Reliability Engineering Book site
• Stackdriver site
• Migrating a monolith to GKE - Customer Story (Get Cooking in Cloud) video

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
  

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 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.

• SQL Server, managed in the cloud blog
• Now, you can explore Google Cloud APIs with Cloud Code blog

• 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

How can I improve reliability/availability with the least amount of work?

• Regional Persistent Disks site
• High Availability Regional Persistent Disks site
  

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 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 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.

• 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

• Humanitec site
• CNCF site
• GKE site
• Cloud SQL site
• Weaveworks site
• Harness site

How do you prevent exposing API keys in source code?

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 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.

• 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

• 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

I need to run something later, but Cron isn’t a good fit. What do I do?

We’ll be at Cloud Next in San Francisco in April! Katie will also be at PyCon US in April!

• “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!

• 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

• 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

• 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
    

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!

• “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

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 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.

• Unlock biology & medicine potential with AlphaFold on Google Cloud video

• 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

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”.

Stephanie Wong

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.

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.

• 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

• 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

How do I run Cloud Functions in a local environment?

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.

• “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 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 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.

• 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

• DevOps insights from Google site
• DevOps Quick Check site
• DevOpsDays site
• Agile Alliance site
• Velocity Conference site
• DevOps Enterprise Summit site

Why do you need the Cloud SQL Proxy?

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 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.

• Cloud Run is now GA blog
• Budget API in Beta blog

• 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

How do I dockerize my Java app?

• video
• github
  

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!

• “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 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.

• 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

• 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

How do I write a Matchmaking function in OpenMatch?

• OpenMatch 0.8RC
• OpenMatch Slack
• OpenMatch Twitter
• Jon’s Twitter
  

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.

• “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 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.

• 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

• 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

What are best practices for setting up user accounts in Cloud IAM?

• Quickstart Guide
• Service Accounts Docs
• Using IAM Securely
  

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.

• “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 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”.

• 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

• 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

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

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 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.

• Massive Entertainment site
• The Division 2 site
• Ubisoft site
• Terraform site
• Grafana site
• Compute Engine site

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.

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.

• 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

• 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

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

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

Jon will be at Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match.

• “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 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.

• 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

• 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

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

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.

• “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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

How do you deploy a Windows container on GKE?

Gabi will be at the Google Cloud Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Aja will be at Cloud Next London.

• “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org

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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

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!

Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon

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 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.

• 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

• 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

What is the difference between Premium vs Standard network?

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.

• “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 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 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.

• 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

• 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

How to integrate Dialogflow with BigQuery

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 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.

• Build a dev workflow with Cloud Code on a Pixelbook blog
• Feminism & Agile blog
• New homepage and improved collaboration features for AI Hub blog

• 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

How many different ways can you run a container on GCP?

• GKE
• Cloud Run
• App Engine Flexible Environment
• Compute Engine
• VM as a computer

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.

• “Mystery Peak2” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org
• “Collect Point 00” by LittleRobotSoundFactory of Freesound.org
• “Cinematic Piano” by Ellary of Freesound.org