Google Cloud Platform Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

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

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

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

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

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

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

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

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

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

John Fiel, CEO, Wela School Systems

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

Chris Fiel, CTO, Wela School Systems

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

Theo Davies

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

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

Hosts

Theo Davies and Paris Tran

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * 5 GKE features to help you optimize your clusters blog

Interview * Gojek site * Gojek: Using Machine Learning for forecasting and dynamic pricing blog * Introducing Firehose: An open source tool from Gojek blog * Meet Optimus, Gojek’s open-source cloud data transformation tool blog * Gojek: Helping drivers reach their pickup points up to 20% more quickly with Google Maps Platform blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Theo is trying out Snapchat and is excited about Snap partnering with Google Cloud

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Boost medical discoveries with AlphaFold on Vertex AI blog * 6 common mistakes to avoid in RESTful web API Design blog * Marketing Analytics With Google Cloud blog

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

Hosts Stephanie Wong, Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Introduction to custom org policy video * How to configure rules and policies in Google Cloud Armor video * + 1:03 - What this video covers + 2:03 - How to create a new rule from scratch + 4:54 - How to clone an existing out-of-the-box rule and modify it to create a new rule + 7:44 - How to copy a rule or policy and apply it to multiple backends / Rate limiting feature + 12:46 - How to use a Rule in Preview mode and test a new rule before enabling it / Threat intelligence feature + 17:35 - Wrap up

Interview * Cloud Workstations site * Cloud Shell site * Software Delivery Shield site * Cloud IDE site * Google Cloud Console site * C2C site * How to increase developer productivity with Cloud Workstations video

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is teaching his cats to do silly tricks!

Stephanie is planning a vacation!

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Solving internal search problems with Dialogflow blog * Automating self-service tech support with Tensorflow blog * Introducing IAM Deny, a simple way to harden your security posture at scale blog * Supporting healthcare delivery with cloud-native medical imaging blog

Interview * Active Assist site * Uber site * Uber Engineering Blog site * How ML-fueled recommendations help developers optimize security, price-performance, and carbon reduction blog * Introducing Unattended Project Recommender: discover, reclaim, or deprecate abandoned projects under your organization blog * Reduce your cloud carbon footprint with new Active Assist recommendations blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is sorting out the final blog posts of the year, planning some secret Santa holiday festivities for the team, and prepping cranberry sauces.

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

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Flexible committed use discounts — a simple new way to discount Compute Engine instances blog * Understanding transactional locking in Cloud Spanner blog * Interactive In-console Tutorial site

Interview * Database Migration Service site * GCP Podcast Episode 262: Database Migration Service with Shachar Guz and Gabe Weiss podcast * AlloyDB for PostgreSQL site * PostgreSQL site * Datastream site * Dataflow site * CloudSQL site * Spanner site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Gabe has been tinkering with new Google Cloud databases and managing a new team.

Hosts Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud supercharges NLP with large language models blog * Practicing the principle of least privilege with Cloud Build and Artifact Registry blog

Interview * Dataiku site * Dataiku YouTube videos * BigQuery site * Kubernetes site * GKE site * AlloyDB for PostgreSQL site * Accelerate AI Adoption: 3 Steps to Deploy Dataiku for Google Cloud Platform blog * Implementing Dataiku with BigQuery docs * GCP Podcast Episode 238: ASML with Arnaud Hubaux podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 229: Lucidworks with Radu Miclaus podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Anu is working on interesting speech use cases and Google’s Speech to Text. Join in with this tutorial!

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

Hosts Carter Morgan and Anu Srivastava

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * DevFests site * Best Kept Security Secrets: Tap into the power of Organization Policy Service podcast

Interview * Assured Workloads site * Assured Workloads Playlist videos * Key Access Justifications docs * Compute Engine site * BigQuery site * GCP Podcast Episode 325: Digital Sovereignty with Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez podcast * T Systems site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Daryl just released a video about using Workflows’ new parallel step.

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

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud Podcasts site * + Cloud Security Podcast podcast + Google Cloud SRE Podcast podcast * Developer Community Keynote: The thing about burnout video

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

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is working on expanding Google’s podcast platform, giving it some more visibility. He’s also working on Halloween and LARP costumes and teaching new board games.

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

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Chloe Condon

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud Next for data professionals: analytics, databases and business intelligence blog * + ANA104 How Boeing overcame their on-premises implementation challenges with data & AI site + ANA100 What’s new in Looker and Data Studio site + ANA101 What’s new in BigQuery site + ANA106 How leading organizations are making open source their super power site * Google Cloud Next: top AI and ML sessions blog

Interview * Building the most open data cloud ecosystem post * Data Journeys videos * Google Cloud Next ‘22 site * Looker site * Looker Studio site * Tableau site * BigLake ste * BigQuery site * Use the BigQuery connector with Spark docs * Connected Sheets docs

What’s something cool you’re working on? Debi is getting married and working on Dataflow Prime.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Unlock biology & medicine potential with AlphaFold on Google Cloud video

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

What’s something cool you’re working on? Steph is working on the developer keynote and DevFest and UKI Google Cloud Next Developer Day. Check out her Next talk “Simplify and secure your network for all workloads”.

Hosts Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Try out Cloud Spanner databases at no cost with new free trial instances blog * Chipotle Is Testing More Artificial Intelligence Solutions To Improve Operations article * Gyfted uses Google Cloud AI/ML tools to match tech workers with the best jobs blog

Interview * 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report blog * DevOps site * 2022 State of the DevOps Report Report site * DORA site * DORA Community site * SLSA site * Security Software Development Framework site * Westrum organizational culture site * Google finds culture, not tech, is the biggest predictor of DevOps security outcomes article * GCP Podcast Episode 205: DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 284: State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 290: Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Steph is working on talks for DevFest Nantes and a Google Cloud dev conference in London. She’ll be talking about subsea fiber optics and Google Cloud networking products.

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

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Sign up for the Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge blog * Google Cloud Firewall introduces Network Firewall Policies, IAM-governed Tags and more blog * Building trust in the data with Dataplex blog

Interview * Google Belonging site * Google 2022 Diversity Annual Report site * Sugi Dakks: Not the Only One | Talks at Google video * Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Keynote site * BigQuery site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie is working on content for Next and the Drone Racing League.

Hosts Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Expanding the Google Cloud Ready - Sustainability initiative with 12 new partners blog * Large Language Models and how they are used with Natural Language Understanding. pdf

Interview * Vertex AI site * Vertex AI Experiments docs * Vertex AI SDK for Python docs * Vertex ML Metedata docs * Vertex AI Pipelines docs * Vertex AI Workbench docs * Vertex AI Tensorboard docs * Track, compare, manage experiments with Vertex AI Experiments blog * Vertex AI Experiments Notebooks site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Anu is working on demos for Next.

Nikita is testing new features for Vertex AI.

Hosts Nikita and Anu Srivastava

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Cloud Next 2022 site * Integrating ML models into production pipelines with Dataflow blog * Four non-traditional paths to a cloud career (and how to navigate them) blog

Interview * What’s New & Next: A Spotlight on Storage site * Google Cloud Online Storage Products site * GCP Podcast Episode 277: Storage Launches with Brian Schwarz and Sean Derrington podcast * GKE site * Filestore site * Filestore Enterprise site * Filestore Enterprise for fully managed, fault tolerant persistent storage on GKE blog * Cloud Storage site * Cloud Storage Autoclass docs * GCP Episode 307: FinOps with Joe Daly podcast * Storage Insights docs * GCP Podcast Episode 318: GKE Turns 7 with Tim Hockin podcast * Backup for GKE docs * Backup and DR Service site * Redivis site

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

Hosts Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * What’s new with Google Cloud blog * + Power Your Business with Modern Cloud Apps: Strategies and Best Practices site * Securing apps for Googlers using Anthos Service Mesh blog

Interview * GKE site * Kubernetes site * Anthos site * Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes blog * Enabling multi-cluster Gateways docs * Cloud Load Balancing site * Multi-cluster Services docs * Keynote: From One to Many, the Road to Multicluster- Kaslin Fields, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud video * GCP Podcast Episode 272: GKE Turns Six with Anthony Bushong, Gari Singh, and Kaslin Fields podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin is working on NEXT and KubeCon stuff.

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

Hosts Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong

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

What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin is working on NEXT and KubeCon stuff.

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

Hosts Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Leveling up your data analysis skills as a student blog * Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude site * How Google Cloud blocked the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack at 46 million rps blog

Interview * BigQuery site * Datastream site * Database Migration Services site * Cloud SQL site * AlloyDB site * PostgreSQL site * Google I/O site * Qwiklabs site * Agones site * Databases blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is wrapping up his hosting of summer interns and getting ready for vacation! He plans to play a lot of board games and video games!

Steph also enjoyed hosting interns this summer!

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Max Saltonstall

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

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

Interview * BigQuery site * Datastream site * Database Migration Services site * Cloud SQL site * AlloyDB site * PostgreSQL site * Google I/O site * Qwiklabs site * Agones site * Databases blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is wrapping up his hosting of summer interns and getting ready for vacation! He plans to play a lot of board games and video games!

Steph also enjoyed hosting interns this summer!

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Max Saltonstall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * How Wayfair is reaching MLOps excellence with Vertex AI blog * Hidden gems of Google BigQuery blog * Google Cloud Innovators site * Google Cloud and Apollo24|7: Building Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) together blog

Interview * Google Cloud Higher Education Programs site * Google Cloud Speaker Series site * Google Cloud Skills Boost site * CSSI site * Tech Equity Collective site * GDSC site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Steph has been working on an AlphaFold video. You can learn more here.

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

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Kelci Mensah

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * No pipelines needed. Stream data with Pub/Sub direct to BigQuery blog * Cloud IAM Google Cloud blog * The Diversity Annual Report is now a BigQuery public dataset blog

Interview * Cloud Functions site * Cloud Functions 2nd gen walkthrough video * Cloud Functions version comparison docs * Lucille Games: Playing to win with Google Cloud Platform site * BigQuery site * Cloud Run site * Eventarc docs * Cloud Shell site * GCP Podcast Episode 261: Full Stack Dart with Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore podcast * Working with Remote Functions docs * Cloud Console site * Where should I run my stuff? Choosing compute options video

What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie has been working on GCP Support Shorts.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * No pipelines needed. Stream data with Pub/Sub direct to BigQuery blog * Cloud IAM Google Cloud blog * The Diversity Annual Report is now a BigQuery public dataset blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie has been working on GCP Support Shorts.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Unify data lakes and warehouses with BigLake, now generally available blog * What it’s like to have a hybrid internship at Google blog

Interview * Vertex AI site * Explainable AI site * Vertex Explainable AI docs * Vertex Explainable AI Notebooks docs * Feature Attribution docs * AI Explanations Whitepaper site * Explainable AI with Google Cloud Vertex AI article * Why you need to explain machine learning models blog

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

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

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Anu Srivastava

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Introducing Batch, a new managed service for scheduling batch jobs at any scale blog * + Examples of Batch for Transcoding site + Using Google Kubernetes Engine’s GPU sharing to search for neutrinos blog

Interview * Arm site * Arm Documentation docs * Arm VMs on Computer docs * Expanding the Tau VM family with Arm-based processors blog * Run your Arm workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine with Tau T2A VMs blog * Compute Engine site * GKE site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is switching his focus from VMs to developer tooling.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey

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

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

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

What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is switching his focus from VMs to developer tooling.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Cloud Next registration is open site * Introducing Parallel Steps for Workflows: Speed up workflow executions by running steps concurrently blog * How to think about threat detection in the cloud blog * + GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniak podcast

Interview * Prometheus site * PromQL site * Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus docs * Kubernetes site * CNCF site * Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database research * Cloud Monitoring site * Cloud Logging site * Google Cloud’s operations suite site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is focusing on getting organized, managing overwhelm, and comedy festivals.

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

Hosts Carter Morgan and Anthony Bushong

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Cloud TPU v4 records fastest training times on five MLPerf 2.0 benchmarks blog * Show off your cloud skills by completing the #GoogleClout weekly challenge blog

Interview * Distributed Cloud site * Distributed Cloud Edge Documentation docs * Contact Center AI site * Kubernetes site * Anthos site * Nephio site * BigQuery site * Vertex AI site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter made a test for a video recap version of the recent pi episode.

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

Hosts Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Announcing general availability of reCAPTCHA Enterprise password leak detection blog * Cloud Podcasts site * Bio-pharma organizations can now leverage the groundbreaking protein folding system, AlphaFold, with Vertex AI blog

Interview * Veeam site * Veeam for Google Cloud site * VeeamHub site * Google Cloud VMware Engine site * Cloud SQL site * Kasten site * Kubernetes site * GKE site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is working on the new Cloud Podcasts website.

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

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

Hosts Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * DALL-E mini site * EbSynth site * Announcing general availability of Confidential GKE Nodes blog

Interview * Contact Center AI Platform site * Contact Center AI reimagines the customer experience through full end-to-end platform expansion blog * UJET site * Dialogflow site * Google Assistant site * One United Bank site * FitBit site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is working on expanding the podcast platform by collecting and adding more content.
Carter is working on his Google Project Management: Professional Certificate.
Kelsey has been working on Google Cloud Skills Boost.

Hosts Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * New Cloud Podcasts Website site * Even more pi in the sky: Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud blog

Interview * GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast * pi.delivery 100 Trillion Digits site * pi.delivery Github site * A History of Pi book * Distributing historically linear calculations of Pi with serverless video * Ycruncher site * Compute Engine site * Cloud Functions site * SRE site * Terraform site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter and Brian are working on a new season of VM End to End

Hosts Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Columnar engine blog * + GCP Podcast Episode 304: AlloyDB with Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet “GG” Goindi podcast * How Google Cloud is helping more startups build, grow, and scale their businesses blog * Automate identity document processing with Document AI blog

Interview * FinOps Foundation site * FinOpsX site * FinOpsPod podcast * Cloud FinOps: The Secret To Unlocking The Economic Potential Of Public Cloud whitepaper * Maximize Business Value with Cloud FinOps whitepaper * Unlocking the value of cloud FinOps with a new operating model whitepaper

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * The new Google Cloud region in Columbus, Ohio is open blog * Assembling and managing distributed applications using Google Cloud Networking solutions blog

Interview * Network Intelligence Center site * Network Analyzer Documentation docs * Introducing Network Analyzer: One stop shop to detect service and network issues blog * CloudSQL site * GKE site * Cloud Monitoring site * Contact the Network Analyzer team email * GCP Podcast Episode 270: Traditional vs. Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Lorin is working on a new video series called Concepts of Networking on the Networking End to End Playlist

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Lorin Price

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

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

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

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

Kobi Magnezi Kobi is the Product Manager for GKE at Google Cloud.

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

Cool things of the week * GKE Essentials videos * KubeCon EU 2023 site * KubeCon Call for Proposals site * Kubernetes 1.24: Stargazer site * + GCP Podcast Episode 292: Pulumi and Kubernetes Releases with Kat Cosgrove podcast * Optimize and scale your startup on Google Cloud: Introducing the Build Series blog

Interview * Kubernetes site * GKE site * Autoscaling with GKE: Overview and pods video * GKE release schedule dcos * Release channels docs * Upgrade-scope maintenance windows docs * Configure cluster notifications for third-party services docs * Cluster notifications docs * Pub/Sub site * Agones site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin is working on KubeCon and new episodes of GKE Essentials.

Hosts Mark Mirchandani and Kaslin Fields

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Google I/O site * Introducing “Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects” blog * Meet the people of Google Cloud: Priyanka Vergadia, bringing Google Cloud to life in illustrations blog * Working with Remote Functions docs

Interview * AlloyDB for PostgreSQL site * AlloyDB Documentation docs * AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Intelligent, database-aware storage blog * PostgreSQL site * Introducing AlloyDB for PostgreSQL video * Introducing AlloyDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible cloud database service video * BigQuery site * Spanner site * CloudSQL site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Gabe is working on some exciting content to support landing the AlloyDB launch.

Hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabe Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Planet and People AI Series videos * Planet and People AI: Mapping carbon pollution globally with satellites video * Geobeam site

Interview * GCP Podcast Episode 282: Geospatial Cloud and Earth Engine with Chad Jennings and Joel Conkling podcast * Google Earth Engine site * NGIS site * NGIS and TraceMark site * TraceMark site * EO Data Science site * EO Data Science GEE Impact site * The technology and climate science helping CPG brands with sustainable sourcing blog * Adopting real-world sustainability solutions with Google Cloud’s ecosystem blog * Achieve Your Sustainability Goals with the Google Cloud Ecosystem site * The data-driven path to real-world sustainability solutions whitepaper * It takes an ecosystem: How the Google Cloud Partner Initiative speeds the transition to enterprise sustainability article * Google Cloud Sustainability Summit site * BigQuery site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Dana is focusing on geospatial analytics, helping customers achieve their sustainability goals. She’s building solutions that solve repeatable problems.

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

Hosts Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Donna Schut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Your ultimate guide to Speech on Google Cloud blog * Announcing the Climate Innovation Challenge—grants to support cutting-edge earth research blog

Interview * BigLake site * BigQuery site * Cloud Storage site * Spark site * Apache Ranger site * BigQuery Omni docs * Apache Iceberg site * Delta Lake site * Presto site * TensorFlow site * Dataplex site

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

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Our plans to invest $9.5 billion in the U.S. in 2022 blog * A policy roadmap for 24⁄7 carbon-free energy blog * SRE Prodcast site * Meet the people of Google Cloud: Grace Mollison, solutions architect and professional problem solver blog + GCP Podcast Episode 224: Solutions Engineering with Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace podcast

Interview * Spanner site * Cloud Spanner myths busted blog * PostgreSQL interface docs * Cloud Spanner Ecosystem site * Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database white paper * Spanner Docs docs * Spanner Qwiklabs site * Using the Cloud Spanner Emulator docs * GCP Podcast Episode 62: Cloud Spanner with Deepti Srivastava podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 248: Cloud Spanner Revisited with Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler podcast * Cloud Spanner federated queries docs

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is working on a new podcast platform and some spring break projects.

Hosts Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Strengthening your DevOps muscle site

Interview * Kubernetes site * GKE site * GKE Gateway API docs * Kubernetes Gateway API site * Ingress docs * Service docs * From edge to mesh: Exposing service mesh applications through GKE Ingress docs * Google Cloud Armor site * Kubernetes Slack site * + Slack channel: #sig-network-gateway-api * GKE Networking Recipes GitHub repo site * The evolution of Kubernetes networking with the GKE Gateway controller blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin is working on KubeCon EU.

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

Kaslin and Anthony are working together on the GKE Essentials Series

Hosts Anthony Bushong and Kaslin Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Under the sea: Building the world’s fiber optic internet video * + Discovering Data Centers videos * Google Data Cloud Summit site * It’s official—Google Distributed Cloud Edge is generally available blog * + GCP Podcast Episode 228: Fastly with Tyler McMullen podcast * Save big by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs—now GA blog

Interview * Apache Beam site * Apache Beam Documentation site * Dataflow site * Apache Flink site * Apache Spark site * Apache Samza site * Apache Nemo site * Spanner site * BigQuery site * Beam College site * Beam College on Github site * Beam Developer Mailing List email * Beam User Mailing List email * Beam Summit site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Mark is working on a new Apache Beam video series Getting Started Wtih Apache Beam

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani

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

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

What’s something cool you’re working on? Mark is working on a new Apache Beam video series Getting Started Wtih Apache Beam

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Ready to solve for the future? Data Cloud Summit ‘22 is coming April 6 blog * Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects site

Interview * Evolving to a programmable cloud blog * Cloud Functions site * Cloud Run site * Eventarc docs * Work Flows site * Chromebook site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Debi is working on Apache Beam series with Mark Mirchandani.

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

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Celebrating Pi Day with Cloud Functions blog * Apollo Scales GraphQL Platform using GKE blog

Interview * Vinton G. Cerf Profile site * ARPANet on Wikipedia site * To Boldly Go Where No Internet Protocol Has Gone Before article * Building the backbone of an interplanetary internet video * IETF site * CCSDS site * IPNSIG site * The Internet Society site * NASA site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie is working on new Discovering Data Centers videos.

Anthony is working on content for building scalable GKE clusters.

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud Innovators site * Redesigning the Cloud SDK + CLI for easier development blog * + GCP Podcast Episode 291: Redesigning the Cloud SDK and CLI with Wael Manasra and Cody Oss podcast * What is Active Assist? video * + GCP Podcast Episode 235: Active Assist with Chris Law + MariaDB SkySQL with Robert Hedgepeth podcast

Interview * SQL Commenter site * Sequelize site * SQL Alchemy site * ADO.net site * GCP Podcast Episode 247: Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat podcast * OpenTelemetry site * Splunk site * Cloud Monitoring site * Cloud Spanner site * Cloud SQL site * Cloud Trace site * Sqlcommenter now extending the vision of OpenTelemetry to databases blog

Hosts Mark Mirchandani and Jan Kleinert

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex, now generally available blog * From watersheds to Koala habitats - tackling ecosystem restoration with data blog

Interview * Understanding Cloud SQL Maintenance: why is it needed? blog * Cloud SQL site * Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that’s right for you blog * Google Cloud Region Picker on GitHub site * Reduce your cloud carbon footprint with new Active Assist recommendations blog * Research: Search abandonment has a lasting impact on brand loyalty blog * Why Search Abandonment Is the Metric That Matters video * The Google Workspace guide to productivity and wellbeing blog * New Google Cloud Student Success Services help educators scale individualized learning blog * Why representation matters: 6 tips on how to build DEI into your business blog * Why representation matters blog

Hosts Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Introducing a Google Cloud architecture diagramming tool blog * Black History Month: Celebrating the success of Black founders with Google Cloud: DOSS blog

Interview * Looker site * LookML site * Data Studio site * Looker Connect site * Looker Documentation docs * Looker Products Page site * Tableau site * Google Cloud Training site * Google Cloud Skills Boost site * Looker and BigQuery Important Considerations whitepaper * BigQuery Playlist videos * Data Analytics Playlist videos * Looker Channel videos * Contact Google Cloud Support site * Request a Free Trial site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Debi is planning her wedding!

Hosts Mark Mirchandani and Debi Cabrera

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

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

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

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

Aaron Biller Aaron is the Manager of Data Engineering at Postmates.

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

Cool things of the week * Celebrating National Muffin Day with machine learning blog * Managed Istio-based service mesh on our managed GKE clusters: Anthos Service Mesh comes to GKE Autopilot blog

Interview * Data Journeys videos * Episode 12: How Postmates delivers on data needs with just six data engineers video * Episode 5: How Delivery Hero uses data to deliver meals video * BigQuery site * Google Workspace site * Dataproc site * Pub/Sub site * Google Analytics site * Looker site * Tableau site * Data Studio site * GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 281: Google Cloud Next Data, Analytics, and AI Launches with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Steph is working on the next Ask Google Cloud event and she wants your Kubernetes questions!

Hosts Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

Kat Cosgrove Kat is Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi.

Cool things of the week * Find products faster with the new All products page blog * Introducing Ephemeral Containers blog * Open sourcing the App Engine Standard Java runtime blog

Interview * Pulumi site * Kubernetes site * Docker site * Kubernetes 1.24 Release Notes site * GKE site * We Didn’t Start the Fire: Communication Breakdowns and How to Prevent Them - Ian Coldwater, Twilio & Kat Cosgrove, JFrog video * Jfokus site * Devopsdays Chicago site * KubeCon EU Valencia site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian just started releasing the next six episodes of VMs End-to-end. It’s a video series all about Compute Engine, starting with a discussion of building reliable systems from unreliable components.

Kaslin is working on the GKE/OSS K8s Events.

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

Hosts Brian Dorsey and Kaslin Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Google Tau VMs deliver over 40% price-performance advantage to customers blog * Find products faster with the new All products page blog

Interview * Cloud SDK site * Cloud SDK Documentation docs * Go site * Google Cloud site * Cloud Storage site * Cloud Storage Documentation docs * Cloud Code site * Cloud Run site * GKE site * Cloud Functions site * Cloud Client Libraries docs * Cloud Shell site * Cloud Shell Editor docs

What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is working on his comedy.

Hosts Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Machine images is GA docs * New Cloud Logging and Monitoring capabilities * + Monitoring third-party applications: MariaDB docs + Monitoring third-party applications: MySQL docs + Monitoring third-party applications: Memcached docs + Starting with version 2.8.0, the Ops Agent supports Ubuntu 21.10. For more information, see Linux operating systems docs

Interview * Shopify site * Kubernetes site * GKE site * Kafka site * Redis site * Elastic Search site * Memcached docs * Toxiproxy site * Shopify Engineering site * Shopify Careers site * BFCM Twitter Thread site * Shopify engineers deliver on peak performance during Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021 blog * Cloud, Load, and Modular Code: What 2022 Looks Like for Shopify blog * Terri Haber on Resiliency at Scale site * Terri Haber on Enforced Pacing site * Bart Jedrocha on Load Testing site * Bart Jedrocha on Tooling for Load Testing site * Bart Jedrocha on The Future of Load Testing site * Ryan McIlmoyl on Code Red site * Ryan McIlmoyl on Working with IMOC site * Camilo Lopez on The 2014 Outage site * Camilo Lopez on Holiday Season Learnings site * Tai Dickerson on Doing Things Differently site * Tai Dickerson on Learning & Community site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie is working on season 2 of the Where the Internet Lives podcast.

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

Hosts Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * 2022 Resolution: Learn Google Cloud, free of charge blog * How to build a virtual employment center on Google Cloud & Workspace video

Interview * Cloud Security Podcast podcast * IT Leaders: Pay Attention To These 8 Security Megatrends In 2022 article * GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniak podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Mark and Carter are working on some cool new changes to the podcast.

Hosts Carter Morgan, Mark Mirchandani, Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Anthos Multi-Cloud v2 is generally available docs * Machine learning, Google Kubernetes Engine, and more: 10 free training offers to take advantage of before 2022 blog * The past, present, and future of Kubernetes with Eric Brewer blog * + GCP Podcast Episode 124: VP of Infrastructure Eric Brewer podcast

Our Favorite Episodes of 2021 * Mark’s Favorites * + GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 267: Cloud Firestore for Users who are new to Firestore podcast * GKE Essentials videos * Beyond Your Bill vidoes * Stephanie’s Favorites * + GCP Podcast Episode 270: Traditional vs. Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 271: The Future of Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 279: MLB with Perry Pierce and JoAnn Brereton podcast * Carter’s Favorites * + GCP Podcast Episode 284: State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 287: Imposter Syndrome with Carter Morgan podcast * Most Popular Episodes of 2021 * + GCP Podcast Episode Episode 264: SRE III with Steve McGhee and Yuri Grinshtey podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 258: The Power of Serverless with Aparna Sinha and Philip Beevers podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 253: Data Governance with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 263: SAP + Apigee: The Power of APIs with Benjamin Schuler and Dave Feuer podcast + GCP Podcast Episode 271: The Future of Service Networking with Ryan Przybyl podcast

Sound Effects Attribution * “Dun Dun Duuun” by Divenorth of Freesound.org * “Cash Register” by Kiddpark of Freesound.org * “Jingles and Pings” by BristolStories of HDInteractive.com * “Time – Inception Theme” Composed by Hanz Zimmer (super-low-budget midi version)

Hosts Stephanie Wong, Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool things of the week * Cloud Learn site * 5 things not to do with Cloud Functions, and 5 things you absolutely should do instead blog

Interview * Cloud Learn site * What do I really need to know to succeed at work? blog

Hosts Stephanie Wong

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Guest Jason Polites joins Stephanie Wong and Bukola Ayodele this week to talk about advances in serverless computing with Cloud Run and how developers and wallets are benefiting.

Cloud Run, a managed service which allows developers to run containers, is now available in all GCP regions, offers increased resource access, global load balancing, and more. Jason tells us how this evolution of Cloud Run has led to the support of bigger, more complicated, and even legacy software fully and efficiently functioning in a serverless environment. The team at Google continues to expand offerings in order to afford the benefits of auto-scaling and other managed services to all workloads. Always On CPU, for example, supports projects with running background functions.

Later, Jason gives us examples of projects that best fit a serverless infrastructure and the cost benefits of using Cloud Run. He offers cost-saving tips for projects, like committed use discounts and auto-scaling limits. Balancing cost efficiency with global reliability is important, and Jason tells us how this is easily achieved with Cloud Run features like scaling to zero.

To limit the barrier to entry for new Cloud Run and container users, Jason and his team have been working on open source build packs. Developers can turn code into a container without creating Docker files. The containers running in Cloud Run are highly portable as well, giving companies the freedom to move their containers freely.

Jason Polites Jason leads the Serverless Compute product team in Google Cloud, including products like Cloud Run and App Engine.

Cool things of the week * Illicit coin mining, ransomware, APTs target cloud users in first Google Cybersecurity Action Team Threat Horizons report blog * Microservices architecture on Google Cloud blog

Interview * Cloud Run site * Cloud Run CPU Allocation docs * Run more workloads on Cloud Run with new CPU allocation controls blog * Docker site * Google Cloud Buildpacks site * App Engine site * Cloud Functions site * GCP Podcast Episode 173: Cloud Run with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 203: Cloud Run GKE with Donna Malayeri podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 261: Full Stack Dart with Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Bukola just finished Season 2 of the Click to Deploy series.

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We’re learning all about Vertex AI this week as Carter Morgan and Jay Jenkins host guest Erwin Huizenga. He helps us understand what is meant by Asia Pacific and how Machine Learning is growing there. APAC’s Machine Learning scene is exciting for its enterprise companies leveraging ML for innovative projects at scale. The ML journey of many of these customers revealed challenges with things like efficiency that Vertex AI was built to solve.

The Vertex AI platform boasts tools that help with everything from the beginning stages of data collection to analysis, validation, transformation, model training, evaluation, serving the model, and metadata tracking. Erwin offers detailed examples of this pipeline process and describes how Feature Store helps clients manage their projects.

Using Vertex AI not only simplifies the initial development process but streamlines the iteration process as the model is adjusted over time. Pipelines offers automation options that help with this, Erwin explains. ML Operations are also built into Vertex AI to ensure everything is done in compliance with industry standards, even at scale. Using customer recommendations as an example, Erwin walks us through how Vertex AI can employ embedding to enhance customer experiences through ML.

By using Vertex AI in combination with other Google offerings like AutoML, companies can effectively build working ML projects without data science experience. We talk about the Vertex AI user interface and the other tools and APIS that are available there. Erwin tells us how Digits Financial uses Vertex AI and Pipeline to bring models to production in days rather than months, and how others can get started with Vertex AI, too.

Erwin Huizenga Erwin Huizenga is a Data Scientist at Google specializing in TensorFLow, Python, and ML.

Cool things of the week * Announcing Spot Pods for GKE Autopilot—save on fault tolerant workloads blog * Indosat Ooredoo and Google Launch Strategic Partnership to Accelerate Digitalization Across SMBs and Enterprises in Indonesia site * Indosat Ooredoo dan Google Luncurkan Kemitraan Strategis untuk Percepatan Digitalisasi UMKM dan Perusahaan di Indonesia site

Interview * Vertex AI site * Google Cloud in Asia Pacific blog * Introduction to Vertex AI docs * What Is a Machine Learning Pipeline? site * TensorFlow site * PyTorch site * Vertex AI Feature Store docs * AutoML site * BigQuery ML site * Vertex AI Matching Engine docs * ScaNN site * Announcing ScaNN: Efficient Vector Similarity Search blog * Vertex AI Workbench site * Vertex Pipeline Case Study: Digits Financial site * Intro to Vertex Pipelines Codelab site * Vertex AI: Training and serving a custom model Codelab site * Vertex AI Workbench: Build an image classification model with transfer learning and the notebook executor Codelab site * APAC Best of Next 2021 site * TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform site * Rules of Machine Learning site * Google Cloud Skills Boost: Build and Deploy Machine Learning Solutions on Vertex AI site * Monitoring feature attributions: How Google saved one of the largest ML services in trouble blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Jay is working on APAC Best of Next and will be doing a session on sustainability!

Carter is working on transitioning the GCP Podcast to a video format!

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This week, Stephanie Wong and Carter Morgan are talking about the recently released State of DevOps Report. Guests Dustin Smith and Nathen Harvey tell us all about DORA, the research group working to study DevOps, and the findings of their years-long study aimed at improving workplace environments, fostering sustainable increased productivity, and ensuring quality output across industries.

During their years of research, the DORA team has developed ways to measure team results and workplace culture. Our guests tell us about the five measures they use, including deployment frequency and reliability. The shared responsibility and collaboration of teams at a company to optimize these five metrics is what makes good DevOps performance. Through a real-life example, we hear how the coordination of goals and incentives across departments can improve results of the DevOps metrics, thus improving the speed and stability of finished products.

Once businesses identify problems, they need realistic expectations of the time and energy required to solve these issues. Learning from each change made and growing during the process is an important part of optimization, and our guests talk about the best practices their research has identified for facilitating smoother transitions. High quality documentation is a vital part of optimizing DevOps, and this year’s report examined internal documentation for the first time. Nathan describes what makes good documentation, like clear ownership of the documents and docs that are regularly updated for easy sharing and scaling of up-to-date material across the company. Dustin elaborates, explaining other factors that make quality, reliable documents.

Later, we talk SRE and how companies can measure and optimize Site Reliability Engineering. A supportive team culture and ensuring a secure product and supply chain are some important factors in optimal SRE, the DORA study found. Our guests offer advice for companies looking to get started with DevOps practices.

Nathen Harvey Nathen Harvey is a developer relations engineer at Google who has built a career on helping teams realize their potential while aligning technology to business outcomes. Nathen has had the privilege of working with some of the best teams and open source communities, helping them apply the principles and practices of DevOps and SRE.

Dustin Smith Dustin Smith is a UX Research Manager and the DORA research lead. He studies the factors that influence a team’s ability to deliver software quickly and reliably.

Cool things of the week * Email is 50 years old, and still where it’s @ blog * Make the most of hybrid work with Google Workspace blog * We analyzed 80 million ransomware samples – here’s what we learned blog

Interview * DevOps site * DORA site * SRE site * 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report addresses burnout, team performance report

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Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall are back this week to learn everything there is to know about Assured Workloads with Bryce Buffaloe and Mikaela Misaka. Google’s Assured Workloads helps companies and governments ensure secure projects and privacy protection in sectors with extensive compliance requirements while taking advantage of Cloud capabilities.

Bryce and Mikaela start the show talking about the challenges faced when using a public cloud for projects with very specific regulations and how Assured Workloads was developed to help solve these issues. The easy setup steps and uncomplicated UI help customers move from their on-prem infrastructure to Google Cloud where scaling, local customer support, and other advantages can be easily leveraged while maintaining a secure, compliant environment.

With so many compliance standards in sectors like finance and healthcare, our guests walk us through the process Assured Workloads clients go through from identifying the regulations of markets they participate in to planning their data security, keeping customer support local to maintain privacy, and using Google Cloud to put these plans into practice with their projects across the world. On the Google Cloud side, the team works to create regulation maps that organize the rules of potential markets so customers can click a button and rest easy knowing their projects are compliant. Bryce details what goes into making Google Services like GKE compliant for customers as well. Assured Workloads continues to grow as new client challenges are presented. In the future, monitoring support, audit management, and other features will be introduced. Global expansion and sovereign cloud capabilities are coming soon, and our guests tell us more.

Bryce Buffaloe Bryce is the Assured Workloads Product Manager at Google.

Mikaela Misaka Mikaela is a Customer Care Offer Lead at Google Cloud, focused on creating new customer care offerings and value-added services tailored to the needs of regulated customer segments.

Cool things of the week * Run your fault-tolerant workloads cost-effectively with Google Cloud Spot VMs blog * 8 more things to love about the new Pixel phones blog * Government and Education Summit site

Interview * Assured Workloads site * Assured Workloads Documentation site * New capabilities for Assured Workloads for Government blog * GKE site * New data sovereignty controls for EU customers blog * T-Systems and Google Cloud partner to deliver sovereign cloud for Germany article

What’s something cool you’re working on? Max has been sharing AI use cases from inside Google IT and tech support and was working on red panda and sith warrior Halloween costumes for his kids.

Mark is planning some cool podcast updates for next year.

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On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Carter Morgan host guests Chad Jennings and Joel Conkling in a fascinating discussion about Earth Engine and performing geospatial processing to help companies become more environmentally conscious.

Google’s geospatial functionality is some of the most advanced in the world, and with the Next announcements, commercial companies can now take advantage of this with tools like Earth Engine and in Cloud analytics offerings like BigQuery. Together, these tools make the three pillars of geospatial cloud: analysis of vector data with tools like CloudSQL or BigQuery, analysis of image data with Earth Engine, and taking advantage of the data assets. This geospatial analysis helps us understand the world and how it’s changing, then apply this information to make important, environmentally friendly decisions.

As a key part of this system, Earth Engine is a geospatial data-processing platform specializing in the analysis of satellite images and other image data. It provides access to over 800 datasets and processing software that scales to planetary-scale analysis. At Next, Google announced Earth Engine availability for commercial use. Our guests talk about the applications of this in the real world, from the effect of climate risk on a financial portfolio to locations most susceptible to forest fire.

Chad and Joel tell us about the sources of Earth Engine’s data, the pre-processing work done to the images collected, and the ease of data sharing between platforms. By working with BigQuery, users have access to additional datasets and analytics tools as well. Google clients are taking this data and creatively using the information to make meaningful decisions. Insurance companies, for example, analyze data to assess flood risk, while the U.S. Forest Service uses the platform to advance their mission of sustainable forest management. Unilever uses Earth Engine in their commitment to zero additional deforestation in their supply chain, and our guests talk more about the Next presentation with Unilever. Additional BigQuery announcements at Next can be leveraged in Earth Engine as well, and new features such as Analytics Hub make accessing datasets even easier.

Google works to meet users where they are and make tools easy to use from day one. Earth Engine’s data processing, scalability, and more make it easy for users to focus on the analysis rather than the prep work. Our guests offer advice for getting started with Earth Engine and BigQuery and share a little about Climate Engine.

Chad Jennings Chad came to Google from the startup world doing big data navigation processing and research. Working at the intersection of geospatial and big data at Google Cloud is a marvelous place to work.

Joel Conkling Joel is the Product Manager for both Earth Engine and Environmental Insights Explorer and has worked at Google since 2010.

Cool things of the week * BigQuery Omni now available for AWS and Azure, for cross cloud data analytics blog * How geospatial insights can help meet business goals blog * 9 things I freakin’ love about Google Cloud identity and environments blog

Interview * Earth Engine site * Earth Engine Development Guides site * Big Query site * CloudSQL site * Climate Engine site * Geospatial analytics and AI site * Analytics Hub site * Monitoring air quality with S5P TROPOMI data blog * Visualizing geospatial data with pydeck and Earth Engine blog * More accurate and flexible cloud masking for Sentinel-2 images blog * NICFI’s satellite imagery of the global tropics now available in Earth Engine for analysis blog * Earth Engine for Commercial Use: Now in Preview with Google Cloud site * Next Session: Geospatial Innovation at Unilever video * Next Developer Keynote: technology trends video * What is Google Earth Engine? video * Helping companies tackle climate change with Earth Engine blog * Google has the cleanest cloud. Now it’s helping other companies go green article

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Mark Mirchandani is back this week with cohost Bukola Ayodele. We’re talking with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza about all the awesome new analytics, data, and AI launches from last week’s Google Cloud Next conference.

Our guests start the show outlining the challenges clients face when storing, organizing, and analyzing data in the cloud. These needs have inspired Google solutions that focus on simplifying data management for customers. Next announcements like BigQuery Omni, which helps customers achieve full data visibility with cross-cloud analytics, and DataPlex, which facilitates data management at scale, will change the way companies think about their data. BigQuery integration with AppSheets and the new Cloud Looker LookML let customers build once and access from anywhere. The new Looker and Tableau integration revolutionizes the use of the semantic model in Tableau, allowing things like company-established data governance and the Looker Blocks ecosystem to pull into Tableau analysis. New Looker Blocks specifically targeted to the healthcare industry were also introduced at Next.

We talk about the ML announcements including Vertex AI Workbench, a fully-managed service used for data exploration aimed at simplifying the workloads of data engineers. Serverless Spark on Google Cloud shares these goals by making performance tuning, scaling, infrastructure provisioning, and other tasks fully-managed. The new PostgreSQL interface for Spanner lets clients use tools already developed in PostgreSQL while leveraging the global scaling and other benefits of Spanner.

Bruno and Eric share some favorite customer stories as we wrap up this week’s episode. Albertson’s, Renault, and others have interesting data journeys on Google Cloud and our listeners can learn more in the YouTube series hosted by Bruno.

Eric Schmidt Eric is the the Head of Advocacy for Data Analytics at Google and has been at Google for almost eight years. Previously, he was with Microsoft, where he led Advocacy and Evangelism there, too. He focuses on products like BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and leads a team of advocates who help customers turn data into value. In his downtime, Eric is a DJ at 90.3 KEXP here in Seattle or online at kexp.org where he focuses on global music culture.

You can find Eric on Twitter. His handle is “not that eric” - not to be confused with the ‘other Eric Schmidt’ here at Google. In fact, internally, people affectionately call him “cloud E”.

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

In his spare time, Bruno writes a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics.

Cool things of the week * Next Reaction: Security and zero-trust announcements blog * Next Reaction: New Data Cloud launches blog * Next Reaction: Making multicloud easier for all blog * Next Reaction: Features to reduce IT carbon emissions and build climate-related solutions blog * Next Reaction: Monitor your conversations, get started with CCAI Insights blog

Interview * GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast * BigQuery site * Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog * Google Cloud Next—Day 1 livestream - WalMart video * Dataplex site * AppSheet site * Cloud Looker LookML site * Tableau site * Vertex AI site * Vertex AI Workbench site * TensorFlow site * Apache Spark on Google Cloud site * New PostgreSQL Interface makes Cloud Spanner’s scalability and availability more open and accessible blog * PostgreSQL site * Cloud Spanner site * Google Earth Engine site * Google Maps Platform site * Inside Industry Data Management 4.0 at Renault site * Chess.com site * Google Next Opening Keynote site * Data Journeys with Bruno Aziza videos * Cloud Next Catalog site * Bruno’s Cloud Next Playlist videos * Cloud Next Data Analytics Playlist videos * Bruno on Linkedin site * Lak on Twitter site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Bukola is working on the Click to Deploy video series.

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On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong hear all about the cool stuff happening at Cloud Next 2021. Brian Hall and Forrest Brazeal join the show to outline exciting announcements, fun partnerships, and what the future holds for Google Cloud.

The immense prep and planning that went into Next shows through in the intentional and unified strategy of announcements and offerings at the conference. Our guests talk about this process and the challenges and decisions that went into the content choices and scheduling. The addition of Community Day, for example, was implemented to create a sense of in-person participation in an online-only event.

Next kicked off this week with a Keynote presentation talking about the momentum of production and infrastructure innovation at Google Cloud, new product announcements across data cloud and open cloud infrastructure, security advancements, sustainability, and more. Our guests talk about important partnerships Google Cloud has fostered this year with clients like Ford, Univision, and GE using AI and other technologies to advance innovative ideas in their businesses. Announcements around AI and analytics at Google Cloud were plentiful, including Spark on Google Cloud that offers managed serverless data processing. Brian details the work Tableau and Google Cloud are doing to advance data visualization.

Our guests talk about the work Google has done to embrace the multi-cloud culture with advancements in Anthos and BigQuery Omni. The newly announced Google Distributed Cloud lets clients use their multi-cloud infrastructures across edge locations. Forrest talks about the pragmatic evolution to the Google Distributed Cloud offering and how other announcements like security advancements through strategic European partnerships have positively affected multi-cloud customers. We talk more about the importance of the new security announcements, like the Google Cyber Security Action Team. The changing landscape of work brought on by the pandemic has lead to more and more remote work. Workspace is adapting to this new environment, and our guests tell us about the new features available to workers at home.

As Google works to revolutionize technologies for clients, they also keep sustainability in mind. Next saw announcements in the clean cloud space and Google’s continued commitment to a carbon-free existence. New carbon reporting for clients and new features in Google Earth Engine and Active Assist help Google clients with their sustainability goals, too.

Brian Hall Brian is the VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud. He was formerly a VP at AWS, CEO of Doppler Labs, and VP for Microsoft Surface with 20+ years at Microsoft.

Forrest Brazeal Forrest is a cloud educator, author, speaker, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter based in Charlotte, NC.

Cool things of the week * Cloud Next site * Solving for What’s Next blog * Training more than 40 million new people on Google Cloud skills blog

Interview * Cloud Next site * Next Catalog site * Opening Keynote site * Solving for What’s Next blog * GKE Autopilot site * Workspace site * Vertex AI site * Apache Spark on Google Cloud site * Tableau site * Fivetran site * HVR site * Informatica site * Trifacta site * Anthos site * Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog * Google Distributed Cloud site * NetApp site * T-Systems and Google Cloud Partner to Deliver Sovereign Cloud for Germany press release * Thales and Google Cloud Announce Strategic Partnership to Jointly Develop a Trusted Cloud Offering in France press release * Google Cybersecurity Action Team site * AppSheet site * BeyondCorp site * Google Earth Engine site * Active Assist site * Data Cloud Keynote site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Stephanie is working on a video series with Eric Brewer.

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This week, Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey welcome Perry Pierce and JoAnn Brereton of Major League Baseball to the show to talk sports and cloud. Baseball teams are independently owned franchises, Perry explains, with MLB acting as the oversight corporation. This keeps game play fair and consistent. Like most large corporations these days, technology has become a vital business tool for MLB. Their partnership with Google facilitated a shift from on-prem to the cloud, allowing MLB to take advantage of advanced capabilities like scaling and managed services in a safe environment. JoAnn talks about the process of this shift and the teams at Google that helped make it happen. She details the systems that MLB has moved to GCP, like game scheduling, umpire management, backend systems, and especially the draft.

The amateur draft, a multi-day event, has a special set of challenges that MLB and Google had to overcome. Analyzing player statistics and updating which players have been picked and who is still available are important information for teams. These stats must update quickly and accurately. On the backend, the Electronic Baseball Information System (EBIS) is the MLB software making this all happen, and JoAnn helps us understand the technical side of this Kubernetes-built platform. Google monitoring and EBIS-specific tools keep the draft running smoothly. Our guests take us through this list of tools employed and why they were chosen.

We hear more about the process of moving such a complicated system to the cloud and what MLB did to make the shift easier. Perry and JoAnn talk about the testing done before draft days to ensure a smooth experience for all and important lessons they learned. To wrap up the show, our guests offer advice, stressing the importance of observability and starting small. Major League Baseball trademarks used with permission.

Perry Pierce Baseball is what Perry Pierce loves and tech is what he does. Living at the intersection of sports and tech is a cool place to be!

JoAnn Brereton JoAnn loves baseball and tech, so she’s happy to be working at a job where she gets to do both.

Cool things of the week * Cloud NAT explained! blog * Build your data analytics skills with the latest no cost BigQuery trainings blog * Introducing Workflows callbacks blog

Interview * MLB site * MLB Draft site * Kubernetes site * Grafana site * Inside Baseball: How MLB Transactions Actually Get Done blog * LBi Software site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian has been working on a YouTube series on VMs with Carter Morgan.

Next week is Google Cloud Next!

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Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Stephanie Wong host this week’s episode all about managing non-REST APIs. Guests Nandan Sridhar and Dave Feuer start the show introducing our listeners to Apigee, a full life cycle API management tool, and the three tenets of Apigee that streamline the relationship between producers of APIs and their users.

APIs have come a long way as technologies have changed, and David explains the evolution of API development and how it relates to the newer non-REST APIs. The consumption of applications has significantly changed, but Nandan points out that developer strategies and experiences have also changed. These advances have led to the popularity of non-REST APIs. APIs are being used in new ways David tells us, and through examples, we hear how Apigee is helping these companies realize their cutting-edge API goals.

Nandan helps our listeners understand the difference between REST and non-REST APIs and the advantages of the latter in today’s technological environments. Each of the four main types of non-REST APIs have their specialities, he explains, like GraphQL which is great for experiences, and gRPC, which has special communication features that increase efficiency. Our guests elaborate on the exciting features of these two protocols and how their uses will continue to innovate business and consumer interactions into the future.

Our guests offer advice for companies and developers looking to take advantage of these non-REST APIs and help us understand the role Apigee plays in protecting the quality of all types of APIs.

Dave Feuer Dave Feuer is Senior Product Manager at Apigee, a part of Google Cloud Platform. Previously, Dave ran the Platforms & Strategies practice at a boutique consulting firm, designing and implementing developer programs for Fortune 100 companies. Prior to that, Dave ran enterprise product development and software engineering at IDT and Net2Phone, a telecommunications and payments company. Dave started his career as an embedded software development engineer, and frequently questions how he ended up spending so much time in Google Slides.

Nandan Sridhar Nandan Sridhar works in the Product Management team at Google Cloud, Apigee. Nandan’s expertise includes API design standards, API security and microservices.

Cool things of the week * What’s your org’s reliability mindset? Insights from Google SREs blog * Climate TRACE site

Interview * Apigee API Management site * GraphQL site * GraphQL Documentation docs * Announcing Apigee’s native support for managing lifecycle of GraphQL APIs blog * Getting started with Apigee API management using Apigee videos * gRPC site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Alexandrina has been working on the Getting Started with Apigee API Management YouTube series.

Next is coming up soon, too!

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On the podcast this week, our guests Brian Schwarz and Sean Derrington discuss the ins and outs of the new storage launches with your hosts Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown. Brian gives light introductions to the five facets of Google’s data storage portfolio, like the primary storage solutions for files, storage of backups of data, and data transfer software and hardware.

Lately, the Google team has been enhancing existing data solutions and building new ones. Cloud Storage’s multi-region and custom dual-region options easily let customers keep data safe and accessible. Our guests explain what happens behind the scenes to make these features so effective. Brian and Sean describe the user experience, including how clients can see when data is being replicated and where. New capabilities like Turbo Replication allow more modernization for clients moving to the cloud as well.

Sean talks about the new Filestore Enterprise, which allows companies to move critical apps to the cloud quickly and securely, and we learn why accurate, fast file and data replication is so important for these large customers. If there is corruption or accidental deletion of a file, Brian and Sean tell us about the fail-safes that are in place and the process for recovery. Filestore Enterprise, Filestore Basic, and GKE working together offer a more customized approach for large clients, allowing them to allocate their critical projects to Enterprise and other less important applications to Basic. Stateful applications in containers are becoming more popular as well, and our guests tell us how Backup for GKE is the easiest way to protect GKE workloads.

Brian Schwarz Brian has had 20 years in product management in data center infrastructure. Before Google, he spent time at Veritas, Cisco, and most recently Pure Storage.

Sean Derrington Sean has spent 20 years in storage product management. Before Google, he spent time at Veritas, Exablox, and StorageCraft.

Cool things of the week * Run code samples directly in the Google Cloud documentation blog * Why representation matters: 6 tips on how to build DEI into your business blog * Google Cloud announces new Cloud Digital Leader training and certification blog * Google Cloud Next site

Interview * GKE site * Google Cloud Storage site * Filestore site * Filestore Enterprise docs * New storage features help ensure data is never lost blog * Announcing Filestore Enterprise, for your most demanding apps blog * Announcing Backup for GKE: the easiest way to protect GKE workloads blog * Webinar: What’s New with Storage at Google Cloud site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Jenny is working on Google Cloud Reader and further audio formats for all your favorite cloud content.

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Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey are together again this week for an episode all about cloud migration using Txture and Accenture. Our guests Matthias Farwick of Txture, Patrick Niesel of Accenture, and Jason Purvor of Google help us understand their roles in cloud migration with some formal introductions to start the show.

Txture helps companies assess their migration capabilities, providing insights to what will be necessary in the process and how viable cloud migration is as an option. Accenture works with Txture to augment the planning of migration strategies for clients. Jason helps us understand how Google uses the information gleaned from these assessments to help customers understand what the journey to Google Cloud will look like for their business. Txture provides good data which helps Google and clients make better decisions, not just in migration, but for the future health of the project while operating in the cloud.

Our guests share the challenges of cloud migration and detail how these three powerhouse companies work together to overcome hurdles. From information gathering and budgeting to security and implementation, Txture, Accenture, and Google help companies understand their specific obstacles and develop a plan. Matthias uses a large banking client as an example to walk our listeners through a typical cloud migration process that takes advantage of Txture, Accenture, and Google.

Jason details the process customers go through with Google as they establish their cloud environments and make decisions about the future of their projects. Through the analysis of four layers, Google helps customers think through this highly technical and involved migration process. Matthias describes the three assessment steps Txture applies to the process as well, and how these multiple-company analyses work together to create a solid cloud project now and continue to improve the project in the future.

Matthias, Patrick, and Jason offer advice for companies considering a shift to the cloud, stressing the importance of preparing good data and keeping time predictions realistic. Company-wide cooperation is an important tool in the success of a cloud migration as well.

Matthias Farwick Matthias Farwick co-founded Txture, a software for large scale cloud application assessments and modernization programs that is currently expanding to the US. Matthias is an avid mountaineer and skier.

Patrick Niesel Patrick Niesel has been working within Accenture focusing on cloud transformations and in particular on application assessments.

Jason Purvor Jason Purvor is a data centre exit strategist engaged in large scale migrations and “all in” transformations. He formerly ran CloudPhysics EMEA supporting Googlers with high resolution data center assessments.

Cool things of the week * What is Cloud SQL? blog * Save money and time with automated VM management and suspend/resume blog + Cost optimization using automated VM management docs

Interview * Txture site * Accenture site * Cloud Insider site * Txture Cloud Transformation site * Data Centre Transformation with Google site * Cloud Maturity Assessment site * Google Cloud Adoption Framework whitepaper * Accenture-Google Business Group site * The Txture Cloud Transformation Platform site * Cloud Center of Excellence blog * The 6Rs of Cloud Transformation blog * Cloud-to-Cloud Assessment blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is working on a video series called VM End to End with Carter Morgan.

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Carter Morgan and Guillaume Laforge co-host this week’s episode about what it took to develop the Google I/O Adventure Game. Our guest Valentin Deleplace and Guillaume introduce us to the game designed to encourage interaction with I/O attendees at the virtual conference held this year.

Adventure takes the look of a 90s role-playing game. The online world facilitates the meeting of hundreds of conference attendees and presenters to mimic the in-person conference setting and facilitate meaningful conversations. With avatars, text chatting capabilities, and mini games, attendees’ experiences go beyond simply watching online technical presentations.

The development of Adventure Game required scalability to handle varying attendee numbers. It takes advantage of many GCP products, including Compute Engine and Cloud Run. Valentin describes why he and the team chose Cloud Run and how they used it to to stress test the game. He talks about challenges the team faced and how they overcame them to produce a smooth, enjoyable experience for conference-goers. Being a game that’s live for specific periods of time rather than indefinitely presented different challenges as well. Valentin explains that scaling down, for example, is treated differently for this type of game.

Adventure will be available at future conferences.

Valentin Deleplace Valentin Deleplace is a developer advocate at Google. He’s also a senior cloud backend engineer, interested in performance and UX, and an enthusiast Gopher.

Cool things of the week * New Cloud Functions min instances reduces serverless cold starts blog * What’s the key to a more secure Cloud Function? It’s a secret! blog * Shift security left with on-demand vulnerability scanning blog * All you need to know about Cloud Storage blog

Interview * Google I/O site * Chrome Dev Summit site * Join the Adventure at Google I/O video * Google’s I/O Adventure was almost as good as being there article * Set Snail site * Compute Engine site * Cloud Run site * Using WebSockets docs * App Engine site * Agones site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is working VM End to End.

Guillaume is working on new features for Cloud Workflows and helping with the Serverless Expeditions videos.

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Your hosts Stephanie Wong and Alicia Williams talk about BigQuery Admin Reference Guides with guest Leigha Jarett. Leigha tells us a bit about the origins of the Admin Reference Guide, which was developed to address frequent customer questions. The series of guides and videos covers onboarding topics from resource hierarchy and APIs to BigQuery tables and storage in an effort to help new admins get started.

The team’s Reference Guide on tables helps admins understand the difference between federated and native tables, and Leigha tells our listeners some tips for using each type. Slots and reservations for workload management in BigQuery can be challenging to understand, but these Reference Guides and accompanying videos offer clear explanations. Optimizing projects for speed and monetary efficiency are important topics for any client, and Leigha and the optimization team have addressed these concerns as well. Tips for monitoring, data governance, and the secure sharing of data are also included in their video series, BigQuery Spotlight.

We wrap up with a discussion on BigQuery APIs and how easy it is to integrate BigQuery and other Google products.

Leigha Jarett Leigha is a developer advocate on the Google Cloud Data & Analytics team. She focuses on making sure developers using tools like BigQuery and Looker are getting the most possible value from their data.

Cool things of the week * Analyze Cloud Spanner data in BigQuery with federated queries docs * Release notes dataset in BigQuery docs and XML feed + Google Cloud release notes docs and XML feed + Release notes in Cloud Console site + Top 25 Google Search terms, now in BigQuery blog

Interview * BigQuery Admin Reference Guide Blog Recap site * BigQuery Admin Reference Guide blog posts site * BigQuery Spotlight Video Series videos * BigQuery site * BigQuery Documentation docs * Cloud Spanner site * Data Catalog site * Apps Script site * Looker site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Alicia is building new BigQuery architectures in order to understand the journey and identify potential pain areas that may need more support.

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This week on the podcast, we welcome guest Megan O’Keefe to talk about KRM and Kubernetes with your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Anthony Bushong. To start the show, Megan gives us a quick rundown of Kubernetes, an open-source tool to orchestrate containers and manage other GCP resources. She explains the difference between declarative and imperative to help us better understand the basics of Kubernetes.

We tackle the challenges people face when beginning their Kubernetes journey and how it works with other open-source projects, like Anthos. This year, Megan and her team have been working to help developers understand the Kubernetes Resource Model, a concept that helps define how companies can organize and run clusters, enforce policies, and more for improved standardization across multiple teams.

Megan explains GitOps, a deployment model for Kubernetes focusing on Git, and takes us through examples of implementation. We learn about Config Sync and how it helps with optimizing and automating GitOps. Megan goes over some other valuable tools, including Open Policy Agent and Gatekeeper, which help developers specify not just which resources are allowed, but also what kinds of things are allowed within each resource.

We wrap up the show with a discussion on streamlining the development process with strategic use of Kubernetes and the help of open-source tools like Skaffold. Megan also talks about controllers like Config Connector that help with deploying to a GCP project and the things she finds most exciting about this space.

Megan O’Keefe Megan O’Keefe is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud, helping developers build platforms with Kubernetes and Anthos.

Cool things of the week * Listen up! Google Cloud Reader reaches 50 episodes blog * Private Pools Overview docs

Interview * Kubernetes site * GKE site * KRM site * KRM Tutorial Demos site * Build a platform with KRM: Part 1 - What’s in a platform? blog * Build a platform with KRM: Part 2 - How the Kubernetes resource model works blog * Build a platform with KRM: Part 3 - Simplifying Kubernetes app development blog * Build a platform with KRM: Part 4 - Administering a multi-cluster environment blog * Build a platform with KRM: Part 5 - Manage hosted resources from Kubernetes blog * I do declare! Infrastructure automation with Configuration as Data blog * Multi-cluster Use Cases docs * CNCF Kubernetes Overview site * Anthos site * Anthos Technical Overview docs * Anthos Config Management site * Config Sync Overview docs * Guide To GitOps site * Policy Controller Overview docs * Kustomize site * Cloud Code site * Config Connector Overview docs * Crossplane site * Skaffold site * Open Policy Agent site * Backstage site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Anthony shared info about GKE on the podcast last week and he’s been working on his video series on GKE cost optimization. The solutions guide and white paper are great resources for this topic.

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Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani host this week’s episode of the podcast as we celebrate one of our favorite Google products, Google Kubernetes Engine! Anthony Bushong and Gari Singh join the party to talk about GKE’s life journey, what’s new, and what’s coming up for the service.

Each guest brings their unique perspective to the show starting with their definitions of Kubernetes and GKE, tailored to a six year old. How does Kubernetes relate to cookies, Disney World, and Pokemon? Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari break it down.

Next, each guest talks their favorite GKE features and what makes the service different. Kaslin loves the persistent storage feature, among others. Anthony appreciates the evolution of GKE to a place where it supports many different workloads and situations for clients and how easy it is to get started with GKE. GKE’s ability to connect easily to other GCP products and features and GKE Autopilot are some of Gari’s favorite things about the service.

Best practices and advice for new users are shared by our guests. From practical tips for project planning to encouragement with long-term problem solving, our guests offer listeners resources and ideas for a successful GKE project. Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari share their favorite customer stories with us and talk about the fun, interesting events Google has hosted for GKE customers.

The future of GKE looks bright, with new options for Windows containers, expanded Autopilot uses, and multicluster support. KubeCon is coming up soon, so keep an eye out for more Kubernetes and GKE news!

Anthony Bushong Anthony Bushong has been working in the field with production GKE users, both large and small, for almost 5 years now. In Kubernetes time, since Kubernetes v1.3!

Gari Singh Gari Singh is an Outbound Product Manager focused on GKE and Anthos. In this role, he has the opportunity to work with many customers and help align their needs with overall product direction.

Kaslin Fields Kaslin Fields is a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador, and a contributor to Open Source Kubernetes. As a Developer Advocate, she engages with Open Source communities both as a member, and as an advocate for their needs as users (or potential users) of Google Cloud’s products. She is passionate about making technology accessible to a broad audience through making the information available in many forms, such as videos, blogs, documentation, and even comics which she illustrates herself!

Cool things of the week * Try a tutorial in the Google Cloud Console blog + GCP Podcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast * Migrate, Manage & Modernize: Windows Workloads Powered by GKE and Anthos site

Interview * GKE site * Kubernetes site * Explain Like I’m 5: Containers VS VMs blog * Introducing GKE Autopilot: a revolution in managed Kubernetes blog * Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs * Discover and invoke services across clusters with GKE multi-cluster services blog * The evolution of Kubernetes networking with the GKE Gateway controller blog * Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud blog * Bayer Crop Science seeds the future with 15000-node GKE clusters blog * Helping researchers at CERN to analyze powerful data and uncover the secrets of our universe blog * Optimize costs in GKE with monitoring systems video * Monitoring for efficient cluster binpacking in GKE video * Monitoring for app right-sizing in GKE video * Cloud Next 2021 site * KubeCon site * GCP Podcast Episode 210: Kubernetes Config Connector with Emily Cai podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 234: GKE Turns Five with Alex Zakonov and Drew Bradstock podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 252: GKE Cost Optimization with Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 257: GKE Autopilot with Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Kaslin is working on a ton of things, including Kube Essentials and GKE Essentials (coming soon), KubeCon panel and keynote addresses, and Fields Tested - CNCF Twitch - CTF.

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Guest Ryan Przybyl is back this week to tell hosts Lorin Price and Stephanie Wong more about service networking and what the future holds for the networking field. Picking up from last week, Ryan starts by detailing the products and features Google has developed to help enterprise customers shift to a service networking architecture. He walks us through an example scenario and explains how a company might work with Google to gradually shift.

Google continues to grow in the service networking space. As client requirements are identified or changed, Google continually develops products to satisfy the varying networking needs. Ryan talks about tools like Network Intelligence Center, which allows network visibility and aims to ease the transition for traditional networking specialists. He talks about the Grow with Google Model, a term he coined to describe the step-by-step path his team helps enterprises take in the journey to full service networking. The process can take years and Ryan encourages clients to revisit their models periodically to take full advantage of new Google product offerings. He addresses the financial aspects of the networking shift as well.

Ryan offers advice for companies looking to move to the cloud and tells our listeners his thoughts on the future of networking.

Ryan Przybyl Ryan Przybyl is a Networking Specialist at Google Chicago, and has held roles in both Cloud Customer Engineering and Google’s Network Operations. Prior to Google, Ryan was the Senior Director of Sales Engineering for Level 3 Communications. Ryan’s focus is on helping customers understand Google Cloud’s networking technologies while ensuring customers make use of Google Cloud best practices. When not talking with customers, Ryan is usually working with product and engineering teams to ensure Google Cloud is developing the right networking products for the future.

Cool things of the week * Consume services faster, privately and securely - Private Service Connect now in GA blog * Elevate your security with new Secret Manager features and integrations blog * Google named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services again blog

Interview * Google Cloud Networking Products site * Private Service Connect docs * Private Service Connect and Service Directory: A revolution to connect your application in Cloud video * Migration to Google Cloud: Getting Started docs * What’s New in Networking videos * The future of service networking video * Traffic Director site * Envoy Proxy site * Network Intelligence Center site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Lorin is working on Private Service Connect docs.

Stephanie is working on new episodes of What’s New in Networking.

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This week on the show, Lorin Price and Stephanie talk about the differences between traditional and service networking with guest Ryan Przybyl. Ryan starts the show telling us how customer needs and advancing cloud technologies have shifted the conversations he has with customers from a traditional networking focus to an emphasis on cloud services.

Ryan describes how he helps different sized companies approach networking, whether they’re cloud native or shifting to a cloud approach from a traditional background. For example, companies that take advantage of Google Cloud and its services can deploy environments quickly, allowing developers to work without infrastructure constraints. Enterprise companies using more traditional networking that move into the cloud will need to make some changes, Ryan says, comparing apples to oranges. They want to move in a way that takes advantage of the cloud without negatively impacting performance.

Later, Ryan tells us all about service-oriented networking and how it’s possible for companies to choose pieces to shift to a service-oriented architecture without re-doing the entire project. We learn about Google’s Private Service Connect which handles things like routing for companies connecting to third party services. Ryan offers some advice for companies considering this move and regales us with interesting anecdotes from his time helping clients.

Cool things of the week * Private Service Connect is GA blog * Securing the software development lifecycle with Cloud Build and SLSA blog + Container Security: Building trust in your software supply chain site * Introducing Cloud Build private pools: Secure CI/CD for private networks blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Lorin is working on Private Service Connect docs.

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Philip O’Toole and Reed Taylor talk with Stephanie and guest host Terry Ryan all about the new features in Google Cloud Logging on this episode of the podcast. Cloud Logging provides users with management and analyzation of project logs, the reports that describe the state of every system in a project.

Reed walks us through Cloud Logging, including a list of features and how other GCP products integrate well with Logging. Once logs are sorted, Cloud Logging also provides tools for detailed query and analysis of log data. But storage and management of logs is as important as sorting and analyzing, and Reed tells us why this third component is vital.

New features in storage and management promise to streamline the process. Log Buckets, for example, allow the separation of routing and storage, while Log Views make secure field-level access possible. Log Retention means users can dictate how long different types of logs are stored. These new features help users comply with standards and regulations in the data space. Our guests give more examples of how these tools improve logging tasks.

Philip O’Toole Philip O’Toole is an Engineering Manager at Google Pittsburgh, leading development teams working on GCP’s Cloud Logging Platform. Prior to Google he led development teams at InfluxDB, Loggly, and Riverbed Technology. You can find him on the web at https://www.philipotoole.com.

Reed Taylor Reed Taylor is a Senior Product Manager at Google Pittsburgh, just last week marked his 10th “Googleversary” since starting at the office. In that time he’s worked on a range of products including Google Search, Google Shopping, and AdWords. Reed joined GCP just this Spring, and is now focused on Logging products within the Cloud Operations suite.

Cool things of the week * Grow your ML skills with free offer from Coursera blog * Advancing our trusted cloud with engineered-in, invisible security blog

Interview * Google Cloud Logging site * Google Cloud Logging Documentation docs * Managing log buckets docs * Managing log views on your log buckets docs * Data Governance for Log Data Whitepaper site * Principles for Security and Managing Logs Whitepaper site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Terry has been working on tutorials for the Cloud Ops team. His recent Cloud Logging tutorial is available now.

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This week on the podcast, hosts Stephanie Wong and Bukola Ayodele speak with Nikhil Kaul and Victor Szalvay about security in the software supply chain. Cloud OnAir will be offering a virtual event on supply chain software security on July 29th, and our guests start the show by telling us more about it.

The recent cyber attacks on US companies have brought to light the importance of cyber security. A new set of guidelines for securing these components and software as a whole will be released soon, impacting not just software developers but the users as well. The Cloud OnAir event will breakdown these new guidelines and educate attendees on steps to take to ensure more secure software and software components. Internally, Google has been optimizing their software supply chain security for years with solutions like BeyondCorp and internally developed solutions that Google has since adapted for their clients. These solutions will be discussed in detail in the Cloud OnAir event.

Victor goes on to explain the three areas of supply chain security and how they fit into the overall security of online platforms. Software projects are often built using many small pieces of software sourced from third parties, which can create vulnerabilities. The new guidelines will help ensure quality and security at all levels of development for software and its pieces, thus strengthening security at every level of the supply chain. Nikhil and Victor talk about issues that contribute to supply chain security, including the risks that a microservices architecture can introduce and the use of open source software and their dependencies. We hear about Google’s contributions to the supply chain security effort, like OpenSSF that strives to bring the open source community together toward the goal of cyber security. Our guests give listeners tips on starting the supply chain security journey.

Join the Cloud OnAir talk to learn more!

Nikhil Kaul Nikhil leads a team of product marketers focused on driving and building messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategy for Google Cloud’s DevOps portfolio.

Victor Szalvay Victor is an Outbound Product Manager with Google Cloud focused on helping customers get the most from the cloud. Previously he has been a tech entrepreneur and leader, with a concentration on DevOps and app dev team productivity.

Cool things of the week * Helping you pick the greenest region for your Google Cloud resources blog * Optimizing your Google Cloud spend with BigQuery and Looker blog

Interview * Container Security: Building trust in your software supply chain site * OpenSSF site * Deps site * SLSA site * Cloud Build site * BeyondCorp site * Binary Authorization for Borg docs * GKE Autopilot docs * GCP Podcast Episode 251: BeyondCorp with Kiran Nair and Ameet Jani podcast

What’s something cool you’re working on? Bukola is working on the new season of Security Command Center set to be released next month!

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Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani are talking intro to Firestore this week with fellow Googler Allison Kornher. Allison, a Cloud Technical Resident, starts the show telling us about the program and how it brought her to Firestore.

Allison takes us through the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases and describes the four categories of NoSQL databases: family, document, key value, and graph. Firestore is a scalable, flexible NoSQL document database. To illustrate the uses and benefits of Firestore, Allison walks us through a delicious pizza example. Each document in the database belongs to a collection, which is used to organize these documents. Firestore documents are assigned an identifier and can be quickly changed and called within their collections. Because these documents are stored in an implicit schema in key value pairs, developers have control over the details of database organization and data change and growth are easy to manage. The availability of subcollections further adds to the flexibility of Firestore database design.

Choosing a database type will depend on the situation, and Allison suggests this starts with a look at CAP theorem. If a document database is your database of choice, Allison gives our listeners tips for getting started with Firestore and clearing any hurdles along the way.

Allison Kornher Allison is a Cloud Technical Resident and has worked helping startups looking to join GCP and in the Premium Tier Cloud Support organization with a focus on Storage.

Cool things of the week * BigQuery admin reference guide: Tables & routines blog * Top 25 Google Search terms, now in BigQuery blog * Three security and scalability improvements for Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog * GCP Podcast Episode 247: Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat podcast * GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast

Interview * Cloud Firestore site * Cloud Firestore Documentation docs * Cloud Firestore explained: for users who never used Firestore before blog * Gabi on Twitter site * Datastore site * BigTable site * Firebase Realtime Database site * Memorystore site * Cloud Spanner site * GCP Podcast Episode 248: Cloud Spanner Revisited with Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler podcast * All you need to know about Firestore: A cheatsheet blog

What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian has been working on sharing a persistent disk between Google Compute Engine VMs.

Cloud Storage site
Cloud Filestore site
Cloud SQL site

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Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown are your hosts this week, discussing data analytics with the yin and yang of the field, Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt. Our guests introduce us to three new Google offerings, BigQuery Omni, Dataplex, and the Analytics Hub, and discuss the uses and implications of each and how they work together to achieve goals.

Bruno and Eric describe challenges in data analytics and how Google uses these as opportunities to create problem-solving systems that solve real client problems. Through real-world examples from companies like Equifax, we see how companies are getting more information from their data in a way that creates actionable opportunities to improve customer experiences.

For multi-cloud companies, BigQuery Omni gets the most out of data that exists in multiple clouds. To accomplish this, Google takes the analytics to the data and is able to reach all appropriate data across clouds without having to move it. This allows for cheaper analysis with much less system downtime. Support for Azure was added this year.

The new Dataplex software helps customers intelligently manage data assets, especially in distributed systems. Dataplex lets companies automatically discover data, make data secure without having to move it, and apply governance and policies centrally so the data is accessible. Rather than sit unused, data can now be found easily, analyzed securely, and put to work for companies no matter where their data lives.

For analytic asset sharing, Analytics Hub lets companies coordinate with others to get the most use out of their data efficiently. Analytics Hub gets to data value as quickly and easily as possible. Companies can publish, discover, and subscribe to shared assets, create exchanges that combine data sets, and curate exchanges of data and insights for full information sharing.

Eric Schmidt Eric is the Head of Advocacy for Data Analytics at Google and has been with us for almost 8 years. He comes to us from Microsoft, where he led Advocacy and Evangelism there, too. Eric is an expert in products like BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and leads a team of leaders who help customers turn data into value. In his downtime, Eric is also a Dj at KEXP 90.3 Seattel - KEPX.ORG where he guest hosts a modern global music show. You can find Eric on Twitter. His handle is @notthateric - not to be confused with the ‘other Eric Schmidt’ here at Google. In fact, internally, we affectionately call him “cloude”.

Bruno Aziza Bruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud and specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence.

Before working at Google, Bruno worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led one of the fastest turnarounds in the business analytics industry. He led the launch of startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco), Sisense and AtScale and he helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. Bruno has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany. He has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management. And he has a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics.

Cool things of the week * BigQuery row-level security enables more granular access to data blog * Expanding access to quantum today for a better tomorrow blog * Expanding partner solutions at the network edge blog

Interview * Data Cloud Summit site * Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog * Dataplex site * Analytics Hub site * Intelligent Data and Analytics Fabric video * GCP Podcast Episode 253: Data Governance with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad podcast * Public Data Sets site * Smart analytics reference patterns site * Data and Analytics Sharing at Equifax: Immediate, Interconnected, Scalable, and Secure video * BigQuery ML site * Learn more about these launches site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Jenny has been working on Google Cloud Reader episodes on BigQuery Explained.

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On the podcast this week, Stephanie Wong and Abdel Sghiouar are joined by guest Jan Harasym of Sharkmob Games, who starts the interview describing how he and his team designed the infrastructure for The Division. With the game’s sequel, The Division II, in development, Jan and his team made the decision to use a cloud provider. Jan describes the differences between on-prem and cloud, outlining the benefits of GCP for game development and hosting, including better reliability and development environments. Scaling a cloud project can be much more efficient, and Jan tells us some tricks for doing it well. We talk about the process of migrating this large game to Google Cloud and how they choose the software and development tools they used.

When Sharkmob migrated to the cloud, Jan worked to convince the company that GCP was the way to go. He tells us more about how he persuaded the team, how they planned the migration, and the overall success of the process. Sharkmob is working on two new projects for the future and soon will be releasing a new game, Vampire Masquerade Blood Hunt.

Jan Harasym Jan has helped make online games work for eight years. Most recently, he helped release Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 with online infrastructure on top of GCP.

Cool things of the week * New Tau VMs deliver leading price-performance for scale-out workloads blog * Introducing container-native Cloud DNS: Global DNS for Kubernetes blog * Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 site

Interview * Sharkmob site * The Division 1 site * The Division 2 site * Massive site * Unreal site * Zookeeper site * Agones site * Kubernetes site * GKE site * Blood Hunt site

What’s something cool you’re working on? Abdel is working on GKE Network Recipes.

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Our old pal Mark Mirchandani is back this week, joining Stephanie Wong and our guests Steve McGhee and Yuri Grinshteyn to talk about Site Reliability Engineering. SRE is Google’s way of helping companies of all sizes create consistent, predictable, and functional projects. It helps clients approach operations from a software engineering stand point so that growing systems can be managed efficiently.
We talk about the challenges of implementing best SRE practices and how companies can overcome these.

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Max Saltonstall and Carter Morgan co-host the podcast this week and talk APIs with our guests, Dave Feuer and Benjamin Schuler. Apigee, an API management platform built by Google, focuses on all steps of the digital product life cycle to make API management easy for clients. The software company SAP provides data storage and other business support for different types of companies across the world. Together, Apigee and SAP allow data to be collected, stored, organized, and securely accessed and shared with other applications.

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Stephanie Wong and cohost Gabi Ferrara talk about the exciting launch of Database Migration Service at Google. Our guests this week, Shachar Guz and Gabe Weis, start the show explaining DMS, focusing on the ease of infrastructure management for cloud users.
Migration is made simpler with DMS, and Schachar and Gabe walk us through the process of using this powerful new service. Our guests outline some hurdles to migration and how DMS and the DMS documentation help developers overcome them.

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On the podcast this week, we’re diving into what full stack development looks like on Google Cloud. Guests Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore join your hosts Stephanie Wong and Grant Timmerman to help us understand how developers can leverage Dart and Google Cloud to create powerful and effective front end and back end systems for their projects.
Kevin takes us through the evolution of Dart and Flutter and how they have become a way to allow developers an experience-first solution.

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Stephanie Wong and Priyanka Vergadia host the podcast this week as we talk responsible AI with guests Craig Wiley and Tracy Frey.
Vertex AI, the newly released AI platform from Google, is where Craig starts, telling us that it helps seamlessly integrate AI best practices into AI projects. When designing and building machine learning projects, it’s important to plan and integrate functions that support a responsible model as well. Tracy and Craig help us understand the process of designing and building these responsible, efficient projects, from problem identification and data set collection and refinement to ethical model considerations and finally project construction.

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This week on the show, our guests Anu Srivastava and Sudheera Vanguri talk about Document AI with hosts Stephanie Wong and Dale Markowitz. Document AI uses artificial intelligence to improve the way businesses create and manage things like paystubs, tax forms, contracts, and virtually any other business document. Data normally stored on paper can be parsed, enriched, and structured, then stored securely with the use of Document AI. Data becomes more accessible and more manageable.

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On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani joins Stephanie Wong to talk about serverless computing and the Cloud OnAir Serverless event with our guests. Aparna Sinha and Philip Beever start the show giving us a thorough definition of serverless infrastructures and how this setup can help clients run efficient and cost-effective projects with easy scalability and observability.
Serverless has grown exponentially over the last decade, and Aparna talks about how that trajectory will continue in the future.

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On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani joins Stephanie Wong to talk about serverless computing and the Cloud OnAir Serverless event with our guests. Aparna Sinha and Philip Beevers start the show giving us a thorough definition of serverless infrastructures and how this setup can help clients run efficient and cost-effective projects with easy scalability and observability.
Serverless has grown exponentially over the last decade, and Aparna talks about how that trajectory will continue in the future.

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Kaslin Fields joins Stephanie Wong hosting the podcast this week as we talk all about GKE Autopilot with our guests Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss. GKE Autopilot manages tasks like quantity and size of nodes so deploying workloads is faster and machines are used efficiently. Autopilot also offers cluster management options, including monitoring the health of nodes and other components.
William and Yochay explain that GKE Autopilot was built to aid companies in the efficient use of resources and give clients more time to focus on their projects.

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This week on the podcast, Stephanie Wong and Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin are diving into an important topic for our global community: sustainability and carbon aware computing. Kendal Smith, program manager for Carbon Intelligent Computing, and Chris Talbott, leader of the sustainability product marketing efforts at Google Cloud, start the show telling us why sustainability is so important in the tech world.
Environmentally conscious data centers are an important part of Google Cloud sustainability efforts.

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Stephanie Wong and co-host Carter Morgan learn all about the no-code experience of AppSheet Automation this week. Guests Jennifer Cadence and Prithpal Bhogill introduce us to AppSheet, a platform that empowers anyone to build applications without code. The strong focus on openness means AppSheet offers support for all manner of APIs and services, making it easy to use and customize.
Jennifer starts by telling us how AppSheet increases productivity and satisfaction at work.

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Brian Dorsey joins Stephanie Wong this week for an in-depth discussion on Workflows. Guests Kris Braun and Guillaume Laforge introduce us to Google Cloud Workflows, explaining that this fully managed serverless product helps connect services in the cloud. By facilitating the creation of an end-to-end schema, Workflows lets developers specify what microservices or other software respond when certain events occur in a detailed, visual format.
Kris and Guillaume list the benefits of using Workflows and detail the many uses for this powerful tool.

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Hosts Stephanie Wong and Priyanka Vergadia learn about data governance this week in an interesting chat with Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad. While data governance includes security measures, the overarching term also means knowing your data, where it is, and how to use it. In their book, Jessi, Uri, and their co-authors hope to make data governance more accessible by sharing the knowledge Google has developed over twenty plus years.

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This week on the podcast, fellow Googlers Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong chat with hosts Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong about how to optimize your spending with Google Kubernetes Engine.
Cost optimization doesn’t necessarily mean lower costs, Kaslin explains. It means running your application the best possible way and accommodating things like traffic spikes while keeping costs as low as possible. As our guests tell us, standard best practices can aid in optimization, but when it comes to efficiently running on a budget, there are more tips and tricks available in GKE.

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Stephanie Wong joins our old pal Mark Mirchandani this week to chat about BeyondCorp Enterprise and the way enterprise companies are using this security software.
Ameet starts the show explaining BeyondCorp’s three pillars of security, including how detailed customer and client knowledge aid in security. Kiran elaborates, stressing the importance of the web browser’s contribution to a secure experience. With BeyondCorp Enterprise offerings, companies can layer additional protections in the cloud, supplementing the often lacking network model and adding better security protections across devices.

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Jenny Brown and Mark Mirchandani are back this week to celebrate a special anniversary! This year marks a ten year partnership between Google and Intel, and our guests, Angela Gosz and Courtney Harrison, are here to reflect on the past and tell us about the future of Chromebook and Chrome OS. Chrome OS running on Chromebook with Intel enables users to get the most out of their Google Cloud products.

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Jenny Brown and Mark Mirchandani are back this week to celebrate a special anniversary! This year marks ten years since the launch of the first Chromebooks, and our guests, Angela Gosz and Courtney Harrison, are here to reflect on the past and talk about the future Chrome OS. Chromebooks powered by Intel allow users to get the most out of their endpoints, serving as a secure and stable entrypoint to the Cloud.

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Jenny Brown co-hosts with Mark Mirchandani this week for a great conversation about the ML lifecycle with our guests Craig Wiley and Dale Markowitz. Using a real-life example of bus cameras detecting potholes, Dale and Craig walk us through the steps of designing, building, implementing, and improving on a piece of machine learning software.
The first step, Craig tells us, is to identify the data collected and determine its viability in an ML model.

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Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong are back this week as we learn about all the new things happening with Google Cloud Spanner. Our guests this week, Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler, describe Cloud Spanner as a fully managed relational database that boasts unlimited scaling and advanced consistency and availability.
Unlimited scaling truly means unlimited, and Chris explains why Cloud Spanner offers this feature and how it’s making database design and development easier.

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This week on the podcast, Mark Mirchandani and Gabi Ferrara talk with Nimesh Bhagat about Cloud SQL Insights. This powerful tool enables developers to diagnose database issues for faster, smoother performance.
Nimesh tells us the inspiration for Cloud SQL Insight’s development and describes its biggest benefits. One of the important aspects of Insights is the ability for developers to gain an application-centric view by allowing them to tag database queries with SQL comments.

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Former GCP Podcast host Mark Mandel is our guest this week. He’s talking Google Cloud Game Servers, Agones, and more with Mark Mirchandani and guest host Stephanie Wong.
Mark explains how dedicated game servers work and why gaming has embraced the idea of dedicated servers. Online multiplayer gaming with its need for fast, consistent state sharing among players benefits from dedicated servers and offers cheating mitigation and reduced latency, as well as development flexibility.

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Dustin Dye and Alex Seegers of Botcopy are on the show today, chatting with hosts Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia. Botcopy uses advanced AI technology along with excellent copy writing to create better chat bots. The software works directly on a company website and doesn’t require a login, allowing chats to stay anonymous.
Our guests explain that their chat bots are treated like virtual employees, built and trained to function and speak appropriately for their specific job.

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Welcome back to a new year of Google Cloud Platform Podcasts! Mark Mirchandani and Emma Iwao host the first show of 2021 with special guest Rebecca Weekly of Intel. She joins us to talk about the partnership between Google Cloud and Intel. Describing the company’s goals of gathering, storing, managing, and analyzing data in all its forms to unlock the power of technology and information, Rebecca points out how well these align with Google’s own goals and why the partnership is such a natural fit.

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This week, four of the podcast’s greatest hosts come together to celebrate all of the fun and informative episodes we’ve been privileged to do this year! Join Mark Mirchandani, Jon Foust, Priyanka Vergadia, and Brian Dorsey as we talk about our favorite guests and shows, some cool things that happened this year, and what we’re looking forward to in 2021!
Cool things of the week A Giant List of Google Cloud Resources blog Google Cloud 4 Words site Our favorite episodes Jon’s Favorites

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Guest host Sara Ford joins our old favorite Mark Mirchandani this week for a special interview with NASA and FDL. Our guests, James Parr and Madhulika Guhathakurta, give us a super cool, in-depth look at how NASA and FDL do what they do. Lika explains the important scientific studies she has worked on during her years at NASA and how she came to understand and appreciate Machine Learning. James introduces us to the Frontier Development Lab, a project collaborated on by private and public companies to leverage AI and Machine Learning in the research of science, exploration, and many other disciplines.

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Mark and Brian are together this week, hosting our guests Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis as we discuss High Performance Computing with Google. HPC uses powerful computers to solve problems that would otherwise be too large or take too long for standard machines. Innovation and advances in cloud technology have made this resource more accessible, more scalable, and more affordable.
Senanu lists some great use cases for HPC, including vehicle manufacturing and the medical field and describes how these markets benefit from the extra power HPC offers.

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This week, your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia are joined by Google Product Marketing Lead for Online Fraud Protection, Kelly Anderson, to talk about reCAPTCHA Enterprise. Kelly’s main focus at Google, reCAPTCHA, is a service that helps online companies determine if a user is a human or an automated system. With an advanced risk analysis engine, Google’s reCAPTCHA system has been defending sites from fraud for more than a decade.

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Jon Foust joins Mark this week as we talk with Nandhini Rangan and Magda Jary about Cloud Learning Services. The Cloud Learning Services team is passionate about helping technical practitioners elevate their careers and transform businesses by building and validating in-demand Google Cloud skills. Nandhini explains that a lack of technical practitioners with skills in the cloud is one of the biggest barriers to entry for companies considering the shift.

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ML in machinery is our main topic this week as Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey talk with Arnaud Hubaux, development lead for ASML. Our good friend, fellow Googler, and ML specialist Dale Markowitz joins the conversation as well!
With a potent combination of physics and Machine Learning, ASML develops machines that build the chips powering our essential devices. These highly refined machines optimize production for each specific customer, detect defects, and make corrections quickly and accurately by harnessing the power of Machine Learning.

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Mark Mirchandani and Jon Foust are together again this week, speaking with NVIDIA VP of Applied Deep Learning Research Bryan Catanzaro. Bryan and his team focus on using deep learning to enhance NVIDIA’s offerings.
Since Bryan was last a guest on the show, NVIDIA has been doing some amazing things. We talk about the A100 Tensor Core GPU and the massive effort it took to create, the new RTX graphics cards great for gaming, and the differences between them.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani team up this week to speak with Thomas Jung and Lucia Subatin about SAP. SAP, the company that builds software and other technology components, is probably best known for their Enterprise Resource Planning software that helps businesses with everything from accounting to order management. Their Customer Relationship Management software helps companies with things like marketing campaign management and sales, while SAP’s Supplier Relationship Management software helps clients manage large supply chains.

Thomas explains how companies can get started with SAP products and integrate them into their current systems. Once SAP products are employed, clients benefit from a better understanding of their complete business and a more efficient company. SAP developers must have great communication skills, as they take SAP products and tailor them to each individual company, whether on-prem or in the cloud. Later, Lucia and Thomas describe instances when clients may want to take their core businesses and enhance them with technologies like AI and how this is possible.

To wrap up the episode, Thomas and Lucia introduce us to SAP products like HANA, their Cloud Application Programming Model, and security measures.

Thomas Jung Thomas Jung is Head of Developer Advocacy - a team within the SAP Developer & Community Relations organization. The Developer Advocates inform and educate about SAP and related development technologies and also act as the voice of external developers within the SAP organization.

Lucia Subatin Chocolate, cats, computers. Lucia spends a lot of time with the computer, either solving problems or starting trouble. She likes to architect technology solutions to help enterprises run more efficiently. Her cats and chocolate help her bring innovations.

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud learning resources at no cost for 30 days blog * Powering up caching with Memorystore for Memcached blog

Interview * SAP site * OData site * Pub/Sub site * Cloud Knative site * SAP TechEd site * Cloud Run site * Google Cloud Platform Podcast Episode 166: SAP HANA with Lucia Subatin and Kevin Nelson podcast * Qwiklabs site

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

Where can you find us next? Brian is taking it day by day right now.

Mark will be making more videos!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Michelle Casbon is back in the host seat with Mark Mirchandani this week as we talk data science with Devoted Health Director of Data Science, Chris Albon. Chris talks with us about what it takes to be a data scientist at Devoted Health and how Devoted Health and machine learning are advancing the healthcare field. Later, Chris talks about the future of Devoted Health and how they plan to grow. They’re hiring!

At Devoted Health, they emphasize knowledge, supporting a culture of not just machine learning but people learning as well. Questions are encouraged and assumptions are discouraged in a field where a tiny mistake can change the care a person receives. Because of this, their team members not only have a strong data science background, they also learn the specific nuances of the healthcare system in America, combined with knowledge of the legal and privacy regulations in that space.

How did Chris go from Political Science Ph.D. to non-profit data science wizard? Listen in to find out his storied past.

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Google’s own Billy Jacobson joins hosts Mark Mandel and Mark Mirchandani this week to dive deeper into Cloud Bigtable. Bigtable is Google’s petabyte scale, fully managed, NoSQL database. Billy elaborates on what projects Bigtable works best with, like time-series data user analytics, and why it’s such a great tool. It offers huge scalability with the benefits of a managed system, and it’s flexible and easily customized so users can turn on and off the pieces they need.

Later, we learn about other programs that are compatible with Bigtable, such as JanusGraph, Open TSDB, and GeoMesa. Bigtable also supports the API for HBase, an open-source project similar to Bigtable. Because of this, it’s easy for HBase users to move to Bigtable, and the Bigtable community has access to many open source libraries. Billy also talks more about the nine clients available, and when customers might want to use Bigtable instead of, or in conjunction with, other Google services such as Spanner and BigQuery.

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Mark Mirchandani is back this week with guest host Gabe Weiss to learn about HerdX. Our guests, Ron Hicks and Austin Adams, describe how this idea came about, the mechanics of the system, and how it could change the world of livestock.

HerdX is an environmentally friendly, humane way to improve the system of livestock management and sales. It uses monitoring systems to follow animals as they move about the field, then employs algorithms to identify any problems that may need attention. This allows for treatment of specific animals, rather than mass treatment of both healthy and unhealthy livestock. When pitted against humans, HerdX’s AI system could pinpoint the problem livestock much faster and more accurately than people. Once problem livestock are found, the rancher can use that information to devise and implement a treatment plan. Consumers benefit from HerdX as well, through better quality meat and better transparency of rancher practices. The players in the supply chain are recorded and meat is monitored through the entire process, from farm, to feed lot, to the dinner table. Because bad animals can be removed or cured and the supply chain is run much more efficiently, meat spoilage and food poisoning can be mitigated.

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On the show today, we speak with Developer Advocate and fellow Googler, Sherol Chen about machine learning and AI. Jon Foust and Aja Hammerly learn about the history and impact of AI and ML on technology and gaming. What does it mean to be human? What can machines do better than humans, and what can humans do better than machines? These are the large questions that we aim to solve in order to understand and use AI. Sherol goes on to explain the types of deep learning machines can achieve, from neural networks to decision trees.

Sherol also went into depth about the potential social impact of AI as it assists doctors parsing through medical records and plans agricultural endeavors to maximize food production and safety. Sherol also elaborates on the ethical responsibilities we must realize when developing AI projects.

For developers looking to build a new AI project, Sherol outlines the pros and cons of using existing tools like Cloud Speech-to-Text, AutoML and AutoML Tables.

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Jon Foust joins Mark Mirchandani this week as we meet up with Alim Karim from NetApp and Technical Director in OCTO Dean Hildebrand of Google. NetApp has been in data management for 20 years, focusing on providing on-prem, high-performance storage solutions for large industry clients. Their recent partnership with Google Cloud has allowed them to expand their services, offering the same great data management and storage in the cloud.

Dean and Alim elaborate on the best uses for NetApp, explaining that lifting and shifting an existing project to the cloud is only one way NetApp can be useful. New projects can be built right in Google Cloud with NetApp as well. Our guests discuss the other pros of the NetApp service, including faster data retrieval, better monitoring, and predictability. We also talk about how NetApp takes customer feedback into consideration to make sure their service is the best it can be for every client. What’s in store for the future of NetApp? Listen in to find out!

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The podcast today is all about conversational AI and Dialogflow with our Google guest, Priyanka Vergadia. Priyanka explains to Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey that conversational AI includes anything with a conversational component, such as chatbots, in anything from apps, to websites, to messenger programs. If it uses natural language understanding and processing to help humans and machines communicate, it can be classified as conversational AI. These programs work as translators so humans and computers can chat seamlessly.

We discuss how people interact with conversational AI, maybe without even realizing it. From asking Google Home to set your alarm to getting customer service support at your favorite online store, AI is probably working behind the scenes to help. Priyanka also tells us all about Google’s natural language understanding and processing program, Dialogflow. Designed to simplify the process, Dialogflow allows you to input a simple idea like asking for coffee, and watch as the program automatically includes many of the different ways people would naturally ask for coffee. Coffee would be great right now!

Listen in to find out the best (and worst) use cases and practices for this powerful tool!

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Jon Foust and Mark Mirchandani are joined by Adé Mochtar to discuss the IT learning platform, Instruqt and how they create and manage the platform with the help of Google Cloud. Sandeep of Google stops in with the info on the Instruqt arcade games we saw at Google Next ‘19.

Instruqt’s main philosophy is that people learn best by doing, and their courses encourage immersion right off the bat. Developers are asked coding questions and allowed to work in sandbox environments to fully expose them to the subject. Instruqt checks the student’s work as they continue through the program to ensure the material is being properly learned.

But learning should be fun, too! By putting developer challenges on old-style arcade machines, developers can test their coding skills, learn new things, and have fun at the same time. At conferences, this has been a great way to engage their target audience. Google Cloud games were run on the Instruqt platform at Next ‘19, and conference attendees came back day after day to try to get on the high score leaderboard. It was a super fun way to get people using Google Cloud technologies!

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Blockchain takes the spotlight as new host Carter Morgan joins veteran Mark Mandel in a fascinating interview with Allen Day. Allen is a developer advocate with Google, specializing in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications.

This week Allen reveals how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be applied to a variety of applications like distributed file storage and video services. We also discuss the hype and merits of blockchain + projects that Allen has worked on to analyze cryptocurrency transactions using Google Cloud’s big data platforms. The results may just surprise you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We’re at Cloud Next this week with special guests, special hosts, and more! On day one, Gabi and new host Mark Mirchandani were able to speak with Jonathan Cham, Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, about his experiences with Google Next. Ori of the Cloud SQL team shared exciting news about Cloud SQL Server.

Later, Aja was joined by co-host Brian Dorsey who elaborated on his Next talk, as well as his favorite things at Next. They were able to get a quick interview with Matt and Nate about Skuid and what they’re looking forward to at Cloud Next. Jose and Bryan of Onix stopped by as well to talk about their company and their experiences in comedy!

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Gabi is back with Mark this week in an interview with Connor Gilbert of StackRox, a Kubernetes security company. StackRox uses Kubernetes and containers to maximize security for customers across the container lifecycle. Connor explains how they monitor your containers through building, deploying, and finally the running of the application, and keep your project secure through all stages. StackRox identifies risks and weak areas, then responds in real time.

Connor’s advice for our listeners is to understand what’s going on with your containers and your application. Look at the data, the specs, and your options and then, if-needed, adjust the defaults to optimize the security of your app.

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Today on the podcast, we speak with Ian Buck and Kari Briski of NVIDIA about new updates and achievements in deep learning. Ian begins by telling hosts Jon and Mark about his first project at NVIDIA, CUDA, and how it has helped expand and pave the way for future projects in super computing, AI, and gaming. CUDA is used extensively in computer vision, speech and audio applications, and machine comprehension, Kari elaborates.

NVIDIA recently announced their new Tensor Cores, which maximize their GPUs and make it easier for users to achieve peak performance. Working with the Tensor Cores, TensorFlow AMP is an acceleration into the TensorFlow Framework. It automatically makes the right choices for neural networks and maximizes performance, while still maintaining accuracy, with only a two line change in Tensor Flow script.

Just last year, NVIDIA announced their T4 GPU with Google Cloud Platform. This product is designed for inferences, the other side of AI. Because AI is becoming so advanced, complicated, and fast, the GPUs on the inference side have to be able to handle the workload and produce inferences just as quickly. T4 and Google Cloud accomplish this together. Along with T4, NVIDIA has introduced TensorRT, a software framework for AI inference that’s integrated into TensorFlow.

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World Pi Day is behind us, but our guest today, Emma Iwao, joins hosts Gabi and Mark to teach us all about pi. Pi is the constant of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Anytime you see a circle on a computer, pi has been used. It’s vital for everything from gaming to calculating rocket trajectories!

Emma crushed the world record for calculating digits of pi using Google Cloud over four months! Listen in to hear more about how she did it!

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Jon Foust is back with Mark this week as we talk about SAP HANA, a data and application platform. Lucia Subatin and Kevin Nelson elaborate, explaining that SAP HANA is engineered for running SAP business applications. It is capable of handling large transactions very quickly and with great flexibility. With HANA, you don’t move data around, so you can run transaction workloads, as well as analytics, etc. in the same platform.

By teaming up with GCP, SAP HANA ensures that their enterprise users will have scalability and storage no matter how their businesses grow. GCP and SAP HANA developers have been working together to continue to make the products better.

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Mark and Brian Dorsey spend today talking Python with Dustin Ingram. Python is an interpreted, dynamically typed language, which encourages very readable code. Python is popular for web applications, data science, and much more! Python works great on Google Cloud, especially with App Engine, Compute Engine, and Cloud Functions. To learn more about best (and worst) use cases, listen in!

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Node.js is our topic this week as Mark and first-time host, Jon Foust, pick the brain of Myles Borins. Myles updates us on all the new things happening with Node.js, including the new .dev site that holds a ton of documentation to help people get started. Node.js now integrates with Cloud Build, the Node.js foundation has some new developments, and Google App Engine supports Node.js. The group has also been working on serverless containers.

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We’re learning all about Cloud SQL this week with our guest, Amy Krishnamohan. Amy’s main job is to teach customers about the products she represents. Today, she explains to Mark and Gabi that Cloud SQL manages services for open source databases, and she spends a little time elaborating on the other database management services Google has to offer.

Cloud SQL is a relational data storage solution. Relational data storage is very structured, almost like a table or spreadsheet, making it easier to analyze the data. Cloud SQL is capable of scaling out and up, meaning it can scale for traffic patterns and for storage. In comparison, NoSQL databases are very unstructured. If you’re not sure what kind of data is coming in, you can sort the data first and analyze it later. Each approach has its pros and cons and each is suitable for different types of projects.

Recently, Cloud SQL released a feature making it easy to move from on-prem to the cloud. In the future, they will continue to streamline the process of moving between the two spaces.

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Today, Mohamed El-Geish joins us to talk about the voice AI technology powering Voicea. Gabi is back on the host bench with Mark as we learn how Voicea can improve productivity. EVA, the voice assistant, will record important information for you so you can focus on your meeting and will create tasks lists to help you stay organized. Voicea integrates well with multiple platforms to help accomplish your goals as well. You can send messages to Slack, add tasks to your Basecamp list, and more.

Mohamed explains the process of building Voicea and how machine learning techniques and user feedback have helped make it such a useful tool. Now, Voicea is working to incorporate video, allowing users to play back things like important meeting slides.

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First-time host, Aja, joins Mark today to talk Go Cloud Functions with two Google colleagues! Stewart, lead Product Manager on Google Cloud Functions, and Tyler, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, start the show by explaining the purpose of Cloud Functions. It is a serverless compute product that supports many programming languages, scales automatically, and only charges for what you use. It works best as event-driven computing, in other words, when something happens, you want something else to happen in response. Cloud Functions also works well between clouds or even Google Cloud services, acting as the glue between them.

Go Cloud Functions works specifically for Go. Google makes a huge effort to make Cloud Functions easy to use for all developers, so that no matter what language you’re familiar with, Cloud Functions works for you.

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We’re back! This week, Mark welcomes Gabi as his new co-host! Listen in as they discuss Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas.

So what is Knative? Mark and Ville explain that Knative is basically a way to simplify Kubernetes for developers. This way, developers can focus on writing good code without worrying about all the aspects of Kubernetes, such as deploying and autoscaling. Knative helps with these functions automatically. Knative also supports many languages which allows developers to bring their own stack. The day-to-day of developing doesn’t change, which is the beautiful thing about Knative!

Knative is open source and easy to deploy. Developers can find installation guides online for any Kubernetes certified instance of service. A link to the installation guide for Knative on GKE is in our show notes.

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Happy Holidays, everyone! Melanie and Mark wrap up a great year by reminiscing about some of their favorite episodes! We also talk about the big news of the year, our favorite articles, and what’s coming up for the GCP Podcast in 2019.

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Melanie and Mark talk with Google Cloud’s VP of Engineering, Melody Meckfessel, this week. In her time with Google Cloud, she and her team have worked to uncover what makes developers more productive. The main focus of their work is DevOps, defined by Melody as automation around the developer workflow and culture. In other words, Melody and her team are discovering new ways for developers to interact and how those interactions can encourage their productive peak.

Melody and her team have used their internal research and expanded it to collaborate with Google Cloud partners and open source projects. The sharing of research and products has created even faster innovation as Google learns from these outside projects and vice versa.

In the future, Melody sees amazing engagement with the community and even better experiences with containers on GCP. She is excited to see the Go community growing and evolving as more people use it and give feedback. Melody also speaks about diversity, encouraging everyone to be open-minded and try to build diverse teams to create products that are useful for all.

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Melanie is solo this week talking with Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech Bren professor and director of ML research at NVIDIA. We touch on tensors, their use, and how they relate to TensorFlow. Anima also details the work she does with NVIDIA and how they are helping to advance machine learning through hardware and software. Our main discussion centers around AI and machine learning research conferences, specifically the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (commonly referred to as NIPS) and the reason they have rebranded.

NIPS originally started as a small conference at Caltech. As deep learning became more and more popular, it grew exponentially. With the higher attendance and interest, the acronym became center stage. Sexual innuendos and harassing puns surrounded the conference, sparking a call for a name change. At first, conference organizers were reluctant to rebrand and they used recent survey results as a reason to keep NIPS.

Anima discusses her personal experience protesting the acronym, opening up about the hate speech and threats of which she and others received. Despite the harassment, Anima and others continued to protest, petition, and share stories of mistreatment within the community which helped lead to the name/acronym change to NeurIPS. The rebranding hopes to reestablish an inclusive academic community and move the focus back to machine learning research and away from unprofessional attention.

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Happy Thanksgiving! On this episode, Mark and Melanie learn about Grace.health with co-founders Therese Mannheimer and Roman Jasins. Grace.health’s goal is to give women control of information about their own bodies, allowing them to make informed healthcare decisions. Grace.health is a female health companion that lets women track and plan their periods, fertility, and ask questions. It is a global undertaking, hoping to reach not just the tech savvy woman, but all women in all markets worldwide.

Stigmas and taboos around the world portray periods as dirty and contagious, preventing women from being able to work, go to school, or even sleep in the house. Grace.health’s goal is to educate people to help limit these superstitions and allow women to live fuller lives. With Grace.health, women know when their periods are coming or when the are ovulating so they can make the proper plans.

In the longterm, Grace.health hopes to be a tool to not only help women identify any health concerns but also find a healthcare professional and get the treatment necessary.

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Viktor Gamov is on the podcast today to discuss Confluent and Kafka with Mark and special first-time guest host, Michelle. Viktor spends time with Mark and Melanie explaining how Kafka allows you to stream and process data in real-time, and how Kafka helps Confluent with its advanced streaming capabilities. Confluent Cloud helps connect Confluent and cloud platforms such as Google Cloud so customers don’t have to manage anything - Confluent takes care of it for you!

To wrap up the show, Michelle answers our question of the week about Next 2019.

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Joanna Smith and Alicia Williams talk G Suite with Mark and Melanie this week! G Suite is Google’s collection of apps to help make working easier. It includes things like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and more and is designed to be collaborative. It’s customizable, allowing users to adjust the programs to their needs and be more effective – including integrating it with Google Cloud! G Suite has an active community of developers building add-ons to increase functionality as well.

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Happy Halloween! On this not-so-spooky episode of the Google Cloud Podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Tony Aiuto of Bazel. Bazel grew from Google’s internal build system, Blaze, to become the open source Bazel that it is today. The aim of the project is to quickly make very large builds across multiple languages.

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On the podcast today, we have two more fascinating interviews from Melanie’s time at Deep Learning Indaba! Mark helps host this episode as we speak with Karim Beguir and Muthoni Wanyoike about their company, Instadeep, the wonderful Indaba conference, and the growing AI community in Africa.

Instadeep helps large enterprises understand how AI can benefit them. Karim stresses that it is possible to build advanced AI and machine learning programs in Africa because of the growing community of passionate developers and mentors for the new generation. Muthoni tells us about Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, a community she is heavily involved with in Nairobi. The group runs workshops and classes for AI developers and encourages volunteers to participate by sharing their knowledge and skills.

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Mark and Melanie speak with Patrick Flynn and Mike Eltsufin about their exciting new Java products for Google Cloud. Mike tells us all about the new Spring Cloud GCP, a helpful tool that integrates Google Cloud Platform APIs and the Spring Framework. Patrick elaborates on his team’s new tool, Jib, a Java container image builder, and how it helps Java developers.

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Melanie and Mark celebrate their 150th episode this week with a high-energy interview of mutual friend, KF, at Strange Loop. KF gives her perspective on Strange Loop, working remotely, and distributed systems. She compliments Strange Loop for the diversity it has achieved as the conference has grown. She laments the lack of introductory material for distributed systems learners, saying it’s not as complicated as everyone thinks but needs more educational material for beginners! In general, she believes everyone could benefit from some code study, especially if you can find a good mentor. KF also gives us some great tips for working remotely and staying effective and social.

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Today, Melanie brings you another great interview from her time at Deep Learning Indaba in South Africa. She was joined by Yabebal Fantaye and Jessica Phalafala for an in-depth look at the deep learning research that’s going on in the continent.

At the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the aim is to gather together minds from all over Africa and the world to not only learn but to use their distinct perspectives to contribute to research that furthers the sciences. Our guests are both part of this initiative, using their specialized skills to expand the abilities of the group and stretch the boundaries of machine learning, mathematics, and other sciences.

Yabebal elaborates on the importance of AIMS and Deep Learning Indaba, noting that the more people can connect with each other, the more confidence they will gain. Jessica points out how this research in Africa can do more than just advance science. By focusing on African problems and solutions, machine learning research can help increase the GDP and economic standards of a continent thought to be “behind”.

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In our last (but not least!) interview from NEXT, Mark and Melanie talked with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko about Wellio, an awesome new platform that combines AI and healthy eating. Wellio was developed as a way to not only educate users on the importance of proper nutrition for well-being but to give them their own personal nutritionist.

The data scientists at Wellio started from scratch (pun intended) to create their own food-related database and then began training models so the data could be organized and personalized. Using a combination of human power and machine learning techniques, Wellio learns your preferences, allergies, diets, etc. and will make healthy decisions for you based on these key facts. It chooses recipes, populates a grocery list, and even has the ingredients delivered to your door in time for dinner!

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This week we are bringing you a couple of interviews from last week’s Deep Learning Indaba conference. Dr. Vukosi Marivate, Andrea Bohmert and Yasin(i) Musa Ayami talk about the burgeoning machine learning community, research, companies and AI investment landscape in Africa. While Mark is at Google Cloud Next in Tokyo, Melanie is joined by special guest co-hosts Nyalleng Moorosi and Willie Brink.

Vukosi and Yasin(i) share how Deep Learning Indaba is playing an important role to recognize and grow machine learning research and companies on the African continent. We also discuss Yasin(i)’s prototyped app, Tukuka, and how it won the Maathai Award which is given to individuals who are a positive force for change. Tukuka is being built to aid economically disadvantaged women in Zambia get access to financial resources that are currently unavailable. Andrea rounds up the interviews by giving us a VC perspective on the AI start-up landscape in Africa and how that compares to other parts of the world. As Nyalleng says at the end, AI is happening in Africa and has great potential for impact.

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Jeff Dean, the lead of Google AI, is on the podcast this week to talk with Melanie and Mark about AI and machine learning research, his upcoming talk at Deep Learning Indaba and his educational pursuit of parallel processing and computer systems was how his career path got him into AI. We covered topics from his team’s work with TPUs and TensorFlow, the impact computer vision and speech recognition is having on AI advancements and how simulations are being used to help advance science in areas like quantum chemistry. We also discussed his passion for the development of AI talent in the content of Africa and the opening of Google AI Ghana. It’s a full episode where we cover a lot of ground. One piece of advice he left us with, “the way to do interesting things is to partner with people who know things you don’t.”

Listen for the end of the podcast where our colleague, Gabe Weiss, helps us answer the question of the week about how to get data from IoT core to display in real time on a web front end.

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Our guest today is Dr. Mario Lassnig, a software engineer working on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN! Melanie and Mark put on their physics hats as they learn all about what it takes to manage the petabytes of data involved in such a large research project.

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This week we learn about how Mercari is handling migrating from an on-prem monolithic infrastructure to cloud microservices architecture with GKE. Terry and Taichi share with Melanie and Mark what drove the decision for the change, the challenges and what the team has learned from the transition. The real value for this change has been about making the platform more scalable as they grow to meet the needs of their millions of daily active users. It’s another great interview we captured out of Google NEXT.

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Mark and Melanie are your hosts again this week as we talk with Steren Giannini and Stewart Reichling discussing what’s new with App Engine. Particularly its new second generation runtime, allowing headless Chrome, and better language support! And automatic scalability to make your life easier, too. App Engine also has an interesting way of inspiring new Google products. Tune in to learn more!

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Mark Mandel is in the guest seat today as Melanie and our old pal Francesc interview Cyril Tovena of Ubisoft and Mark about Agones. We discuss dedicated game servers and their importance in game performance, how Agones can make hosting and scaling dedicated game servers easier to manage, and the future of Agones. Cyril and Mark elaborate on Ubisoft’s relationship with Google and how it’s progressing the world of gaming. Listen in!

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On this episode of the podcast we continue a conversation we started with Haben Girma, an advocate for equal rights for people with disabilities, regarding the value of tech accessibility. Melanie and Mark talk with her about common challenges and best practices when considering accessibility in technology design and development. Bottom line - we need one solution that works for all.

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Let’s talk container security! This week, Melanie and Mark learn all about the three main pillars of container security and more with our guest, Maya Kaczorowski.

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It’s the third and final day for us at NEXT, and Mark and Melanie are wrapping up with some great interviews! First, we spoke with Stephanie Cueto and Vivian San of Techtonica, a San Francisco non-profit. Next, Liz Fong-Jones and Nikhita Raghunath joined us for a quick discussion about open source and Stackdriver and last but not least, Robert Kubis helped us close things sharing what it means to do DevRel at this event.

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Day two of NEXT was another day full of interesting interviews! Melanie and Mark sat down for quick chats with Haben Girma about accessibility in tech and Paresh Kharya to talk about NVIDIA. Next, we touched base with Amruta Gulanikar and Simon Zeltser to learn more about Windows SQL Server and .NET workloads on Google Cloud. The interviews wrap up with Henry Hsu & Isaac Wong of Holberton.

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On this very special episode of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast, we have live interviews from the first day of NEXT! Melanie and Mark had the chance to chat with Melody MeckFessel, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud and Pavan Srivastava of Deloitte. Next we spoke with Sandeep Dinesh about Open Service Broker and Raejeanne Skillern of Intel.

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On this episode of the podcast, Mark and Melanie delve into the fascinating world of robotics and reinforcement learning. We discuss advances in the field, including how robots are learning to navigate new surroundings and how machine learning is helping us understand the human mind better.

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On this episode of the podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Emiliano (Emi) Martínez to learn more about how VirusTotal is helping to create a safer internet by providing tools and building a community for security researchers.

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Happy 4th of July! Today, Melanie and Mark go in depth with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker to learn more about Unity and its new strategic alliance with Google Cloud. We explore how an alliance between Google Cloud and Unity means easier development for game creators and better gaming for fans.

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Brahim Elbouchikhi and Sachin Kotwani talk with Melanie and Mark about Firebase’s ML Kit and how it enables machine learning on mobile and cloud apps. We delve into why ML Kit was developed, how it makes machine learning easier, what it’s used for now and plans for the future.

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Thadeu Luz from Hand Talk shares with Melanie and Mark how the free Hand Talk education application translates and interprets spoken and written Portuguese into Brazilian Sign Language (aka LIBRAS or BSL). The application uses an animated avatar Hugo to deliver the signs through gestures and facial expressions and its built off of a statistical machine translation system and Firebase. Future plans include expanding into other languages with a priority on ASL and they welcome support.

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This week is all about Voices! 🎶🎤🔊 Mandy Chan joins Melanie and Mark to discuss the intricacies of building user Voice user interfaces with Actions on Google, developing with SSML and more!

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Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon are on the podcast this week to talk about data science with Melanie and Mark. We had a great discussion about methodology, applications, tools, pipelines, challenges and resources. Juliet shared insights into the unique data science ownership workflow from idea to deployment at Stitch Fix, and Michelle dove into how Kubeflow is playing a role to help drive reliability in model development and deployment.

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Mandy Waite joins Mark and Melanie to share what is developer relations and how trust and empathy are key to its success. We discuss meeting developers where they are and the wide variety of differing communities that exist across the technology ecosystem.

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Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov joins Mark and Melanie this week to explain data science, analytics, machine learning and statistical inference, in relation to decision intelligence.

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This week is a clash of titans! Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo join Mark and Melanie, to battle out on which is better: SRE or Devops (hint - everyone wins!).

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Holden Karau is on the podcast this week to talk all about Spark and Beam, two open source tools that helps process data at scale, with Mark and Melanie.

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Mark and Melanie are joined by Sarah Novotny, Head of Open Source Strategy for Google Cloud Platform, to talk all about Open Source, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and their relationships to Google Cloud Platform.

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VP of Infrastructure at Google Cloud Eric Brewer, talks to Melanie and Mark all about open source at Google Cloud, distributed systems, hybrid cloud, and more!

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Nick Sullivan, and Adam Langley join Melanie and Mark to provide a pragmatic view on post-quantum cryptography and what it means to research security for the potential of quantum computing. Post-quantum cryptography is about developing algorithms that are resistant to quantum computers in conjunction with “classical” computers. It’s about looking at the full picture of potential threats and planning on how to address them using a diversity of types of mathematics in the research. Adam and Nick help clarify the different terminology and techniques that are applied in the research and give a practical understanding of what to expect from a security perspective.

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Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf join Melanie and Mark to discuss Project Jupyter from it’s interactive notebook origin story to the various open source modular projects it’s grown into supporting data research and applications. We dive specifically into JupyterHub using Kubernetes to enable a multi-user server. We also talk about Binder, an interactive development environment that makes work easily reproducible.

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Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues join Mark and Melanie to discuss the Contributor Experience on Kubernetes, and how people can get involved with Kubernetes!

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Nenad Stojanovski and Andrew Hoying join Mark and Melanie this week to discuss Forseti - open source tools for Google Cloud Platform security.

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Bryan Catanzaro, the VP Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, joins Mark and Melanie this week to discuss how his team uses applied deep learning to make NVIDIA products and processes better. We talk about parallel processing and compute with GPUs as well as his team’s research in graphics, text and audio to change how these forms of communication are created and rendered by using deep learning.

This week we are also joined by a special co-host, Sherol Chen who is a developer advocate on GCP and machine learning researcher on Magenta at Google. Listen at the end of the podcast where Mark and Sherol chat about all things GDC.

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Product Manager Morgan McLean and Software Engineer JBD join Melanie and Mark this week to discuss the new open source project OpenCensus, a single distribution of libraries for metrics and distributed tracing with minimal overhead that allows you to export data to multiple backends.

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Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google joins Melanie and Mark this week to talk about how Google enables businesses to solve critical problems through AI solutions. We talk about the work she is doing at Google to help reduce AI barriers to entry for enterprise, her research with Stanford combining AI and health care, where AI research is going, and her efforts to overcome one of the key challenges in AI by driving for more diversity in the field.

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We have the pleasure this week of having the Director of Solutions for Google Cloud Miles Ward and Cloud Solutions Architect Grace Mollison join Mark and Melanie to discuss Solution Architects, what they do and how they interact with Customers at Google Cloud Platform.

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In this episode, Google Play Marketing is the customer of Google Cloud Platform. Melanie and Mark chat with Dom Elliott (Google Play) and Stewart Bryson (Red Pill Analytics) about how they use our big data processing and visualisation tools to introspect what is happening in the Google play ecosystem.

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This week, we dive into machine learning bias and fairness from a social and technical perspective with machine learning research scientists Timnit Gebru from Microsoft and Margaret Mitchell (aka Meg, aka M.) from Google.

They share with Melanie and Mark about ongoing efforts and resources to address bias and fairness including diversifying datasets, applying algorithmic techniques and expanding research team expertise and perspectives. There is not a simple solution to the challenge, and they give insights on what work in the broader community is in progress and where it is going.

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Yifei Feng talks with Mark and Melanie about working on the open source TensorFlow platform, the recent 1.5 release, and how her team engages and supports the growing community. She provides a great overview of what its like to work on an open source project and ways to get involved especially for anyone new to contributing.

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We return once again to Continuous Integration tooling, this time with a visual spin. Mike Fotinakis joins Mark and Melanie to discuss how they use Google Cloud Platform to develop Percy, the platform for continuous visual reviews for web apps.

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The delightful Sam Ramji joins Mark and Melanie this week to talk about Google Cloud Platform, Open Source, Distributed Systems and Philosophy and how they are all interrelated.

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Bringing you a special second episode this week with Matt Linton and Paul Turner sharing insights with Mark and Melanie about the CPU vulnerabilities, Spectre & Meltdown, and how Google coordinated and managed security with the broader community. We talked about how there has been minimal to no performance impact for GCP users and GCP’s Live Migration helped deploy patches and mitigations without requiring maintenance downtime.

Due to the special nature, no cool things or question included on this podcast.

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Launchpad Studio, a product development acceleration program focused on helping machine learning startups iterate quickly, fail fast, and collaborate on best practices.

Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig talk with Mark and Melanie this week about how the Launchpad Studio program is helping startups overcome data, expertise and tooling barriers by providing access to talent and resources and building universal best practices.

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This week we get the band back together! Francesc Campoy Flores rejoins the show along with Director of Google Cloud Developer Relations Greg Wilson to talk all about 2017 and Google Cloud with Mark and Melanie

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Deep Kapadia and JP Robinson from New York Times join Mark and Francesc to discuss how they use Google Cloud Platform to serve the New York Times to its readers.

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On this week’s podcast, Eric Anderson shares how Dataprep helps summarize, transform, visualize and cleanup data on the Google Cloud Platform. When doing data analysis, typically data munging can take up most of the time and this serverless tool helps optimize the process.

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Colt McAnalis joins the podcast this week to talk about his Performance Atlas series where he dives into how to make Google Cloud applications faster and cheaper. In his words, his job is to help get someone promoted.

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Brian Granatir comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about the New Zealand company Smart Parking taking advantage of IoT Core and our Serverless products!

This is also the inaugural episode of Melanie joining Mark on the podcast!

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It’s time to learn everything about Cloud IoT Core from Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager, and Gabe Weiss, Developer Advocate on IoT.

Listen to Mark and Francesc ask all of the questions you had about IoT but didn’t dare to ask.

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Google, the Cloud, or podcasts would not exist without the internet, so it’s with an incredible honor that we celebrate our 100th episode with one of its creators: Vint Cerf.

Listen to Mark and Francesc talk about the origins, current trends, and the future of the internet with one of the best people to cover the topic.

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Firebase Developer Advocate David East joins Francesc and Mark to discuss the mega powerful combination of Firebase Hosting and Cloud Functions for Firebase!

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This summer (aka Australian winter) a new Cloud Region was announced in Australia and today Francesc and Mark talk to two Australian engineers, Andrew Walker founder of 3wks and Graham Polley, about how this new region has changed the way they think about the cloud down under.

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Dan McGrath and Alex Dufetel join Francesc and Mark in the studio this week to discuss Cloud Firestore, the brand new, fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development.

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Avere provides high performance file system solutions for hybrid cloud infrastructures, and is partner for Google Cloud Platform.

To tell you all about it Francesc and Mark are joined by Scott Jeschonek, Director of Cloud Products at Avere, and Dave Elliott, Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform.

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Sourcegraph provides navigation tools for source code, and it’s powered by Go and Google Cloud Platform. Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder, joins your co-hosts Francesc and Mark to discuss how they built their features on top of our infrastructure.

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Have you ever wanted to know what powers BigQuery under the hood? Tino Tereshko and Jordan Tigani sit in front of the microphone with co-hosts Mark and Francesc to talk all about it!

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What is the difference between AI and ML? Melanie Warrick joins your co-hosts Mark and Francesc to discuss the differences and what applications it can have.

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Michael Will, Director of Technical Operations at Phoenix One Games, joins your co-hosts Mark and Francesc today to tell us about their migration from their own hardware to the cloud, how they did it, and what they learned from it.

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In this week’s episode Mark and Francesc are joined by Amit Pande, Product Management Leader for Google Cloud to discuss how machine learning can automate the media and entertainment industry.

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Mark and Francesc welcome the incredible Greg DeMichillie into their studio this week, to talk all about Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, and how it works with enterprise companies.

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Today Francesc and Mark have the honor to be joined by Alim Jaffer and Mo Firouz from Heroic Labs to discuss their open source framework for social and realtime apps and games.

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Tim Hockin, one of the engineers that started the Kubernetes project, joins Francesc and Mark to talk about all of the cool stuff coming up with Kubernetes 1.7.

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Francesc and Mark are joined this week by Jonathan Cham, a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud Platform, to discuss what his job entails and how our customers can benefit from it.

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Francesc and Mark are joined this week by Lukas Karlsson from Broad Institute and Mike Altarace from Google Cloud Platform to discuss the Platinum Customer relationship with Google Cloud Platform.

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Due to popular demand, this week Francesc and Mark are joined by Product Manager Varun Talwar and Senior Staff Software Engineer Sven Mawson to discuss all things Istio, an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices.

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Wendy Kan joins your co-hosts Francesc and Mark today to talk about Kaggle, their competitions, and the cool data sets available on their platform.

Kaggle joined the Google family a few months ago, so it’s a great opportunity to know more about the platform and the amazing community behind it.

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If you have ever wanted to play with huge datasets - this is the episode for you! Partner Operations Manager Mike Hamberg and Program Manager Will Curran join your co-hosts Francesc and Mark to talk through all the public datasets that Google Cloud Platform hosts for you on BigQuery and Google Compute Storage.

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It’s all about open source monitoring this week, as Prometheus Co-Founder Julius Volz, joins your co-hosts Francesc and Mark to talk all about Prometheus. Where it came from, why it was built and why you should use it.

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Cloud Dataflow and its OSS counterpart Apache Beam are amazing tools for Big Data. So today your co-hosts Francesc and Mark interview Frances Perry, the Tech Lead and PMC for those projects, to join us and tell us more about it.

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Yesterday Spinnaker reached its version 1.0, today Francesc and Mark talk to Steven Kim and Christopher Sanson about it!

Spinnaker is an open-source multi-cloud continuous delivery platform used in production at companies like Netflix, Waze, Target, and Cloudera, plus a new open-source command line interface (CLI) tool called halyard that makes it easy to deploy Spinnaker itself

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In this episode Mark and Francesc enter the land of Continuous Integration, chatting with David Bendory and Christopher Sanson all about Container Builder.

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Fresh from Google I/O, Mark and Francesc are joined by the co-founders of Firebase, James Tamplin and Andrew Lee to let us in on all the new and awesome things that were announced!

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Basecamp Networks uses Machine Learning to diagnose easily what kind of sickness or parasite a crop might be suffering. They’re powered by Google Cloud Platform, and their CEO, Craig Ganssle, is here to tell Mark and Francesc all about it.

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This week Mark and Francesc have an in depth chat with Daniel Smith about the recent Kubernetes 1.6 release and all the amazing new features found therein.

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In this episode Mark and Francesc have a great interview with Chen Goldberg, the Engineering Director for Container Engine and Kubernetes at Google - discussing all about why Kubernetes is open source and the integrations that Google Container Engine has with the wider Google Cloud Platform.

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Have you ever wanted to apply Cloud Vision API to videos? Well, Sara Robinson is here to tell your co-hosts Mark and Francesc about Cloud Video Intelligence API, which allows you to do that and much more.

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This week, Mark and Francesc ask all the questions that you’ve ever had about Cloud Functions to Bret McGowen.

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This week, Mark and Francesc get a chance to talk directly to the Director of Customer Reliability Engineering himself, Luke Stone, all about CRE - where it came from, what it’s goals are, and how it’s been working with some big customers at Google Cloud Platform.

About Luke Stone Luke is defining the customer experience of Google’s new Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team. When he joined Google in 2002 he was the first technical support engineer for AdSense. He ran software engineering teams and started building on Google App Engine in 2009. Recently, he led the technical support team for Google Cloud Platform before becoming a founding member of the CRE team. Before Google, Luke was a system administrator and developer in academic and non-profit organizations, and studied computer science at Stanford.

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud announces Machine Learning Startup Competition blog * Quantifying the performance of the TPU, our first machine learning chip blog * DeepBreath: Preventing angry emails with machine learning blog github

Interview * Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering blog * All the CRE blog posts blog * Site Reliability Engineering book * Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure chapter

Question of the week Rokesh Jankie returns this week, with another question:

What does it mean to have 99.99% availability. That’s not 100%, what does it mean for customers who have mission critical applications?

SRE II with Paul Newson podcast
High Availability wikipedia
Borg and Kubernetes with John Wilkes podcast

Where can you find us next? Mark is going to be at and then on to East Coast Games Conference and Vector in April. He’s also going to be hosting the Playcrafting + Extra Life Game Jame & Game Fest, raising money for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. Finally he’ll be in Sweden for Nordic Games Conference as well.

Francesc will be presenting at Gophercon China in April, and will then be at the New York Google Developer Group for a Serverless event! Francesc has also released a new Just for Func episode, covering the Context package!

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One of our dear Developer Advocates, Yufeng Guo, joins your co-hosts, Mark and Francesc, to talk about the Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

Cloud Machine Learning Engine offers a managed platform for training and serving Tensorflow models.

About Yufeng Guo Yufeng is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform, where he is trying to make machine learning more understandable and usable for all. He enjoys hearing about new and interesting applications of machine learning, share your use case with him on Twitter @YufengG.

Cool things of the week Kubernetes 1.6:

Kubernetes 1.6: Multi-user, Multi-workloads at Scale blog post
Five Days of Kubernetes 1.6 blog post

Recapping Google Next ‘17 by Kalev Leetaru:

Deep Learning As A Service Forbes
Making Security Forbes
The Great Cloud Shift From Renting Hardware To Services And Experts Forbes

Interview * Tensorflow homepage * On-device machine learning: TensorFlow on Android (Google Cloud Next ‘17) YouTube * TensorFlow and Deep Learning without a PhD part 1 and part 2 * Cloud Machine Learning Engine docs * Huggable or not? Build smart applications with your new superpower: cloud machine learning YouTube * Kaggle homepage

Cloud Machine Learning Engine has a cool logo

Question of the week What are API keys and when should I use them?

Why and When to use API Keys docs

Where can you find us next? Mark is at Vancouver Unity Games Meetup and on Thursday he’ll be at Polyglot Vancouver Meetup, then on to East Coast Games Conference and Vector in April.

Francesc will be presenting at Gophercon China in April, and will then head off to New York!

Then he’ll be back to San Francisco for GopherFest.

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Digging back into our archive of interviews from Google Cloud Next, Mark and Francesc talk to Brad Rydzewski, creator of Drone, about the open source continuous integration and delivery platform. We are also excited to have the amazing Jessie Frazelle joining us as well!

About Brad Rydzewksi Brad Rydzewski is the creator of the open source Drone project, which provides container based continuous delivery.

About Jessie Frazelle Jessie Frazelle is also part of the Google Cloud Platform Developer Advocacy team, and is generally known as “That container girl”, and is an avid “Door to door leenuux salesperson.”

Cool things of the week * Announcing general availability of Google Cloud Dataflow for Python blog * Google Cloud Platform for Data Scientists: Using R with Google Cloud SQL for MySQL blog * Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL: Managed PostgreSQL for your mobile and geospatial applications in Google Cloud blog

Interview * Drone homepage github * Drone on Container Engine github * Kubernetes Namespaces docs * Docker compose docs * Drone Plugins site

http://try.drone.io/

Question of the week This questions of the week comes from Rokesh Jankie:

What is protocol buffers, and why should we all start using it?

Protocol Buffers site
gRPC previously on the podcast episode 15 episode 43
FlatBuffers site

Where can you find us next? Mark will be heading to Vancouver Unity Games Meetup and Polyglot Vancouver Meetup, and then on to East Coast Games Conference and Vector in April.

Francesc will be presenting at Gophercon China in April, and will then head off to New York!

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The CEO and founder of Server Density, David Mytton, joins the podcast today to tell your co-hosts Mark and Francesc about their experience migrating from on-premise MongoDB to Cloud Bigtable.

Server Density provides an open source logging and monitoring solution running on Google Cloud Platform.

About David Mytton David Mytton is founder and CEO of Server Density, a scalable infrastructure monitoring software company. He built the original version of the product and founded the HumanOps community to discuss and share how to improve the human aspects of running infrastructure following experiences being on-call 24⁄7 for the first few years of the company.

Cool things of the week * TensorFlow and Deep Learning without a PhD part 1 and part 2 * Discover and redact sensitive data with the Data Loss Prevention API blog * Digging deep on PHP 7.1 for Google App Engine

Interview * Server Density homepage * Mongo DB homepage * Google Cloud Bigtable docs * OpenTSDB: The Scalable Time Series Database docs * Google Container Engine docs * Apache Kafka project * Designing your Bigtable schema docs * HumanOps community * Bigtable in action (Google Cloud Next ‘17) YouTube

Question of the week What region should I use to optimize access from where I am?

GCPing

Google Cloud Load Balancing docs

Where can you find us next? Mark will be heading to Polyglot Vancouver Meetup in April, and then on to East Coast Games Conference and Vector

Francesc just released the last episode of the Flappy Gopher miniseries of JustForFunc, and then will be presenting at Gophercon China in April.

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This week brings us back to an interview that we did while at Cloud Next last week. Mark and Francesc talk to William Bonnell, Senior Director of SRE at The Home Depot all about SRE culture, and the CRE team as well.

About William Bonnell William Bonnell is Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering at The Home Depot - managing the e-commerce and order management systems, support millions of customers per day!

Cool things of the week * 100 announcements (!) from Google Cloud Next ‘17 blog + Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) for Google Cloud Platform (Beta) site + Cloud.google.com/community site + Cloud SQL for Postgre SQL (Beta) site + 64 Core machines + more memory blog * A new issue tracker for Google Cloud Platform blog * Happy Pi Day! site

Interviews * 24⁄7 resiliency (Google Cloud Next ‘17) youtube * Smart, Secure, and Modern app delivery for enterprises and cloud-natives (Google Cloud Next ‘17) youtube * Building Microservices book * Production-Ready Microservices book * Site Reliability Engineering book * Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering blog * Managed Instance Groups docs

Question of the week Why should I be using Cloud Spanner, rather than Cloud SQL? (Thanks AJ!)

What’s the difference between Google Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL? quora
Cloud Spanner docs
Cloud Spanner Pricing docs

Where can you find us next? Mark will be heading to Polyglot Vancouver Meetup in April, and then on to East Coast Games Conference and Vector

Francesc will be presenting at Gophercon China in April.

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It is the last day of Google Cloud Next 2017 and we got two amazing interviews for you: Titan chips, head of Marketing, and head of Solution Architects, and more in a single episode!

One more day, Francesc and Mark are back with a daily episode from Google Cloud Next! Today we interview some of the many Google Cloud Partners attending the conference.

Daily Highlights * Full Day 3 Keynote * 100 announcements (!) from Google Cloud Next ‘17

Interviews ###### Cornelius and Neal

Cornelius Willis is the Head of Marketing for Google Cloud Platform, and Neal Mueller is a Product Marketing Lead also at Google Cloud Platform.

They joined us today to tell us more about Titan, a new Trusted Platform Module designed by Google and for Google Cloud Platform, and a very fancy jewelry accessory!

Watch Urs Hölzle talk about his earring/Trusted Platform Module here.

###### Miles Ward

Miles Ward is the Global Head of Solutions at Google Cloud Platform, and he joins us to share his Cloud Next experience and that of some of the many customers he got to interact with.

You can find all of our Google Cloud Platform Solutions at cloud.google.com/solutions.

More about Cloud Next This is the last episode of Google Cloud Next, but you can find a great amount of content on the Google Cloud YouTube Channel.

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One more day, Francesc and Mark are back with a daily episode from Google Cloud Next! Today we interview some of the many Google Cloud Partners attending the conference.

Video Highlights * Keynote Highlights in under 5 minutes! * Full Day 2 Keynote

Our favorite announcements * Free usage limits for Google Cloud Platform products cloud.google.com/free * PostgreSQL now available on Google Cloud SQL docs

Interviews ###### Martin Sleeman from Tableau

Martin Sleeman tells us about Tableau and the amazing demo they built for his talk that you can watch here:

Visualizing big data on Google Cloud.

###### Ed Bender from Fastly

Ed Bender joined us to talk about Fastly, an amazing edge network, and told us about their partnership and the history of their relationship with Google.

They also had a session and you can find all the details here Selecting the right storage class for your use-case: from content delivery and big data analytics to cold storage.

###### Jonathan Lieberman from Itopia

Itpopia is “The Fastest Way to Deploy Desktops in The Google Cloud” and its CEO and co-founder Jonathan Lieberman joined us to tell us all about it.

###### James Williams from Udacity

James Williams is an Android Curriculum Lead at Udacity. Udacity is an online education platform with some amazing Google courses (more here).

We also highlighted the Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes course, and you should definitely go check it out!

More about Cloud Next * You can watch the live stream! * Francesc’s talk is already online: Google Cloud Endpoints: serving your API to the world * Mark’s talk is also online here: Building massive online worlds with SpatialOS and Google Cloud Platform * More daily episodes to come - stay tuned! * Come find us on the ground floor at Moscone!

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Francesc and Mark are back again with our DAILY EPISODES from Cloud Next! Today we are bringing you interviews for a wide variety of speakers and attendees!

Video Highlights * Keynote Highlights in under 4 minutes! * Full Day 1 Keynote

Interviews ###### Sara Robinson

Sara Robinson is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform, and came to talk to us about her amazing keynote demo on The Google Cloud Video Intelligence API.

Francesc also references this Total Eclipse of the Heart Literal Video.

###### Sowmya Subramanian

Sowmya Subramanian came to talk to us about her experience being Director of Engineering at YouTube, and the panel she was on Driving Success through Diversity & Inclusion: Lessons from Leaders in Technology.

###### Tammy Bütow

Tammy Bütow, SRE Manager at Dropbox visited our booth to talk about SRE culture at Dropbox, and to talk about all the exciting things she had seen at Cloud Next!

###### Clare Bayley

Clare Bayley, Global Codelabs Lead gave us the inside scoop on how you can Codelabs both at Next, and at home - without the need for a Google Cloud Platform account. Check it out at https://google.qwiklabs.com/catalog.

More about Cloud Next * You can watch the live stream! * More daily episodes to come - stay tuned! * Come find us on the ground floor at Moscone!

https://twitter.com/tammybutow/status/839604540282290176

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This week brings your hosts Francesc and Mark doing DAILY EPISODES from Cloud Next! Today’s episode brings interviews straight from the Cloud Next Community Summit!

Interviews ###### Kalev Leetaru

Kalev Leetaru is the creator of the GDELT project, a global database of society, powered by Google Bigquery, Machine Learning APIs, and many other Google Cloud products.

###### Tim Kelton

Tim Kelton works at Descartes Labs and is here to show off his demo. Learn more about it on the blog post.

###### Verónica López

Verónica López joins us to talk about all the cool things she saw during the Community Summit and all the sessions she’s excited about day 1.

More about Cloud Next * You can watch the live stream! * More daily episodes to come - stay tuned! * Come find us on the ground floor at Moscone!

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Following the saga of episodes on programming languages today your co-hosts, Francesc and Mark, have the honor to talk to Jon Wayne Parrott, a Developer Programs Engineer at Google Cloud Platform, about Python on the cloud.

About Jon Wayne Jon Wayne focuses on the Python developer experience for Google Cloud Platform. He’s an active contributor to multiple open-source Python projects.

Cool things of the week * Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake blog * GPUs are now available for Google Compute Engine and Cloud Machine Learning blog * Developer Advocates offer up their favorite Google Cloud NEXT 17 sessions blog

Interviews * Python on Google Cloud Platform cloud.google.com/python * Python on App Engine Standard Environment docs * Python on App Engine Flexible Environment docs * A skeleton for creating Python applications using the Flask framework on App Engine GitHub

Question of the week * Can I send emails as part of a Cloud Datastore transaction? No, but you can use Task Queues docs

Where can you find us next? Mark is today at GDC and afterwards he’ll be speaking at Cloud NEXT, both in San Francisco.

Francesc is coming back from Gophercon India and on his way to Cloud NEXT.

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On the heels of the Cloud Spanner launch, Deepti Srivastava joins your hosts Francesc and Mark on this week’s podcast to talk all about this globally distributed, horizontally scalable, relational database that also provides global consistency and ACID transactions!

About Deepti Deepti Srivastava is passionate about technology and its ability to be a positive change enabler. As Product Manager for Cloud Spanner, on Google’s Cloud Platform, Srivastava works on best in class Cloud Databases and Storage technologies. Srivastava is an enthusiastic member of Women@Google and a passionate advocate of STEM education, especially for girls. She also enjoys dancing, snowboarding and all things fashion.

Cool thing of the week * Each Google Cloud Product described in 4 words or less tweet doc * Google Cloud and YouTube-8M Challenge blog

Interview * Cloud Spanner site docs * Introducing Cloud Spanner: a global database service for mission-critical applications blog * Inside Cloud Spanner and the CAP Theorem blog * Quizlet Tests Cloud Spanner — The Most Sophisticated Cloud Database blog * Don’t Give Up on Serializability Just Yet • Neha Nerula youtube * CAP Theorom wikipedia * Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database white paper * Spanner, TrueTime and the CAP Theorem white paper * Cloud Next: Cloud Spanner 101: Google’s mission-critical relational database schedule * Cloud Next: Cloud Spanner 201: getting the most out of Cloud Spanner schedule * Ben Sigelman will present Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database youtube

Spanner: No-Compromise Relational Database Service

Question of the week How do I run a mail server on the cloud?

Sending Mail from a Virtual Machine docs
Sending Email with SendGrid docs
Sending Email with Mailgun docs
Sending Email with Mailjet docs
SMTP relay: Route outgoing non-Gmail messages through Google docs

Were will we be? Mark will be at GDC and afterwards he’ll be speaking at Cloud NEXT, both in San Francisco.

Francesc will be at Gophercon India, at Cloud NEXT, and then Gopher China.

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You might have heard about Improbable teaming up with Google Cloud, and you might want to know more about it. Well, this episode is for you!

Rob Whitehead, CTO and co-founder of Improbable, joins the podcast to explain to your co-hosts, Mark and Francesc, everything there is to know about Improbable, SpatialOS, and their relationship to Google Cloud Platform.

About Rob Rob Whitehead co-founded Improbable in the summer of 2012 with a fellow Cambridge classmate, with the goal of creating a technology to digitally recreate and fully simulate the real and virtual worlds using the massive computational power of the cloud.

In a previous life, he was an indie iOS developer, and an arms dealer in Second Life!

Cool thing of the week * Google Cloud Endpoints now generally available: a fast, scalable API gateway blog post * Introducing Cloud Spanner: a global database service for mission-critical applications blog post * Inside Cloud Spanner and the CAP Theorem white paper

Interview * Google partners with Improbable to support next generation of video games blog post. * Improbable improbable.io * SpatialOS docs

A collision of two fully customized ships flying through the procedurally generated and persistent universe of Worlds Adrift, a game developed on SpatialOS. Read about the game’s origin story and technical details of its physics.

Join the SpatialOS Games Alpha here
Running CoreOS Container Linux on Google Compute Engine CoreOS docs
SpatialOS also use gRPC and Bazel.
What we found when we simulated the backbone of the entire Internet on SpatialOS blog post

Question of the week How can I resize a persistent disk?

Adding or Resizing Persistent Disks docs

Were will we be? Mark will be at GDC and afterwards hell be speaking at Cloud NEXT, both in San Francisco.

Francesc will speak tomorrow at the Go 1.8 release party in San Francisco. A bit later hell also be at Gophercon India.

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Answering the call from last episode, Soam Vasani joins your co-hosts, Mark and Francesc, today to tell them about Fission, a Function as a Service framework built on top of Kubernetes.

About Soam Soam Vasani is a software engineer at Platform9 Systems Inc, where he works on the Fission framework. In the past he’s worked on distributed storage and other stuff at VMware. He’s interested in languages, tools and frameworks, and distributed systems.

Cool thing of the week * Highly Available Kubernetes Clusters blog post * Continuous Delivery in a microservice infrastructure with Google Container Engine, Docker and Travis Medium * Delivering a better platform for your SQL Server Enterprise workloads blog post

Interview * Fission: Serverless Functions as a Service for Kubernetes blog post * Kubernetes home page * Fission: Serverless Functions for Kubernetes fission.io * Fission’s code GitHub * Fission examples GitHub * Serverless Computing Wikipedia

Question of the week Is there a way for me to secure my websocket connections on GCP? - TCP SSL Load Balancer docs - Deploying WebSockets cluster to GCP with Let’s Encrypt certificates Medium

Were will we be? Mark just released a blog post on game development sessions at Cloud Next. Next he will be at GDC and afterwards he’ll be speaking at Cloud NEXT, both in San Francisco.

Francesc, who just released a new episode of #justforfunc and a demo for Go plugins, will speak at the Go 1.8 release party in San Francisco. A bit later he’ll also be at Gophercon India.

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Our beloved teammate Paul Newson is back from his SRE rotation to tell us about all the lessons that he learned during all these months. Your co-hosts, Mark and Francesc, are as always here to ask all the burning questions.

About Paul Paul is an SRE Advocate at Google. As part of Google’s Cloud developer relations team, he helps our customers understand reliability best practices based on his experiences working as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) on Google Compute Engine and as a Software Engineer on Google Cloud Storage.

Before joining Google, he cofounded a tiny game technology startup, sold it to Microsoft, where he then worked on DirectX, Xbox, Xbox Live, and Forza Motorsport, before spending some time working on interesting machine learning problems in Microsoft Research.

Outside of work he enjoys rock climbing, motorcycling, and other activities that demand complete focus.

He doesn’t often post on social media, but when he does, he does it at @newsons_nybbles.

Cool thing of the week * Fission: Serverless Functions as a Service for Kubernetes Kubernetes blog * CRE Life Lessons blog post series * The SRE book is now free! read it online

Interview More episodes with Paul Newson:

Storage with Paul Newson episode 14
Site Reliability Engineering episode 38

Google Cloud Platform Podcast: Recent Episodes

Bill Scott

46: Borg and Kubernetes with John Wilkes gcppodcast.com

44: Cloud Endpoints with Dan Ciruli and Sepehr Ebrahimzadeh gcppodcast.com

31: TensorFlow with Eli Bixby gcppodcast.com

37: GKE 1.3 with Carter Morgan gcppodcast.com

43: gRPC at CoreOS with Brandon Philips gcppodcast.com

19: GCP Next Speakers gcppodcast.com

23: Humble Bundle with Andy Oxfeld gcppodcast.com

52: Google Developer Experts Summit gcppodcast.com

25: Go on the Cloud with Andrew Gerrand and Chris Broadfoot gcppodcast.com

38: Site Reliability Engineering with Paul Newson gcppodcast.com

43: gRPC at CoreOS with Brandon Philips gcppodcast.com