Google Cloud Platform Podcast

2020 Year End Wrap Up

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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

Cool things of the week

A Giant List of Google Cloud Resources blog
Google Cloud 4 Words site

Our favorite episodes

Jon’s Favorites
- GCP Podcast Episode 212: Data Management with Amy Krishnamohan podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 237: NVIDIA with Bryan Catanzaro podcast
Priyanka’s Favorite
- GCP Podcast Episode 240: reCAPTCHA Enterprise with Kelly Anderson + Spring ML Potholes with Eric Clark podcast
Mark’s Favorites
- GCP Podcast Episode 242: NASA and FDL with James Parr and Madhulika Guhathakurta podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 228: Fastly with Tyler McMullen podcast
Brian’s Favorites
- GCP Podcast Episode 223: Voice Coding with Emily Shea and Ryan Hileman podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 233: Bare Metal Solution with James Harding and Gurmeet Goindi podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 212: Data Management with Amy Krishnamohan podcast

Sound Effects Attribution

“Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org
“Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“It’s Always Night in Space” by JamesSilvera of HDInteractive.com
“Easy Cheesy” by LoboLoco of FreeMusicArchive.org

NASA and FDL with James Parr and Madhulika Guhathakurta

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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

From saving Earth from asteroids to conducting research on our sun, James describes the process of solving these solar system sized problems, starting with creating a solid team. Machine Learning is a team sport, he says, and like making a Hollywood film, it takes many people from different backgrounds to find these solutions. The cloud has been integral in facilitating this meeting of the minds and the analyzing of data at FDL.

Later, we talk about the process of astronomical research before the current technological age and how techniques have advanced into the 21st century. James tells us the origin story of FDL and how they were tasked with applying Machine Learning to complex problems like planetary defense and space weather. Lika describes space weather and details how it impacts our planet. We talk about the role of data engineers in the team sport of astro-research and how data is collected and analyzed. Lika emphasizes the benefits of building a working system and how the processes can be applied to many other disciplines.

James and Lika wrap up the show with a look at what cool things they expect in the future.

James Parr

James is Director of the Frontier Development Lab, in partnership with NASA ARC and the SETI Institute. FDL has successfully demonstrated that structured interdisciplinary problem solving, sprint methodologies, radical collaboration methods and partnering with leaders in commercial AI, such as Google Cloud, are powerful amplifiers in applying AI to the science and technology goals of space agencies.

Madhulika(Lika) Guhathakurta, PhD

For the past two decades, Lika has led the development of Heliophysics as an integrated scientific discipline from which fundamental discoveries about our universe provide direct societal benefits. As the Lead for the Living With a Star (LWS) program for 16 years (2001-2016), she made possible the flagship missions (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Van Allen Probes, Solar Orbiter Collaboration and Parker Solar Probe) including STEREO that would revolutionize our understanding of how the Sun shapes space weather in the solar system.

To accelerate innovation and scientific discovery she created funding mechanisms to shepherd traditional domain scientists out of their comfort zones to create LWS system science known as Targeted Research & Technology program and Focused Science Teams that foster competitive, yet collaborative environments that promote the crosspollination of ideas and technology.

To nurture the next generation of leaders in Heliophysics, she created the Jack Eddy Fellowship Program which has become an important channel for the professional growth of promising researchers and has been successful at promoting the careers of many women scientists reaching 50% parity with men.

Since 2017, she was the driving force at NASA Headquarters and at NASA Ames behind the growth of Frontier Development Laboratory, both in terms of the breadth of problem areas tackled as well as in the number of agency and industry partners (e.g. Google, Nvidia, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Planet). The types of innovative solutions include virtual telescopes, data fusion, edge computing, and autonomy and this approach will have an enduring imprint on the way science and exploration is carried out by future generations.

Cool things of the week

Prepare for Google Cloud certification with one free month of new Professional Certificates on Coursera blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 239: Cloud Learning Services with Nandhini Rangan and Magda Jary podcast
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Collects Significant Amount of Asteroid site

Interview

NASA site
Frontier Development Lab (FDL) site
Oort Information site

Sound Effects Attribution

“Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org
“Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org

HPC with Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis + Deloitte Cyber Analytics with Eric Dull

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark and Brian are together this week, hosting our guests Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis as we discuss High Performance Computing with Google. HPC uses powerful computers to solve problems that would otherwise be too large or take too long for standard machines. Innovation and advances in cloud technology have made this resource more accessible, more scalable, and more affordable.

Senanu lists some great use cases for HPC, including vehicle manufacturing and the medical field and describes how these markets benefit from the extra power HPC offers. Ilias talks tech and helps us understand the evolution of the Google HPC offering and the architecture most often used with HPC. He explains the benefits of HPC on the cloud over the old way, emphasizing the flexibility of choosing machines based on your code rather than forcing your code onto small machines. Storage of data is flexible, scalable, and secure as well. Diminishing VM to VM latency has been an important advancement in HPC, and Ilias describes how Google has decreased latency.

Google Cloud customers are using the HPC offering for all kinds of large computing jobs, and Senanu details some of these real world instances. From Covid vaccine research to disaster evacuation planning, HPC on the cloud is changing the way we process data. Later, Ilias tells our listeners how to get started with their HPC project.

Senanu Aggor

Senanu Aggor is the Product Marketing Manager for Google Cloud’s High Performance Computing (HPC) solution.

Ilias Katsardis

Ilias Katsardis is the HPC Solution Lead for the Customer Engineering team (EMEA) at Google. In this role, Ilias brings over 14 years of experience in the cloud computing and high-performance computing industries to promote Google Cloud’s state-of-the-art infrastructure for complex HPC workloads. Previously, he worked as an applications analyst at Cray Inc., where he was a dedicated analyst to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and, prior to that, was an HPC application specialist at ClusterVision. Ilias also founded two startups Airwire Networks in 2006 and Performance Hive in 2017.

Cool things of the week

What’s happening in BigQuery: Time unit partitioning, Table ACLs and more blog
BigQuery explained: Blog series blog
BigQuery Spotlight videos
Cloud Functions vs. Cloud Run video

Interview

High Performance Computing site
GCP Podcast Episode 237: NVIDIA with Bryan Catanzaro podcasdt
GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast
Compute Engine site
Compute Engine Machine Types site
Cloud Storage site
Cloud Firestore site
Google Cloud with Intel site
Cloud GPUs site
Best practices for running tightly coupled HPC applications on Compute Engine site
Super Computing Event site

Stackchat at home

This week, Max Saltonstall is talking cyber analytics with Eric Dull from Deloitte.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise with Kelly Anderson + Spring ML Potholes with Eric Clark

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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

Later, we focus on reCAPTCHA Enterprise which caters this security software to enterprise companies. Like version three, Enterprise boasts detailed risk analysis and actions. Companies can also expect reason codes for high risk scores and the ability to use the risk analysis engine customized to their company. They are able to find bots impersonating users and neutralize them easily. reCAPTCHA Enterprise is easy to use, whether you’re a Google Cloud customer or not. With the handy API, any company can take advantage of this security feature. Kelly leads us through the steps of deploying the API and details instances where this software plays a vital role in the protection of your website across multiple devices.

Kelly takes us through the reCAPTCHA Enterprise dashboard and talks about the future as we conclude the show. reCAPTCHA hopes to move beyond behavioral protection to continue to stay ahead of malicious actors online. As Kelly explains, Machine Learning will become more and more important as fraud detection continues to grow and change.

Kelly Anderson

Kelly Anderson currently leads product marketing for Google Cloud’s online fraud protection business. She devotes most of her time to working on reCAPTCHA Enterprise and Web Risk and is passionate about helping businesses and their customers stay protected from fraud and abuse. Prior to Google, she worked in product marketing for Microsoft in Azure, where she marketed a variety of security products and business continuity products. For more information about Kelly Anderson and her leather jacket, you can follow her on Twitter.

Cool things of the week

Introducing HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Cloud Run blog
Introducing Google Workspace blog

Interview

reCAPTCHA Enterprise site
reCAPTCHA enterprise product demo video
Top 10 use cases for reCAPTCHA Enterprise to defend against OWASP Web-Automated Attacks site
Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise: Frictionless, Flexible, and Effective Web App Security site

Stackchat at home

This week, Max Saltonstall is fixing potholes in Memphis with Eric Clark of SpringML.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka has been working on Google Cloud Whiteboard episodes Operations and CDN. She’s been working on new comic strips for zero trust and new GCPSketchnotes as well!

Cloud Learning Services with Nandhini Rangan and Magda Jary

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Jon Foust joins Mark this week as we talk with Nandhini Rangan and Magda Jary about Cloud Learning Services. The Cloud Learning Services team is passionate about helping technical practitioners elevate their careers and transform businesses by building and validating in-demand Google Cloud skills. Nandhini explains that a lack of technical practitioners with skills in the cloud is one of the biggest barriers to entry for companies considering the shift. But with the right knowledge, companies that take full advantage of cloud environments are proven to be more efficient, reach more of their goals, and overall, be more successful. Cloud Learning Services offerings empower technical practitioners and companies to learn new skills, put these skills into practice, and achieve their objectives.

Magda tells us that these training courses focus around job roles in the cloud. The cloud has necessitated a shift in the idea of development learning, she tells us, explaining that nowadays, the focus is on job roles, like Data Scientist, and the technological requirements of that job rather than learning one coding language.

We talk later about the specific offerings Cloud Learning Services provides. With a focus on hands-on learning, technical practitioners are put into the real Google Cloud environment with Qwiklabs, while videos and lectures accompany the material. Job-specific skill badges and certifications are earned as courses are completed, allowing technical practitioners and employers to better understand what proficiency in each job role looks like. Our guests tell us more about Qwiklabs and how its sandbox environment facilitates better learning without the added cost and commitment of services that they may not be ready to use. When the time for real-world development comes, this hands-on approach means no disconnect between learning and applying. We talk more about the Challenge Labs used to test learning and the skill badges earned on completion.

To wrap up, we discuss the future of Cloud Learning Services and how the team stays on top of new technologies and job roles to keep learning materials updated and fun. The team is working on new material for badging and certifying business professionals as well.

Resources to check out to learn more about Google Cloud training and certifications: https://cloud.google.com/training https://cloud.google.com/certification

Follow a learning path designed to help you prepare for the certification most suited to your role: https://g.co/cloud/getcertified

Nandhini Rangan

Nandhini Rangan works at Google Cloud Learning and is very passionate about the topic of upskilling, reskilling, and especially for cloud roles that are needed in organizations today, but also defining the roles and jobs of the future. She is based in Canada and works out of Toronto. She started her career as a Software Engineer, went on and got her MBA and then spent many years in operations and strategy including a stint as a management consultant. Learning was always top of mind for her and she decided to make the jump to join a learning organization full time in 2018 with Google Cloud. She launched the Google Cloud Technical Residency program, worked in the Higher Education learning space bringing programs to faculty and students globally, and currently works as a learning portfolio manager helping bring cloud training content closer to its audiences.

Magda Jary

Magda Jary is responsible for all aspects of Google Cloud Certification and Digital Badges go-to market and her mission is to grow Cloud skill sets. She joined Google in 2008 after graduating with two Masters degrees: Media and Communications at Warsaw School of Economics and International Management at Rotterdam School of Management. Currently based in San Francisco, she has been leading global learning and engagement programs for Google Cloud customers and partners. Magda is a frequent guest speaker at events dedicated to skills development, diversity, and women in tech. She is a certified yoga teacher and has completed a mindfulness teacher certification. She teaches the Search Inside Yourself training at Google, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course for leaders.

Cool things of the week

Announcing Google Cloud Public Sector Summit, a free global digital event: Dec. 8-9 blog
5 tips for more interactive meetings with Q&A and Polls, rolling out to Google Meet blog
Add a more accurate sense of place to your applications using these five YouTube tutorials blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 181: Google Maps Platform with Angela Yu podcast

Interview

Google Cloud Training site
Google Cloud Skill Badges site
Qwiklabs site
Deploy to Kubernetes in Google Cloud site
Professional Machine Learning Engineer Certification site
Coursera site
Codelabs site
TSIA Star Awards site

Question of the week

I’ve been interested in the Cloud Architect Certification and after listening to the interview, I’ve be inspired to look into taking it. What training material is available for preparing for the exam?

Check out the Google Cloud certification, Professional Cloud Architect certification, and the Preparing for the Professional Cloud Architect Examination Qwiklab.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Jon finished Game Summit last week and is back to creating Open Match content, specifically on submitting request from games and writing a match function in a language you may be familiar with!

ASML with Arnaud Hubaux

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

ML in machinery is our main topic this week as Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey talk with Arnaud Hubaux, development lead for ASML. Our good friend, fellow Googler, and ML specialist Dale Markowitz joins the conversation as well!

With a potent combination of physics and Machine Learning, ASML develops machines that build the chips powering our essential devices. These highly refined machines optimize production for each specific customer, detect defects, and make corrections quickly and accurately by harnessing the power of Machine Learning. The machines also effectively train themselves to ensure the intense accuracy required is sustained over time. Arnaud describes the process these machines go through in order to accomplish these goals, including how they build and train their ML models with the help of physics.

Arnaud tells us how the machine’s closed ML system works from zero to train the particular job it will do. By taking a minimum spec chip that has already been created, the machine learns the process for creating that chip and continues to improve that process. These machines are not only able to detect problems but can figure out why these issues are occurring, decreasing production downtime.

Recently, ASML moved to Google Cloud. We talk about the products they use, why they chose Google Cloud, and their journey to the cloud.

Arnaud Hubaux

Arnaud Hubaux is development lead for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning products at ASML. He works with the world’s biggest chip manufacturers on AI-driven solutions to solve problems like optimizing production yield. As a trailblazer, Arnaud and his team implemented the first ASML AI application development pipeline on Google Cloud. With a PhD on applied constraint solving, Arnaud has deep experience as an architect of software platforms and product lifecycle management.

Cool things of the week

Cloud migration: What you need to know (and where to find it) blog
All together now: Fleet-wide monitoring for your Compute Engine VMs blog
SRE Classroom: exercises for non-abstract large systems design blog
gVisor: Protecting GKE and serverless users in the real world blog

Interview

ASML site
ASML in One Minute video
Zoom in on the chip in your smartphone video
KubeFlow site
BigQuery site
AI Platform Notebooks site
Cloud Build site
Introduction to Kubeflow video
Intro to Kubeflow Pipelines video
How to Build a Kubeflow Pipeline video

Tip of the week

We have a super cool tip on combining AI and WTH with meetings and webcams! Check out the Level Up - AI Director and Level Up - Real-Time Video Translation with AR Subtitles videos!

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Mark is working on some upcoming Kubernetes content.

Brian is working on an upcoming series of GCE videos with Carter Morgan.

NVIDIA with Bryan Catanzaro

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mirchandani and Jon Foust are together again this week, speaking with NVIDIA VP of Applied Deep Learning Research Bryan Catanzaro. Bryan and his team focus on using deep learning to enhance NVIDIA’s offerings.

Since Bryan was last a guest on the show, NVIDIA has been doing some amazing things. We talk about the A100 Tensor Core GPU and the massive effort it took to create, the new RTX graphics cards great for gaming, and the differences between them. Bryan explains how the new A100 chips compare to the previous versions, saying the new chips are larger, but with almost three times the power, making them ideal for things like precise calculations. And, as Bryan says, with better computation and more insight, we can make discoveries that benefit humanity. While the new RTX graphic cards are cheaper than previous versions, they are faster and more powerful, making gaming and video streaming much more enjoyable. Background noises and objects can even be removed with the help of deep learning.

Jon and Bryan talk about The Black Box at NVIDIA and what demos Jon hopes to see on his next visit. With this as the catalyst, Bryan talks more about how the NVIDIA architecture and the deep learning they employ have created efficient 8k graphics rendering for truly powerful gaming experiences. Outside of gaming, DLSS could have farther reaching benefits as the model learns new purposes, and Bryan talks us through some fun examples.

With the acquisitions of Mellanox and ARM, Bryan explains that NVIDIA has been able to streamline networking and really take advantage of powerful performance at all stages. The future of AI and HPC is about the data center, Bryan explains, and NVIDIA is hoping to push the boundaries on latency reduction and more.

Bryan Catanzaro

Bryan Catanzaro is VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, where he leads a team finding new ways to use deep learning for graphics, speech, audio, and system design. His research led to the creation of the CUDNN library.

Cool things of the week

Introducing interactive code samples in Google Cloud documentation blog
GCP Podcast Episode 228: Fastly with Tyler McMullen podcast
Fastly Offers First Partner Edge Cloud-Based Content Delivery Solution on Google Cloud Marketplace press release and marketplace

Interview

NVIDIA site
NVIDIA A100 site
NVIDIA RTX 30 Series site
Mellanox site
ARM site
Cuda site
GCP Podcast Episode 119: NVIDIA and Deep Learning Research with Bryan Catanzaro podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast
Digital GTC site

Tip of the week

Zack Akil is here this week with a tip about ML on the edge with Teachable Machine and AutoML.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Jon has been working on Open Match which went 1.0 recently! He’s been working on samples for matchfunctions, sending requests from game clients, and putting all that content out for the world to play with!

IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) with Matthew Lawson

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew Lawson of IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) joins Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia today, telling us all about IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s move to the cloud. Engineering Manager Matt and his team primarily focus on the early stages of development at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), helping the company with research and planning as well as development. Lately, they have been focused on incrementally moving IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s digital presence to the cloud.

Matt explains the digital shift process for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) and why they chose to modernize and move pieces to the cloud over time. By illustrating through examples, he details projects the team worked on during this digital transformation. Matt also talks about the changes to the IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) Digital DNA, emphasizing progress made in their digital culture to allow for the drastic change from on-prem to the cloud. Using managed services like Google Cloud Run, IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) has been able to adapt and grow in the cloud. Because IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s culture is developer-supportive, Matt and his team were able to research and convince the company that managed services in the cloud was the way to go, and developers were allowed some autonomy to choose things like GKE to create an effective cloud environment for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group).

Next year, Matt and his engineering team are hoping to run some online hackathons and other events.

Matthew Lawson

Matthew Lawson is responsible for leading a small innovation team at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) in southern Sweden. He has worked within the IT/Digital industry for 13 years and has deep experience and knowledge in application development, automation, DevOps and cloud technologies - especially serverless. He has a deep passion for enabling teams to quickly provide business value across the entire digital and physical customer journey.

Cool things of the week

Next OnAir as it happens: All the announcements in one place blog
A developer’s take: Get the most out of Cloud AI Week at Next OnAir blog
BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. brings PAC-MAN to the real world in PAC-MAN GEO blog

Interview

IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) site
Matt’s Next Session: Serverless Functions (FaaS): Secure, Scalable, Resilient, Anywhere site
ML Kit site
Compute Engine site
Cloud Run site
Google Cloud Functions site
Pub/Sub site
BigQuery site
GKE site
Firestore site
IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) is hiring! site

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka is working on sketches like this summary of Google Cloud Next and more GCP Comics!

Active Assist with Chris Law + MariaDB SkySQL with Robert Hedgepeth

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Max Saltonstall is back in the co-host seat, joining Mark for a fun chat about Active Assist. Chris Law is our guest this week, and he starts with the story of his arrival at Google and his path to the Active Assist team. Active Assist is Google’s way of helping clients learn about and take advantage of all the cloud features available.

Chris describes the main ways Active Assist helps customers in the real world, from troubleshooting tools that identify problems to analysis software that helps clients determine how changes will effect the project. Active Assist also provides recommendations for cost savings, better security, and performance boosters to help clients proactively build better projects. As companies scale, these features become even more important, Chris tells us, citing examples from real users.

Later, we talk about how machine learning is employed to create these recommendations. We talk transparency and learn how Chris and his team keep open communication with clients as they design and improve client security structures. In the future, the Active Assist team will continue to work with departments across Google Cloud and build more recommendations tools for customers. DataFlow and BigQuery are some of the recommendations projects coming soon. More automation will be introduced as well, helping clients do things like scale automatically based on machine learning analysis done behind the scenes.

Chris Law

Chris has helped to start several companies in the past, everything from Social Networking (Tribe.net) to Aggregate Knowledge, which started out as a Recommendations company and moved into Data Management Platform in the Ads space. He joined Google to see what it’s like to build things at scale.

Cool things of the week

Cloud Next Week 9: Business Application Platform site
From One to More: Why Sharing Our Narrative Matters site
The 2020 Doodle for Google national finalists are here blog
Explore Kids Space: A way to nurture your kid’s curiosity blog

Interview

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

Stack Chat at Home

This week, we talk to Rob Hedgepeth about SkySQL.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Max is working on quite a few things, from fixing his dishwasher and teaching his family new board games to a new animated Google series with Jen Person.

GKE Turns Five with Alex Zakonov and Drew Bradstock

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This week on the podcast, we’re celebrating GKE’s fifth birthday! Mark Mirchandani is joined by special guest host Carter Morgan to talk all things Kubernetes and GKE with fellow Googlers and GKE experts Alex and Drew.

Drew starts the show with a thorough explanation of Kubernetes, telling our hosts that its a great way to manage containers as you scale. Because it is an open source offering, Kubernetes has grown and adapted quickly. Alex elaborates, pointing out that Kubernetes has helped redefine how people create cloud native applications. A year after Kubernetes was born, Google introduced Google Kubernetes Engine to help simplify things for developers while optimizing scalability and efficiency.

Our guests talk about the progression of GKE over its short life, what’s new with the latest version, and why reliability and scalability have become the focus for year six. Later, we hear examples of companies taking advantage of everything GKE has to offer and how the symbiotic relationship between Google and its customers has helped GKE grow. In the world of gaming, GKE’s global scaling capabilities have been vital. Drew talks about Anthos, explaining that it helps businesses run Kubernetes in their controlled on-prem system while leaving the option for an easy cloud migration in the future.

We wrap up the show with a look into the Kubernetes crystal ball where Drew sees a more adaptive Kubernetes and GKE. Alex hopes to continue to simplify GKE, making it easier and easier to use anywhere in the world.

Alex Zakonov

Alex Zakonov leads Google Kubernetes Engine team being responsible for operations of Google K8S fleet and for driving innovation in the K8S management. Prior to Google, Alex led a portfolio of products for Azure Monitoring at Microsoft enabling Azure customers to reliably operate and scale their applications. Alex has co-founded two successful start-ups, one of which, AVIcode, was acquired by Microsoft. Alex brings experience and passion in building and operating large scale systems and enabling engineering teams to deliver innovation at scale.

Drew Bradstock

Drew Bradstock leads product management for Google Kubernetes Engine. He previously worked on Google Ad Exchange and is based in Waterloo, Ontario in the Great White North of Canada.

Cool things of the week

New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers blog
Week 8 of Cloud Next: Cloud AI site
- Interpreting ML Models with Explainable AI site
How I Launched This: A SaaS Story podcast

Interview

Kubernetes site
GKE site
Bare Metal Solution site
Optimize cost to performance on Google Kubernetes Engine video
Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs
Anthos site
Start your K8s learning journey with hands-on training at no cost site
Kubernetes Podcast podcast

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

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

Sound Effect Attribution

A wonky midi version of the Superman Theme was used comedically at the end of this episode. The powerful and moving original symphonic music composed by John Williams can be found here.

Bare Metal Solution with James Harding and Gurmeet Goindi

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark and Brian Dorsey are together again this week as we learn all about Google’s Bare Metal Solution with our guests James Harding and Gurmeet “GG” Goindi. To start the show, GG introduces us to Bare Metal Solution, explaining that it allows client projects built on specialized, often outdated software to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud environment. Using Bare Metal Solution, clients can choose to migrate all or part of their projects for a fully customized experience.

We learn how Bare Metal Solution is able to support a partial or full native solution for clients and go through the steps to getting a project from completely on-prem to the cloud where latency is decreased, security is increased, and other cloud benefits can be leveraged. GG gives examples of situations where Bare Metal is a great option for clients, for instance an established company with an early 90s database that recently branched out into apps built in cloud native software. James outlines the benefits of Bare Metal Solution over other options, including real world examples of industries that have been able to modernize their offerings and adapt with the Bare Metal.

GG and James wrap up the show explaining why the open source aspect of Bare Metal is so important to the evolution and flexibility of the product, and we talk about the recent developments at Bare Metal.

James Harding

James Harding leads the Data Management Practice for North America, with responsibility for the go-to-market strategy for all products and services data mangement. He also oversees marketing campaigns and sales field enablement.

Gurmeet “GG” Goindi

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

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud Next Week 7: Application Modernization site
Brian’s Cloud Next Presentation: Where Should I Run My Stuff? Choosing Compute Options site
Mark’s Cloud Next Presentation: What’s New in Google Cloud Cost Management site
Announcing the general availability of Google Cloud Game Servers blog

Interview

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

Stack Chat Segment of the Week

Max talks to Deloitte about how they built their system to help groups collect and respond to COVID-19 data on our Stack Chat Segment this week!

What’s something cool you’re working on?

NCAA bracket predictions on QwikLabs
Here’s a hint for next week’s episode! GKE Turns 5: What’s New?

Sanity.io with Simen Svale Skogsrud and Knut Melvær

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This week on the podcast, Mark and Max Saltonstall talk with Simen Svale Skogsrud and Knut Melvær of Sanity.io. Sanity.io started as a consulting company but organically morphed into a software company when they realized their content management solutions worked across many industries. By providing a managed system that includes search indexing and data hosting, Sanity.io allows customers to analyze and deliver content all over the world with ease. They also offer an open source kit that facilitates complete customization of the program to each client’s particular needs.

Simen explains headless CMS as compared to the conventional systems and how it benefits Sanity.io clients. Data is separate and much more flexible, allowing it to be used in any way on any platform. Knut tells us about the developer experience using Sanity, describing the dashboard of useful APIs and other features that make using the program a breeze. We talk about how real clients have influenced and built on the product and why customer service is so important to Sanity.

Later in the show, our guests go in-depth about specific features of Sanity, including how the system handles different types of data and data relationships. We get technical, talking about the importance of scaling and how Sanity is accomplishing this with Google Cloud and Kubernetes. Simen and Knut offer our listeners some valuable advice on product launching, time management, and more.

Knut Melvær

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

Simen Svale Skogsrud

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

Cool things of the week

The Anywhere School: 50+ Google for Education updates blog
It’s Week 6 of Next site
Google Cloud and Spotify Demo at Next site
Bare Metal Solution talk from GG site

Interview

Sanity.io site
Get Started with Sanity.io site
Get Started with Sanity CLI site
Sanity.io Careers site
Sanity.io Docs site
OMA site
Bengler site
Kubernetes site

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Max is blogging about identity and security and access control. Here’s his latest post with Jen Person, Zero Trust for Enterprise : Cooking up some access controls. Mark and Max have been working on turning their popular YouTube Series, Stack Chat, into a new addition to the podcast! Join us next week to hear the first installment!

SpringML and Iron Mountain with Prabhu Palanisamy and Jarrett Garcia

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Priyanka is back this week, joining Mark as we talk big data with our guests Prabhu Palanisamy and Jarrett Garcia. Iron Mountain, a data management company, securely stores hard-copy and online data for enterprise customers. SpringML aides enterprises in the use of data analytics and machine learning to transform their projects. With the help of SpringML and Google Cloud, Iron Mountain migrated much of their data to datalakes and cloud storage for easier access and manipulation of the data.

Jarrett and Prabhu talk about the process of migrating so much data, including the main goals of their partnership. First, they established systems that could be repeated and help Iron Mountain understand when data is moved, destroyed, migrated, and more. We discuss the next steps taken, learning how Iron Mountain moved so much data to the cloud. Using Google products like DataFlow, BigQuery, and Cloud Composer, SpringML was able to take the data from Iron Mountain’s landing zone and transform it. Prior planning meant that the system was optimized and ready from the beginning, complete with automation and tools to make a fast, effective migration of data without any restructuring. Later, the data visualization is done by GSuite, Google Data Studio, and Looker so Iron Mountain and their customers can use the data for analysis.

Later in the show, Jarrett describes real-life situations in which Iron Mountain has helped manage, migrate, and store data for customers. Prabhu details the lessons SpringML learned while working on this project and offers advice to other developers. He talks about the future of the project, explaining that now that the data has been migrated, more detailed analytics can be performed and machine learning projects added on to augment Iron Mountain’s offerings.

Jarrett Garcia

Jarrett Garcia recently joined Iron Mountain as the Director of Enterprise Data. At Iron Mountain, Jarrett is working closely with the executive leadership team to build a robust Enterprise Data Platform in the cloud. His partnership with Google Cloud is a critical component to the transformation journey. Before coming to Iron Mountain, Jarrett worked as a Lead Architect at Nielsen within their Technology R&D team to create an AI/ML platform in the cloud. Jarrett has been at the forefront in introducing modern technologies into the organization such as Docker, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes. Before that, he lead the Data Science technology team where he spent over a decade building analytic tools and ushering in new technology.

Prabhu Palanisamy

Prabhu Palanisamy is co-founder of SpringML. He has a long history of running data-driven consulting organizations from Software AG to Appirio. Building on relationships he created leading integration and analytics services, Prabhu co-founded SpringML, a next generation data analytics company that serves data intensive industries. Prabhu constantly questions the conventional way of doing things and finds ways to be creative and innovative for customer business problems.

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud Next Week 5: Data Analytics site
Best practices for performance and cost optimization for machine learning site
Building smarter games with Machine Learning video
Anthos in a Minute video
What is BigQuery? video

Interview

SpringML site
Iron Mountain site
BigQuery site
Google Cloud Storage site
Dataflow site
Cloud Composer site
GSuite site
Data Studio site
Looker site
Scaling Data-Driven Insights Across a Complex Global Organization with Looker and BigQuery site

Tip of the week

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

What is BigQuery? video
Visualizing query results video

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and Sketchnote.

Traffic Director and Microservices with Stewart Reichling and John Laham

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey talk with fellow Googlers John Laham and Stewart Reichling about Traffic Director, a managed control plane for service mesh. Traffic Director solves many common networking problems developers face when breaking apart monoliths into multiple, manageable microservices. We start the conversation with some helpful definitions of terms like data plane (the plane that data passes through when one service calls on another) and service mesh (the art of helping these microservices speak with each other) and how Traffic Director and the Envoy Proxy use these concepts to streamline distributed services.

Envoy Proxy can handle all sorts of networking solutions, from policy enforcement to routing, without adding hundreds of lines of code to each project piece. The proxy can receive a request, process it, and pass it on to the next correct piece, speeding up your distributed system processes. But Envoy can do more than the regular proxy. With its xDS APIs, services can configure proxies automatically, making the process much more efficient. In some instances, the same benefits developers see with a distributed system can be gained from distributed proxies as well. To make distributed proxy configuration easy and manageable, a managed control plane system like Traffic Director is the solution. Traffic Director not only helps you facilitate communication between microservices, it also syncs distributed states across regions, monitors your infrastructure, and more.

Stewart Reichling

Stewart is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stewart leads Product Management for Traffic Director (Google’s managed control plane for open service mesh) and Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing (Google’s managed, Envoy-based Layer 7 load balancer). He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across strategy, Marketing and Product Management at Google.

John Laham

John is an infrastructure architect and cloud solutions architect that works with customers to help them build their applications and platforms on Google Cloud. Currently, he leads a team of consultants and engineers as part of the Google Cloud Professional Services organization, aligned to the telco, media, entertainment and gaming verticals.

Cool things of the week

Week four sessions of Cloud Next: Security site
Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel Week 2 site
Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel Week 3 site
Cost optimization on Google Cloud for developers and operators site
- GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast

Interview

Traffic Director site
Envoy Proxy site
NGINX site
HAProxy site
Kubernetes site
Cloud Run site
Service Mesh with Traffic Director site
Traffic Director Documentation site
gRPC site
Traffic Director and gRPC—proxyless services for your service mesh blog

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Brian is working on the Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel we mentioned in the cool things this week and continuing his Terraform studies.

Check out the Immutable Infrastructure video we talked about last week.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Lucidworks with Radu Miclaus

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mirchandani is joined again by Priyanka Vergadia this week for an ML-filled interview with Radu Miclaus of Lucidworks. Lucidworks, a company specializing in information retrieval, strives to make data searching easier for developers and users. Building off Solr, Lucidworks created Fusion, an environment more conducive to easy AI-enhanced query capabilities, better scalability, and more. With Fusion, developers can take advantage of the highly advanced relevance tuning tools such as query rewrites, which analyze user behavior and automatically rewrite queries based on that information.

On the tech side, Fusion was built with a combination of Java, Kubernetes to increase scalability, Solr management tools, and logging and reporting tools. The engineers at Lucidworks have created Fusion-specific system-enhancing pieces as well, including a machine learning service that allows data scientists to train their models elsewhere and plug them in for a completely customized experience. The team also created Smart Answers, which is a Q-And-A system built on a search engine that can connect to chatbots, virtual assistants, and others. Radu goes into detail explaining the Smart Answers system and how the layers of the project work together. We also learn about the customization capabilities and integration of Smart Answers.

Radu wraps up the show with interesting use-case stories and how Fusion is working in the real world. In the future, Lucidworks will be available right in the GCP marketplace!

Radu Miclaus

Radu has over 12 years of experience in the data science space with applications in general machine learning architecture, search, customer analytics, risk and financial analysis. At Lucidworks, Radu focuses on low-code AI for search developers, pluggable machine learning for data scientists, and cloud managed services that offload the burden of operating search applications.

Cool things of the week

Week 2 sessions on productivity and collaboration site
Online shopping gets more personal with Recommendations AI blog
Using new traffic control features in External HTTP(S) load balancer blog
Optimizing your costs on Compute Engine video
Google Cloud Talks by DevRel site
Giving you better cost analytics capabilities—and a simpler invoice blog
GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast

Interview

Lucidworks site
Solr site
Lucene site
Fusion site
Try Fusion site
Smart Answers site
Spark site
Kubernetes site
GKE site
Dialogflow site
Webinar: Smart Answers for Employee and Customer Support After COVID-19 site
Deconstructing Chatbots video
GCP Podcast Episode 227: Pandium with Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 195: Conversational AI Best Practices with Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha podcast

Tip of the week

We’re talking to Dale Markowitz about Prototyping Machine Learning projects.

You can also hear more from Dale in GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz and GCP Podcast Episode 194: ML with Dale Markowitz.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and Sketchnote.

Fastly with Tyler McMullen

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tyler McMullen of Fastly is with us today, telling our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey all about the company, CDNs, and more.

Fastly is an edge cloud platform, focusing on ways to improve the more customer-focused side of the cloud with things like latency reduction, efficient scaling, and more. Content Delivery Networks can be a part of this, due to their proximity to customers and better caching. Edge cloud takes pieces of normal cloud setups and moves them to the edge of the cloud, closer to the customer, to achieve better speed. Tyler explains what pieces make sense to move out to the edge and what he sees as the future of edge cloud platforms.

Later in the show, Tyler tells us how to analyze projects and make decisions on the use of edge cloud, CDNs, and microservices. He explains the technical process of using an edge cloud platform too, giving examples of situations that might benefit from a more edge cloud approach. WebAssembly, technology originally created for web browsers, actually plays a role in Fastly’s edge platforms, Tyler explains, going further into the technical side of how the engineers at Fastly have created this system to run smoothly while also being easy to build on.

In the future, Tyler hopes to see WebAssembly support more languages so compiling and distributing can be even easier.

Tyler McMullen

Tyler McMullen is CTO at Fastly, a global edge cloud platform, where he is responsible for evolving the company’s system architecture and technology vision. He leads a team of experienced technology innovators focused on internet scale, and working on future-facing, ambitious projects and standards. As part of the founding team at Fastly, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. Prior to joining Fastly, Tyler worked on large scale web applications, text analysis, and performance. He can be found debating about edge computing, networking, and distributed systems all over the world.

Cool things of the week

Week 1 recap of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir blog
Introducing Google Cloud Confidential Computing with Confidential VMs blog
Next OnAir Sessions (Week 2) site
Introducing your new home for work in G Suite blog

Interview

Fastly site
Reaching 100 Tbps of Capacity blog
Fastly’s investment in WASM ecosystem blog
Fastly’s Developer Hub site
Fastly’s Developer Hub: Everything you need to build on Fastly is now in one place blog
Bytecode Alliance site
WebAssembly site
BigQuery site
Fastly Labs site
Altitude site

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Brian is learning Terraform!

Mark is working on more video content and his Next talk, CST103.

Pandium with Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This week is all about business-to-business marketplace software with Pandium as Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall talk with our guests Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn. The Pandium platform helps companies build and support in-app marketplaces with a focus on software integration and flexibility.

Kelly and Cristina start by explaining how Pandium deals with scalability for clients with multiple users and partners. Cristina elaborates on Pandium’s role in facilitating integrations, helping customers build customized, flexible solutions. We discuss how APIs are handled and the way Pandium takes care of authentication, security, and other standard pieces.

We continue with a thorough discussion of ‘yes code’, ‘low code’, and ‘no code’ approaches, and the benefits and drawbacks of each system. With a combination approach of some ‘no code’ tools and other ‘yes code’ pieces, Pandium allows better customization in any code language, while keeping some functions easy for non-engineers.

Cristina Flaschen

Cristina Flaschen is the CEO and co-founder of Pandium. She has managed integration projects and technical implementation teams for over a decade, including at Handshake and Booker.

Kelly Sarabyn

Kelly Sarabyn is a senior product marketer at Pandium. Previously, she was a partner at Woden and 2K North, where she crafted the positioning for dozens of SaaS companies.

Cool things of the week

Choose the right Google Compute Engine machine type for you blog
New gcloud cheat sheet available as free printable download blog
Search for Racial Equity video

Interview

Pandium site
GKE site
Google Sheets site
Improving marketplace integrations with Pandium blog
Scaling and support on GKE with Pandium video
What’s Wrong with Low and No Code Platforms? blog
“No Code” is great. But here’s why we need Yes Code blog

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

A new video series called Season of Scale started just last week!

Max’s latest blog post is all about Pandium!

The Stack Chat series!

Sound Effect Attribution

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

Documentation in Developer Practices with Riona Macnamara

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia are here this week to talk about some cool things that are going on. Then, Mark brings us an interesting interview all about documentation in development with Technical Writing Manager Riona Macnamara. Riona specializes in technical documentation for DevOps at Google.

Having written technical documentation for both external and internal audiences, Riona starts the show comparing the two, explaining how the process can be very different. In external writing, she stresses the importance of engineers and technical writers working together. She details the challenges of documentation in code development culture and offers some solutions. Laying out goals can create better quality documents, while providing a simple documentation process for engineers can help bolster a culture of documenting. She talks about open source projects, stressing that documentation is possibly more necessary because of the diverse contributor base.

We wrap up the interview learning how to get started creating and maintaining useful documentation. Better trumps best with documentation; a lot of decent documentation is better than very few documents no one can find or use!

Riona Macnamara

Riona is a 13-year Google veteran, and a documentation manager in Google Cloud. Previously at Google, she drove Google’s open source documentation strategy, led the team that developed Google’s internal engineering doc platform used by more than 20,000 projects, and supported Google’s Webmaster Tools (now Search Console). Before Google, she was a product manager at Amazon, and spent ten years at Microsoft as an editor on Encarta and mapping products, and a technical writer. She is a frequent speaker on documentation, open source, and diversity and inclusion, and is based in New York City.

Cool things of the week

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

Interview

Berlin Buzzwords 2019: Aizhamal Nurmamat Kyzy & Riona MacNamara - From User to Contributor video
Documentation for Good: Knowledge as a tool for equity and inclusion video
SREcon18 Asia/Australia - Do Docs Better: Practical Tips on Delivering Value to your Business video
DevOps Days Galway videos
Write the Docs Portland 2019 videos
Write the Docs Australia 2019 videos
Technical Writing Courses at Google site
Docs Like Code on Amazon site

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Riona will be the Keynote speaker for TCWorld India

Priyanka’s been working on new episodes of Cloud Bytes. App Engine in a Minute is now up! She’s also working on her series GCP Comics.

Cloud Audit Logging with Philip O'Toole and Oscar Guerrero

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This week, Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia learn all about Cloud Audit Logging with fellow Googlers Philip O’Toole and Oscar Guerrero. Our guests explain the importance of Cloud Audit Logs to keep track of your GCP resources so you know who, what, where, and when things were done. Our guests explain the types of logs GCP offers and why each is important for security. The interview continues with a discussion the various other benefits of audit logging, including proof of compliance and measuring of risk.

Because audit logs have the ability to create more data than some businesses can use, Philip and Oscar help our listeners understand how to choose the correct logging services for their needs, and we learn how Cloud Logging can help users digest their data. Philip describes how audit logs and event driven systems can benefit businesses, explaining how event driven systems can be built and pushed with GCP. Oscar continues the conversation with audit logging in G Suite. The Cloud Logging team is continuing to expand offerings, so be on the lookout!

Philip O’Toole

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

Oscar Guerrero

Oscar Guerrero is a Product Manager at Google New York, focused on Data Privacy and Compliance, in particular Audit Logging. Prior to Google, he consulted on Cloud based Financial Risk systems and was a Program Manager at Microsoft in Commerce, Xbox, and Cloud Recommendations.

Cool things of the week

The new Google Cloud region in Jakarta is now open blog
Cloud SQL database instances now discounted blog
- Beyond Your Bill videos
- Understanding and analyzing your committed use discounts video
Now available: Next OnAir ‘20 schedule, sessions, learning, and resources blog

Interview

Cloud Audit Logs site
Cloud Audit Logs Documentation site
Cloud Logging site
Cloud Logging Documentation site
BigQuery site
Google Cloud Storage site
Operations (formerly Stackdriver) site
Chronicle site
Splunk site
G Suite audit logging information guide
Google G Suite to Splunk HEC Configuration blog
Anthos site

Tip of the week

This week, we have a tip from our Customer Engineering friend, Anthony Bushong, about audit logging in Kubernetes. You can find great documentation on this here and here.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Cloud Bytes launched on Sunday and the 2nd episode of the Drawing Board launched late last week! Continuing to work on these.

Solutions Engineering with Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia host this week’s episode of the podcast, with a thorough discussion of Solutions Engineering at Google. Our guests, Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace, explain that the Solutions Engineering team is there to help customers choose appropriate products for things like security, analytics, data management, and more. The products are laid out in guides and blueprints so the client can easily understand why products are chosen and how to use them.

Grace and Ann talk later in the podcast about the Solutions Engineering blueprints that Solutions Engineering Architects have begun creating. They describe how the idea came about, how they’re built, as well as the types of blueprints that are available and how to use them. The team is still working to create more blueprints and make them even easier to use.

Grace Mollison

Based in London, UK, Grace Mollison leads the Cloud Solutions Architect team in EMEA, where she helps customers to understand how to architect and deploy applications “safely” on the Google Cloud platform. In her spare time she spends time attempting to teach her international team how to speak the Queen’s English! Before Google, Grace was a Solutions Architect at AWS where she worked with the AWS ecosystem and customers to ensure well architected solutions.

Ann Wallace

Ann Wallace (she/her) is Security Solutions Manager for Google Cloud where she develops, designs, and packages security solutions for Enterprise Customers. She co-wrote Google’s guidance for running PCI compliant workloads on GKE. Before Google, Ann spent 14 years at Nike in various engineering and architecture roles. She volunteers and leads workshops with Women Who Code Portland. When not working, Ann can be found traveling and ultra-trail running with her dog, Cedar.

Cool things of the week

Father’s Day present of the past: 30 years of family videos in an AI archive blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz podcast
Open Match is now 1.0 and ready for deployment in production blog
Google Data Center Security: 6 Layers Deep video

Interview

Cloud Solutions site
Security blueprint: PCI on GKE site
PCI and GKE Blueprint on GitHub site
GCP Podcast Episode 116: Solution Architects with Miles Ward and Grace Mollison podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 174: Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman podcast
Terraform site
Kubernetes site
Anthos site
Anthos security blueprint: Auditing and monitoring for deviation from policy site
Anthos security blueprint: Enforcing policies site
Anthos security blueprint: Enforcing locality restrictions for clusters on Google Cloud site
OnlineBoutique on GitHub site

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Our guests will be giving talks at virtual summits, including KubeCon and CISO Forum.

Priyanka has been working on a new video series called Google Cloud Drawing Board, as well as a new animation series that will launch next week!

Voice Coding with Emily Shea and Ryan Hileman

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mirchandani is back this week as he and co-host Brian Dorsey learn all about voice coding with some great guests! Emily Shea, senior software engineer at Fastly and user of Talon Voice, and Ryan Hileman, developer of Talon Voice, tell us about Repetitive Strain Injury and how it led to the design and use of Talon Voice. Talon allows not only straight voice input but includes eye tracking, noise recognition, and user customization to perform complex actions like moving windows, selecting text, and user-specific workflow customizations without touching any hardware.

Emily describes her experiences with Talon, including the process to get started and how she looked past voice recognition stereotypes to find how useful the product could be. She demos Talon for us, explaining how the alphabet system works. Ryan types a sentence using his voice then explains the process of developing the alphabet and other parts of Talon. Later, Ryan and Emily tell us how they write code using Talon and the logistics of using the software at home or in the office.

We end the show talking about how Talon and voice recognition software have helped people with and without debilitating injuries and given hope to those spending hours on computers every day. Emily stresses the importance of adding accessibility to websites to accommodate Talon users and others with disabilities.

Emily Shea

Emily is a Senior Software Engineer at Fastly, where she works on the platform for delivering core Edge Cloud configurations. Because of a Repetitive Strain Injury, she develops using Talon’s speech recognition.

Ryan Hileman

Ryan was a software engineer for over a decade and in 2017 quit his job due to hand pain. He has since worked full time on Talon with a mission of enabling anyone to be equally productive for any and all tasks on a computer without their hands.

Cool things of the week

How to find—and use—your GKE logs with Cloud Logging blog
- The Stack Doctor videos
Using Recommenders to keep your cloud running optimally blog

Interview

Talon Voice site
Talon Slack site
Talon Patreon site
Hammerspoon site
AutoHotkey site
Whale Quench site
The Accessibility Project site
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines site
Perl Conference video
Demo from The Perl Conf video
Strange Loop video
Demo from Strange Loop video
Ryan’s demo video
Street Fighter video

Security Operations with Elliott Abraham and Jason Bisson

Wed, 27 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’re discussing security operations on the podcast this week with your hosts Priyanka Vergadia and Mark Mirchandani. They’re joined by Elliott Abraham and Jason Bisson who start the interview explaining that they created the CLAM framework to help customers use Google Cloud security features to their fullest potential to create safe projects and relaxed clients.

The CLAM (Cloud Logging Alerting and Monitoring) framework came about specifically to help customers transition products to, and run products securely in, the cloud. Using the Mitre GCP Matrix, the security team addressed each element with GCP product solutions, from initial access to persistence and beyond. CLAM is GCP specific, taking into account the default security measures GCP already provides and supplementing these measures with appropriate procedures for each client. Once the framework is in place and things are secure, clients can build on that with operational controls, such as SRE best practices.

Elliott explains the shared security model and how clients can shift more of the security responsibility to the cloud service provider by employing more managed services. Jason tells us about VPC Service Controls and how they allow clients to set specific security rules such as from where data can be accessed. They go on to describe the GCP Security Command Center and the tools available there.

We wrap up the interview with some tips from our guests, including what to do if you are compromised.

Elliott Abraham

Elliott Abraham is a Security and Compliance Specialist based in Atlanta. Elliott works with Financial Services, Healthcare and Life Sciences and other Select Accounts migrating to or expanding their footprint on the Google Cloud Platform. Elliott has helped many customers to operationalize GCP Security solutions in alignment with their security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Jason Bisson

Jason Bisson is a Security and Compliance Specialist based in NYC. He works with Financial Services, Healthcare, Government, and Retail customers to explain the security, compliance, and regulatory abilities of Google Cloud Platform.

Cool things of the week

Announcing Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir blog
Celebrating a decade of data: BigQuery turns 10 blog
- A very special BigQuery Day (The Data Show, w/ Felipe Hoffa & Yufeng Guo) video

Interview

CLAM Framework pdf
Mitre site
Mitre ATT&CK site
Mitre GCP Matrix site
SRE Handbook site
VPC Service Controls site
Cloud Audit Logs site
Cloud Data Loss Prevention site
GCP Podcast Episode 218: Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniakpodcast
GCP Podcast Episode 221: BeyondCorp with Robert Sadowski podcast

Tip of the week

Yuri Grinshteyn talks about the new logging feature.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka is working on Building an Unbreakable DevOps Pipeline with Google Cloud.

Mark is working on more videos and will be speaking at Next.

BeyondCorp with Robert Sadowski

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On this episode of the podcast, our old pal Mark Mirchandani is joined by special guest host Max Saltonstall to talk trust and security with fellow Googler Rob Sadowski. BeyondCorp is Google’s answer to allowing employees to use company networks on any device while outside the building in a way that is both secure and efficient. Users are authenticated per session and per device to give access only to the specific person, on the specific device, for the specific job each time. In addition to the thorough authentication process, BeyondCorp continues to monitor device metadata during use as part of the system’s decision to continue to trust (or not trust) a user. With this information, if a user accidentally exposes the system to malware, for example, access can be revoked quickly.

Max and Rob explain the steps Google went through to create such a state-of-the-art security program and give tips on how companies can build something similar. Codifying your employees’ needs and preferences, detailing the levels of trust you’ll allow, and thinking ahead about where in the world your employees will be when they access the system are some of their tips. Rob stresses how complicated the system was to build from scratch and emphasizes that with BeyondCorp Remote Access, companies don’t have to build a whole new system.

BeyondCorp Remote Access offers automatic scaling and world-wide points of presence for a fast user experience anywhere in the world. Companies can define access rules for each user, setting trust levels and parameters for who can access what parts of the network. Rob points out that this is a great solution, not only for employees who find themselves working from home due to the current global climate, but also for freelance or contract workers who only need access to parts of the internal system.

Rob Sadowski

Rob Sadowski is the Trust & Security Product Lead for Google Cloud at Google. He is responsible for creating and delivering Google Cloud’s security message, spanning platforms, applications, and connected devices.

Cool things of the week

Using Bigtable’s monitoring tools, meant for a petabyte-scale database, to… make art blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 192: Cloud Bigtable with Billy Jacobson podcast
A simple, secure way for teams to meet and work: G Suite Essentials is here blog

Interview

BeyondCorp site
BeyondCorp Remote Access site
BeyondCorp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security paper
BeyondCorp: Design to Deployment at Google paper
BeyondCorp: The Access Proxy paper
Migrating to BeyondCorp: Maintaining Productivity While Improving Security paper
BeyondCorp: The User Experience paper
BeyondCorp 6: Building a Healthy Fleet paper
NYC Cyber Command site

Tip of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Max is working on Stack Chat at Home (coming soon!), BeyondCorp in a Bottle, as well as Ring Fit Adventure and Just Dance video games.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Clarinet Multiphonics” by jfcharles of Freesound.org

Strise with Marit Rødevand

Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Priyanka Vergadia hops back into the host seat this week, joining Mark Mirchandani to talk to Marit Rødevand of Strise. Strise is an AI-driven enterprise company using knowledge graphs to gather and analyze massive amounts of information, depositing it into a web-based interface to help large clients such as banks solve data-driven problems. Strise’s web-based data platform is customizable, flexible, and capable of keeping up with the fast-paced world of technology so enterprise companies aren’t constantly putting time and resources into reworking old or building new software. To do this, Strise uses knowledge graphs rather than typical databases to create what Marit calls a future-proof data model.

Marit explains knowledge graphs in detail, emphasizing that they can reduce training of machine models, allow new data to be input easily, and make analyzing unstructured data much easier. Knowledge graphs take data that would normally only make sense to humans and in effect translate it for computers. Using banking as an example, she details how information about customers can be collected and analyzed thoroughly to help the bank come to conclusions about credit-worthiness or possible criminal activity.

On Strise’s platform, Marit tells us that the information is now available to the end user who provides feedback to the system, marking things as relevant or irrelevant, rather than leaving those decisions to a data scientist outside of the client’s field. This means that massive amounts of information could be stored in the knowledge graph, across many industries, and each user only gets the data he or she needs.

Google Cloud tools such as Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, and Pub/Sub have played an integral roll in the creation of the Strise data pipeline. Marit explains how Strise gets their data, how it’s input into the knowledge graph, and how these Google tools help to keep Strise running.

Marit Rødevand

Marit Rødevand is the CEO & co-founder of Strise, an AI startup from Norway who is signaling a new era of enterprise software.

Strise makes the world’s information useful across the enterprise. Their novel approach by utilizing a knowledge graph to power their data platform, allows Strise to break data silos, end customization projects, and bring new insights from unstructured data. Strise is currently helping leading Nordic banks and financial institutions to solve their hardest data-driven problems within KYC/AML, risk, and sales.

Strise recently announced their Seed round from Maki.vc, the leading Nordic early stage investor, who invests in deep tech & brand-led startups.

Marit has a background from Cybernetics & Robotics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). In university, she co-founded Rendra, a construction SaaS, who was later acquired. Marit started as Entrepreneur in Residence at NTNU where she spun Strise out of a research project that focused on new data models as a foundation for better AI.

Cool things of the week

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

Interview

Strise site
A world in text — Strise blog
GKE site
Helm sote
Dataproc site
Operations site
Cloud Run site
Cloud Pub/Sub site
Cloud DNS site
Cloud Storage site
GCP Podcast Episode 198: SeMI Technologies with Laura Ham podcast
Building on Google Cloud with SeMI Technologies - Stack Chat video
Knowledge graphs with Weaviate - Stack Chat video
Natural Language Data Processing with Mito.ai - Stack Chat video

Question of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka wrote this post on 13 Most Common Google Cloud Reference Architectures and her parents were on the news for the vegetable garden they’ve been working on. She’s also been working with material design components and firebase hosting. And The Data Show with Yufeng and Felipe is going strong!

Spotify with Josh Brown

Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Josh Brown, Developer Advocate at Spotify, is on the podcast this week with your hosts Mark and Brian. Working in the Open Developer Platform department, Josh supports third-party developers as they create music experiences for users using the Spotify APIs and SDKs. The most popular of these, the Spotify Web API, lets developers access metadata about music and facilitates library management for users.

We talk later in the episode about the types of applications developers are creating using the Spotify Web API and how it’s changing the way people listen. Using developer feedback, Spotify has continued to improve on the API, now offering podcast support, for example. With the new podcast support, hobby developers especially are developing apps that make podcast listening easier and more social.

To create these open platform APIs, Josh tells us they relied heavily on Google Cloud products like GKE and Cloud Storage. To manage the GCP products they use, Spotify created an internal portal called Backstage. Independent developers are encouraged to make use of Backstage to help with their Spotify projects as well.

Josh wraps up the episode explaining the lessons learned in creating these APIs and how developer feedback became so important for them.

Josh Brown

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

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud training available at no cost for 30 days blog
Cost optimization for serverless workloads blog
Understanding forwarding, peering, and private zones in Cloud DNS blog
- Stephanie Wong’s video series on networking videos
- Stephanie Wong’s blog on Medium blog

Interview

Spotify site
Backstage site
Spotify for Developers site
Spotify Community site
Spotify Web API site
Search, browse and follow podcasts using the new Podcast APIs news
Kubernetes site
GKE site
Cloud SQL site
Google Cloud Storage site
Spotify Platform Documentation site
Adopting Kubernetes with Spotify - Stack Chat video
Updates on future Spotify events twitter

Question of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

The Google Cloud livestreams we talked about a few weeks ago have expanded into a new Meetup group!

Chronicle Security with Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Ansh Patniak

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s cyber security week on the podcast as Priyanka Vergadia joins Mark Mirchandani to talk with the folks of the Chronicle Security Team. Our guests Ansh Patniak and Dr. Anton Chuvakin start the show off with a brief explanation of Chronicle, which is a security analytics platform that can identify threats and correct them.

Anton details the threats facing clients today and why it’s important to continue to guard against old threats as well. Cyber security developers must constantly examine the landscape, adjust tools used, and think ahead to try to predict possible future problems. Ansh elaborates, pointing out that sometimes, all the security needed to protect against old, current, and potentially new threats can create a data overload that causes some threats to be lost in a jungle of notifications. Analyzing this data to gain insights about the health of a company’s cyber security is an important part of the process, and Chronicle can help with that. We discuss other challenges in the security analytics world and learn tips and tricks to help overcome them.

Our guests wrap up the show explaining how Chronicle, as part of GCP, benefits Google Cloud customers.

Dr. Anton Chuvakin

Dr. Anton Chuvakin is now involved with security solution strategy at Google Cloud, where he arrived via Chronicle Security (an Alphabet company) acquisition in July 2019. Anton was, until recently, a Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) Security and Risk Management Strategies team. Anton is a recognized security expert in the field of log management, SIEM and PCI DSS compliance.

Ansh Patniak

Ansh Patnaik is responsible for product marketing at Chronicle. Previously, he was VP of Product Management at Oracle where he defined and launched their Security Analytics Cloud service. Ansh has held product management, marketing and sales engineering roles at several cybersecurity and data segment market leaders including Delphix, ArcSight (acquired by HP), and BindView (acquired by Symantec).

Cool things of the week

UEFI, Shielded VM now the default for Google Compute Engine customers—no additional charge blog
Anthos—driving business agility and efficiency blog
Anthos 101 videos

Interview

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

Question of the week

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

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Our guests be doing the SANS Webinar on April 30th.

13 days of GCP Architecture series! We’re on day nine now, but you can catch up on Twitter with posts like Day 6 on Data Lake and join us for the next few!

Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our guests Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma join Brian and Mark this week to talk cost optimization techniques for internet projects. Justin and Pathik, both of the Professional Services Organization, work to help customers get the most out of GCP while maintaining their project budgets. They help customers take business success metrics and track them from a cost perspective, allowing the client to get an understanding of how much each business goal actually costs, rather than an aggregate of how much has been spent in total. This information is used to tailor GCP product usage and cost optimization to each client project.

Pathik explains how the Recommender API can help with VM usage by suggesting shrinking or removing a VM altogether for cost savings. With thorough analysis, clients can also benefit from cost savings by paying for longterm usage of GCP products rather than month-to-month. For storage and analysis, BigQuery can offer better performance at a lower cost with partitioning and clustering.

Throughout the episode, Justin and Pathik offer up other tips and tricks to help our listeners save money with GCP, as well as suggested reading materials, videos, and labs to get you started on your cost optimization adventure.

Pathik Sharma

Pathik Sharma is a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud, focusing on proactively guiding enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud. He loves helping customers to maximize their business value by optimizing their cloud spend. 

Justin Lerma

Justin Lerma is a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud. He has a passion for sharing best practices in operational efficiency as it allows for the proliferation of more experimentation and breeds new ideas.

Cool things of the week

Get started with Google Cloud Training & Certification site

Interview

Compute Engine site
BigQuery site
BigQuery Reservations docs
Cloud Storage site
Operations site
Recommenders docs
Google Cloud Support Plans site
Cloud SQL site
Use labels to gain visibility into GCP resource usage and spending blog
GCP Advanced Billing Dashboard site
Stack Doctor Series videos
Cost Management Playlist videos
Best practices for Cloud Storage cost optimization blog
Best practices for optimizing your cloud costs blog
Cost optimization best practices for BigQuery blog
Networking cost optimization best practices: an overview blog
5 best practices for Compute Engine Cost Optimization blog
Cloud Logging and Monitoring Cost Optimization Strategies docs
Codelabs: BigQuery Pricing site
Qwiklabs: Business Transformation with Google Cloud site
Qwiklabs: Understand Your Google Cloud Costs site
Qwiklabs: Optimizing Your GCP Costs site
Business Learning Path site
Cloud Platform Resource Hierarchy docs
Cleaning up unused IP addresses docs
Cleaning up unused and orphaned persistent disks docs
Schedule VMs to auto start/stop with Cloud Scheduler docs

Question of the week

What is the metadata server?

Rugby and ML with Capgemini

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani are back this week with guests from Capgemini as we learn all about ML in the rugby industry. Priscilla Li, Head of Applied Innovation, and Aishwarya Kandukuri, Data Scientist, start the interview explaining what they do at Capgemini and how the company uses new technologies to enhance projects with their partners.

When Capgemini became the official global innovation partner of the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series, they were tasked with creating new ways for fans to use technology to further their experience. Priscilla and Aishwarya explain how they created a series of digital projects to accomplish this goal, and how the experience inspired them to use AI to automate aspects of the actual rugby games, such as identifying a scrum. They explain the challenges of these projects and how they conquered those challenges, as well as ways it has benefited the rugby commentators, players, and fans.

Later, they talk specifics regarding the process of tagging images and audio to use in AI projects and things they learned along the way. Priscilla and Aishwarya wrap up the interview with advice for others who may want to tackle a similar project.

Priscilla Li

Priscilla Li is a leader of Applied Innovation Exchange in the UK.  Her purpose is to apply innovation in ways that advance humanity with a team that is diverse in gender, thought, discipline and experience.  Together, they shape ideas and breathe life into them through the application of emerging technologies with a human perspective.  Priscilla has held leadership roles in innovation and technology, advising and implementing innovative solutions across industries in telecommunications, transport, public sector, and media.  As a founding member of Artfinder, funded by Silicon Valley and UK Venture Capitalists, she delivered the first image recognition technology to discover, share and sell art. In 2012, she was selected by Business Weekly as one of the top Cambridge entrepreneurs and received the Chairman’s Award for excellence at American Airlines. In the Applied Innovation Exchange, she continues to bring to life the art of the possible, collaborating with start-ups, academia, and the wider community to unlock new opportunities for growth and meaningful transformation.  Grateful for her journey, she hopes to inspire women to be pioneers, unencumbered by the reality of today, but energised by the promise of tomorrow.  

Aishwarya Kandukuri

Aishwarya Kandukuri is a Data Scientist in Capgemini’s Insights & Data Practice. Her role involves testing ideas and concepts by analysing data and building machine learning models using emerging technology. Aishwarya works with an interdisciplinary team to drive business solutions. She worked on various projects across the industries to apply Machine Learning concepts to solve complex business problems to meet the needs of the customers. She continues to seek innovative approaches and explore new technologies to achieve long lasting solutions.

Cool things of the week

From raw data to machine learning model, no coding required blog
Helping contact centers respond rapidly to customer concerns about COVID-19 blog
- How can Chatbots help during global pandemic (COVID-19)? blog
- Verily COVID-19 Pathfinder virtual agent site
- COVID-19 Rapid Response Demo on GitHub site
- Deconstructing Chatbots video
Recent Podcasts with Priyanka:
- GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 195: Conversational AI Best Practices with Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha podcast

Interview

Capgemini site
Altran site
Rugby sevens partnership and technology site
AWS Kinesis site
AWS Fargate site
Applied Innovations Exchange on Medium blog
Emerging technologies in sports site
Applied AI within a Pop-Up store: a collaboration between Action for Children and Capgemini AIE video
To get the Quarterly Applied Innovation UK newsletter email
TensorFlow site
Firebase site

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Capgemini will be at more What’s Now London Events with topics like Disrupting The Field

Brian has been working on videos like Rethinking VMs - Eyes on Enterprise. He’s also been live streaming with Yufeng in Adventures with Yufeng on VMs.

Mark will be making more videos like Kubeflow 101.

SAP with Thomas Jung and Lucia Subatin

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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!

AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Gabi Ferrara joins Mark Mirchandani today for an in-depth interview with Dale Markowitz about machine learning in the healthcare and medical fields. Dale talks about the coolest ways ML is transforming the healthcare field with advances in imaging and more accurate diagnoses of cancers.

Later, Dale talks about how the cloud is used in healthcare to make data collection and sharing more efficient. The Google For Healthcare API, for example, makes working with common medical data types such as FHIR easier and more consistent. It helps with things like anonymizing of data and works with BigQuery for data analyzation. When data is collected and stored in the right format, it can be used to track healing progress, make health predictions, and more.

Dale Markowitz

Dale Markowitz is an Applied AI Engineer and Developer Advocate at Google.

Cool things of the week

Google Game Developer Summit on Youtube videos
Simplifying Google Drive’s folder structure and sharing models blog
PostgreSQL 12 is in Beta on Google Cloud docs
- New 96-core machine types for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server

Interview

Google’s lung cancer detection AI outperforms 6 human radiologists article
BigQuery site
Cloud Healthcare API site
Google FHIR docs
Google Games Dev Summit Playlist videos
Building Contact Center AI Solutions with Quantiphi - Stack Chat video
Verily site
DeepMind site
AlphaFold: Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning research
Computational predictions of protein structures associated with COVID-19 research
How Machine Learning is Transforming Healthcare at Google and Beyond blog
How to develop machine learning models for healthcare article

Question of the week

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

Diagnose and Slow-Query Log

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be working Office Hours.

Mark will be making more videos like KubeFlow 101 Series and Stack Chat.

The Art of SLOs with Alex Bramley

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today on the podcast, Jon Foust is back with Mark Mirchandani as we talk about SLOs and the importance of measuring service reliability with Alex Bramley. As a member of the Google SRE team, Alex and his coworkers help customers optimally run their services on Google Cloud. They collaborate with the client, weighing client needs and user needs to develop a plan that is affordable, efficient, and has the highest reliability for the user. Recently, they’ve been working to automate functions such as detection of outages, so that Google and the customer can work together quickly to get everything working smoothly again.

Later, Alex, describes the steps developers go through at his workshop, The Art of SLOs, which was designed to help companies measure and improve reliability. At this workshop, attendees are encouraged to set SLO targets and error budgets. They are given theoretical reliability problems to solve, allowing them to practice without the added pressure of messy, real-world problems. The Art of SLOs helps developers understand what measurements are beneficial and why and the best way to implement projects that can take those measurements accurately. Alex was able to make the materials for the workshop free online!

Alex Bramley

Alex Bramley joined Google in January 2010 as the first Mobile SRE in London, after IBM bought the startup he enjoyed working for and made it much less fun. He spent around 7½ years in various reincarnations of Mobile/Android/Play SRE, looking after the infrastructure that makes phones smart, keeps them up to date, and provides them with countless distracting apps.

CRE offered an interesting opportunity to do something different and learn from a bunch of very smart senior people, and Alex has not regretted taking the leap into the unknown. Much of his time recently has been spent rethinking how people teach customers, partners and the general public about SLOs. He helped create the Coursera course on measuring and managing reliability and developed what became the Art of SLOs for Liz Fong-Jones to deliver with other Google SREs at SREcon EMEA’18.

Alex works four days a week so he can (suffer) enjoy looking after his children on Wednesdays, listen to cheerful music, and waste a lot of time playing computer games and occasionally writing code.

Cool things of the week

Postponing Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect blog
New research: How effective is basic account hygiene at preventing hijacking blog
Simplified global game management: Introducing Game Servers blog

Interview

The Art of SLOs site
CRE Life Lessons blog
Putting customers first with SLIs and SLOs blog
Putting customers first with SLIs and SLOs (Part 2) blog
Measuring and Managing Reliability course
Site Reliability Engineering books

Question of the week

How do I get started with GCGS? docs

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

Where can you find us next?

Jon will be working on an Open Match sample project for the developer community.

Mark will be making more videos like Error Reporting and error logging - Stack Doctor.

Data Management with Amy Krishnamohan

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s all about data management this week on the podcast as Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani talk to Google Cloud Product Marketing Manager, Amy Krishnamohan. Amy starts the show by explaining that Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that recently added Microsoft SQL Server to its repertoire. We talk about SQL Server’s migration from 2008R2 to a newer version, the process involved, and how it’s effecting customers. Luckily, Cloud SQL for SQL Server is very backwards compatible, making the process easy for Google Cloud customers! Cloud SQL also offers other tools to make using Microsoft SQL Server easier with Google Cloud, including shortcuts to set up the high availability function.

Amy talks later in the show about what companies are a good fit for Microsoft SQL Servers on Google Cloud. She explains the steps to set up and tear down, how licensing works, and what the best use cases are for Microsoft SQL Servers on Google Cloud. In the future, Cloud SQL will have a managed AD service available.

A multi-cloud strategy is important, according to Amy. It is up to each company to research cloud services and pick the best vendors and products for themselves and their clients. Cloud SQL for SQL Server is a way to bring two great products together for the benefit of consumers.

Amy Krishnamohan

Amy Krishnamohan is Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud responsible for databases. She has diverse experience across product marketing, marketing strategy and product management from leading enterprise software companies such as MariaDB, Teradata, SAP, Accenture, Cisco and Intuit. Amy received her Masters in Software Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Cool things of the week

Introducing Cloud AI Platform Pipelines blog
Finding a problem at the bottom of the Google stack blog
Larger local SSD storage available now blog
Compute Engine gets machine images blog
Google Cloud Next Update site

Interview

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

Question of the week

Lift and shift, move and improve, or re-architect: How do we “move and improve”?

GCP Podcast Episode 211: Digital Services with xMatters podcast
Importing virtual disks docs
Create machine image from virtual appliance file (OVA/OVF) docs
Tutorial: Getting started with Migrate for Compute Engine docs
Whitepaper: Velostrata technology for mass migrations into Google Cloud Platform whitepaper

Where can you find us next?

We’re working from home for a while!

Brian will be looking at getting a kind of weekly “reading group” of people who work with VMs and want to get better. Ping him on Twitter if you’re interested!

Mark will be working on more video content and a cool nickname for Brian!

Digital Services with xMatters

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Priyanka Vergadia joins Mark Mirchandani today to talk shop with Travis DePuy about all things digital services. Travis is a product evangelist for xMatters, a company that provides digital services for clients in a way that makes it easy for them to “limit the blast radius” as they build and use their projects. At xMatters, customers can build an incident management workflow for their custom services and integrate the tools of their choice. Travis talks about service degradation and how xMatters helps clients optimize and manage their services to control instances of degradation. With programs like Google Stackdriver, xMatters can set limits and get alerts when thresholds are met, then use that information to fix performance.

Later in the show, Travis talks about moving a large enterprise like xMatters to the cloud.

Travis DePuy

Travis DePuy is a Tinkerer of Things, Master of Hats and Father of Kitties. He is currently Head Product Evangelist at xMatters where he gets to talk to people about how they are doing Incident Management, DevOps notifications and anything else involving humans, processes and tools. Travis balances the stationary computer work with the fluid moving of Chen Taichi and is often found in the sun flowing the forms of the old ways.

Cool things of the week

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

Interview

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

Question of the week

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

Codelabs site
Migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine article
Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine — An Overview blog

Where can you find us next?

You can find Priyanka online in her video series Get Cooking in Cloud and her series on Pub/Sub.

You can see Mark in recently released Stack Chat videos.

Kubernetes Config Connector with Emily Cai

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Emily Cai of Google is on the podcast today with hosts Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani to talk about Kubernetes Config Connector, which went GA last month. The program helps users manage their Google Cloud resources in a way that is familiar for Kubernetes developers. Emily explains that it’s a great tool for Kubernetes developers looking to easily manage their infrastructure in one place. A platform team managing other teams is a perfect example of large-scale companies who could benefit from this tool, Emily explains.

Walking listeners through the development cycle before and after Kubernetes Config Connector, Emily shines some light on specific instances when this powerful tool could streamline the process of building your project, making it faster and more efficient. She elaborates on the ways Config Connector and Anthos can work together as well.

In the future, the Config Connector team hopes to cover all GCP resources, to create a more clear end-to-end experience for Kubernetes developers, and to allow Config Connector to be enabled straight onto a cluster.

Emily Cai

Emily is an engineer on Google Cloud’s Config Connector team focused on creating a declarative way for users to manage their non-Kubernetes resources. She has been with Google since November 2018 after interning twice (once in Irvine, once in Zurich). Currently living in Seattle, she is an avid frisbee player and winter sports enthusiast who is always open to new experiences.

Cool things of the week

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

Interview

Kubernetes site
Kubernetes Docs site
Kubernetes Config Connector on Github site
Kubernetes Config Connector Docs site
Unify Kubernetes and GCP resources for simpler and faster deployments blog
keeprunning.io blog
Cloud SQL site
Compute Engine site
Pub/Sub site
Terraform site
Anthos site

Question of the week

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

Regional Persistent Disks site
High Availability Regional Persistent Disks site

Where can you find us next?

Our guest will be at Kubecon Europe and speaking at Next

Mark and Brian will also be at Next!

Humanitec with Domile Janenaite and Chris Stephenson

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Jon Foust and Mark Mirchandani are joined today by Domile Janenaite and Chris Stephenson of Humanitec. Humanitec, a German startup, helps developers run their code easily and smoothly in various environments. Chris and Domile start off by explaining why Humanitec was founded and what sets it apart from competitors, especially in the way it streamlines devops integration.

Later, we learn how Humanitec is helping developers get the most out of cloud development by not only easily running deployments but also aiding in environment management. Developers can spend more time writing code and less time worrying about how they’ll get it to run. Chris also expands on how they built Humanitec, the reasoning behind their development decisions, and the challenges they faced. Domile goes on to describe the types of teams and companies that Humanitec is best suited for and why.

Domile Janenaite

Domile Janenaite is a product manager at Humanitec, focusing on developer experience in cloud-native development. Her team’s goal is to help developers escape scripting hell and smoothly enter the world of continuous delivery. In 2014 while studying she dove into Lithuania’s tech hub seeking to promote IT education nationwide. After finishing her studies she landed in Berlin’s tech scene and began working with 200+ dev teams across Europe analysing their processes and helping to improve workflows. During this period Domile became fascinated by the struggles that tech teams face working with cloud technologies. She envisioned building a product that helps developers optimize their workflows and reduce cognitive load. In 2018 she joined Humanitec in its early stages and currently she is working on an Internal Developer Platform which is pushing the industry to live in a “you-build-it, you-run-it” mindset.

Chris Stephenson

Chris Stephenson is VP of Product at Humanitec. He has worked in Engineering or Product across industries as diverse as Waste Management, HR-tech and Insurance but in recent years has been focusing on building platforms that enable development teams to implement and quickly scale applications. This has included running the High Performance Computing Group at Lloyd’s of London focusing on designing and implementing a platform to allow Engineers and Actuaries to quickly iterate on internal models at Lloyd’s of London, building a platform to allow for very fast development of “Partner Front-End” applications at Google (think the partner facing admin interfaces for Google Transit search or managing inventory for Google Play Movies) and currently at Humanitec building an Internal Developer Platform that can be used by all engineering teams to speed up their development of Cloud Native Apps.

Cool things of the week

Showing the C++ developer love with new client libraries blog
New GCP Essentials video “GCP vs. Firebase — Part 1” blog
- GCPodcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast
Here to serve Korea’s businesses with a new GCP region in Seoul blog

Interview

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

Question of the week

How do you prevent exposing API keys in source code?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be traveling and working on a video series for the Google Cloud YouTube Channel.

Jon will be at GDC in March.

Python with Katie McLaughlin

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Aja Hammerly and Brian Dorsey are here this week to start off a new year of podcasts! In an interview with Google Developer Advocate Katie McLaughlin, we talk about the advantages of Python 3 and why version 2 has been retired, as well as the cool things you can do with Django.

Later, Katie discusses the complexities of deployment and how she makes it work smoothly with GCP, and we have some fun with emojis!

Katie McLaughlin

Katie has worn many different hats over the years. She is currently a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, and a Director of the Python Software Foundation. When she’s not changing the world, she enjoys making tapestries, cooking, and seeing just how well various application stacks handle emoji.

Cool things of the week

Running workloads on dedicated hardware just got better blog
Container security summit is going on as we record this site
Easily upgrade Windows Server 2008 R2 while migrating to Google Cloud blog
Launch of the BigQuery Weekly Data Challenge! site
New data engineering learning path site

Interview

Python Software Foundation site
PyCascades site
Django Demo site
Emojipedia site
App Engine site
Compute Engine site
Cloud Run site
Cloud Build site
Secrets Manager site
Kakapo Mountain Parrot site
The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility 😓 of Unicode Adoption ✨ video

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

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

Sound Effects Attribution

“African Gray” by Jmagiera of Freesound.org

End of the Year Recap

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hosts new and old gather together for this special episode of the podcast! We’ll talk about our favorite episodes of the year, the coolest things from 2019, and wrap up another great year together doing what we love! Happy Holidays to all of our listeners, and we’ll see you in the new year!

Top episodes of the year

GCP Podcast Episode 173: Cloud Run with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 165: Python with Dustin Ingram podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 175: MongoDB with Andrew Davidson podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 160: Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 180: Firebase with Jen Person podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 164: Node.js with Myles Borins podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 174: Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 176: Human-Centered AI with Di Dang podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast

Favorite episodes of the year

Mark Mirchandani’s Favorites:
- GCP Podcast Episode 193: Devoted Health and Data Science with Chris Albon podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 177: Primer with John Bohannon podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 202: Supersolid with Kami May podcast
Mark Mandel’s Favorites:
- GCP Podcast Episode 186: Blockchain with Allen Day podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 196: Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston podcast
Jon’s Favorites:
- GCP Podcast Episode 199: Data Visualization with Manuel Lima podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 196: Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 206: ML/AI with Zack Akil podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 201: FACEIT with Maria Laura Scuri podcast
Gabi’s Favorites:
- GCP Podcast Episode 199: Data Visualization with Manuel Lima podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 206: ML/AI with Zack Akil podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 198: SeMI Technologies with Laura Ham podcast

Favorite things of the year

Mark Mirchandani’s Favorites:
- Cloud Run
Mark Mandel’s Favorites:
- Stadia
- Samurai Shodown available on Stadia
- All the new podcast hosts!
Jon’s Favorites:
- First time doing the podcast at NEXT and it was quite the experience.
- Going to Nvidia offices to do an episode
- Getting to talk to guests in the gaming industry and hear how passionate they are about the things they are building
- Joining the podcast
- Podcast outtakes!
Gabi’s Favorites:
- Visited a bunch of offices!
- Joining the podcast
- Cloud NEXT talk, where my demo failed but I recovered!
- Spreading the love and joy of databases

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirch’ will be sleeping as much as possible!

Mandel will be working on plans for Next, GDC, and I/O 2020!

Gabi will be running away to warm weather for her winter vacation!

Jon will be home! He’ll also be planning gaming content for next year and wrapping up this year with some deep dives into multiplayer games and some possible content!

Sound Effects Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Incorrect” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org
“Correct” by Epon of Freesound.org
“Fireworks 3 Bursts” by AtomWrath of Freesound.org
“Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org
“Dark Cinematic” by Michael-DB of Freesound.org
“Bossa Loop” by Reinsamba of Freesound.org

ML/AI with Zack Akil

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are joined today by fellow Googler Zack Akil to discuss machine learning and AI advances at Google. First up, Zack explains some of the ways AutoML Vision and Video can be used to make life easier. One example is how Google Photos are automatically tagged, allowing them to be searchable thanks to AutoML. Developers can also train their own AutoML to detect specific scenarios, such as laughing in a video.

We also talk Cloud Next 2019 and learn how Zack comes up with ideas for his cool demos. His goal is to inspire people to incorporate machine learning into their projects, so he tries to combine hardware and exciting technology to think of fun, creative ways developers can use ML. Recently, he made a smart AI bicycle that alerts riders of possible danger behind them through a system of lights and a project to track and photograph balls as they fly through the air after being kicked.

To wrap it all up, Zack tells us about some cool projects he’s heard people use AutoML for (like bleeping out tv show spoilers in online videos!) and the future of the software.

Zack Akil

When he’s not teaching machine learning at Google, Zack likes to teach machine learning at his hands-on data science meetup, Central London Data Science Project Nights. Although he works in the cloud, most of his hobby projects look at different ways you can embed machine learning into low-power devices like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. He also likes to have a bit of banter with his mixed tag rugby teams.

Cool things of the week

Stackdriver Logging comes to Cloud Code in Visual Studio Code blog
Open Match v0.8 was released last month site
Cloud Spanner now supports the WITH clause blog

Interview

Zack’s Website site
Cloud AutoML site
AutoML Video docs
AutoML Vision site
AutoML Vision Object Detection docs
Coral site
TensorFlow.js site
Central London Data Science Meetup site

Question of the week

How do I run Cloud Functions in a local environment?

Where can you find us next?

Zack will be at DevRelCon.

Gabi will be taking time to recharge after conference season, then visiting family.

Jon will be attending several baby showers.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Sparkling Effect A” by CetSoundCrew of Freesound.org

DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Thanksgiving! This week, Aja and Brian are talking DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble. Our guests thoroughly explain what DevOps is and why it’s important. DevOps purposely has no official definition but can be thought of as a community of practice that aims to make large-scale systems reliable and secure. It’s also a way to get developers and operations to work together to focus on the needs of the customer.

Nathen later tells us all about DevOpsDays, a series of locally organized conferences occurring in cities around the world. The main goal is to bring a cross-functional group of people together to talk about how they can improve IT, DevOps, business strategy, and consider cultural changes the organization might benefit from. DevOpsDays supports this by only planning content for half the conference, then turning over the other half to attendees via Open Spaces. At this time, conference-goers are welcome to propose a topic and start a conversation.

Jez then describes the Accelerate State of DevOps Report, how it came to be, and why it’s so useful. It includes items like building security into the software, testing continuously, ideal management practices, product development practices, and more. With the help of the DevOps Quick Check, you can discover the places your company could use some help and then refer back to the report for suggestions of improvements in those areas.

Nathen Harvey

Nathen Harvey helps the community understand and apply DevOps and SRE practices in the cloud. He is part of the global organizing committee for the DevOpsDays conferences and was a technical reviewer for the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report.

Jez Humble

Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner “Accelerate” and Jolt Award winner “Continuous Delivery”. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He works for Google Cloud as a technology advocate and teaches at UC Berkeley.

Cool things of the week

It’s a wrap: Key announcements from Next ‘19 UK blog
Explainable AI site
Hand-drawn Graphviz diagrams blog
- Add one line to plot in XKCD comic sketchy style site

Interview

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

Question of the week

Why do you need the Cloud SQL Proxy?

Where can you find us next?

DevOpsDays has events coming up across the globe, including Galway, Warsaw, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Nathen and Jez will be at Delivery Conf.

Aja will be home drinking tea!

Brian will also be home drinking tea!

End to End Java on Google Cloud with Ray Tsang

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mirchandani hosts solo today but is later joined by fellow Googler and Developer Advocate Ray Tsang to talk Java! Ray tells us what’s new with Java 11, including more memory and fewer restrictions for developers. One of the greatest things for Ray is using Java 11 in App Engine because of the management support that it provides.

Later, we talk about Spring Boot on GCP. Ray explains the many benefits of using this framework. Developers can get their projects started much more quickly, for example, and with Spring Cloud GCP, it’s easy to integrate GCP services like Spanner and run your project in the cloud. For users looking to containerize their Java projects, JIB can help you do this without having to write a Dockerfile.

At the end of the show, Ray and Mark pull it all together by explaining how Spring Boot, Cloud Code, Skaffold, and proper dev-ops can work together for a seamless Java project.

Ray Tsang

Ray is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform and a Java Champion. Ray works with engineering and product teams to improve Java developer productivity on GCP. He also helps Alphabet companies migrate and adopt cloud native architecture. Prior to Google, Ray worked at Red Hat, Accenture, and other consulting companies, where he focused on enterprise architecture, managed solutions delivery, and contributed to open source projects. Aside from technology, Ray enjoys traveling and adventures.

Cool things of the week

Cloud Run is now GA blog
Budget API in Beta blog

Interview

App Engine site
Micronaut site
Quarkus site
Java 11 on App Engine blog and docs
Spring Boot and Spring Cloud site
Spring Cloud GCP Projects site
Cloud Spanner site
Spring Cloud Sleuth site
Stackdriver site
Bootiful GCP: To Production! blog
Effective Cloud Native Spring Boot on Kubernetes & Google Cloud Platform blog
JDBC drivers site
Hibernate ORM with Cloud Spanner docs
Effective Cloud Native Spring Boot on Kubernetes & Google Cloud Platform blog
Dev to Prod with Spring on GCP in 20 Minutes (Cloud Next ‘19) video
Cloud Code site
JIB site
Skaffold site
Debugger site
Troubleshooting & Debugging Microservices in Kubernetes blog
Cloud Code Quickstart docs
Spring (or Java) to Kubernetes Faster and Easier blog
GCP Podcast Episode 58: Java with Ray Tsang and Rajeev Dayal podcast

Question of the week

How do I dockerize my Java app?

video
github

Where can you find us next?

Ray is taking a break for the holidays, but in the future, you can find him at Java and JUG conferences.

Mark is hanging out in the Bay Area, but Google Cloud Next in London and KubeCon and CloudNativeCon are happening now!

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Tre-Loco1” by Sonipro of Freesound.org
“Mens Sincere Laughter” by Urupin of Freesound.org
“Party Pack” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
“DrumRoll” by HolyGhostParty of Freesound.org
“Tension” by ERH of Freesound.org

Cloud Run GKE with Donna Malayeri

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Jon and Aja host our guest Donna Malayeri this week to learn all about Cloud Run and Anthos! Designed to provide serverless containers, Cloud Run has two versions: fully managed and Cloud Run for Anthos.

Donna’s passion for serverless projects and containers shows as we discuss how these options benefit developers and customers. With containers, developers are able to go serverless without a lot of the typical restrictions, and because they are a standard format, containers are fairly easy to learn to use. Tools such as Ko can even do the work of generating docker containers for you. One of Cloud Run’s most unique features is that it allows developers to bring existing applications. You don’t have to rewrite your entire app to make it serverless! Developers can also reuse instances, making the process more efficient and cost effective.

Cloud Run for Anthos allows projects to stay on-prem while still enjoying the benefits of containers and the Cloud Run platform.

Later in the show, Donna tells us about Knative, which is the API Cloud Run is based on that helps create portability between Cloud Run versions, as well as portability to other vendors. We also get to hear the weirdest things she’s seen put in a container and run in Cloud Run!

Donna Malayeri

Donna Malayeri is a product manager for Cloud Run for Anthos. She’s worked in the serverless space since 2016 and is bullish on the future of serverless. Prior to joining Google, she was the first product manager at the Seattle startup, Pulumi. She was also a product manager on the Azure Functions team at Microsoft, guiding the developer experience from its beta through the first year of general availability. Donna is passionate about creating products that developers love and has worked on programming languages such as F# and Scala.

Cool things of the week

Bringing Google AutoML to 3.5 million data scientists on Kaggle blog
GCP Podcast has a website on dev site
Command and control now easier in BigQuery with scripting and stored procedures bog
Skaffold now GA blog

Interview

Cloud Run site
Cloud Run for Anthos site
Anthos site
Ko site
Buildpacks site
Google Cloud Functions site
Kubernetes site
Knative site
Serverless: An ops experience of a programming model? video

Question of the week

How do I write a Matchmaking function in OpenMatch?

Where can you find us next?

Donna will be at Google Cloud Next in London.

Aja will also be attending Google Cloud Next in London.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Anime Cat Girl” by KurireeVA of Freesound.org
“Anime Sword Hit” by Syna-Max of Freesound.org
“Wedding Bells” by Maurice_J_K of Freesound.org
“Big Dinosaur Whirrs” by RobinHood76 of Freesound.org
“Cat Purring & Meow” by SkyMary of Freesound.org

Supersolid with Kami May

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This week, Mark and Jon bring us a fascinating interview with Kami May of Supersolid, a gaming company in London. With the help of Kami May, Supersolid recently launched their first multiplayer game, Snake Rivals. This session-based game puts players in an arena where they can choose from three modes: endless, gold rush, or battle royale.

To produce the game, Supersolid makes use of many GCP products. Snake Rivals is powered by Kubernetes and Agones, which Kami chose because it offers functionality that works well with gaming. It provides server allocation which allows players to continue play even during an update, has the ability to scale, allows labeling, allows for different gaming modes, and more. To reduce latency, Supersolid operates in nine regions. Supersolid uses BigQuery and continuously gathers data so they can make adjustments to make sure game play is efficient, fun, and functional. Kami explains that navigating the world of multiplayer gaming for the first time was tricky, but the Google support team has been very helpful!

Kami May

Kami May is a Senior Server Developer at London-based mobile games studio, Supersolid. Her lifetime passion for video games drove her to join the games industry soon after graduating from university in 2016. Since then, Kami has worked on multiple titles for mobile, PC, and console. Most recently, she’s been bringing Supersolid’s most ambitious project to date - Snake Rivals - to life, powered by Agones on GCP. In her free time she can be found at the top of the ladder on Path of Exile, chasing the 6k MMR dream on Dota 2, or searching for London’s best fried chicken.

Cool things of the week

Keep Parquet and ORC from the data graveyard with new BigQuery features blog
Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI site
Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly’s shortened cloud migration blog

Interview

Supersolid site
Snake Rivals site
Agones site
Kuberentes site
Go site
Cloud Load Balancing site
BigQuery site
Stackdriver site
Supersolid Careers site
Snake Rivals on Google Play site
Snake Rivals on iTunes site

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be working on blogs and videos at home.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Human has been Nutralised” by cityrocker of Freesound.org
“Laser Automatic Heavy” by dpren of Freesound.org
“Gong Sabi” by Veiler of Freesound.org

FACEIT with Maria Laura Scuri

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Halloween! Today, Jon Foust and Brian Dorsey chat with Maria Laura Scuri of FACEIT about ways they are reducing toxicity in gaming. FACEIT is a competitive gaming platform that helps connect gamers and game competition and tournament organizers. In order to do this well, FACEIT has put a lot of energy into finding ways to keep the experience positive for everyone.

Because gaming toxicity can involve anything from verbal jabs to throwing a game, FACEIT uses a combination of data collecting programs and input from players to help identify toxic behavior. In identifying this behavior, FACEIT has to consider not only the literal words spoken or actions made, but the context around them. Is that player being rude to strangers or is he egging on a friend? The answer to this question could change the behavior from unacceptable to friendly banter. Using their own machine learning model, interactions are then given a score to determine how toxic the player was in that match.

The toxicity scores along with their program, Minerva, determine if any bans should be put on a player. FACEIT focuses on punishing player behavior, rather than the player themselves, in an effort to help players learn from the experience and change the way they interact with others in the future.

Maria’s advice to other companies looking to help reduce toxicity on their platforms is to know the context of the toxic event. Know how toxicity can express itself on your platform and find ways to deal with all of them. She also suggests tackling the issues of toxicity in small portions and celebrating the small wins! Her final piece of advice is to focus on criticizing the behavior of the user rather than attacking them personally.

Maria Laura Scuri

Maria is the Director of Business Intelligence at FACEIT, the leading competitive platform for online multiplayer games with over 15 million users. She joined FACEIT as part of the core team in 2013 as an intern assisting with everything from customer support to event management. Her passion for data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence saw her quickly rise through the ranks to her current position, leading the Business Intelligence and Data Science teams.

Maria works side by side with some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Google Cloud. She is the main lead on a number of projects including the inception of an Artificial Intelligence Admin to fight toxicity on the platform. Maria is responsible for implementing best practices around data visualization and tools that allow the FACEIT team to thrive, as well as sourcing and training new talent.

Maria is a huge video games fan. You can find her on League of Legends as “FACEIT Lulu” and on Steam as “Sephariel”.

Cool things of the week

What can Google Cloud do for you? New trainings for business professionals blog
Leave no database behind with Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog
How to orchestrate Cloud Dataprep jobs using Cloud Composer blog
Updates make Cloud AI platform faster and more flexible blog
Use GKE usage metering to combat over-provisioning blog

Interview

FACEIT site
FACEIT blog
FACEIT on Medium site
Steam site
Perspective API site
BigQuery site
Looker site
Cloud Datalab site
Jupyter Notebook site
Cloud AI Platform site
TensorFlow site
Google Cloud Data Labeling site
Google Translation site]
Dealing with CS:GO Free to Play and Addressing Toxicity in Matches blog
Revealing Minerva and addressing toxicity and abusive behaviour in matches blog
One of Europe’s Largest Gaming Platforms is Tackling Toxicity with Machine Learning blog
FACEIT And Google Partner To Use AI To Tackle In Game Toxicity article
FACEIT implement Minerva, an AI to punish toxicity in CSGO blog
FACEIT Takes On Toxicity With Machine Learning article
Exploring Cyberbullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games whitepaper
Toxic Behavior in Online Games whitepaper
A Look at Gaming Culture and Gaming Related Problems: From a Gamer’s Perspective whitepaper
An Analysis of (Bad) Behavior in Online Video Games whitepaper
Toxicity detection in multiplayer online games whitepaper
Jon’s gaming info steam
- BattleNet: Syntax#11906

Question of the week

When I SSH into my VM via different methods (Cloud Console, GCloud, terminal/command prompt) I get a different username… What can I do to make that static?

OS Login

Where can you find us next?

FACEIT will be at Next London and GDC

Brian will be at Super Computing in Denver.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland and Montreal in December.

Massive with Björn Lindberg

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re sad to say goodbye to Mark Mandel this week but excited to bring you an interview he and guest host Robert Martin did with Björn Lindberg of Massive Entertainment. The gaming studio is located in Sweden and owned by Ubisoft. Their most recent game, The Division 2, is a “looter shooter” game that was released in March. It can be played solo or users can be matched up to play with or against others.

To keep the game running smoothly, Massive employs a micro-service architecture to divide and conquer the trials of creating and running such a large, intense game. The Division 2 was launched with Google Cloud, a process Björn says was a bit easier than launching on physical hardware. Autoscaling in the cloud has created a simpler, more trustworthy gaming process as well, and by connecting to data centers in multiple regions, they’re able to decrease latency.

Björn Lindberg

Björn Lindberg is working as On-Line technical director at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft owned and operated game studio in Malmö Sweden. He does design and implementation of on-line backend systems for large AAA on-line games such as The Division series of games and World in Conflict.

Interview

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

Thank You Mark!

Thank you Mark for everything you’ve done to make this podcast a success! We’ll miss you!

Data Visualization with Manuel Lima

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are back today and joined by fellow Googler Manuel Lima. In this episode, Manuel tells us all about data visualization, what it means, why it’s important, and the best ways to do it effectively.

For Google and its mission, data visualization is especially necessary in facilitating the accessibility of information. It “makes the invisible visible” because of the way it can decode meaningful data patterns. Working across multiple GCP products, Manuel and his team build advanced visualization models that go beyond graphs and bar charts to things like sophisticated time lines that aid in the progression from data to usable knowledge. They have also created guidelines for things like what kind of graphical language to use, what type of charts users might need, and more. These guidelines, originally used only internally, have now been adjusted and released for use by developers outside Google with the help of the Material.io team.

The guidelines are based around the six data visualization principles that help users get started. They can be employed to plan and inspire an entire project or to evaluate a specific data visualization chart. Some of the most important principles are to be honest and to lend a helping hand. You can read more in their Medium article, Six Principles for Designing Any Chart.

Manuel Lima

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009,” Manuel Lima is the founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Google, and a regular teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design.

Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various publications and media outlets, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Fast Company, Forbes, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Design Observer, Creative Review, Eye, Grafik, étapes, and El País. His first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His latest, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, covers 1,000 hundred years of humanity’s long-lasting obsession with all things circular.

With more than twelve years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. During the course of his MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Cool things of the week

Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine? New trainings teach you the basics of architecting on Google Cloud blog
Stadia comes next month site
Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for the fourth consecutive time blog
Google Hardware Event
- Pixel 4 is here to help blog
- Meet the new Google Pixel Buds blog
- Nest Mini brings twice the bass and an upgraded Assistant blog
- More affordable and portable: let’s Pixelbook Go blog

Interview

Material.io site
Data Visualization Guides site
Six Principles for Designing Any Chart article
Google’s six rules for great data design article
BigQuery site
Stackdriver site
Google Analytics site

Question of the week

What are the most common products used in cloud gaming?

Cloud Spanner for storing player authentication and inventory or long-term state storage site
Redis is used in Open Match
VM’s have been the most commonly used product for game servers but there has been a shift to Kubernetes
Pub/Sub

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

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

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

SeMI Technologies with Laura Ham

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Today on the podcast, Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust share a great interview with Laura Ham, Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies. At SeMI Technologies, Laura works with their project Weaviate, an open-source knowledge graph program that allows users to do a contextualized search based on inputted data. However, unlike traditional databases, Weaviate attaches meanings and links within the data.

Laura details what knowledge graphs are and how they can be useful for both small and large projects. Explaining that ontology is the meaning of words, she tells us how Weaviate is able to use this concept to make more specific data entries and links, allowing users to perform better and more informative searches. Weaviate is able to do this with the help of Kubernetes. Later, Laura tells Gabi and Jon the ways Weaviate helps developers and users with thorough documentation, assistance with troubleshooting, and support from solution engineers.

Laura Ham

Laura is the Community Solution Engineer at SeMI Technologies, where she takes care of building and supporting a community around their open source software product, Weaviate. She also takes care of the developer and user experience within the business, which means she writes documentation to support both developers and users, as well as researches and evaluates new software implementations on user experience. She has a user-centered approach in the work that she develops and designs. Laura is a full-time graduate student in Human Computer Interaction and Design with a special focus on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at EIT Digital Master School. Here, she learns about how to develop and design technology from a user perspective, and how to apply this with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Cool things of the week

Use G Suite to make documents (and other tools) more accessible to people with disabilities blog
4 steps to stop data exfiltration with Google Cloud blog
Using Colab to get more out of BigQuery blog
Updates to AutoML Vision Edge, Auto ML Video, & AutoML Intelligence API blog

Interview

SeMI Technologies site
Weaviate site
Weaviate GitHub github
Weaviate documentation site
GraphQL API github
Kubernetes site
GKE site
Cloud BigTable site
SeMI Technologies Meetups site

Question of the week

When will Python 2 reach the end of its life, and what does that mean for GCP?

Python Google Cloud Client Libraries only support Python 3 github
Countdown to end of life site

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

Jon will be at his twin’s wedding! Then Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match.

SeMI Technologies will be hosting meetups in NYC on October 24th, the Bay Area on October 25th, and Amsterdam on November 7th.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Small Group Laugh 2” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“02 Storm Orage” by ArnaudCoutancier of Freesound.org
“Harry Potter Theme”, a clunky midi file rendition of music originally composed by John Williams. Purchase the soundtrack on Amazon

Qubit with Matthew Tamsett and Ravi Upreti

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our guests Matthew Tamsett and Ravi Upreti join Gabi Ferrara and Aja Hammerly to talk about data science and their project, Qubit. Qubit helps web companies by measuring different user experiences, analyzing that information, and using it to improve the website. They also use the collected data along with ML to predict things, such as which products users will prefer, in order to provide a customized website experience.

Matthew talks a little about his time at CERN and his transition from working in academia to industry. It’s actually fairly common for physicists to branch out into data science and high performance computing, Matthew explains. Later, Ravi and Matthew talk GCP shop with us, explaining how they moved Qubit to GCP and why. Using PubSub, BigQuery, and BigQuery ML, they can provide their customers with real-time solutions, which allows for more reactive personalization. Data can be analyzed and updates can be created and pushed much faster with GCP. Autoscaling and cloud management services provided by GCP have given the data scientists at Qubit back their sleep!

Matthew Tamsett

Matthew was trained in experimental particle physics at Royal Holloway University of London, and did his Ph.D. on the use of leptonic triggers for the detection of super symmetric signals at the ATLAS detector at CERN. Following this, he completed three post doctoral positions at CERN and on the neutrino experiment NOvA at Louisiana Tech University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and the University of Sussex UK, culminating in a EU Marie Curie fellowship. During this time, Matt co-authored many papers including playing a minor part in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Since leaving academia in 2016, he’s worked at Qubit as a data scientist and later as lead data scientist where he lead a team working to improve the online shopping experience via the use of personalization, statistics and predictive modeling.

Ravi Upreti

Ravi has been working with Qubit for almost 4 years now and leads the platform engineering team there. He learned distributed computing, parallel algorithms and extreme computing at Edinburgh University. His four year stint at Ocado helped developed a strong domain knowledge for e-commerce, along with deep technical knowledge. Now it has all come together, as he gets to apply all these learnings to Qubit, at scale.

Cool things of the week

A developer goes to a DevOps conference blog
Cloud Build brings advanced CI/CD capabilities to GitHub blog
Cloud Build called out in Forrester Wave twitter
6 strategies for scaling your serverless applications blog

Interview

Qubit site
Qubit Blog blog
Pub/Sub site
BigQuery site
BigQuery ML site
Cloud Datastore site
Cloud Memorystore site
Cloud Bigtable site
Cloud SQL site
Cloud AutoML site
Goodbye Hadoop. Building a streaming data processing pipeline on Google Cloud blog

Question of the week

How do you deploy a Windows container on GKE?

Where can you find us next?

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

Aja will be at Cloud Next London.

Sound Effect Attribution

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

Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Mandel and Jon Foust return this week to host Jesse Houston, CEO of Phoenix Labs. Jesse goes into detail about their online, multiplayer game Dauntless, a hunting action game that brings friends together from every platform to fight giant monsters. Users can even switch platforms, say from Xbox to Playstation, and pick up right where they left off.

Later in the show, Jesse describes the hurdles of building such a huge game and how Phoenix Labs overcame them. Late nights and holiday hours helped them create “no downtime deploys”, so users can continue to play even as the game updates. Because big projects sometimes come with big problems, Jesse also emphasized the importance of developing crisis management skills to help get through tough times. We talk more specifically about what it takes to build and run Dauntless, from GCP products such as GKE, Bigtable, and BigQuery, to tricks with scaling and management. In the future, Dauntless will be available on the Switch, new expansions will be released, and more.

Jesse Houston

Jesse Houston is a games industry veteran with over 18 years experience in the gaming space. Houston fell in love with games at an early age and found his footing in the games industry by applying to a QA position in a local paper. Previously, Houston has held lead producer roles at both Riot Games on League of Legends, and BioWare on the Mass Effect series. He also served as Production Director at Ubisoft, overseeing Technical Project Management, Pipeline Planning, Development and Design, among other responsibilities. Houston formed Phoenix Labs with Sean Bender and Robin Mayne to create deep multiplayer games that bring players together.

Cool things of the week

Virtual display devices for Compute Engine are now GA blog
Container-native load balancing on GKE are now GA blog
How to deploy a Windows container on Google Compute Engine blog
Agones 1.0 site

Interview

Phoenix Labs site
Dauntless site
Dauntless Updates site
Dauntless on Twitter twitter
Cloud Bigtable site
Kubernetes site
BigQuery site
GKE site
Redis site
Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering blog
Cloud SQL site

Question of the week

What is the difference between Premium vs Standard network?

Where can you find us next?

Jesse will be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit. You can see Phoenix Labs at many other gaming conferences, including Pax, TwitchCon, and GDC.

Mark is taking some vacation time, then he’ll be at Kubecon.

Jon will also be at Kubecon, as well as taking some personal time to attend several weddings.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Fantasy Orchestra” by BigManJoe of Freesound.org

Conversational AI Best Practices with Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Conversational AI is our topic this week as your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia are joined by Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha. Cathy explains what conversation AI is, describing it as people teaching computers to communicate the way humans do, rather than forcing humans to communicate like computers.

Later, we talk best practices in design and development, including how a good conversation design and sample dialogues before building can create a better product. This prep work helps anticipate the ways different users could respond to the same question and how the program should react. In multi-modal programming, planning is also important. Our guests suggest starting with the spoken portions of the design and then planning visual components that would augment the experience. Working together as a team is one of the most important parts of the planning process.

We also talk best use-cases for conversation AI. Does performing this task via voice make the experience better? Does it make the task easier or more accessible? If so, that could be a great application. In the future, the conversation may be a silent communication with the help of MIT’s Alter Ego.

Cathy Pearl

Cathy Pearl is head of conversation design outreach and author of the O’Reilly book, “Designing Voice User Interfaces”. She’s been creating Voice User Interfaces for 20 years and has worked on everything from programming NASA helicopter pilot simulators to a conversational app in which Esquire’s style columnist advises what to wear on a first date. She earned an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University and a BS in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego. You can find Cathy on Twitter, or check out her latest Medium article “A Conversation With My 35-year-old Chatbot”.

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha

Jessica Dene Earley-Cha is a Developer Advocate for Actions on Google. She loves to connect with developers and explore VUI (voice user interface) to add another dimension to how users interact with technology. Jessica is part of the leadership team for @WomenInVoice. You’ll find her either spending time with her dog, collecting strawberry knick knack or biking around town. Stay up-to-date on her ventures on Twitter.

Cool things of the week

How Google and Mayo Clinic will transform the future of healthcare blog
Announcing the general availability of 6 and 12 TB VMs for SAP HANA instances on Google Cloud Platform blog
Understanding your GCP Costs site and videos
- Coupon code for qwiklabs is: 1q-costs-626

Interview

GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast
Google’s Conversation Design Best Practices site
Actions on Google site
Interactive Canvas docs
Dialogflow site
Deconstructing Chatbots videos
Behind the Actions videos
Assistant On Air videos
MIT’s Alter Ego site
Google Developers on Medium site
Actions Codelabs site
Actions Code Samples site
Actions on Google Twitter site
Google Assistant Dev on Reddit site
Cathy’s Book: Designing Voice User Interfaces site
How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation site
Talk: The Science of Conversation site

Question of the week

How to integrate Dialogflow with BigQuery

Where can you find us next?

Cathy will be at Project Voice.

Mark will be on vacation soon!

Priyanka will be at GOTO Berlin, Codemotion Milan, and GOTO Copenhagen

ML with Dale Markowitz

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On the podcast this week, we have a great interview with Google Developer Advocate, Dale Markowitz. Aja Hammerly and Jon Foust are your hosts, as we talk about machine learning, its best use cases, and how developers can break into machine learning and data science. Dale talks about natural language processing as well, explaining that it’s basically the intersection of machine learning and text processing. It can be used for anything from aggregating and sorting Twitter posts about your company to sentiment analysis.

For developers looking to enter the machine learning space, Dale suggests starting with non life-threatening applications, such as labeling pictures. Next, consider the possible mistakes the application can make ahead of time to help mitigate issues. To help prevent the introduction of bias into the model, Dale suggests introducing it to as many different types of project-appropriate data sets as possible. It’s also important to continually monitor your model.

Later in the show, we talk Google shop, learning about all the new features in Google Translate and AutoML.

Dale Markowitz

Dale Markowitz is an Applied AI Engineer and Developer Advocate for ML on Google Cloud. Before that she was a software engineer in Google Research and an engineer at the online dating site OkCupid.

Cool things of the week

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

Interview

TensorFlow site
Natural Language API site
AutoML Natural Language site
Content Classification site
Sentiment Analysis site
Analyzing Entities site
Translation API site
AutoML Translate site
Google Translate Glossary Documentation docs
Google News Lab site
AI Platform’s Data Labeling Service docs

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Dale will be at DevFest Minneapolis, DevFest Madison, and London NEXT.

Jon will be at the internal Google Game Summit and visiting Montreal.

Aja will be holding down the fort at home.

Sound Effect Attribution

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

Devoted Health and Data Science with Chris Albon

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Chris Albon

Chris Albon is the Director of Data Science at Devoted Health, using data science and machine learning to help fix America’s health care system. Previously, he was Chief Data Scientist at the Kenyan startup BRCK, cofounded the anti-fake news company New Knowledge, created the data science podcast Partially Derivative, led the data team at the humanitarian non-profit Ushahidi’s, and was the director of the low-resource technology governance project at FrontlineSMS. Chris also wrote Machine Learning For Python Cookbook (O’Reilly 2018) and created Machine Learning Flashcards.

He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis researching the quantitative impact of civil wars on health care systems. Chris earned a B.A. from the University of Miami, where he triple majored in political science, international studies, and religious studies.

Cool things of the week

How Itaú Unibanco built a CI/CD pipeline for ML using Kubeflow blog
Why TPUs are so high-performance
- BFloat16: The secret to high performance on Cloud TPUs blog
- TPU Codelabs site
- Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU Platforms for Deep Learning paper
Machine Learning Flashcards site

Interview

Devoted Health site
Devoted Health is hiring! site
Ushahidi site
FrontlineSMS site
New Knowledge site
Joel Grus: Fizz Buzz in TensorFlow site
Snowflake site
Periscope Data site
Airflow site
Kubernetes site
Chris Albon’s Website site
Partially Derivative podcast
Partially Derivative Back Episodes podcast

Question of the week

Chris Albon

To paraphrase: A computer program is said to learn if its performance at specific tasks improves with experience.

To find out more, including the definition of a partial derivative, buy a pack of Chris’s flashcards. Who knows, they might help you land your next job.

Where can you find us next?

Michelle is planning the ML for Developers track for QCon SF on Nov. 13.

Mark is staying in San Francisco and just launched two Beyond Your Bill videos: Organizing your GCP resources and Managing billing permissions.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 5” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Crowd Laugh” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org
“Transformers Type SFX 2” by HykenFreak of Freesound.org
“Approx 800 Laugh” by LoneMonk of Freesound.org
“Bad Beep” by RicherLandTV of Freesound.org
“C-ClassicalSuspense” by DuckSingle of Freesound.org

Cloud Bigtable with Billy Jacobson

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Billy Jacobson

Billy Jacobson is a developer programs engineer focusing on Cloud Bigtable.

Cool things of the week

Introducing Cloud Run Button: Click-to-deploy your git repos to Google Cloud blog
Firebase Unity Solutions: Update game behavior without deploying with Remote Config blog
Introducing the BigQuery Terraform module blog
Macy’s uses Google Cloud to streamline retail operations blog

Interview

Cloud Bigtable site
GCP Podcast Episode 18: Bigtable with Ian Lewis podcast
BigQuery site
Bigtable Documentation docs
Codelab: Introduction to Cloud Bigtable site
Key Visualizer docs
Bigtable Replication Documentation docs
Bigtable and HBase Documentation docs
HBase site
JanusGraph site
Open TSDB site
GeoMesa site
Bigtable Client Libraries docs
Cloud Spanner site
Managing IoT Storage with Google’s Cloud Platform (Google I/O’19) video
Cloud Datastore site
Cloud Firestore site
Mapping the invisible: Street View cars add air pollution sensors site
Breathing Easy with Bigtable article

Question of the week

If I have an organization, how do I break down my billing data by folder?

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirch is working around town but will be headed to LA soon.

Mark Mandel will be at Pax Dev, Pax West, Kubecon, and the GDC Online Games Technology Summit.

HerdX With Ron Hicks and Austin Adams

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Ron Hicks

As the CEO & Founder of HerdX, Inc., a global AgTech company based in the Texas Hill Country, Ron is filling the void in ag data with IoT devices designed for livestock herds. In a nutshell, HerdX is using tags, water, and data to connect farmers around the world with families around the dinner table. Before his time with HerdX, Ron had a number of immensely successful career paths and achievements as a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and a strong visionary who loves disruptive technologies that can change the world. He was distinguished with Business Week’s top industrial design award in Medical Technologies, which recognized him along with other leaders and companies throughout the world, including BMW, Sony, Logitech, and Ford Motor Company. Ron is also a dynamic speaker who is passionate about solving problems rather than just talking about them and has spoken at conferences as a keynote speaker at Google headquarters in the United States and Singapore. He was also the keynote speaker at Texas Governor Rick Perry’s program titled “Technology Excellence for Rural America” which served as a springboard for the formation of HerdX.

Austin Adams

Austin Adams holds over a decade of experience in leading innovative software teams. At his previous employer Adams took multiple greenfield projects from initial scoping, to research and development, to proof of concept, and ultimately to market-leading products. Adams is an early adopter, leader, and contributor to the Kubernetes open source platform. He has used Kubernetes to create automation systems to help drive more than a billion dollars of product sales.

Cool things of the week

Press play: Find and listen to podcast episodes on Search blog
Japanese researchers build robotic tail to keep elderly upright site
Shining a light on your costs: New billing features from Google Cloud blog

Interview

HerdX site
New Zealand Innovator of the Year Awards site

Question of the week

How do I connect an IoT device to a trigger event in the cloud?

Cloud IoT step-by-step: Cloud to device communication blog
Cloud IoT Core site
Gabe’s blog blog

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be hanging out locally and working on training content.

Gabe will be at Next London.

Sound Effect Attribution

“radio t3 SW bleep.wav” by ERH of Freesound.org

ML and AI with Sherol Chen

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Sherol Chen

Sherol advocates for Machine Learning for Google Cloud, and works in Research at Google Brain for Machine Learning in Music and Creativity for the Magenta team. She’s taught Artificial Intelligence at Stanford and around the world in six different countries. Her PhD work is in Computer Science, researching storytelling and Artificial Intelligence at the Expressive Intelligence Studio.

Cool things of the week

AMD EPYC processors come to Google—and to Google Cloud blog
Kaggle Petfinder Dataset site
Streaming data from Cloud Storage into BigQuery using Cloud Functions blog
App Engine Standard Ruby site
- Thagomizer blog

Interview

AutoML Tables site
AutoML Tables Promo Video video
Can Machines Think? article
AI Impact Challenge site
NeurIPS site
ICLR site
ICML site
Machine Learning Crash Course site
TensorFlow site
Project Magenta site
Cloud Speech-to-Text site
Cloud AutoML site
Sherol’s Blog blog

Question of the week

You mentioned that you can run App Engine + Rails, how do you handle migrations?

Where can you find us next?

Jon will be at PAX Dev and PAX West, the internal game summit at Google in Sunnyvale, and taking some personal time to travel to Montreal.

Aja will be hanging around at home, on the internet, and at Seattle.rb.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Coins 1.wav” by ProjectsU012 of Freesound.org
“Wedding Bells.wav” by Maurice_J_K of Freesound.org
“Small Group Laugh.wav” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org

NetApp with Alim Karim and Dean Hildebrand

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Alim Karim

Alim Karim is a Product Manager in the Cloud Data Services BU at NetApp. He started his career as a software developer and joined NetApp in 2011. At NetApp Alim has held several customer-facing positions and is passionate about solving business problems with technology. He holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and an MBA from Queen’s University.

Dean Hildebrand

Dean Hildebrand is a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Google Cloud focusing on enterprise and HPC storage systems. He has authored over 100 scientific publications and patents, and been the technical program chair and sat on the program committee of numerous conferences. He received a B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 1998 and M.S. and PhD. degrees in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2003 and 2007, respectively.

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud Game Servers site
VMware Cloud Foundation comes to Google Cloud blog
Using GCP NuGet Packages in Unity article

Interview

NetApp on Google Cloud site
Cloud Volumes Service site
BigQuery site
TensorFlow site
Google Cloud Storage site
Anthos site

Question of the week

How do I authenticate my Google Kubernetes Engine cluster in a CI/CD pipeline?

Where can you find us next?

Our guests will be at Google Cloud Summit Seattle and Next London.

Jon will be at PAX Dev, doing some Google Game stuff in Sunnyvale, and taking some personal time to travel to Montreal.

After Austin, Mark will be staying local to work on some stuff, and he’s about to launch the next few episodes of Stack Doctor.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Audience Laughs.wav” by Oniwe of Freesound.org
“MysteryPeak1.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org
“Small Group Laugh.wav” by TimKahn of Freesound.org

Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Priyanka Vergadia

Priyanka Vergadia is a Developer Advocate at Google. She worked directly with customers for 1.5 years prior to recently joining Google Cloud Developer Relations team. She loves architecting cloud solutions and enjoys building conversational experiences. Her interest in Conversational AI led to the Deconstructing Chatbots YouTube series. Priyanka is currently starring in a new show called “Get Cooking in Cloud” where she will be sharing recipes to cook various business solutions on Google Cloud.

Cool things of the week

Least privilege for Cloud Functions using Cloud IAM blog
Containerizing in the real world … of Minecraft blog
Introducing the What-If Tool for Cloud AI Platform models blog

Interview

Chatbot Fail site
Dialogflow site and docs
Deconstructing Chatbots videos
Codelab: Build your first Chatbot with Dialogflow site

Question of the week

How do you run a recurring python script?

Where can you find us next?

Priyanka will be at Codemotion Milan in October and GOTO Copenhagen in November.

Brian will be at the office in Seattle, thinking about Compute Engine.

Mark will be in Austin and the Bay Area working on new training content!

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh Set.wav” by Tim Kahn of Freesound.org
“Whip Crack 01.wav” by CGEffex of Freesound.org

Instruqt with Adé Mochtar

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Adé Mochtar

Adé is Co-Founder and CTO of Instruqt, a hands-on learning platform for IT technology. Before starting Instruqt, he was an engineer and consultant in Cloud and DevOps-related topics. A big part of that job was to educate organizations on how to adopt new technology. With Instruqt, he tries to achieve the same but on a larger scale. His mission is to make learning DevOps and Cloud more effective and fun. At Instruqt, Adé mainly focuses on back-end and infrastructure engineering using Terraform, Go, and (probably too much) Bash.

Cool things of the week

Step up your interviewing game with Byteboard blog
Gartner names Google Cloud a leader in its IaaS Magic Quadrant blog
Real-time bikeshare information in Google Maps rolls out to 24 cities blog
Run Visual Studio Code in Cloud Shell blog

Interview

Instruqt site
Instruqt on Slack site
Kubernetes site
Cloud Functions site
Hashi Corp site
Instruqt Arcade at Next ‘19 video
Google Developer Advocate - Sandeep Dinesh on Instruqt video
Go site
React site
Terraform site
GKE site
Cloud SQL site
Cloud Build site
Firebase site

Question of the week

I want to be more familiar with Google Cloud, how do I navigate the space for material? Learn more with Qwiklabs and Coursera. Get Certified.

Where can you find us next?

Instruqt arcade games will be at GopherCon and Cloud Summits!

Jon will be speaking at Pax Dev and Pax West.

Mark will be hanging on the East Coast, then meeting with customers in Austin.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Red Arrows Flyby.wav” by Figowitz of Freesound.org
“crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org
“Alien_Scream.wav” by Syna-Max of Freesound.org
“Laser Gun7.wav” by Burkay of Freesound.org
“Scratch2.mp3” by Feveran of Freesound.org
“BumbleBeeShort.mp3” by CGEffex of Freesound.org
“ComedyRimshot.wav” by XTRgamr of Freesound.org

Blockchain with Allen Day

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Allen Day

Allen Day is a developer advocate with Google in Singapore. He specializes in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. Allen studied at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine and earned his PhD in Human Genetics. Allen’s blockchain work is focused on interoperability between smart contract platforms and cloud platforms. He created Google Cloud’s blockchain public datasets program, which allows non-specialist engineers and data scientists to search and analyze public blockchain data.

Cool things of the week

Blockchain.com, scaling and saving with Cloud Spanner blog
Cloud TPU Pods break AI training records blog
Cloud Memorystore adds import-export and Redis 4.0 blog
To run or not to run a database on Kubernetes: What to consider blog
Google to acquire Elastifile blog

Interview

Blockchain site
Bitcoin site
Coinbase site
Ethereum site
$24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200% news article
Blockchain ETL project on GitHub site
BigQuery site
Kubernetes site
Cloud Composer site
Pub/Sub site
Bigtable site
Tensorflow site
Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog
BigQuery public blockchain datasets on GCP site
Ethereum in BigQuery: how we built this dataset blog
Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics blog
Introducing six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets—and how to analyze them blog
Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud blog
Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog
Unchained Podcast podcast
Off the Chain Podcast podcast

Question of the week

What are the four (or six?) types of VMs that exist on Google Cloud Platform? blog and docs

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit, as well as Pax Dev and Pax West.

Carter will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and working on new videos.

Allen will be at Strike Two Summit (Amsterdam), Singularity Festival (Heraklion), and Ethereum Devcon (Osaka).

Sound Effect Attribution

“mysterypeak1.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org
“crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org

Scotiabank with Yuri Litvinovich

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Yuri Litvinovich

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

Cool things of the week

Introducing Deep Learning Containers: Consistent and portable environments blog
How to implement document tagging with AutoML blog
Analyze BigQuery data with Kaggle Kernels notebooks blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 84: Kaggle with Wendy Kan podcast
Introducing the Jenkins GKE Plugin—deploy software to your Kubernetes clusters blog

Interview

Scotiabank site
Kubernetes site
Kubernetes Engine site
Cloud SQL site
BigQuery site
Dataflow site
Pub/Sub site
Stackdriver site
Anthos site
GKE On-Prem site
Istio site
Autoscaling Streaming Applications in Cloud Dataflow with Scotiabank video
Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 2 Product Innovation Keynote video
Kubeflow site

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirch is working on This Week in Cloud.

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

Sound Effect Attribution

“crowd laugh.wav” by tom_woysky of Freesound.org

Informatica with Bill Creekbaum

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Bill Creekbaum

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

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud + Chronicle: The security moonshot joins Google Cloud blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 135: VirusTotal with Emi Martinez podcast
Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa blog
Kubernetes 1.15: Extensibility and Continuous Improvement blog
Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas blog
See how your code actually executes with Stackdriver Profiler, now GA blog

Interview

Informatica site
Informatica for GCP site
BigQuery site
Cloud Storage site
Cloud Dataproc site
Intelligent Cloud Services site
Enterprise Data Catalog site
Big Data Management site
Google Analytics site
Pub/Sub site
Google Cloud & Informatica: Accelerate your Data-Driven Digital Transformation webinar
Informatica for Google BigQuery data sheet
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for Google BigQuery site

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is done traveling.

Mark Mirch’ is working on Stack Chat.

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

Sound Effect Attribution

“small group laugh 6.flac” by tim.kahn of Freesound.org
“Chewing, Carrot, A” by Inspector J of Freesound.org
“Testtone1000hz” by Jobro of Freesound.org

Google Cloud Platform UX with Michael Kleinerman

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Michael Kleinerman

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

Cool things of the week

Committed use discounts at a glance blog
Networking in depth blog
Chatbots with Dialog Flow blog and video
Turn it up to eleven: Java 11 runtime comes to App Engine blog
App Engine second generation runtimes now get double the memory; plus Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 now generally available blog

Interview

Material.io site
Material Design site
Firebase site
Cloud Firestore site

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is done traveling.

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

Everyone else is just laying low for now!

Sound Effect Attribution

“alert.wav” by danielnieto7 of Freesound.org
“cell phone vibraion.wav” by MrAuralization of Freesound.org
“laugh crowd 2.wav” by MrAuralizationFunWithSound of Freesound.org

Derwen, Inc. with Paco Nathan

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Paco Nathan

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

Cool things of the week

CERN recreated the Higgs discovery on GCP video
- To discover the Higgs yourself, check out the CERN open data portal site
Fun facts from Michelle’s visit:
- Seven total, four main experiments
  - ATLAS (largest, general-purpose) site
  - CMS (prettiest, general-purpose) site
  - ALICE (heavy-ion) site
  - LHCb (interactions of b-hadrons, matter/antimatter asymmetry) site
- The French/Swiss border runs across the CERN property
- Streetview of CERN control center site
- CERN is the birthplace of the web
- Where the protons come from site
- Watch Particle Fever movie

Interview

Derwen, Inc. site
Derwen, Inc. Blog blog
Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing paper
Apache Spark site
Google Cloud Storage site
Datastore site
Kubeflow site
Quicksilver site
O’Reilly Media site
Google Knowledge Graph site
Jupyter site
JupyterCon site
The Economics of Artificial Intelligence site
“Why Do Businesses Fail At Machine Learning?” by Cassie Kozyrkov video
The Gutenberg Galaxy site
Programmed Inequality site

Question of the week

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

Where can you find us next?

Jon is in New York for Games for Change.

Michelle and Mark Mirchandani are back in San Francisco.

Brian & Aja are at home in Seattle.

Gabi is in Brazil.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Crowd laugh.wav” by tom_woysky of Freesound.org

Google Maps Platform with Angela Yu

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Angela Yu

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

Cool things of the week

Google to acquire Looker blog
New Translate API capabilities can help localization experts and global enterprises blog
Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud CDN blog
Save money by stopping and starting Compute Engine instances on schedule blog
An update on Sunday’s service disruption blog

Interview

Google Maps Platform site blog docs
Google Maps Places site
Google Maps Routes site
Google Maps Treks site
Visualizing data from Firebase on a Google Map site
Google Maps Platform Codelabs site
BigQuery site
BigQuery Public Datasets docs
Deck.GL site
Google Maps SDK for Android Beta site
Popular Antipodes on Google Maps site
The True Size of countries site
Google Maps on Github site
Google Maps Client Libraries site
StreetView Gallery site
Earth Engine site
xkcd: Map Projections site
Beautiful data visualizations using deck.gl on Google Maps demo and docs

Question of the week

What is helm, and how do I use it?

GCP Podcast Episode 50: Helm with Michelle Noorali and Matthew Butcher podcast
- Kubernetes Podcast podcast and twitter
- Kuberenetes twitter

Where can you find us next?

Angela will be at the Chrome Dev Summit.

Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next.

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

Sound Effect Attribution

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

Firebase with Jen Person

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Jen Person

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

Cool things of the week

Uploading images directly to Cloud Storage using Signed URL blog
Build your own event-sourced system using Cloud Spanner blog
Cloud Shell on the Cloud Console app site
Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud Load Balancing deconstructed blog

Interview

Firebase site
Firestore site
Cloud Storage site
Firebase Authentication site
ML Kit site
TensorFlow Lite site
Cloud Functions for Firebase site
Cloud Functions Samples site
I/O 2019 Talk: Zero to App video
Guide - Cloud Firestore collection group queries docs
Guide - Scheduled Cloud Functions docs
YouTube - #AskFirebase Playlist videos
Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: iOS site
Codelab - Train and deploy on-device image classification model with AutoML Vision in ML Kit site
Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site
Codelab - Identify objects in images using custom machine learning models with ML Kit for Firebase site
Codelab - Detect objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site
Previous episodes on Firebase:
- GCP Podcast Episode 13: Firebase with Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 29: The New Firebase with Abe Haskins and Doug Stevenson podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 78: Firebase at I/O 2017 with James Tamplin and Andrew Lee podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 97: Cloud Firestore with Dan McGrath and Alex Dufetel podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 99: Cloud Functions and Firebase Hosting with David East podcast

Question of the week

How do I save money on my GCP resources?

Where can you find us next?

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

Mark Mirch is going on vacation!

Stackdriver with Rory Petty

Wed, 29 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Rory Petty

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

Cool things of the week

Commute just got easier with Google Pay and Google Assistant blog
5 year anniversary of Kubernetes and KubeCon content videos
- Kubernetes Podcast podcast
Early Preview of AR in Google Maps video

Interview

Stackdriver site
Stackdriver with Kubernetes video
Stackdriver Monitoring site
Stackdriver Logging site
Stackdriver Debugger site
Stackdriver Trace site
Stackdriver Profiler site
App Engine site
Compute Engine site
GKE site
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Book site
Istio site
Stackdriver Service Monitoring site
Stackdriver Sandbox site
Cloud Next ‘19 DevOps & SRE Sessions videos
Cloud On Air site
Stack Doctor Playlist videos
Implementing GCP Stackdriver and Adapting SRE Practices to Samsung’s AI System video
Stackdriver Documentation site

Question of the week

How do I decide between Apps Script and App Maker?

Where can you find us next?

Jon is going to Games for Change.

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

Sound Effect Attribution

“Spaceship Fly-by, A” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org
“Teleport” by Sergenious of Freesound.org
“Moretube.wav” by NoiseCollector of Freesound.org
“Mystery Peak2.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org

The Linux Foundation with Chris Aniszczyk

Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Chris Aniszczyk

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

Cool things of the week

Uber datasets in BigQuery: Driving times around SF (and your city too) blog
Topping the tower: the Obstacle Tower Challenge AI Contest with Unity and Google Cloud blog
Querying the Stars with BigQuery GIS blog
GKE Sandbox: Bring defense in depth to your pods blog
Google Cloud launches new Osaka region to support growing customer base in Japan blog

Interview

Linux Foundation site
OpenJS Foundation site
CNCF site
Automotive Linux Foundation site
Let’s Encrypt site
How to start a project with the Linux Foundation site
Community Bridge site
Academy Software Foundation site
Open Container Initiative site
CNCF Cloud Native Definition site
CNCF Annual Report site
GraphQL site
Linux Foundation Events site

Question of the week

How do I connect Cloud SQL to my serverless?

Where can you find us next?

Mark Mirchandani will be working on more film projects.

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

Primer with John Bohannon

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

John Bohannon

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

Cool things of the week

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone book
Next ‘19 Recap video
I/O ‘19 Recap video
All I/O Sessions videos
Michelle’s Favorites:
- Session: Taylor Wilson interviewing Michio Kaku on the future of humanity video
- Sandbox: AI on the Edge by Gabe Weiss, Noah Negrey, Yu-Han Liu, and Luiz Gustavo Martins
  - TensorFlow Lite site
  - OSS site
- Codelab: AI on a microcontroller with TFLite and SparkFun Edge site

Interview

Primer site
Primer Blog blog
Headline Generation: Learning from Decomposable Document Titles paper
BERT site
Ngram Viewer site
Google Books site
Dance Your PhD 2018 WINNER - Superconductivity: The Musical! video
Kinetech Arts site
John Bohannon’s Website site

Question of the week

How can we be like John?

Where can you find us next?

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

Human-Centered AI with Di Dang

Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Di Dang

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

Cool things of the week

Bringing the best of open source to Google Cloud customers blog
James Ward’s Cloud Run button site
Michelle’s favorite codelabs from I/O
- TPU-speed data pipelines site
- Your first Keras model site
- Convolutional neural networks site
- Modern convnets, squeezenet, with Keras with TPUs site

Interview

People + AI Guidebook site
PAIR site
GCP Podcast Episode 114: Machine Learning Bias and Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell podcast
Machine Learning Crash Course site
Google Clips site
Google Brain Team site

Question of the week

Where can you find us next?

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

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

MongoDB with Andrew Davidson

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Andrew Davidson

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

Cool things of the week

Level up on Android with Indie Games Accelerator blog
Berglas site
American Cancer Society uses Google Cloud machine learning to power cancer research blog
Efficiently scale ML and other compute workloads on NVIDIA’s T4 GPU, now generally available blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 168: NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski podcast
After school, this teen tracks climate change with NASA blog

Interview

MongoDB site
MongoDB Atlas site
JSON site
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) site
Kubernetes site
MongoDB Charts site
MondgoDB Stitch site
MongoDB University site
MongoDB.local site
MongoDB World site

Question of the week

How can I access Google Cloud Shell from any terminal?

Introducing the ability to connect to Cloud Shell from any terminal blog
gcloud alpha cloud-shell ssh site
gcloud alpha cloud-shell scp site
gcloud alpha cloud-shell get-mount-command site

Where can you find us next?

Jon and Mark will be at IO.

Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

Ann Wallace

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

Michael Wallman

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

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

Cool things of the week

Amy built an app that uses Cloud Vision to identify key features of images texted to it link
Want to Change the Game? Design your own with Google Play blog
- Change the Game site
The team based game of life app we demoed during the keynote is still up site
How we search for bow wows and meows blog
- Why do cats and dogs…? site

Interview

G Suite site
Chrome site
GKE site
Kubernetes site
Anthos (the new Cloud Services Platform) site
Pub/Sub site
GCS site
GCS Dual-Region Buckets site
Grafeas site
CRDS site
Exploring container security: Digging into Grafeas container image metadata blog
CRE site
SRE site
Cloud Consulting Services site

Question of the week

How do I cache files between builds in Cloud Build?

Cloud Builders Community site

Where can you find us next?

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

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

Our guests will be at Kubecon EU.

Cloud Run with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Steren Giannini

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

Ryan Gregg

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

Cool things of the week

News to build on: 122+ announcements from Google Cloud Next ‘19 blog
Mark’s Favorite Announcement:
- Network service tiers site
Michelle’s Favorite Announcements:
- Cloud Code site
- Cloud SQL for Postgres now supports v11 release notes
- Cloud Data Fusion for visual code-free ETL pipelines site
- Cloud AI Platform site
- AutoML Natural Language site
- Google Voice for G Suite blog
- Hangouts Chat in Gmail site
- Kubeflow v0.5.0 release site

Interview

Cloud Run site
Knative site
Knative Docs site
Firestore site
App Engine site
Cloud Functions site
GKE site
Cloud Run on GKE site
Understanding cluster resource usage site
Docker site
Cloud Build site
Gitlab site
Buildpacks site
Jib (Java Image Builder) site
Pub/Sub site
Cloud VPC site
Google Cloud Next ‘19 All Sessions videos

Question of the week

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

Get started with the beta version by logging in site
Quicklinks site
Codelab site

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is at PyTexas

Jon and Mark Mandel are at East Coast Game Conference

Michelle & Mark Mirchandani will be at Google IO in May

Michelle will be at Kubecon Barcelona in May

Next 2019 Day 3

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Interviews

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

Where can you find us next?

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

Next 2019 Day 2

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Interviews

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

Where can you find us next?

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

Next 2019 Day 1

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Interviews

Cloud Next site
Next On Air site
Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 1 Run Channel video
Cloud Next Opening Keynote video
Anthos site
Cloud SQL site
SQL Server on Google Cloud site
Skuid site
Firebase site
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL site
Google Compute Engine site
Onix site
Cloud Search site
OnSpend site
GSuite site
Onix Outreach site

Where can you find us next?

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

StackRox with Connor Gilbert

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Connor Gilbert

Connor Gilbert is a product manager at StackRox, a Kubernetes security company, where he contributes to product vision and advocates for customer needs. Connor previously worked in architecture and engineering roles at StackRox. Before that, as Security Research Scientist at Qadium, he built tools to uncover network perimeter exposures and conducted DARPA Internet security research. He first discovered Kubernetes in 2015 and has been using it on GCP ever since.

Cool things of the week

Simplify reporting with the Sheets data connector for BigQuery, and voila: automated content updates for G Suite blog
6 standout serverless sessions at Google Cloud Next ‘19 blog
9 mustn’t-miss machine learning sessions at Next ‘19 blog
Don’t miss these must-see G Suite sessions at Google Cloud Next ‘19 blog
Next On Air live show

Interview

StackRox site
StackRox Overview site
StackRox Data Sheet data sheet
Kubernetes site
GKE site
Google Container Registry site
Google Cloud Security Command Center site
Go site
Istio site
Kubernetes Documentation site
Kubernetes Blog blog
Kubernetes Blog: A Guide to Kubernetes Admission Controllers blog
CNCF site
CNCF Webinar: Operationalizing Kubernetes Security Best Practices video
BSidesSF 2019 Talk: “Containers: Your Ally in Improving Security” video
Nine Kubernetes Security Best Practices Everyone Should Follow site
Top 5 Kubernetes RBAC Mistakes to Avoid white paper

Question of the week

How do I migrate my traditional data warehouse platform to BigQuery?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO.

Gabi will be at Cloud NEXT and PyTexas

StackRox will be at Cloud NEXT, KubeCon, FS-ISAC, DockerCon, Red Hat Summit, and Black Hat.

NVIDIA T4 with Ian Buck and Kari Briski

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Ian Buck

Ian Buck is general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. He is responsible for the company’s worldwide datacenter business, including server GPUs and the enabling NVIDIA computing software for AI and HPC used by millions of developers, researchers and scientists. Buck joined NVIDIA in 2004 after completing his PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where he was development lead for Brook, the forerunner to generalized computing on GPUs. He is also the creator of CUDA, which has become the world’s leading platform for accelerated parallel computing. Buck has testified before the U.S. Congress on artificial intelligence and has advised the White House on the topic. Buck also received a BSE degree in computer science from Princeton University.

Kari Briski

Kari Briski is a Senior Director of Accelerated Computing Software Product Management at NVIDIA. Her talents and interests include Deep Learning, Accelerated Computing, Design Thinking, and supporting women in technology. Kari is also a huge Steelers fan.

Cool things of the week

Kubernetes 1.14: Production-level support for Windows Nodes, Kubectl Updates, Persistent Local Volumes GA blog
Stadia blog
How Google Cloud helped Multiplay power a record-breaking Apex Legends launch blog
Massive Entertainment hosts Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 on Google Cloud Platform blog

Interview

NVIDIA site
NVIDIA Catalog site
CUDA site
Tensor Cores site
TensorFlow sote
Automatic Mixed Precision for Deep Learning site
Automatic Mixed Precision for NVIDIA Tensor Core Architecture in TensorFlow blog
TensorFlow 2.0 on NVIDIA GPU video
NVIDIA Volta site
NVIDIA T4 site
WaveNet blog
BERT blog
Compute Engine site
T4 on GCP site
Webinar On Demand: Accelerate Your AI Models with Automatic Mixed-Precision Training in PyTorch site
PyTorch site
NVIDIA TensorRT site
TensorRT 5.1 site
Kubernetes site
Rapids site
NVIDIA GTC site
Deep Learning Institute site
KubeFlow Pipeline Docs site
KubeFlow Pipelines on GitHub site
NVIDIA RTX site

Question of the week

Where can we learn more about Stadia?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO.

Jon may be going to Unite Shanghai and will definitely be at Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO.

NVIDIA will be at Cloud NEXT and KubeCon, as well as International Conference on Machine Learning, The International Conference on Learning Representations, and CVPR

World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Emma Haruka Iwao

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

Cool things of the week

The Next OnAir site is live today and provides many of the details viewers could be looking for ahead of the event site
Get Google Cloud Certified at Next ‘19: What you need to know blog
Game Playing on Google Maps (see more at GDC) blog
Your mission, gumshoe: Catch Carmen San Diego in Google Earth blog

Interview

Y-cruncher site
Join the pi-31415926535897 Google Group group
Fetching pi digits site
Pi digit snapshots site

Question of the week

How do I track what is happening to my containers? Who has access to them, changes, etc?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and IO.

Gabi will be at Cloud NEXT, PyTexas 2019, and she will be conducting a Cloud on Air Webinar on Migrating to Cloud SQL

SAP HANA with Lucia Subatin and Kevin Nelson

Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Lucia Subatin

Lucia, Developer Advocate for SAP, is a proud geek. Her mission is to bring developers closer to SAP HANA and optimal enterprise solutions. Her contribution towards the community is based on enabling content and facilitating adoption by exploring and sharing more and better ways to capitalize the power of the platform.

Kevin Nelson

Kevin is a Google Cloud Developer Advocate focused on enterprise strategic partners. In his free time, Kevin is an avid sailor, brewer, and history buff who loves stargazing and studying the Age of Exploration.

Cool things of the week

Take your mobile games business to the next level with Google AdMob and Google Ads at GDC blog
Gaming developer hub site
Go global with Cloud Bigtable blog
Announcing Knative v0.4 Release article
Build with Classroom G Suite blog

Interview

SAP site
SAP HANA site
SAP S/4HANA site
SAP C/4HANA site
BigQuery site
Cloud Foundry site
SAP HANA Express site
Compute Engine site
GCP Marketplace site
Kubernetes site
Ubuntu site
Elephants, Rhinos, and People site
Request an SAP CodeJam site
Information for Developers site
SAP TechEd site

Question of the week

If I want to programmatically search for links to an image that I have, how can I do that?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, and ECGC in April.

Jon will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, ECGC, and Vector Conf 2019.

Our guests will be at SAP CodeJam Venice, CA March 7, 2019, SAP CodeJam Mannheim, Germany March 18, 2019 and at Cloud NEXT.

Python with Dustin Ingram

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

Dustin Ingram

Dustin Ingram is a Developer Advocate at Google, focused on supporting the Python community on Google Cloud. He’s also a member of the Python Packaging Authority, maintainer of PyPI, and organizer for the PyTexas conference.

Cool things of the week

Machine learning can boost the value of wind energy blog
Compute Engine Guest Attributes site
Colopl open sourced a Cloud Spanner driver for Laravel framework site
Running Redis on GCP: four deployment scenarios blog

Interview

GCP Podcast Episode 3: Kubernetes and Google Container Engine podcast
Python site
Extending Python with C or C++ docs
PyPy site
PyPI site
App Engine site
Compute Engine site
Cloud Functions site
Ubuntu site
Flask site
Flask documentation docs
Docker site
Python documentation docs
PyCon site
PyCaribbean site

Question of the week

How can I manipulate images with Cloud Functions?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, and ECGC in April.

Dustin will be at Cloud Next and PyCon.

Brian will be lecturing at Cloud Next: ‘Where should I run my code?’

Node.js with Myles Borins

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

Myles Borins

Myles Borins is a developer, musician, artist, and maker. They work for Google as a developer advocate serving the Node.js ecosystem. Myles cares about the open web and healthy communities.

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud Next ‘19 session guide now available blog
Introducing scheduled snapshots for Compute Engine persistent disk blog
Reliable task scheduling on Compute Engine with Cloud Scheduler site
How to make a self-destructing VM on Google Cloud Platform article
Making AI-powered speech more accessible—now with more options, lower prices, and new languages and voices blog

Interview

GCP Podcast Episode 105: Node.js with Myles Borins podcast
Node.js site
Introduction to Node.js site
Nodejs.dev on Github site
Cloud Build site
Firebase site
Node.js Foundation site
JS Foundation site
Linux Foundation site
Foundation Bootstrap Team on Github site
App Engine site
G Suite site
Apps Script site
BigQuery site
JSON site
The hilarious misadventures of being a platform downstream from your language video
Node.js Versions - How Do They Work? video
Open Source Leadership Summit site
Black Girls Code site
Scripted site
Girls Who Code site

Question of the week

How do I get google cloud APIs to work within Unity?

Add packages from NuGet to a Unity project and read more in the Unity docs here

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April.

Jon will be at GDC, Cloud NEXT, ECG, and Vector 2019.

Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan

Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Amy Krishnamohan

Amy is Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud responsible for Databases. She has diverse experience across product marketing, marketing strategy and product management from leading enterprise software companies such as MariaDB, Teradata, SAP, Accenture, Cisco and Intuit. Amy received her Masters in Software Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Cool things of the week

Process Workflows with the new Google Docs API blog
Jib 1.0.0 is GA—building Java Docker images has never been easier blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 151: Java & Jib with Patrick Flynn and Mike Eltsufin podcast
A guided tour in Google Earth that explores Black history blog
Author: Gabe Weiss - Publishing series: Cloud IoT step-by-step
- Cloud IoT step-by-step: Connecting Raspberry PI + Python site
- Cloud IoT step-by-step: Cloud to device communication site
- Cloud IoT step-by-step: Quality of life tip - The command line site

Interview

Cloud SQL site
Cloud SQL Features site
MySQL site
PostgreSQLsite
Cloud MemoryStore site
Cloud Bigtable site
Cloud Firestore site
Cloud Spanner site
GCP Podcast Episode 62: Cloud Spanner with Deepti Srivastava podcast
Mongo site
Getting to know Google Cloud SQL video

Question of the week

What is a virtual column in a database?

Generated columns blog and docs

Where can you find us next?

Amy will be at the Postgres Conference in New York on March 19.

Gabi will be at PHP UK in London and Cloud NEXT in April.

Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April.

Diamond Partner Q&A: Google’s Mark Mandel Has The Tools To Help You Make Great Games article

Voicea with Mohamed El-Geish

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Mohamed El-Geish

Mohamed El-Geish is the Chief Architect and co-founder at Voicea (formerly Voicera), a voice AI technology company based in Menlo Park, Calif. Voicea leverages AI technology to harness voice in the workplace to increase productivity through EVA, Voicea’s Enterprise Voice Assistant. EVA listens, takes notes, and automatically provides highlights, actions, and recaps so your meetings can be activated. Voicea can turn talk into action from any conversation with in-person chats, meetings, conference calls, or video conferences.

Cool things of the week

Query without a credit card: introducing BigQuery sandbox blog
Exploring container security: Encrypting Kubernetes secrets with Cloud KMS blog
Golden State Warriors power data analytics and fan experiences with Google Cloud blog
Seven steps to making DevOps a reality blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 158: VP of Engineering - Melody Meckfessel podcast
The Telegraph UK: Reimagining media with the help of Google Cloud blog

Interview

Voicea site
Voicea Integrations site
Kubernetes site
GKE site
Stackdriver site
Docker site
Voicea on LinkedIn site
Mohamed El-Geish site

Question of the week

What if I’m working in a terminal in Cloud shell, and I want to move to another computer? How can I continue my work?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April.

Gabi will be at the Museum of Natural History for their Brown Scholars program giving a workshop on ML APIs and Cloud Functions. She’ll also be at Cloud NEXT.

Go Cloud Functions with Stewart Reichling and Tyler Bui-Palsulich

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Stewart Reichling

Stewart Reichling is the lead Product Manager on Google Cloud Functions. He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across Strategy, Marketing, and Product Management at Google.

Tyler Bui-Palsulich

Tyler is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He graduated with his Master’s in Computer Science from NYU and loves detailed documentation, random trivia, and homemade bread. You can find his blog at buipalsulich.com

Cool things of the week

Actually cool thing of the week twitter
NoSQL for the serverless age: Announcing Cloud Firestore general availability and updates blog
Site Reliability Workbook now available in HTML site
Building a serverless online game: Cloud Hero on Google Cloud Platform blog
The tech industry is failing people with disabilities and chronic illnesses article

Interview

GCP Podcast Episode 34: Stackdriver monitoring with Aja Hammerly podcast
GCP Podcast Episode 53: Ruby with Aja Hammerly podcast
Cloud Functions site
Cloud Scheduler site
Firestore site
Pub/Sub site
Go Mod site
App Engine site
Open Census site
GCP Podcast Episode 118: OpenCensus with Morgan McLean and JBD podcast
Google Stackdriver site
Launch/overview video video
The Go Runtime site
Cloud Functions Quickstarts site

Question of the week

How many ways can you run containers on GCP?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April. Agones has a new website agones.dev! And he’s also back to Twitch streaming!

Aja will be at Cloud NEXT in April.

Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Mark Chmarny

Mark is a Technical Program Manager for Serverless focusing on enabling customers to be successful with our serverless portfolio on GCP, and driving community awareness of our serverless products on GKE. Prior to that Mark lead the Partner Engineering team for Data, Analytics and ML at Google. Before Google, Mark was the Sr. Director of Datacenter Solutions Group at Intel.

Ville Aikas

Ville is a member of the Technical Oversight Committee for Knative, leads Knative Eventing, and (with Matt) conceived ducks for K8s. Previously, Ville worked on Helm, K8s Service Catalog and Kubernetes (before it was Kubernetes). Before the OSS stint Ville was a TL for Google Cloud Storage.

Cool things of the week

Let the sunshine in: opening the market for more renewable energy in Asia blog
Get Go-ing with Cloud Functions: Go 1.11 is now a supported language blog
Building Google’s Game of the Year with Cloud Text-to-Speech and App Engine blog
Welcome to the service mesh era: Introducing a new Istio blog post series blog

Interview

Knative site
Knative Blog blog
Knative on GitHub site
Kubernetes site
MiniKube site
GKE site
Pub/Sub site
Cloudevents site
Knative Install on Google Kubernetes Engine site
Knative Slack site

Question of the week

How long does it take for Cloud SQL to detect an outage and trigger High Availability failover?

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be discussing the awesome new features of MySQL 8.0 at PHP UK - London and you will be also able to find her at Cloud NEXT

Mark will be at GDC in March, Cloud NEXT, and ECG in April

Our guests will be at Cloud NEXT and KubeCon Barcelona

End of Year Wrap-up

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Cool things of the week

Kubernetes and GKE for developers: a year of Cloud Console blog
Reducing gender bias in Google Translate blog
Cloud Security Command Center is now in beta and ready to use blog

Main content

Podcast accomplishments!
- We have awesome new intro and outro music, new website, new YouTube videos!
- We hit 1 million and then 2 million downloads!
- Mark and the podcast are celebrating their three year anniversary!
Top 10 most downloaded episodes of all time!
1. GCP Podcast Episode 111: Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji podcast
2. GCP Podcast Episode 112: Percy.io with Mike Fotinakis podcast
3. GCP Podcast Episode 146: Google AI with Jeff Dean podcast
4. GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast
5. GCP Podcast Episode 128: Decision Intelligence with Cassie Kozyrkov podcast
6. GCP Podcast Episode 113: Open Source TensorFlow with Yifei Feng podcast
7. GCP Podcast Episode 88: Kubernetes 1.7 with Tim Hockin podcast
8. GCP Podcast Episode 108: Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig podcast
9. GCP Podcast Episode 130: Data Science with Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon podcast
10. GCP Podcast Episode 125: Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny podcast
Top 10 most downloaded episodes for 2018!
- Exact same list except Tim Hockin is not #7. Following episodes go up a number and we added to #10 spot.
- GCP Podcast Episode 122: Project Jupyter with Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf podcast
Mark’s favorite episodes
- GCP Podcast Episode 129: Developer Relations with Mandy Waite podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 121: Kontributing to Kubernetes with Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 131: Actions on Google with Mandy Chan podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 148: Wellio with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 110: CPU Vulnerability with Matt Linton and Paul Turner podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 125: Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 140: Container Security with Maya Kaczorowski podcast
Melanie’s favorite episodes
- GCP Podcast Episode 117: Cloud AI Fei-Fei Li was the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 114: ML Bias & Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 141: Accessibility in Tech podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 136: Robotics with Raia podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 150: Strange Loop, Remote Working, and Distributed Systems with KF podcast
- DL Indaba
  - GCP Podcast Episode 147: DL Indaba: AI Investments in Africa podcast
  - GCP Podcast Episode 149: Deep Learning Research in Africa with Yabebal Fantaye & Jessica Phalafala podcast
  - GCP Podcast Episode 152: AI Corporations and Communities in Africa with Karim Beguir & Muthoni Wanyoike podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 157: NeurIPS and AI Research with Anima Anandkumar podcast
Favorite announcements, products, and more at Google Cloud
- Unity and Google Cloud Strategic Alliance blog
  - Open Match blog
- Cloud TPU site
- Google Dataset Search is in beta site
- No tricks, just treats: Globally scaling the Halloween multiplayer Doodle with Open Match on Google Cloud blog
- GKE On-Prem site
- Open Source - Knative release, Skaffold, Istio updates, gVisor, etc.
- Google in Ghana blog
- Cloud NEXT blog
  - GCP Podcast Episode 137: Next Day 1 podcast
  - GCP Podcast Episode 138: Next Day 2 podcast
  - GCP Podcast Episode 139: Next Day 3 podcast
- Unity and DeepMind partner to advance AI research blog
- Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog

Question of the week

What were your personal highlights for 2018?

Mark
- Agones
- Introducing Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting built on Kubernetes blog github
- The new website
- Having Melanie join me on the podcast
Melanie
- Bringing Francesc back
- Meeting Grace
- GCP Podcast Episode 142: Agones With Mark Mandel and Cyril Tovena podcast

Where can you find us next?

It’s the holidays!

Special thanks!

Thank you guests
Thank you Jennifer
Thank you HD Interactive: James, Trae, Sabrina, and Sean
Thank you Greg
Thank you Neil, Chuck, and Shana
Thank you MBooth for the website overhaul and social media support
Thank you Francesc
Thank you listeners!

VP of Engineering - Melody Meckfessel

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Melody Meckfessel

Melody Meckfessel is a hands-on technology leader with more than 20 years experience building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale. As VP of Engineering, she leads the team building DevOps tools and sharing DevOps best practices across Google and with software development and operations teams around the world. Her team powers the world’s most advanced continuously delivered software, enabling development teams to turn ideas into reliable, scalable production systems. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Melody programmed for startups and enterprise companies. Since joining Google in 2004, Melody has led teams in Google’s core search systems, search quality and cluster management. Melody is passionate about making software development fast, scalable, and fun.

Cool things of the week

Mark is back from vacation!
We are at 2 million downloads! tweet
Greg Wilson twitter and github
Open source gaming:
- Agones - 0.6.0 - site
- Open Match - 0.2.0 RC - site
What’s new at Firebase Summit 2018 blog

Interview

GCP Podcast Episode 137: Next Day 1 podcast
Stackdriver site
GitLab site
Google SRE site
Borg site
Cloud Spanner site
Go site
GKE On-Prem site
Skaffold site
Minikube site
DORA site
Cloud Build site
Bazel site

Question of the week

If I want to configure third party notifications (such as Slack or Github) into my Cloud Build configuration - how can I do that?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at KubeCon next week.

Melanie will be at NeurIPS this week. She’ll be attending Queer in AI, Black in AI, and LatinX this week as well.

NeurIPS and AI Research with Anima Anandkumar

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Anima Anandkumar

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. Her research spans both theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning. In particular, she has spearheaded research in tensor-algebraic methods, large-scale learning, deep learning, probabilistic models, and non-convex optimization.

Anima is the recipient of several awards such as the Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Young investigator awards from the Air Force and Army research offices, Faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google and Adobe, and several best paper awards. She is the youngest named professor at Caltech, the highest honor bestowed to an individual faculty. She is part of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network consisting of leading experts from academia, business, government, and the media. She has been featured in documentaries by PBS, KPCC, wired magazine, and in articles by MIT Technology review, Forbes, Yourstory, O’Reilly media, and so on.

Anima received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2009 to 2010, visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England in 2012 and 2014, assistant professor at U.C. Irvine between 2010 and 2016, associate professor at U.C. Irvine between 2016 and 2017, and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services between 2016 and 2018.

Cool things of the week

Taking charge of your data: using Cloud DLP to de-identify and obfuscate sensitive information blog
Unlocking what’s possible with medical imaging data in the cloud blog
Google makes dataset of 50 million drawings available on its cloud blog
Machine learning on machines: building a model to evaluate CPU performance blog

Interview

Anima at TensorLab site
NeurIPS site
Petition site
Name Change (results of the poll) letter
Johns Hopkins University letter letter
AI Researchers Fight Over Four Letters article
From the Board: Changing our Acronym letter
TensorFlow site
NVIDIA site

Question of the week

What are some actions I can take if I’m being trolled, harassed and/or bullied online or I want to be proactive about my safety?

If you are experiencing harassment, tell someone who can support you, document it, and assess escalating to authorities depending on the severity.
Surveillance Self-Defense
Preventing Doxxing

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML this week and NeurIPS next week. She’ll be attending WIML, Black in AI, and LatinX.

Grace Health with Therese Mannheimer and Roman Jasins

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Therese Mannheimer

Therese, one of the founders of Grace.health, is an experienced business developer and product person who believes that the best way to solve problems is to put relevant solutions into the hands of people. She is also co-founder of the Allbright Foundation that works with driving opinion around meritocracy.

Roman Jasins

Roman is CTO and co-founder of Grace.health.

Cool things of the week

Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video
Getting started with Kubeflow Pipelines blog
Subatomic particles and big data: Google joins CERN openlab blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 145: ATLAS with Dr. Mario Lassnig podcast
Istio Routing Basics site

Interview

Grace Health site
- Google Cloud Startup site
Dialogflow site
FEM International site
UN site
Doctors Without Borders site
The Hunger Project site

Question of the week

With background cloud functions - how can I set them up to retry on failure?

Where can you find us next?

Mark and will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML in November and Black in AI and LatinX in December.

Confluent and Kafka with Viktor Gamov

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Viktor Gamov

Viktor Gamov is a Developer Advocate at Confluent, the company that makes a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Working in the field, Viktor developed comprehensive expertise in building enterprise application architectures using open source technologies. He enjoys helping different organizations design and develop low latency, scalable, and highly available distributed systems.

Back in his consultancy days, he co-authored O’Reilly’s «Enterprise Web Development».

He is a professional conference speaker on distributed systems, Java, and JavaScript topics, and is a regular at events, including JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon, and others. He blogs and produces the podcasts Razbor Poletov (in Russian) and co-hosts DevRelRad.io.

Follow Viktor on Twitter, where he posts about gym life, food, open source, and, of course, Kafka and Confluent!

Cool things of the week

Kubeflow published a leadership guide to inclusivity site
Picture what the cloud can do: How the New York Times is using Google Cloud to find untold stories in millions of archived photos blog
Click-to-deploy on Kubeflow site
Containerd available for beta testing in Google Kubernetes Engine blog
Introducing AI Hub and Kubeflow Pipelines: Making AI simpler, faster, and more useful for businesses blog
Announcing Cloud Scheduler: a modern, managed cron service for automated batch jobs blog

Interview

Kafka site
Kafka Connect site
Kafka Streams site
KSQL site
Confluent site
Confluent Hub site
Confluent Schema Registry site
Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace site
Confluent Enterprise site
Confluent Cloud site
Confluent on Github site
Confluent Blog blog
How to choose the number of topics/partitions in a Kafka cluster? blog
Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times blog
Google Cloud Platform and Confluent partner to deliver a managed Apache Kafka service blog
Viktor’s Presentations site
Confluent Community site

Question of the week

If I wanted to submit a CFP for Next 2019, how would I do it?

Where can you find us next?

Mark and Michelle will be at KubeCon in December.

Michelle will be at Scale by the Bay on Friday. She’ll also be at YOW! Sydney, Brisbane, & Melbourne in Nov & December.

G Suite with Joanna Smith and Alicia Williams

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Joanna Smith

Joanna is a Developer Advocate for G Suite, working to make sure that anyone can extend G Suite with clever solutions to make Google work for them.

Alicia Williams

Alicia is an advocate for Google Cloud, trying to help data analysts solve problems. She uses machine learning, SQL, and visualizations to help solve problems and tell stories.

Cool things of the week

A dataset of congressional bills and built a text classification model with AutoML Natural Language by Sara Robinson tweet and blog
Serverless from the ground up: Connecting Cloud Functions with a database (Part 3) blog
How 20th Century Fox uses ML to predict a movie audience blog
Kick off developer projects with improved G Suite Developer Hub blog
This multiplayer game integrates Open Match, a highly-scalable, open source matchmaking framework from Google Cloud, Unity tweet, and Google Doodle
Happy Anniversary, Melanie!

Interview

G Suite site
Google Sheets site
G Suite on Google Plus site
G Suite Marketplace site
G Suite on Github site
G Suite APIs site
G Suite App Maker site
Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video
Firestore Google Apps Script Library site
Build on G Suite site
Advanced Services Documentation site
BigQuery site
New Google Sheets enterprise data integrations with BigQuery and SAP blog
Analyze big data within Google Sheets site
Analyzing text in a Google Sheet using Cloud Natural Language API and Apps Script blog
Entity sentiment analysis on text data in a Google sheet using Cloud Natural Language Github site

Question of the week

What if I want to write a code sample with a link that opens the Cloud Console and automatically clones a Git repository into Cloud Shell?

Where can you find us next?

Alicia will be at DevFest.

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML this month.

Bazel with Tony Aiuto

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tony Aiuto

Tony is the tech-lead/manager for Bazel Product Excellence. He works on removing what enterprise users see as barriers to adoption. Tony’s efforts are on bridging the gap between the piece of open source code that the developers see and the product that users want to see.

Commentary of the week

Where can I donate if I’m angry or sad by last week’s news?

Time’s Up Now site
Project Alloy site
MeToo Stem site
HIAS site
ADL site
Protest NIPS conference name site

Interview

Bazel site
BazelCon site
Bazel on GitHub site
Bazel Discuss on Google Groups site
Bazel on Slack site
Tweag site
Tweag Haskell Rules site

Cool things of the week

It’s Halloween!
And it’s the 3rd anniversary of the podcast!
Gain insights about your GCP resources with asset inventory blog
Introducing the Cloud KMS plugin for HashiCorp Vault blog
Serverless from the ground up: Adding a user interface with Google Sheets (Part 2) blog
Cyber Security for the Previous Generation blog
The Red Sox won the World Series!

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML in November.

AI Corporations and Communities in Africa with Karim Beguir & Muthoni Wanyoike

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Karim Beguir

Karim Beguir helps companies get a grip on the latest AI advancements and how to implement them. A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products. Karim is also the founder of the TensorFlow Tunis Meetup. He regularly organises educational events and workshops to share his experience with the community. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience.

Muthoni Wanyoike

Muthoni Wanyoike is the team lead at Instadeep in Kenya. She is Passionate about bridging the skills gap in AI in Africa and does this by co-organizing the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning community. The community enables learning, mentorship, networking, and job opportunities for people interested in working in AI. She is experienced in research, data analytics, community and project management, and community growth hacking.

Cool things of the week

Is there life on other planets? Google Cloud is working with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to find out blog
In this Codelab, you will learn about StarCraft II Learning Environment project and to train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent. You will also get familiar some of the concepts and frameworks to get to train a machine learning agent. site
A new course to teach people about fairness in ML blog
Serverless from the ground up: Building a simple microservice with Cloud Functions (Part 1) blog
Superposition Podcast from Deep Learning Indaba with Omoju Miller and Nando de Freitas tweet and video

Interview

Instadeep site
Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science site
Neural Information Processing Systems site
Google Launchpad Accelerator site
TensorFlow site
Google Assistant site
Cloud AutoML site
Hackathon Lagos site
Deep Learning Book book
Ranked Reward: Enabling Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization research paper
Lessons learned on building a tech community blog
Kenya Open Data Initiative site
R for Data Science GitHub site and book
TWIML Presents Deep Learning Indaba site

Question of the week

If I want to create a GKE cluster with a specific major kubernetes version (or even just the latest) using the command line tools, how do I do that?

GCloud container clusters create site
Specifying cluster version site

Where can you find us next?

Our guests will be at Indaba 2019 in Kenya.

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML in November.

Java & Jib with Patrick Flynn and Mike Eltsufin

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Patrick Flynn

Patrick Flynn is a long time Java developer who spent many years in Google Ads, and is now four years into being the tech lead of the Google Cloud Java Tools team.

Mike Eltsufin

Mike Eltsufin has been an enterprise Java application developer in the banking sector for over a decade before joining Google. Currently, he’s the tech lead of the Cloud Java Frameworks team, focusing on bringing the goodness of Spring Boot to Google Cloud Java developers.

Cool things of the week

Introducing container-native load balancing on Google Kubernetes Engine blog
Simplifying cloud networking for enterprises: announcing Cloud NAT and more blog
Store it, analyze it, back it up: Cloud Storage updates bring new replication options blog
Postmortems and Retrospectives with Liz and Seth video
- GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast

Interview

App Engine site
Kubernetes Engine site
Spring Framework site
Spring Boot site
Spring Cloud GCP site
Spring Cloud GCP on GitHub site
Cloud Pub/Sub site
Spanner site
Cloud Sql site
Cloud Datastore site
Docker site
Jib on GitHub site
Cloud Tools for IntelliJ Documentation site
Introducing Jib — build Java Docker images better blog
Bazel site
Skaffold on GitHub site
Netty site
SpringOne site
Knative and riff for Spring Developers video
Jib Gitter site
Sig Apps site
Kubernetes Slack site
Codelabs site

Question of the week

What if we have an object in Google Cloud Storage, and I want to automatically change an aspect of it – such as:

Downgrade the storage class of objects older than 365 days to Coldline Storage.
Delete objects created before January 1, 2013.
Keep only the 3 most recent versions of each object in a bucket with versioning enabled.

Managing Object Lifecycles docs and guide

Where can you find us next?

Patrick’s team will be at KubeCon Shanghai and Oracle Code One and he will be at KubeCon Seattle

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at Twilio Signal $BASH event on Thursday and SOCML in November.

Strange Loop, Remote Working, & Distributed Systems with KF

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Katherine Fellows

KF is a senior engineer focusing on backend, infrastructure, and data engineering. She has worked remotely for companies at all stages of growth in San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and Philadelphia. Most recently, she’s been a Senior Software Engineer at Turbine Labs, developing tools that leverage a service mesh to make collaboration more effective for engineering teams. KF currently lives with her cat in Portland, OR.

Cool things of the week

Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog
Is that a device driver, golf driver, or taxi driver? Building custom translation models with AutoML Translate blog
A developer onramp to Kubernetes with GKE blog
Network controls in GCP vs. on-premises: Not so different after all blog

Interview

Strange Loop site
Kubernetes site
Docker site
SRE site
GCP Podcast Episode 102: Smart Parking and IoT Core with Brian Granatir podcast

Question of the week

How do I encrypt and decrypt data with Cloud KMS? Symmetric and Asymmetric

Where can you find us next?

Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December. Mark streams on Twitch streaming.

Melanie will be at CAMLIS.

Get in touch!

Deep Learning Research in Africa with Yabebal Fantaye & Jessica Phalafala

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Jessica Phalafala

Jessica Phalafala is a PhD Applied Mathematics student at Stellenbosch University and currently affiliated with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In her mid-twenties, she finds herself with four qualifications all obtained with distinction, including a Master of Science in Pure Mathematics degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. Jessica is interested in using her functional analysis background together with a number of newly developed skills to contribute towards developing rigorous mathematical theory to support some existing deep learning methods and algorithms for her PhD research. Outside of research she takes great interest in fast-tracking the level of accessibility of higher education in South Africa as co-founder of the Sego Sa Lesedi Foundation, a platform created to inform underprivileged high school learners of career and funding opportunities in science as well as provide them with mentorship as they transition into undergraduate studies.

Yabebal Fantaye

Dr. Fantaye is an AIMS-ARETE Research Chair based in South Africa. His research is in applying artificial intelligence and advanced statistical methods to cosmological data sets in order to understand the nature of the universe and to satellite images of the Earth in order to find alternative ways to monitor African development progress. Dr. Fantaye is a fellow of the World Economic Forum Young Scientists community, and a fellow and a Chair of the Next Einstein Forum Community of Scientists.

Cool things of the week

A Kubernetes FAQ for the C-suite blog
BigQuery and surrogate keys: a practical approach blog
Adding custom intelligence to Gmail with serverless on GCP blog
Announcing Cloud Tasks, a task queue service for App Engine flex and second generation runtimes blog
Unity and DeepMind partner to advance AI research blog

Interview

African Institute for Mathematical Sciences site
Provable approximation properties for deep neural networks research
Next Einstein Initiative site
Square Kilometer Array (SKA) site
University of the Witwatersrand site
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) site
South African National Space Agency (SANSA) site
National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP)site
IndabaX site
Coursera site
Andrej Karpathy research
Andrej Karpathy Blog blog

Question of the week

If I’m using the Cluster Autoscaler for Kubernetes (or GKE), how can I prevent it from removing specific nodes from the cluster when scaling down?

How can I prevent Cluster Autoscaler from scaling down a particular node? github
What types of pods can prevent CA from removing a node? github

Where can you find us next?

Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December and will probably be at Unite L.A. this month.

Melanie is speaking at Monktoberfest Oct 4th in Portland, Maine and will be at CAMLIS the following week.

Wellio with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Sivan Aldor-Noiman

Sivan heads Data Science for Wellio, an early stage startup in the FoodTech space that is helping people eat better. In Wellio, her team delivers models that help inspire, empower and adapt to people’s eating needs, cooking abilities and health constraints. She began her career in the Israeli military serving as an instructor for an anti-tank missile unit (please don’t think Rambo, think more like a classroom teacher). Sivan then transitioned to school and received her undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a Master in Statistics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She moved to the U.S. to complete a Ph.D. degree in Statistics from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In her previous job, Sivan ended up leading several Data Science teams and learned that she really liked leading technical people since she got to learn a lot from them. Ultimately, she missed the smaller company mentality, so she is back in the startup world. Sivan was once asked to define herself so here goes: “I am an enthusiastic disagreeable giver and a constant empirical driven learner”.

Erik Andrejko

Erik has spent his career making a positive impact on the world through mathematics. He is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Wellio - an early stage startup applying AI to the intersection of food and human health. Previously, Erik lead the data science and research organization at The Climate Corporation, which applies data science to solve challenging problems in numerous domains including climatology, agronomic modeling and geospatial applications. When not analyzing interesting datasets, Erik can often be found riding up some incline on a bicycle or cooking.

Cool things of the week

Summary of Google Cloud Next Tokyo site
Deep Learning Indaba GCP Credit Awards site
Data Studio and Dataprep are now generally available blog
- DS: BI analyze more than 500 other data sources via more than 100 partner-built connectors and used by over a million people globally
- DP: new look, team collab and more analytics features blog
Announcing general availability of Cloud Memorystore for Redis blog
Coursera Advanced Machine Learning with TensorFlow with GCP blog
- Webinar on October 9th at 9AM PST to learn more
Simplifying ML predictions with Google Cloud Functions blog
50 Best Cloud Security Podcasts site
- GCP Podcast Episode #100: Vint Cerf: past, present, and future of the internet podcast

Interview

Wellio site
GKE site
Cloud Storage site
Pub/Sub site
Cloud Composer site
Cloud ML Engine site
Stackdriver site
Cloud Functions site
TensorFlow site
Keras site
Scikit Learn site
Cloud TPU site
Cloud AutoML site
Cloud Vision site
DevOps201 for Application Developers video
Cloud Firestore site
Day 3 Keynote: Made Here Together video
Spinnaker site
Contact Wellio email

Questions of the week

Is Inbox going away?

Inbox is signing off: find your favorite features in the new Gmail blog
5 ways the new Gmail can help you get more done blog

Where can you find us next?

We’ll both be at Strangeloop.

Mark will probably be at Unite L.A. in October.

Melanie speaking at Monktoberfest Oct 4th in Portland, Maine.

DL Indaba: AI Investments in Africa

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Willie Brink

Willie Brink is a senior lecturer of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He teaches various courses in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, at all levels, and his research interests fall mainly in the broad fields of computer vision and machine learning. He has worked on multi-view geometry, visual odometry, recognition and tracking, probabilistic graphical models, as well as deep learning. Recent research directions include visual knowledge representation and reasoning. Willie is also one of the founders and organisers of the Deep Learning Indaba, an exciting initiative working to celebrate and strengthen machine learning and artificial intelligence research in Africa, and to promote diversity and transformation in these fields.

Nyalleng Moorosi

Nyalleng is a Software Engineer and Researcher with the Google AI team in Ghana. Before joining Google, Nyalleng was a senior Data Science researcher at South Africa’s national science lab, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with the Modeling and Digital Sciences Unit. In her capacity at CSIR, she works on projects ranging from: rhino poaching prevention with park rangers, working with news outlets to understand social media sentiments, and searching for Biomarkers in African cancer proteomes. Before getting into ML research at CSIR, she was a computer science lecturer at Fort Hare University and a software engineer at Thomson Reuters. Moorosi is an active member of Women in Machine Learning, Black in Artificial Intelligence, and an organising member of the Deep Learning Indaba - a yearly workshop that gathers African researchers in one space to share ideas and grow machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Dr. Vukosi Marivate

Dr. Vukosi Marivate holds a PhD in Computer Science (Rutgers University) and MSc & BSc in Electrical Engineering (Wits University). He has recently started at the University of Pretoria as the ABSA Chair of Data Science. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (due to the abundance of text data and need to extract insights). As part of his vision for the ABSA Data Science chair, Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is an organizer of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He is passionate about developing young talent, supervising MSc and PhD students, and mentoring budding Data Scientists.

Yasin(i) Musa Ayami

Yasin(i) Musa Ayami is Team Lead at TsogoloTech and a certified Oracle Associate. Mr. Ayami recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in Information Technology at the prestigious Durban University of Technology (DUT) were his study mainly focused on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Prior to him enrolling for his Master’s Degree, Mr Ayami served as an Intern Software Engineer at DUT’s App Factory where he also served as Team Lead before deciding to further his studies. He also worked as a Part-Time Student Instructor at the DUT. In 2017, he co-founded TsogoloTech. His vision has always been to leverage technology for social good.

Andrea Bohmert

Andrea Bohmert is a Co-Managing Partner at Knife Capital. Before joining Knife Capital, she was the Founder and Co-Managing Partner of Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa. Passionate about strategizing how to scale businesses and meeting the entrepreneurs responsible for creating them, she has been actively involved in numerous initiatives aiming to accelerate the African entrepreneurial ecosystem.

What are you looking forward to this week?

AlphaGo Movie site
WiML: Women in Machine Learning site
Deep Learning Indaba Poster Sessions site
Neural Information Processing Systems site

Interview

Deep Learning Indaba site
Deep Learning Indaba GitHub site
Deep Learning Indaba Tutorials site
Deep Learning Indaba 2018 Slides site
Deep Learning Indaba 2017 Presentations videos
Deep Learning Indaba X site
Yasin(i) Musa Ayami on GitHub site and LinkedIn site
Deep Learning Indaba Award Winners site and tweet
Maathai Award site
Xamarin site
SuperPosition at The Deep Learning Indaba with Dr. Vukosi Marivate podcast
Knife Capital site
Investing in AI by Andrea Bohmert article
10 Defining Moments that shaped the 2016 SA startup ecosystem article
Data Science Africa site
International Data Week site
Google Cloud Platform Credits award winners tweet

Question of the week

The co-hosts weigh in on our question of the week: What have you taken away from this week and will take forward?

Where can you find us next?

Mark and Melanie will be at Strangeloop.

Willie will be teaching Machine Learning at Stellenbosch University this summer.

Nyalleng will be at the Women in Machine Learning Workshop and the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Montreal in December.

Google AI with Jeff Dean

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Senior Fellow, leading Google AI and related research efforts. His teams are working on systems for speech recognition, computer vision, language understanding, and various other machine learning tasks. He has co-designed/implemented many generations of Google’s crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, and co-designed/implemented major pieces of Google’s initial advertising and AdSense for Content systems. He is also a co-designer and co-implementor of Google’s distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner systems, protocol buffers, the open-source TensorFlow system for machine learning, and a variety of internal and external libraries and developer tools.

Jeff received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1996, working with Craig Chambers on whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented languages. He received a B.S. in computer science & economics from the University of Minnesota in 1990. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), and a winner of the ACM Prize in Computing.

Cool things of the week

Google Dataset Search is in beta site
Expanding our Public Datasets for geospatial and ML-based analytics blog
- Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) site
Google AI and Kaggle Inclusive Images Challenge site
We are rated in the top 100 technology podcasts on iTunes site
What makes TPUs fine-tuned for deep learning? blog

Interview

Jeff Dean on Google AI profile
Deep Learning Indaba site
Google AI site
Google AI in Ghana blog
Google Brain site
Google Cloud site
DeepMind site
Cloud TPU site
Google I/O Effective ML with Cloud TPUs video
Liquid cooling system article
DAWNBench Results site
Waymo (Alphabet’s Autonomous Car) site
DeepMind AlphaGo site
Open AI Dota 2 blog
Moustapha Cisse profile
Sanjay Ghemawat profile
Neural Information Processing Systems Conference site
Previous Podcasts
- GCP Podcast Episode 117: Cloud AI with Dr. Fei-Fei Li podcast
- GCP Podcast Episode 136: Robotics, Navigation, and Reinforcement Learning with Raia Hadsell podcast
- TWiML & AI Systems and Software for ML at Scale with Jeff Dean podcast
Additional Resources
- arXiv.org site
- Chris Olah blog
- Distill Journal site
- Google’s Machine Learning Crash Course site
- Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville book and site
- NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering site
- Senior Thesis Parallel Implementations of Neural Network Training: Two Back-Propagation Approaches by Jeff Dean paper and tweet
- Machine Learning for Systems and Systems for Machine Learning slides

Question of the week

How do I get data from IoT core to display in real time on a web front end?

Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video
MQTT site
Cloud Pub/Sub site
Cloud Functions site
Cloud Firestore site

Where can you find us next?

Melanie is at Deep Learning Indaba and Mark is at Tokyo NEXT. We’ll both be at Strangeloop end of the month.

Gabe will be at Cloud Next London and the IoT World Congress.

ATLAS with Dr. Mario Lassnig

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Dr. Mario Lassnig

Dr. Mario Lassnig has been working as a Software Engineer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) since 2006. Within the ATLAS Experiment, he is responsible for all aspects of its large-scale distributed data, including management, storage, network, and access. He is also one of the principal developers of the Rucio system for scientific data management. In his previous life, he developed mobile navigation software for multi-modal transportation in Vienna at Seibersdorf Research, as well as cryptographic smart-card applications for access control at the University of Klagenfurt. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Klagenfurt, and a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck.

Cool things of the week

The Machines Can Do the Work, a Story of Kubernetes Testing, CI, and Automating the Contributor Experience blog
- Google Cloud grants $9M in credits for the operation of the Kubernetes project blog
Improving job searches for veterans with Google Cloud’s Talent Solution blog
Unity For Beginners… From a Beginner blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 134: Connected Games with Unity and Google Cloud with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker podcast
Neural Information Processing Systems Conference site

Interview

Rucio - Scientific Data Management site
CERN site
ATLAS site
Google Cloud Storage site
Google Compute Engine site
G Suite site
GKE On-Prem site
Rucio on GitHub site
University of Oslo site
University of Innsbruck site
Brookhaven National Laboratory site
University of Texas at Arlington site
Square Kilometer Array site
DUNE site
LIGO Lab site
Scientific Computing with Google Cloud Platform: Experiences from the Trenches in Particle Physics and Earth Sciences video
GCP Podcast Episode 122: Project Jupyter with Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf podcast
Rucio Workshop site
ACM/IEEE Supercomputing 2018 site

Question of the week

I am not familiar with Docker or Kubernetes - where can I get started?

Where can you find us next?

Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba.

Mark will be at Tokyo NEXT.

We’ll both be at Strange Loop.

Mercari with Taichi Nakashima and Tonghui (Terry) Li

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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

Taichi Nakashima

Taichi is a tech lead for the microservices platform at Mercari. Prior to Mercari, he was a backend engineer at Rakuten, building internal Platform as a Service. Mercari chose microservice architecture as their next development platform, and built two teams to proceed with the migration. One is the microservice platform team that is building a platform that can deploy any microservices, and the other is the microservice development team that are focusing on migrating the current monolithic API to microservices. Mercari use GKE as a platform and GCP as the main infrastructure for microservices.

Tonghui (Terry) Li

Tonghui joined Mercari in April 2018 and is responsible for migrating the monolithic backend API to a microservice architecture. Prior to Mercari, he was a tech lead of Indeed, working on different components of the job search engine including Title Normalization, Location system, Job Search API, and more.

Cool things of the week

How to call the Cloud AutoML API from a web app site
- GCPPodcast Episode 108: Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig site
Who is this street artist? Building a graffiti artist classifier using AutoML blog
Datastore Transactions, Batches and Perf! video and twitter
Deploy only what you trust: introducing Binary Authorization for Google Kubernetes Engine blog

Interview

Mercari site
Microservices on GKE at Mercari site
Continuous Delivery for Microservices with Spinnaker at Mercari site
Microservices site
GKE site
Terraform site
Spinnaker site
GKE On-Prem site
- GKE On-Prem - Managing Across Hybrid IT Environments with Open Architectures (Cloud Next ‘18) video
Mercari on GitHub site
BigQuery site
Mercari Engineering Blog blog
kubectl site
Google Cloud AutoML site

Photo credit: Taichi Nakashima

Question of the week

How do I use my existing identity management system with Google Cloud Platform? site and blog

Where can you find us next?

Mark is at Pax Dev and Pax West. Find him and say hi.

In September, Mark will be at Tokyo NEXT and Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba. You can find both of us at Strangeloop.