Google Cloud Platform Podcast (Google Cloud Platform)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Google Cloud Platform Podcast
| Date | Titre | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Jun 2022 | Network Analyzer with Zach Seils and Manasa Chalasani | 00:38:50 | |
Stephanie Wong and Lorin Price welcome guests Zach Seils and Manasa Chalasani to talk about networking and the newly released Network Analyzer. Google Cloud’s Network Intelligence Center is described as a one-stop shop that simplifies network monitoring, troubleshooting, workload expansion, security, and more. Manasa tells us about the four modules of Network Intelligence Center and how they work together. As part of Network Intelligence Center, the new Network Analyzer monitors and proactively runs tests and detects issues on the network automatically, taking the guesswork out of network troubleshooting. Network Analyzer checks the entire network ecosystem, finding any connectivity issues and extrapolating them to other similar situations as well. Zach tells us more about the specific features of Analyzer, like its ability to check for overlapping or shadowed routes and validating network configurations in relation to any managed services being used. Zach walks us through the set up of Network Analyzer and how to navigate results. Manasa expands on the development of Network Analyzer, including how customer feedback really shaped the project, and we hear about challenges along the way. Through examples, Zach describes different types of Analyzer customers and how they’re using the product. More analyzers will be available soon, and the team is open to suggestions for future projects. Zach SeilsZach Seils is a Networking Specialist with Google Cloud, where he works with customers to accelerate their adoption of cloud networking. Manasa ChalasaniManasa is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Networking team with a focus on network observability. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Lorin is working on a new video series called Concepts of Networking on the Networking End to End Playlist HostsStephanie Wong and Lorin Price | |||
| 19 Jan 2022 | Cloud Security Megatrends with Phil Venables | 00:32:05 | |
We’re back for a new, exciting year of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast! Mark Mirchandani and Carter Morgan start 2022 with a jointly hosted interview with Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock of the Cloud Security Podcast team. Our guest, Phil Venables, is here to tell us about the driving trends in cloud security today. Phil starts the show with a discussion on the advances in cloud security in general and how it compares with on-prem security. Megatrends like economies of scale and competition between cloud providers benefit cloud users by allowing better security for less money. Cloud environments tend to be simpler and therefore easier to manage, and with scaling and geographic location options, cloud projects allow more flexibility to reach security and sustainability goals. Phil talks about the iteration process of advances in security based on customer requirements and how this builds client trust. The Shared Responsibility Model, where the cloud provider runs a secure infrastructure and the customer configures their project securely in the cloud, is a great start, Phil tells us. But with Shared Fate, he sees the provider crossing the responsibility barrier to work together with the client towards a secure project through actions like analyzation of security defaults. Customer feedback helps Google Cloud make a better product, which in turn helps customers, creating an environment of reliability and shared trust. We talk about how the Shared Fate model and shared incentives work together to create a closer partnership between cloud providers and customers, and Phil elaborates on the idea of project security as an immune system. We tackle the idea of security diversity and whether it benefits clients to expand their security outside of cloud provider offerings. Phil helps security novices understand valuable feature-add security services and what to look for in the future. Phil VenablesPhil leads the risk, security, compliance, and privacy teams for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google Cloud, Phil was a Partner at Goldman Sachs where he held multiple roles over a long career, initially as their first Chief Information Security Officer, a role he held for 17 years. Before Goldman Sachs, Phil held multiple CISO roles as well as senior engineering roles across a range of finance, energy and technology companies. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Mark and Carter are working on some cool new changes to the podcast. HostsCarter Morgan, Mark Mirchandani, Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock | |||
| 26 Jan 2022 | Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson | 00:39:58 | |
Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong host Shopify guests Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson this week. Shopify streamlines the online purchasing process so merchants and customers can transact with confidence. Camilo and Tai talk in-depth about Shopify’s tech stack and why the choices made are so important to performance. Shopify engineers use a combination of Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Google products like Kubernetes. Resiliency systems like active-active configurations, chat ops for quick solutions, and bot and overload protection are worked in. By leveraging these tools and staying flexible in their resiliency efforts, Shopify is able to adjust to new merchant requirements and teams are able to work efficiently. While tech continues to progress and change, the Shopify culture remains a driving force for advancement, Camilo tells us. The company ideals and axioms help steer the brand and dictate which technologies they’ll use to solve new and changing client demands. The 2014 outage shaped the future of these cultural ideals, emphasizing the need for quick action and resiliency components like constraints to ensure system safety. Shopify engineers also built enhanced testing tools like Toxiproxy to simulate poor network conditions and account for potential issues. The 2021 Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping season was Shopify’s biggest yet. Camilo and Tai describe how Shopify’s resiliency culture and intense prep work made the biggest shopping weekend of the year so successful. By offering educational tools and a support network that values good communication, their company culture continues to grow, and Tai tells us how it’s not just the software that should be resilient. Building a resilient, flexible company culture is just as important. Camilo talks about Shopify’s recent shift to a completely remote work place and the new challenges and opportunities it presents. Camilo LopezCamilo has worked at Shopify for more than 10 years, he has been an IC and a manager leading teams that take care of Shopify’s scalability and resiliency. Tai DickersonTai is a production engineer at Shopify, where she shares her passion for resilience engineering with others via paper discussions and as a leader in Shopify’s Resiliency SIG. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Stephanie is working on season 2 of the Where the Internet Lives podcast. Carter is working on season 2 of VM End to End. HostsCarter Morgan and Stephanie Wong | |||
| 14 Sep 2022 | Storage Spotlight with Sean Derrington and Nishant Kohli | 00:30:59 | |
Host Stephanie Wong chats with storage pros Sean Derrington and Nishant Kohli this week to learn more about cost optimization with storage projects and exciting new launches in the Google Cloud storage space! To start, we talk about the Storage Spotlight of years past and the cool Google Cloud products that Google is unveiling this year. Optimization is a huge theme this year, with a focus not only on cost optimization but also performance and resource use as well. Enterprise readiness and storage everywhere, Sean tells us, are the most important pillars as Google continues to improve offerings. We learn about Hyperdisk and the three customizable attributes users can control and the benefits of Filestore Enterprise for GKE for large client systems. Nishant talks about Cloud Storage and how clients are using it at scale for their huge data projects. Specifically, Google Storage has been working to help clients with large-scale data storage needs to optimize costs with Autoclass. Storage Insights is another new tool launching late this year or early next year that empowers better decision-making through increased knowledge and analytics of storage usage. GKE storage is getting a revamp as well with Backup for GKE to help clients recover applications and data easily. Google Cloud for Backup and DR helps keep projects secure as well. This managed service is easy to use and integrate into all cloud projects and can be used with on prem projects and then backed up into the cloud. This is ideal for clients as they shift to cloud or hybrid systems. Companies like Redivis take advantage of some of these new data features, and Nishant talks more about how Autoclass and other tools have helped them save money and improve their business. Sean DerringtonSean is the Group Product Manager for the storage team. He is a long time storage industry PM veteran; he’s worked on Veritas, Symantec, Exablox (storage startup). Nishant KohliNishant has a decade plus of Object Storage experience at Dell/EMC and Hitachi. He’s currently Senior Product Manager on the storage team. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Stephanie is working on new video content and two Next sessions: one teaching how to simplify and secure your network for all workloads and one talking about how our infrastructure partner ecosystem helps customers. HostsStephanie Wong | |||
| 12 Oct 2022 | Next 2022 with Forrest Brazeal and Stephanie Wong | 00:43:44 | |
Forrest Brazeal joins Stephanie Wong today on the second day of Google Cloud Next ‘22. We’re talking about all the exciting announcements, how the conference has changed in recent years, and what to expect in the days ahead. The excitement and energy of the first in-person Next since 2019 was one of the best parts for Forrest. With 1300 releases in just half the year, a lot has happened in BigQuery, AI, Looker, and more. Next includes announcements in many of these areas as well, as Google Cloud expands and makes Cloud easier for all types of projects and clients. Strategic partnerships and development have allowed better use of Google Cloud for the virtual work world and advancements in sustainability have helped Google users feel better about their impact on the environment. New announcements in compute include C3 VMs, the first VM in the cloud with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with Google’s custom Intel IPU. MediaCDN uses the YouTube infrastructure and the new Live Stream API optimizes streaming capabilities. Among many other announcements, Network Analyzer is now GA allowing for simplified network configuration monitoring and Google Cloud Armor has been extended to include ML-based Adaptive Protection capabilities. Software Delivery Shield and Cloud Workstations are recent offerings to help developers in each of the four areas of software supply chain management. Advancements in Cloud Build include added security benefits, and new GKE and Cloud Run logging and security alerts ensure projects remain secure through the final stages of development. The best way to ensure secure, optimized work is with well-trained developers. And in that vein, Google Cloud is introducing Innovators Plus to provide a new suite of developer benefits under a fixed cost subscription. Forrest tells us about #GoogleClout and the challenges available in the Next portal for conference-goers. Assured Workloads helps with data sovereignty in different regions, Confidential Space in Confidential Computing provides trust guarantees when companies perform joint data analysis and machine learning training, and Chronicle Security Operations are some of the exciting security announcements we saw at Next. On the show next week, we’ll go in depth on data announcements at Next, but Steph gives us a quick rundown of some of the biggest ones today. She talks briefly about announcements in AI, including Vertex AI Vision and Translation Hub. Forrest wraps up by talking about predictions for the future of tech and cloud. Forrest BrazealForrest Brazeal is a cloud educator, author, speaker, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He is the creator of the Cloud Resume Challenge initiative, which has helped thousands of non-traditional learners take their first steps into the cloud. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Steph is working on the developer keynote and DevFest and UKI Google Cloud Next Developer Day. Check out her Next talk “Simplify and secure your network for all workloads”. HostsStephanie Wong | |||
| 20 Jul 2022 | Managed Service for Prometheus with Lee Yanco and Ashish Kumar | 00:37:25 | |
Hosts Carter Morgan and Anthony Bushong are in the studio this week! We’re talking about Prometheus with guests Lee Yanco and Ashish Kumar and learning about the build process for Google Cloud’s Managed Service for Prometheus and how Home Depot uses this tool to power their business. To begin with, Lee helps us understand what Managed Service for Prometheus is. Prometheus, a popular monitoring solution for Kubernetes, lets you know that your project is up and running and in the event of a failure, Prometheus lets you know what happened. But as Kubernetes projects scale and spread across the globe, Prometheus becomes a challenge to manage, and that’s where Google Cloud’s Managed Service for Prometheus comes in. Lee describes why Prometheus is so great for Kubernetes, and Ashish talks about CNCF’s involvement helps open source tools integrate easily. With the help of Monarch, Google’s Managed Service stands above the competition, and Lee explains what Monarch is and how it works with Prometheus to benefit users. Ashish talks about Home Depot’s use of Google Cloud and the Managed Service for Prometheus, and how Home Depot’s multiple data centers make data monitoring both trickier and more important. With Google Cloud, Home Depot is able to easily ensure everything is healthy and running across data centers, around the world, at an immense scale. He describes how Home Depot uses Managed Service for Prometheus in each of these data center environments from the point of view of a developer and talks about how easy Prometheus and the Managed Service are to integrate and use. Lee and Ashish wrap up the show with a look at how Home Depot and Google have worked together to create and adjust tools for increased efficiency. In the future, tighter integration into the rest of Google Cloud’s suite of products is the focus. Lee YancoLee Yanco is the Product Management lead for Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. He also works on Monarch, Google’s planet-scale in-memory time series database, and on Cloud Monitoring’s Kubernetes observability experience. Ashish KumarAshish Kumar is Senior Manager for Site Reliability and Production Engineering for The Home Depot. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Carter is focusing on getting organized, managing overwhelm, and comedy festivals. Anthony is testing a few new exciting features, working with build provenance in Cloud Build, jobs and network file systems in Cloud Run. HostsCarter Morgan and Anthony Bushong | |||
| 19 Oct 2022 | Top 5 Data & Analytics Launches from Next 2022 with Bruno Aziza and Maire Newton | 00:30:51 | |
Debi Cabrera and Stephanie Wong have more great Next content this week as we focus on launches specifically related to data and analytics with guests Bruno Aziza and Maire Newton. We start the episode with a look at current customer trends in data, including tools for increasing efficiency when working with many different types of data. Data governance and security is another area where Bruno sees advances in satisfying customer needs. Maire talks about the steps Google is taking to help customers implement knowledge gained with data, including Looker and new integrations with tools like Looker Studio to easily connect tools for better data access and use. Strategic partnerships with companies like Tableau help accomplish these goals as well. With 21 data and analytics launches at Next, exciting solutions are out there for customers. Bruno and Maire highlight their five favorites, like BigQuery support for unstructured data, allowing analysts working with SQL to do more with more data. To simplify workflows, BigQuery integration with Spark is a new feature that Maire tells us about, and we hear more about BigLake and it’s increased format support. Data reaches more people easier now with Connected Sheets available for anyone using Google Workspace, and finally we talk more about Looker. Bruno details the four use cases of business intelligence customers and how Google’s suite of data products satisfy their needs for a reasonable price. Bruno AzizaBruno is head of data and analytics for Google Cloud and leads the outbound product management team. He has more than two decades’ of Silicon Valley experience, specializing in scaling businesses, and has written two books on Data Analytics and Enterprise Performance Management. Maire NewtonMaire is an Outbound Product Manager at Google Cloud with almost 15 years of experience partnering with organizations to develop data solutions and drive digital transformation. She’s passionate about helping customers develop data-driven cultures by using technology to meet users where they are. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Debi is getting married and working on Dataflow Prime. HostsStephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera | |||
| 28 Sep 2022 | DEI and Belonging in the Cloud with Jason Smith | 00:33:26 | |
Jason Smith, founder of the Mixed Googlers group here at Google, joins Stephanie Wong to talk about DEI and the importance of belonging in tech. Jason helps us better understand what the concepts diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging mean to him. It’s more than just including different types of people, Jason tells us, companies must also give them equal opportunities and say in their jobs. We talk about the difference between DEI and belonging. Belonging means feeling comfortable and accepted and conveys a more concrete, real-life sense of community that brings DEI to life. While DEI is easy enough for a company to measure, it’s sometimes tricky to get a clear picture of belonging in a company. Jason talks about possible solutions to this problem. Growing up as the child of both a white and a black parent, Jason understands the importance of feeling a sense of belonging as a mixed race individual. In that vein, he founded Mixed Googlers, and he tells us more about how this group supports other mixed individuals at Google. He talks about the events they have hosted, including talks with famous mixed race speakers, and how the grassroots efforts to form and grow Mixed Googlers has created a great community. Later, Jason talks about DEI and belonging in tech companies and cloud specifically. He introduces us to some fun ways to incorporate DEI principles into company culture in a way that encourages all individuals to contribute their personal perspectives. He stresses the importance of allowing mistakes, especially when discussing diversity issues with your coworkers, so the conversation can be about growth and not about confrontation. Jason SmithJason Smith is a Customer Engineer supporting application modernization and the founder of Mixed Googlers, an ERG dedicated to mixed race individuals. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Stephanie is working on content for Next and the Drone Racing League. HostsStephanie Wong | |||
| 05 Oct 2022 | 2022 State of DevOps Report with Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis | 00:44:07 | |
On the show this week, we’re talking updated DevOps practices for 2022 with hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon and our guests Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis. Nathen and Derek start the show with a thorough discussion of DORA, the research program dedicated to helping organizations improve software delivery and operations, and the state of DevOps report that Google publishes every year. This year, the DevOps research team strengthened their focus on security and discovered that one of the biggest predictors in security practice adoption is company culture. Open, communicative, and trustful company cultures are some of the best for accepting and implementing optimized security practices. Derek tells us how company cultures are measured and scored for this purpose and Nathen talks about team and individual burnout and its affects on culture. Low, medium, high, and elite teams are another indicator of culture, and Nathen explains how teams earn their label through four keys of software delivery performance. Each year, they let the data show these four clusters of team performance. But this year there were only three, and Derek talks more about this phenomenon and why the elite cluster seems to have disappeared. When operational performance analysis was added, the four clusters reemerged and were renamed to better suit the new analysis metrics. Nathen details these four new clusters: starting, which performs neither well nor poorly and may be just starting out; flowing, teams that are performing well across throughput, stability, and operational performance; slowing teams, which don’t have high throughput but excel in other areas; and retiring teams, which are reliable but not actively developing projects. We discuss how companies may shift from one cluster to another and how much context can affect this shift. We talk about key findings in the 2022 DevOps report, especially in the security space. Some of the most notable include the adoption of DevOps security practices and the decreased incidence of burnout on teams who leverage security practices. Nathen and Derek elaborate on how this year’s research changed from last year and what remained the same. Nathen HarveyNathen works with teams helping them learn about and apply the findings of our research into high performing teams. He’s been involved in the DevOps community for more than a decade. Derek DeBellisDerek is a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google, where Derek focuses on survey research, logs analysis, and figuring out ways to measure concepts central to product development. Derek has published on Human-AI interaction, the impact of Covid-19’s onset on smoking cessation, designing for NLP errors and the role of UX in ensuring privacy. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Steph is working on talks for DevFest Nantes and a Google Cloud dev conference in London. She’ll be talking about subsea fiber optics and Google Cloud networking products. Chloe is a Noogler, so she’s been working on learning as much as she can! She is excited to make her podcast debut this week! HostsStephanie Wong and Chloe Condon | |||
| 03 May 2023 | Streamlining the Philippine education network with an all-in-one school management app with Wela | 00:23:35 | |
In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. In the Philippines, class sizes in schools are often quite large with an average of 30 students per class. This makes keeping track of individual students’ progress a challenge. To solve this problem, John and Chris Fiel, co-founders of Wela School Systems developed a digital solution for schools, teachers, and parents to keep track of basic administrative tasks like daily attendance-taking and keeping record of grades, among other things to keep paperwork at bay. Starting with just three schools upon launch, Wela now serves more than 200 schools on its platform. To make sure it meets the needs of users, the duo constantly asks for feedback from customers, and pick out the most common needs to address and build around. The startup also follows a freemium model so that schools can test and discover if the product is really adding value for them, before deciding to purchase it. Listen in to hear how Wela continues to win the hearts of educators, and the impact they are making on the Philippine education system. In this podcast, they also share their views on the future of education and how data can be used to improve teaching processes and the learning environment. John Fiel, CEO, Wela School Systems
Chris is a serial technopreneur with the aim of creating disruptive and useful apps using the latest technology trends. His heart and inclination is into programming where his 25 years of experience as a freelance developer can speak of. He is currently into ERP, IoT and blockchain and looking for consulting and development projects along these areas.
Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of “That Digital Show APAC”. He is a record breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Interview
Hosts Theo Davies and Paris Tran
| |||
| 15 Dec 2021 | 2021 Year End Wrap Up | 00:43:16 | |
We’re finishing out 2021 with a celebration of our favorite episodes and topics from the year! From new tools for Cost Optimization in GKE and advances in AI to tips for improving feelings of imposter syndrome, Carter Morgan, Stephanie Wong, and Mark Mirchandani share memorable moments from 2021 and look forward to future episodes. Carter MorganCarter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google’s Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course “Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes” he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who’s approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft. Stephanie WongStephanie Wong is a Developer Advocate focusing on online content across all Google Cloud products. She’s a host of the GCP Podcast and the Where the Internet Lives podcast, along with many GCP Youtube video series. She is the winner of a 2021 Webby Award for her content about data centers. Previously she was a Customer Engineer at Google and at Oracle. Outside of her tech life she is a former pageant queen and hip hop dancer and has an unhealthy obsession with dogs. Mark MirchandaniMark Mirchandani is a developer advocate for Google Cloud, occasional host of the Google Cloud Platform podcast, and helps create content for users. Cool things of the week
Our Favorite Episodes of 2021
Sound Effects Attribution
HostsStephanie Wong, Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani | |||
| 08 Jun 2022 | FinOps with Joe Daly | 00:39:37 | |
On the podcast this week, guest Joe Daly tells Stephanie Wong, Mark “Money” Mirchandani, and our listeners all about FinOps principles and how they’re helping companies take advantage of the cloud while saving their bottom lines. He describes FinOps as financial DevOps, making financial decisions in an effective and optimized way. With his experience in finance and tax accounting, Joe has developed a special knack for navigating the sometimes confusing world of cloud finance policies, and his contributions to the FinOps Foundation have been many. For starters, collaboration with various business departments is important for developing a plan that leverages the benefits of the cloud but keeps the company using resources wisely, Joe explains. He talks about the FinOps Foundation and their focus on creating community for knowledge sharing. By fostering collaboration among different company roles and promoting financial education, companies are better able to determine financial goals while making sure each facet of the company reaps all the benefits of cloud participation. Following the FinOps cycle is the easiest way for community members to get started. The three steps, Joe tells us, are inform, optimize, and operate. The inform phase involves clarity in spending so teams understand how much money is being spent. In the optimize phase, benefits of spending are matched with expenditures to ensure resources are being used to their full potential. Finally, in the operate phase, engineers and finance managers come together to understand why solutions were chosen and understand if these tools are offering the right answers for the company. Every company is different but the sooner it’s possible to start the FinOps journey the easier it will be to maintain in the future. Joe gives us examples of how companies are using the principles for successful strategies and the challenges that some of them have faced. The Foundation has monthly summits that offer perspectives from these companies as well as partner presentations. The FinOpsX conference is coming up soon as well. To wrap up, Joe offers other resources from the FinOps Foundation, including his podcast. Joe DalyJoe set up two FinOps teams at Fortune 100 companies. He joined the FinOps Foundation and has been setting up the ambassador program, supporting meetup groups, and producing FinOpsPod. Cool things of the week
Interview
HostsStephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani | |||
| 07 Dec 2022 | Active Assist and Resource Lifecycle Management with Sharon Fang and Michael Sudakovitch | 00:28:31 | |
Guests Sharon Fang and Michael Sudakovitch are here this week to talk with Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme about Google’s Active Assist optimization portfolio and managing cloud projects efficiently. Michael, tech lead at Uber, first employed Active Assist for the company in their security department, but they have since realized how useful Active Assist is in many areas of the resource management space. Responsible architects, Michael points out, continually evaluate their resources and patch, update, or remove as necessary to ensure proper security and optimize spending. Sharon helps us understand resource management further and how Active Assist helps teams find resources that can be changed or even removed for better spending, tighter security, and smaller carbon footprint. Active Assist will even recommend the removal of entire projects that have become dormant. Michael talks in detail about Uber’s use of Active Assist and how it helped them find vulnerable projects that could be removed for better security. Sharon highlights the effects of Active Assist on reducing CO2 emissions as well, as discontinued projects keep hardware running needlessly. As Michael and his team at Uber began taking advantage of all Active Assist had to offer, Google worked with him to answer questions, tailor resources, and take feedback to improve offerings. The future includes a portfolio expansion of resource life cycle management tools to identify more idol systems like GKE clusters and helping larger customers take advantage of Active Assist at scale automatically. Together, Sharon and Michael tell us stories about the partnership and interesting findings and results of Uber’s carbon footprint reduction journey. Sharon FangSharon Fang is a Product Manager for Google Cloud’s Active Assist, which aims to help users optimize their cloud operations with recommendations. Michael SudakovitchMichael is a Tech Lead at Uber’s Engineering Security organization, focusing on securing and optimizing Uber’s Multi-Cloud infrastructure. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Max is sorting out the final blog posts of the year, planning some secret Santa holiday festivities for the team, and prepping cranberry sauces. Daryl is planning videos for the new year, including a video to help celebrate our 1 millionth subscriber on the Google Cloud Tech YouTube channel and several videos to help people get the most out of Google Cloud IAM features. HostsMax Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme | |||
| 27 Jul 2022 | Arm Servers on GCP with Jon Masters and Emma Haruka Iwao | 00:35:39 | |
We’re learning all about Arm servers on Google Cloud Platform this week. Hosts Brian Dorsey and Stephanie Wong welcome fellow Googlers Jon Masters and Emma Haruka Iwao to talk about the newest VMs on GCP. To start, our guests dive in to Arm, explaining what it is and how it’s grown over the years. Nowadays, Arm-based chips dominate the mobile market and this volume has allowed them to build both advanced chips for supercomputers and beneficial partnerships. Emma explains how having the Arm architecture available in the cloud helps keep projects efficient and walks us through example setups of an Arm projects, illustrating the ease of setup in Google Cloud. Jon and Emma talk about the T2A VMs running Arm workloads at Google, including their balance of performance and cost. Emma and Jon bust some myths about Arm, emphasizing how performant it is despite its humble beginnings. Jon MastersJon Masters is a compute architect focused on Arm server architecture, platform standards, and ecosystem with almost a dozen years of experience working on Arm. Emma Haruka IwaoEmma Haruka Iwao is a DevRel engineer focused on Compute products and a computer architecture enthusiast. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Brian is switching his focus from VMs to developer tooling. HostsStephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey | |||
| 24 Aug 2022 | Launching Products at Google Cloud with Anita Kibunguchy-Grant and Gabe Weiss | 00:44:49 | |
This week, Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong go behind the scenes at Google Cloud with Gabe Weiss and Anita Kibunguchy-Grant to learn how new products move from idea to market. To start, our guests walk us through a typical end-to-end life cycle as Google creates new and exciting products for users. Starting with a problem sometimes brought to light by users, a solution is workshopped, and a team is brought together to tackle the issue. Once the product is workable, Gabe and his team step in to evaluate and pass it on to Anita for market launch. With examples like BigQuery Omni and AlloyDB, Anita and Gabe walk us through a real launch scenario, from naming the product to promotion and observing the satisfying impacts of a product solving real-world problems. Anita details the three phases of a product launch and which teams are involved. The phases are pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch. In pre-launch, things like naming and messaging are crafted, priority is assigned via tier assignment, and plans are made to interact with various promotional and other teams who may need to be involved with the launch. Launch day activities are coordinated next as various marketing avenues are leveraged for maximum visibility and development teams work together to make the technical side successful. Post-Launch involves some debriefing on the success of the marketing as well as analysis of use, press coverage, page views, revenue, sentiment among users, and enabling sales teams for success. Gabe talks about the importance of his team in the process as they test products for customer usability and QA before launch as well. He and Anita elaborate on the differences with Google launches versus other companies, including the stages involved in launch and the naming of these stages. Many launches are done at big Google Cloud events, like Google I/O, Anita points out as a unique feature of Google, which can be a gift and a curse. Challenges are addressed as our guests talk us through possible problems and the ways launch teams address them. Anita and Gabe emphasize empathy and communication in product launching and the importance of clear, productive feedback. Anita Kibunguchy-GrantAnita Kibunguchy-Grant is a Product Marketing Lead at Google with extensive experience across Data Analytics and Databases products and solutions. Before Google, she led awareness and go-to-market programs at VMware. She has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and is passionate about helping customers use data and technology to transform their businesses. Gabe WeissGabe leads the database advocacy team for the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can make awesome things, both inside and outside of Google. Prior to Google he’s worked in virtual reality production and distribution, source control, the games industry, and professional acting. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Max is wrapping up his hosting of summer interns and getting ready for vacation! He plans to play a lot of board games and video games! Steph also enjoyed hosting interns this summer! HostsStephanie Wong and Max Saltonstall | |||
| 23 Feb 2022 | Looker with Leigha Jarett and Debi Cabrera | 00:45:39 | |
Guests Leigha Jarett and Debi Cabrera from the Looker team join Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about this powerful tool. Looker, Google’s data analytics platform, was built to provide enterprise companies with customizable analytics tools that allow anyone to get the data they need when they need it. This facilitates better business decisions. Leigha talks about how Looker and LookML keep data consistent among data analysts no matter where they pull data from or what they do with it. Data is more trustworthy, fostering a positive data-driven business. She details how LookML works, from database connection to metric creation, and tells us how easy it is for non-data engineers to work with as well. Robust data analysis based on trusted data points used to drive decision making is how Looker builds an environment of business intelligence rather than simple reporting. By offering easy integration into other Google tools like Data Studio and BigQuery, Looker is easy to set up, learn, and use. Our guests help listeners navigate Looker’s Explore From Here functionality and explain how it could help them answer important business questions. With advanced admin permissioning, Looker also helps limit the chaos that comes with multiple people accessing the same data. Later, we hear real-world examples of companies taking the Looker journey. Our guests offer advice based on these experiences with clients and talk about how client feedback has influenced new Looker tools, like the Looker Tableau Connector that’s coming soon. We hear about the relationship between BigQuery and Looker and suggestions for companies newly embarking on their data journey. Leigha JarettLeigha is a Product Manager for Looker’s application platform. She focuses on making Looker both simple and powerful for developers. Debi CabreraDebi recently became a Developer Advocate after being at Looker for three years as an Engagement Manager and StratOps PgM. You can find her on Linkedin Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Debi is planning her wedding! HostsMark Mirchandani and Debi Cabrera | |||
| 02 Feb 2022 | Redesigning the Cloud SDK and CLI with Wael Manasra and Cody Oss | 00:44:09 | |
This week on the podcast, Wael Manasra and Cody Oss join hosts Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani to chat about new branding in Cloud SDK and gcloud CLI. Google Cloud SDK was built and designed to take over mundane development tasks, allowing engineers to focus on specialized features and solutions. The SDK documentation and tutorials are an important part of this as well. With clear instructions, developers can easily make use of Cloud SDK. Software Development Kits have evolved so much over the years that recently, Cody, Wael, and their teams have found it necessary to redefine and rethink SDKs. The popularity of cloud projects and distributed systems, for example, means changes to kit requirements. The update is meant to reevaluate the software included in SDKs and CLIs and to more accurately represent what the products offer. Giving developers the tools they need in the place they work means giving developers code language options, providing thorough instruction, and listening to feedback. These are the goals of this redesign. The Google Cloud SDK contains downloadable parts and web publications. Our guests explain the types of software and documentation in each group and highlight the importance of documentation and supporting materials like tutorials. The Cloud Console is a great place for developers to start building solutions using the convenient point-and-click tools that are available. When these actions need to be repeated, the downloadable Command Line Interface tool can do the work. Cody talks about authentication and gcloud, including its relationship to client libraries. He walks us through the steps a typical developer might take when using Google products and how they relate to the SDK and CLI. Through examples, Wael helps us further understand client libraries and how they can interact with the CLI. The Cloud SDK is a work in progress. Our guests welcome your feedback for future updates! Wael ManasraWael manages the gcloud CLI, the client libraries for all GCP services, and the general Cloud SDK developer experience. Cody OssCody works on the Go Cloud Client libraries where he strives to provide an delightful and idiomatic experience to all the Gophers on Google Cloud. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Carter is working on his comedy. HostsCarter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani | |||
| 08 Dec 2021 | Imposter Syndrome in Tech with Carter Morgan | 00:25:53 | |
Carter Morgan takes the guest seat today to chat with host Stephanie Wong about imposter syndrome in tech. The technology ecosystem is constantly changing, with new advances every day. To keep up, tech workers are learning and developing new skills so frequently that at times it can feel as though they don’t actually know everything they need to know. Here is where self-doubt can really take hold. Imposter syndrome is most prevalent around transition points, Carter tells us. A new job or new responsibility, for example, opens tech workers to feelings of inadequacy. But there’s hope, and he explains how we can learn and develop skills to overcome this difficulty. Through tales of his own experiences, Carter offers supportive tips he’s learned, including how important it is to communicate with your manager and seek help rather than isolating. Unhealthy comparisons can foster self-doubt as well. Depth and breadth of knowledge are important factors to consider as well, and Carter points out that each has its benefits. Knowing when to go deep into a subject and when to obtain surface level knowledge can foster a sense of ease and adequacy in knowledge workers. Stephanie shares her experiences with imposter syndrome, highlighting the difference between self-perception and audience perception and why it’s important to give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished. Breaking into a new space can be intimidating. Carter walks us through important steps to take to start tackling imposter syndrome from the beginning, including the effects of positive mentorships. This month, Carter is giving a presentation at Cloud Learn (Dec 8-9, 2021), and he wraps up this episode with a sneak peak. Carter MorganCarter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google’s Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course “Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes” he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who’s approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft. Cool things of the week
InterviewHostsStephanie Wong | |||
| 20 Apr 2022 | Spanner Myths Busted with Pritam Shah and Vaibhav Govil | 00:35:47 | |
This week, we’re busting myths around Cloud Spanner with our guests Pritam Shah and Vaibhav Govil. Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall host this episode and learn about the fantastic capabilities of Cloud Spanner. Our guests give us a quick run-down of Spanner database software and its fully-managed offerings. Spanner’s unique take on the relational database has sparked some myths. We start by addressing cost and the idea that Spanner is expensive. With its high availability achieved through synchronously replicating data, failures are virtually a non-issue, making the cost well worth it. Our guests describe other features that add to the value of Spanner as well. Workloads of any size are a good fit for Spanner because of its scalability and pricing based on use. Despite rumors, Spanner is now very easy to start using. New additions like the PostgreSQL interface and ORM support have made the usability of Spanner much more familiar. Regional and multi-regional instances are supported, busting the myth that Spanner is only good for global workloads. Our guests offer examples of projects using local and global configurations with Spanner. In the database world, Vaibhav sees trends like the convergence of non-relational and relational databases as well as convergence in the OLTP and OLAP database semantics, and he tells us how Spanner is adapting and growing with these trends. Pritam points out that customers are paying more attention to total cost of ownership, the importance of scalable and reliable database solutions, and the peace of mind that comes with a managed database system. Spanner helps customers with these, freeing up business resources for other things. This year, Spanner has made many announcements about new capabilities coming soon, like PostgreSQL interface on spanner GA, Query Insights visualization tools, cross-regional backups GA, and more. We hear all about these awesome updates. Pritam ShahPritam is the Director of Engineering for Cloud Spanner. He has been with Google for about four and a half years. Before Spanner, he was the Engineering Lead for observability libraries at Google. That included Distributed Tracing and Metrics at Google scale. His mission was to democratize the instrumentation libraries. That is when he launched Open Census and then took on Cloud Spanner. Vaibhav GovilVaibhav is the Product lead for Spanner. He has been in this role for the past three years, and before this he was a Product Manager in Google Cloud Storage in Google. Overall, he has spent close to four years at Google, and it has been a great experience. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Max is working on a new podcast platform and some spring break projects. HostsMark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall | |||
| 17 Aug 2022 | Google Cloud for Higher Education with Laurie White and Aaron Yeats | 00:48:17 | |
On the podcast this week, our guests Laurie White and Aaron Yeats talk with Stephanie Wong and Kelci Mensah about higher education and how Google Cloud is helping students realize their potential. As a former educator, Laurie has seen the holes in tech education and, with the help of Google, is determined to aid faculty and students in expanding learning to include cloud education as well as the standard on prem curriculum. Aaron and Laurie work together toward this goal with programs like their Speaker Series. Laurie’s approach involves supporting faculty as they design courses that incorporate cloud technologies. With the busy lives of students today, she recognizes that the best way to get the information into the hands of students is through regular coursework, not just through elective activities outside the regular classroom. Aaron’s work with students and student organizations rounds out their support of higher education learning. He facilitates the creation of student clubs that use Cloud Skills Boost, a program in which students navigate full pathways as they learn the skills they need to create and manage cloud builds. Soon, Aaron will offer hack-a-thons that encourage students to attend weekend events to work together on passion projects outside of regular classwork. Our guests talk more about the specifics of Google Cloud Higher Education Programs and the importance of incorporating certifications into the higher education learning process. Aaron talks about expanding the program and his hopes for reaching out to more schools and students and Laurie talks about the funding for students and how Google Cloud’s system of credits for students enables them to use real cloud tools without a credit card. Laurie and Aaron tell us fun stories about past student successes, conference interactions, and hack-a-thon projects that went well. Laurie WhiteLaurie taught CS in higher ed for over 30 years where her biggest frustration was trying to keep the curriculum up with the field. She thought she was retiring seven years ago but got the call from Google to a job where she could help faculty around the world keep their curriculum up with cloud computing, so here she is. Aaron YeatsAaron Yeats has been working in education outreach for two decades. His work in education has included Texas government education programs including public health, non-profit advocacy, and education. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Steph has been working on an AlphaFold video. You can learn more here. Kelci is working on developing a Neos tutorial for introductory Google Cloud developers to learn how to write HTTP functions in Python all within the Google Cloud environment and wrapping up her summer internship with Google! HostsStephanie Wong and Kelci Mensah | |||
| 30 Mar 2022 | Celebrating Women's History Month with Vidya Nagarajan Raman | 00:41:05 | |
Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera host a special episode highlighting the amazing accomplishments of our guest Vidya Nagarajan Raman as we celebrate Women’s History Month! With her more than 20 years of experience fostering growth and monetization in enterprise and education platforms, investing and working in the holistic lifestyle space, and earning her MBA while raising her two children, Vidya has certainly done a lot! Vidya tells us about her latest blog post stressing the importance of being an event-driven organization. In this business structure, reactions to events are planned in advance and developers consider how services are integrated for maximum efficiency. With synchronous extensions, projects retain flexibility in existing applications as they work with Cloud Functions to extend to new areas. Vidya gives our listeners examples of how this works. The journey from engineer to Head of Product Management was an interesting one for Vidya, and she describes how she got started in computer engineering. Her passion for connecting with users later pushed her to product management. She tells us about her contributions to Chromebooks for Education as well as other milestones during her time with Google. Vidya talks about the support system she credits with helping her along the way and gives our listeners advice for finding mentors in their fields. She touches on the challenges she faced, describes what it was like for a woman in the industry when she first started, and offers encouragement to women getting started now. Balancing work, continuing her education, and raising children was tough, but Vidya says that, along with her incredible professional and personal support systems, defining priorities is vital. Vidya offers our listeners the insights she’s gained as she’s watched Google and workplace teams change and adapt over the years. Building an inclusive team, encouraging diverse perspectives, and defining a framework for settling disagreements are some of the pieces of advice she shares. Don’t be afraid to fail and be a risk-taker, Vidya says, because that promotes growth and learning. If you learn something new every day and have fun doing it, then you will be successful. In her spare time, Vidya leads a charitable foundation that partners with organizations in countries like India and Peru to further education, build orphanages and libraries, and provide medical care for women. She is an angel investor and runs workshops on creating a holistic lifestyle to help others lead well-rounded, fulfilling lives. Vidya Nagarajan RamanVidya Nagarajan Raman is the Head of Product Management for Serverless at Google Cloud. She is also an angel investor, advisor, and co-founder of a holistic lifestyle platform that empowers people to grow and transform their lives. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Debi is working on Apache Beam series with Mark Mirchandani. Stephanie is working on scripts for a series about getting into a career in cloud. HostsStephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera | |||
| 21 Sep 2022 | Vertex AI Experiments with Ivan Nardini and Karthik Ramachandran | 00:26:15 | |
Vertex AI Experiments with Ivan Nardini and Karthik RamachandranHosts Anu Srivastava and Nikita Namjoshi are joined by guests Ivan Nardini and Karthik Ramachandran in a conversation about Vertex AI Experiments this week on the podcast. Vertex AI Experiments allows for easy, thorough ML experimentation and analysis of ML strategies. Our guests start the show with a brief introduction to Vertex AI and go on to help us understand where Experiments fits in. Because building ML models takes trial and error as we figure out what architecture and data management will work best, Experiments is a handy tool that helps developers try different variations. With extensive tracking capabilities and analysis tools, developers can see what is working, what’s not, and get ideas for other things to try. Ivan tells us about the two concepts to keep in mind before using Experiments: runs, which are training configurations, and experiments, adjustments you make as you look for the best solution. Vertex ML Metadata, a managed ML metadata tool, helps analyze Experiment runs in a graph, Ivan tells us. He takes us through an example ML model build and training using Vertex AI Experiments and other tools. He and Karthik also elaborate on the relationship between Vertex AI Experiments and Pipelines. We talk about the future of AI, including the foundational model, and some cool examples of what’s happening in the real world with Vertex AI Experiments. Ivan NardiniIvan Nardini is a customer engineer specialized in ML and passionate about Developer Advocacy and MLE. He is currently collaborating and enabling Data Science developers and practitioners to define and implement MLOps on Vertex AI. He is an active contributor in Google Cloud. Karthik RamachandranKarthik Ramachandran is a Product Managed on the VertexAI team. He’s been focused on developing MLOps tools like Vertex Pipelines and Experiments. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Anu is working on demos for Next. Nikita is testing new features for Vertex AI. HostsNikita and Anu Srivastava | |||
| 14 Dec 2022 | Cloud Workstations with Marcos Grappeggia and Antoine Castex | 00:41:26 | |
Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong welcome fellow Googler Marcos Grappeggia and Antoine Castex of L’Oreal to talk about Cloud Workstations, Google’s software that provides managed development environments. Marcos elaborates on the power of Cloud Workstations and all the features and offerings this software provides. The preconfigured nature of Cloud Workstations means developers simply press a button and get an IDE so they’re ready to code quickly. Other teams benefit as well, with templates created by Cloud Workstations that specify options to be preinstalled. Marcos talks more about the benefits of Workstations over local environments, especially in the areas of security and productivity. L’Oreal chose Google Cloud years ago when they began their transition to the cloud, Antoine tells us, and we hear how L’Oreal offered Marcos suggestions and feedback as Workstations was developed. Working with Cloud Workstations today, L’Oreal’s teams spread across the globe are able to begin realizing the dream of creating environments with parameters specific to different regions and areas. While Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell are similar solutions in some ways, Marcos helps us understand the differences as well. For example, Cloud Shell is less flexible while Workstations is highly customizable. Antoine talks more about the adoption process of Workstations at L’Oreal and how they plan to continue using the software with more teams in the future. He offers advice for other companies looking to introduce it. Workstations works with the Software Delivery Shield suite to build and maintain a secure software supply chain. Security features developers are used to in productions services are easily applied to development environments in Workstations as well. Marcos talks about the future of Cloud Workstations, including deeper security integration. Marcos GrappeggiaMarcos is a Product Manager at Google Cloud, leading Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell. Marcos is an engineer from University of Campinas (Brazil) and École Centrale Paris (France). Prior to joining Google, he led product at Appurify (acquired by Google, now Firebase Test Lab), enabling mobile test automation on real devices for mobile developers. Antoine CastexAntoine is a curious French man, a Serverless Guru multiple times GCP Certified and C2C French Club Co-President & Co-Founder. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Max is teaching his cats to do silly tricks! Stephanie is planning a vacation! HostsMax Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong | |||
| 16 Feb 2022 | Data Journeys with Bruno Aziza | 00:43:49 | |
On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong share two popular episodes of Bruno Aziza’s YouTube series Data Journeys. First up, Bruno talks with Aaron Biller of Postmates about their triangle of complex data that includes customer, courier, and merchant. He details their data storage and analytics structure, describing it as a reverse pyramid of tons of data with few engineers to manage and analyze it. To handle this, Postmates takes a stay-out-of-the-way approach by providing good data and letting the analysts do what they do best without micromanaging. Aaron talks about this data architecture, including the use of BigQuery as data lakes to keep data storage simple, and how Google collaboration tools streamline access and authorization tasks. Communication and flexibility are important, Aaron tells us, and he offers other advice for companies designing data systems. Feedback loops, dedicated training, and an open environment with no silos also help foster a productive, healthy data workplace. Matteo of Delivery Hero speaks to Bruno next. With the goal of increasing their global reach and offerings, it’s important that Delivery Hero has a smooth data system. Matteo outlines the new data structure they’ve built to ease onboarding of new companies and territories and describes different use cases for their data. From determining the number of delivery people necessary in each area to offering personalized customer recommendations, Delivery Hero uses Google offerings like Google Analytics and BigQuery to interpret collected data. Matteo details how they tailor data infrastructures for each use case and offers tips to help companies think through their data infrastructure design. Don’t work in a bubble, Matteo stresses, and focus on thorough onboarding of team members and clear communication with colleagues and customers. Bruno AzizaBruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud. He specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence. Before working at Google, he worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led a big turnarounds in the business analytics industry. Bruno also had the opportunity to help launch startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco). Sisense and AtScale and helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. He has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany and has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management. In his spare time, Bruno writes a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics. Aaron BillerAaron is the Manager of Data Engineering at Postmates. Matteo FavaMatteo is Senior Director of Global Data Products and Analytics at Delivery Hero. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Steph is working on the next Ask Google Cloud event and she wants your Kubernetes questions! HostsMark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong | |||
| 31 Aug 2022 | GKE Turns 7 with Tim Hockin | 00:38:04 | |
Tim Hockin joins Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong to celebrate GKE’s seventh birthday! Tim starts with a brief background on GKE from its beginnings in 2015 and its relationship to Borg to the visions Google developers had for the software. GKE is meant to help companies focus on what they’re good at and leave the rest to Google’s managed Kubernetes service. Tim talks about his acting gig in a Kubernetes documentary, including some fun facts about Kubernetes’ early days and the significance of the number seven. Over time, the teams working on open source Kubernetes and GKE have worked together, with advances in the open source software influencing updates in GKE. Kubernetes 1.25 was released the day this episode was recorded, and Tim describes how much work and thought goes into building these updates. GKE offers GCP users unique ways to leverage Kubernetes tools like scaling, and Tim shares stories about the evolution of some of these tools and his experiences with networking. Talking with the Kubernetes community has helped refine GKE mult-icluster tools to help companies solve real problems, and Tim tells us more about other features and updates coming with future iterations of GKE. KubeCon is in October, so come by and learn more! Tim HockinTim Hockin is Principal Software Engineer working with Kubernetes at Google Cloud. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Kaslin is working on NEXT and KubeCon stuff. Anthony is working on GKE Essentials and getting ready to go on leave. HostsKaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong | |||
| 29 Jun 2022 | Disaster Recovery with Cody Ault and Jo-Anne Bourne | 00:36:03 | |
Your hosts Max Saltonstall and Carter Morgan talk with guests Cody Ault and Jo-Anne Bourne of Veeam. Veeam is revolutionizing the data space by minimizing data loss impacts and project downtime with easy backups and user-friendly disaster recovery solutions. As a software company, Veeam is able to stay flexible with its solutions, helping customers keep any project safe. Cody explains what is meant by disaster recovery and how different systems might require different levels of fail-safe protection. Jo-Anne talks about the financial cost of downtime and how Veeam can help save money by planning for and preventing downtime. Veeam backup and replication is the main offering that can be customized depending on workloads, Cody tells us. He gives examples of how this works for different types of projects. Businesses can easily make plans for recovery and data backups then implement them with the help of Veeam. Cody talks about cloud migration and how Veeam can streamline this process with its replication services, and Jo-Anne emphasizes the importance of these recovery processes for data in the cloud. The journey from fledgling Veeam to their current suite of offerings was an interesting one, and Cody talks about this evolution, starting with the simple VM backups of version 5. As companies have brought new recovery challenges, Veeam has grown to provide these services. Their partnership with Google has grown as well, as they continue to leverage Google offerings and support Google Cloud customers. We hear examples of Veeam customers and how they use the software, and Cody tells us a little about the future of Veeam. Cody AultCody has been at Veeam for over 11 years in various roles and departments including Technical Lead for US Support team, Advisory Architect for Presales Solutions Architect and Staff Solutions Architect for Product Management Alliances. He has acted as the performance, databases, security, and monitoring specialist for North America for the Presales team and has helped develop the Veeam Design Methodology and Architecture Documentation template. Cody is currently working with the Alliances team focusing on Google Cloud, Kubernetes and Red Hat. Jo-Anne BourneJo-Anne is a Partner Marketing Strategist who works with global companies to support them in positioning company products with their customer base. She is effective in developing strategic partnerships with International Resellers, CCaaS partners, Systems Integrators, OEM partners and ISV partnerships like Amazon, Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, BT to develop strategies to enable sales teams to generate significant revenue and in turn, build profitability for the company. Jo-Anne is a brand steward successful in using analytics to create results-driven campaigns that increase brand awareness, generate sales leads, improve customer engagement and strengthen partner relationships. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Carter is working on the new Cloud Podcasts website. Max is working on research papers about how we built and deployed Google’s Zero Trust system for employees, BeyondCorp. Kelci is working on creating a series of blog posts highlighting the benefits of having access to public data sets embedded within BigQuery. HostsCarter Morgan and Max Saltonstall | |||
| 10 Aug 2022 | Cloud Functions (2nd gen) with Jaisen Mathai and Sara Ford | 00:41:05 | |
Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey are joined today by fellow Googlers Jaisen Mathai and Sara Ford to hear all about Cloud Functions (2nd gen) and how it differs from the original. Jaisen gives us some background on Cloud Functions and why it was built. Supporting seven languages, this tool allows clients to write a function without worrying about scaling, devops, and a number of other things that are handled by Cloud Functions automatically. Customer feedback led to new features, and that’s how the second evolution of Cloud Functions came about. Don’t worry, first gen users! This will continue to be available and supported. Features in the 2nd gen fit into three categories: performance, cost, and control. Among other benefits, costs stay low or may even be reduced with some of the new features, larger instances and longer processing times mean better performance, and traffic splitting means better control over projects. Sara details an example illustrating the power of the new concurrency features, and Jaisen helps us understand when Cloud Functions is the right choice for your project and when it’s not. Our guests walk us through getting started with Cloud Functions and using the 2nd gen additions. Companies like Lucille Games are using Cloud Functions, and our guests talk more about how specific users are leveraging the new features of the 2nd gen. Jaisen MathaiJaisen is a product manager for Cloud Functions. He’s been at Google for about six years and before joining Google was both a developer and product manager. Sara FordSara is a Cloud Developer Advocate focusing on Cloud Functions and enjoys working on serverless. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Stephanie has been working on GCP Support Shorts. HostsStephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey | |||
| 27 Apr 2022 | BigLake with Gaurav Saxena and Justin Levandoski | 00:41:23 | |
Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera are learning all about BigLake from guests Gaurav Saxena and Justin Levandoski of the BigQuery team. BigLake offers unified data management from both data warehouses and data lakes. What exactly is the difference between a data warehouse and a data lake? Justin explains what a data lake is, how they came to be, and the benefits. Each data option has its cons too, like the limitations of data lakes for enterprise use. Enter BigLake built on BigQuery, which helps enterprise clients manage and analyze their data from both data warehouses and data lakes. The best features of BigQuery are now available for Google Cloud Storage and across multi-cloud solutions. Guarav describes BigLake behind the scenes and how the principles of BigQuery’s data management can now be used for open file formats in BigLake. It’s BigQuery for more data formats, Justin explains. BigLake solves many data problems quickly with a special emphasis on improving security. Our guests talk specifically about clients who gain the most from using BigLake, especially those looking to analyze distributed data and those who need easy and fast security and compliance solutions. With tightened security, BigLake offers access delegation and secure APIs that work over object storage. We hear about the user experience and how easy it is to get started, especially for customers already familiar with and using other GCP products. Google’s advocacy of open source projects means many clients are coming in with workloads built with open source software. BigLake supports multi-cloud projects so that tables can be built on top of any data system. No matter the format of your data, you can run analytics with BigLake. We talk more about the security features of BigLake and how easy it is to unify data warehouses and data lakes with optimal data security. The customers have helped shape BigLake, and Gaurav describes how these clients are using this data software. We hear about integration with BigQuery Omni and Dataplex and how BigLake is different. In the future, Google will continue to make simple, effective solutions for data management and analytics, building further off of BigQuery. Gaurav SaxenaGaurav Saxena is a product management lead at Google BigQuery. He has 12+ years of experience building products at the intersection of cloud, data and AI. Before Google, Gaurav led product management at Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for some of the most widely used cloud offerings in storage and data. Justin LevandoskiJustin is a tech lead/manager in BigQuery leading BigLake and other projects pushing the frontier of BigQuery. Prior to Google, just worked on Amazon Aurora and was part of the Database research group at Microsoft Research. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Debi is working on a series about automatic DLP. Cloud Data Loss Prevention is now automatic and allows you to scan data across your whole org with the click of one button! HostsStephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera | |||
| 25 May 2022 | GKE Release Channels with Kobi Magnezi and Abdelfettah Sghiouar | 00:47:56 | |
Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani learn how GKE manages their releases and how customers can take advantage of the GKE release channels for smooth transitions. Guests Abdelfettah Sghiouar and Kobi Magnezi of the Google Cloud GKE team are here to explain. With releases every four months or so, Kobi tells us that Kubernetes requires two pieces to be managed with each release: the control plane and the nodes. Both are managed for the customer in GKE. The new addition of release channels allows flexibility with release updating so customers can adjust to their specific project needs. Each channel offers a different updating mix and speed, and clients choose the channel that’s right for their project. The idea for release channels isn’t a new one, Kobi explains. In fact, Google’s frequent project releases, while keeping things secure and running well, also can be customized by choosing from an assortment of channels in other Google offerings like Chrome. Our guests talk us through the process of releasing through channels and how each release marinates in the Rapid channel to be sure the version is supported and secure before being pushed to customers through other channels. We hear how release channels differ from no-channel releases, the benefits of specialized channels, and recommendations for customers as far as which channels to use with different development environments. Abdel describes real-world use cases for the Rapid, Regular, and Stable channels, the Surge Upgrade feature, and how GKE notifications with Pub/Sub helps in the updating process. Kobi talks about maintenance and exclusion windows to help customers further customize when and how their projects will update. Kobi and Abdel wrap up with a discussion of the future of GKE release channels. Kobi MagneziKobi is the Product Manager for GKE at Google Cloud. Abdelfettah SghiouarAbdel is a Cloud Dev Advocate with a focus on Cloud native, GKE, and Service Mesh technologies. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Kaslin is working on KubeCon and new episodes of GKE Essentials. HostsMark Mirchandani and Kaslin Fields | |||
| 22 Jun 2022 | Contact Center AI with Amit Kumar and Vasili Triant | 00:36:47 | |
This week on the GCP Podcast, Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall are joined by Amit Kumar and Vasili Triant. Our guests are here to talk about new features in Contact Center AI. Amit starts the show helping us understand what Contact Center as a Service is and what makes this unified platform so useful for enterprise companies. The scalability helps keep costs down and overall satisfaction up while leveraging advances in cloud. UJET and Google Cloud have worked together to bring this AI advancement, and our guests describe the partnership and evolution CCAI. CCAI has streamlined the Contact Center as a Service space, helping businesses work efficiently and while putting an emphasis on positive experiences for the end customer. CCAI users can use the platform straight out of the box or customize it to build specific experiences with tools like Dialogflow. Amit further describes the tools available like Interactive Voice Response and for which circumstances each tool would be most useful. The journey to CCAI can be easily managed by a team who knows the business well. We learn more about the onboarding experience and the skills required to transition. Vasili talks about the past and future of Contact Center and how customer information is used not just for sales purposes but for bettering the customer service experience. Our guests share success stories from companies like FitBit and how CCAI is used to handle customer interactions through the app. Things like the call back feature save customers the time and frustration of waiting on hold and save businesses money. Amit KumarAmit is responsible for bringing GCP’s native CCaaS offering to market and helps enterprise customers modernize their contact centers. Previously, Amit worked as a Cloud AI Incubator lead where he helped customers in adopting Google’s conversational AI technology. He also has an extensive background in large scale cloud transformational efforts and have worked with enterprise software companies mainly Salesforce and TIBCO Software. Vasili TriantAs UJET’s Chief Operating Officer, Vasili Triant oversees all Go To Market activities including Sales, Channel, Alliances, and Customer Success. Triant brings more than 20 years of experience in Telecoms, Unified Communications (UC), and Contact Center industries, having previously served as VP/GM of Contact Center at Cisco, where he achieved the fastest growth in over a decade through a focus on global alliances and enterprise cloud-readiness. Cool things of the weekInterview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Max is working on expanding the podcast platform by collecting and adding more content. HostsCarter Morgan and Max Saltonstall | |||
| 16 Nov 2023 | How UniSuper is helping Australians get the best of their superannuation fund investments with cloud | 00:25:34 | |
In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. In Australia, every employee is required to select their superannuation fund of choice to help them invest a portion of their income. Having celebrated its 40th anniversary recently, UniSuper, one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds, is committed to delivering value and efficiency for its members. Started as a fund for the higher education and research sector, it has now opened its platform to all industries across the country. Today, UniSuper invests more than $120 billion on behalf of more than 620,000 members. With the new Treasury Laws Amendment Act 2021, Your Future, Your Super, that aims to improve the outcome of superannuation funds for Australians, UniSuper decided to undergo a data centre transformation, taking on an 80/20 rule on cloud hosting and adopting the right digital technologies to improve its performance and portfolio. In this episode, Angelo talks about how Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) underpins UniSuper’s shift to the cloud as it moves existing VMware-based workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud. This enables the organization to quickly scale up while having the flexibility and agility it needs to drive operational efficiencies as it continues to deliver the best returns for its customers. He also shares how the COVID-19 pandemic presented him with some crucial moments of thought that have resulted in some of the changes in best practices across the organization today. Angelo Furina, Head of Enterprise Infrastructure & CloudAngelo is the Head of Enterprise Infrastructure and Cloud at UniSuper and is passionate about business transformation and bridging the gap between technology and business strategy. With more than a decade of industry experience, Angelo has delivered technology solutions across manufacturing, telecommunications, media and finance. Theo DaviesTheo is the Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud. He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.
| |||
| 16 Aug 2023 | Creating a sustainable EV ecosystem in Taiwan with ChargeSmith | 00:26:42 | |
In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. As the electric vehicles (EV) sector accelerates, drivers are finding it a challenge to conveniently access charging points. This has become one of the biggest concerns for EV drivers around the world. Intending to solve this problem, Taiwan-born company ChargesSmith offers EV users an end-to-end charging solution by developing a map for drivers, with the most updated information on location and availability of charging points around the country. Today, ChargeSmith serves more than 70% of EV users in Taiwan, partnering with various charging point operators to give users a high level of accessibility. Their vision and goal is to organize and share energy with communities, countries, and the earth. In this episode, ChargeSmith CEO Andy Chen talks about sustainability in the EV market and the growth of EV adoption. As an EV driver himself, Chen shares the issues he faces first-hand, and how ChargeSmith is leveraging data to solve the challenges of today while paving a future for EV drivers of tomorrow. In this episode, we also hear from Alex Kuo of GAIA, who shares how his team collaborates with ChargeSmith to use cloud technology as an enabler in this evolving landscape. Are you ready for a cleaner driving experience? Tune in to find out. Andy Chen, CEO of ChargeSmithAndy is one of the earliest EV adaptors in Taiwan. With enthusiasm for the EV community, he has led ChargeSmith to build up Taiwan's largest EV charging roaming network. Andy enjoys observing the market’s pain points and using data-driven strategies to accelerate the adoption of the product. Alex Kuo, Sr. Account Manager of GAIAAn accomplished sales professional, Alex has led sales teams across the IT industry to success, helping SMB and enterprise clients achieve impressive business growth. With a passion for blockchain technology, Alex enjoys innovating and developing new products and services for clients that ultimately contribute to the growth of the industry. Theo DaviesTheo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of “That Digital Show APAC”. He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Interview
Hosts Theo Davies and Paris Tran | |||
| 06 Apr 2022 | Apache Beam with Kenneth Knowles and Pablo Estrada | 00:39:28 | |
On the podcast this week, your hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani talk about the data processing tool Apache Beam with guests Pablo Estrada and Kenneth Knowles. Kenn starts us off with an overview of how Apache Beam began and how Cloud Dataflow was involved. The unique batch and stream method and emphasis on correctness garnered support from developers early on and continues to attract users. Pablo helps us understand why Beam is a better option for certain projects looking to process large amounts of data. Our guests describe how Beam may be a better fit than microservices that could become obsolete as company needs change. Next, we step back and take a look at why batch and stream is the gold standard of data processing because of its balance between low latency and ease of “being done” with data collection. Beam’s focus on the correctness of data and correctness in processing that data is a core component. With good data, processing becomes easier, more reliable, and cheaper. Kenn gives examples of how things can go wrong with bad data processing. Beam strives for the perfect combination of low latency, correct data, and affordability. Users can choose where to run Beam pipelines, from other Apache software offerings to Dataflow, which means excellent flexibility. Our guests talk about the pros and cons of some of these options and we hear examples of how companies are using Beam along with supporting software to solve data processing challenges. To get started with Beam, check out Beam College or attend Beam Summit 2022. Kenneth KnowlesKenn Knowles is chair of the Apache Beam Project Management Committee. Kenn has been working on Google Cloud Dataflow—Google’s Beam backend—since 2014. Kenn holds a PhD in programming languages from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Pablo EstradaPablo is a Software Engineer at Google, and a management committee member for Apache Beam. Pablo is big into working on an open source project, and has worked all across the Apache Beam stack. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Mark is working on a new Apache Beam video series Getting Started Wtih Apache Beam HostsStephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani | |||
| 18 May 2022 | AlloyDB with Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet "GG" Goindi | 00:47:36 | |
AlloyDB for PostgreSQL has launched and hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabe Weiss are here this week to talk about it with guests Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet Goindi. This fully managed, Postgres compatible database for enterprise use combines the power of Google Cloud and the best features of Postgres for superior data management. AlloyDB began years ago as a solution to help manage huge data migrations to the cloud. Customers needed a way to take advantage of the benefits of cloud, modernizing their databases as they migrated in an easy, flexible, and scalable way. Databases had to maintain performance and availability while offering enterprise customers optimal security features and more. We learn why PostgreSQL is important in the equation and how AlloyDB is built with Google scaling abilities and ML while supporting open source compatibility. We talk about data analytics workloads and how AlloyDB handles in-the-moment analytics needs. Our guests describe and compare different database offerings at Google, emphasizing the solutions that set AlloyDB apart. We chat about the types of projects each database is best suited for and how AlloyDB fits into the Google database portfolio. We hear examples of customers moving to AlloyDB and how they’re using this new service. Clients have been leveraging the embedded ML features for better data management. Sandy GhaiSandy is a product manager on GCP Databases and has been working on the AlloyDB team since the beginning. Gurmeet “GG” GoindiGG 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
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Gabe is working on some exciting content to support landing the AlloyDB launch. HostsMark Mirchandani and Gabe Weiss | |||
| 16 Mar 2022 | SQL Commenter with Nimesh Bhagat and Morgan McLean | 00:42:32 | |
First time co-host Jan Kleinert joins Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about database observability and the cool tools that make it possible. Morgan McLean and Nimesh Bhagat describe database observability, which uses metrics, logs, and other tools to help users understand the health of your database. We talk about Object Relational Mappers and the challenges with using these for debugging database performance. SQL Commenter helps database observability in two ways: it is both a library and a standard, Nimesh tells us. He describes the process for us, detailing exactly how SQL Commenter effects projects. Recently, SQL Commenter was donated to OpenTelemetry to augment the observability offerings, create an application standard, and make it easier for developers to use a variety of different tools and languages. Engineers can get end-to-end traces no matter which database technologies they use. Morgan tells us about Splunk and how information from SQL Commenter is taken into Splunk and used. Backend data like metrics from Cloud Monitoring and client libraries can be correlated together with SQL Commenter and brought into Splunk for full stack observability. Nimesh offers client examples to help us understand how these useful tools integrate for optimal observability. He tells us about the databases and ORMs supported by SQL Commenter. Our guests and co-host Jan give tips to help our listeners get started with SQL Commenter and talk about what they’re looking forward to in the future of observability. Nimesh BhagatNimesh is a product manager at Google Cloud, he leads Database Observability. He has worked across engineering and product roles, building highly available and high performance enterprise infrastructure used by Fortune 500 companies. His passion lies in combining powerful infrastructure with simple user experience so that every business and developer can build software at scale and velocity. Morgan McLeanMorgan is Director of Product Management at Splunk and co-creator of OpenCensus / OpenTelemetry. Cool things of the week
Interview
HostsMark Mirchandani and Jan Kleinert | |||
| 09 Feb 2022 | Pulumi and Kubernetes Releases with Kat Cosgrove | 00:34:19 | |
Brian Dorsey and Kaslin Fields welcome Kat Cosgrove of Pulumi this week to talk about what’s new with Kubernetes 1.24. Pulumi is infrastructure as code, allowing developers to use whatever language they are comfortable with to create and test infrastructure. Kat walks us through typical Pulumi infrastructure test scenarios to demonstrate the benefits of this software, especially with GCP. In the new Kubernetes release, one of the biggest updates is the removal of Dockershim. If you’re using a managed Kubernetes service through GCP, this update should not affect you, Kat tells us. She clears up some common Docker misconceptions and tells us how Kubernetes and Docker still work together. Kat describes the situations where this update might affect certain projects and how to tell if you’re one of the unlucky few. Later, we talk about the future of tech conferences. Kat is excited to get back to some in-person learning and networking, but at the same time, is hopeful that conferences will continue a hybrid model and allow some online interaction. Pulumi will be at KubeCon, Devlopsdays, and Jfokus in the next few months with some cool new free merchandise. Kat CosgroveKat is Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Brian just started releasing the next six episodes of VMs End-to-end. It’s a video series all about Compute Engine, starting with a discussion of building reliable systems from unreliable components. Kaslin is working on the GKE/OSS K8s Events.
HostsBrian Dorsey and Kaslin Fields | |||
| 07 Mar 2022 | Google Cloud Reader with Jenny Brown | 00:48:28 | |
On the show this week, we’re talking about Google Cloud Reader, a nifty podcast we created to narrate Google Tech blog posts. Host Jenny Brown tells us her inspiration for creating Google Cloud Reader and she and cohost Stephanie Wong walk us through a series of published episodes. First up, we learn what Cloud SQL Maintenance is and how customers can customize maintenance schedules to limit the impacts of downtime. Region picker is the topic of our next segment, and we hear how it helps projects stay cost efficient while conserving resources. Using three inputs, companies can decide quickly which region offers the best balance between cost, latency, and carbon footprint for them. Next, we learn about search abandonment’s effect on brand loyalty and how important it is for the right products to show in search results. We tackle the working environment with the next piece, redefining productivity to make it more personal and less robotic and offering advice on being productive while maintaining a good work-life balance. Making learning more personalized is the subject of our next segment. We hear how Google is using AI to aid the instruction of students no matter their learning style. Building diversity, equity, and inclusion into companies is important for success, and our last segment offers advice on how to incorporate DEI initiatives to ensure employees feel valued. Cool things of the week
Interview
HostsStephanie Wong and Jenny Brown | |||
| 23 Mar 2022 | Fathers of the Internet with Vint Cerf | 00:41:00 | |
This week, Stephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong introduce a special podcast of the Gtalk at Airbus speaker series where prestigious Googlers have been invited to talk with Airbus. In this episode, Vint Cerf, who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, talks with Rhys Phillips of Airbus and fellow Googler Rafael Lami Dozo. Vint tells us about his journey to Google, including his interest in science which stemmed from a chemistry set he received as a child. After high school, he got a job writing data analyzation software on the Apollo project. His graduate work at UCLA led him to the ARPANet project where he developed host protocols, and eventually to his work on the original Internet with Bob Kahn. Vint tells us about the security surrounding this project and the importance of internet security still today. The open architecture of the internet then and now excites Vint because it allows new, interesting projects to contribute without barriers. Vint is also passionate about accessibility. At Google, he and his team continue to make systems more accessible by listening to clients and adapting software to make it usable. He sees an opportunity to train developers to optimize software to work with common accessibility tools like screen readers to ensure better usability. Later, Vint tells us about the Interplanetary Internet, describing how this system is being built to provide fast, effective Internet to every part of the planet. Along with groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force, this new Internet is being deployed and tested now to ensure it works as expected. He talks about his work with NASA and other space agencies to grow the Interplanetary Internet. Digital obsolescence is another type of accessibility that concerns Vint. Over time, the loads of data we store and their various storage devices could become unreadable. Software needed to use or see this media could no longer be supported as well, making the data inaccessible. Vint hopes we will begin practicing ways to perpetuate the existence of this data through copying and making software more backward compatible. He addresses the issues with this, including funding. Vint CerfWhile at UCLA, Vint Cerf worked on ARPANet - the very beginnings of what we know as the internet today and is now, fittingly, Chief Internet Evangelist & VP at Google. He is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet”, sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. Rhys PhillipsRhys Phillips is Change and Adoption Leader, Digital Workplace at Airbus. Rafael Lami DozoRafael Lami Dozo is Customer Success Manager, Google Cloud Workspace for Airbus. Cool things of the weekInterview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Stephanie is working on new Discovering Data Centers videos. Anthony is working on content for building scalable GKE clusters. HostsStephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong | |||
| 13 Jul 2022 | Distributed Cloud Edge for Telcos with DP Ayyadevara and Krishna Garimella | 00:36:20 | |
Stephanie Wong and Carter Morgan are back this week learning about Google’s Distributed Cloud Edge for telcos with guests Krishna Garimella and DP Ayyadevara. Launched last year, Google Distributed Cloud Edge has benefited companies across many industries. Today, our guests are here to elaborate on how telecommunications companies specifically are leveraging this powerful tool. Because telcos deliver essential services, they tend to create detailed plans for their infrastructure in advance and stick with this setup for many years, DP tells us. Identifying the right tools for their project is vital, and Google has created and improved on many services to aid the telecommunications sector. Contact Center AI, for example, helps with customer service needs. Specifically, our guests elaborate on the modernization of telco networks through managed infrastructure offerings. We learn more about Google Distributed Cloud Edge and the managed hardware and software stack that’s included. Container as a service for optimal network function is the first focus of Google in supporting telcos companies with Distributed Cloud and has been used for 5G rollouts. Google has been working behind the scenes to make Kubernetes more telco friendly as well, so that projects are more portable, scalable, and able to leverage Kubernetes benefits easily. Krishna gives us some great real-life examples of telecommunications companies using GDC Edge in areas like virtual broadband networks. In order to dedicate maximum resources to customer workloads, the team chose to keep the Kubernetes control plane in the cloud while worker nodes are at the edge. With superior security protection, minimal service disruption, and more, GDC Edge boasts fleet management as a core capability. In order to continue satisfying telco’s needs, Google collaborates with many businesses to grow with changing customer needs. Krishna GarimellaKrishna is a technology evangelist who has worked with service providers across the globe in the network and media areas. DP AyyadevaraDP is the Product Group Product Manager leading Telco Network Modernization products and solutions at Google Cloud. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Carter made a test for a video recap version of the recent pi episode. Stephanie recently made a pi video as well and is working on an Alphafold video and the Cloud client library new reference docs homepage rollout. HostsCarter Morgan and Stephanie Wong | |||
| 03 Aug 2022 | Vertex Explainable AI with Irina Sigler and Ivan Nardini | 00:26:24 | |
Max Saltonstall and new host Anu Srivastava are in the studio today talking about Vertex Explainable AI with guests Irina Sigler and Ivan Nardini. Vertex Explainable AI was born from a need for developers to better understand how their models determine classifications. Trusting the operation of models for business decision making and easier debugging are two reasons this classification understanding is so important. Explainable models help developers understand and describe how their trained models are making decisions. Google’s managed service, Vertex Explainable AI, offers Feature Attribution and Example Based Explanations to provide better understanding of model decision making. Irina describes these two services and how each works to foster better decision-making based on AI models. One or both services can be used in every stage of model building and to create a more precise model with better results. Example Based Explanations, Irina tells us, also makes it easier to explain the model to those who may not have strong technical backgrounds. Ivan runs us through a sample build of a model taking advantage of the Vertex Explainable AI tools. Presets provide easier setup and use as well. We talk more about the benefits of being able to easily explain your models. When decision-makers understand the importance of your AI tool, it’s more likely to be cleared for production, for example. When you understand why your model is making certain choices, you can trust the model’s outcomes as part of your decision-making process. Irina SiglerIrina Sigler is a Product Manager on the Vertex Explainable AI team. Before joining Google, Irina worked at McKinsey and did her Ph.D. in Explainable AI. She graduated from the Freie Universität Berlin and HEC Paris. Ivan NardiniIvan Nardini is a customer engineer specialized in ML and passionate about Developer Advocacy and MLE. He is currently collaborating and enabling Data Science developers and practitioners to define and implement MLOps on Vertex AI. He also leads a worldwide hackathon community initiative and he is an active contributor in Google Cloud. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Anu just got back from a nice vacation and is picking back up on how to use our AI APIs with Serverless workflows. She’s working on some exciting tutorials for our AI backed Translation API. Max just got back from family dance camp and is working to make excellent intern experiences. HostsMax Saltonstall and Anu Srivastava | |||
| 29 Mar 2023 | GoJek’s digital journey to becoming one of Indonesia’s biggest multi-platform apps | 00:44:38 | |
In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. Theo Davies and Stephanie Wong speak to Sartaj Singh, Head of Technology at GoJek, who shares inside knowledge on GoJek’s explosive growth, from being a ride hailing app, to a multi-platform one that is a now a major eCommerce player in Indonesia, especially in last mile delivery. Sartaj shares GoJek’s focus on three pillars, customer incentive, driver rewards and pricing, to ensure consistency in service delivery quality. He also discusses how he looks to improve platformization with his team through innovation, by putting people over processes, and helping engineers address challenges in order to stay agile and scalable. From sitting at the side of the street to solve production issues, to managing and growing a team of over 1,000 in just a few years, listen in as Sartaj shares interesting personal excerpts on GoJek’s journey in shifting from a startup “hustler” mindset, to a more corporate way of working, and everything that it entails. Sartaj SinghSartaj Singh is the Head of Engineering Platforms at Gojek. Sartaj is one of the few engineers who has been with GOJEK since the early days. As a literary enthusiast, he never thought that he would end up working in tech. Sartaj is responsible for driving growth, standardizing and improving Indonesia’s multi-service platform. Theo DaviesTheo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of “That Digital Show APAC”. He is a record breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Theo is trying out Snapchat and is excited about Snap partnering with Google Cloud Hosts Stephanie Wong and Theo Davies | |||
| 15 Jun 2022 | New Pi World Record with Emma Haruka Iwao and Sara Ford | 00:39:02 | |
Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey are working on their math skills today with guests Emma Haruka Iwao and Sara Ford. What kind of computing power does it take to break the world record for pi computations? Emma and Sara are here to tell us. Emma tells us how she started with pi and how she and Sara came to work together to break the record. In 2019, Emma was on the show with her previous world record, and with the advancements in technology and Google products since, she knew she could do even more this year. Her 100 trillion digit goal wasn’t enough to scare people away, and Sara, along with other partners, joined Emma on the pi computation journey. Together, Sara and Emma talk about the hardware required, building the algorithm, how it’s run, and where the data is stored. Running on a personal computer was cheaper and easier than a super computer, and Emma explains why. Performing these immense calculations can also help illustrate just how far computers have come. The storage required for this project was immense, and Emma tells us how they worked around some of the storage limitations. We hear more about Ycruncher and how it was used to help with calculations. Our guests talk about how things might change for computing and specifically for pi computations in the next few years, and Sara tells us about the storage journey from the perspective of a mathematician, and gives us some interesting facts about the algorithms involved, and we learn how world records are verified. Emma Haruka IwaoEmma is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform, focusing on application developers’ experience and high performance computing. She has been a C++ developer for 15 years and worked on embedded systems and the Chromium Project. Emma is passionate about learning and explaining the most fundamental technologies such as operating systems, distributed systems, and internet protocols. Besides software engineering, she likes games, traveling, and eating delicious food. Sara FordSara Ford is a Developer Advocate on Google Cloud focusing on Serverless. She received a Masters degree in Human Factors (UX) because she wants to make dev tools more usable. Her lifelong dream is to be a 97-year old weightlifter so she can be featured on the local news. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Carter and Brian are working on a new season of VM End to End HostsCarter Morgan and Brian Dorsey | |||
| 13 Apr 2022 | GKE Gateway Controller with Bowei Du and Abdelfettah Sghiouar | 00:36:25 | |
Hosts Anthony Bushong and Kaslin Fields welcome Bowei Du and Abdelfettah Sghiouar to talk about the Gateway Controller, a tool that helps developers use the Gateway API in GKE. Bowei starts the show with a thorough explanation of how and why the Gateway Controller was developed. Compared to tools like Ingress, Gateway Controller allows engineers to implement more expressive solutions. While providing developers with portability has been an important part of Gateway Controller, it also gives developers freedom to use non-portable features in a structured, consistent environment and helps manage tenancy across different teams. Bowei and Abdel describe the difference between Ingress and Service and how these tools fit in with Gateway Controller. Abdel walks us through how a company would use the Gateway Controller for optimal tenancy management across name spaces and how this is an improvement over Ingress and Service. He gives examples of how companies are using this new tool. We hear more about the GKE Gateway Controller and how its fully-managed deployments and integration with other Google APIs make it so easy to use. Bowei tells us how Gateway helps with the unification of mesh and non mesh environments through the standardization of noun describers in both instances. A handy edge to mesh tutorial is available to help developers. Abdelfettah SghiouarAbdel is a Cloud Dev Advocate with a focus on Cloud native, GKE, and Service Mesh technologies. Bowei DuBowei is tech lead on Gateway Controller and a specialist in distributed systems and networking. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Kaslin is working on KubeCon EU. Anthony is working on software supply chain security with Cloud Build. Kaslin and Anthony are working together on the GKE Essentials Series HostsAnthony Bushong and Kaslin Fields | |||
| 04 May 2022 | Geospatial Awakening in Global Supply Chains with Nathan Eaton and Denise Pearl | 00:56:21 | |
This week, Googler Denise Pearl and NGIS Executive Director Nathan Eaton join hosts Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Donna Schut to talk about how modern technology and data collection can significantly enhance environmental protection practices. Denise starts the show with a thorough explanation of geospatial awakening and how Google is making its backend geo services like Google Earth Engine more usable for Google Cloud customers. With better data, easier access, and substantially more cloud compute power, companies are awakening to the possibilities of geospatial driven projects that analyze not just text but photographic data as well. Thousands of satellites collect information about Earth every day, and companies are realizing just how much of this data is available for their own sustainability, geo-centric, and location-based projects. Geospatial, Nathan explains, can help combine layers of text and photo data based on one location for a richer, more robust view of a particular location in real time. As a geospatial partner with Google for a decade, NGIS has had experience using Earth Engine, Google Maps, and more to help Google Cloud customers use this data in meaningful ways. Because most projects involve analyzing locations as they change over time, companies need massive storage and processing power for their data. This is only made possible with the recent advances in infrastructure afforded by the cloud. With these amazing advances in technology, Denise and Nathan are seeing more and more exciting use cases. Companies are taking this data and making meaningful decisions for their future and the future of the planet. Sustainability goals like limiting deforestation in the supply chain can be made and measured. Climate change models can be created and applied. And all of this can be done quickly. Nathan and Denise talk about TraceMark, the sustainable sourcing solution built by NGIS and made to integrate flexibly with customer projects. Consumers are increasingly aware of their affect on the environment and are pushing for change. With TraceMark, companies are able to see the environmental impact of their supply chain partners and make changes in line with customer values. These decisions can influence the growth of the company as well, as suppliers are vetted and chosen based on sustainability and availability. We hear about the building of TraceMark and the challenges the team overcame. Denise runs through some features of the software and how users can take advantage of them. Our guests give some great tips for organizations to get started with their data-driven sustainability goals, and Nathan talks about what’s next with NGIS and TraceMark. Nathan EatonAs Executive Director at NGIS, Nathan has worked with hundreds of clients to deliver fit for purpose, innovative solutions. Nathan leads our GIS capabilities and stakeholder management including consulting with a range of large multinational companies and federal government departments. Most recently, Nathan has led the development, build and launch of TraceMark, a SaaS sustainable sourcing solution from NGIS, Google Cloud and partners Planet and CARTO. Denise PearlDenise Pearl leads strategic ISV efforts for Google Cloud’s Geospatial, Earth Observation and Sustainability vertical. Her primary focus is to align engineering, marketing and sales teams within Google around the issues that matter to enterprise customers and government agencies enabling the use of technology to better solve sustainability challenges communities face across the globe. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Dana is focusing on geospatial analytics, helping customers achieve their sustainability goals. She’s building solutions that solve repeatable problems. AGV is getting ready for the Cloud Sustainability Summit on June 28th. HostsAlexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Donna Schut | |||
| 09 Nov 2022 | ML/AI Data Science for Data Analytics with Jed Dougherty and Dan Darnell | 00:32:13 | |
On the show this week, Carter Morgan and Anu Srivastava talk about AI and ML data analytics with Dataiku VP of Platform Strategy, Jed Dougherty, and Head of Product Marketing, Dan Darnell. Dataiku is an AI platform targeted for business team collaboration. The low and no code environments make it easy for developers and not so tech savvy employees to work together on analytics projects. It strives for everyday AI, making these normally highly technical data processes more accessible. Our guests detail the tools Dataiku provides customers, including ML Ops features for efficient models. Dataiku’s managed offering allows businesses to concentrate on the model while Dataiku takes care of things like the deployment processes behind the scenes. We hear about the partnership between Dataiku and Google Cloud and Dataiku’s integration with AlloyDB. Through a real example, our guests run us through the use of these two tools together. Jed talks about why Google Cloud works so well with Dataiku, especially for businesses looking for cutting edge technology. Jed DoughertyJed is the VP of Platform Strategy at Dataiku. In this role he acts as a strategic technical advisor to Dataiku customers and prospects. He also works tightly with Engineering and Product stakeholders in order to ensure that all technical platform requests are properly followed, scoped and implemented. Dan DarnellDan has over 20 years of experience in the analytics industry at established software companies, hyper-growth technology companies, and small technology start-ups. As the Head of Product Marketing at Dataiku, he owns positioning, evangelism, and content creation for product offerings and education on products for customers and partners. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Anu is working on interesting speech use cases and Google’s Speech to Text. Join in with this tutorial! Carter is working on getting organized and working on something super cool! HostsCarter Morgan and Anu Srivastava | |||
| 16 Nov 2022 | Database Migration Service with Shachar Guz, Inna Weiner, and Gabe Weiss | 00:40:02 | |
Stephanie Wong talks with guests Shachar Guz, Inna Weiner, and Gabe Weiss about Google’s Database Migration Service and how it helps companies move data to Google Cloud. What typically is a complicated process, DMS simplifies everything from planning to security to validating database migrations. DMS has undergone some changes since last we spoke with Shachar and Gabe. It’s gone GA and helped thousands of customers benefit from the service. Migrations are possible from any PostgreSQL database source to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, which is designed to support HTAP data (transactional and analytical). One of the most exciting updates is the introduction of the DMS modernization journey, which allows customers to change database type during migration (heterogenous). In addition, migrations with DMS can be set up to continuously replicate data between the old and new database. With this feature, developers can compare the application performance against the old vs. new database. Inna talks about the benefits of keeping your data in the cloud, like secure, reliable, and scalable data storage. Google Cloud takes care of the maintenance work for you as well. DMS takes security seriously and supports multiple security methods to keep your data safe as it migrates. We talk about the different customers using DMS and how the process works for homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations. Before you even start, Gabe tells us, DMS helps you prepare for the migration. And tools like Dataflow can help when customers decide full migration would be too difficult. We talk about the difference between Datastream and DMS and use cases for each. We wrap up the show with a look at the future of DMS. Shachar GuzShachar is a product manager at Google Cloud, he works on the Cloud Database Migration Service. Shachar worked in various product and engineering roles and shares a true passion about data and helping customers get the most out of their data. Shachar is passionate about building products that make cumbersome processes simple and straightforward and helping companies adopt Cloud technologies to accelerate their business. Inna WeinerInna is a senior technical leader with 20+ years of global experience. She is a big data expert, specializing in deriving insights from data, product and user analytics. Currently, she leads engineering for Cloud DMS. Inna enjoys building diverse engineering organizations, with common vision, growth strategy and inclusive culture. Gabe WeissGabe leads the database advocacy team for the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can make awesome things, both inside and outside of Google. That could mean speaking at conferences, writing example code, running bootcamps, writing technical blogs or just doing some hand holding. Prior to Google he’s worked in virtual reality production and distribution, source control, the games industry and professional acting. Cool things of the week
Interview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Gabe has been tinkering with new Google Cloud databases and managing a new team. HostsStephanie Wong | |||
| 02 Nov 2022 | Assured Workloads with Key Access Justifications with Bryce Buffaloe and Seth Denney | 00:42:17 | |
Hosts Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme are joined by Bryce Buffaloe and Seth Denney to chat about Assured Workloads and the sovereignty control Key Access Justifications so customers can see how their data is used and control who can see what. Assured Workloads with Google is a security and compliance engine that allows users to control their data with the help of Google. With the expansion of data use around the globe, data sovereignty has become more important as well, and Google Cloud products offer myriad tools to maintain control, privacy, and compliance no matter the location. Seth talks more about sovereignty and how it’s changing data storage and management. Our guests talk about how Google has tackled the sovereignty issues, difficult decisions that had to be made, and the process of working with clients to optimize tools for different security and sovereignty scenarios. With Key Access Justifications, Google has bolstered its offerings to provide clients with trustworthy controls to keep data secure and sovereign, from Compute Engine VMs to BigQuery. We learn what Key Access Justifications look like for users and how the encryption keys work in different Google Cloud services. Customer managed key material is stored outside of Google and the key manager must give permission for access for an added layer of trust and security. Seth and Bryce explain why this is important and describe how KAJ are used with some examples. These features may also be used to improve security in the future by preventing data from being decrypted and stolen should someone ever get access to your system. We hear more about the future of data security and sovereignty, including simplifying the process with managed services and easier onboarding. Strategic European partnerships are helping Google tackle these important issues overseas so clients can focus on their businesses and worry less about data security. The catalyst for KAJ was a large German bank that recognized the sovereignty changes coming, and we hear more about the origins of KAJ and the path to where it is today. When paired with Assured Workloads, clients get maximum sovereignty coverage. Seth talks a little about the Sovereignty Access Controls done internally as well. Bryce walks us through using these Google services with a European example. Bryce BuffaloeBryce is Product manager for Google Cloud Security managing the portfolio of the Assured Workload’s solution suite. Seth DenneySeth is KAJ Tech Lead, responsible for ensuring the integrity and usefulness of KAJs to support customer data sovereignty Cool things of the weekInterview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Daryl just released a video about using Workflows’ new parallel step. Max is working on crossover episodes across our various podcast streams, so we can have SRE guests on to the GCP podcast to talk reliability, for example, or bring some of the Kubernetes hosts to the Cloud Security podcast to discuss securing Kubernetes workloads. HostsMax Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme | |||
| 26 Jul 2023 | Tapping onto AI to build a more sustainable future with Recursive AI | 00:25:53 | |
In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. AI is seen as a powerful tool and enabler for businesses around the world. At the same time, more organizations are looking for ways to operate more sustainably. To combine the two, Recursive AI was established in 2020, formalizing the way AI can be used for sustainability. Whether it’s through innovation, improving productivity, providing better education, or using AI for prevention and mitigation efforts in managing climate change, Recursive AI is changing the sustainability landscape one project at a time. In this episode, Recursive AI co-founder Tiago Ramalho puts on a new lens to the way we think about AI. He tells us how neural networks, which form the core infrastructure of AI, can simulate systems quickly, finding new and improved solutions to existing problems. He also shares how the company is predicting the future of natural disasters so that organizations can take action before it is too late. When it comes to sustainability, no action is too small. Listen in to find out how the organization is innovating by leveraging AI technology to solve the sustainability problems of today and tomorrow. Dr. Tiago Ramalho, Recursive Co-founder and CEOTiago is the co-founder and CEO of Recursive AI, a company focused on building AI tools to help companies grow their sustainability impact. Tiago is a physicist and former Googler at Google DeepMMind with a passion for technology and sustainability. Through Recursive, Tiago is able to marry the two to help others create a greener tomorrow. Theo DaviesTheo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of “That Digital Show APAC”. He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Interview
Hosts Theo Davies and Paris Tran | |||
| 21 Dec 2022 | 2022 Year End Wrap Up | 00:39:20 | |
Happy Holidays from all of us at Google! This week, hosts Carter Morgan, Stephanie Wong, and Max Saltonstall are sharing their favorite moments from the year! From great partnerships with national companies, new releases in some of your favorite Google software tools, and a trillion digits of pi, we’re breaking down some 2022 highlights and introducing special guest Podcast Producer Kevin McCormack to help with a fun podcast trivia game! Carter MorganCarter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google’s Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course “Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes” he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who’s approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft. Stephanie WongStephanie Wong is a Developer Advocate focusing on online content across all Google Cloud products. She’s a host of the GCP Podcast and the Where the Internet Lives podcast, along with many GCP Youtube video series. She is the winner of a 2021 Webby Award for her content about data centers. Previously she was a Customer Engineer at Google and at Oracle. Outside of her tech life she is a former pageant queen and hip hop dancer and has an unhealthy obsession with dogs. Max SaltonstallMax Saltonstall is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud. He is a father, teacher, storyteller, speaker, educator, nefarious villain, game designer, juggler, and is only part zombie. Cool things of the week
Our Favorite Episodes of 2022
HostsStephanie Wong, Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall | |||
| 26 Oct 2022 | Digital Sovereignty with Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez | 00:36:03 | |
This week, Max Saltonstall and Chloe Condon welcome guests Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez to talk about digital sovereignty and what goes into a technical strategy for dealing with this complicated facet of web projects. Our guests start the show with a thorough explanation of digital sovereignty, explaining that it typically involves a state or regulatory agency exerting control over data and technology. As more and more data is taken into the cloud, countries are understandably concerned about a loss of control over this data, and nations are enacting laws and regulations to help manage security of data in the cloud. Standardization has been a human issue for a long time, from trains to international travel and more, Archana reminds us, and this challenge is now moving to the management of cloud data out in the world. As sovereign nations implement their own standards, cloud providers must adapt to help developers create projects that follow these laws. Julien talks about the discussions around digital sovereignty in Europe, especially as it affects data security. Lawmakers, cloud providers, and companies have been working together to think through effective laws and strategies for digital security around the world. Googlers across the globe are working locally to make sure Google’s suite of products are compatible with government regulations and the needs of developers. Archana and Julien talk about the three important action segments Google employs to make sure tools allow for control over who has access to data when and how, and we hear the journey Google has trekked from the very beginning to now as the company has worked for strong security and versatile data management. Local partnerships are a big part of the advancements made in the sovereignty space, Julien tells us, increasing trust with developers in the area and leveraging local knowledge. With offerings like Cloud Key Management, Google provides unique options for developers to control and secure data. To keep things easy, especially in the case of hybrid solutions, this portfolio of sovereignty products uses the same APIs, streamlined onboarding setups, and familiar interfaces Google product users are accustomed to. Archana RamamoorthyArchana is the Director of Cloud Security Product Management. She has spent a lot of her career building security products for enterprise organizations. Julien BlanchezJulien looks after the coordination of Google’s local digital sovereignty partnerships and how to position them in the market, after many years helping regulators and highly regulated customers in EMEA on their Google Cloud adoption journey worldwide. Cool things of the weekInterview
What’s something cool you’re working on?Max is working on expanding Google’s podcast platform, giving it some more visibility. He’s also working on Halloween and LARP costumes and teaching new board games. Chloe is working on her Halloween costume, too, and working on Google Cloud Reader. HostsMax Saltonstall and Chloe Condon | |||
| 27 Oct 2015 | We Got a Podcast! | 00:19:47 | |
In this first episode your hosts, Francesc and Mark, discuss how this podcast was built and deployed to Google Cloud Platform. Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
Links:
Errata:
| |||
| 26 Jan 2016 | Graham Polley & Pablo Caif from Shine Technologies | 00:32:06 | |
In the tenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Graham Polley and Pablo Caif, who are both Google Developer Experts who work at Shine Technologies. About GrahamGraham is a senior software engineer based out of Melbourne Australia. He’s passionate about promoting the adoption of cloud technologies into software development, and regularly blogs and gives presentations. Graham has extensive experience in building big data solutions for clients using the Google technology stack, and in particular with BigQuery & Dataflow. Graham works very closely with the GCP engineering team in the US, where he is a member of their cloud platform trusted tester program, and the solutions he helps build are used as internal exemplars of developer use cases. Graham is also a GDE on the GCP. You can contact Graham through Twitter, blog and Google Developer Expert Profile. About PabloPablo is a passionate software engineer who enjoys solving complex problems, and devising simple solutions. He works at Shine Technologies and he is part of a team that uses BigQuery and Dataflow to solve challenging and complex data processing business requirements. Pablo considers that scalability and performance are paramount to developing a great solution, and that is why he has been using Dataflow and BigQuery to bring these solutions to reality. Pablo is also a GDE on GCP. You can contact Pablo through Twitter, and blog. Cool thing of the week
Interview
Question of the week
| |||
| 25 Oct 2017 | Vint Cerf: past, present, and future of the internet | 00:48:49 | |
Google, the Cloud, or podcasts would not exist without the internet, so it’s with an incredible honor that we celebrate our 100th episode with one of its creators: Vint Cerf. Listen to Mark and Francesc talk about the origins, current trends, and the future of the internet with one of the best people to cover the topic. About Vint CerfVinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995. Cerf is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and Swedish Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the British Computer Society, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has served as President of the Association for Computing Machinery, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and completed a term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. President Obama appointed him to the National Science Board in 2012. Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 29 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year’s “25 Most Intriguing People.” His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, were married in 1966 and have two sons, David and Bennett. Also, he’s awesome. Cool things of the weekWe interviewed Vint Cerf! Interview Question of the weekWho will you interview for episode 100?
| |||
| 01 Nov 2017 | Cloud IoT Core with Indranil Chakraborty and Gabe Weiss | 00:35:05 | |
It’s time to learn everything about Cloud IoT Core from Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager, and Gabe Weiss, Developer Advocate on IoT. Listen to Mark and Francesc ask all of the questions you had about IoT but didn’t dare to ask. About Indranil ChakrabortyIndranil is a product manager for Google Cloud Platform and leads product strategy and development for Cloud IoT Core. Previously, he held product management roles at Google Fiber and sales strategy roles for Google AdWords. Indranil holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson. About Gabe WeissGabe works on the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can make awesome things, both inside and outside of Google. Focused primarily on the Internet of Things, it’s his job to be sure IoT devices can play nicely with the GCP ecosystem. That’s everything from speaking at conferences, writing example code, running bootcamps, writing technical blogs or just doing some hand holding. Prior to Google he’s worked in virtual reality production and distribution, source control, the games industry and professional acting. Cool things of the week
Interview Question of the weekFrancesc says his goodbyes to Google and the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. | |||
| 08 Nov 2017 | Smart Parking and IoT Core with Brian Granatir | 00:36:08 | |
Brian Granatir comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about the New Zealand company Smart Parking taking advantage of IoT Core and our Serverless products! This is also the inaugural episode of Melanie joining Mark on the podcast! About Brian GranatirBrian Granatir has been developing for the cloud since the beginning, back in 2007. He left Oregon and moved to New Zealand to be with his future wife in 2014. In 2017, he joined Smart Parking to help with the development of their new Smart City platform built on GCP. Before becoming a developer, Brian spent 3 years as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do I configure a PostgreSQL Cloud SQL instance for high availability?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be Montreal in December to speak at Montreal International Games Summit. Melanie will be speaking at QCon is San Francisco next week! | |||
| 15 Nov 2017 | Performance Atlas with Colt McAnlis | 00:30:23 | |
Colt McAnalis joins the podcast this week to talk about his Performance Atlas series where he dives into how to make Google Cloud applications faster and cheaper. In his words, his job is to help get someone promoted. About Colt McAnlisColt McAnlis is a Developer Advocate at Google focusing on performance & compression. Before that, he was a graphics programmer in the games industry working at Blizzard, Microsoft (Ensemble), and Petroglyph. He’s been an Adjunct Professor at SMU Guildhall, a UDACITY instructor (twice), and a Book Author, (twice). When he’s not working with developers, Colt spends his time preparing for an invasion of giant ants from outer space. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekWhat are the differences between sustained and committed use discounts? Where can you find us next?Mark will be Montreal in December to speak at Montreal International Games Summit. | |||
| 22 Nov 2017 | Dataprep with Eric Anderson | 00:25:45 | |
On this week’s podcast, Eric Anderson shares how Dataprep helps summarize, transform, visualize and cleanup data on the Google Cloud Platform. When doing data analysis, typically data munging can take up most of the time and this serverless tool helps optimize the process. About Eric AndersonEric is a Product Manager at Google working on Cloud Dataprep and recently Cloud Dataflow. Previously he was at Amazon Web Services, Harvard Business School, General Electric and University of Utah. He’s from Salt Lake City, Utah and lives in Mountain View, California with and wife and three kids. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekWhat is feature engineering?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be Montreal in December to speak at Montreal International Games Summit. | |||
| 29 Nov 2017 | Node.js with Myles Borins | 00:32:06 | |
Myles Borins talks with Mark and Francesc about Node.js from its history, how to contribute, the consensus-seeking governance, and why it’s important to Google Cloud Platform. Node.js is an open-source, JavaScript runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, and Google is a Platinum Member of the Node.js Foundation. About Myles BorinsMyles Borins is a developer, musician, artist, and maker he works for Google as a developer advocate serving the Node.js ecosystem he graduated with a Master of Music Science and Technology from c.c.r.m.a. a.k.a the center for computer research in music and acoustics Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do you give public postmordems?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be Montreal in December to speak at Montreal International Games Summit. | |||
| 06 Dec 2017 | New York Times with Deep Kapadia and JP Robinson | 00:31:15 | |
Deep Kapadia and JP Robinson from New York Times join Mark and Francesc to discuss how they use Google Cloud Platform to serve the New York Times to its readers. About JP RobinsonJP Robinson maintains NYT’s internal and open source tools and frameworks that are related to the Go programming language. He also lead backend development of NYT’s games platform. Recently his team completely rewrote our backend with Go and GCP tools. In doing so they’ve managed to significantly lower request latencies and cut costs in half. About Deep KapadiaDeep Kapadia manages the Infrastructure and Delivery Engineering, Site Reliability and Test Automation teams at The New York Times. His teams are responsible for providing other engineering teams with tools and processes needed to get their jobs done on a day to day basis. His teams recently have been working on building the GKE deployment pipeline and enabling other teams to migrate to the Cloud from our physical datacenters and also moving their entire edge and routing caching architecture from internally hosted varnish to Fastly. They also helped move most of their site behind HTTPS. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekWhat best practices are there for securing a Kubernetes Engine Cluster?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be Montreal in December to speak at Montreal International Games Summit. Melanie will be at NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) in Long Beach and will also be attending Black in AI on December 8th. | |||
| 13 Dec 2017 | A Year in Review with Francesc Campoy Flores and Greg Wilson | 00:39:12 | |
This week we get the band back together! Francesc Campoy Flores rejoins the show along with Director of Google Cloud Developer Relations Greg Wilson to talk all about 2017 and Google Cloud with Mark and Melanie About Francesc Campoy FloresFrancesc Campoy Flores is the VP of Developer Relations at source{d}, He’s also a Gopher, Catalan, LGBTQIA advocate, previous Google employee (and Podcast host), and creator of the Just For Func YouTube series! About Greg WilsonGreg Wilson is the Director of Google Cloud Developer Relations, overseeing developer relations work across both G Suite and Google Cloud Platform. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekWhat were your personal highlights for 2017?
Where can you find us next?It’s the end of the year! So we’ll be taking a break, and returning in January 2018! | |||
| 10 Jan 2018 | Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig | 00:37:49 | |
Launchpad Studio, a product development acceleration program focused on helping machine learning startups iterate quickly, fail fast, and collaborate on best practices. Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig talk with Mark and Melanie this week about how the Launchpad Studio program is helping startups overcome data, expertise and tooling barriers by providing access to talent and resources and building universal best practices. About Malika CantorMalika is the Global Lead for Google Launchpad Studio. Launchpad is the acceleration engine of Google - running a number of accelerator programs focused on supporting the global startup ecosystem. Prior to joining Google, Malika was a co-founder and partner at Comet Labs, a venture capital firm and experimental research lab focused on investing and supporting applied AI startups. She has worked with founders for around 6 years, in London, Beijing, Singapore, Toronto, and Silicon Valley. About Peter NorvigPeter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google; previously he directed Google’s core search algorithms group. He is a fellow and councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart Russell, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, now the leading college text in the field. He was head of the Computational Sciences Division (now the Intelligent Systems Division) at NASA Ames Research Center. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow does a startup get GCP credits?
CPU Vulnerability Links
Where can you find us next?San Francisco | |||
| 17 Jan 2018 | Cloud AutoML Vision with Amy Unruh and Sara Robinson | 00:26:00 | |
Amy Unruh and Sara Robinson join the podcast this week to talk with Mark and Melanie about the alpha launch of Cloud AutoML Vision. Cloud AutoML is a suite of products enabling developers with limited ML expertise to build high quality models using transfer learning and Neural Architecture Search techniques. AutoML Vision is the first product out the gate with a focus on making it easy to train customized vision models. About Amy UnruhAmy is a developer relations engineer for the Google Cloud Platform, where she focuses on machine learning and data analytics as well as other Cloud Platform technologies. Amy has an academic background in CS/AI and has also worked at several startups, done industrial R&D, and published a book on App Engine. About Sara RobinsonSara is a developer relations engineer on Google’s Cloud Platform team, focusing on big data and machine learning. She worked on providing initial product feedback and building a demo for the AutoML Vision launch. Cool things of the week
Honorable mention… - Scientists put a worm brain in a lego robot blog Interview
Question of the weekHow does someone in academia get GCP credits?
Where can you find us next?Melanie is speaking at AI Congress in London Jan 30th and she will be at FOSDEM in Brussels in Feb. Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 03 Feb 2016 | The Internet of Things with Jen Tong | 00:30:41 | |
In the eleventh episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Jen Tong, a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform, about the Internet of Things. About JenJenny is a Developer Advocate on Cloud at Google. In this role she helps developers build cool stuff on all sorts of platforms. Previously she worked in a wide variety of software roles from robotics at NASA, to developer advocacy for Google Glass. She is passionate about education, especially on the subjects of technology and science. If she’s away from her laptop, she’s probably skating around a roller derby track, or hanging from aerial silk. You can contact Jen through Twitter and her home page. Cool thing of the week
Interview
Question of the week
| |||
| 17 Jan 2018 | CPU Vulnerability Security with Matt Linton and Paul Turner | 00:28:33 | |
Bringing you a special second episode this week with Matt Linton and Paul Turner sharing insights with Mark and Melanie about the CPU vulnerabilities, Spectre & Meltdown, and how Google coordinated and managed security with the broader community. We talked about how there has been minimal to no performance impact for GCP users and GCP’s Live Migration helped deploy patches and mitigations without requiring maintenance downtime. Due to the special nature, no cool things or question included on this podcast. About Matt LintonMatt is an Incident Manager (aka Chaos Specialists) for Google, which means his team is on-call to handle suspected security incidents and other major urgent issues. About Paul TurnerPaul is a Software Engineer specializing in operating systems, concurrency, and performance. Interview
Patch your operating systems and all the things. Keep updated. | |||
| 24 Jan 2018 | Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji | 00:37:18 | |
The delightful Sam Ramji joins Mark and Melanie this week to talk about Google Cloud Platform, Open Source, Distributed Systems and Philosophy and how they are all interrelated. Sam RamjiA 20+ year veteran of the Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes, Sam Ramji is VP Product Management for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He was the founding CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, was Chief Strategy Officer for Apigee (APIC), designed and led Microsoft’s open source strategy, founded the Outercurve Foundation, and drove product strategy for BEA WebLogic Integration. Previously he built distributed systems and client software at firms including Broderbund, Fair Isaac, and Ofoto. He is an advisor to multiple companies including Accenture, Insight Engines, and the Linux Foundation, and served on the World Economic Forum’s Industrial Internet Working Group. He received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from UCSD in 1994. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekI would like to run a Google Cloud Function every day/week/hour etc - but there is no cron ability in Cloud Functions (yet?). How can I do this now?
Where can you find us next?Melanie is speaking at AI Congress in London Jan 30th and she will be at FOSDEM in Brussels in Feb. Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 31 Jan 2018 | Percy.io with Mike Fotinakis | 00:34:58 | |
We return once again to Continuous Integration tooling, this time with a visual spin. Mike Fotinakis joins Mark and Melanie to discuss how they use Google Cloud Platform to develop Percy, the platform for continuous visual reviews for web apps. Mike FotinakisMike is Co-Founder and CEO of Percy, where he is working on problems at the intersection of design, development, and deployment. Mike has previously worked as an engineer at companies including Google, Science Exchange, and AltSchool, and is now enjoying building his first company from the ground up. Sometimes, he even enjoys things that don’t involve computers at all, including rock climbing, coffee, classical singing, and scuba diving. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Percy.io Question of the weekI would love a weekly roundup of news about Google Cloud Platform - where can I get one?
Where can you find us next?Melanie will be at FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend. Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 07 Feb 2018 | Open Source TensorFlow with Yifei Feng | 00:26:22 | |
Yifei Feng talks with Mark and Melanie about working on the open source TensorFlow platform, the recent 1.5 release, and how her team engages and supports the growing community. She provides a great overview of what its like to work on an open source project and ways to get involved especially for anyone new to contributing. Yifei FengYifei is a software engineer on TensorFlow team. Her main focus is building tools and infractures to help TensorFlow engineers do their best work. She works on release and the open source process of TensorFlow. She also worked on TensorFlow’s high level API and TensorFlow Serving. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do I design identity and access management policies policies for a GCP?
Where can you find us next?Melanie will be at Fat* in New York in Feb. Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 14 Feb 2018 | Machine Learning Bias and Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell | 00:42:42 | |
This week, we dive into machine learning bias and fairness from a social and technical perspective with machine learning research scientists Timnit Gebru from Microsoft and Margaret Mitchell (aka Meg, aka M.) from Google. They share with Melanie and Mark about ongoing efforts and resources to address bias and fairness including diversifying datasets, applying algorithmic techniques and expanding research team expertise and perspectives. There is not a simple solution to the challenge, and they give insights on what work in the broader community is in progress and where it is going. Timnit GebruTimnit Gebru works in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at the New York Lab. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was a PhD student in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result, including fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. The Economist and others have recently covered part of this work. She is currently studying how to take dataset bias into account while designing machine learning algorithms, and the ethical considerations underlying any data mining project. As a cofounder of the group Black in AI, she works to both increase diversity in the field and reduce the impact of racial bias in the data. Margaret MitchellM. Mitchell is a Senior Research Scientist in Google’s Research & Machine Intelligence group, working on artificial intelligence. Her research involves vision-language and grounded language generation, focusing on how to evolve artificial intelligence toward positive goals. Margaret’s work combines machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, social media, and insights from cognitive science. Before Google, Margaret was a founding member of Microsoft Research’s “Cognition” group, focused on advancing artificial intelligence, and a researcher in Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group. Cool things of the week
Interview
Sample papers on bias and fairness:
Additional links:
Question of the week“Is there a gcp service that’s cloud identity-aware proxy except for a static site that you host via cloud storage?”
Where can you find us next?Melanie will be at Fat* in New York in Feb. Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 21 Feb 2018 | Google Play Marketing with Dom Elliott and Stewart Bryson | 00:31:44 | |
In this episode, Google Play Marketing is the customer of Google Cloud Platform. Melanie and Mark chat with Dom Elliott (Google Play) and Stewart Bryson (Red Pill Analytics) about how they use our big data processing and visualisation tools to introspect what is happening in the Google play ecosystem. Dom ElliottDom Elliott leads global developer marketing communications for Google Play. His goal is to help Android app and game developers improve their app quality and business performance on Google Play, by raising awareness and understanding of features that can help them find success. Stewart BrysonStewart Bryson is the Owner & Co-founder of Red Pill Analytics, a products and services company specializing in Cloud Analytics delivery. Red Pill is 4 years old and has about 30 employees in the US, UK and Brazil. We work with customers to accelerate their use of the public cloud for analytics, including migrating current on-premises workloads. Red Pill Analytics was engaged by Google Play to build the digital channel ingestion processes, as well as build all the Data Studio content for analyzing those channels. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Google Play Question of the weekIf you want to be able to unit test your integrations with Kubernetes with client-go, how can you mock what happens inside the cluster in your unit tests? Where can you find us next?Melanie will be at Fat* in New York very shortly! Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 28 Feb 2018 | Solution Architects with Miles Ward and Grace Mollison | 00:34:25 | |
We have the pleasure this week of having the Director of Solutions for Google Cloud Miles Ward and Cloud Solutions Architect Grace Mollison join Mark and Melanie to discuss Solution Architects, what they do and how they interact with Customers at Google Cloud Platform. Miles WardMiles Ward is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur with a decade of experience building cloud infrastructures. Miles is Director of Solutions for Google Cloud; focused on delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization. He worked as a core part of the Obama for America 2012 “TECH” team, crashed Twitter a few times, helped NASA stream the Curiosity Mars Rover landing, put Skype back online in a pinch, and plays a mean electric sousaphone. Grace MollisonBased in London, UK, Grace Mollison is a Cloud Solutions Architect where she helps customers to understand how to apply policies to their Google cloud platform environments as well as how to architect and deploy applications on the Google Cloud platform. In her spare time she spends time attempting to teach her international team how to speak the Queens english! Before Google Grace was a Solutions Architect at AWS where she worked with the AWS ecosystem and customers to ensure well architected solutions. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do I get a Docker image into Minikube without uploading it to an external registry and then downloading it all over again? Is there an easy way to do this locally?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 07 Mar 2018 | Cloud AI with Dr. Fei-Fei Li | 00:30:59 | |
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google joins Melanie and Mark this week to talk about how Google enables businesses to solve critical problems through AI solutions. We talk about the work she is doing at Google to help reduce AI barriers to entry for enterprise, her research with Stanford combining AI and health care, where AI research is going, and her efforts to overcome one of the key challenges in AI by driving for more diversity in the field. Dr. Fei-Fei LiDr. Fei-Fei Li is the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. She is also an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s main research areas are in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience. She has published more than 150 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, etc. Dr. Fei-Fei Li obtained her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012. Prior to that, she was on faculty at Princeton University (2007-2009) and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005-2006). Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. In addition to her technical contributions, she is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She is co-founder of Stanford’s renowned SAILORS outreach program for high school girls and the national non-profit AI4ALL. For her work in AI, Dr. Li is a speaker at the TED2015 main conference, a recipient of the IAPR 2016 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, the 2016 nVidia Pioneer in AI Award, 2014 IBM Faculty Fellow Award, 2011 Alfred Sloan Faculty Award, 2012 Yahoo Labs FREP award, 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and a number of Google Research awards. Work from Dr. Li’s lab have been featured in a variety of popular press magazines and newspapers including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Science, Wired Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Financial Times, and more. She was selected as a 2017 Women in Tech by the ELLE Magazine, a 2017 Awesome Women Award by Good Housekeeping, a Global Thinker of 2015 by Foreign Policy, and one of the “Great Immigrants: The Pride of America” in 2016 by the Carnegie Foundation, past winners include Albert Einstein, Yoyo Ma, Sergey Brin, et al. Cool things of the week
Interview
Additional sample resources on Dr. Fei-Fei Li:
 Dr. Fei-Fei Li Question of the weekWhere can I learn more about machine learning? Listing of some of the many resources out there in no particular order:
International Women’s Day March 8thInternational Women’s Day site covers information on events in your area, and additional resources. Sample of recent women in tech events to keep on radar for next year: Where can you find us next?Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. | |||
| 14 Mar 2018 | OpenCensus with Morgan McLean and JBD | 00:30:01 | |
Product Manager Morgan McLean and Software Engineer JBD join Melanie and Mark this week to discuss the new open source project OpenCensus, a single distribution of libraries for metrics and distributed tracing with minimal overhead that allows you to export data to multiple backends. Morgan McLeanMorgan McLean is the Product Manager for Tracing, Debugging, and Profiling at Google, including OpenCensus JBDJBD leads the OpenCensus Go and our integrations with other projects. Cool things of the week
Interview
 OpenCensus Question of the weekI heard there are abilities to natively extend Kubernetes - what does that mean, and also how do I do that?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be at the Game Developer’s Conference | GDC in March. You can find him via the Google at GDC 2108 site. | |||
| 21 Mar 2018 | NVIDIA and Deep Learning Research with Bryan Catanzaro | 00:43:52 | |
Bryan Catanzaro, the VP Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, joins Mark and Melanie this week to discuss how his team uses applied deep learning to make NVIDIA products and processes better. We talk about parallel processing and compute with GPUs as well as his team’s research in graphics, text and audio to change how these forms of communication are created and rendered by using deep learning. This week we are also joined by a special co-host, Sherol Chen who is a developer advocate on GCP and machine learning researcher on Magenta at Google. Listen at the end of the podcast where Mark and Sherol chat about all things GDC. Bryan CatanzaroBryan Catanzaro is VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, where he leads a team solving problems in domains ranging from video games to chip design using deep learning. Bryan earned his PhD from Berkeley, where he focused on parallel computing, machine learning, and programming models. He earned his MS and BS from Brigham Young University, where he worked on higher radix floating-point representations for FPGAs. Bryan worked at Baidu to create next generation systems for training and deploying deep learning models for speech recognition. Before that, he was a researcher at NVIDIA, where he worked on programming models for parallel processors, as well as libraries for deep learning, which culminated in the creation of the widely used CUDNN library. Cool things of the week
Interview
Referenced Papers & Research:
Sample Talks:
Sample Resources:
 Question of the weekWhat to watch out for and get involved in at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year and in the future?
Where can you find us next?Mark and Sherol are at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). You can find them via the Google at GDC 2018 site. Sherol will be at TensorFlow Dev Summit speaking about machine learning research and creativity next week. | |||
| 28 Mar 2018 | Forseti with Nenad Stojanovski and Andrew Hoying | 00:32:08 | |
Nenad Stojanovski and Andrew Hoying join Mark and Melanie this week to discuss Forseti - open source tools for Google Cloud Platform security. Nenad StojanovskiStaff Security Engineer, Spotify Andrew HoyingAndrew Hoying is a Senior Security Engineer at Google. His goal is to ensure all services built by Google and running on Google Cloud Platform have the same, or better, security assurances as services running in any other environment. He is also a top contributor to the Forseti Security open-source project, helping enterprises monitor and secure their GCP environments. Cool things of the week
Interview Forseti Security Question of the weekHow do I automatically scan the Docker images in your Google Cloud Repository for known vulnerabilities? Where can you find us next?
| |||
| 04 Apr 2018 | Kontributing to Kubernetes with Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues | 00:32:04 | |
Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues join Mark and Melanie to discuss the Contributor Experience on Kubernetes, and how people can get involved with Kubernetes! Paris PittmanCo-Chair of Contributor Experience Special Interest Group for Kubernetes. Paris is a Developer Relations Program Manager on the Google Cloud Open Source Strategy team focusing on Kubernetes Community. She has 13 years of professional experience in attracting, retaining, growing, and incentivizing engineering talent for organizations and open source projects. She has also been organizing communities in one form or another for over 20 years, and at one point ran enough hackathons and meetups to subsist solely on the free pizza leftovers. Garrett RodriguesTechnical Lead of the Contributor Experience SIG for Kubernetes. Garrett is a Technical Program Manager at Google, and he joined the Kubernetes and GKE Team at Google in June 2016. As a lead of ContribX, he has focused on scaling the Kubernetes project in a sustainable way. Garrett developed a lot of the tooling and automation to support OSS code review, issue triage, and data collection about the project. In addition to his work on Contributor Experience, Garrett is currently involved with the app-def working group to get a new declarative application management tool released. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Question of the weekIf I need to temporarily increases the power of a Cloud Shell, how do I do that? Where can you find us next?
| |||
| 11 Apr 2018 | Project Jupyter with Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf | 00:47:20 | |
Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf join Melanie and Mark to discuss Project Jupyter from it’s interactive notebook origin story to the various open source modular projects it’s grown into supporting data research and applications. We dive specifically into JupyterHub using Kubernetes to enable a multi-user server. We also talk about Binder, an interactive development environment that makes work easily reproducible. Jessica FordeJessica Forde is a Project Jupyter Maintainer with a background in reinforcement learning and Bayesian statistics. At Project Jupyter, she works primarily on JupyterHub, Binder, and JuptyerLab to improve access to scientific computing and scientific research. Her previous open source projects include datamicroscopes, a DARPA-funded Bayesian nonparametrics library in Python, and density, a wireless device data tool at Columbia University. Jessica has also worked as a machine learning researcher and data scientist in a variety of applications including healthcare, energy, and human capital. Yuvi PandaYuvi Panda is the Project Jupyter Technical Operations Architect in the UC Berkeley Data Sciences Division. He works on making it easy for people who don’t traditionally consider themselves “programmers” to do things with code. He builds tools (e.g., Quarry, PAWS, etc.) to sidestep the list of historical accidents that constitute the “command line tax” that people have to pay before doing productive things with computing. Chris HoldgrafChris Holdgraf is a is a Project Jupyter Maintainer and Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and a Community Architect at the Data Science Education Program at UC Berkeley. His background is in cognitive and computational neuroscience, where he used predictive models to understand the auditory system in the human brain. He’s interested in the boundary between technology, open-source software, and scientific workflows, as well as creating new pathways for this kind of work in science and the academy. He’s a core member of Project Jupyter, specifically working with JupyterHub and Binder, two open-source projects that make it easier for researchers and educators to do their work in the cloud. He works on these core tools, along with research and educational projects that use these tools at Berkeley and in the broader open science community. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Question of the weekHow did Google’s predictions do during March Madness?
Where can you find us next?
| |||
| 18 Apr 2018 | Post-Quantum Cryptography with Nick Sullivan and Adam Langley | 00:42:04 | |
Nick Sullivan, and Adam Langley join Melanie and Mark to provide a pragmatic view on post-quantum cryptography and what it means to research security for the potential of quantum computing. Post-quantum cryptography is about developing algorithms that are resistant to quantum computers in conjunction with “classical” computers. It’s about looking at the full picture of potential threats and planning on how to address them using a diversity of types of mathematics in the research. Adam and Nick help clarify the different terminology and techniques that are applied in the research and give a practical understanding of what to expect from a security perspective. Nick SullivanNick Sullivan runs the cryptography team at Cloudflare, an internet security and performance company. Adam LangleyAdam Langley is a Principal Software Engineer at Google, responsible for a variety of cryptography-related efforts. Cool things of the week
Interview
Additional References / Resources:
 Question of the weekHow to stream realtime coding?
Where can you find us next?
| |||
| 25 Apr 2018 | VP of Infrastructure Eric Brewer | 00:35:11 | |
VP of Infrastructure at Google Cloud Eric Brewer, talks to Melanie and Mark all about open source at Google Cloud, distributed systems, hybrid cloud, and more! Eric BrewerEric Brewer is the main inventor of a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet, which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world. He is a tenured professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation (bought by Yahoo! in 2003) and became a paper billionaire during the dot-com bubble. Working with Bill Clinton, he helped to create USA.gov, which launched in 2000.[1] He is known for formulating the CAP Theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s.[2] Starting in May 2011 he has been on a sabbatical at Google as VP of Infrastructure.[3] Credits: Wikipedia Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekIf I want to visualise the network traffic between pods/services within my Kubernetes cluster, is there an easy way to do this?
Where can you find us next?Mark can be found streaming Agones development on Twitch, and will be presenting on Agones at Cloud Next. Melanie will be presenting at the internet2 Global Summit, May 9th in San Diego, and will also be talking at the Understand Risk Forum on May 17th, in Mexico City. | |||
| 02 May 2018 | Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny | 00:38:12 | |
Mark and Melanie are joined by Sarah Novotny, Head of Open Source Strategy for Google Cloud Platform, to talk all about Open Source, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and their relationships to Google Cloud Platform. Sarah NovotnySarah Novotny leads an Open Source Strategy group for Google Cloud Platform. She has long been an Open Source community champion in communities such as Kubernetes, NGINX and MySQL and ran large scale technology infrastructures at Amazon before web-scale had a name. In 2001, she co-founded Blue Gecko, which was sold to DatAvail in 2012. She is a program chair emeritus for O’Reilly Media’s OSCON. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekMark broke SSH access to his Compute Engine instance by accidentally removing the GCP linux guest environment. How did he fix it?
Where can you find us next?Mark can be found streaming Agones development on Twitch and finished his blog series on scaling game servers on Kubernetes. Melanie will be speaking at the internet2 Global Summit, May 9th in San Diego, and will also be talking at the Understand Risk Forum on May 17th, in Mexico City. | |||
| 09 May 2018 | Beam and Spark with Holden Karau | 00:34:44 | |
Holden Karau is on the podcast this week to talk all about Spark and Beam, two open source tools that helps process data at scale, with Mark and Melanie. Holden KarauHolden Karau is a transgender Canadian open source developer advocate @ Google with a focus on Apache Spark, BEAM, and related “big data” tools. She is the co-author of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that’s a bit more out of date. She is a commiter on and PMC on Apache Spark and committer on SystemML & Mahout projects. She was tricked into the world of big data while trying to improve search and recommendation systems and has long since forgotten her original goal. Cool things of the week
Interview
Upcoming Talks:
Question of the weekI have a continuous integration build process setup with Container Builder, but it’s all sequential. I want to speed things up by processing parts of it in parallel. How do I do that?
Where can you find us next?Mark can be found streaming Agones development on Twitch. Melanie is speaking at the internet2 Global Summit, May 9th in San Diego, and will also be talking at the Understand Risk Forum on May 17th, in Mexico City. Special shout out: Google I/O and PyCon are both happening this week | |||
| 16 May 2018 | SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo | 00:35:42 | |
This week is a clash of titans! Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo join Mark and Melanie, to battle out on which is better: SRE or Devops (hint - everyone wins!). Liz Fong-JonesLiz is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google and works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team in New York. She has worked on services ranging from Google Flights to Cloud Bigtable in her 10+ years at Google. She lives with her wife, metamour, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights. Seth VargoSeth Vargo is a Developer Advocate at Google. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and a few Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. Seth is an active member of the DevOps community and has written thought-leader-y pieces such as the 10 Myths of DevOps. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekI’m a researcher at a regionally accredited academic institution and I need compute resources. Does Google Cloud have any programs that can help me out? Where can you find us next?Mark will be speaking at the Monthly SF Game Development Community, presenting on You Can’t Just Add More Servers on May the 30th in San Francisco. Melanie is speaking at the Understand Risk Forum on May 17th, in Mexico City. | |||
| 23 May 2018 | Decision Intelligence with Cassie Kozyrkov | 00:39:34 | |
Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov joins Mark and Melanie this week to explain data science, analytics, machine learning and statistical inference, in relation to decision intelligence. Cassie KozyrkovAs Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie advises leadership teams on decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She works to democratize statistical thinking and machine learning so that everyone - Google, its customers, the world! - can harness the beauty and power of data. She is the innovator behind the practice of Decision Intelligence Engineering at Google and she has personally trained over 15,000 Googlers in machine learning, statistics, and data-driven decision-making. Before her current role, she served in Google’s Office of the CTO as Chief Data Scientist. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. When she’s not working, you’re most likely to find Cassie at the theater, in an art museum, exploring the world, or curled up with a good novel. Cool things of the week
Interview
There are several other episodes that provide insights into data science:
As well as case studies on real world problems:
Question of the weekHow can I secure my Google Cloud Platoform acount using a YubiKey?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be speaking at the Monthly SF Game Development Community, presenting on You Can’t Just Add More Servers on May the 30th in San Francisco. Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event “Paths to Data Science” on June 26th. More details to come. | |||
| 30 May 2018 | Developer Relations with Mandy Waite | 00:36:06 | |
Mandy Waite joins Mark and Melanie to share what is developer relations and how trust and empathy are key to its success. We discuss meeting developers where they are and the wide variety of differing communities that exist across the technology ecosystem. Mandy WaiteMandy Waite has worked at Google for nearly 8 years, 6 of which have been spent growing and nurturing the Cloud Advocacy team. She heads up the Infrastructure and Ops Advocacy team in Google Cloud with a focus on Cloud Native, DevOps, SRE, Observability and Security. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekWhere do I go to learn about GDPR in regards to Google Cloud Platform? Where can you find us next?Mark is speaking at the Monthly SF Game Development Community, presenting on You Can’t Just Add More Servers on May the 30th in San Francisco. Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event “Paths to Data Science” on June 26th. More details to come. | |||
| 17 Feb 2016 | Firebase with Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar | 00:31:00 | |
In the thirteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar. Sara is now a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform but was part of Firebase until recently, and Vikrum - Firebase employee #1 - works as a Site Reliance Engineer (SRE) for Firebase. Together they discuss the origins, features, and future of Firebase. About SaraSara is a Developer Advocate on Google’s Cloud Platform team, where she helps with developer relations through online content, outreach and events. She has a bachelor’s degree in Business and International Studies from Brandeis University. When she’s not programming, she can be found running, listening to country music, or finding the best ice cream in SF. Follow Sara on Twitter @SRobTweets. About VikrumVikrum is a Bay Area native and SWE-SRE on the Firebase team. He started out with startups in the 90s with Speedera and has been with Firebase as employee #1 as they were going through YCombinator during the summer of 2011. He has a degree in CS from UC San Diego and enjoys a deep conspiracy with his boba tea. Follow Vikrum on Twitter at @Vikrum5000. Cool thing of the week
Interview
Question of the week | |||
| 06 Jun 2018 | Data Science with Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon | 00:45:00 | |
Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon are on the podcast this week to talk about data science with Melanie and Mark. We had a great discussion about methodology, applications, tools, pipelines, challenges and resources. Juliet shared insights into the unique data science ownership workflow from idea to deployment at Stitch Fix, and Michelle dove into how Kubeflow is playing a role to help drive reliability in model development and deployment. Juliet HouglandJuliet Hougland leads the Workflow, Environment, and Execution team at Stichfix. She is a data scientist and engineer with expertise in computational mathematics and years of hands-on machine learning and big data experience. She has built and deployed production ML models, advised Fortune 500 companies on infrastructure and worked on a variety of open source projects (Apache Spark, Scalding, and Kiji) at the intersection of big data and machine learning. Michelle CasbonMichelle Casbon is a Senior Engineer on the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team, where she focuses on open source contributions and community engagement for machine learning and big data tools. Prior to joining Google, she was at several San Francisco-based startups as a Senior Engineer and Director of Data Science. Within these roles, she built and shipped machine learning products on distributed platforms using both AWS and GCP. Michelle’s development experience spans more than a decade and has primarily focused on multilingual natural language processing, system architecture and integration, and continuous delivery pipelines for machine learning applications. She especially loves working with open source projects and is an active contributor to Kubeflow. Michelle holds a masters degree from the University of Cambridge. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekIf I have written a gRPC Service, but I’m using a language/platform that isn’t supported - is there any way I can access it as REST? Where can you find us next?Mark is speaking at the San Francisco Kubernetes Meetup: Scaling Game Servers and the Conduit Service Mesh on June 14th. Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event “Paths to Data Science” on June 26th and Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th. | |||
| 11 Jun 2018 | Actions on Google with Mandy Chan | 00:34:46 | |
This week is all about Voices! 🎶🎤🔊 Mandy Chan joins Melanie and Mark to discuss the intricacies of building user Voice user interfaces with Actions on Google, developing with SSML and more! Mandy ChanMandy Chan is the developer community manager for the Actions On Google team. Her role is to help expand the funnel of the Actions on Google developer community by creating practical tools and content like http://bit.ly/aog-codelab-1 and http://bit.ly/aog-codelab-2 Mandy began to build voice applications back in early 2016, and since then, she has built more than a dozen Voice Applications on Actions On Google and other platforms. One of her most frequently downloaded open source projects is called the SSML-Builder which creates well-formed Speech Synthesis Markup Language without worrying about string concatenation. You can learn more about her open source project on http://bit.ly/ssml-build When she is not pondering about how to improve the developer experience, you can find her hiking at mountains or learning new magic tricks. You can also learn more about Mandy by following @MandyChanNYC Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekI want to push a Docker image to Google Container Registry via Where can you find us next?Mark is speaking at the San Francisco Kubernetes Meetup: Scaling Game Servers and the Conduit Service Mesh on June 14th, and also speaking at the Online Kubernetes Community Meeting on the 21st of June, at 10am Pacific. Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event “Paths to Data Science” on June 26th and Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th. | |||
| 20 Jun 2018 | Hand Talk with Thadeu Luz | 00:32:42 | |
Thadeu Luz from Hand Talk shares with Melanie and Mark how the free Hand Talk education application translates and interprets spoken and written Portuguese into Brazilian Sign Language (aka LIBRAS or BSL). The application uses an animated avatar Hugo to deliver the signs through gestures and facial expressions and its built off of a statistical machine translation system and Firebase. Future plans include expanding into other languages with a priority on ASL and they welcome support. Thadeu LuzThadeu Luz is entrepreneur, data scientist and full-stack engineer with a background in 3D Animation, Video Compositing and Architecture. In early 2018 I have joined the Google Developers Experts program as a Firebase Expert. He’s CPO and founder of Hand Talk, an internationally decorated company that produces automatic sign language interpretation with the help of a friendly virtual 3D Character named Hugo. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Hand Talk Question of the weekWhat DOES a Go developer need to know about GCP? Where can you find us next?Mark is speaking at the Online Kubernetes Community Meeting on the 21st of June, at 10am Pacific. Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event “Paths to Data Science” on June 26th and Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th. | |||
| 27 Jun 2018 | ML Kit with Brahim Elbouchikhi and Sachin Kotwani | 00:32:18 | |
Brahim Elbouchikhi and Sachin Kotwani talk with Melanie and Mark about Firebase’s ML Kit and how it enables machine learning on mobile and cloud apps. We delve into why ML Kit was developed, how it makes machine learning easier, what it’s used for now and plans for the future. Sachin KotwaniSachin Kotwani is a product manager with a special passion for making software development easy and fun. He has worked on several teams at Google, including Google Cloud, Play, and now Firebase. Before joining product management he worked worked as a strategy & ops manager in Google’s Sales organization, and prior to Google, he worked in finance at Amazon. He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and dual bachelor’s degrees in Business Management and Computer Science from the University of Missouri - Columbia. His hobbies include traveling with his family, chasing his daughter around the house, and tinkering with mobile apps and backends. Brahim ElbouchikhiBrahim Elbouchikhi is a Group Product Manager on the Android team. On Android, Brahim is responsible for developer and consumer facing ML products, including Camera and developer SDKs. Prior to Android, Brahim led Daydream’s software team. Brahim was also a founding PM of the Google Play store where he led monetization, search, and discovery. Brahim holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA. Brahim has also worked at Amazon and Deloitte in addition to starting a company in the past. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Question of the weekWhat is a Developer Programs Engineer? Where can you find us next?Mark is going to the Unity Hackweek. Read how Google Cloud is teaming up with Unity for gaming blog Melanie is speaking at Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th. We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT! | |||
| 04 Jul 2018 | Connected Games with Unity and Google Cloud with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker | 00:27:49 | |
Happy 4th of July! Today, Melanie and Mark go in depth with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker to learn more about Unity and its new strategic alliance with Google Cloud. We explore how an alliance between Google Cloud and Unity means easier development for game creators and better gaming for fans. Brett BibbyBrett Bibby is Unity’s Vice President, Engineering. Prior to his current role, Brett served as a Field Engineering and Evangelist at Unity consulting with developers throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, India, and greater Asia. Before Unity, Brett founded and ran a game studio developing console titles, and has more than 30 years of experience developing games and game engine technology. Micah BakerAs Product Manager leading the strategy for Gaming on the Google Cloud Platform, Micah is committed to enabling developers to realize their vision for great games. An avid gamer on all major platforms, he never hesitates to get involved in games that were built with a passion for immersive storytelling, innovative multiplayer experiences, and breathtaking artwork. Cool things of the week
Interview
 Brett Bibby Question of the weekHow do I report errors to Stackdriver from a cloud function? Where can you find us next?We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT! | |||
| 11 Jul 2018 | VirusTotal with Emi Martínez | 00:35:33 | |
On this episode of the podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Emiliano (Emi) Martínez to learn more about how VirusTotal is helping to create a safer internet by providing tools and building a community for security researchers. Emiliano (Emi) MartínezEmiliano has been with VirusTotal for over 10 years. He has seen the business grow from a small startup in southern Spain into a Google X moonshot under the new Chronicle bet. He is a software engineer acting as the Tech Lead for VirusTotal. Throughout the past 10 years, not only has he been immersed in coding and architecting the platform, but he has also participated at all levels of the business: from bootstrapping the very first sales to working close with marketing and other teams in order to take the project to the next level. His main interests are IT security (more specifically malware) and designing products and services from scratch. VirusTotal and Chronicle are HiringVirusTotal is part of Chronicle, and Chronicle is hiring! Come join our team experts to help build out the next generation of security intelligence solutions. We are looking for talent that is comfortable operating in an organization that is scaling quickly, that loves variety in their work and wants to get their hands dirty with all things cyber security, cloud computing, and machine learning. We are a dynamic organization that likes to run experiments so we are looking for colleagues that are excited about trying new things and offering a creative yet efficient, and client-centric approach to engineering solutions. You are scrappy and resourceful, creative and driven – and excited to share in the magic of working at Chronicle Cool things of the week
Interview
 Question of the weekThis week’s question comes from Andrew Sheridan, with a special guest answer from Robert Kubis. What is the best practice for multi tenancy in Google Cloud Spanner, especially if customers are not of the same size and have unequal load?
Where can you find us next?We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT! Melanie will speak at CERN July 17th and PyCon Russia July 22nd | |||
| 18 Jul 2018 | Robotics, Navigation, and Reinforcement Learning with Raia Hadsell | 00:31:33 | |
On this episode of the podcast, Mark and Melanie delve into the fascinating world of robotics and reinforcement learning. We discuss advances in the field, including how robots are learning to navigate new surroundings and how machine learning is helping us understand the human mind better. Raia HadsellRaia Hadsell, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, has worked on deep learning and robotics problems for the past 15 years. After completing a PhD at New York University, which featured a self-supervised deep learning vision system for a mobile robot, her research continued at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and SRI International, and in early 2014 she joined DeepMind in London to develop artificial general intelligence. Her current research focuses on the challenge of interactive learning for AI agents and robots, including subjects such as neural memory for real world navigation and lifelong learning. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do you connect a Google Cloud Source repository to an existing Git repository? site and blog Where can you find us next?We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT!
Melanie will speak at PyCon Russia July 22nd | |||
| 25 Jul 2018 | Next Day 1 | 00:18:07 | |
On this very special episode of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast, we have live interviews from the first day of NEXT! Melanie and Mark had the chance to chat with Melody MeckFessel, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud and Pavan Srivastava of Deloitte. Next we spoke with Sandeep Dinesh about Open Service Broker and Raejeanne Skillern of Intel. Melody MeckfesselMelody 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. Pavan SrivastavaPavan is a technology leader with 20 years of experience in developing strategies and implementation of SAP focused technology solutions. Pavan leads Deloitte’s SAP technology capability that focuses on helping clients adopt innovative technology solutions such as cloud and SAP HANA to improve business efficiencies. Pavan has led several engagements helping clients develop strategy, architecture and implement SAP on the cloud and SAP HANA platform. Sandeep DineshSandeep Dinesh is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. He blends and creates new opportunities for businesses and people by leveraging the best technology possible. Raejeanne SkillernRaejeanne Skillern is the VP of Data Center and General Manager of Intel’s cloud service provider (CSP) business. Her goal is to make it easier, more cost-effective and more efficient for CSPs to build new infrastructure and services. She is privileged to lead an exceptional team that manages Intel’s business, products and technologies for cloud infrastructure deployments and works closely with the world’s largest cloud providers to ensure Intel’s data center products are optimized for their unique needs. Interviews
Where can you find us next?We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT in Moscone West on the first floor! Come by and say hi! | |||
| 26 Jul 2018 | Next Day 2 | 00:19:09 | |
Day two of NEXT was another day full of interesting interviews! Melanie and Mark sat down for quick chats with Haben Girma about accessibility in tech and Paresh Kharya to talk about NVIDIA. Next, we touched base with Amruta Gulanikar and Simon Zeltser to learn more about Windows SQL Server and .NET workloads on Google Cloud. The interviews wrap up with Henry Hsu & Isaac Wong of Holberton. Haben GirmaThe first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities. President Obama named her a White House Champion of Change. She received the Helen Keller Achievement Award, and a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30. Haben travels the world consulting and public speaking, teaching clients the benefits of fully accessible products and services. She’s a talented storyteller who helps people frame difference as an asset. She resisted society’s low expectations, choosing to create her own pioneering story. Haben is working on a book that will be published by Hachette in 2019. Paresh KharyaParesh Kharya is Group Product Marketing Manager for data center products at NVIDIA responsible for product marketing of NVIDIA’s Tesla accelerated computing platform. Previously, Paresh held a variety of business roles in the high-tech industry, including group product manager at Adobe and business development manager at Tech Mahindra. Paresh has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and a bachelors of computer science and engineering from the National Institute of Technology, India. Amruta Gulanikar & Simon ZeltserPrior to joining Google Amruta spent 5+ years as a PM in the Office division at Microsoft working on many different products. Just before she left, she worked on launching a new service and supporting apps - “O365 Planner” which offers people a simple and visual way to organize teamwork. At Google, Amruta owns Windows on GCE which includes support for premium OS & Microsoft Server product images, platform improvements to support Windows workloads on GCE. Simon Zeltser is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, working with .NET and Windows on Google Cloud Platform. Henry Hsu & Isaac WongHenry Hsu is a software engineer trained at Holberton School. He has experience with C, C++, Python, Ruby/Rails, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, MySQL/Postgres, Unity, Game Maker Studio, Linux, Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, systems design, algorithms, and devops. Isaac Wong attends the Holberton School. He has a degree in horticulture from Texas A&M. Interviews
Where can you find us next?We’ll both be at Cloud NEXT in Moscone West on the first floor, so come by and say hi! We have chocolate! | |||
| 27 Jul 2018 | Next Day 3 | 00:26:39 | |
It’s the third and final day for us at NEXT, and Mark and Melanie are wrapping up with some great interviews! First, we spoke with Stephanie Cueto and Vivian San of Techtonica, a San Francisco non-profit. Next, Liz Fong-Jones and Nikhita Raghunath joined us for a quick discussion about open source and Stackdriver and last but not least, Robert Kubis helped us close things sharing what it means to do DevRel at this event. Stephanie Cueto and Vivian SanStephanie Cueto is a Software Engineer and advocate for the Latinx & women community. She has been involved in the Tech community since 2016. Playing with code at an early age and working in education led to my interest in becoming a Software Engineer. Currently she is a Software Engineer Apprentice at Techtonica, where she has gained the skills to build projects in MongoDb, MySQL, Express.js, React, and Node.js. During the program, she created Salient Alert, a platform for reporting ICE Raids and Checkpoints. Vivian San is a highly analytical full-stack software engineer with an educational background in the hard sciences. She is strongly motivated by writing clean, efficient code, and passionate about teaching and giving back to underrepresented individuals and communities. Liz Fong-Jones and Nikhita RaghunathLiz Fong-Jones is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google and works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team in New York. In her 10+ years at Google she has worked across eight different teams spanning the stack from Google Flights to Cloud Bigtable. She lives with her wife, Metamour, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix in Brooklyn. In her spare time she plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights. Nikhita Raghunath is an intern at Red Hat and works on the extensibility of Kubernetes. Previously, she was a Google Summer of Code (2017) student for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and also worked on Kubernetes. She is interested in backend applications, distributed systems and Linux. Nikhita likes programming in Go, C++, C, and Python. She also likes to give talks at conferences and speak about her work. Robert KubisRobert Kubis is a developer advocate for the Google Cloud Platform based in London, UK, specializing in container, storage, and scalable technologies. Before joining Google, Robert collected over 10 years of experience in software development and architecture. He has driven multiple full-stack application developments at SAP with a passion for distributed systems, containers, and databases. In his spare time he enjoys following tech trends, trying new restaurants, traveling, and improving his photography skills. Interviews
| |||
| 24 Feb 2016 | Storage with Paul Newson | 00:31:13 | |
In the fourteenth episode of this podcast, your hosts Francesc and Mark interview Paul Newson. Paul is now a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform but was a Software Engineer in the Cloud Storage team. Together they discuss the multiple options available for data storage on the cloud and the trade offs to be taken into account while choosing one. About PaulPaul currently focuses on helping developers harness the power of Google Cloud Platform to solve their big data problems. Previously, he was an engineer on Google Cloud Storage. Before joining Google, Paul founded a startup which was acquired by Microsoft, where he worked on DirectX, Xbox, Xbox Live, and Forza Motorsport, before spending time working on machine learning problems at Microsoft Research. Follow Paul on Twitter @newsons_nybbles. Cool thing of the week
Interview
 Question of the weekQuestion from Jeff Schnitzer: Can you use Java 8 features in Standard App Engine?
| |||
| 01 Aug 2018 | Container Security with Maya Kaczorowski | 00:27:57 | |
Let’s talk container security! This week, Melanie and Mark learn all about the three main pillars of container security and more with our guest, Maya Kaczorowski. Maya KaczorowskiMaya is a Product Manager in Security & Privacy at Google, focused on container security. She previously worked on encryption at rest and encryption key management. Prior to Google, she was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, working in IT security for large enterprises and before that, completed her Master’s in mathematics focusing on cryptography and game theory. She is bilingual in English and French. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do I setup SSL termination on Kubernetes with Let’s Encrypt?
Where can you find us next?Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. Melanie will be at the 2018 Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp at Berkeley on August 6th. | |||
| 08 Aug 2018 | Accessibility in Tech with Haben Girma | 00:21:03 | |
On this episode of the podcast we continue a conversation we started with Haben Girma, an advocate for equal rights for people with disabilities, regarding the value of tech accessibility. Melanie and Mark talk with her about common challenges and best practices when considering accessibility in technology design and development. Bottom line - we need one solution that works for all. Haben GirmaThe first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities. President Obama named her a White House Champion of Change, and Forbes recognized her in Forbes 30 Under 30. Haben travels the world consulting and public speaking, teaching clients the benefits of fully accessible products and services. Haben is a talented storyteller who helps people frame difference as an asset. She resisted society’s low expectations, choosing to create her own pioneering story. Because of her disability rights advocacy she has been honored by President Obama, President Clinton, and many others. Haben is also writing a memoir that will be published by Grand Central Publishing in 2019. Learn more at habengirma.com. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekHow do I perform large scale mutations in BigQuery? blog and site Where can you find us next?Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. In September, he’ll be at Tokyo NEXT. Melanie is at Def Con, Black Hat, and BSides Las Vegas. In September, she will be at Deep Learning Indaba. | |||
| 15 Aug 2018 | Agones with Mark Mandel and Cyril Tovena | 00:30:30 | |
Mark Mandel is in the guest seat today as Melanie and our old pal Francesc interview Cyril Tovena of Ubisoft and Mark about Agones. We discuss dedicated game servers and their importance in game performance, how Agones can make hosting and scaling dedicated game servers easier to manage, and the future of Agones. Cyril and Mark elaborate on Ubisoft’s relationship with Google and how it’s progressing the world of gaming. Listen in! Mark MandelMark Mandel is a Developer Advocate for Games for Google Cloud Platform, founder of the open source, multiplayer dedicated game server scaling project Agones, and one half of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Hailing from Australia, Mark built his career developing backend systems for over 15 years, writing open source software, and building infrastructure in the cloud. Cyril TovenaCyril Tovena is a Technical Lead for the online group for Ubisoft Montreal, helping game productions to build online features in the last four years. Cyril started his career eight years ago, building web services in London. He is currently designing and implementing scalable microservices in the cloud. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekFrancesc answers our question of the week, “Should you do ML in Go?”. Short answer? Probably not. Python may be the better choice. If you do want to experiment with Go and ML, try Gonum, Gorgonia, or TensorFlow for Go. Where can you find us next?Francesc will be at GopherCon, GoSF, and Velocity. Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba and Strangeloop. Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. In September, he’ll be at Tokyo NEXT and Strangeloop. | |||
| 22 Aug 2018 | What's new in App Engine with Steren Giannini and Stewart Reichling | 00:27:47 | |
Mark and Melanie are your hosts again this week as we talk with Steren Giannini and Stewart Reichling discussing what’s new with App Engine. Particularly its new second generation runtime, allowing headless Chrome, and better language support! And automatic scalability to make your life easier, too. App Engine also has an interesting way of inspiring new Google products. Tune in to learn more! Steren GianniniSteren Giannini is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He graduated from École Centrale Lyon, France and then was CTO of a startup that created mobile and multi-device solutions. After joining Google, Steren launched Stackdriver Error Reporting and now focuses on GCP’s serverless offering. Recently, Steren has been working on upgrading App Engine’s auto scaling system and bringing Node.js to App Engine standard environment. Stewart ReichlingStewart Reichling is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across Strategy, Marketing and Product Management at Google. He currently works on bringing new runtimes (Python, Node.js, +more to come!) to App Engine and Cloud Functions. Cool things of the week
Interview
Question of the weekWhat does it mean when the recommendation is to update your image? Where can you find us next?Melanie will be at Deep Learning Indaba and Strangeloop. Mark will be at Pax Dev and Pax West starting August 28th. In September, he’ll be at Tokyo NEXT and Strangeloop. | |||
| 29 Aug 2018 | Mercari with Taichi Nakashima and Tonghui (Terry) Li | 00:23:25 | |
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 NakashimaTaichi 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) LiTonghui 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
Interview
 Photo credit: Taichi Nakashima Question of the weekHow 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. | |||