Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey are together again this week for an episode all about cloud migration using Txture and Accenture. Our guests Matthias Farwick of Txture, Patrick Niesel of Accenture, and Jason Purvor of Google help us understand their roles in cloud migration with some formal introductions to start the show. Txture helps companies assess their migration capabilities, providing insights to what will be necessary in the process and how viable cloud migration is as an option. Accenture works with Txture to augment the planning of migration strategies for clients. Jason helps us understand how Google uses the information gleaned from these assessments to help customers understand what the journey to Google Cloud will look like for their business. Txture provides good data which helps Google and clients make better decisions, not just in migration, but for the future health of the project while operating in the cloud. Our guests share the challenges of cloud migration and detail how these three po

Carter Morgan and Guillaume Laforge co-host this week’s episode about what it took to develop the Google I/O Adventure Game. Our guest Valentin Deleplace and Guillaume introduce us to the game designed to encourage interaction with I/O attendees at the virtual conference held this year. Adventure takes the look of a 90s role-playing game. The online world facilitates the meeting of hundreds of conference attendees and presenters to mimic the in-person conference setting and facilitate meaningful conversations. With avatars, text chatting capabilities, and mini games, attendees’ experiences go beyond simply watching online technical presentations. The development of Adventure Game required scalability to handle varying attendee numbers. It takes advantage of many GCP products, including Compute Engine and Cloud Run. Valentin describes why he and the team chose Cloud Run and how they used it to to stress test the game. He talks about challenges the team faced and how they overcame them to produce a smooth, enjo

Your hosts Stephanie Wong and Alicia Williams talk about BigQuery Admin Reference Guides with guest Leigha Jarett. Leigha tells us a bit about the origins of the Admin Reference Guide, which was developed to address frequent customer questions. The series of guides and videos covers onboarding topics from resource hierarchy and APIs to BigQuery tables and storage in an effort to help new admins get started. The team’s Reference Guide on tables helps admins understand the difference between federated and native tables, and Leigha tells our listeners some tips for using each type. Slots and reservations for workload management in BigQuery can be challenging to understand, but these Reference Guides and accompanying videos offer clear explanations. Optimizing projects for speed and monetary efficiency are important topics for any client, and Leigha and the optimization team have addressed these concerns as well. Tips for monitoring, data governance, and the secure sharing of data are also included in their video

This week on the podcast, we welcome guest Megan O’Keefe to talk about KRM and Kubernetes with your hosts Mark Mirchandani and Anthony Bushong. To start the show, Megan gives us a quick rundown of Kubernetes, an open-source tool to orchestrate containers and manage other GCP resources. She explains the difference between declarative and imperative to help us better understand the basics of Kubernetes. We tackle the challenges people face when beginning their Kubernetes journey and how it works with other open-source projects, like Anthos. This year, Megan and her team have been working to help developers understand the Kubernetes Resource Model, a concept that helps define how companies can organize and run clusters, enforce policies, and more for improved standardization across multiple teams. Megan explains GitOps, a deployment model for Kubernetes focusing on Git, and takes us through examples of implementation. We learn about Config Sync and how it helps with optimizing and automating GitOps. Megan goes o

Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani host this week’s episode of the podcast as we celebrate one of our favorite Google products, Google Kubernetes Engine! Anthony Bushong and Gari Singh join the party to talk about GKE’s life journey, what’s new, and what’s coming up for the service. Each guest brings their unique perspective to the show starting with their definitions of Kubernetes and GKE, tailored to a six year old. How does Kubernetes relate to cookies, Disney World, and Pokemon? Kaslin, Anthony, and Gari break it down. Next, each guest talks their favorite GKE features and what makes the service different. Kaslin loves the persistent storage feature, among others. Anthony appreciates the evolution of GKE to a place where it supports many different workloads and situations for clients and how easy it is to get started with GKE. GKE’s ability to connect easily to other GCP products and features and GKE Autopilot are some of Gari’s favorite things about the service. Best practices and advice for new users ar

Guest Ryan Przybyl is back this week to tell hosts Lorin Price and Stephanie Wong more about service networking and what the future holds for the networking field. Picking up from last week, Ryan starts by detailing the products and features Google has developed to help enterprise customers shift to a service networking architecture. He walks us through an example scenario and explains how a company might work with Google to gradually shift. Google continues to grow in the service networking space. As client requirements are identified or changed, Google continually develops products to satisfy the varying networking needs. Ryan talks about tools like Network Intelligence Center, which allows network visibility and aims to ease the transition for traditional networking specialists. He talks about the Grow with Google Model, a term he coined to describe the step-by-step path his team helps enterprises take in the journey to full service networking. The process can take years and Ryan encourages clients to revi

This week on the show, Lorin Price and Stephanie talk about the differences between traditional and service networking with guest Ryan Przybyl. Ryan starts the show telling us how customer needs and advancing cloud technologies have shifted the conversations he has with customers from a traditional networking focus to an emphasis on cloud services. Ryan describes how he helps different sized companies approach networking, whether they’re cloud native or shifting to a cloud approach from a traditional background. For example, companies that take advantage of Google Cloud and its services can deploy environments quickly, allowing developers to work without infrastructure constraints. Enterprise companies using more traditional networking that move into the cloud will need to make some changes, Ryan says, comparing apples to oranges. They want to move in a way that takes advantage of the cloud without negatively impacting performance. Later, Ryan tells us all about service-oriented networking and how it’s possib

Philip O’Toole and Reed Taylor talk with Stephanie and guest host Terry Ryan all about the new features in Google Cloud Logging on this episode of the podcast. Cloud Logging provides users with management and analyzation of project logs, the reports that describe the state of every system in a project. Reed walks us through Cloud Logging, including a list of features and how other GCP products integrate well with Logging. Once logs are sorted, Cloud Logging also provides tools for detailed query and analysis of log data. But storage and management of logs is as important as sorting and analyzing, and Reed tells us why this third component is vital. New features in storage and management promise to streamline the process. Log Buckets, for example, allow the separation of routing and storage, while Log Views make secure field-level access possible. Log Retention means users can dictate how long different types of logs are stored. These new features help users comply with standards and regulations in the data sp

This week on the podcast, hosts Stephanie Wong and Bukola Ayodele speak with Nikhil Kaul and Victor Szalvay about security in the software supply chain. Cloud OnAir will be offering a virtual event on supply chain software security on July 29th, and our guests start the show by telling us more about it. The recent cyber attacks on US companies have brought to light the importance of cyber security. A new set of guidelines for securing these components and software as a whole will be released soon, impacting not just software developers but the users as well. The Cloud OnAir event will breakdown these new guidelines and educate attendees on steps to take to ensure more secure software and software components. Internally, Google has been optimizing their software supply chain security for years with solutions like BeyondCorp and internally developed solutions that Google has since adapted for their clients. These solutions will be discussed in detail in the Cloud OnAir event. Victor goes on to explain the thre

Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani are talking intro to Firestore this week with fellow Googler Allison Kornher. Allison, a Cloud Technical Resident, starts the show telling us about the program and how it brought her to Firestore. Allison takes us through the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases and describes the four categories of NoSQL databases: family, document, key value, and graph. Firestore is a scalable, flexible NoSQL document database. To illustrate the uses and benefits of Firestore, Allison walks us through a delicious pizza example. Each document in the database belongs to a collection, which is used to organize these documents. Firestore documents are assigned an identifier and can be quickly changed and called within their collections. Because these documents are stored in an implicit schema in key value pairs, developers have control over the details of database organization and data change and growth are easy to manage. The availability of subcollections further adds to the flexibility

Stephanie Wong and Jenny Brown are your hosts this week, discussing data analytics with the yin and yang of the field, Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt. Our guests introduce us to three new Google offerings, BigQuery Omni, Dataplex, and the Analytics Hub, and discuss the uses and implications of each and how they work together to achieve goals. Bruno and Eric describe challenges in data analytics and how Google uses these as opportunities to create problem-solving systems that solve real client problems. Through real-world examples from companies like Equifax, we see how companies are getting more information from their data in a way that creates actionable opportunities to improve customer experiences. For multi-cloud companies, BigQuery Omni gets the most out of data that exists in multiple clouds. To accomplish this, Google takes the analytics to the data and is able to reach all appropriate data across clouds without having to move it. This allows for cheaper analysis with much less system downtime. Support f

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

Our old pal Mark Mirchandani is back this week, joining Stephanie Wong and our guests Steve McGhee and Yuri Grinshteyn to talk about Site Reliability Engineering. SRE is Google’s way of helping companies of all sizes create consistent, predictable, and functional projects. It helps clients approach operations from a software engineering stand point so that growing systems can be managed efficiently. We talk about the challenges of implementing best SRE practices and how companies can overcome these. Though the benefits of SRE are many, it can be difficult for clients to grasp. Steve and Yuri tell us the process they go through with customers to help them set realistic goals and work to make reliable, scalable projects with little downtime. By starting small and taking wins early, Steve says clients reap the rewards of SRE and are encouraged to push forward. Yuri’s customer-centric approach encourages companies to prioritize alerts that affect the user experience, thus limiting inbox mayhem and keeping custome

Max Saltonstall and Carter Morgan co-host the podcast this week and talk APIs with our guests, Dave Feuer and Benjamin Schuler. Apigee, an API management platform that is a part of Google Cloud, focuses on all steps of the digital product life cycle to make API management easy for clients. The software company SAP provides data storage and other business support for different types of companies across the world. Together, Apigee and SAP allow data to be collected, stored, organized, and securely accessed and shared with other applications. The shift to e-commerce and the desire for tailored experiences has driven the need for more API usage and therefore better API management. SAP and Apigee, with their myriad features, allow businesses to keep up with these increasing demands efficiently. We hear examples of how companies are leveraging these tools and use cases where the power of SAP and Apigee benefit customers most. Our guests describe the developer experience as well. We talk about the process of creatin

Stephanie Wong and cohost Gabi Ferrara talk about the exciting launch of Database Migration Service at Google. Our guests this week, Shachar Guz and Gabe Weiss, start the show explaining DMS, focusing on the ease of infrastructure management for cloud users. Migration is made simpler with DMS, and Shachar and Gabe walk us through the process of using this powerful new service. Our guests outline some hurdles to migration and how DMS and the DMS documentation help developers overcome them. Shacher tells us the steps companies should take before and after running DMS to ensure projects run correctly and business logic is preserved as well, and Gabe stresses the importance of testing. Database Migration Service focuses on open source, and we talk about why this is an important benefit. In addition, the thorough explanations embedded in DMS help users navigate easily, serverless technology means projects are fast and efficient, and native applications are leveraged for better transparency. And it’s free. Shachar

On the podcast this week, we’re diving into what full stack development looks like on Google Cloud. Guests Tony Pujals and Kevin Moore join your hosts Stephanie Wong and Grant Timmerman to help us understand how developers can leverage Dart and Google Cloud to create powerful and effective front end and back end systems for their projects. Kevin takes us through the evolution of Dart and Flutter and how they have become a way to allow developers an experience-first solution. Developers can focus on the experience they want to create, then decide which platforms to run on. With Dart, Google provides business logic that allows developers to provide the front end and back end experience for users in one programming language. Our guests talk about the types of projects that will benefit most from the use of Dart and how Dart is expanding to offer more features and better usability. Flutter offers a high fidelity, rich framework that supports mobile and can be deployed on any platform. When paired with Dart on Doc

Stephanie Wong and Priyanka Vergadia host the podcast this week as we talk responsible AI with guests Craig Wiley and Tracy Frey. Vertex AI, the newly released AI platform from Google, is where Craig starts, telling us that it helps seamlessly integrate AI best practices into AI projects. When designing and building machine learning projects, it’s important to plan and integrate functions that support a responsible model as well. Tracy and Craig help us understand the process of designing and building these responsible, efficient projects, from problem identification and data set collection and refinement to ethical model considerations and finally project construction. Part of Responsible AI is considering all the stakeholders of a project and how they will be impacted. Through examples, Tracy demonstrates how businesses can decide if the software solution affects stakeholders in a way the business would be proud of. Starting in the planning stages and continuing through data collection and model training, c

This week on the show, our guests Anu Srivastava and Sudheera Vanguri talk about Document AI with hosts Stephanie Wong and Dale Markowitz. Document AI uses artificial intelligence to improve the way businesses create and manage things like paystubs, tax forms, contracts, and virtually any other business document. Data normally stored on paper can be parsed, enriched, and structured, then stored securely with the use of Document AI. Data becomes more accessible and more manageable. Our guests go on to describe the process of using this powerful tool and instances where developers and enterprise companies could benefit. We talk about Lending DocAI and Procurement DocAI and how offerings like Google Vision and Knowledge Graph enhance these powerful tools. Users of Document AI can take advantage of these tools as well as bring their own expertise to create custom models. Later, we learn about the developer experience when using the Document AI Platform. Our guests talk specifically about the use of Knowledge Grap

On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani joins Stephanie Wong to talk about serverless computing and the Cloud OnAir Serverless event with our guests. Aparna Sinha and Philip Beevers start the show giving us a thorough definition of serverless infrastructures and how this setup can help clients run efficient and cost-effective projects with easy scalability and observability. Serverless has grown exponentially over the last decade, and Aparna talks about how that trajectory will continue in the future. At its core, the serverless structure allows large enterprise companies to do what they need to do, from analyzing real time information to ensuring dinner is delivered piping hot. Aparna describes the three aspects of next generation serverless, developer centricity, versatility, and built-in best practices, and how Google is using these to empower developers and company employees to create robust projects efficiently and economically. Phil tells us about the experience of using serverless products and the succ

Kaslin Fields joins Stephanie Wong hosting the podcast this week as we talk all about GKE Autopilot with our guests Yochay Kiriaty and William Denniss. GKE Autopilot manages tasks like quantity and size of nodes so deploying workloads is faster and machines are used efficiently. Autopilot also offers cluster management options, including monitoring the health of nodes and other components. William and Yochay explain that GKE Autopilot was built to aid companies in the efficient use of resources and give clients more time to focus on their projects. Important efficiency features that are optional in GKE, like multidimensional pod autoscaling, are employed automatically for clients in Autopilot, giving clients peace of mind. Kubernetes best practices are auto-deployed for projects so clients can rest assured things will run as quickly and smoothly as possible without extra work. Kubernetes is a great way to manage containers, and our guests describe cases where this tool is best suited. We compare GKE standard