Google Cloud Platform Podcast

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. In Australia, every employee is required to select their superannuation fund of choice to help them invest a portion of their income. Having celebrated its 40th anniversary recently, UniSuper, one of Australia's largest superannuation funds, is committed to delivering value and efficiency for its members. Started as a fund for the higher education and research sector, it has now opened its platform to all industries across the country. Today, UniSuper invests more than $120 billion on behalf of more than 620,000 members. With the new Treasury Laws Amendment Act 2021, Your Future, Your Super, that aims to improve the outcome of superannuation funds for Australians, UniSuper decided to undergo a data centre transformation, taking on an 80/20 rule on cloud hosting and adopting the right digital technologies to improve its performance and portfolio. In this episode, Angelo talks about how Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) underpins UniSuper's shift to the cloud as it moves existing VMware-based workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud. This enables the organization to quickly scale up while having the flexibility and agility it needs to drive operational efficiencies as it continues to deliver the best returns for its customers. He also shares how the COVID-19 pandemic presented him with some crucial moments of thought that have resulted in some of the changes in best practices across the organization today. Angelo Furina, Head of Enterprise Infrastructure & Cloud Angelo is the Head of Enterprise  Infrastructure and Cloud at UniSuper and is passionate about business transformation and bridging the gap between technology and business strategy. With more than a decade of industry experience, Angelo has delivered technology solutions across manufacturing, telecommunications, media and finance.  Theo Davies Theo is the Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud. He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy.

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. As the electric vehicles (EV) sector accelerates, drivers are finding it a challenge to conveniently access charging points. This has become one of the biggest concerns for EV drivers around the world. Intending to solve this problem, Taiwan-born company ChargesSmith offers EV users an end-to-end charging solution by developing a map for drivers, with the most updated information on location and availability of charging points around the country.  Today, ChargeSmith serves more than 70% of EV users in Taiwan, partnering with various charging point operators to give users a high level of accessibility. Their vision and goal is to organize and share energy with communities, countries, and the earth.  In this episode, ChargeSmith CEO Andy Chen talks about sustainability in the EV market and the growth of EV adoption. As an EV driver himself, Chen shares the issues he faces first-hand, and how ChargeSmith is leveraging data to solve the challenges of today while paving a future for EV drivers of tomorrow. In this episode, we also hear from Alex Kuo of GAIA, who shares how his team collaborates with ChargeSmith to use cloud technology as an enabler in this evolving landscape. Are you ready for a cleaner driving experience? Tune in to find out.  Andy Chen, CEO of ChargeSmith Andy is one of the earliest EV adaptors in Taiwan. With enthusiasm for the EV community, he has led ChargeSmith to build up Taiwan's largest EV charging roaming network. Andy enjoys observing the market's pain points and using data-driven strategies to accelerate the adoption of the product.  Alex Kuo, Sr. Account Manager of GAIA An accomplished sales professional, Alex has led sales teams across the IT industry to success, helping SMB and enterprise clients achieve impressive business growth. With a passion for blockchain technology, Alex enjoys innovating and developing new products and services for clients that ultimately contribute to the growth of the industry. Theo Davies Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Interview ChargeSmith: https://www.chargesmith.com/ev/ Hosts Theo Davies and Paris Tran

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. AI is seen as a powerful tool and enabler for businesses around the world. At the same time, more organizations are looking for ways to operate more sustainably. To combine the two, Recursive AI was established in 2020, formalizing the way AI can be used for sustainability. Whether it's through innovation, improving productivity, providing better education, or using AI for prevention and mitigation efforts in managing climate change, Recursive AI is changing the sustainability landscape one project at a time. In this episode, Recursive AI co-founder Tiago Ramalho puts on a new lens to the way we think about AI. He tells us how neural networks, which form the core infrastructure of AI, can simulate systems quickly, finding new and improved solutions to existing problems. He also shares how the company is predicting the future of natural disasters so that organizations can take action before it is too late.   When it comes to sustainability, no action is too small. Listen in to find out how the organization is innovating by leveraging AI technology to solve the sustainability problems of today and tomorrow. Dr. Tiago Ramalho, Recursive Co-founder and CEO Tiago is the co-founder and CEO of Recursive AI, a company focused on building AI tools to help companies grow their sustainability impact. Tiago is a physicist and former Googler at Google DeepMMind with a passion for technology and sustainability. Through Recursive, Tiago is able to marry the two to help others create a greener tomorrow.  Theo Davies Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record-breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Interview Recursive AI: https://recursiveai.co.jp/en/ Hosts Theo Davies and Paris Tran

In this special episode, we are featuring That Digital Show. In the Philippines, class sizes in schools are often quite large with an average of 30 students per class. This makes keeping track of individual students' progress a challenge. To solve this problem, John and Chris Fiel, co-founders of Wela School Systems developed a digital solution for schools, teachers, and parents to keep track of basic administrative tasks like daily attendance-taking and keeping record of grades, among other things to keep paperwork at bay.  Starting with just three schools upon launch, Wela now serves more than 200 schools on its platform. To make sure it meets the needs of users, the duo constantly asks for feedback from customers, and pick out the most common needs to address and build around. The startup also follows a freemium model so that schools can test and discover if the product is really adding value for them, before deciding to purchase it.  Listen in to hear how Wela continues to win the hearts of educators, and the impact they are making on the Philippine education system. In this podcast, they also share their views on the future of education and how data can be used to improve teaching processes and the learning environment. John Fiel, CEO, Wela School Systems John's  interest in the startup industry brought him to establish his own game development startup after college, which lasted for two years. Now, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wela School System. Wela is one of the Pioneering DOST Funded Startups in the Philippines. Wela is now running for five years and serving over 190 schools both national and international. Chris Fiel, CTO, Wela School Systems Chris is  a serial technopreneur with the aim of creating disruptive and useful apps using the latest technology trends. His heart and inclination is into programming where his 25 years of experience as a freelance developer can speak of. He is currently into ERP, IoT and blockchain and looking for consulting and development projects along these areas. Theo Davies Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence " aria-level="1

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 Singh Sartaj Singh is the Head of Engineering Platforms at Gojek. Sartaj is one of the few engineers who has been with GOJEK since the early days. As a literary enthusiast, he never thought that he would end up working in tech. Sartaj is responsible for driving growth, standardizing and improving Indonesia's multi-service platform.  Theo Davies Theo is Head of Cloud Sales Excellence & Productivity at Google Cloud and host of "That Digital Show APAC". He is a record breaking salesperson, sales leader, coach and speaker with a 20+ year career beginning in sales. Theo is also the President of the Google Public Speaking Academy. Cool things of the week 5 GKE features to help you optimize your clusters blog Interview Gojek site Gojek: Using Machine Learning for forecasting and dynamic pricing blog Introducing Firehose: An open source tool from Gojek blog Meet Optimus, Gojek's open-source clou

Happy Holidays from all of us at Google! This week, hosts Carter Morgan, Stephanie Wong, and Max Saltonstall are sharing their favorite moments from the year! From great partnerships with national companies, new releases in some of your favorite Google software tools, and a trillion digits of pi, we're breaking down some 2022 highlights and introducing special guest Podcast Producer Kevin McCormack to help with a fun podcast trivia game! Carter Morgan Carter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google's Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course "Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes" he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who's approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft. Stephanie Wong Stephanie Wong is a Developer Advocate focusing on online content across all Google Cloud products. She's a host of the GCP Podcast and the Where the Internet Lives podcast, along with many GCP Youtube video series. She is the winner of a 2021 Webby Award for her content about data centers. Previously she was a Customer Engineer at Google and at Oracle. Outside of her tech life she is a former pageant queen and hip hop dancer and has an unhealthy obsession with dogs. Max Saltonstall Max Saltonstall is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud. He is a father, teacher, storyteller, speaker, educator, nefarious villain, game designer, juggler, and is only part zombie. Cool things of the week Boost medical discoveries with AlphaFold on Vertex AI blog 6 common mistakes to avoid in RESTful web API Design blog Marketing Analytics With Google Cloud <a

Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong welcome fellow Googler Marcos Grappeggia and Antoine Castex of L'Oreal to talk about Cloud Workstations, Google's software that provides managed development environments. Marcos elaborates on the power of Cloud Workstations and all the features and offerings this software provides. The preconfigured nature of Cloud Workstations means developers simply press a button and get an IDE so they're ready to code quickly. Other teams benefit as well, with templates created by Cloud Workstations that specify options to be preinstalled. Marcos talks more about the benefits of Workstations over local environments, especially in the areas of security and productivity. L'Oreal chose Google Cloud years ago when they began their transition to the cloud, Antoine tells us, and we hear how L'Oreal offered Marcos suggestions and feedback as Workstations was developed. Working with Cloud Workstations today, L'Oreal's teams spread across the globe are able to begin realizing the dream of creating environments with parameters specific to different regions and areas. While Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell are similar solutions in some ways, Marcos helps us understand the differences as well. For example, Cloud Shell is less flexible while Workstations is highly customizable. Antoine talks more about the adoption process of Workstations at L'Oreal and how they plan to continue using the software with more teams in the future. He offers advice for other companies looking to introduce it. Workstations works with the Software Delivery Shield suite to build and maintain a secure software supply chain. Security features developers are used to in productions services are easily applied to development environments in Workstations as well. Marcos talks about the future of Cloud Workstations, including deeper security integration. Marcos Grappeggia Marcos is a Product Manager at Google Cloud, leading Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell. Marcos is an engineer from University of Campinas (Brazil) and École Centrale Paris (France). Prior to joining Google, he led product at Appurify (acquired by Google, now Firebase Test Lab), enabling mobile test automation on real devices for mobile developers. Antoine Castex Antoine is a curious French man, a Serverless Guru multiple times GCP Certified and C2C French Club Co-President "

Guests Sharon Fang and Michael Sudakovitch are here this week to talk with Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme about Google's Active Assist optimization portfolio and managing cloud projects efficiently. Michael, tech lead at Uber, first employed Active Assist for the company in their security department, but they have since realized how useful Active Assist is in many areas of the resource management space. Responsible architects, Michael points out, continually evaluate their resources and patch, update, or remove as necessary to ensure proper security and optimize spending. Sharon helps us understand resource management further and how Active Assist helps teams find resources that can be changed or even removed for better spending, tighter security, and smaller carbon footprint. Active Assist will even recommend the removal of entire projects that have become dormant. Michael talks in detail about Uber's use of Active Assist and how it helped them find vulnerable projects that could be removed for better security. Sharon highlights the effects of Active Assist on reducing CO2 emissions as well, as discontinued projects keep hardware running needlessly. As Michael and his team at Uber began taking advantage of all Active Assist had to offer, Google worked with him to answer questions, tailor resources, and take feedback to improve offerings. The future includes a portfolio expansion of resource life cycle management tools to identify more idol systems like GKE clusters and helping larger customers take advantage of Active Assist at scale automatically. Together, Sharon and Michael tell us stories about the partnership and interesting findings and results of Uber's carbon footprint reduction journey. Sharon Fang Sharon Fang is a Product Manager for Google Cloud's Active Assist, which aims to help users optimize their cloud operations with recommendations. Michael Sudakovitch Michael is a Tech Lead at Uber's Engineering Security organization, focusing on securing and optimizing Uber's Multi-Cloud infrastructure. Cool things of the week Solving internal search problems with Dialogflow blog Automating self-service tech support with Tensorflow blog Introducing IAM Deny, a simple way to harden your security posture at scale <a href= "https://cloud

Stephanie Wong talks with guests Shachar Guz, Inna Weiner, and Gabe Weiss about Google's Database Migration Service and how it helps companies move data to Google Cloud. What typically is a complicated process, DMS simplifies everything from planning to security to validating database migrations. DMS has undergone some changes since last we spoke with Shachar and Gabe. It's gone GA and helped thousands of customers benefit from the service. Migrations are possible from any PostgreSQL database source to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, which is designed to support HTAP data (transactional and analytical). One of the most exciting updates is the introduction of the DMS modernization journey, which allows customers to change database type during migration (heterogenous). In addition, migrations with DMS can be set up to continuously replicate data between the old and new database. With this feature, developers can compare the application performance against the old vs. new database. Inna talks about the benefits of keeping your data in the cloud, like secure, reliable, and scalable data storage. Google Cloud takes care of the maintenance work for you as well. DMS takes security seriously and supports multiple security methods to keep your data safe as it migrates. We talk about the different customers using DMS and how the process works for homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations. Before you even start, Gabe tells us, DMS helps you prepare for the migration. And tools like Dataflow can help when customers decide full migration would be too difficult. We talk about the difference between Datastream and DMS and use cases for each. We wrap up the show with a look at the future of DMS. Shachar Guz Shachar is a product manager at Google Cloud, he works on the Cloud Database Migration Service. Shachar worked in various product and engineering roles and shares a true passion about data and helping customers get the most out of their data. Shachar is passionate about building products that make cumbersome processes simple and straightforward and helping companies adopt Cloud technologies to accelerate their business. Inna Weiner Inna is a senior technical leader with 20+ years of global experience. She is a big data expert, specializing in deriving insights from data, product and user analytics. Currently, she leads engineering for Cloud DMS. Inna enjoys building diverse engineering organizations, with common vision, growth strategy and inclusive culture. Gabe Weiss Gabe leads the database advocacy team for the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that develo

On the show this week, Carter Morgan and Anu Srivastava talk about AI and ML data analytics with Dataiku VP of Platform Strategy, Jed Dougherty, and Head of Product Marketing, Dan Darnell. Dataiku is an AI platform targeted for business team collaboration. The low and no code environments make it easy for developers and not so tech savvy employees to work together on analytics projects. It strives for everyday AI, making these normally highly technical data processes more accessible. Our guests detail the tools Dataiku provides customers, including ML Ops features for efficient models. Dataiku's managed offering allows businesses to concentrate on the model while Dataiku takes care of things like the deployment processes behind the scenes. We hear about the partnership between Dataiku and Google Cloud and Dataiku's integration with AlloyDB. Through a real example, our guests run us through the use of these two tools together. Jed talks about why Google Cloud works so well with Dataiku, especially for businesses looking for cutting edge technology. Jed Dougherty Jed is the VP of Platform Strategy at Dataiku. In this role he acts as a strategic technical advisor to Dataiku customers and prospects. He also works tightly with Engineering and Product stakeholders in order to ensure that all technical platform requests are properly followed, scoped and implemented. Dan Darnell Dan has over 20 years of experience in the analytics industry at established software companies, hyper-growth technology companies, and small technology start-ups. As the Head of Product Marketing at Dataiku, he owns positioning, evangelism, and content creation for product offerings and education on products for customers and partners. Cool things of the week Google Cloud supercharges NLP with large language models blog Practicing the principle of least privilege with Cloud Build and Artifact Registry blog Interview Dataiku site Dataiku YouTube videos BigQuery <a href= "https://cloud.goo

Hosts Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme are joined by Bryce Buffaloe and Seth Denney to chat about Assured Workloads and the sovereignty control Key Access Justifications so customers can see how their data is used and control who can see what. Assured Workloads with Google is a security and compliance engine that allows users to control their data with the help of Google. With the expansion of data use around the globe, data sovereignty has become more important as well, and Google Cloud products offer myriad tools to maintain control, privacy, and compliance no matter the location. Seth talks more about sovereignty and how it's changing data storage and management. Our guests talk about how Google has tackled the sovereignty issues, difficult decisions that had to be made, and the process of working with clients to optimize tools for different security and sovereignty scenarios. With Key Access Justifications, Google has bolstered its offerings to provide clients with trustworthy controls to keep data secure and sovereign, from Compute Engine VMs to BigQuery. We learn what Key Access Justifications look like for users and how the encryption keys work in different Google Cloud services. Customer managed key material is stored outside of Google and the key manager must give permission for access for an added layer of trust and security. Seth and Bryce explain why this is important and describe how KAJ are used with some examples. These features may also be used to improve security in the future by preventing data from being decrypted and stolen should someone ever get access to your system. We hear more about the future of data security and sovereignty, including simplifying the process with managed services and easier onboarding. Strategic European partnerships are helping Google tackle these important issues overseas so clients can focus on their businesses and worry less about data security. The catalyst for KAJ was a large German bank that recognized the sovereignty changes coming, and we hear more about the origins of KAJ and the path to where it is today. When paired with Assured Workloads, clients get maximum sovereignty coverage. Seth talks a little about the Sovereignty Access Controls done internally as well. Bryce walks us through using these Google services with a European example. Bryce Buffaloe Bryce is Product manager for Google Cloud Security managing the portfolio of the Assured Workload's solution suite. Seth Denney Seth is KAJ Tech Lead, responsible for ensuring the integrity and usefulness of KAJs to support customer data sovereignty Cool things of the week DevFests site <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-le

This week, Max Saltonstall and Chloe Condon welcome guests Archana Ramamoorthy and Julien Blanchez to talk about digital sovereignty and what goes into a technical strategy for dealing with this complicated facet of web projects. Our guests start the show with a thorough explanation of digital sovereignty, explaining that it typically involves a state or regulatory agency exerting control over data and technology. As more and more data is taken into the cloud, countries are understandably concerned about a loss of control over this data, and nations are enacting laws and regulations to help manage security of data in the cloud. Standardization has been a human issue for a long time, from trains to international travel and more, Archana reminds us, and this challenge is now moving to the management of cloud data out in the world. As sovereign nations implement their own standards, cloud providers must adapt to help developers create projects that follow these laws. Julien talks about the discussions around digital sovereignty in Europe, especially as it affects data security. Lawmakers, cloud providers, and companies have been working together to think through effective laws and strategies for digital security around the world. Googlers across the globe are working locally to make sure Google's suite of products are compatible with government regulations and the needs of developers. Archana and Julien talk about the three important action segments Google employs to make sure tools allow for control over who has access to data when and how, and we hear the journey Google has trekked from the very beginning to now as the company has worked for strong security and versatile data management. Local partnerships are a big part of the advancements made in the sovereignty space, Julien tells us, increasing trust with developers in the area and leveraging local knowledge. With offerings like Cloud Key Management, Google provides unique options for developers to control and secure data. To keep things easy, especially in the case of hybrid solutions, this portfolio of sovereignty products uses the same APIs, streamlined onboarding setups, and familiar interfaces Google product users are accustomed to. Archana Ramamoorthy Archana is the Director of Cloud Security Product Management. She has spent a lot of her career building security products for enterprise organizations. Julien Blanchez Julien looks after the coordination of Google's local digital sovereignty partnerships and how to position them in the market, after many years helping regulators and highly regulated customers in EMEA on their Google Cloud adoption journey worldwide. Cool things of the week <li style="f

Debi Cabrera and Stephanie Wong have more great Next content this week as we focus on launches specifically related to data and analytics with guests Bruno Aziza and Maire Newton. We start the episode with a look at current customer trends in data, including tools for increasing efficiency when working with many different types of data. Data governance and security is another area where Bruno sees advances in satisfying customer needs. Maire talks about the steps Google is taking to help customers implement knowledge gained with data, including Looker and new integrations with tools like Looker Studio to easily connect tools for better data access and use. Strategic partnerships with companies like Tableau help accomplish these goals as well. With 21 data and analytics launches at Next, exciting solutions are out there for customers. Bruno and Maire highlight their five favorites, like BigQuery support for unstructured data, allowing analysts working with SQL to do more with more data. To simplify workflows, BigQuery integration with Spark is a new feature that Maire tells us about, and we hear more about BigLake and it's increased format support. Data reaches more people easier now with Connected Sheets available for anyone using Google Workspace, and finally we talk more about Looker. Bruno details the four use cases of business intelligence customers and how Google's suite of data products satisfy their needs for a reasonable price. Bruno Aziza Bruno is head of data and analytics for Google Cloud and leads the outbound product management team. He has more than two decades' of Silicon Valley experience, specializing in scaling businesses, and has written two books on Data Analytics and Enterprise Performance Management. Maire Newton Maire is an Outbound Product Manager at Google Cloud with almost 15 years of experience partnering with organizations to develop data solutions and drive digital transformation. She's passionate about helping customers develop data-driven cultures by using technology to meet users where they are. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next for data professionals: analytics, databases and business intelligence blog ANA104 How Boeing overcame their on-premises implementation challenges with data " aria-level

Forrest Brazeal joins Stephanie Wong today on the second day of Google Cloud Next '22. We're talking about all the exciting announcements, how the conference has changed in recent years, and what to expect in the days ahead. The excitement and energy of the first in-person Next since 2019 was one of the best parts for Forrest. With 1300 releases in just half the year, a lot has happened in BigQuery, AI, Looker, and more. Next includes announcements in many of these areas as well, as Google Cloud expands and makes Cloud easier for all types of projects and clients. Strategic partnerships and development have allowed better use of Google Cloud for the virtual work world and advancements in sustainability have helped Google users feel better about their impact on the environment. New announcements in compute include C3 VMs, the first VM in the cloud with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with Google's custom Intel IPU. MediaCDN uses the YouTube infrastructure and the new Live Stream API optimizes streaming capabilities. Among many other announcements, Network Analyzer is now GA allowing for simplified network configuration monitoring and Google Cloud Armor has been extended to include ML-based Adaptive Protection capabilities. Software Delivery Shield and Cloud Workstations are recent offerings to help developers in each of the four areas of software supply chain management. Advancements in Cloud Build include added security benefits, and new GKE and Cloud Run logging and security alerts ensure projects remain secure through the final stages of development. The best way to ensure secure, optimized work is with well-trained developers. And in that vein, Google Cloud is introducing Innovators Plus to provide a new suite of developer benefits under a fixed cost subscription. Forrest tells us about #GoogleClout and the challenges available in the Next portal for conference-goers. Assured Workloads helps with data sovereignty in different regions, Confidential Space in Confidential Computing provides trust guarantees when companies perform joint data analysis and machine learning training, and Chronicle Security Operations are some of the exciting security announcements we saw at Next. On the show next week, we'll go in depth on data announcements at Next, but Steph gives us a quick rundown of some of the biggest ones today. She talks briefly about announcements in AI, including Vertex AI Vision and Translation Hub. Forrest wraps up by talking about predictions for the future of tech and cloud. Forrest Brazeal Forrest Brazeal is a cloud educator, author, speaker, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. He is the creator of the Cloud Resume Challenge initiative, whic

On the show this week, we're talking updated DevOps practices for 2022 with hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon and our guests Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis. Nathen and Derek start the show with a thorough discussion of DORA, the research program dedicated to helping organizations improve software delivery and operations, and the state of DevOps report that Google publishes every year. This year, the DevOps research team strengthened their focus on security and discovered that one of the biggest predictors in security practice adoption is company culture. Open, communicative, and trustful company cultures are some of the best for accepting and implementing optimized security practices. Derek tells us how company cultures are measured and scored for this purpose and Nathen talks about team and individual burnout and its affects on culture. Low, medium, high, and elite teams are another indicator of culture, and Nathen explains how teams earn their label through four keys of software delivery performance. Each year, they let the data show these four clusters of team performance. But this year there were only three, and Derek talks more about this phenomenon and why the elite cluster seems to have disappeared. When operational performance analysis was added, the four clusters reemerged and were renamed to better suit the new analysis metrics. Nathen details these four new clusters: starting, which performs neither well nor poorly and may be just starting out; flowing, teams that are performing well across throughput, stability, and operational performance; slowing teams, which don't have high throughput but excel in other areas; and retiring teams, which are reliable but not actively developing projects. We discuss how companies may shift from one cluster to another and how much context can affect this shift. We talk about key findings in the 2022 DevOps report, especially in the security space. Some of the most notable include the adoption of DevOps security practices and the decreased incidence of burnout on teams who leverage security practices. Nathen and Derek elaborate on how this year's research changed from last year and what remained the same. Nathen Harvey Nathen works with teams helping them learn about and apply the findings of our research into high performing teams. He's been involved in the DevOps community for more than a decade. Derek DeBellis Derek is a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google, where Derek focuses on survey research, logs analysis, and figuring out ways to measure concepts central to product development. Derek has publis

Jason Smith, founder of the Mixed Googlers group here at Google, joins Stephanie Wong to talk about DEI and the importance of belonging in tech. Jason helps us better understand what the concepts diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging mean to him. It's more than just including different types of people, Jason tells us, companies must also give them equal opportunities and say in their jobs. We talk about the difference between DEI and belonging. Belonging means feeling comfortable and accepted and conveys a more concrete, real-life sense of community that brings DEI to life. While DEI is easy enough for a company to measure, it's sometimes tricky to get a clear picture of belonging in a company. Jason talks about possible solutions to this problem. Growing up as the child of both a white and a black parent, Jason understands the importance of feeling a sense of belonging as a mixed race individual. In that vein, he founded Mixed Googlers, and he tells us more about how this group supports other mixed individuals at Google. He talks about the events they have hosted, including talks with famous mixed race speakers, and how the grassroots efforts to form and grow Mixed Googlers has created a great community. Later, Jason talks about DEI and belonging in tech companies and cloud specifically. He introduces us to some fun ways to incorporate DEI principles into company culture in a way that encourages all individuals to contribute their personal perspectives. He stresses the importance of allowing mistakes, especially when discussing diversity issues with your coworkers, so the conversation can be about growth and not about confrontation. Jason Smith Jason Smith is a Customer Engineer supporting application modernization and the founder of Mixed Googlers, an ERG dedicated to mixed race individuals. Cool things of the week Sign up for the Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge blog Google Cloud Firewall introduces Network Firewall Policies, IAM-governed Tags and more <a href= "https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/announcing-

Vertex AI Experiments with Ivan Nardini and Karthik Ramachandran Hosts Anu Srivastava and Nikita Namjoshi are joined by guests Ivan Nardini and Karthik Ramachandran in a conversation about Vertex AI Experiments this week on the podcast. Vertex AI Experiments allows for easy, thorough ML experimentation and analysis of ML strategies. Our guests start the show with a brief introduction to Vertex AI and go on to help us understand where Experiments fits in. Because building ML models takes trial and error as we figure out what architecture and data management will work best, Experiments is a handy tool that helps developers try different variations. With extensive tracking capabilities and analysis tools, developers can see what is working, what's not, and get ideas for other things to try. Ivan tells us about the two concepts to keep in mind before using Experiments: runs, which are training configurations, and experiments, adjustments you make as you look for the best solution. Vertex ML Metadata, a managed ML metadata tool, helps analyze Experiment runs in a graph, Ivan tells us. He takes us through an example ML model build and training using Vertex AI Experiments and other tools. He and Karthik also elaborate on the relationship between Vertex AI Experiments and Pipelines. We talk about the future of AI, including the foundational model, and some cool examples of what's happening in the real world with Vertex AI Experiments. Ivan Nardini Ivan Nardini is a customer engineer specialized in ML and passionate about Developer Advocacy and MLE. He is currently collaborating and enabling Data Science developers and practitioners to define and implement MLOps on Vertex AI. He is an active contributor in Google Cloud. Karthik Ramachandran Karthik Ramachandran is a Product Managed on the VertexAI team. He's been focused on developing MLOps tools like Vertex Pipelines and Experiments. Cool things of the week Expanding the Google Cloud Ready - Sustainability initiative with 12 new partners blog Large Language Models and how they are used with Natural Language Understanding. pdf Interview Vertex AI site Vertex AI Experiments <a href= "https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/experiments/intro-vertex-ai-expe

Host Stephanie Wong chats with storage pros Sean Derrington and Nishant Kohli this week to learn more about cost optimization with storage projects and exciting new launches in the Google Cloud storage space! To start, we talk about the Storage Spotlight of years past and the cool Google Cloud products that Google is unveiling this year. Optimization is a huge theme this year, with a focus not only on cost optimization but also performance and resource use as well. Enterprise readiness and storage everywhere, Sean tells us, are the most important pillars as Google continues to improve offerings. We learn about Hyperdisk and the three customizable attributes users can control and the benefits of Filestore Enterprise for GKE for large client systems. Nishant talks about Cloud Storage and how clients are using it at scale for their huge data projects. Specifically, Google Storage has been working to help clients with large-scale data storage needs to optimize costs with Autoclass. Storage Insights is another new tool launching late this year or early next year that empowers better decision-making through increased knowledge and analytics of storage usage. GKE storage is getting a revamp as well with Backup for GKE to help clients recover applications and data easily. Google Cloud for Backup and DR helps keep projects secure as well. This managed service is easy to use and integrate into all cloud projects and can be used with on prem projects and then backed up into the cloud. This is ideal for clients as they shift to cloud or hybrid systems. Companies like Redivis take advantage of some of these new data features, and Nishant talks more about how Autoclass and other tools have helped them save money and improve their business. Sean Derrington Sean is the Group Product Manager for the storage team. He is a long time storage industry PM veteran; he's worked on Veritas, Symantec, Exablox (storage startup). Nishant Kohli Nishant has a decade plus of Object Storage experience at Dell/EMC and Hitachi. He's currently Senior Product Manager on the storage team. Cool things of the week Cloud Next 2022 site Integrating ML models into production pipelines with Dataflow blog Four non-traditional paths to a cloud career (and how to navigate them) blog Interview</str

Tim Hockin joins Kaslin Fields and Anthony Bushong to celebrate GKE's seventh birthday! Tim starts with a brief background on GKE from its beginnings in 2015 and its relationship to Borg to the visions Google developers had for the software. GKE is meant to help companies focus on what they're good at and leave the rest to Google's managed Kubernetes service. Tim talks about his acting gig in a Kubernetes documentary, including some fun facts about Kubernetes' early days and the significance of the number seven. Over time, the teams working on open source Kubernetes and GKE have worked together, with advances in the open source software influencing updates in GKE. Kubernetes 1.25 was released the day this episode was recorded, and Tim describes how much work and thought goes into building these updates. GKE offers GCP users unique ways to leverage Kubernetes tools like scaling, and Tim shares stories about the evolution of some of these tools and his experiences with networking. Talking with the Kubernetes community has helped refine GKE mult-icluster tools to help companies solve real problems, and Tim tells us more about other features and updates coming with future iterations of GKE. KubeCon is in October, so come by and learn more! Tim Hockin Tim Hockin is Principal Software Engineer working with Kubernetes at Google Cloud. Cool things of the week What's new with Google Cloud blog Power Your Business with Modern Cloud Apps: Strategies and Best Practices site Securing apps for Googlers using Anthos Service Mesh blog Interview GKE site Kubernetes site Anthos site Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes <a href= "https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kuberne

This week, Max Saltonstall and Stephanie Wong go behind the scenes at Google Cloud with Gabe Weiss and Anita Kibunguchy-Grant to learn how new products move from idea to market. To start, our guests walk us through a typical end-to-end life cycle as Google creates new and exciting products for users. Starting with a problem sometimes brought to light by users, a solution is workshopped, and a team is brought together to tackle the issue. Once the product is workable, Gabe and his team step in to evaluate and pass it on to Anita for market launch. With examples like BigQuery Omni and AlloyDB, Anita and Gabe walk us through a real launch scenario, from naming the product to promotion and observing the satisfying impacts of a product solving real-world problems. Anita details the three phases of a product launch and which teams are involved. The phases are pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch. In pre-launch, things like naming and messaging are crafted, priority is assigned via tier assignment, and plans are made to interact with various promotional and other teams who may need to be involved with the launch. Launch day activities are coordinated next as various marketing avenues are leveraged for maximum visibility and development teams work together to make the technical side successful. Post-Launch involves some debriefing on the success of the marketing as well as analysis of use, press coverage, page views, revenue, sentiment among users, and enabling sales teams for success. Gabe talks about the importance of his team in the process as they test products for customer usability and QA before launch as well. He and Anita elaborate on the differences with Google launches versus other companies, including the stages involved in launch and the naming of these stages. Many launches are done at big Google Cloud events, like Google I/O, Anita points out as a unique feature of Google, which can be a gift and a curse. Challenges are addressed as our guests talk us through possible problems and the ways launch teams address them. Anita and Gabe emphasize empathy and communication in product launching and the importance of clear, productive feedback. Anita Kibunguchy-Grant Anita Kibunguchy-Grant is a Product Marketing Lead at Google with extensive experience across Data Analytics and Databases products and solutions. Before Google, she led awareness and go-to-market programs at VMware. She has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and is passionate about helping customers use data and technology to transform their businesses. Gabe Weiss Gabe leads the database advocacy team for the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can mak

On the podcast this week, our guests Laurie White and Aaron Yeats talk with Stephanie Wong and Kelci Mensah about higher education and how Google Cloud is helping students realize their potential. As a former educator, Laurie has seen the holes in tech education and, with the help of Google, is determined to aid faculty and students in expanding learning to include cloud education as well as the standard on prem curriculum. Aaron and Laurie work together toward this goal with programs like their Speaker Series. Laurie's approach involves supporting faculty as they design courses that incorporate cloud technologies. With the busy lives of students today, she recognizes that the best way to get the information into the hands of students is through regular coursework, not just through elective activities outside the regular classroom. Aaron's work with students and student organizations rounds out their support of higher education learning. He facilitates the creation of student clubs that use Cloud Skills Boost, a program in which students navigate full pathways as they learn the skills they need to create and manage cloud builds. Soon, Aaron will offer hack-a-thons that encourage students to attend weekend events to work together on passion projects outside of regular classwork. Our guests talk more about the specifics of Google Cloud Higher Education Programs and the importance of incorporating certifications into the higher education learning process. Aaron talks about expanding the program and his hopes for reaching out to more schools and students and Laurie talks about the funding for students and how Google Cloud's system of credits for students enables them to use real cloud tools without a credit card. Laurie and Aaron tell us fun stories about past student successes, conference interactions, and hack-a-thon projects that went well. Laurie White Laurie taught CS in higher ed for over 30 years where her biggest frustration was trying to keep the curriculum up with the field. She thought she was retiring seven years ago but got the call from Google to a job where she could help faculty around the world keep their curriculum up with cloud computing, so here she is. Aaron Yeats Aaron Yeats has been working in education outreach for two decades. His work in education has included Texas government education programs including public health, non-profit advocacy, and education. Cool things of the week How Wayfair is reaching MLOps excellence with Vertex AI blog Hidden gems of Google BigQuery <a href= "https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics

Stephanie Wong and Brian Dorsey are joined today by fellow Googlers Jaisen Mathai and Sara Ford to hear all about Cloud Functions (2nd gen) and how it differs from the original. Jaisen gives us some background on Cloud Functions and why it was built. Supporting seven languages, this tool allows clients to write a function without worrying about scaling, devops, and a number of other things that are handled by Cloud Functions automatically. Customer feedback led to new features, and that's how the second evolution of Cloud Functions came about. Don't worry, first gen users! This will continue to be available and supported. Features in the 2nd gen fit into three categories: performance, cost, and control. Among other benefits, costs stay low or may even be reduced with some of the new features, larger instances and longer processing times mean better performance, and traffic splitting means better control over projects. Sara details an example illustrating the power of the new concurrency features, and Jaisen helps us understand when Cloud Functions is the right choice for your project and when it's not. Our guests walk us through getting started with Cloud Functions and using the 2nd gen additions. Companies like Lucille Games are using Cloud Functions, and our guests talk more about how specific users are leveraging the new features of the 2nd gen. Jaisen Mathai Jaisen is a product manager for Cloud Functions. He's been at Google for about six years and before joining Google was both a developer and product manager. Sara Ford Sara is a Cloud Developer Advocate focusing on Cloud Functions and enjoys working on serverless. Cool things of the week No pipelines needed. Stream data with Pub/Sub direct to BigQuery blog Cloud IAM Google Cloud blog The Diversity Annual Report is now a BigQuery public dataset blog Interview Cloud Functions site Cloud Functions 2nd gen walkthrough video Cloud Functions version comparison <a href= "https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/concepts/ve

Max Saltonstall and new host Anu Srivastava are in the studio today talking about Vertex Explainable AI with guests Irina Sigler and Ivan Nardini. Vertex Explainable AI was born from a need for developers to better understand how their models determine classifications. Trusting the operation of models for business decision making and easier debugging are two reasons this classification understanding is so important. Explainable models help developers understand and describe how their trained models are making decisions. Google's managed service, Vertex Explainable AI, offers Feature Attribution and Example Based Explanations to provide better understanding of model decision making. Irina describes these two services and how each works to foster better decision-making based on AI models. One or both services can be used in every stage of model building and to create a more precise model with better results. Example Based Explanations, Irina tells us, also makes it easier to explain the model to those who may not have strong technical backgrounds. Ivan runs us through a sample build of a model taking advantage of the Vertex Explainable AI tools. Presets provide easier setup and use as well. We talk more about the benefits of being able to easily explain your models. When decision-makers understand the importance of your AI tool, it's more likely to be cleared for production, for example. When you understand why your model is making certain choices, you can trust the model's outcomes as part of your decision-making process. Irina Sigler Irina Sigler is a Product Manager on the Vertex Explainable AI team. Before joining Google, Irina worked at McKinsey and did her Ph.D. in Explainable AI. She graduated from the Freie Universität Berlin and HEC Paris. Ivan Nardini Ivan Nardini is a customer engineer specialized in ML and passionate about Developer Advocacy and MLE. He is currently collaborating and enabling Data Science developers and practitioners to define and implement MLOps on Vertex AI. He also leads a worldwide hackathon community initiative and he is an active contributor in Google Cloud. Cool things of the week Unify data lakes and warehouses with BigLake, now generally available blog What it's like to have a hybrid internship at Google blog Interview Verte

We're learning all about Arm servers on Google Cloud Platform this week. Hosts Brian Dorsey and Stephanie Wong welcome fellow Googlers Jon Masters and Emma Haruka Iwao to talk about the newest VMs on GCP. To start, our guests dive in to Arm, explaining what it is and how it's grown over the years. Nowadays, Arm-based chips dominate the mobile market and this volume has allowed them to build both advanced chips for supercomputers and beneficial partnerships. Emma explains how having the Arm architecture available in the cloud helps keep projects efficient and walks us through example setups of an Arm projects, illustrating the ease of setup in Google Cloud. Jon and Emma talk about the T2A VMs running Arm workloads at Google, including their balance of performance and cost. Emma and Jon bust some myths about Arm, emphasizing how performant it is despite its humble beginnings. Jon Masters Jon Masters is a compute architect focused on Arm server architecture, platform standards, and ecosystem with almost a dozen years of experience working on Arm. Emma Haruka Iwao Emma Haruka Iwao is a DevRel engineer focused on Compute products and a computer architecture enthusiast. Cool things of the week Introducing Batch, a new managed service for scheduling batch jobs at any scale blog Examples of Batch for Transcoding site Using Google Kubernetes Engine's GPU sharing to search for neutrinos <a href= "https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/contai

Hosts Carter Morgan and Anthony Bushong are in the studio this week! We're talking about Prometheus with guests Lee Yanco and Ashish Kumar and learning about the build process for Google Cloud's Managed Service for Prometheus and how Home Depot uses this tool to power their business. To begin with, Lee helps us understand what Managed Service for Prometheus is. Prometheus, a popular monitoring solution for Kubernetes, lets you know that your project is up and running and in the event of a failure, Prometheus lets you know what happened. But as Kubernetes projects scale and spread across the globe, Prometheus becomes a challenge to manage, and that's where Google Cloud's Managed Service for Prometheus comes in. Lee describes why Prometheus is so great for Kubernetes, and Ashish talks about CNCF's involvement helps open source tools integrate easily. With the help of Monarch, Google's Managed Service stands above the competition, and Lee explains what Monarch is and how it works with Prometheus to benefit users. Ashish talks about Home Depot's use of Google Cloud and the Managed Service for Prometheus, and how Home Depot's multiple data centers make data monitoring both trickier and more important. With Google Cloud, Home Depot is able to easily ensure everything is healthy and running across data centers, around the world, at an immense scale. He describes how Home Depot uses Managed Service for Prometheus in each of these data center environments from the point of view of a developer and talks about how easy Prometheus and the Managed Service are to integrate and use. Lee and Ashish wrap up the show with a look at how Home Depot and Google have worked together to create and adjust tools for increased efficiency. In the future, tighter integration into the rest of Google Cloud's suite of products is the focus. Lee Yanco Lee Yanco is the Product Management lead for Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. He also works on Monarch, Google's planet-scale in-memory time series database, and on Cloud Monitoring's Kubernetes observability experience. Ashish Kumar Ashish Kumar is Senior Manager for Site Reliability and Production Engineering for The Home Depot. Cool things of the week Cloud Next registration is open site Introducing Parallel Steps for Workflows: Speed up workflow executions by running steps concurrently <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/introducing-parallel-steps-workflows-speed-up-workflow-exec

Stephanie Wong and Carter Morgan are back this week learning about Google's Distributed Cloud Edge for telcos with guests Krishna Garimella and DP Ayyadevara. Launched last year, Google Distributed Cloud Edge has benefited companies across many industries. Today, our guests are here to elaborate on how telecommunications companies specifically are leveraging this powerful tool. Because telcos deliver essential services, they tend to create detailed plans for their infrastructure in advance and stick with this setup for many years, DP tells us. Identifying the right tools for their project is vital, and Google has created and improved on many services to aid the telecommunications sector. Contact Center AI, for example, helps with customer service needs. Specifically, our guests elaborate on the modernization of telco networks through managed infrastructure offerings. We learn more about Google Distributed Cloud Edge and the managed hardware and software stack that's included. Container as a service for optimal network function is the first focus of Google in supporting telcos companies with Distributed Cloud and has been used for 5G rollouts. Google has been working behind the scenes to make Kubernetes more telco friendly as well, so that projects are more portable, scalable, and able to leverage Kubernetes benefits easily. Krishna gives us some great real-life examples of telecommunications companies using GDC Edge in areas like virtual broadband networks. In order to dedicate maximum resources to customer workloads, the team chose to keep the Kubernetes control plane in the cloud while worker nodes are at the edge. With superior security protection, minimal service disruption, and more, GDC Edge boasts fleet management as a core capability. In order to continue satisfying telco's needs, Google collaborates with many businesses to grow with changing customer needs. Krishna Garimella Krishna is a technology evangelist who has worked with service providers across the globe in the network and media areas. DP Ayyadevara DP is the Product Group Product Manager leading Telco Network Modernization products and solutions at Google Cloud. Cool things of the week Cloud TPU v4 records fastest training times on five MLPerf 2.0 benchmarks blog Show off your cloud skills by completing the #GoogleClout weekly challenge blog Interview

Your hosts Max Saltonstall and Carter Morgan talk with guests Cody Ault and Jo-Anne Bourne of Veeam. Veeam is revolutionizing the data space by minimizing data loss impacts and project downtime with easy backups and user-friendly disaster recovery solutions. As a software company, Veeam is able to stay flexible with its solutions, helping customers keep any project safe. Cody explains what is meant by disaster recovery and how different systems might require different levels of fail-safe protection. Jo-Anne talks about the financial cost of downtime and how Veeam can help save money by planning for and preventing downtime. Veeam backup and replication is the main offering that can be customized depending on workloads, Cody tells us. He gives examples of how this works for different types of projects. Businesses can easily make plans for recovery and data backups then implement them with the help of Veeam. Cody talks about cloud migration and how Veeam can streamline this process with its replication services, and Jo-Anne emphasizes the importance of these recovery processes for data in the cloud. The journey from fledgling Veeam to their current suite of offerings was an interesting one, and Cody talks about this evolution, starting with the simple VM backups of version 5. As companies have brought new recovery challenges, Veeam has grown to provide these services. Their partnership with Google has grown as well, as they continue to leverage Google offerings and support Google Cloud customers. We hear examples of Veeam customers and how they use the software, and Cody tells us a little about the future of Veeam. Cody Ault Cody has been at Veeam for over 11 years in various roles and departments including Technical Lead for US Support team, Advisory Architect for Presales Solutions Architect and Staff Solutions Architect for Product Management Alliances. He has acted as the performance, databases, security, and monitoring specialist for North America for the Presales team and has helped develop the Veeam Design Methodology and Architecture Documentation template. Cody is currently working with the Alliances team focusing on Google Cloud, Kubernetes and Red Hat. Jo-Anne Bourne Jo-Anne is a Partner Marketing Strategist who works with global companies to support them in positioning company products with their customer base. She is effective in developing strategic partnerships with International Resellers, CCaaS partners, Systems Integrators, OEM partners and ISV partnerships like Amazon, Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, BT to develop strategies to enable sales teams to generate significant revenue and in turn, build profitability for the company. Jo-Anne is a brand steward successful in using analytics to create results-driven campaigns that increase brand awareness, generate sales leads,

This week on the GCP Podcast, Carter Morgan and Max Saltonstall are joined by Amit Kumar and Vasili Triant. Our guests are here to talk about new features in Contact Center AI. Amit starts the show helping us understand what Contact Center as a Service is and what makes this unified platform so useful for enterprise companies. The scalability helps keep costs down and overall satisfaction up while leveraging advances in cloud. UJET and Google Cloud have worked together to bring this AI advancement, and our guests describe the partnership and evolution CCAI. CCAI has streamlined the Contact Center as a Service space, helping businesses work efficiently and while putting an emphasis on positive experiences for the end customer. CCAI users can use the platform straight out of the box or customize it to build specific experiences with tools like Dialogflow. Amit further describes the tools available like Interactive Voice Response and for which circumstances each tool would be most useful. The journey to CCAI can be easily managed by a team who knows the business well. We learn more about the onboarding experience and the skills required to transition. Vasili talks about the past and future of Contact Center and how customer information is used not just for sales purposes but for bettering the customer service experience. Our guests share success stories from companies like FitBit and how CCAI is used to handle customer interactions through the app. Things like the call back feature save customers the time and frustration of waiting on hold and save businesses money. Amit Kumar Amit is responsible for bringing GCP's native CCaaS offering to market and helps enterprise customers modernize their contact centers. Previously, Amit worked as a Cloud AI Incubator lead where he helped customers in adopting Google's conversational AI technology. He also has an extensive background in large scale cloud transformational efforts and have worked with enterprise software companies mainly Salesforce and TIBCO Software. Vasili Triant As UJET's Chief Operating Officer, Vasili Triant oversees all Go To Market activities including Sales, Channel, Alliances, and Customer Success. Triant brings more than 20 years of experience in Telecoms, Unified Communications (UC), and Contact Center industries, having previously served as VP/GM of Contact Center at Cisco, where he achieved the fastest growth in over a decade through a focus on global alliances and enterprise cloud-readiness. Cool things of the week DALL-E mini site EbS

Carter Morgan and Brian Dorsey are working on their math skills today with guests Emma Haruka Iwao and Sara Ford. What kind of computing power does it take to break the world record for pi computations? Emma and Sara are here to tell us. Emma tells us how she started with pi and how she and Sara came to work together to break the record. In 2019, Emma was on the show with her previous world record, and with the advancements in technology and Google products since, she knew she could do even more this year. Her 100 trillion digit goal wasn't enough to scare people away, and Sara, along with other partners, joined Emma on the pi computation journey. Together, Sara and Emma talk about the hardware required, building the algorithm, how it's run, and where the data is stored. Running on a personal computer was cheaper and easier than a super computer, and Emma explains why. Performing these immense calculations can also help illustrate just how far computers have come. The storage required for this project was immense, and Emma tells us how they worked around some of the storage limitations. We hear more about Ycruncher and how it was used to help with calculations. Our guests talk about how things might change for computing and specifically for pi computations in the next few years, and Sara tells us about the storage journey from the perspective of a mathematician, and gives us some interesting facts about the algorithms involved, and we learn how world records are verified. Emma Haruka Iwao Emma is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform, focusing on application developers' experience and high performance computing. She has been a C++ developer for 15 years and worked on embedded systems and the Chromium Project. Emma is passionate about learning and explaining the most fundamental technologies such as operating systems, distributed systems, and internet protocols. Besides software engineering, she likes games, traveling, and eating delicious food. Sara Ford Sara Ford is a Developer Advocate on Google Cloud focusing on Serverless. She received a Masters degree in Human Factors (UX) because she wants to make dev tools more usable. Her lifelong dream is to be a 97-year old weightlifter so she can be featured on the local news. Cool things of the week New Cloud Podcasts Website site Even more pi in the sky: Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi on Google Cloud blog Interview <li style="font-wei

On the podcast this week, guest Joe Daly tells Stephanie Wong, Mark "Money" Mirchandani, and our listeners all about FinOps principles and how they're helping companies take advantage of the cloud while saving their bottom lines. He describes FinOps as financial DevOps, making financial decisions in an effective and optimized way. With his experience in finance and tax accounting, Joe has developed a special knack for navigating the sometimes confusing world of cloud finance policies, and his contributions to the FinOps Foundation have been many. For starters, collaboration with various business departments is important for developing a plan that leverages the benefits of the cloud but keeps the company using resources wisely, Joe explains. He talks about the FinOps Foundation and their focus on creating community for knowledge sharing. By fostering collaboration among different company roles and promoting financial education, companies are better able to determine financial goals while making sure each facet of the company reaps all the benefits of cloud participation. Following the FinOps cycle is the easiest way for community members to get started. The three steps, Joe tells us, are inform, optimize, and operate. The inform phase involves clarity in spending so teams understand how much money is being spent. In the optimize phase, benefits of spending are matched with expenditures to ensure resources are being used to their full potential. Finally, in the operate phase, engineers and finance managers come together to understand why solutions were chosen and understand if these tools are offering the right answers for the company. Every company is different but the sooner it's possible to start the FinOps journey the easier it will be to maintain in the future. Joe gives us examples of how companies are using the principles for successful strategies and the challenges that some of them have faced. The Foundation has monthly summits that offer perspectives from these companies as well as partner presentations. The FinOpsX conference is coming up soon as well. To wrap up, Joe offers other resources from the FinOps Foundation, including his podcast. Joe Daly Joe set up two FinOps teams at Fortune 100 companies. He joined the FinOps Foundation and has been setting up the ambassador program, supporting meetup groups, and producing FinOpsPod. Cool things of the week AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Columnar engine blog GCP Podcast Episode 304: AlloyDB with Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet "GG" Goindi <a href= "https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/e

Stephanie Wong and Lorin Price welcome guests Zach Seils and Manasa Chalasani to talk about networking and the newly released Network Analyzer. Google Cloud's Network Intelligence Center is described as a one-stop shop that simplifies network monitoring, troubleshooting, workload expansion, security, and more. Manasa tells us about the four modules of Network Intelligence Center and how they work together. As part of Network Intelligence Center, the new Network Analyzer monitors and proactively runs tests and detects issues on the network automatically, taking the guesswork out of network troubleshooting. Network Analyzer checks the entire network ecosystem, finding any connectivity issues and extrapolating them to other similar situations as well. Zach tells us more about the specific features of Analyzer, like its ability to check for overlapping or shadowed routes and validating network configurations in relation to any managed services being used. Zach walks us through the set up of Network Analyzer and how to navigate results. Manasa expands on the development of Network Analyzer, including how customer feedback really shaped the project, and we hear about challenges along the way. Through examples, Zach describes different types of Analyzer customers and how they're using the product. More analyzers will be available soon, and the team is open to suggestions for future projects. Zach Seils Zach Seils is a Networking Specialist with Google Cloud, where he works with customers to accelerate their adoption of cloud networking. Manasa Chalasani Manasa is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Networking team with a focus on network observability. Cool things of the week The new Google Cloud region in Columbus, Ohio is open blog Assembling and managing distributed applications using Google Cloud Networking solutions blog Interview Network Intelligence Center site Network Analyzer Documentation docs Introducing Network Analyzer: One stop shop to detect service and network issues blog <li style

Kaslin Fields and Mark Mirchandani learn how GKE manages their releases and how customers can take advantage of the GKE release channels for smooth transitions. Guests Abdelfettah Sghiouar and Kobi Magnezi of the Google Cloud GKE team are here to explain. With releases every four months or so, Kobi tells us that Kubernetes requires two pieces to be managed with each release: the control plane and the nodes. Both are managed for the customer in GKE. The new addition of release channels allows flexibility with release updating so customers can adjust to their specific project needs. Each channel offers a different updating mix and speed, and clients choose the channel that's right for their project. The idea for release channels isn't a new one, Kobi explains. In fact, Google's frequent project releases, while keeping things secure and running well, also can be customized by choosing from an assortment of channels in other Google offerings like Chrome. Our guests talk us through the process of releasing through channels and how each release marinates in the Rapid channel to be sure the version is supported and secure before being pushed to customers through other channels. We hear how release channels differ from no-channel releases, the benefits of specialized channels, and recommendations for customers as far as which channels to use with different development environments. Abdel describes real-world use cases for the Rapid, Regular, and Stable channels, the Surge Upgrade feature, and how GKE notifications with Pub/Sub helps in the updating process. Kobi talks about maintenance and exclusion windows to help customers further customize when and how their projects will update. Kobi and Abdel wrap up with a discussion of the future of GKE release channels. Kobi Magnezi Kobi is the Product Manager for GKE at Google Cloud. Abdelfettah Sghiouar Abdel is a Cloud Dev Advocate with a focus on Cloud native, GKE, and Service Mesh technologies. Cool things of the week GKE Essentials videos KubeCon EU 2023 site KubeCon Call for Proposals site Kubernetes 1.24: Stargazer <a href= "https://kubernetes.io/blog/2022/05/03/kubernetes-1-24-relea

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL has launched and hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabe Weiss are here this week to talk about it with guests Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet Goindi. This fully managed, Postgres compatible database for enterprise use combines the power of Google Cloud and the best features of Postgres for superior data management. AlloyDB began years ago as a solution to help manage huge data migrations to the cloud. Customers needed a way to take advantage of the benefits of cloud, modernizing their databases as they migrated in an easy, flexible, and scalable way. Databases had to maintain performance and availability while offering enterprise customers optimal security features and more. We learn why PostgreSQL is important in the equation and how AlloyDB is built with Google scaling abilities and ML while supporting open source compatibility. We talk about data analytics workloads and how AlloyDB handles in-the-moment analytics needs. Our guests describe and compare different database offerings at Google, emphasizing the solutions that set AlloyDB apart. We chat about the types of projects each database is best suited for and how AlloyDB fits into the Google database portfolio. We hear examples of customers moving to AlloyDB and how they're using this new service. Clients have been leveraging the embedded ML features for better data management. Sandy Ghai Sandy is a product manager on GCP Databases and has been working on the AlloyDB team since the beginning. Gurmeet "GG" Goindi GG is a product manager at Google, where he focuses on databases and attends meetings. Prior to joining Google, GG led product management for Exadata at Oracle, where he also worked on databases and attended meetings. GG has had various product management, management, and engineering roles for the last 20 years in Silicon Valley, but his favorite meetings have been at Google. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Cool things of the week Google I/O site Introducing "Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects" blog Meet the people of Google Cloud: Priyanka Vergadia, bringing Google Cloud to life in illustrations blog <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level

This week, Googler Denise Pearl and NGIS Executive Director Nathan Eaton join hosts Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin and Donna Schut to talk about how modern technology and data collection can significantly enhance environmental protection practices. Denise starts the show with a thorough explanation of geospatial awakening and how Google is making its backend geo services like Google Earth Engine more usable for Google Cloud customers. With better data, easier access, and substantially more cloud compute power, companies are awakening to the possibilities of geospatial driven projects that analyze not just text but photographic data as well. Thousands of satellites collect information about Earth every day, and companies are realizing just how much of this data is available for their own sustainability, geo-centric, and location-based projects. Geospatial, Nathan explains, can help combine layers of text and photo data based on one location for a richer, more robust view of a particular location in real time. As a geospatial partner with Google for a decade, NGIS has had experience using Earth Engine, Google Maps, and more to help Google Cloud customers use this data in meaningful ways. Because most projects involve analyzing locations as they change over time, companies need massive storage and processing power for their data. This is only made possible with the recent advances in infrastructure afforded by the cloud. With these amazing advances in technology, Denise and Nathan are seeing more and more exciting use cases. Companies are taking this data and making meaningful decisions for their future and the future of the planet. Sustainability goals like limiting deforestation in the supply chain can be made and measured. Climate change models can be created and applied. And all of this can be done quickly. Nathan and Denise talk about TraceMark, the sustainable sourcing solution built by NGIS and made to integrate flexibly with customer projects. Consumers are increasingly aware of their affect on the environment and are pushing for change. With TraceMark, companies are able to see the environmental impact of their supply chain partners and make changes in line with customer values. These decisions can influence the growth of the company as well, as suppliers are vetted and chosen based on sustainability and availability. We hear about the building of TraceMark and the challenges the team overcame. Denise runs through some features of the software and how users can take advantage of them. Our guests give some great tips for organizations to get started with their data-driven sustainability goals, and Nathan talks about what's next with NGIS and TraceMark. Nathan Eaton As Executive Director at NGIS, Nathan has worked with hundreds of clients to deliver fit

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera are learning all about BigLake from guests Gaurav Saxena and Justin Levandoski of the BigQuery team. BigLake offers unified data management from both data warehouses and data lakes. What exactly is the difference between a data warehouse and a data lake? Justin explains what a data lake is, how they came to be, and the benefits. Each data option has its cons too, like the limitations of data lakes for enterprise use. Enter BigLake built on BigQuery, which helps enterprise clients manage and analyze their data from both data warehouses and data lakes. The best features of BigQuery are now available for Google Cloud Storage and across multi-cloud solutions. Guarav describes BigLake behind the scenes and how the principles of BigQuery's data management can now be used for open file formats in BigLake. It's BigQuery for more data formats, Justin explains. BigLake solves many data problems quickly with a special emphasis on improving security. Our guests talk specifically about clients who gain the most from using BigLake, especially those looking to analyze distributed data and those who need easy and fast security and compliance solutions. With tightened security, BigLake offers access delegation and secure APIs that work over object storage. We hear about the user experience and how easy it is to get started, especially for customers already familiar with and using other GCP products. Google's advocacy of open source projects means many clients are coming in with workloads built with open source software. BigLake supports multi-cloud projects so that tables can be built on top of any data system. No matter the format of your data, you can run analytics with BigLake. We talk more about the security features of BigLake and how easy it is to unify data warehouses and data lakes with optimal data security. The customers have helped shape BigLake, and Gaurav describes how these clients are using this data software. We hear about integration with BigQuery Omni and Dataplex and how BigLake is different. In the future, Google will continue to make simple, effective solutions for data management and analytics, building further off of BigQuery. Gaurav Saxena Gaurav Saxena is a product management lead at Google BigQuery. He has 12+ years of experience building products at the intersection of cloud, data and AI. Before Google, Gaurav led product management at Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for some of the most widely used cloud offerings in storage and data. Justin Levandoski Justin is a tech lead/manager in BigQuery leading BigLake and other projects pushing the frontier of BigQuery. Prior to Google, just worked on Amazon

This week, we're busting myths around Cloud Spanner with our guests Pritam Shah and Vaibhav Govil. Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall host this episode and learn about the fantastic capabilities of Cloud Spanner. Our guests give us a quick run-down of Spanner database software and its fully-managed offerings. Spanner's unique take on the relational database has sparked some myths. We start by addressing cost and the idea that Spanner is expensive. With its high availability achieved through synchronously replicating data, failures are virtually a non-issue, making the cost well worth it. Our guests describe other features that add to the value of Spanner as well. Workloads of any size are a good fit for Spanner because of its scalability and pricing based on use. Despite rumors, Spanner is now very easy to start using. New additions like the PostgreSQL interface and ORM support have made the usability of Spanner much more familiar. Regional and multi-regional instances are supported, busting the myth that Spanner is only good for global workloads. Our guests offer examples of projects using local and global configurations with Spanner. In the database world, Vaibhav sees trends like the convergence of non-relational and relational databases as well as convergence in the OLTP and OLAP database semantics, and he tells us how Spanner is adapting and growing with these trends. Pritam points out that customers are paying more attention to total cost of ownership, the importance of scalable and reliable database solutions, and the peace of mind that comes with a managed database system. Spanner helps customers with these, freeing up business resources for other things. This year, Spanner has made many announcements about new capabilities coming soon, like PostgreSQL interface on spanner GA, Query Insights visualization tools, cross-regional backups GA, and more. We hear all about these awesome updates. Pritam Shah Pritam is the Director of Engineering for Cloud Spanner. He has been with Google for about four and a half years. Before Spanner, he was the Engineering Lead for observability libraries at Google. That included Distributed Tracing and Metrics at Google scale. His mission was to democratize the instrumentation libraries. That is when he launched Open Census and then took on Cloud Spanner. Vaibhav Govil Vaibhav is the Product lead for Spanner. He has been in this role for the past three years, and before this he was a Product Manager in Google Cloud Storage in Google. Overall, he has spent close to four years at Google, and it has been a great experience. Cool things of the week Our plans to invest $9.5 billion in the U.S. in 2022 <a href= "https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/investi

Hosts Anthony Bushong and Kaslin Fields welcome Bowei Du and Abdelfettah Sghiouar to talk about the Gateway Controller, a tool that helps developers use the Gateway API in GKE. Bowei starts the show with a thorough explanation of how and why the Gateway Controller was developed. Compared to tools like Ingress, Gateway Controller allows engineers to implement more expressive solutions. While providing developers with portability has been an important part of Gateway Controller, it also gives developers freedom to use non-portable features in a structured, consistent environment and helps manage tenancy across different teams. Bowei and Abdel describe the difference between Ingress and Service and how these tools fit in with Gateway Controller. Abdel walks us through how a company would use the Gateway Controller for optimal tenancy management across name spaces and how this is an improvement over Ingress and Service. He gives examples of how companies are using this new tool. We hear more about the GKE Gateway Controller and how its fully-managed deployments and integration with other Google APIs make it so easy to use. Bowei tells us how Gateway helps with the unification of mesh and non mesh environments through the standardization of noun describers in both instances. A handy edge to mesh tutorial is available to help developers. Abdelfettah Sghiouar Abdel is a Cloud Dev Advocate with a focus on Cloud native, GKE, and Service Mesh technologies. Bowei Du Bowei is tech lead on Gateway Controller and a specialist in distributed systems and networking. Cool things of the week Strengthening your DevOps muscle site Interview Kubernetes site GKE site GKE Gateway API docs Kubernetes Gateway API site Ingress docs Service docs From edge to mesh: Exposing service mesh applications through GKE Ingress <a href= "h

On the podcast this week, your hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani talk about the data processing tool Apache Beam with guests Pablo Estrada and Kenneth Knowles. Kenn starts us off with an overview of how Apache Beam began and how Cloud Dataflow was involved. The unique batch and stream method and emphasis on correctness garnered support from developers early on and continues to attract users. Pablo helps us understand why Beam is a better option for certain projects looking to process large amounts of data. Our guests describe how Beam may be a better fit than microservices that could become obsolete as company needs change. Next, we step back and take a look at why batch and stream is the gold standard of data processing because of its balance between low latency and ease of "being done" with data collection. Beam's focus on the correctness of data and correctness in processing that data is a core component. With good data, processing becomes easier, more reliable, and cheaper. Kenn gives examples of how things can go wrong with bad data processing. Beam strives for the perfect combination of low latency, correct data, and affordability. Users can choose where to run Beam pipelines, from other Apache software offerings to Dataflow, which means excellent flexibility. Our guests talk about the pros and cons of some of these options and we hear examples of how companies are using Beam along with supporting software to solve data processing challenges. To get started with Beam, check out Beam College or attend Beam Summit 2022. Kenneth Knowles Kenn Knowles is chair of the Apache Beam Project Management Committee. Kenn has been working on Google Cloud Dataflow—Google's Beam backend—since 2014. Kenn holds a PhD in programming languages from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Pablo Estrada Pablo is a Software Engineer at Google, and a management committee member for Apache Beam. Pablo is big into working on an open source project, and has worked all across the Apache Beam stack. Cool things of the week Under the sea: Building the world's fiber optic internet video Discovering Data Centers videos Google Data Cloud Summit site <li sty

On the podcast this week, your hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani talk about the data processing tool Apache Beam with guests Pablo Estrada and Kenneth Knowles. Kenn starts us off with an overview of how Apache Beam began and how Cloud Dataflow was involved. The unique batch and stream method and emphasis on correctness garnered support from developers early on and continues to attract users. Pablo helps us understand why Beam is a better option for certain projects looking to process large amounts of data. Our guests describe how Beam may be a better fit than microservices that could become obsolete as company needs change. Next, we step back and take a look at why batch and stream is the gold standard of data processing because of its balance between low latency and ease of "being done" with data collection. Beam's focus on the correctness of data and correctness in processing that data is a core component. With good data, processing becomes easier, more reliable, and cheaper. Kenn gives examples of how things can go wrong with bad data processing. Beam strives for the perfect combination of low latency, correct data, and affordability. Users can choose where to run Beam pipelines, from other Apache software offerings to Dataflow, which means excellent flexibility. Our guests talk about the pros and cons of some of these options and we hear examples of how companies are using Beam along with supporting software to solve data processing challenges. To get started with Beam, check out Beam College or attend Beam Summit 2022. Kenneth Knowles Kenn Knowles is chair of the Apache Beam Project Management Committee. Kenn has been working on Google Cloud Dataflow—Google's Beam backend—since 2014. Kenn holds a PhD in programming languages from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Pablo Estrada Pablo is a Software Engineer at Google, and a management committee member for Apache Beam. Pablo is big into working on an open source project, and has worked all across the Apache Beam stack. Cool things of the week Under the sea: Building the world's fiber optic internet video Discovering Data Centers videos Google Data Cloud Summit site <li sty

Stephanie Wong and Debi Cabrera host a special episode highlighting the amazing accomplishments of our guest Vidya Nagarajan Raman as we celebrate Women's History Month! With her more than 20 years of experience fostering growth and monetization in enterprise and education platforms, investing and working in the holistic lifestyle space, and earning her MBA while raising her two children, Vidya has certainly done a lot! Vidya tells us about her latest blog post stressing the importance of being an event-driven organization. In this business structure, reactions to events are planned in advance and developers consider how services are integrated for maximum efficiency. With synchronous extensions, projects retain flexibility in existing applications as they work with Cloud Functions to extend to new areas. Vidya gives our listeners examples of how this works. The journey from engineer to Head of Product Management was an interesting one for Vidya, and she describes how she got started in computer engineering. Her passion for connecting with users later pushed her to product management. She tells us about her contributions to Chromebooks for Education as well as other milestones during her time with Google. Vidya talks about the support system she credits with helping her along the way and gives our listeners advice for finding mentors in their fields. She touches on the challenges she faced, describes what it was like for a woman in the industry when she first started, and offers encouragement to women getting started now. Balancing work, continuing her education, and raising children was tough, but Vidya says that, along with her incredible professional and personal support systems, defining priorities is vital. Vidya offers our listeners the insights she's gained as she's watched Google and workplace teams change and adapt over the years. Building an inclusive team, encouraging diverse perspectives, and defining a framework for settling disagreements are some of the pieces of advice she shares. Don't be afraid to fail and be a risk-taker, Vidya says, because that promotes growth and learning. If you learn something new every day and have fun doing it, then you will be successful. In her spare time, Vidya leads a charitable foundation that partners with organizations in countries like India and Peru to further education, build orphanages and libraries, and provide medical care for women. She is an angel investor and runs workshops on creating a holistic lifestyle to help others lead well-rounded, fulfilling lives. Vidya Nagarajan Raman Vidya Nagarajan Raman is the Head of Product Management for Serverless at Google Cloud. She is also an angel investor, advisor, and co-founder of a holistic lifestyle platform that empowers people to grow and transform

This week, Stephanie Wong and Anthony Bushong introduce a special podcast of the Gtalk at Airbus speaker series where prestigious Googlers have been invited to talk with Airbus. In this episode, Vint Cerf, who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet, talks with Rhys Phillips of Airbus and fellow Googler Rafael Lami Dozo. Vint tells us about his journey to Google, including his interest in science which stemmed from a chemistry set he received as a child. After high school, he got a job writing data analyzation software on the Apollo project. His graduate work at UCLA led him to the ARPANet project where he developed host protocols, and eventually to his work on the original Internet with Bob Kahn. Vint tells us about the security surrounding this project and the importance of internet security still today. The open architecture of the internet then and now excites Vint because it allows new, interesting projects to contribute without barriers. Vint is also passionate about accessibility. At Google, he and his team continue to make systems more accessible by listening to clients and adapting software to make it usable. He sees an opportunity to train developers to optimize software to work with common accessibility tools like screen readers to ensure better usability. Later, Vint tells us about the Interplanetary Internet, describing how this system is being built to provide fast, effective Internet to every part of the planet. Along with groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force, this new Internet is being deployed and tested now to ensure it works as expected. He talks about his work with NASA and other space agencies to grow the Interplanetary Internet. Digital obsolescence is another type of accessibility that concerns Vint. Over time, the loads of data we store and their various storage devices could become unreadable. Software needed to use or see this media could no longer be supported as well, making the data inaccessible. Vint hopes we will begin practicing ways to perpetuate the existence of this data through copying and making software more backward compatible. He addresses the issues with this, including funding. Vint Cerf While at UCLA, Vint Cerf worked on ARPANet - the very beginnings of what we know as the internet today and is now, fittingly, Chief Internet Evangelist & VP at Google. He is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. Rhys Phillips Rhys Phillips is Change and Adoption Leader, Digital Workplace at Airbus. Rafael Lami Dozo Rafael Lami Dozo is Customer Success Manager, Google Cloud Wo

First time co-host Jan Kleinert joins Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about database observability and the cool tools that make it possible. Morgan McLean and Nimesh Bhagat describe database observability, which uses metrics, logs, and other tools to help users understand the health of your database. We talk about Object Relational Mappers and the challenges with using these for debugging database performance. SQL Commenter helps database observability in two ways: it is both a library and a standard, Nimesh tells us. He describes the process for us, detailing exactly how SQL Commenter effects projects. Recently, SQL Commenter was donated to OpenTelemetry to augment the observability offerings, create an application standard, and make it easier for developers to use a variety of different tools and languages. Engineers can get end-to-end traces no matter which database technologies they use. Morgan tells us about Splunk and how information from SQL Commenter is taken into Splunk and used. Backend data like metrics from Cloud Monitoring and client libraries can be correlated together with SQL Commenter and brought into Splunk for full stack observability. Nimesh offers client examples to help us understand how these useful tools integrate for optimal observability. He tells us about the databases and ORMs supported by SQL Commenter. Our guests and co-host Jan give tips to help our listeners get started with SQL Commenter and talk about what they're looking forward to in the future of observability. Nimesh Bhagat Nimesh is a product manager at Google Cloud, he leads Database Observability. He has worked across engineering and product roles, building highly available and high performance enterprise infrastructure used by Fortune 500 companies. His passion lies in combining powerful infrastructure with simple user experience so that every business and developer can build software at scale and velocity. Morgan McLean Morgan is ​​Director of Product Management at Splunk and co-creator of OpenCensus / OpenTelemetry. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Innovators site Redesigning the Cloud SDK + CLI for easier development blog GCP Podcast Episode 291: Redesigning the Cloud SDK and CLI with Wael Manasra and Cody Oss podcast <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level

On the show this week, we're talking about Google Cloud Reader, a nifty podcast we created to narrate Google Tech blog posts. Host Jenny Brown tells us her inspiration for creating Google Cloud Reader and she and cohost Stephanie Wong walk us through a series of published episodes. First up, we learn what Cloud SQL Maintenance is and how customers can customize maintenance schedules to limit the impacts of downtime. Region picker is the topic of our next segment, and we hear how it helps projects stay cost efficient while conserving resources. Using three inputs, companies can decide quickly which region offers the best balance between cost, latency, and carbon footprint for them. Next, we learn about search abandonment's effect on brand loyalty and how important it is for the right products to show in search results. We tackle the working environment with the next piece, redefining productivity to make it more personal and less robotic and offering advice on being productive while maintaining a good work-life balance. Making learning more personalized is the subject of our next segment. We hear how Google is using AI to aid the instruction of students no matter their learning style. Building diversity, equity, and inclusion into companies is important for success, and our last segment offers advice on how to incorporate DEI initiatives to ensure employees feel valued. Cool things of the week Build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex, now generally available blog From watersheds to Koala habitats - tackling ecosystem restoration with data blog Interview Understanding Cloud SQL Maintenance: why is it needed? blog Cloud SQL site Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that's right for you blog Google Cloud Region Picker on GitHub site Reduce your cloud carbon footprint with new Active Assist recommendations <a h

Guests Leigha Jarett and Debi Cabrera from the Looker team join Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about this powerful tool. Looker, Google's data analytics platform, was built to provide enterprise companies with customizable analytics tools that allow anyone to get the data they need when they need it. This facilitates better business decisions. Leigha talks about how Looker and LookML keep data consistent among data analysts no matter where they pull data from or what they do with it. Data is more trustworthy, fostering a positive data-driven business. She details how LookML works, from database connection to metric creation, and tells us how easy it is for non-data engineers to work with as well. Robust data analysis based on trusted data points used to drive decision making is how Looker builds an environment of business intelligence rather than simple reporting. By offering easy integration into other Google tools like Data Studio and BigQuery, Looker is easy to set up, learn, and use. Our guests help listeners navigate Looker's Explore From Here functionality and explain how it could help them answer important business questions. With advanced admin permissioning, Looker also helps limit the chaos that comes with multiple people accessing the same data. Later, we hear real-world examples of companies taking the Looker journey. Our guests offer advice based on these experiences with clients and talk about how client feedback has influenced new Looker tools, like the Looker Tableau Connector that's coming soon. We hear about the relationship between BigQuery and Looker and suggestions for companies newly embarking on their data journey. Leigha Jarett Leigha is a Product Manager for Looker's application platform. She focuses on making Looker both simple and powerful for developers. Debi Cabrera Debi recently became a Developer Advocate after being at Looker for three years as an Engagement Manager and StratOps PgM. You can find her on Linkedin Cool things of the week Introducing a Google Cloud architecture diagramming tool blog Black History Month: Celebrating the success of Black founders with Google Cloud: DOSS blog Interview Looker site <li style="font-weight: 400

On the show this week, Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong share two popular episodes of Bruno Aziza's YouTube series Data Journeys. First up, Bruno talks with Aaron Biller of Postmates about their triangle of complex data that includes customer, courier, and merchant. He details their data storage and analytics structure, describing it as a reverse pyramid of tons of data with few engineers to manage and analyze it. To handle this, Postmates takes a stay-out-of-the-way approach by providing good data and letting the analysts do what they do best without micromanaging. Aaron talks about this data architecture, including the use of BigQuery as data lakes to keep data storage simple, and how Google collaboration tools streamline access and authorization tasks. Communication and flexibility are important, Aaron tells us, and he offers other advice for companies designing data systems. Feedback loops, dedicated training, and an open environment with no silos also help foster a productive, healthy data workplace. Matteo of Delivery Hero speaks to Bruno next. With the goal of increasing their global reach and offerings, it's important that Delivery Hero has a smooth data system. Matteo outlines the new data structure they've built to ease onboarding of new companies and territories and describes different use cases for their data. From determining the number of delivery people necessary in each area to offering personalized customer recommendations, Delivery Hero uses Google offerings like Google Analytics and BigQuery to interpret collected data. Matteo details how they tailor data infrastructures for each use case and offers tips to help companies think through their data infrastructure design. Don't work in a bubble, Matteo stresses, and focus on thorough onboarding of team members and clear communication with colleagues and customers. Bruno Aziza Bruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud. He specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence. Before working at Google, he worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led a big turnarounds in the business analytics industry. Bruno also had the opportunity to help launch startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco). Sisense and AtScale and helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. He has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany and has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management. In his spare time, Bruno writes a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics. Aaron Biller Aaron is the Manager of Data Engineering at Postmates. Matteo Fava Matteo is Se

Brian Dorsey and Kaslin Fields welcome Kat Cosgrove of Pulumi this week to talk about what's new with Kubernetes 1.24. Pulumi is infrastructure as code, allowing developers to use whatever language they are comfortable with to create and test infrastructure. Kat walks us through typical Pulumi infrastructure test scenarios to demonstrate the benefits of this software, especially with GCP. In the new Kubernetes release, one of the biggest updates is the removal of Dockershim. If you're using a managed Kubernetes service through GCP, this update should not affect you, Kat tells us. She clears up some common Docker misconceptions and tells us how Kubernetes and Docker still work together. Kat describes the situations where this update might affect certain projects and how to tell if you're one of the unlucky few. Later, we talk about the future of tech conferences. Kat is excited to get back to some in-person learning and networking, but at the same time, is hopeful that conferences will continue a hybrid model and allow some online interaction. Pulumi will be at KubeCon, Devlopsdays, and Jfokus in the next few months with some cool new free merchandise. Kat Cosgrove Kat is Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi. Cool things of the week Find products faster with the new All products page blog Introducing Ephemeral Containers blog Open sourcing the App Engine Standard Java runtime blog Interview Pulumi site Kubernetes site Docker site Kubernetes 1.24 Release Notes site GKE site We Didn't Start the Fire: Communication Breakdowns and How to Prevent Them - Ian Coldwater, Twilio & Kat Cosgrove, JFrog <a href= "https://www.you

This week on the podcast, Wael Manasra and Cody Oss join hosts Carter Morgan and Mark Mirchandani to chat about new branding in Cloud SDK and gcloud CLI. Google Cloud SDK was built and designed to take over mundane development tasks, allowing engineers to focus on specialized features and solutions. The SDK documentation and tutorials are an important part of this as well. With clear instructions, developers can easily make use of Cloud SDK. Software Development Kits have evolved so much over the years that recently, Cody, Wael, and their teams have found it necessary to redefine and rethink SDKs. The popularity of cloud projects and distributed systems, for example, means changes to kit requirements. The update is meant to reevaluate the software included in SDKs and CLIs and to more accurately represent what the products offer. Giving developers the tools they need in the place they work means giving developers code language options, providing thorough instruction, and listening to feedback. These are the goals of this redesign. The Google Cloud SDK contains downloadable parts and web publications. Our guests explain the types of software and documentation in each group and highlight the importance of documentation and supporting materials like tutorials. The Cloud Console is a great place for developers to start building solutions using the convenient point-and-click tools that are available. When these actions need to be repeated, the downloadable Command Line Interface tool can do the work. Cody talks about authentication and gcloud, including its relationship to client libraries. He walks us through the steps a typical developer might take when using Google products and how they relate to the SDK and CLI. Through examples, Wael helps us further understand client libraries and how they can interact with the CLI. The Cloud SDK is a work in progress. Our guests welcome your feedback for future updates! Wael Manasra Wael manages the gcloud CLI, the client libraries for all GCP services, and the general Cloud SDK developer experience. Cody Oss Cody works on the Go Cloud Client libraries where he strives to provide an delightful and idiomatic experience to all the Gophers on Google Cloud. Cool things of the week Google Tau VMs deliver over 40% price-performance advantage to customers blog Find products faster with the new All products page blog</li

Carter Morgan and Stephanie Wong host Shopify guests Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson this week. Shopify streamlines the online purchasing process so merchants and customers can transact with confidence. Camilo and Tai talk in-depth about Shopify's tech stack and why the choices made are so important to performance. Shopify engineers use a combination of Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Google products like Kubernetes. Resiliency systems like active-active configurations, chat ops for quick solutions, and bot and overload protection are worked in. By leveraging these tools and staying flexible in their resiliency efforts, Shopify is able to adjust to new merchant requirements and teams are able to work efficiently. While tech continues to progress and change, the Shopify culture remains a driving force for advancement, Camilo tells us. The company ideals and axioms help steer the brand and dictate which technologies they'll use to solve new and changing client demands. The 2014 outage shaped the future of these cultural ideals, emphasizing the need for quick action and resiliency components like constraints to ensure system safety. Shopify engineers also built enhanced testing tools like Toxiproxy to simulate poor network conditions and account for potential issues. The 2021 Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping season was Shopify's biggest yet. Camilo and Tai describe how Shopify's resiliency culture and intense prep work made the biggest shopping weekend of the year so successful. By offering educational tools and a support network that values good communication, their company culture continues to grow, and Tai tells us how it's not just the software that should be resilient. Building a resilient, flexible company culture is just as important. Camilo talks about Shopify's recent shift to a completely remote work place and the new challenges and opportunities it presents. Camilo Lopez Camilo has worked at Shopify for more than 10 years, he has been an IC and a manager leading teams that take care of Shopify's scalability and resiliency. Tai Dickerson Tai is a production engineer at Shopify, where she shares her passion for resilience engineering with others via paper discussions and as a leader in Shopify's Resiliency SIG. Cool things of the week Machine images is GA docs New Cloud Logging and Monitoring capabilities Monitoring third-party applications: MariaDB <a href= "https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/age

We're back for a new, exciting year of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast! Mark Mirchandani and Carter Morgan start 2022 with a jointly hosted interview with Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock of the Cloud Security Podcast team. Our guest, Phil Venables, is here to tell us about the driving trends in cloud security today. Phil starts the show with a discussion on the advances in cloud security in general and how it compares with on-prem security. Megatrends like economies of scale and competition between cloud providers benefit cloud users by allowing better security for less money. Cloud environments tend to be simpler and therefore easier to manage, and with scaling and geographic location options, cloud projects allow more flexibility to reach security and sustainability goals. Phil talks about the iteration process of advances in security based on customer requirements and how this builds client trust. The Shared Responsibility Model, where the cloud provider runs a secure infrastructure and the customer configures their project securely in the cloud, is a great start, Phil tells us. But with Shared Fate, he sees the provider crossing the responsibility barrier to work together with the client towards a secure project through actions like analyzation of security defaults. Customer feedback helps Google Cloud make a better product, which in turn helps customers, creating an environment of reliability and shared trust. We talk about how the Shared Fate model and shared incentives work together to create a closer partnership between cloud providers and customers, and Phil elaborates on the idea of project security as an immune system. We tackle the idea of security diversity and whether it benefits clients to expand their security outside of cloud provider offerings. Phil helps security novices understand valuable feature-add security services and what to look for in the future. Phil Venables Phil leads the risk, security, compliance, and privacy teams for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google Cloud, Phil was a Partner at Goldman Sachs where he held multiple roles over a long career, initially as their first Chief Information Security Officer, a role he held for 17 years. Before Goldman Sachs, Phil held multiple CISO roles as well as senior engineering roles across a range of finance, energy and technology companies. Cool things of the week 2022 Resolution: Learn Google Cloud, free of charge blog How to build a vir

We're finishing out 2021 with a celebration of our favorite episodes and topics from the year! From new tools for Cost Optimization in GKE and advances in AI to tips for improving feelings of imposter syndrome, Carter Morgan, Stephanie Wong, and Mark Mirchandani share memorable moments from 2021 and look forward to future episodes. Carter Morgan Carter Morgan is Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, where he creates and hosts content on Google's Youtube channel, co-hosts several Google Cloud podcasts, and designs courses like the Udacity course "Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes" he co-created with Kelsey Hightower. Carter Morgan is an international standup comedian, who's approach of creating unique moments with the audience in front of him has seen him perform all over the world, including in Paris, London, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Joe White. And in 2019, and the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previously, he was a programmer for the USAF and Microsoft. Stephanie Wong Stephanie Wong is a Developer Advocate focusing on online content across all Google Cloud products. She's a host of the GCP Podcast and the Where the Internet Lives podcast, along with many GCP Youtube video series. She is the winner of a 2021 Webby Award for her content about data centers. Previously she was a Customer Engineer at Google and at Oracle. Outside of her tech life she is a former pageant queen and hip hop dancer and has an unhealthy obsession with dogs. Mark Mirchandani Mark Mirchandani is a developer advocate for Google Cloud, occasional host of the Google Cloud Platform podcast, and helps create content for users. Cool things of the week Anthos Multi-Cloud v2 is generally available docs Machine learning, Google Kubernetes Engine, and more: 10 free training offers to take advantage of before 2022 blog The past, present, and future of Kubernetes with Eric Brewer blog GCP Podcast Episode 124: VP of Infrastructure Eric Brewer <a href= "https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/episode-124-vp