Google Cloud Platform Podcast

We have the pleasure this week of having the Director of Solutions for Google Cloud Miles Ward and Cloud Solutions Architect Grace Mollison join Mark and Melanie to discuss Solution Architects, what they do and how they interact with Customers at Google Cloud Platform. Miles Ward Miles Ward is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur with a decade of experience building cloud infrastructures. Miles is Director of Solutions for Google Cloud; focused on delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization. He worked as a core part of the Obama for America 2012 “TECH” team, crashed Twitter a few times, helped NASA stream the Curiosity Mars Rover landing, put Skype back online in a pinch, and plays a mean electric sousaphone. Grace Mollison Based in London, UK, Grace Mollison is a Cloud Solutions Architect where she helps customers to understand how to apply policies to their Google cloud platform environments as

In this episode, Google Play Marketing is the customer of Google Cloud Platform. Melanie and Mark chat with Dom Elliott (Google Play) and Stewart Bryson (Red Pill Analytics) about how they use our big data processing and visualisation tools to introspect what is happening in the Google play ecosystem. Dom Elliott Dom Elliott leads global developer marketing communications for Google Play. His goal is to help Android app and game developers improve their app quality and business performance on Google Play, by raising awareness and understanding of features that can help them find success. Stewart Bryson Stewart Bryson is the Owner & Co-founder of Red Pill Analytics, a products and services company specializing in Cloud Analytics delivery. Red Pill is 4 years old and has about 30 employees in the US, UK and Brazil. We work with customers to accelerate their use of the public cloud for analytics, including migrating current on-premises workloads. Red Pill Analytics was engaged by Google Play to build the dig

This week, we dive into machine learning bias and fairness from a social and technical perspective with machine learning research scientists Timnit Gebru from Microsoft and Margaret Mitchell (aka Meg, aka M.) from Google. They share with Melanie and Mark about ongoing efforts and resources to address bias and fairness including diversifying datasets, applying algorithmic techniques and expanding research team expertise and perspectives. There is not a simple solution to the challenge, and they give insights on what work in the broader community is in progress and where it is going. Timnit Gebru Timnit Gebru works in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at the New York Lab. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was a PhD student in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that a

Yifei Feng talks with Mark and Melanie about working on the open source TensorFlow platform, the recent 1.5 release, and how her team engages and supports the growing community. She provides a great overview of what its like to work on an open source project and ways to get involved especially for anyone new to contributing. Yifei Feng Yifei is a software engineer on TensorFlow team. Her main focus is building tools and infractures to help TensorFlow engineers do their best work. She works on release and the open source process of TensorFlow. She also worked on TensorFlow’s high level API and TensorFlow Serving. Cool things of the week TensorFlow 1.5 Release blog Use Forseti to make sure your Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are updated for Meltdown and Spectre blog GCP arrives in Canada with launch of Montreal region blog Interview TensorFlow site and github TensorFlow Contributing Guidelines page TensorFlow Summit site Stack Overflow site TensorFlow with Eli Bixby podcast Cloud Machine Learning Eng

We return once again to Continuous Integration tooling, this time with a visual spin. Mike Fotinakis joins Mark and Melanie to discuss how they use Google Cloud Platform to develop Percy, the platform for continuous visual reviews for web apps. Mike Fotinakis Mike is Co-Founder and CEO of Percy, where he is working on problems at the intersection of design, development, and deployment. Mike has previously worked as an engineer at companies including Google, Science Exchange, and AltSchool, and is now enjoying building his first company from the ground up. Sometimes, he even enjoys things that don’t involve computers at all, including rock climbing, coffee, classical singing, and scuba diving. Cool things of the week OpenCensus: A Stats Collection and Distributed Tracing Framework blog medium London Zoo trials facial recognition technology to help track elephants in the wild blog Cloud Dataflow and the Tram Challenge youtube Interview Percy site docs Google Kubernetes Engine site docs Google Cloud Storage

The delightful Sam Ramji joins Mark and Melanie this week to talk about Google Cloud Platform, Open Source, Distributed Systems and Philosophy and how they are all interrelated. Sam Ramji A 20+ year veteran of the Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes, Sam Ramji is VP Product Management for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He was the founding CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, was Chief Strategy Officer for Apigee (APIC), designed and led Microsoft’s open source strategy, founded the Outercurve Foundation, and drove product strategy for BEA WebLogic Integration. Previously he built distributed systems and client software at firms including Broderbund, Fair Isaac, and Ofoto. He is an advisor to multiple companies including Accenture, Insight Engines, and the Linux Foundation, and served on the World Economic Forum’s Industrial Internet Working Group. He received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from UCSD in 1994. Cool things of the week An example escalation policy — CRE life lessons blog The new Google Arts &

Amy Unruh and Sara Robinson join the podcast this week to talk with Mark and Melanie about the alpha launch of Cloud AutoML Vision. Cloud AutoML is a suite of products enabling developers with limited ML expertise to build high quality models using transfer learning and Neural Architecture Search techniques. AutoML Vision is the first product out the gate with a focus on making it easy to train customized vision models. About Amy Unruh Amy is a developer relations engineer for the Google Cloud Platform, where she focuses on machine learning and data analytics as well as other Cloud Platform technologies. Amy has an academic background in CS/AI and has also worked at several startups, done industrial R&D, and published a book on App Engine. About Sara Robinson Sara is a developer relations engineer on Google’s Cloud Platform team, focusing on big data and machine learning. She worked on providing initial product feedback and building a demo for the AutoML Vision launch. Cool things of the week Google Brai

Bringing you a special second episode this week with Matt Linton and Paul Turner sharing insights with Mark and Melanie about the CPU vulnerabilities, Spectre & Meltdown, and how Google coordinated and managed security with the broader community. We talked about how there has been minimal to no performance impact for GCP users and GCP’s Live Migration helped deploy patches and mitigations without requiring maintenance downtime. Due to the special nature, no cool things or question included on this podcast. About Matt Linton Matt is an Incident Manager (aka Chaos Specialists) for Google, which means his team is on-call to handle suspected security incidents and other major urgent issues. About Paul Turner Paul is a Software Engineer specializing in operating systems, concurrency, and performance. Interview Protecting our Google Cloud customers from new vulnerabilities without impacting performance blog What Google Cloud, G Suite and Chrome customers need to know about the CPU vulnerability blog Google S

Launchpad Studio, a product development acceleration program focused on helping machine learning startups iterate quickly, fail fast, and collaborate on best practices. Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig talk with Mark and Melanie this week about how the Launchpad Studio program is helping startups overcome data, expertise and tooling barriers by providing access to talent and resources and building universal best practices. About Malika Cantor Malika is the Global Lead for Google Launchpad Studio. Launchpad is the acceleration engine of Google - running a number of accelerator programs focused on supporting the global startup ecosystem. Prior to joining Google, Malika was a co-founder and partner at Comet Labs, a venture capital firm and experimental research lab focused on investing and supporting applied AI startups. She has worked with founders for around 6 years, in London, Beijing, Singapore, Toronto, and Silicon Valley. About Peter Norvig Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google; previously he dire

This week we get the band back together! Francesc Campoy Flores rejoins the show along with Director of Google Cloud Developer Relations Greg Wilson to talk all about 2017 and Google Cloud with Mark and Melanie About Francesc Campoy Flores Francesc Campoy Flores is the VP of Developer Relations at source{d}, He’s also a Gopher, Catalan, LGBTQIA advocate, previous Google employee (and Podcast host), and creator of the Just For Func YouTube series! About Greg Wilson Greg Wilson is the Director of Google Cloud Developer Relations, overseeing developer relations work across both G Suite and Google Cloud Platform. Cool things of the week Jeff Dean’s talk at NIPS on ML for Systems and Systems for ML sides The Case for Learned Index Structures paper KubeFlow github hackernews Manage Google Kubernetes Engine from Cloud Console dashboard, now generally available blog Interview Top 5 Downloaded Episode of 2017 #88 Kubernetes 1.7 with Tim Hockin #91 The Future of Media with Machine Learning with Amit Pande #93 W

Deep Kapadia and JP Robinson from New York Times join Mark and Francesc to discuss how they use Google Cloud Platform to serve the New York Times to its readers. About JP Robinson JP Robinson maintains NYT’s internal and open source tools and frameworks that are related to the Go programming language. He also lead backend development of NYT’s games platform. Recently his team completely rewrote our backend with Go and GCP tools. In doing so they’ve managed to significantly lower request latencies and cut costs in half. About Deep Kapadia Deep Kapadia manages the Infrastructure and Delivery Engineering, Site Reliability and Test Automation teams at The New York Times. His teams are responsible for providing other engineering teams with tools and processes needed to get their jobs done on a day to day basis. His teams recently have been working on building the GKE deployment pipeline and enabling other teams to migrate to the Cloud from our physical datacenters and also moving their entire edge and routing cach

Myles Borins talks with Mark and Francesc about Node.js from its history, how to contribute, the consensus-seeking governance, and why it’s important to Google Cloud Platform. Node.js is an open-source, JavaScript runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, and Google is a Platinum Member of the Node.js Foundation. About Myles Borins Myles Borins is a developer, musician, artist, and maker he works for Google as a developer advocate serving the Node.js ecosystem he graduated with a Master of Music Science and Technology from c.c.r.m.a. a.k.a the center for computer research in music and acoustics Cool things of the week Reduced GPU prices on GCP and preemptible local SSDs blog Skylake processors now available in 7 regions blog New Episodes of Learn TensorFlow and Deep Learning, without a PhD: Modern Convolutional Neural Nets video Modern RNN Architectures video Deep Reinforcement Leanring video Interview Node.js site Node.js on Google Cloud Platform site docs Node School site Node.js w

On this week’s podcast, Eric Anderson shares how Dataprep helps summarize, transform, visualize and cleanup data on the Google Cloud Platform. When doing data analysis, typically data munging can take up most of the time and this serverless tool helps optimize the process. About Eric Anderson Eric is a Product Manager at Google working on Cloud Dataprep and recently Cloud Dataflow. Previously he was at Amazon Web Services, Harvard Business School, General Electric and University of Utah. He’s from Salt Lake City, Utah and lives in Mountain View, California with and wife and three kids. Cool things of the week Intel Performance Libraries and Python Distribution enhance performance and scaling of Intel Xeon Scalable (‘Skylake’) processors on GCP blog The hidden costs of cloud blog and Server Density podcast Monitor and manage your costs with Cloud Platform billing export to BigQuery blog and Public Datasets podcast Kaggle TensorFlow Speech Recognition Challenge site Interview Cloud Dataprep site docs Clo

Colt McAnalis joins the podcast this week to talk about his Performance Atlas series where he dives into how to make Google Cloud applications faster and cheaper. In his words, his job is to help get someone promoted. About Colt McAnlis Colt McAnlis is a Developer Advocate at Google focusing on performance & compression. Before that, he was a graphics programmer in the games industry working at Blizzard, Microsoft (Ensemble), and Petroglyph. He’s been an Adjunct Professor at SMU Guildhall, a UDACITY instructor (twice), and a Book Author, (twice). When he’s not working with developers, Colt spends his time preparing for an invasion of giant ants from outer space. Cool things of the week With Multi-Region Support in Cloud Spanner, have your cake and eat it too blog The State of Data Science & Machine Learning by Kaggle blog and podcast Introducing Certified Kubernetes (and Google Kubernetes Engine!) blog Interview Performance Atlas series Profiling App Engine (Standard) Boot Time video TCP BBR s

Brian Granatir comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about the New Zealand company Smart Parking taking advantage of IoT Core and our Serverless products! This is also the inaugural episode of Melanie joining Mark on the podcast! About Brian Granatir Brian Granatir has been developing for the cloud since the beginning, back in 2007. He left Oregon and moved to New Zealand to be with his future wife in 2014. In 2017, he joined Smart Parking to help with the development of their new Smart City platform built on GCP. Before becoming a developer, Brian spent 3 years as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Cool things of the week Demystifying ML: How machine learning is used for speech recognition blog GCP arrives in India with launch of Mumbai region blog Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL adds high availability and replication blog Interview Smart Parking site IoT Core site docs Cloud Pub/Sub site docs Cloud Functions site docs Cloud Datastore site docs BigQuery site docs Google Data Studio site docs Question of t

It’s time to learn everything about Cloud IoT Core from Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager, and Gabe Weiss, Developer Advocate on IoT. Listen to Mark and Francesc ask all of the questions you had about IoT but didn’t dare to ask. About Indranil Chakraborty Indranil is a product manager for Google Cloud Platform and leads product strategy and development for Cloud IoT Core. Previously, he held product management roles at Google Fiber and sales strategy roles for Google AdWords. Indranil holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson. About Gabe Weiss Gabe works on the Google Cloud Platform team ensuring that developers can make awesome things, both inside and outside of Google. Focused primarily on the Internet of Things, it’s his job to be sure IoT devices can play nicely with the GCP ecosystem. That’s everything from speaking at conferences, writing example code, running bootcamps, writing technical blogs or just doing some hand holding. Prior to Google he’s worked in virtual reality production and distribution, source

Google, the Cloud, or podcasts would not exist without the internet, so it’s with an incredible honor that we celebrate our 100th episode with one of its creators: Vint Cerf. Listen to Mark and Francesc talk about the origins, current trends, and the future of the internet with one of the best people to cover the topic. About Vint Cerf Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998.

Firebase Developer Advocate David East joins Francesc and Mark to discuss the mega powerful combination of Firebase Hosting and Cloud Functions for Firebase! About David East David East is a Developer Advocate for Firebase at Google. Web die-hard. Also possibly the shortest bio on the podcast. Cool things of the week Introducing custom roles, a powerful way to make Cloud IAM policies more precise blog Serverless Transfer Learning with Cloud ML Engine and Keras blog Five things learned using terraform to manage cloud infrastructure blog Interview Firebase Hosting site docs Cloud Functions for Firebase site docs Cloud Functions for Firebase Sample Library github Serve Dynamic Content with Cloud Functions docs Cloud Hosting: Deploying Your Site docs Express Javascript Framework site Cache Control Headers w3c Server-side Rendering with JavaScript Frameworks youtube Node.js apps on Firebase Hosting Crash Course youtube Question of the week How do I learn more about Google Cloud? I love the docs, but I’m l

This summer (aka Australian winter) a new Cloud Region was announced in Australia and today Francesc and Mark talk to two Australian engineers, Andrew Walker founder of 3wks and Graham Polley, about how this new region has changed the way they think about the cloud down under. About Andrew Walker Andrew is the founder of 3wks who have delivered 190 projects on Google Cloud platform for enterprise customers in Australia. He loves everything serverless, from App Engine through to BigQuery. About Graham Polley Graham is a senior software engineer based out of Melbourne Australia, and works for Shine Solutions. Shine are a enterprise digital consultancy with offices in Melbourne & Sydney. Being an official Google Developer Expert, he’s passionate about promoting the adoption of cloud technologies into software development, and regularly blogs and gives presentations. He has extensive experience in building big data solutions for clients using the Google technology stack, and in particular with BigQuery &

Dan McGrath and Alex Dufetel join Francesc and Mark in the studio this week to discuss Cloud Firestore, the brand new, fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. About Dan McGrath Dan McGrath is the Product Manager for Cloud working on databases such as Cloud Firestore. Dan has spent the last decade working in product & engineering for large scale database systems. He has a background in banking software, databases, and information security. About Alex Dufetel Alex Dufetel is a Product Manager for the Firebase team at Google, working on Backend-as-Service products such as the Realtime Database and Cloud Firestore. Alex was previously Director of Products at Fuze, a video conferencing and enterprise communications provider and, before that, a co-founder of LiveMinutes, a real-time team collaboration app. Cool things of the week Extending per second billing in Google Cloud blog PHP 7.1 for Google App Engine is generally available blog Java 8 on App Engine standard environme