Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Mark Mirchandani and Michelle Casbon take over the show this week to discuss AI and the PAIR Guidebook to Human-Centered AI. Mark Mandel pops in on the interview, and Di Dang, Design Advocate at Google, talks about her role in designing and building the guidebook with the intent of helping others create quality AI projects. Di describes human-centered AI as a practice of not only being conscious of the project being built, but also considering how this AI project will impact us as humans at the end of the day. We influence machine learning so much, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it’s our job to look at the project and results as a whole. In the guidebook, topics like data bias in machine learning, what design patterns work, how to establish trust with the user, and more are addressed. Di explains that the guidebook is a work in progress that will develop with input from users and advances in technology. Di Dang Di Dang recently joined Google’s Design Relations team as a Design Advocate supporting

On the podcast today we have a fascinating interview from our time at Cloud Next ‘19! Mark and Jon went in-depth with Andrew Davidson about MongoDB to find out what they do and how they do it. MongoDB is a document database that stores JSON natively, making it super easy for developers to work with data in a way that’s similar to how they think about building applications. The database is scalable, highly available by default with built-in replication, has an intuitive query language, and can be run anywhere. MongoDB Atlas is a global database service that runs on Google Cloud; it automates deployment and provisioning, and ongoing operations such as maintenance, upgrades, and scaling with no downtime. Atlas is a declarative model to manage your databases easily, is easy to migrate to, and offers advanced features such as global clusters for low latency read and write access anywhere in the world. In the future, Andrew sees a world where we think in terms of JSON-style documents instead of just tables. MongoDB

Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman are here today to teach Aja and Mark about Professional Services Organization (PSO) at Google Cloud. PSO is the “post sales” department, helping clients come up with solutions for security, data migration, AI, ML, and more. Listen in to this episode to learn more about the specifics of the PSO! Ann Wallace Ann Wallace is the Global Security Practice Lead for Google PSO. She has spent the last 6 months building out the security practice. Ann is passionate about inclusion in tech. She is the West regional lead for Google Cloud EDII and a volunteer with Women Who Code Portland. Before Google Ann spent 14 years at Nike in various engineering and architecture roles. CloudNOW named her one of the top 10 Women in Cloud in 2015. When not working, Ann can be found ultra-trail running around the world. Michael Wallman Michael Wallman is a TPM, working on Cloud Migration for internal Alphabet companies and acquisitions. He also serves as the America’s infrastructure practice lead. He is i

Mark Mirchandani is our Mark this week, joining new host Michelle Casbon in a recap of their favorite things at Next! The main story this episode is Cloud Run, and Gabi and Mark met up with Steren Giannini and Ryan Gregg at Cloud Next to learn more about it. Announced at Next, Cloud Run brings serverless to containers! It offers great options and security, and the client only pays for what they use. With containers, developers can use any language, any library, any software, anything! Two versions of Cloud Run were released last week. Cloud Run is the fully managed, hosted service for running serverless containers. The second version, Cloud Run GKE, provides a lot of the same benefits, but runs the compute inside your Kubernetes container. It’s easy to move between the two if your needs change as well. Steren Giannini Steren is a Product Manager in the Google Cloud Platform serverless team. He graduated from École Centrale Lyon, France and then was CTO of a startup that created mobile and multi-device solutio

Welcome to day three of Next! More awesome interviews await in this episode, as hosts Mark Mirchandani, Aja Hammerly, Mark Mandel, Jon Foust and their guests explore more of Next. To start, Dan of Viacom joins Mark and Jon to talk about his job in the TV business and why he loves Istio. Host-turned-guest Aja and Lauren of the Developer Relations team sat in the booth to talk with the Marks about the developer keynote at Next. Aja and Lauren elaborate on how they work to promote Next and put together content inclusive of all aspects of Google Cloud. Mark and Mark hear how Yuri from Scotiabank is using Kubernetes to help advance Scotiabank’s latest projects. Anthony from Google joins the conversation, too. And lastly, we tease you with a short interview with Andrew of MongoDB to speak more on the partnership between MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud. Andrew will be joining us for a full interview on the podcast later this year! Interviews Cloud Next site Next On Air site Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 3 Run Channel v

The podcast celebrates day two of Next as our hosts speak with some more conference attendees. Andre came by to talk with Aja and Jon about his work with Stackdriver IRM and their mission for fewer, shorter, and smaller outages. We had three hosts in the booth with guest, Anne, who works for the GCP Trust and Security Product Team. Brian, Mark, and Aja find out exactly what Anne does at GCP and how she’s enjoying Next! Brian and Mark also met up with Mario who came all the way from Munich, Germany. Mario runs the Cloud Community in his hometown, and he shared his thoughts on Anthos and what he’s excited about at Next. Last but not least, Valentin stopped by to talk with Mark and Jon about Go and the presentation he’s giving at Next on site performance. Interviews Cloud Next site Next On Air site Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 2 Run Channel video Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 2 Build Channel video Stackdriver site Stackdriver Incident Response and Management site Stackdriver Incident Response and Management document

We’re at Cloud Next this week with special guests, special hosts, and more! On day one, Gabi and new host Mark Mirchandani were able to speak with Jonathan Cham, Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, about his experiences with Google Next. Ori of the Cloud SQL team shared exciting news about Cloud SQL Server. Later, Aja was joined by co-host Brian Dorsey who elaborated on his Next talk, as well as his favorite things at Next. They were able to get a quick interview with Matt and Nate about Skuid and what they’re looking forward to at Cloud Next. Jose and Bryan of Onix stopped by as well to talk about their company and their experiences in comedy! Interviews Cloud Next site Next On Air site Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 1 Run Channel video Cloud Next Opening Keynote video Anthos site Cloud SQL site SQL Server on Google Cloud site Skuid site Firebase site Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL site Google Compute Engine site Onix site Cloud Search site OnSpend site GSuite site Onix Outreach site Where can you find us next? We’re

Gabi is back with Mark this week in an interview with Connor Gilbert of StackRox, a Kubernetes security company. StackRox uses Kubernetes and containers to maximize security for customers across the container lifecycle. Connor explains how they monitor your containers through building, deploying, and finally the running of the application, and keep your project secure through all stages. StackRox identifies risks and weak areas, then responds in real time. Connor’s advice for our listeners is to understand what’s going on with your containers and your application. Look at the data, the specs, and your options and then, if-needed, adjust the defaults to optimize the security of your app. Connor Gilbert Connor Gilbert is a product manager at StackRox, a Kubernetes security company, where he contributes to product vision and advocates for customer needs. Connor previously worked in architecture and engineering roles at StackRox. Before that, as Security Research Scientist at Qadium, he built tools to uncover net

Today on the podcast, we speak with Ian Buck and Kari Briski of NVIDIA about new updates and achievements in deep learning. Ian begins by telling hosts Jon and Mark about his first project at NVIDIA, CUDA, and how it has helped expand and pave the way for future projects in super computing, AI, and gaming. CUDA is used extensively in computer vision, speech and audio applications, and machine comprehension, Kari elaborates. NVIDIA recently announced their new Tensor Cores, which maximize their GPUs and make it easier for users to achieve peak performance. Working with the Tensor Cores, TensorFlow AMP is an acceleration into the TensorFlow Framework. It automatically makes the right choices for neural networks and maximizes performance, while still maintaining accuracy, with only a two line change in Tensor Flow script. Just last year, NVIDIA announced their T4 GPU with Google Cloud Platform. This product is designed for inferences, the other side of AI. Because AI is becoming so advanced, complicated, and fas

World Pi Day is behind us, but our guest today, Emma Iwao, joins hosts Gabi and Mark to teach us all about pi. Pi is the constant of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Anytime you see a circle on a computer, pi has been used. It’s vital for everything from gaming to calculating rocket trajectories! Emma crushed the world record for calculating digits of pi using Google Cloud over four months! Listen in to hear more about how she did it! Emma Haruka Iwao Emma is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform, focusing on application developers’ experience and high performance computing. She has been a C++ developer for 15 years and worked on embedded systems and the Chromium Project. Emma is passionate about learning and explaining the most fundamental technologies such as operating systems, distributed systems, and internet protocols. Besides software engineering, she likes games, traveling, and eating delicious food. Cool things of the week The Next OnAir site is live today and provides

Jon Foust is back with Mark this week as we talk about SAP HANA, a data and application platform. Lucia Subatin and Kevin Nelson elaborate, explaining that SAP HANA is engineered for running SAP business applications. It is capable of handling large transactions very quickly and with great flexibility. With HANA, you don’t move data around, so you can run transaction workloads, as well as analytics, etc. in the same platform. By teaming up with GCP, SAP HANA ensures that their enterprise users will have scalability and storage no matter how their businesses grow. GCP and SAP HANA developers have been working together to continue to make the products better. Lucia Subatin Lucia, Developer Advocate for SAP, is a proud geek. Her mission is to bring developers closer to SAP HANA and optimal enterprise solutions. Her contribution towards the community is based on enabling content and facilitating adoption by exploring and sharing more and better ways to capitalize the power of the platform. Kevin Nelson Kevin is a

Mark and Brian Dorsey spend today talking Python with Dustin Ingram. Python is an interpreted, dynamically typed language, which encourages very readable code. Python is popular for web applications, data science, and much more! Python works great on Google Cloud, especially with App Engine, Compute Engine, and Cloud Functions. To learn more about best (and worst) use cases, listen in! Dustin Ingram Dustin Ingram is a Developer Advocate at Google, focused on supporting the Python community on Google Cloud. He’s also a member of the Python Packaging Authority, maintainer of PyPI, and organizer for the PyTexas conference. Cool things of the week Machine learning can boost the value of wind energy blog Compute Engine Guest Attributes site Colopl open sourced a Cloud Spanner driver for Laravel framework site Running Redis on GCP: four deployment scenarios blog Interview GCP Podcast Episode 3: Kubernetes and Google Container Engine podcast Python site Extending Python with C or C++ docs PyPy site PyPI site

Node.js is our topic this week as Mark and first-time host, Jon Foust, pick the brain of Myles Borins. Myles updates us on all the new things happening with Node.js, including the new .dev site that holds a ton of documentation to help people get started. Node.js now integrates with Cloud Build, the Node.js foundation has some new developments, and Google App Engine supports Node.js. The group has also been working on serverless containers. Myles Borins Myles Borins is a developer, musician, artist, and maker. They work for Google as a developer advocate serving the Node.js ecosystem. Myles cares about the open web and healthy communities. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next ‘19 session guide now available blog Introducing scheduled snapshots for Compute Engine persistent disk blog Reliable task scheduling on Compute Engine with Cloud Scheduler site How to make a self-destructing VM on Google Cloud Platform article Making AI-powered speech more accessible—now with more options, lower prices, and ne

We’re learning all about Cloud SQL this week with our guest, Amy Krishnamohan. Amy’s main job is to teach customers about the products she represents. Today, she explains to Mark and Gabi that Cloud SQL manages services for open source databases, and she spends a little time elaborating on the other database management services Google has to offer. Cloud SQL is a relational data storage solution. Relational data storage is very structured, almost like a table or spreadsheet, making it easier to analyze the data. Cloud SQL is capable of scaling out and up, meaning it can scale for traffic patterns and for storage. In comparison, NoSQL databases are very unstructured. If you’re not sure what kind of data is coming in, you can sort the data first and analyze it later. Each approach has its pros and cons and each is suitable for different types of projects. Recently, Cloud SQL released a feature making it easy to move from on-prem to the cloud. In the future, they will continue to streamline the process of moving

Today, Mohamed El-Geish joins us to talk about the voice AI technology powering Voicea. Gabi is back on the host bench with Mark as we learn how Voicea can improve productivity. EVA, the voice assistant, will record important information for you so you can focus on your meeting and will create tasks lists to help you stay organized. Voicea integrates well with multiple platforms to help accomplish your goals as well. You can send messages to Slack, add tasks to your Basecamp list, and more. Mohamed explains the process of building Voicea and how machine learning techniques and user feedback have helped make it such a useful tool. Now, Voicea is working to incorporate video, allowing users to play back things like important meeting slides. Mohamed El-Geish Mohamed El-Geish is the Chief Architect and co-founder at Voicea (formerly Voicera), a voice AI technology company based in Menlo Park, Calif. Voicea leverages AI technology to harness voice in the workplace to increase productivity through EVA, Voicea’s Ent

First-time host, Aja, joins Mark today to talk Go Cloud Functions with two Google colleagues! Stewart, lead Product Manager on Google Cloud Functions, and Tyler, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, start the show by explaining the purpose of Cloud Functions. It is a serverless compute product that supports many programming languages, scales automatically, and only charges for what you use. It works best as event-driven computing, in other words, when something happens, you want something else to happen in response. Cloud Functions also works well between clouds or even Google Cloud services, acting as the glue between them. Go Cloud Functions works specifically for Go. Google makes a huge effort to make Cloud Functions easy to use for all developers, so that no matter what language you’re familiar with, Cloud Functions works for you. Stewart Reichling Stewart Reichling is the lead Product Manager on Google Cloud Functions. He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across Strategy,

We’re back! This week, Mark welcomes Gabi as his new co-host! Listen in as they discuss Knative with Mark Chmarny and Ville Aikas. So what is Knative? Mark and Ville explain that Knative is basically a way to simplify Kubernetes for developers. This way, developers can focus on writing good code without worrying about all the aspects of Kubernetes, such as deploying and autoscaling. Knative helps with these functions automatically. Knative also supports many languages which allows developers to bring their own stack. The day-to-day of developing doesn’t change, which is the beautiful thing about Knative! Knative is open source and easy to deploy. Developers can find installation guides online for any Kubernetes certified instance of service. A link to the installation guide for Knative on GKE is in our show notes. Mark Chmarny Mark is a Technical Program Manager for Serverless focusing on enabling customers to be successful with our serverless portfolio on GCP, and driving community awareness of our serverles

Happy Holidays, everyone! Melanie and Mark wrap up a great year by reminiscing about some of their favorite episodes! We also talk about the big news of the year, our favorite articles, and what’s coming up for the GCP Podcast in 2019. Cool things of the week Kubernetes and GKE for developers: a year of Cloud Console blog Reducing gender bias in Google Translate blog Cloud Security Command Center is now in beta and ready to use blog Main content Podcast accomplishments! We have awesome new intro and outro music, new website, new YouTube videos! We hit 1 million and then 2 million downloads! Mark and the podcast are celebrating their three year anniversary! Top 10 most downloaded episodes of all time! GCP Podcast Episode 111: Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji podcast GCP Podcast Episode 112: Percy.io with Mike Fotinakis podcast GCP Podcast Episode 146: Google AI with Jeff Dean podcast GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast GCP Podcast Episode 128: D

Melanie and Mark talk with Google Cloud’s VP of Engineering, Melody Meckfessel, this week. In her time with Google Cloud, she and her team have worked to uncover what makes developers more productive. The main focus of their work is DevOps, defined by Melody as automation around the developer workflow and culture. In other words, Melody and her team are discovering new ways for developers to interact and how those interactions can encourage their productive peak. Melody and her team have used their internal research and expanded it to collaborate with Google Cloud partners and open source projects. The sharing of research and products has created even faster innovation as Google learns from these outside projects and vice versa. In the future, Melody sees amazing engagement with the community and even better experiences with containers on GCP. She is excited to see the Go community growing and evolving as more people use it and give feedback. Melody also speaks about diversity, encouraging everyone to be open

Melanie is solo this week talking with Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech Bren professor and director of ML research at NVIDIA. We touch on tensors, their use, and how they relate to TensorFlow. Anima also details the work she does with NVIDIA and how they are helping to advance machine learning through hardware and software. Our main discussion centers around AI and machine learning research conferences, specifically the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (commonly referred to as NIPS) and the reason they have rebranded. NIPS originally started as a small conference at Caltech. As deep learning became more and more popular, it grew exponentially. With the higher attendance and interest, the acronym became center stage. Sexual innuendos and harassing puns surrounded the conference, sparking a call for a name change. At first, conference organizers were reluctant to rebrand and they used recent survey results as a reason to keep NIPS. Anima discusses her personal experience protesting the acronym, openi