Google Cloud Platform Podcast

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Next Day 1 Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

On this very special episode of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast, we have live interviews from the first day of NEXT! Melanie and Mark had the chance to chat with Melody MeckFessel, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud and Pavan Srivastava of Deloitte. Next we spoke with Sandeep Dinesh about Open Service Broker and Raejeanne Skillern of Intel.

Melody Meckfessel

Melody Meckfessel is a hands-on technology leader with more than 20 years experience building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale. As VP of Engineering, she leads the team building DevOps tools and sharing DevOps best practices across Google and with software development and operations teams around the world. Her team powers the world's most advanced continuously delivered software, enabling development teams to turn ideas into reliable, scalable production systems. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Melody programmed for startups and enterprise companies. Since joining Google in 2004, Melody has led teams in Google's core search systems, search quality and cluster management. Melody is passionate about making software development fast, scalable and fun.

Pavan Srivastava

Pavan is a technology leader with 20 years of experience in developing strategies and implementation of SAP focused technology solutions. Pavan leads Deloitte's SAP technology capability that focuses on helping clients adopt innovative technology solutions such as cloud and SAP HANA to improve business efficiencies. Pavan has led several engagements helping clients develop strategy, architecture and implement SAP on the cloud and SAP HANA platform.

Sandeep Dinesh

Sandeep Dinesh is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. He blends and creates new opportunities for businesses and people by leveraging the best technology possible.

Raejeanne Skillern

Raejeanne Skillern is the VP of Data Center and General Manager of Intel's cloud service provider (CSP) business. Her goal is to make it easier, more cost-effective and more efficient for CSPs to build new infrastructure and services. She is privileged to lead an exceptional team that manages Intel's business, products and technologies for cloud infrastructure deployments and works closely with the world's largest cloud providers to ensure Intel's data center products are optimized for their unique needs.

Interviews

Cloud AutoML site
GKE On-Prem site
Melody Meckfessel's Speaking Schedule at NEXT site
DevOps site
Google Open Source site
Cloud Build site
Spinnaker site
Kubernetes site
Stackdriver site
Application Performance Management site
OpenCensus site
Deloitte site
SAP site
Deloitte and Google Cloud blog
Google Cloud Platform Service Broker site
Open Service Broker site
Pub/Sub site
Cloud Spanner site
Intel Cloud Computing site
Intel Xeon site
Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory site
Partnering with Intel and SAP on Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for SAP HANA blog

Where can you find us next?

We'll both be at Cloud NEXT in Moscone West on the first floor! Come by and say hi!

Robotics, Navigation, and Reinforcement Learning with Raia Hadsell Jul 18, 2018

Show notes

On this episode of the podcast, Mark and Melanie delve into the fascinating world of robotics and reinforcement learning. We discuss advances in the field, including how robots are learning to navigate new surroundings and how machine learning is helping us understand the human mind better.

Raia Hadsell

Raia Hadsell, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, has worked on deep learning and robotics problems for the past 15 years. After completing a PhD at New York University, which featured a self-supervised deep learning vision system for a mobile robot, her research continued at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and SRI International, and in early 2014 she joined DeepMind in London to develop artificial general intelligence. Her current research focuses on the challenge of interactive learning for AI agents and robots, including subjects such as neural memory for real world navigation and lifelong learning.

Cool things of the week

AI Adventures How to Make a Data Science Project with Kaggle site
Predict your future costs with Google Cloud Billing cost forecast blog and site
Kaggle Competition Winning Solutions site
- Google Cloud Platform Podcast Episode 84: Kaggle with Wendy Kan podcast
Introducing Jib — build Java Docker images better blog
- Google Container Tools site

Interview

Raia Hadsell site
Learning to Navigate Cities Without a Map research paper and blog
Unsupervised Predictive Memory in a Goal-Directed Agent | MERLIN research paper
Nature: Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in AI research paper
DeepMind has trained an AI to unlock the mysteries of your brain site
Navigating with grid-like representations in artificial agents blog
DeepMind site and blog
Boston Dynamics site
Google Brain Robotics site
Transylvanian Machine Learning Summer School site
IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures research paper
Edward Mozer - Grid Cells and the Brain's Spatial Mapping System video
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 site
TensorFlow site

Question of the week

How do you connect a Google Cloud Source repository to an existing Git repository? site and blog

Where can you find us next?

We'll both be at Cloud NEXT!

Mark will be talking about Agones blog

Melanie will speak at PyCon Russia July 22nd

VirusTotal with Emi Martínez Jul 11, 2018

Show notes

On this episode of the podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Emiliano (Emi) Martínez to learn more about how VirusTotal is helping to create a safer internet by providing tools and building a community for security researchers.

Emiliano (Emi) Martínez

Emiliano has been with VirusTotal for over 10 years. He has seen the business grow from a small startup in southern Spain into a Google X moonshot under the new Chronicle bet. He is a software engineer acting as the Tech Lead for VirusTotal. Throughout the past 10 years, not only has he been immersed in coding and architecting the platform, but he has also participated at all levels of the business: from bootstrapping the very first sales to working close with marketing and other teams in order to take the project to the next level. His main interests are IT security (more specifically malware) and designing products and services from scratch.

VirusTotal and Chronicle are Hiring

VirusTotal is part of Chronicle, and Chronicle is hiring! Come join our team experts to help build out the next generation of security intelligence solutions. We are looking for talent that is comfortable operating in an organization that is scaling quickly, that loves variety in their work and wants to get their hands dirty with all things cyber security, cloud computing, and machine learning.

We are a dynamic organization that likes to run experiments so we are looking for colleagues that are excited about trying new things and offering a creative yet efficient, and client-centric approach to engineering solutions. You are scrappy and resourceful, creative and driven – and excited to share in the magic of working at Chronicle

Cool things of the week

BigQuery in June: a new data type, new data import formats, and finer cost controls blog
Dataflow Stream Processing now supports Python blog
Associate Cloud Engineer blog
Six AI & ML Sessions to Attend at NEXT blog

Interview

VirusTotal site
VirusTotal Use Cases site and videos
VirusTotal Intelligence site
VirusTotal Malware Hunting site
VirusTotal Monitor site
VirusTotal APIs site
VirusTotal Community site
VirusTotal Contact site
Data Connectors San Jose on July 12, 2018 site
Data Connectors Raleigh on July 26, 2018 site
BSides Las Vegas on August 7-8, 2018 site
- If you are interested in a 1:1 meeting with VirusTotal, please email info@virustotal.com
Google Cloud App Engine site
Google Compute Engine site
Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine site
BigQuery site
Google Cloud Data Studio site
Google Cloud MemoryStore site
Google Cloud SQL site
G Suite site

Question of the week

This week's question comes from Andrew Sheridan, with a special guest answer from Robert Kubis.

What is the best practice for multi tenancy in Google Cloud Spanner, especially if customers are not of the same size and have unequal load?

What DBAs need to know about Cloud Spanner, part 1: Keys and indexes blog
Cloud Spanner - Choosing the Right Primary Keys video
More questions about Spanner? Robert will be presenting on it at Cloud NEXT.

Where can you find us next?

We'll both be at Cloud NEXT!

Melanie will speak at CERN July 17th and PyCon Russia July 22nd

Connected Games with Unity and Google Cloud with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker Jul 04, 2018

Show notes

Happy 4th of July! Today, Melanie and Mark go in depth with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker to learn more about Unity and its new strategic alliance with Google Cloud. We explore how an alliance between Google Cloud and Unity means easier development for game creators and better gaming for fans.

Brett Bibby

Brett Bibby is Unity's Vice President, Engineering. Prior to his current role, Brett served as a Field Engineering and Evangelist at Unity consulting with developers throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, India, and greater Asia. Before Unity, Brett founded and ran a game studio developing console titles, and has more than 30 years of experience developing games and game engine technology.

Micah Baker

As Product Manager leading the strategy for Gaming on the Google Cloud Platform, Micah is committed to enabling developers to realize their vision for great games. An avid gamer on all major platforms, he never hesitates to get involved in games that were built with a passion for immersive storytelling, innovative multiplayer experiences, and breathtaking artwork.

Cool things of the week

The 2018 World Cup Visualized: All the Goals So Far site
Why we believe in an open cloud blog
Kubernetes 1.11: a look from inside Google blog
Understanding error budget overspend - part one - CRE life lessons blog
Good housekeeping for error budgets - part two - CRE life lessons blog
New GitHub repo: Using Firebase to add cloud-based features to games built on Unity blog

Interview

Unity site
Google Cloud Spanner site
Unity Hackweek site
Unity Connected Games site
Bringing connected games within reach with Google Cloud blog
Unity Hackweek 2018: Creating X Together blog

Brett Bibby

Question of the week

How do I report errors to Stackdriver from a cloud function?

Where can you find us next?

We'll both be at Cloud NEXT!

ML Kit with Brahim Elbouchikhi and Sachin Kotwani Jun 27, 2018

Show notes

Brahim Elbouchikhi and Sachin Kotwani talk with Melanie and Mark about Firebase's ML Kit and how it enables machine learning on mobile and cloud apps. We delve into why ML Kit was developed, how it makes machine learning easier, what it's used for now and plans for the future.

Sachin Kotwani

Sachin Kotwani is a product manager with a special passion for making software development easy and fun. He has worked on several teams at Google, including Google Cloud, Play, and now Firebase. Before joining product management he worked worked as a strategy & ops manager in Google's Sales organization, and prior to Google, he worked in finance at Amazon.

He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and dual bachelor's degrees in Business Management and Computer Science from the University of Missouri - Columbia.

His hobbies include traveling with his family, chasing his daughter around the house, and tinkering with mobile apps and backends.

Brahim Elbouchikhi

Brahim Elbouchikhi is a Group Product Manager on the Android team. On Android, Brahim is responsible for developer and consumer facing ML products, including Camera and developer SDKs. Prior to Android, Brahim led Daydream's software team. Brahim was also a founding PM of the Google Play store where he led monetization, search, and discovery. Brahim holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA. Brahim has also worked at Amazon and Deloitte in addition to starting a company in the past.

Cool things of the week

Our 10th Doodle 4 Google winner is dino-mite blog
Google Podcasts now on Android blog
Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform Specialization site
Introducing Cloud Dataflow's new Streaming Engine blog
ML Explorer: talking and listening with Google Cloud blog
- #131 Actions on Google with Mandy Chan podcast

Interview

ML Kit for Firebase site
TensorFlow Hub site
TensorFlow Lite site
Federated Learning document and blog
TensorFlow.js site

Question of the week

What is a Developer Programs Engineer?

Developer Programs Engineer — Say What!? blog
Franziska Hinkelmann twitter

Where can you find us next?

Mark is going to the Unity Hackweek. Read how Google Cloud is teaming up with Unity for gaming blog

Melanie is speaking at Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th.

We'll both be at Cloud NEXT!

Hand Talk with Thadeu Luz Jun 20, 2018

Show notes

Thadeu Luz from Hand Talk shares with Melanie and Mark how the free Hand Talk education application translates and interprets spoken and written Portuguese into Brazilian Sign Language (aka LIBRAS or BSL). The application uses an animated avatar Hugo to deliver the signs through gestures and facial expressions and its built off of a statistical machine translation system and Firebase. Future plans include expanding into other languages with a priority on ASL and they welcome support.

Thadeu Luz

Thadeu Luz is entrepreneur, data scientist and full-stack engineer with a background in 3D Animation, Video Compositing and Architecture. In early 2018 I have joined the Google Developers Experts program as a Firebase Expert. He's CPO and founder of Hand Talk, an internationally decorated company that produces automatic sign language interpretation with the help of a friendly virtual 3D Character named Hugo.

Cool things of the week

Our video for NEXT video
First research center in Ghana blog
GCP in Finland blog
AI Adventures BigQuery and Open Datasets video
Dockercon and value of childcare at conferences tweet
What is going on in Unite Berlin 2018 blog & Powering up Conncected Game Development blog

Interview

Hand Talk site & video
Firebase Hosting site docs
Cloud Functions for Firebase site docs
Cloud Functions for Firebase Sample Library github
Launchpad Studio site and podcast
TensorFlow.js site
ML Kit for Firebase site & podcast coming next week
Serve Dynamic Content with Cloud Functions docs
Google Translate Community site
Cloud Machine Learning Engine docs

Hand Talk

Question of the week

What DOES a Go developer need to know about GCP?

Where can you find us next?

Mark is speaking at the Online Kubernetes Community Meeting on the 21st of June, at 10am Pacific.

Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event "Paths to Data Science" on June 26th and Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th.

Actions on Google with Mandy Chan Jun 11, 2018

Show notes

This week is all about Voices! 🎶🎤🔊 Mandy Chan joins Melanie and Mark to discuss the intricacies of building user Voice user interfaces with Actions on Google, developing with SSML and more!

Mandy Chan

Mandy Chan is the developer community manager for the Actions On Google team. Her role is to help expand the funnel of the Actions on Google developer community by creating practical tools and content like http://bit.ly/aog-codelab-1 and http://bit.ly/aog-codelab-2

Mandy began to build voice applications back in early 2016, and since then, she has built more than a dozen Voice Applications on Actions On Google and other platforms. One of her most frequently downloaded open source projects is called the SSML-Builder which creates well-formed Speech Synthesis Markup Language without worrying about string concatenation. You can learn more about her open source project on http://bit.ly/ssml-build

When she is not pondering about how to improve the developer experience, you can find her hiking at mountains or learning new magic tricks. You can also learn more about Mandy by following @MandyChanNYC

Cool things of the week

AI at Google: our principles blog
Incorporating Google's AI Principles into Google Cloud blog
Deploying to Google Kubernetes Engine blog
Fighting fire with machine learning: two students use TensorFlow to predict wildfires blog
Together, we can help Puerto Rico recover donation match
Introducing sole-tenant nodes for Google Compute Engine — when sharing isn't an option blog docs

Interview

Actions on Google site docs github console g+ community
ssml-builder site npm
Advanced SSML by Leon blog
Actions on Google: SSML docs
Actions on Google Codelabs level one level two
Dialogflow site docs console
Google Assistant SDK for devices site
Cloud Functions for Firebase docs
Google Action Firebase Services docs
To get inspired by some interesting voice applications voice experiment
Mandy Chan medium github
Systers on June 21st 9AM PST – Getting started with Actions on Google Workshop site

Question of the week

I want to push a Docker image to Google Container Registry via docker push. How can I set things up so that I don't have to use gcloud docker -- push every time?

Pushing and Pulling Images docs
Authentication Methods docs

Where can you find us next?

Mark is speaking at the San Francisco Kubernetes Meetup: Scaling Game Servers and the Conduit Service Mesh on June 14th, and also speaking at the Online Kubernetes Community Meeting on the 21st of June, at 10am Pacific.

Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event "Paths to Data Science" on June 26th and Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th.

Data Science with Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon Jun 06, 2018

Show notes

Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon are on the podcast this week to talk about data science with Melanie and Mark. We had a great discussion about methodology, applications, tools, pipelines, challenges and resources. Juliet shared insights into the unique data science ownership workflow from idea to deployment at Stitch Fix, and Michelle dove into how Kubeflow is playing a role to help drive reliability in model development and deployment.

Juliet Hougland

Juliet Hougland leads the Workflow, Environment, and Execution team at Stichfix. She is a data scientist and engineer with expertise in computational mathematics and years of hands-on machine learning and big data experience. She has built and deployed production ML models, advised Fortune 500 companies on infrastructure and worked on a variety of open source projects (Apache Spark, Scalding, and Kiji) at the intersection of big data and machine learning.

Michelle Casbon

Michelle Casbon is a Senior Engineer on the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team, where she focuses on open source contributions and community engagement for machine learning and big data tools. Prior to joining Google, she was at several San Francisco-based startups as a Senior Engineer and Director of Data Science. Within these roles, she built and shipped machine learning products on distributed platforms using both AWS and GCP. Michelle's development experience spans more than a decade and has primarily focused on multilingual natural language processing, system architecture and integration, and continuous delivery pipelines for machine learning applications. She especially loves working with open source projects and is an active contributor to Kubeflow. Michelle holds a masters degree from the University of Cambridge.

Cool things of the week

Sandeep Dinesh: Kubernetes Best Practices YouTube
CNCF TOC voted to accept Helm as an incubation-level hosted project to CNCF site
Andriod P in Beta blog
Agones 0.2.0 site
Securing cloud-connected devices with Cloud IoT and Microchip blog

Interview

flotilla-os repo
Kubeflow repo
Cloud Dataproc site & docs
Spark site & community site
scikit-learn site
xgboost repo
PyTorch site
TensorFlow site and github
Kubernetes site github
Introducing ultramem Google Compute Engine machine types blog
#114 Machine Learning Bias and Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell podcast
Machine Learning Flash Clards site
Open Source Data Science Masters site
DockerCon SF site

Question of the week

If I have written a gRPC Service, but I'm using a language/platform that isn't supported - is there any way I can access it as REST?

Where can you find us next?

Mark is speaking at the San Francisco Kubernetes Meetup: Scaling Game Servers and the Conduit Service Mesh on June 14th.

Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event "Paths to Data Science" on June 26th and Stanford AI4ALL on June 28th.

Developer Relations with Mandy Waite May 30, 2018

Show notes

Mandy Waite joins Mark and Melanie to share what is developer relations and how trust and empathy are key to its success. We discuss meeting developers where they are and the wide variety of differing communities that exist across the technology ecosystem.

Mandy Waite

Mandy Waite has worked at Google for nearly 8 years, 6 of which have been spent growing and nurturing the Cloud Advocacy team. She heads up the Infrastructure and Ops Advocacy team in Google Cloud with a focus on Cloud Native, DevOps, SRE, Observability and Security.

Cool things of the week

Better cost control with Google Cloud Billing programmatic notifications blog
Music in Motion: a Firebase and IoT story blog
Google Cloud Codelabs and Challenges codelabs
Kubernetes Podcast site and blog

Interview

Google Cloud Platform site
#46 Borg and K8s with John Wilkes podcast
#118 OpenCensus with Morgan McLean and JBD podcast
Felipe Hoffa & BigQuery reddit, blog and podcast
Livestreaming with Jen Tong Twitch, Holden Karau Twitch, and Chris Broadfoot Twitch
Ben Treynor on What is 'Site Reliability Engineering' interview
Solomon Hykes at dotScale on Docker video
Istio site and #85 Istio with Varun Talwar and Sven Mawson podcast
Kubernetes site
Docker site
The Core Competencies of Developer Relations blog

Question of the week

Where do I go to learn about GDPR in regards to Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud: Ready for GDPR blog
Google Cloud & the General Data Protection Regulation site

Where can you find us next?

Mark is speaking at the Monthly SF Game Development Community, presenting on You Can't Just Add More Servers on May the 30th in San Francisco.

Melanie is speaking at a joint WiMLDS and PyLadies event "Paths to Data Science" on June 26th. More details to come.

Decision Intelligence with Cassie Kozyrkov May 23, 2018

Show notes

Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov joins Mark and Melanie this week to explain data science, analytics, machine learning and statistical inference, in relation to decision intelligence.

Cassie Kozyrkov

As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie advises leadership teams on decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She works to democratize statistical thinking and machine learning so that everyone - Google, its customers, the world! - can harness the beauty and power of data. She is the innovator behind the practice of Decision Intelligence Engineering at Google and she has personally trained over 15,000 Googlers in machine learning, statistics, and data-driven decision-making. Before her current role, she served in Google's Office of the CTO as Chief Data Scientist. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. When she's not working, you're most likely to find Cassie at the theater, in an art museum, exploring the world, or curled up with a good novel.

Cool things of the week

Cloud ML Engine adds Cloud TPU support for training blog docs
Google Kubernetes Engine 1.10 is generally available and ready for the enterprise blog
Introducing ultramem Google Compute Engine machine types blog
Increase performance while reducing costs with the new App Engine scheduler blog docs

Interview