Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Google Cloud Platform Podcast

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Google Cloud Platform Podcast episodes

  • Instruqt with Adé Mochtar

    Jon Foust and Mark Mirchandani are joined by Adé Mochtar to discuss the IT learning platform, Instruqt and how they create and manage the platform with the help of Google Cloud. Sandeep of Google stops in with the info on the Instruqt arcade games we saw at Google Next '19.

    Instruqt's main philosophy is that people learn best by doing, and their courses encourage immersion right off the bat. Developers are asked coding questions and allowed to work in sandbox environments to fully expose them to the subject. Instruqt checks the student's work as they continue through the program to ensure the material is being properly learned.

    But learning should be fun, too! By putting developer challenges on old-style arcade machines, developers can test their coding skills, learn new things, and have fun at the same time. At conferences, this has been a great way to engage their target audience. Google Cloud games were run on the Instruqt platform at Next '19, and conference attendees came back day after day to try to get on the high score leaderboard. It was a super fun way to get people using Google Cloud technologies!

    Adé Mochtar

    Adé is Co-Founder and CTO of Instruqt, a hands-on learning platform for IT technology. Before starting Instruqt, he was an engineer and consultant in Cloud and DevOps-related topics. A big part of that job was to educate organizations on how to adopt new technology. With Instruqt, he tries to achieve the same but on a larger scale. His mission is to make learning DevOps and Cloud more effective and fun. At Instruqt, Adé mainly focuses on back-end and infrastructure engineering using Terraform, Go, and (probably too much) Bash.

    Cool things of the week
    • Step up your interviewing game with Byteboard blog
    • Gartner names Google Cloud a leader in its IaaS Magic Quadrant blog
    • Real-time bikeshare information in Google Maps rolls out to 24 cities blog
    • Run Visual Studio Code in Cloud Shell blog
    Interview
    • Instruqt site
    • Instruqt on Slack site
    • Kubernetes site
    • Cloud Functions site
    • Hashi Corp site
    • Instruqt Arcade at Next '19 video
    • Google Developer Advocate - Sandeep Dinesh on Instruqt video
    • Go site
    • React site
    • Terraform site
    • GKE site
    • Cloud SQL site
    • Cloud Build site
    • Firebase site
    Question of the week

    I want to be more familiar with Google Cloud, how do I navigate the space for material? Learn more with Qwiklabs and Coursera. Get Certified.

    Where can you find us next?

    Instruqt arcade games will be at GopherCon and Cloud Summits!

    Jon will be speaking at Pax Dev and Pax West.

    Mark will be hanging on the East Coast, then meeting with customers in Austin.

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "Red Arrows Flyby.wav" by Figowitz of Freesound.org
    • "crowd laugh.wav" by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org
    • "Alien_Scream.wav" by Syna-Max of Freesound.org
    • "Laser Gun7.wav" by Burkay of Freesound.org
    • "Scratch2.mp3" by Feveran of Freesound.org
    • "BumbleBeeShort.mp3" by CGEffex of Freesound.org
    • "ComedyRimshot.wav" by XTRgamr of Freesound.org
    27 min
  • Blockchain with Allen Day

    Blockchain takes the spotlight as new host Carter Morgan joins veteran Mark Mandel in a fascinating interview with Allen Day. Allen is a developer advocate with Google, specializing in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications.

    This week Allen reveals how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be applied to a variety of applications like distributed file storage and video services. We also discuss the hype and merits of blockchain + projects that Allen has worked on to analyze cryptocurrency transactions using Google Cloud's big data platforms. The results may just surprise you.

    Allen Day

    Allen Day is a developer advocate with Google in Singapore. He specializes in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. Allen studied at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine and earned his PhD in Human Genetics. Allen's blockchain work is focused on interoperability between smart contract platforms and cloud platforms. He created Google Cloud's blockchain public datasets program, which allows non-specialist engineers and data scientists to search and analyze public blockchain data.

    Cool things of the week
    • Blockchain.com, scaling and saving with Cloud Spanner blog
    • Cloud TPU Pods break AI training records blog
    • Cloud Memorystore adds import-export and Redis 4.0 blog
    • To run or not to run a database on Kubernetes: What to consider blog
    • Google to acquire Elastifile blog
    Interview
    • Blockchain site
    • Bitcoin site
    • Coinbase site
    • Ethereum site
    • $24 million iced tea company says it's pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200% news article
    • Blockchain ETL project on GitHub site
    • BigQuery site
    • Kubernetes site
    • Cloud Composer site
    • Pub/Sub site
    • Bigtable site
    • Tensorflow site
    • Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog
    • BigQuery public blockchain datasets on GCP site
    • Ethereum in BigQuery: how we built this dataset blog
    • Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics blog
    • Introducing six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets—and how to analyze them blog
    • Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud blog
    • Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog
    • Unchained Podcast podcast
    • Off the Chain Podcast podcast
    Question of the week

    What are the four (or six?) types of VMs that exist on Google Cloud Platform? blog and docs

    Where can you find us next?

    Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit, as well as Pax Dev and Pax West.

    Carter will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and working on new videos.

    Allen will be at Strike Two Summit (Amsterdam), Singularity Festival (Heraklion), and Ethereum Devcon (Osaka).

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "mysterypeak1.wav" by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org
    • "crowd laugh.wav" by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org
    32 min
  • Scotiabank with Yuri Litvinovich

    This week on the podcast, Yuri Litvinovich of Scotiabank was able to join Mark Mirchandani and Michelle Casbon to talk about migration from on-prem and their partnership with Google Cloud. Mark Mandel stops in with some cool things of the week and the question of the week, too!

    With Yuri's help, Scotiabank is working to become a modern financial services technology company. Their transition from working mostly on-prem to working in the cloud was exciting for him as he discovered how much cheaper, faster, and more secure large enterprise projects can be in the public cloud. Three years ago, Scotiabank's CEO began encouraging this shift to keep the company up-to-date, with funds allocated to moving all their thousands of applications and products to a more efficient system.

    To accomplish this, Yuri turned to Kubernetes to make use of containers. Because they are light and homogenous in different environments, the modernization at Scotiabank went much more smoothly with Kubernetes and GKE. They also use a mix of managed systems like BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub, as well as made-from-scratch applications that help the Google products to be compatible with Scotiabank's existing software. Yuri believes this was a key to their success in the migration from on-prem to the cloud.

    In the process of migration, Yuri experienced some pushback from developers who were concerned about the move. He encouraged them not to "lift and shift" their projects, but to completely re-build them with cloud dev ops principles in mind. Yuri's goal was to convince developers that doing this would result in projects that were much easier, cheaper, and more secure in the long run. By outlining the benefits and goals of migration and sharing success stories of other businesses who have transferred to Kubernetes and the cloud, Scotiabank was able to help convince developers of the importance of it. Yuri also encourages trust and cooperation between teams.

    Yuri Litvinovich

    Yuri is a Senior Cloud Engineer and Kubernetes Tech Lead at Scotiabank. He's currently part of Platform Organization (PLATO) within Scotiabank, which performs enterprise modernization program to transform the Bank into a modern technology company in financial services. Yuri has extensive experience in Cloud technologies, Kubernetes, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Automation, CI/CD, Linux, networking, and system administration. His pursuit of excellence led him to work on implementing cutting-edge technologies in both startups, and large enterprise environments making them vital part of organization's digital transformation journey.

    Cool things of the week
    • Introducing Deep Learning Containers: Consistent and portable environments blog
    • How to implement document tagging with AutoML blog
    • Analyze BigQuery data with Kaggle Kernels notebooks blog
      • GCP Podcast Episode 84: Kaggle with Wendy Kan podcast
    • Introducing the Jenkins GKE Plugin—deploy software to your Kubernetes clusters blog
    Interview
    • Scotiabank site
    • Kubernetes site
    • Kubernetes Engine site
    • Cloud SQL site
    • BigQuery site
    • Dataflow site
    • Pub/Sub site
    • Stackdriver site
    • Anthos site
    • GKE On-Prem site
    • Istio site
    • Autoscaling Streaming Applications in Cloud Dataflow with Scotiabank video
    • Google Cloud Next '19: Day 2 Product Innovation Keynote video
    • Kubeflow site
    Question of the week

    Rather than using the standard Cloud Shell image - what if I want to add my own "by default" installed tooling?

    Where can you find us next?

    Mark Mirch is working on This Week in Cloud.

    Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit.

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "crowd laugh.wav" by tom_woysky of Freesound.org
    42 min
  • Informatica with Bill Creekbaum

    Happy Independence Day to our American listeners! Mark Mandel is back today as he and Gabi Ferrara interview Bill Creekbaum of Informatica to learn how they work with Google Cloud for a better big data user experience. Mark Mirchandani is hanging around the studio as well, bringing some cool things of the week and helping with the question of the week!

    Informatica provides data managing products that offer complete solutions focusing on metadata management, integration, governance, security, data quality, and discoverability. Bill's job at Informatica is to ensure these products really take advantage of the strengths of Google Cloud Platform. One such example is a product that allows customers to design in Informatica and push their projects to Cloud Dataproc. Informatica also offers similar capabilities in BigQuery. When moving data from on-prem to the cloud, customers can use Informatica and Google Cloud together for a seamless transition, cost savings, and easier data control.

    Together, Informatica and Google Cloud can also facilitate the acquisition of high quality data. To have better, more trustworthy output, data inputed needs to be safe to access, have few or no duplicates and null values, and be complete. To achieve this, developers usually use a combination of the Informatica tools Intelligent Cloud Services, Enterprise Data Catalog, and Big Data Management, and the Google tools BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Analytics, Dataproc, and Pub/Sub.

    Bill's closing advice for companies comes in three parts: take stock of the data you've got, set goals, and develop a well-rounded team.

    Bill Creekbaum

    Bill Creekbaum is Sr. Director of Product Management for Cloud, Big Data, and Analytic Ecosystems at Informatica. He is focused on delivering market leading unified data management platforms and services that help customers take advantage of their greatest assets, data. Bill has been in product management and product marketing for more than 20 years and for the past 10 has been focused on successfully delivering SaaS and Cloud Applications to the market. Prior to joining Informatica, Bill has worked at SnapLogic, GoodData, Oracle, Microsoft, Mindjet, and more. See more of Bill's experience on LinkedIn.

    Cool things of the week
    • Google Cloud + Chronicle: The security moonshot joins Google Cloud blog
      • GCP Podcast Episode 135: VirusTotal with Emi Martinez podcast
    • Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa blog
    • Kubernetes 1.15: Extensibility and Continuous Improvement blog
    • Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas blog
    • See how your code actually executes with Stackdriver Profiler, now GA blog
    Interview
    • Informatica site
    • Informatica for GCP site
    • BigQuery site
    • Cloud Storage site
    • Cloud Dataproc site
    • Intelligent Cloud Services site
    • Enterprise Data Catalog site
    • Big Data Management site
    • Google Analytics site
    • Pub/Sub site
    • Google Cloud & Informatica: Accelerate your Data-Driven Digital Transformation webinar
    • Informatica for Google BigQuery data sheet
    • Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for Google BigQuery site
    Question of the week

    If I want to have my App Engine Application serve any subdomain on my custom domain, how do I do that?

    Where can you find us next?

    Gabi is done traveling.

    Mark Mirch' is working on Stack Chat.

    Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit.

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "small group laugh 6.flac" by tim.kahn of Freesound.org
    • "Chewing, Carrot, A" by Inspector J of Freesound.org
    • "Testtone1000hz" by Jobro of Freesound.org
    37 min
  • Google Cloud Platform UX with Michael Kleinerman

    On this episode, our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabi Ferrara dive into Google Cloud Platform UX with guest and Google Product Designer Michael Kleinerman. Michael's path to Product Designer started with "ancient" tech designing with Flash and 3D motion graphics and progressed from there through interaction designer to his place now with Google. His experience has helped him appreciate the many different kinds of designers needed for projects and how they have to work together for a good product.

    At Google, Michael's team builds design systems that create a balance between what Google uses and what the products built on Google use. He adopted Material Design, which offers guidelines for patterns and components of design, to Google Cloud. Material Design spans across multiple devices and screen sizes to help simplify design across devices. When Cloud reached the enterprise space, where components can be more complex, Michael's team worked to adjust Cloud using Material Design so that features like tables would work correctly.

    Accessibility is also a top priority for Cloud and the design team. To begin the process of designing for accessibility, the team finds the top three or so reasons that a user would come to their product and ensures those are accessible to all. The next step is to create easier usability in the second tier features of the product, and then all features beyond. Using a screen reader, they go through the product to see if it's usable, and really try to make the experience better. The team also makes sure there are a lot of guidance pages as well.

    The goal in product design is to make things simple and consistent for everyone.

    Michael Kleinerman

    Michael is a Product Designer at Google. He worked on Android and YouTube in the Bay Area before joining Cloud in NYC, where he started by leading the UX for Firestore until it launched in both Firebase and GCP. This work evolved into his current role on the core platform team, responsible for the design direction of the main design system used by producer teams to build and launch products on GCP.

    Cool things of the week
    • Committed use discounts at a glance blog
    • Networking in depth blog
    • Chatbots with Dialog Flow blog and video
    • Turn it up to eleven: Java 11 runtime comes to App Engine blog
    • App Engine second generation runtimes now get double the memory; plus Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 now generally available blog
    Interview
    • Material.io site
    • Material Design site
    • Firebase site
    • Cloud Firestore site
    Question of the week

    How do I work with my containers locally and then get them into the cloud?

    Where can you find us next?

    Gabi is done traveling.

    Mark Mirch' is filming for customers in the Bay area.

    Everyone else is just laying low for now!

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "alert.wav" by danielnieto7 of Freesound.org
    • "cell phone vibraion.wav" by MrAuralization of Freesound.org
    • "laugh crowd 2.wav" by MrAuralizationFunWithSound of Freesound.org
    34 min
  • Derwen, Inc. with Paco Nathan

    This week, Jon Foust and Michelle Casbon bring you another fascinating interview from our time at Next! Michelle and special guest Amanda were able to catch up with Paco Nathan of Derwen AI to talk about his experience at Next and learn what Derwen is doing to advance AI.

    Paco and Derwen have been working extensively on ways developer relations can be enhanced by machine learning. Along with O'Reilly Media, Derwen just completed three surveys, called ABC (AI, Big Data, and Cloud), to look at the adoption of AI and the cloud around the world. The particular interest in these studies is a comparison between countries who have been using AI, Big Data, and Cloud for years and countries who are just beginning to get involved. One of the most interesting things they learned is how much budget companies are allocating to machine learning projects. They also noticed that more and more large enterprises are moving, at least partially, to the cloud.

    One of the challenges Paco noticed was the difference between machine learning projects in testing versus how they act once they go live. Here, developers come across bias, ethical, and safety issues. Good data governance polices can help minimize these problems. Developing good data governance policies is complex, especially with security issues, but it's an important conversation to have. In the process of computing the survey data, Paco discovered many big companies spend a lot of time with this issue and even employ checklists of requirements before projects can be made live.

    In his research, Paco also discovered that about 54% of companies are non-starters. Usually, their problems stem from tech debt and issues with company personnel who do not recognize the need for machine learning. The companies working toward integrating machine learning tend to have issues finding good staff. Berkeley is working to solve this problem by requiring data science classes of all students. But as Paco says, data science is a team sport that works well with a team of people from different disciplines. Paco is an advocate of mentoring, to help the next generation of data scientists learn and grow, and of unbundling corporate decision making to help advance AI.

    Amanda, Michelle, and Paco wrap up their discussion with a look toward how to change ML biases. People tend to blame ML for bias outcomes, but models are subject to data we feed in. Humans have to make decisions to work around that by looking at things from a different perspective and taking steps to avoid as much bias as we can. ML and humans can work together to find these biases and help remove them.

    Paco Nathan

    Paco Nathan is the Managing Parter at Derwen. He has 35+ years tech industry experience, ranging from Bell Labs to early-stage start-ups. Paco is also the Co-chair Rev. Advisor for Amplify Partners, Recognai, Primer AI, and Data Spartan. He was formerly the Director of Community Evangelism for Databricks and Apache Spark.

    Cool things of the week
    • CERN recreated the Higgs discovery on GCP video
      • To discover the Higgs yourself, check out the CERN open data portal site
    • Fun facts from Michelle's visit:
      • Seven total, four main experiments
        • ATLAS (largest, general-purpose) site
        • CMS (prettiest, general-purpose) site
        • ALICE (heavy-ion) site
        • LHCb (interactions of b-hadrons, matter/antimatter asymmetry) site
      • The French/Swiss border runs across the CERN property
      • Streetview of CERN control center site
      • CERN is the birthplace of the web
      • Where the protons come from site
      • Watch Particle Fever movie
    Interview
    • Derwen, Inc. site
    • Derwen, Inc. Blog blog
    • Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing paper
    • Apache Spark site
    • Google Cloud Storage site
    • Datastore site
    • Kubeflow site
    • Quicksilver site
    • O'Reilly Media site
    • Google Knowledge Graph site
    • Jupyter site
    • JupyterCon site
    • The Economics of Artificial Intelligence site
    • "Why Do Businesses Fail At Machine Learning?" by Cassie Kozyrkov video
    • The Gutenberg Galaxy site
    • Programmed Inequality site
    Question of the week

    Stadia Connect occurred last Thursday. What are some of the biggest announcements that came out of it?

    Where can you find us next?

    Jon is in New York for Games for Change.

    Michelle and Mark Mirchandani are back in San Francisco.

    Brian & Aja are at home in Seattle.

    Gabi is in Brazil.

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "Crowd laugh.wav" by tom_woysky of Freesound.org
    43 min
  • Derwen, Inc. with Paco Nathan

    This week, Jon Foust and Michelle Casbon bring you another fascinating interview from our time at Next! Michelle and special guest Amanda were able to catch up with Paco Nathan of Derwen AI to talk about his experience at Next and learn what Derwen is doing to advance AI.

    Paco and Derwen have been working extensively on ways developer relations can be enhanced by machine learning. Along with O’Reilly Media, Derwen just completed three surveys, called ABC (AI, Big Data, and Cloud), to look at the adoption of AI and the cloud around the world. The particular interest in these studies is a comparison between countries who have been using AI, Big Data, and Cloud for years and countries who are just beginning to get involved. One of the most interesting things they learned is how much budget companies are allocating to machine learning projects. They also noticed that more and more large enterprises are moving, at least partially, to the cloud.

    One of the challenges Paco noticed was the difference between machine learning projects in testing versus how they act once they go live. Here, developers come across bias, ethical, and safety issues. Good data governance polices can help minimize these problems. Developing good data governance policies is complex, especially with security issues, but it’s an important conversation to have. In the process of computing the survey data, Paco discovered many big companies spend a lot of time with this issue and even employ checklists of requirements before projects can be made live.

    In his research, Paco also discovered that about 54% of companies are non-starters. Usually, their problems stem from tech debt and issues with company personnel who do not recognize the need for machine learning. The companies working toward integrating machine learning tend to have issues finding good staff. Berkeley is working to solve this problem by requiring data science classes of all students. But as Paco says, data science is a team sport that works well with a team of people from different disciplines. Paco is an advocate of mentoring, to help the next generation of data scientists learn and grow, and of unbundling corporate decision making to help advance AI.

    Amanda, Michelle, and Paco wrap up their discussion with a look toward how to change ML biases. People tend to blame ML for bias outcomes, but models are subject to data we feed in. Humans have to make decisions to work around that by looking at things from a different perspective and taking steps to avoid as much bias as we can. ML and humans can work together to find these biases and help remove them.

    43 min
  • Google Maps Platform with Angela Yu

    Your favorite Marks Mirchandani and Mandel are back hosting this week to touch base with Angela Yu about recent updates in Google Maps. As Angela describes Google Maps at a high level, it is your window into the real world, with coverage of Earth's land and oceans. Google works hard to keep that information updated with satellite pictures, street view Google vehicles, and even backpacks for hikers to record hard to reach areas.

    The Google Maps API makes it easy for developers to use Maps data in their own projects. It can be used for something as simple as showing location to something more complicated, for example showing the user specific things around them to help them make decisions. Game developers can create rich experiences by building real-world gaming situations with Maps and augmented reality. Using the Places API can display parks, government buildings, and other interesting places beyond streets. And the Routes API can expand the user experience by providing directions, tracking drivers in real time, etc. Maps and Google Cloud together work well with BigQuery to search huge amounts of data and visualize them on a map.

    In the future, Angela is particularly excited about how ridesharing apps will continue to use Maps and Routes to optimize their businesses. She also looks forward to more augmented reality projects beyond gaming, where data, directions, and more are overlaid on the physical world.

    Angela Yu

    Angela Yu is a developer advocate for Google Maps Platform. Throughout her career, she has geeked out on voice recognition, mobile app development, and IoT. You can find her trapped in escape rooms or on Twitter.

    Cool things of the week
    • Google to acquire Looker blog
    • New Translate API capabilities can help localization experts and global enterprises blog
    • Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud CDN blog
    • Save money by stopping and starting Compute Engine instances on schedule blog
    • An update on Sunday's service disruption blog
    Interview
    • Google Maps Platform site blog docs
    • Google Maps Places site
    • Google Maps Routes site
    • Google Maps Treks site
    • Visualizing data from Firebase on a Google Map site
    • Google Maps Platform Codelabs site
    • BigQuery site
    • BigQuery Public Datasets docs
    • Deck.GL site
    • Google Maps SDK for Android Beta site
    • Popular Antipodes on Google Maps site
    • The True Size of countries site
    • Google Maps on Github site
    • Google Maps Client Libraries site
    • StreetView Gallery site
    • Earth Engine site
    • xkcd: Map Projections site
    • Beautiful data visualizations using deck.gl on Google Maps demo and docs
    Question of the week

    What is helm, and how do I use it?

    • GCP Podcast Episode 50: Helm with Michelle Noorali and Matthew Butcher podcast

      • Kubernetes Podcast podcast and twitter
      • Kuberenetes twitter
    Where can you find us next?

    Angela will be at the Chrome Dev Summit.

    Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next.

    Mark Mirch will be customer filming for Stack Chat in NYC.

    Sound Effect Attribution
    • "Striking a Match" by Nebulousflynn of Freesound.org
    • "Bad Beep" by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org
    • "Correct" by Tristan_Lohengrin of Freesound.org
    • "Spaceship Atmosphere 02" by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org
    • "At the jazz concert Crowd laugh.wav" by Ftom_woysky of Freesound.org
    38 min
  • Google Maps Platform with Angela Yu

    Your favorite Marks Mirchandani and Mandel are back hosting this week to touch base with Angela Yu about recent updates in Google Maps. As Angela describes Google Maps at a high level, it is your window into the real world, with coverage of Earth’s land and oceans. Google works hard to keep that information updated with satellite pictures, street view Google vehicles, and even backpacks for hikers to record hard to reach areas.

    The Google Maps API makes it easy for developers to use Maps data in their own projects. It can be used for something as simple as showing location to something more complicated, for example showing the user specific things around them to help them make decisions. Game developers can create rich experiences by building real-world gaming situations with Maps and augmented reality. Using the Places API can display parks, government buildings, and other interesting places beyond streets. And the Routes API can expand the user experience by providing directions, tracking drivers in real time, etc. Maps and Google Cloud together work well with BigQuery to search huge amounts of data and visualize them on a map.

    In the future, Angela is particularly excited about how ridesharing apps will continue to use Maps and Routes to optimize their businesses. She also looks forward to more augmented reality projects beyond gaming, where data, directions, and more are overlaid on the physical world.

    38 min
  • Firebase with Jen Person

    Google Developer Advocate Jen Person talks with Mark Mandel and Mark Mirchandani today about developments in Firebase. Firebase is a suite of products that helps developers build apps. According to Jen, it's equivalent to the client-side of Google Cloud. Firebase works across platforms, including Android, web, iOS and offers many growth features, setting it apart from other Google products. It helps site and app owners interact with and reach customers with services like notifications, remote configurations to optimize the app, testing, and more.

    Cloud Firestore has come out of beta, and it is available both through Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, making it easy for developers to move from one to the other if their needs change.

    Recently, the Firebase team has been working to refine their products based on user feedback. Firebase Authentication has been upgraded with the additions of phone authentication, email link authentication, and multiple email actions. They've also added a generic authentication option so developers can use any provider they choose.

    ML Kit makes machine learning much easier for client apps or on the server. With on-device ML features, users can continue using the app without internet service. Things like face recognition can still be done quickly without a wifi connection. ML Kit is adding new features all the time, including smart reply and translation, image labeling , facial feature detection, etc.

    Cloud Functions for Firebase is also out of beta. It includes new features like a crash-litics trigger that can notify you if your site or app crashes and scheduled functions. An emulator is new as well, so you can test without touching your live code.

    Jen Person

    Jen is a Developer Advocate at Google. She worked with Firebase for 2.5 years prior to recently joining Google Cloud. She loves building iOS apps with Swift and planning the ideal data structures for various apps using Cloud Firestore. Jen is currently co-starring with JavaScript in a buddy cop comedy where the two don't see eye to eye but are forced to work together, eventually forming a strong loving bond through a series of hilarious misadventures.

    Cool things of the week
    • Uploading images directly to Cloud Storage using Signed URL blog
    • Build your own event-sourced system using Cloud Spanner blog
    • Cloud Shell on the Cloud Console app site
    • Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud Load Balancing deconstructed blog
    Interview
    • Firebase site
    • Firestore site
    • Cloud Storage site
    • Firebase Authentication site
    • ML Kit site
    • TensorFlow Lite site
    • Cloud Functions for Firebase site
    • Cloud Functions Samples site
    • I/O 2019 Talk: Zero to App video
    • Guide - Cloud Firestore collection group queries docs
    • Guide - Scheduled Cloud Functions docs
    • YouTube - #AskFirebase Playlist videos
    • Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: iOS site
    • Codelab - Train and deploy on-device image classification model with AutoML Vision in ML Kit site
    • Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site
    • Codelab - Identify objects in images using custom machine learning models with ML Kit for Firebase site
    • Codelab - Detect objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site
    • Previous episodes on Firebase:
      • GCP Podcast Episode 13: Firebase with Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar podcast
      • GCP Podcast Episode 29: The New Firebase with Abe Haskins and Doug Stevenson podcast
      • GCP Podcast Episode 78: Firebase at I/O 2017 with James Tamplin and Andrew Lee podcast
      • GCP Podcast Episode 97: Cloud Firestore with Dan McGrath and Alex Dufetel podcast
      • GCP Podcast Episode 99: Cloud Functions and Firebase Hosting with David East podcast
    Question of the week

    How do I save money on my GCP resources?

    Where can you find us next?

    Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next! Watch him live code on Twitch.

    Mark Mirch is going on vacation!

    37 min

About Google Cloud Platform Podcast

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