Google Cloud Platform Podcast

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.

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.

• 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

• 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!

  1. GCP Podcast Episode 111: Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji podcast
  2. GCP Podcast Episode 112: Percy.io with Mike Fotinakis podcast
  3. GCP Podcast Episode 146: Google AI with Jeff Dean podcast
  4. GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast
  5. GCP Podcast Episode 128: Decision Intelligence with Cassie Kozyrkov podcast
  6. GCP Podcast Episode 113: Open Source TensorFlow with Yifei Feng podcast
  7. GCP Podcast Episode 88: Kubernetes 1.7 with Tim Hockin podcast
  8. GCP Podcast Episode 108: Launchpad Studio with Malika Cantor and Peter Norvig podcast
  9. GCP Podcast Episode 130: Data Science with Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon podcast
  10. GCP Podcast Episode 125: Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny podcast

• Top 10 most downloaded episodes for 2018!

  • Exact same list except Tim Hockin is not #7. Following episodes go up a number and we added to #10 spot.
  • GCP Podcast Episode 122: Project Jupyter with Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf podcast

• Mark's favorite episodes

  • GCP Podcast Episode 129: Developer Relations with Mandy Waite podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 121: Kontributing to Kubernetes with Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 131: Actions on Google with Mandy Chan podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 148: Wellio with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 110: CPU Vulnerability with Matt Linton and Paul Turner podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 125: Open Source at Google Cloud Platform with Sarah Novotny podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 140: Container Security with Maya Kaczorowski podcast

• Melanie's favorite episodes

  • GCP Podcast Episode 117: Cloud AI Fei-Fei Li was the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 114: ML Bias & Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 141: Accessibility in Tech podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 136: Robotics with Raia podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 150: Strange Loop, Remote Working, and Distributed Systems with KF podcast
  • DL Indaba
    • GCP Podcast Episode 147: DL Indaba: AI Investments in Africa podcast
    • GCP Podcast Episode 149: Deep Learning Research in Africa with Yabebal Fantaye & Jessica Phalafala podcast
    • GCP Podcast Episode 152: AI Corporations and Communities in Africa with Karim Beguir & Muthoni Wanyoike podcast
  • GCP Podcast Episode 157: NeurIPS and AI Research with Anima Anandkumar podcast

• Favorite announcements, products, and more at Google Cloud

  • Unity and Google Cloud Strategic Alliance blog
    • Open Match blog
  • Cloud TPU site
  • Google Dataset Search is in beta site
  • No tricks, just treats: Globally scaling the Halloween multiplayer Doodle with Open Match on Google Cloud blog
  • GKE On-Prem site
  • Open Source - Knative release, Skaffold, Istio updates, gVisor, etc.
  • Google in Ghana blog
  • Cloud NEXT blog
    • GCP Podcast Episode 137: Next Day 1 podcast
    • GCP Podcast Episode 138: Next Day 2 podcast
    • GCP Podcast Episode 139: Next Day 3 podcast
  • Unity and DeepMind partner to advance AI research blog
  • Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog

What were your personal highlights for 2018?

• Mark

  • Agones
  • Introducing Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting built on Kubernetes blog github
  • The new website
  • Having Melanie join me on the podcast

• Melanie

  • Bringing Francesc back
  • Meeting Grace
  • GCP Podcast Episode 142: Agones With Mark Mandel and Cyril Tovena podcast

It's the holidays!

• Thank you guests
• Thank you Jennifer
• Thank you HD Interactive: James, Trae, Sabrina, and Sean
• Thank you Greg
• Thank you Neil, Chuck, and Shana
• Thank you MBooth for the website overhaul and social media support
• Thank you Francesc
• Thank you listeners!

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.

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-minded and try to build diverse teams to create products that are useful for all.

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.

• Mark is back from vacation!
• We are at 2 million downloads! tweet
• Greg Wilson twitter and github
• Open source gaming:
  • Agones - 0.6.0 - site
  • Open Match - 0.2.0 RC - site
• What's new at Firebase Summit 2018 blog

• GCP Podcast Episode 137: Next Day 1 podcast
• Stackdriver site
• GitLab site
• Google SRE site
• Borg site
• Cloud Spanner site
• Go site
• GKE On-Prem site
• Skaffold site
• Minikube site
• DORA site
• Cloud Build site
• Bazel site

If I want to configure third party notifications (such as Slack or Github) into my Cloud Build configuration - how can I do that?

• Sending build notifications
• Configuring notifications for third-party services

Mark will be at KubeCon next week.

Melanie will be at NeurIPS this week. She'll be attending Queer in AI, Black in AI, and LatinX this week as well.

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-minded and try to build diverse teams to create products that are useful for all.

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, opening up about the hate speech and threats of which she and others received. Despite the harassment, Anima and others continued to protest, petition, and share stories of mistreatment within the community which helped lead to the name/acronym change to NeurIPS. The rebranding hopes to reestablish an inclusive academic community and move the focus back to machine learning research and away from unprofessional attention.

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. Her research spans both theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning. In particular, she has spearheaded research in tensor-algebraic methods, large-scale learning, deep learning, probabilistic models, and non-convex optimization.

Anima is the recipient of several awards such as the Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, Young investigator awards from the Air Force and Army research offices, Faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google and Adobe, and several best paper awards. She is the youngest named professor at Caltech, the highest honor bestowed to an individual faculty. She is part of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network consisting of leading experts from academia, business, government, and the media. She has been featured in documentaries by PBS, KPCC, wired magazine, and in articles by MIT Technology review, Forbes, Yourstory, O'Reilly media, and so on.

Anima received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2009 to 2010, visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England in 2012 and 2014, assistant professor at U.C. Irvine between 2010 and 2016, associate professor at U.C. Irvine between 2016 and 2017, and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services between 2016 and 2018.

• Taking charge of your data: using Cloud DLP to de-identify and obfuscate sensitive information blog
• Unlocking what's possible with medical imaging data in the cloud blog
• Google makes dataset of 50 million drawings available on its cloud blog
• Machine learning on machines: building a model to evaluate CPU performance blog

• Anima at TensorLab site
• NeurIPS site
• Petition site
• Name Change (results of the poll) letter
• Johns Hopkins University letter letter
• AI Researchers Fight Over Four Letters article
• From the Board: Changing our Acronym letter
• TensorFlow site
• NVIDIA site

What are some actions I can take if I'm being trolled, harassed and/or bullied online or I want to be proactive about my safety?

• If you are experiencing harassment, tell someone who can support you, document it, and assess escalating to authorities depending on the severity.
• Surveillance Self-Defense
• Preventing Doxxing

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML this week and NeurIPS next week. She'll be attending WIML, Black in AI, and LatinX.

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, opening up about the hate speech and threats of which she and others received. Despite the harassment, Anima and others continued to protest, petition, and share stories of mistreatment within the community which helped lead to the name/acronym change to NeurIPS. The rebranding hopes to reestablish an inclusive academic community and move the focus back to machine learning research and away from unprofessional attention.

Happy Thanksgiving! On this episode, Mark and Melanie learn about Grace.health with co-founders Therese Mannheimer and Roman Jasins. Grace.health's goal is to give women control of information about their own bodies, allowing them to make informed healthcare decisions. Grace.health is a female health companion that lets women track and plan their periods, fertility, and ask questions. It is a global undertaking, hoping to reach not just the tech savvy woman, but all women in all markets worldwide.

Stigmas and taboos around the world portray periods as dirty and contagious, preventing women from being able to work, go to school, or even sleep in the house. Grace.health's goal is to educate people to help limit these superstitions and allow women to live fuller lives. With Grace.health, women know when their periods are coming or when the are ovulating so they can make the proper plans.

In the longterm, Grace.health hopes to be a tool to not only help women identify any health concerns but also find a healthcare professional and get the treatment necessary.

Therese, one of the founders of Grace.health, is an experienced business developer and product person who believes that the best way to solve problems is to put relevant solutions into the hands of people. She is also co-founder of the Allbright Foundation that works with driving opinion around meritocracy.

Roman is CTO and co-founder of Grace.health.

• Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video
• Getting started with Kubeflow Pipelines blog
• Subatomic particles and big data: Google joins CERN openlab blog
  • GCP Podcast Episode 145: ATLAS with Dr. Mario Lassnig podcast
• Istio Routing Basics site

• Grace Health site
  • Google Cloud Startup site
• Dialogflow site
• FEM International site
• UN site
• Doctors Without Borders site
• The Hunger Project site

With background cloud functions - how can I set them up to retry on failure?

• Background functions
• Retrying Background Functions

Mark and will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML in November and Black in AI and LatinX in December.

Happy Thanksgiving! On this episode, Mark and Melanie learn about Grace.health with co-founders Therese Mannheimer and Roman Jasins. Grace.health’s goal is to give women control of information about their own bodies, allowing them to make informed healthcare decisions. Grace.health is a female health companion that lets women track and plan their periods, fertility, and ask questions. It is a global undertaking, hoping to reach not just the tech savvy woman, but all women in all markets worldwide.

Stigmas and taboos around the world portray periods as dirty and contagious, preventing women from being able to work, go to school, or even sleep in the house. Grace.health’s goal is to educate people to help limit these superstitions and allow women to live fuller lives. With Grace.health, women know when their periods are coming or when the are ovulating so they can make the proper plans.

In the longterm, Grace.health hopes to be a tool to not only help women identify any health concerns but also find a healthcare professional and get the treatment necessary.

Viktor Gamov is on the podcast today to discuss Confluent and Kafka with Mark and special first-time guest host, Michelle. Viktor spends time with Mark and Melanie explaining how Kafka allows you to stream and process data in real-time, and how Kafka helps Confluent with its advanced streaming capabilities. Confluent Cloud helps connect Confluent and cloud platforms such as Google Cloud so customers don't have to manage anything - Confluent takes care of it for you!

To wrap up the show, Michelle answers our question of the week about Next 2019.

Viktor Gamov is a Developer Advocate at Confluent, the company that makes a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Working in the field, Viktor developed comprehensive expertise in building enterprise application architectures using open source technologies. He enjoys helping different organizations design and develop low latency, scalable, and highly available distributed systems.

Back in his consultancy days, he co-authored O'Reilly's «Enterprise Web Development».

He is a professional conference speaker on distributed systems, Java, and JavaScript topics, and is a regular at events, including JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon, and others. He blogs and produces the podcasts Razbor Poletov (in Russian) and co-hosts DevRelRad.io.

Follow Viktor on Twitter, where he posts about gym life, food, open source, and, of course, Kafka and Confluent!

• Kubeflow published a leadership guide to inclusivity site
• Picture what the cloud can do: How the New York Times is using Google Cloud to find untold stories in millions of archived photos blog
• Click-to-deploy on Kubeflow site
• Containerd available for beta testing in Google Kubernetes Engine blog
• Introducing AI Hub and Kubeflow Pipelines: Making AI simpler, faster, and more useful for businesses blog
• Announcing Cloud Scheduler: a modern, managed cron service for automated batch jobs blog

• Kafka site
• Kafka Connect site
• Kafka Streams site
• KSQL site
• Confluent site
• Confluent Hub site
• Confluent Schema Registry site
• Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace site
• Confluent Enterprise site
• Confluent Cloud site
• Confluent on Github site
• Confluent Blog blog
• How to choose the number of topics/partitions in a Kafka cluster? blog
• Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times blog
• Google Cloud Platform and Confluent partner to deliver a managed Apache Kafka service blog
• Viktor's Presentations site
• Confluent Community site

If I wanted to submit a CFP for Next 2019, how would I do it?

Mark and Michelle will be at KubeCon in December.

Michelle will be at Scale by the Bay on Friday. She'll also be at YOW! Sydney, Brisbane, & Melbourne in Nov & December.