Cloud Workstations with Marcos Grappeggia and Antoine Castex
Dec 14, 2022
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Discover the power of Cloud Workstations and how L'Oreal leverages Google Cloud for global development teams. Learn about the benefits over local environments, security features, and future plans for adoption. Explore the differences between Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell, and the importance of internal champions in driving adoption across organizations.
Cloud Workstations offer easy setup for developers with preconfigured environments and customization options for platform teams.
Cloud Workstations provide flexibility beyond Cloud Shell, allowing users to add tools and customization while addressing VM limitations.
Future plans for Cloud Workstations include supporting additional developer tools with a focus on productivity and security enhancements.
Deep dives
Cloud Workstations Overview
Cloud Workstations provide managed development environments accessible from browsers or local IDs, preconfigured with libraries, code samples, compute, storage, and network access, offering easy setup for developers and configuration options for platform teams.
Integration with Cloud Shell
Cloud Workstations complement Cloud Shell, serving as a primary development environment, offering customization beyond Cloud Shell's prototyping and sandbox capabilities, providing flexibility for users to add tools and customization while addressing limitations of preconfigured VMs.
Future Directions and Security Features
Future plans for Cloud Workstations include supporting additional developer tools to cater to diverse use cases and audiences, emphasizing a balance between productivity and security measures, with features like source code prevention, IAM controls, and network security enhancements, aligning with Google Cloud's software delivery shield suite.
L'Oreal's Adoption and Transition Process
L'Oreal's adoption of Cloud Workstations focused on simplifying developer onboarding and providing secure, customized environments for global development teams, emphasizing standardization, flexibility, and centralized management, with gradual rollout, grassroots champions, and continuous feedback to ease the transition process.
User Feedback and Further Integrations
Users desire more integrations within the Google Cloud ecosystem to enhance developer productivity and software delivery, showcasing the benefits of simplified workflows and enhanced flexibility. The ongoing focus on increasing integrations and continuing engagement with users aims to refine and expand Cloud Workstations based on real-world usage and feedback.
Marcos elaborates on the power of Cloud Workstations and all the features and offerings this software provides. The preconfigured nature of Cloud Workstations means developers simply press a button and get an IDE so they’re ready to code quickly. Other teams benefit as well, with templates created by Cloud Workstations that specify options to be preinstalled. Marcos talks more about the benefits of Workstations over local environments, especially in the areas of security and productivity. L’Oreal chose Google Cloud years ago when they began their transition to the cloud, Antoine tells us, and we hear how L’Oreal offered Marcos suggestions and feedback as Workstations was developed. Working with Cloud Workstations today, L’Oreal’s teams spread across the globe are able to begin realizing the dream of creating environments with parameters specific to different regions and areas.
While Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell are similar solutions in some ways, Marcos helps us understand the differences as well. For example, Cloud Shell is less flexible while Workstations is highly customizable. Antoine talks more about the adoption process of Workstations at L’Oreal and how they plan to continue using the software with more teams in the future. He offers advice for other companies looking to introduce it.
Workstations works with the Software Delivery Shield suite to build and maintain a secure software supply chain. Security features developers are used to in productions services are easily applied to development environments in Workstations as well. Marcos talks about the future of Cloud Workstations, including deeper security integration.
Marcos Grappeggia
Marcos is a Product Manager at Google Cloud, leading Cloud Workstations and Cloud Shell. Marcos is an engineer from University of Campinas (Brazil) and École Centrale Paris (France). Prior to joining Google, he led product at Appurify (acquired by Google, now Firebase Test Lab), enabling mobile test automation on real devices for mobile developers.
Antoine Castex
Antoine is a curious French man, a Serverless Guru multiple times GCP Certified and C2C French Club Co-President & Co-Founder.