Matthew Lawson of IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) joins Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia today, telling us all about IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s move to the cloud. Engineering Manager Matt and his team primarily focus on the early stages of development at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), helping the company with research and planning as well as development. Lately, they have been focused on incrementally moving IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s digital presence to the cloud. Matt explains the digital shift process for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) and why they chose to modernize and move pieces to the cloud over time. By illustrating through examples, he details projects the team worked on during this digital transformation. Matt also talks about the changes to the IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) Digital DNA, emphasizing progress made in their digital culture to allow for the drastic change from on-prem to the cloud. Using managed services like Google Cloud Run, IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) has been able to adapt and grow in the cloud. Because IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s culture is developer-supportive, Matt and his team were able to research and convince the company that managed services in the cloud was the way to go, and developers were allowed some autonomy to choose things like GKE to create an effective cloud environment for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group). Next year, Matt and his engineering team are hoping to run some online hackathons and other events. Matthew Lawson Matthew Lawson is responsible for leading a small innovation team at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) in southern Sweden. He has worked within the IT/Digital industry for 13 years and has deep experience and knowledge in application development, automation, DevOps and cloud technologies - especially serverless. He has a deep passion for enabling teams to quickly provide business value across the entire digital and physical customer journey. Cool things of the week Next OnAir as it happens: All the announcements in one place blog A developer’s take: Get the most out of Cloud AI Week at Next OnAir blog BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. brings PAC-MAN to the real world in PAC-MAN GEO blog Interview IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) site Matt’s Next Session: Serverless Functions (FaaS): Secure, Scalable, Resilient, Anywhere site ML Kit site Compute Engine site Cloud Run site Google Cloud Functions site Pub/Sub site BigQuery site GKE site Firestore site IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) is hiring! site Tip of the week This week, we get a great tip from our friend Grant on using Google Cloud Functions! github What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka is working on sketches like this summary of Google Cloud Next and more GCP Comics!

Max Saltonstall is back in the co-host seat, joining Mark for a fun chat about Active Assist. Chris Law is our guest this week, and he starts with the story of his arrival at Google and his path to the Active Assist team. Active Assist is Google’s way of helping clients learn about and take advantage of all the cloud features available. Chris describes the main ways Active Assist helps customers in the real world, from troubleshooting tools that identify problems to analysis software that helps clients determine how changes will effect the project. Active Assist also provides recommendations for cost savings, better security, and performance boosters to help clients proactively build better projects. As companies scale, these features become even more important, Chris tells us, citing examples from real users. Later, we talk about how machine learning is employed to create these recommendations. We talk transparency and learn how Chris and his team keep open communication with clients as they design and improve client security structures. In the future, the Active Assist team will continue to work with departments across Google Cloud and build more recommendations tools for customers. DataFlow and BigQuery are some of the recommendations projects coming soon. More automation will be introduced as well, helping clients do things like scale automatically based on machine learning analysis done behind the scenes. Chris Law Chris has helped to start several companies in the past, everything from Social Networking (Tribe.net) to Aggregate Knowledge, which started out as a Recommendations company and moved into Data Management Platform in the Ads space. He joined Google to see what it’s like to build things at scale. Cool things of the week Cloud Next Week 9: Business Application Platform site From One to More: Why Sharing Our Narrative Matters site The 2020 Doodle for Google national finalists are here blog Explore Kids Space: A way to nurture your kid’s curiosity blog Interview Active Assist site IAM Recommender Documentation site IAM Recommender Service Account Insights site Committed Use Discounts site Stack Chat at Home This week, we talk to Rob Hedgepeth about SkySQL. What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is working on quite a few things, from fixing his dishwasher and teaching his family new board games to a new animated Google series with Jen Person.

This week on the podcast, we’re celebrating GKE’s fifth birthday! Mark Mirchandani is joined by special guest host Carter Morgan to talk all things Kubernetes and GKE with fellow Googlers and GKE experts Alex and Drew. Drew starts the show with a thorough explanation of Kubernetes, telling our hosts that its a great way to manage containers as you scale. Because it is an open source offering, Kubernetes has grown and adapted quickly. Alex elaborates, pointing out that Kubernetes has helped redefine how people create cloud native applications. A year after Kubernetes was born, Google introduced Google Kubernetes Engine to help simplify things for developers while optimizing scalability and efficiency. Our guests talk about the progression of GKE over its short life, what’s new with the latest version, and why reliability and scalability have become the focus for year six. Later, we hear examples of companies taking advantage of everything GKE has to offer and how the symbiotic relationship between Google and its customers has helped GKE grow. In the world of gaming, GKE’s global scaling capabilities have been vital. Drew talks about Anthos, explaining that it helps businesses run Kubernetes in their controlled on-prem system while leaving the option for an easy cloud migration in the future. We wrap up the show with a look into the Kubernetes crystal ball where Drew sees a more adaptive Kubernetes and GKE. Alex hopes to continue to simplify GKE, making it easier and easier to use anywhere in the world. Alex Zakonov Alex Zakonov leads Google Kubernetes Engine team being responsible for operations of Google K8S fleet and for driving innovation in the K8S management. Prior to Google, Alex led a portfolio of products for Azure Monitoring at Microsoft enabling Azure customers to reliably operate and scale their applications. Alex has co-founded two successful start-ups, one of which, AVIcode, was acquired by Microsoft. Alex brings experience and passion in building and operating large scale systems and enabling engineering teams to deliver innovation at scale. Drew Bradstock Drew Bradstock leads product management for Google Kubernetes Engine. He previously worked on Google Ad Exchange and is based in Waterloo, Ontario in the Great White North of Canada. Cool things of the week New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers blog Week 8 of Cloud Next: Cloud AI site Interpreting ML Models with Explainable AI site How I Launched This: A SaaS Story podcast Interview Kubernetes site GKE site Bare Metal Solution site Optimize cost to performance on Google Kubernetes Engine video Best practices for running cost-optimized Kubernetes applications on GKE docs Anthos site Start your K8s learning journey with hands-on training at no cost site Kubernetes Podcast podcast Tip of the week Anthony gives us a GKE tip on NodeLocal DNSCache this week! What’s something cool you’re working on? Carter is working on the SaaS podcast. Mark and Carter are working on a Kubernetes series! Sound Effect Attribution A wonky midi version of the Superman Theme was used comedically at the end of this episode. The powerful and moving original symphonic music composed by John Williams can be found here.

Mark and Brian Dorsey are together again this week as we learn all about Google’s Bare Metal Solution with our guests James Harding and Gurmeet “GG” Goindi. To start the show, GG introduces us to Bare Metal Solution, explaining that it allows client projects built on specialized, often outdated software to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud environment. Using Bare Metal Solution, clients can choose to migrate all or part of their projects for a fully customized experience. We learn how Bare Metal Solution is able to support a partial or full native solution for clients and go through the steps to getting a project from completely on-prem to the cloud where latency is decreased, security is increased, and other cloud benefits can be leveraged. GG gives examples of situations where Bare Metal is a great option for clients, for instance an established company with an early 90s database that recently branched out into apps built in cloud native software. James outlines the benefits of Bare Metal Solution over other options, including real world examples of industries that have been able to modernize their offerings and adapt with the Bare Metal. GG and James wrap up the show explaining why the open source aspect of Bare Metal is so important to the evolution and flexibility of the product, and we talk about the recent developments at Bare Metal. James Harding James Harding leads the Data Management Practice for North America, with responsibility for the go-to-market strategy for all products and services data mangement. He also oversees marketing campaigns and sales field enablement. Gurmeet “GG” Goindi Gurmeet Goindi (GG) is a product manager at Google, where he focuses on databases and attends meetings. Prior to joining Google, GG led product management for Exadata at Oracle, where he also worked on databases and attended meetings. GG has had various product management, management, and engineering roles for the last 20 years in Silicon Valley, but his favorite meetings have been at Google. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next Week 7: Application Modernization site Brian’s Cloud Next Presentation: Where Should I Run My Stuff? Choosing Compute Options site Mark’s Cloud Next Presentation: What’s New in Google Cloud Cost Management site Announcing the general availability of Google Cloud Game Servers blog Interview Bare Metal Solution site Bare Metal Solution Next Presentation site Bare Metal Solution on GitHub site Oracle site Oracle Rack Cabinets site Stack Chat Segment of the Week Max talks to Deloitte about how they built their system to help groups collect and respond to COVID-19 data on our Stack Chat Segment this week! What’s something cool you’re working on? NCAA bracket predictions on QwikLabs Here’s a hint for next week’s episode! GKE Turns 5: What’s New?

This week on the podcast, Mark and Max Saltonstall talk with Simen Svale Skogsrud and Knut Melvær of Sanity.io. Sanity.io started as a consulting company but organically morphed into a software company when they realized their content management solutions worked across many industries. By providing a managed system that includes search indexing and data hosting, Sanity.io allows customers to analyze and deliver content all over the world with ease. They also offer an open source kit that facilitates complete customization of the program to each client’s particular needs. Simen explains headless CMS as compared to the conventional systems and how it benefits Sanity.io clients. Data is separate and much more flexible, allowing it to be used in any way on any platform. Knut tells us about the developer experience using Sanity, describing the dashboard of useful APIs and other features that make using the program a breeze. We talk about how real clients have influenced and built on the product and why customer service is so important to Sanity. Later in the show, our guests go in-depth about specific features of Sanity, including how the system handles different types of data and data relationships. We get technical, talking about the importance of scaling and how Sanity is accomplishing this with Google Cloud and Kubernetes. Simen and Knut offer our listeners some valuable advice on product launching, time management, and more. Knut Melvær Knut Melvær is the Head of Developer Relations and Support at Sanity.io. Simen Svale Skogsrud Simen Svale Skogsrud is Co-founder and CTO of Sanity.io. Cool things of the week The Anywhere School: 50+ Google for Education updates blog It’s Week 6 of Next site Google Cloud and Spotify Demo at Next site Bare Metal Solution talk from GG site Interview Sanity.io site Get Started with Sanity.io site Get Started with Sanity CLI site Sanity.io Careers site Sanity.io Docs site OMA site Bengler site Kubernetes site Tip of the week Roger gives us a tip about Google Cloud’s Data Loss Prevention. Check out the demo here! What’s something cool you’re working on? Max is blogging about identity and security and access control. Here’s his latest post with Jen Person, Zero Trust for Enterprise : Cooking up some access controls. Mark and Max have been working on turning their popular YouTube Series, Stack Chat, into a new addition to the podcast! Join us next week to hear the first installment!

Priyanka is back this week, joining Mark as we talk big data with our guests Prabhu Palanisamy and Jarrett Garcia. Iron Mountain, a data management company, securely stores hard-copy and online data for enterprise customers. SpringML aides enterprises in the use of data analytics and machine learning to transform their projects. With the help of SpringML and Google Cloud, Iron Mountain migrated much of their data to datalakes and cloud storage for easier access and manipulation of the data. Jarrett and Prabhu talk about the process of migrating so much data, including the main goals of their partnership. First, they established systems that could be repeated and help Iron Mountain understand when data is moved, destroyed, migrated, and more. We discuss the next steps taken, learning how Iron Mountain moved so much data to the cloud. Using Google products like DataFlow, BigQuery, and Cloud Composer, SpringML was able to take the data from Iron Mountain’s landing zone and transform it. Prior planning meant that the system was optimized and ready from the beginning, complete with automation and tools to make a fast, effective migration of data without any restructuring. Later, the data visualization is done by GSuite, Google Data Studio, and Looker so Iron Mountain and their customers can use the data for analysis. Later in the show, Jarrett describes real-life situations in which Iron Mountain has helped manage, migrate, and store data for customers. Prabhu details the lessons SpringML learned while working on this project and offers advice to other developers. He talks about the future of the project, explaining that now that the data has been migrated, more detailed analytics can be performed and machine learning projects added on to augment Iron Mountain’s offerings. Jarrett Garcia Jarrett Garcia recently joined Iron Mountain as the Director of Enterprise Data. At Iron Mountain, Jarrett is working closely with the executive leadership team to build a robust Enterprise Data Platform in the cloud. His partnership with Google Cloud is a critical component to the transformation journey. Before coming to Iron Mountain, Jarrett worked as a Lead Architect at Nielsen within their Technology R&D team to create an AI/ML platform in the cloud. Jarrett has been at the forefront in introducing modern technologies into the organization such as Docker, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes. Before that, he lead the Data Science technology team where he spent over a decade building analytic tools and ushering in new technology. Prabhu Palanisamy Prabhu Palanisamy is co-founder of SpringML. He has a long history of running data-driven consulting organizations from Software AG to Appirio. Building on relationships he created leading integration and analytics services, Prabhu co-founded SpringML, a next generation data analytics company that serves data intensive industries. Prabhu constantly questions the conventional way of doing things and finds ways to be creative and innovative for customer business problems. Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next Week 5: Data Analytics site Best practices for performance and cost optimization for machine learning site Building smarter games with Machine Learning video Anthos in a Minute video What is BigQuery? video Interview SpringML site Iron Mountain site BigQuery site Google Cloud Storage site Dataflow site Cloud Composer site GSuite site Data Studio site Looker site Scaling Data-Driven Insights Across a Complex Global Organization with Looker and BigQuery site Tip of the week Nick Orlove tells us a bit more about what to think about when optimizing BigQuery: What is BigQuery? video Visualizing query results video What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and Sketchnote.

On the podcast this week, Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey talk with fellow Googlers John Laham and Stewart Reichling about Traffic Director, a managed control plane for service mesh. Traffic Director solves many common networking problems developers face when breaking apart monoliths into multiple, manageable microservices. We start the conversation with some helpful definitions of terms like data plane (the plane that data passes through when one service calls on another) and service mesh (the art of helping these microservices speak with each other) and how Traffic Director and the Envoy Proxy use these concepts to streamline distributed services. Envoy Proxy can handle all sorts of networking solutions, from policy enforcement to routing, without adding hundreds of lines of code to each project piece. The proxy can receive a request, process it, and pass it on to the next correct piece, speeding up your distributed system processes. But Envoy can do more than the regular proxy. With its xDS APIs, services can configure proxies automatically, making the process much more efficient. In some instances, the same benefits developers see with a distributed system can be gained from distributed proxies as well. To make distributed proxy configuration easy and manageable, a managed control plane system like Traffic Director is the solution. Traffic Director not only helps you facilitate communication between microservices, it also syncs distributed states across regions, monitors your infrastructure, and more. Stewart Reichling Stewart is a Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stewart leads Product Management for Traffic Director (Google’s managed control plane for open service mesh) and Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing (Google’s managed, Envoy-based Layer 7 load balancer). He is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked across strategy, Marketing and Product Management at Google. John Laham John is an infrastructure architect and cloud solutions architect that works with customers to help them build their applications and platforms on Google Cloud. Currently, he leads a team of consultants and engineers as part of the Google Cloud Professional Services organization, aligned to the telco, media, entertainment and gaming verticals. Cool things of the week Week four sessions of Cloud Next: Security site Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel Week 2 site Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel Week 3 site Cost optimization on Google Cloud for developers and operators site GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast Interview Traffic Director site Envoy Proxy site NGINX site HAProxy site Kubernetes site Cloud Run site Service Mesh with Traffic Director site Traffic Director Documentation site gRPC site Traffic Director and gRPC—proxyless services for your service mesh blog Tip of the week This week, we’re talking about IAM Policy Troubleshooter. What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is working on the Weekly Cloud Talks by DevRel we mentioned in the cool things this week and continuing his Terraform studies. Check out the Immutable Infrastructure video we talked about last week. Sound Effect Attribution “Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Mark Mirchandani is joined again by Priyanka Vergadia this week for an ML-filled interview with Radu Miclaus of Lucidworks. Lucidworks, a company specializing in information retrieval, strives to make data searching easier for developers and users. Building off Solr, Lucidworks created Fusion, an environment more conducive to easy AI-enhanced query capabilities, better scalability, and more. With Fusion, developers can take advantage of the highly advanced relevance tuning tools such as query rewrites, which analyze user behavior and automatically rewrite queries based on that information. On the tech side, Fusion was built with a combination of Java, Kubernetes to increase scalability, Solr management tools, and logging and reporting tools. The engineers at Lucidworks have created Fusion-specific system-enhancing pieces as well, including a machine learning service that allows data scientists to train their models elsewhere and plug them in for a completely customized experience. The team also created Smart Answers, which is a Q-And-A system built on a search engine that can connect to chatbots, virtual assistants, and others. Radu goes into detail explaining the Smart Answers system and how the layers of the project work together. We also learn about the customization capabilities and integration of Smart Answers. Radu wraps up the show with interesting use-case stories and how Fusion is working in the real world. In the future, Lucidworks will be available right in the GCP marketplace! Radu Miclaus Radu has over 12 years of experience in the data science space with applications in general machine learning architecture, search, customer analytics, risk and financial analysis. At Lucidworks, Radu focuses on low-code AI for search developers, pluggable machine learning for data scientists, and cloud managed services that offload the burden of operating search applications. Cool things of the week Week 2 sessions on productivity and collaboration site Online shopping gets more personal with Recommendations AI blog Using new traffic control features in External HTTP(S) load balancer blog Optimizing your costs on Compute Engine video Google Cloud Talks by DevRel site Giving you better cost analytics capabilities—and a simpler invoice blog GCP Podcast Episode 217: Cost Optimization with Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma podcast Interview Lucidworks site Solr site Lucene site Fusion site Try Fusion site Smart Answers site Spark site Kubernetes site GKE site Dialogflow site Webinar: Smart Answers for Employee and Customer Support After COVID-19 site Deconstructing Chatbots video GCP Podcast Episode 227: Pandium with Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn podcast GCP Podcast Episode 188: Conversation AI with Priyanka Vergadia podcast GCP Podcast Episode 195: Conversational AI Best Practices with Cathy Pearl and Jessica Dene Earley-Cha podcast Tip of the week We’re talking to Dale Markowitz about Prototyping Machine Learning projects. You can also hear more from Dale in GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz and GCP Podcast Episode 194: ML with Dale Markowitz. What’s something cool you’re working on? Priyanka has been working on GCP Comics and Sketchnote.

Tyler McMullen of Fastly is with us today, telling our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Brian Dorsey all about the company, CDNs, and more. Fastly is an edge cloud platform, focusing on ways to improve the more customer-focused side of the cloud with things like latency reduction, efficient scaling, and more. Content Delivery Networks can be a part of this, due to their proximity to customers and better caching. Edge cloud takes pieces of normal cloud setups and moves them to the edge of the cloud, closer to the customer, to achieve better speed. Tyler explains what pieces make sense to move out to the edge and what he sees as the future of edge cloud platforms. Later in the show, Tyler tells us how to analyze projects and make decisions on the use of edge cloud, CDNs, and microservices. He explains the technical process of using an edge cloud platform too, giving examples of situations that might benefit from a more edge cloud approach. WebAssembly, technology originally created for web browsers, actually plays a role in Fastly’s edge platforms, Tyler explains, going further into the technical side of how the engineers at Fastly have created this system to run smoothly while also being easy to build on. In the future, Tyler hopes to see WebAssembly support more languages so compiling and distributing can be even easier. Tyler McMullen Tyler McMullen is CTO at Fastly, a global edge cloud platform, where he is responsible for evolving the company’s system architecture and technology vision. He leads a team of experienced technology innovators focused on internet scale, and working on future-facing, ambitious projects and standards. As part of the founding team at Fastly, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. Prior to joining Fastly, Tyler worked on large scale web applications, text analysis, and performance. He can be found debating about edge computing, networking, and distributed systems all over the world. Cool things of the week Week 1 recap of Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir blog Introducing Google Cloud Confidential Computing with Confidential VMs blog Next OnAir Sessions (Week 2) site Introducing your new home for work in G Suite blog Interview Fastly site Reaching 100 Tbps of Capacity blog Fastly’s investment in WASM ecosystem blog Fastly’s Developer Hub site Fastly’s Developer Hub: Everything you need to build on Fastly is now in one place blog Bytecode Alliance site WebAssembly site BigQuery site Fastly Labs site Altitude site Tip of the week We’re talking to Stephanie Wong about the Network Intelligence Center and her video series, GCP Networking End to End What’s something cool you’re working on? Brian is learning Terraform! Mark is working on more video content and his Next talk, CST103.

This week is all about business-to-business marketplace software with Pandium as Mark Mirchandani and Max Saltonstall talk with our guests Cristina Flaschen and Kelly Sarabyn. The Pandium platform helps companies build and support in-app marketplaces with a focus on software integration and flexibility. Kelly and Cristina start by explaining how Pandium deals with scalability for clients with multiple users and partners. Cristina elaborates on Pandium’s role in facilitating integrations, helping customers build customized, flexible solutions. We discuss how APIs are handled and the way Pandium takes care of authentication, security, and other standard pieces. We continue with a thorough discussion of ‘yes code’, ‘low code’, and ‘no code’ approaches, and the benefits and drawbacks of each system. With a combination approach of some ‘no code’ tools and other ‘yes code’ pieces, Pandium allows better customization in any code language, while keeping some functions easy for non-engineers. Cristina Flaschen Cristina Flaschen is the CEO and co-founder of Pandium. She has managed integration projects and technical implementation teams for over a decade, including at Handshake and Booker. Kelly Sarabyn Kelly Sarabyn is a senior product marketer at Pandium. Previously, she was a partner at Woden and 2K North, where she crafted the positioning for dozens of SaaS companies. Cool things of the week Choose the right Google Compute Engine machine type for you blog New gcloud cheat sheet available as free printable download blog Search for Racial Equity video Interview Pandium site GKE site Google Sheets site Improving marketplace integrations with Pandium blog Scaling and support on GKE with Pandium video What’s Wrong with Low and No Code Platforms? blog “No Code”​ is great. But here’s why we need Yes Code blog Tip of the week Alicia Williams is here to tell us about connecting Sheets to BigQuery. What’s something cool you’re working on? A new video series called Season of Scale started just last week! Max’s latest blog post is all about Pandium! The Stack Chat series! Sound Effect Attribution “Laser Wrath 4.wav” by Marcuslee of Freesound.org