This year there are many interesting sessions on Google Cloud. Here are some that I think you might enjoy watching the live stream (or jump into the room if you are at Moscone center). There are many more great sessions, so the best advice is to check the schedule and plan in advance which one you wish to follow live. You can always catch the other sessions later on developers.google.com channel. Continue reading
Category Archives: cloud
What’s New On Google Cloud Platform
This year at #DevConTLV the main theme was around cloud and databases. 
In my talk I did my best to emphasis, that in the past 15 years, Google has been building out the world’s fastest, most powerful, highest quality cloud infrastructure on the planet and it is opening it so external developers could enjoy it. There are many services like: App Engine, BigQuery and VMs on Compute engine that all come with the same idea. You (=the developer) should focus on what you good at and not by reinventing the wheel again (and again) by trying to find the secret in memcache optimizations. It’s my 4th year in this event and I can say that it is (without doubt) one of the best developer conferences in Tel Aviv. So if you are around next time, please try to join us. It’s great fun to talk with so many talented developers and the talks that I’ve been to, where very good and informative. Continue reading
Spark Cluster on Google Compute Engine
What is Spark and Why?
Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing system that aims to make data analytics fast — both fast to run and fast to write. To run programs faster, Spark offers a general execution model that can optimize arbitrary operator graphs, and supports in-memory computing, which lets it query data faster than disk-based engines like Hadoop. In the past, I’ve wrote an intro on how to install Spark on GCE and since then, I wanted to do a follow up on the topic but with more real world example of installing a cluster. Luckily to me, a reader of the blog did the work! So after I got his approval, I wanted to share with you his script. Continue reading
How To Set A Server To Server VPN on Google Compute Engine
There are many cases where you wish to migrate data from one location to another. In most cases, you will wish to do it over a secure channel. In this tutorial we will see what are the main steps in order to set a VPN (in this case: StrongSwan) on Google Compute Engine so you will have a server to server VPN solution between your on own server(s) located in the basement and Compute Engine.
In this tutorial we will setup a VPN connection from your own datacenter to Compute Engine. First, let’s look at the big picture. We wish to have one gateway in our datacenter and another on Compute Engine. These gateways, will be responsible to connect and secure our channel so we could transfer our data over it in a secure way.
High Level Network diagram
Main steps
What’s New In Google Developers World
Big Query Basics
In today talk, I’ve covered one of the coolest tools in the “big data” world – Big Query. What is BigQuery? Well, querying massive datasets can be time consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure. BigQuery solves this problem by enabling super-fast, SQL-like queries, using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. If you wish to play with a cool a BQ demo, just click on the picture on the left.
When to use it?
There are few bold use cases in the analytic landscape that Big Query is the right tool for the job:
- It’s a great option when your MapReduce based analysis (=Hadoop system) can be slow for ad-hoc queries.
- If you don’t wish to manage large data centers and tuning Hadoop all day long.
- It seems that analytics tools should be services at 2014, no? Continue reading
Google Cloud Storage Migration, Backup, and Archive
Today we covered Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Storage is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data objects on Google’s infrastructure. Few important features: Multiple layers of redundancy. All data replicated to multiple data centers. Objects can be terabytes in size, with resumable uploads and downloads, and range read support. If you wish to start with Google cloud storage, a good starting point will be to click on the image to the left. In my session, I’ve covered:
- Migrating Data to Cloud Storage
- Object Composition
- Durable Reduced Availability Storage Continue reading
Memcache Basics On Google App Engine
This week is packed with great content on “Google cloud platform”. I will summaries some of the talks we having in our office. The first talk I gave was on leveraging memcache when you developing with Google App Engine. Here is the summary:
What is Memcache?
Memcache is an in-memory key-value pairs data store. You can use the put(key, value) and get(key) in order to save and fetch data from it. key or value can be anything that is serializable. It’s important to remember that with GAE – Memcache is a shared service accessed via App Engine APIs. So it’s not a RAM base caching layer that you might have on a single server but a service that you will make a network call each time you write/read from it. Continue reading
Google Cloud Platform Update
Yesterday we had a very cool event at Google’s offices. There were many mobile and web developers that came to hear what is new with Google cloud technologies (among other thing). I’ve used this set of slides because I knew they will be useful to many more developers that miss the event. That is the reason, I’ve used ‘a lot’ of words on each slide.
The event was recorded and I will update this post with the video soon. Have a great 2014! Continue reading
Big Query And Google Spreadsheet Integration
There are many options to extend the powerful spreadsheets that Google offers. One of the cool, new ways to leverage its power is by using a spreadsheet as your ‘front-end’ to a big data processing power (=Big Query). In our world, there is a need to get results as fast as possible and since our data sources grow fast. It’s nice to have a tool that let us ‘see’ (and share) results quickly and easily.
What is BigQuery?
Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets. When we saying massive we are talking here on billions of rows (or more). It is a scalable and easy to use tool that gives developers and businesses an easy way into powerful data analytics on demand.
As for Google Docs and their powerful sharing capabilities – I guess we don’t need to elaborate here. So, let’s see what are the steps that will let us get data from BigQuery into our Google spreadsheet.
Ido Green 