Google Cloud OnBoard Bucharest

Google Cloud OnBoard – Bucharest

Launched end of last year in Tokyo, Google Cloud OnBoard is a series of conferences which already brought together more than 20,000 technology enthusiasts from 49 cities. Bucharest joined it today when around 600 people gathered at JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel.

Talking with some of the participants, it was like Google succeeded to attract talents from all major IT companies from Romania. These conferences are not only about presenting someone’s vision and product, it’s also about networking. I met with friends and colleagues, I made new acquaintances, so it was a good day. My knowledge on Google Cloud Platform is extremely limited, so I had a lot to learn today.

Inside the Agenda

Event started with a small presentation by Boris Georgiev, Head of Google Cloud CEE & Russia. Google is running on the platform 7 of their own products each with more than 1 billion users. Currently they have 12 regions with 5 more to come. CAPEX investment for the last 3 years is about 29 billion USD. More than 100 edge point of presence, and more than 800 global cache edge nodes. Jupiter network consolidates 100k x 10Gb. Forget about CPU and GPU, the new star is Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). I spotted some interesting names in the customer list: Ebay, Spotify, The New York Times, Evernote and Pokemon Go.

Bogdan Nourescu from Atlas Networking took over and drove us deep into the Google Cloud Platform services (Identity and Access Management, Google AppEngine, Google Cloud Datastore, Machine Learning Platform, Google Compute Engine, Cloud Virtual Network, Cloud Interconnect, DNS, Load Balancing, CDN, Stackdriver, Google Cloud Functions, Container Engine, Cloud Storage, Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Big Data Platform). Cool stuff: Google is spinning up to 2 billion containers every week, Snapchat send 700 million photos and videos every day, Shazam use dedicated GPUs to deliver services each day to 20+ million users, Philips Hue use containers to manage each day 18 million remote lighting commands (Wi-Fi bulbs is just wow), Sungard write in Bigtable 5 billion market events per hour with bursts of up to 10 billion per hour.

At the Close

I learned today a lot of data, I probably need to check the material and go through some of the resources presented after each chapter. On the negative side, I feel that replacing some of the material with interactive activities like demos or hands-on tasks will score extra points to the existing format of the conference.

All in all, it’s a good introductory event into Google Cloud Platform. If you are new, see when Google Cloud OnBoard is near your house!

Constantin Ghioc

I usually play with vSphere API, Ansible, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and different AWS tools. In my other life I’m a husband and a father, an amateur photographer and a Go enthusiast.

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