BRIAN DORSEY: Hello, everybody.
My name is Brian.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I'm Laurence.
BRIAN DORSEY: And we are both from Developer Relations
on the Google Cloud Platform, and we're
going to try an experiment today.
So tell us more about it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, we'd like
to start just really having a good, open conversation
with you developers, talk with you about Google Cloud Platform
and about Cloud as a whole.
Obviously it's a little too late for this video
to answer any of your questions.
But for future videos, if you've any questions,
just put them in the comments section
down here, like under the video window,
not on the floor of this studio.
And we'd love to answer them.
And if we can't answer them-- I mean, between Brian and I,
we should be able to answer most of them.
Mostly Brian answering, not me.
BRIAN DORSEY: It's a given we won't know all the answers,
but--
LAURENCE MORONEY: If we don't, we know the people that do,
and we'd love to bring it out there and answer them for you.
BRIAN DORSEY: Fantastic.
So, yeah.
So, questions, conversation topics,
like things you'd like to hear about Cloud platform,
or anything goes.
Give us a shot.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Speaking of go?
BRIAN DORSEY: Go.
Anything goes.
So for today, I think we'll try little, few questions here
between us, to get things going.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Totally unrehearsed.
BRIAN DORSEY: Completely unrehearsed.
So you will see flubs here and there.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I think we've seen a few already.
BRIAN DORSEY: So, Laurence, what is Cloud to you?
How would your previous experiences
developing software and designing software
have changed if you had Cloud as an option.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I guess I'm quite experienced in designing
software, and developing it a little bit.
And experienced probably to the length
that it made me a little cynical.
So forgive me if it comes across as that,
but I think Cloud for me is like, it's one of those terms
that we, as an industry-- and I don't mean
any particular company, but just we as an industry-- haven't
done a great job in the past of really articulating what it is
and what it means.
And I guess I could give one example that-- it's
a funny little story if you'll indulge me.
I used to be an architect on a financial services platform.
And we built products for Wall Street.
And we built products for financial analysts
on Wall Street.
And generally the way that you'd build the product
is that an architect would come in.
The architect talks to the business people,
gathers the business requirements,
takes a look at the infrastructure
that we have in place and joins the dots.
So for example, it might be, we'd
build a product that is providing
some financial analytics.
And so we have a feed of fundamentals.
And we have a speed of data.
And we have a feed of history.
BRIAN DORSEY: At this point, is it all lines and boxes?
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's all lines and boxes.
Exactly.
BRIAN DORSEY: Not software yet.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Not software yet.
It's lines and boxes and Visio diagrams.
And cylinders.
Don't forget the cylinders.
BRIAN DORSEY: Cylinders
LAURENCE MORONEY: Databases are cylinders.
They're not boxes.
So we'd draw all these things up.
And before we'd get developers involved,
we'd draw all this up.
And then we'd generally have a big fluffy cloud, right?
So we have all our lines and boxes
of our feeds and our databases, and a big fluffy cloud.
And then a PC connected to it, a mobile device connecting to it,
like a terminal connecting--
BRIAN DORSEY: So that's like the internet and everything, or--
LAURENCE MORONEY: That was like everything hidden behind it.
And I'm sure if you open Visio, or other drafting tools today,
there's always an icon for a big fluffy cloud, right?
And that was the cloud.
And I can remember, for me the next step
is, once I've designed this and I've figured out
all these feeds and where I'm getting all this data,
I would bring the Ops people in.
And I remember specifically, the best Ops
guy I've ever worked with-- I can't remember his name.
I remember it was Scott something.
It's not Scott Guthrie.
And I remember it was Scott something.
And I remember having this conversation with him
and presenting the thing to him.
And he looked through, and I thought
I'd done a fabulous job of pitching
my architecture to him.
And his job would be then to think about
how many servers do we have running this?
How do we secure that?
How do we make sure the servers are patched, managed, powered.
Yadda yadda yadda.
All this kind of stuff.
And I remember doing this fabulous presentation
that I'd prepared for weeks, and giving it
to this guy to get him on board.
And he said four words to me.
And these are words that I can share on video, don't worry.
So what you think the four words were?
BRIAN DORSEY: Um, "I love it?"
No, that's three words.
LAURENCE MORONEY: His four words were, "There is no cloud."
BRIAN DORSEY: Wait.
OK.
This is 10 years ago?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, about that.
About that.
BRIAN DORSEY: So where was he coming from with that?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Where he was coming from--
and he was exactly right-- was because,
if you think about the complexity of running
an application like this, OK?
Security.
And the manageability.
Like I say, virus scanning.
Even the number of servers that you need to run this thing.
We would actually do a calculation that
would look at our traffic and then would
say this one's going to be a Java application running
on a Weblogic app server.
And we'd say, OK, we looked at our traffic that we'd have.
We'd looked at the number of users.
We'd figure out how many-- based on the CPU,
based on the network connectivity--
BRIAN DORSEY: So he's thinking just straight logistics.
Like how do you get the hardware you need to do that?
What networking infrastructure do need?
How do the switches work?
Load balancing.
How much storage do we need?
You can't just handwave that away and draw--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Hide it behind a fluffy cloud.
BRIAN DORSEY: Gotcha.
Well, how does that change now?
That's not really what we think of as Cloud now,
but it kind of is.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I think that's the main thing.
And that's the magic, the perceived magic
that I as an architect would do is draw a fluffy cloud
and hide away all the complexity.
BRIAN DORSEY: It all just works?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, and it all just works.
That is a reality now.
It's no longer a perceived magic.
Right?
Because we work with the Google Cloud Platform.
And I'm going to go do my Superman thing,
go-- You know, we work with the Google Cloud Platform now.
And so the nice thing about that is
if we build applications that run, for example on App Engine.
And it was funny that I was talking
about Java and Weblogic.
And App Engine supports Java, which makes me very happy.
And then all of those complexities
of scaling up when you need it, and scaling down
when you don't need it, and only paying for what you use.
BRIAN DORSEY: So now that's all real.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's all real.
Because in his-- to go back to my friend who said,
"There is no cloud," he would look at the amount of traffic
that we need.
We'll calculate the number of servers
that we'd need for that.
And then we had an algorithm based on a bathtub curve type
thing and-- what do you call that?
A binary curve.
And I think we calculated the average number of servers,
and we multiplied that by 2 root 2.
And that would give us the 95 percent estimate for traffic.
And so we might need 10 servers for traffic,
but would end up with 28 servers.
And for the times from outside of nine to five,
those 28 servers are still sitting there and not
being used.
And average times, we're using 10, and 18 of them were unused.
And for the sake of peak time, we
might use 23, 24, 25 of them.
But now with Cloud, now we can talk
about that kind of fluffy thing and all of that magic
is going on for us.
BRIAN DORSEY: It really exists.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it really, really exists.
I'd love to have Scott on a future show
and ask him, "Is there a cloud now?"
BRIAN DORSEY: Let's find him.
OK.
So I had kind of a related experience.
I spent many years working on a system for distributing files
around many locations so that they were always
available from all of these sites
that the organization worked at.
And we were trying to create the illusion
that all of these files were available everywhere.
And realistically, you would keep
a hot set of files, or recent things,
or some subset of what you could actually
afford to keep there at some sites.
And maybe other sites would have everything.
And you have too many copies of everything,
really because you don't need them all.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Asset management's a difficult
problem.
BRIAN DORSEY: Exactly.
And you look at things like Google Cloud Storage, which
is blob storage service in the Cloud.
And it essentially is that entire system that we built,
just ready to use.
LAURENCE MORONEY: As a service.
BRIAN DORSEY: As a service.
The entire product doesn't even need to be built in that way.
So that would save a huge amount of time.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So you could have really focused
on building out the user experience.
BRIAN DORSEY: Exactly
LAURENCE MORONEY: Instead of the plumbing
and the infrastructure.
BRIAN DORSEY: And what we wanted to build on top of that.
Because this was all just a necessary foundation
to get to what we were trying to do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: There are only so many hours in the day.
And so if you're spending all that time and all those cycles
building that planning, think about the things
that you're not building.
BRIAN DORSEY: Exactly.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And particularly
nowadays, I feel folks have much more
of a demand for a rich user experience than they
used to have.
The things that were acceptable 10 years ago
are completely unacceptable today,
because now you have the luxury of being
able to hide behind that big fluffy cloud
with its own storage.
And now you can focus on building a better user
experience and such a thing like that.
BRIAN DORSEY: Totally.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So do you have a feature of Cloud
that kind of gets you excited?
BRIAN DORSEY: Yeah!
There's a bunch of things, like so many things about Cloud
that gets me really excited.
I mean, the big picture, like the whole Cloud
space is super exciting right now.
I think we've gotten to the point where you can create
a model of the hardware we used to have
to run all these things.
So you've got your servers, and you've got your networks,
and switches, and everything that you
used to have to go to a data center and do by hand,
there's an API for.
And that is super useful, incredibly exciting,
and allows a layer-- a level of automation
that just wasn't possible before.
And there's peaks and slopes.
But I don't think we're done there, right?
This is the next step of figuring out,
OK now that these things that used to be physical
are abstract concepts, are they the right abstractions
we want for building software in the future?
And I think we can do better, right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, absolutely.
BRIAN DORSEY: And so there's things that are really exciting
right now.
So App Engine's really interesting in that space.
I think Docker is super exciting.
There's a bunch of stuff going on there.
So Cloud as a whole, super exciting.
I think in Compute Engine terms, we've
got a load balancer that's basically
Google's datacenter-level load balancing
available as a feature for you to use.
We've got Block Storage, where it's super consistent,
and that's like its primary design goal is consistency.
Great for running databases on, things like that.
But I think if I wanted to just--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Pick one.
BRIAN DORSEY: Pick one?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Pick one.
BRIAN DORSEY: I'm actually going to pick--
LAURENCE MORONEY: I put a gopher to your head
and ask you to pick one.
BRIAN DORSEY: Only one.
OK.
I think I would have to pick Notifications in Cloud Storage.
Cloud Storage is this blobstore in the sky.
You can push files to it, and you can get them back
from anywhere in the world.
And it has, essentially, subscription notifications.
You can say, at this HTTP endpoint,
that's my application.
I want you to send the metadata for every single change that
happens to this bucket.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice
BRIAN DORSEY: So you can build workflow.
And you can build deep integration
between Cloud Storage and any application,
whether that's running on Google Cloud or not.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
So going back to your video scenario.
So if you're building a video app
and you've got people all over the world shooting footage
for a movie or something like that,
and then somebody puts some new footage,
everybody's going to be notified.
BRIAN DORSEY: So you can get notifications to tell people
about it.
You could kick off a transcoding process.
You can just deeply integrate it within your whole app.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Cool.
BRIAN DORSEY: Anything you need to do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And there's an API for that?
BRIAN DORSEY: There's an API for that.
There's an API for everything.
LAURENCE MORONEY: They used to say, "There's an app for that."
Now we say, "There's an API for that."
BRIAN DORSEY: There's an API for that.
So if you had to pick one, what's your--
LAURENCE MORONEY: If I put the gopher to my head?
Oh, there's so many.
I think one, for me, that actually--
the very first thing.
You know what they say about first love is
the one you remember.
So the first love for me with the Google Cloud
was actually Java.
BRIAN DORSEY: OK
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I know it's a surprise.
BRIAN DORSEY: Coming from Python background, I'm like--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Over in Python background.
I've got some great stuff to say about Python, but maybe
for a future video.
But I think it's because I came from a Java background.
And I worked for Microsoft for many years
and moved more into the ASP.NET background.
But really, one of the things that disappointed me
about Java years ago was how hard it was,
and how expensive it was, for you to put Java stuff publicly.
BRIAN DORSEY: Oh, right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
Like if you had an App Server, like for a J2EE thing,
those things cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
And--
BRIAN DORSEY: So compared to your PHP app, or--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Python app, you know,
where you can $2 a month, for a server, and that kind of thing.
And it was like, I'd really like to be
able to showcase some Java work.
But I couldn't!
OK?
Short of putting an app server, like a Tomcat,
or something that, on a machine under my desk,
and opening port 80 on my router--
BRIAN DORSEY: So you're a good Java programmer
and you've made some awesome thing in Java,
and you want to show it off.
What do you do?
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm applying for a job.
It's a Java job.
And I want to show some Java stuff.
Can't do it.
But then, what comes along, but App Engine?
And I know I'm holding the gopher now,
so he'd probably feel a bit disappointed
I'm talking about a different language.
And App Engine.
And now I can use Eclipse.
And I can put a simple plug-in into Eclipse,
and I can start writing code in Java.
And I can deploy it to App Engine.
And I'm not even paying a monthly fee.
I'm paying based on usage.
BRIAN DORSEY: OK.
So this is a case where it scales down really well,
in addition to scaling up.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
And actually, I haven't been working at Google that long.
And as part of my interview process,
I've had this algorithm that I've been working on for years,
where it's like I do predictive analysis of the stock market.
So take a look at the history of a stock price,
and then take a guess from there what it's going be at.
And I thought, OK, here's a great example for me to--
and I had originally written this in Java.
And I moved it to C Sharp.
And I dusted off my old Java and put into AppSpot.
AppSpot is where you host AppEngine apps.
And so for my actual interview, my first interview here
at Google, I showed them.
And it was on that particular day, it was really interesting.
Because it was predicting that Google would spike,
and it would go up.
And I told my interviewers, because you're talking to me.
BRIAN DORSEY: How'd it turn out?
Did it--
LAURENCE MORONEY: They hired me.
BRIAN DORSEY: OK.
Good to go.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Well, we saw that we
went over $1,000 soon afterwards, right?
So.
BRIAN DORSEY: OK.
So.
Fantastic.
Thank you very much for this time together.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And thank you, viewers.
BRIAN DORSEY: Yeah.
Thanks for watching all the way to the end.
So are you interested in seeing more stuff like this?
Yes or no.
Like, other topics you'd like to hear.
Hit up the comments and we'll be in touch and do more.
Talk to you soon.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thank you.
BRIAN DORSEY: Bye.
LAURENCE MORONEY: All righty.
BRIAN DORSEY: OKey-doke.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So we're recording now, right?
BRIAN DORSEY: We are absolutely recording now.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
BRIAN DORSEY: Out-takes have begun.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yes they have.
We haven't even begun the in-takes yet.
BRIAN DORSEY: Respect The gopher.
No--
LAURENCE MORONEY: We have to respect the gopher.
That's true.
BRIAN DORSEY: No throwing the gopher.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Maybe we could even
defer to him for some questions.
BRIAN DORSEY: If I get stuck, you know who to talk to.