MILES WARD: Hi, everybody.
My name is Miles Ward and I'm CTO at SADA.
This is Cloud Next 2021 and a story
about how Meow Wolf has created this incredible, immersive
alternative reality with the power of Anthos.
I am super excited about having this conversation with you
and to introduce our two guests, superstars from the Meow Wolf
team.
First, Jordan Snyder, Vice President
of Platform for Meow Wolf.
Jordan, say howdy.
JORDAN SNYDER: Hey, everybody.
MILES WARD: And one of her compatriots and cohorts,
Nathan Bloom, who's a DevOps engineer
we worked really closely with on this project.
Nathan, say hi.
NATHAN BLOOM: Hi.
MILES WARD: So look at me like, the titles are a thing.
I'm happy that we have executive sponsorship, as well
as hands-on engineering here in the room.
But maybe you can tell us a little more
about your roles in the project, starting with you, Jordan.
JORDAN SNYDER: Sure, Miles.
Thank you.
Here at Meow Wolf, I oversee our digital experience--
the development and the support of those experiences out
of exhibition.
MILES WARD: And Nathan.
NATHAN BLOOM: Yeah, I'm a software engineer
on the platform team.
I focus on building tools for artists
that are backend services, APIs, Pub/Sub systems--
things like that.
I focus on doing that and the availability of those things
as well.
And yeah, that's really me.
MILES WARD: Perfect.
So we're talking Meow Wolf as a company.
And it has a fantastic name.
But what you actually were working on together
was a product of that company, which is really
a building or an art show.
Nathan, tell them about Omega Mart.
What is Omega Mart?
NATHAN BLOOM: If I had to put it in a box,
I guess I would say Omega Mart is like an ARG.
You could describe it that way.
You could also call it a painting or a sculpture
that you can walk into and experience.
It's a choose your own adventure sort of scenario
where you get to just be yourself
in this crazy, multidimensional world.
MILES WARD: Folks, he is exactly right.
Crazy, multidimensional-- the place defies explanation.
We have some video to show you what
it is we're even remotely talking about.
Take a look.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- (SINGING) Omega Mart, your super friendly store!
- We've given you an Omega Access Card.
- How would you describe Meow Wolf?
And how do you fit into the art scene?
- Meow Wolf is an arts and entertainment company
that produces immersive experiences that
transport our audiences of all ages into fantastic realms.
I'm Jordan Snyder, I'm the VP of Platform at Meow Wolf.
Omega Mart empowers artists and viewers to experience art
in completely different ways.
It masquerades as a grocery store,
but there's a whole lot more behind the scenes.
- Hi, my name is Miles Ward.
I'm CTO at SADA.
In collaboration with SADA engineers,
the artists at Meow Wolf have built
this incredible environment called
Omega Mart on top of the technical power of Anthos
that allowed them to iterate and innovate much faster building
this whole crazy environment.
- Be sure to boop your Omega Access Card.
- Congratulations.
- Using the boop cards, visitors can dive much deeper
into the story in an interactive way that actually remembers
their choices and their involvement in the story
itself.
- Here at Omega Mart, you have two constraints.
I want my developers to have the experience of developing
at the speed of Cloud.
But I also have to build an environment that is OK
if the internet gets cut off.
- This is a good example of the sort of Cloud and on-prem
hybrid environment that we have.
- Anthos is a superpower.
Anthos is a magic trick.
Anthos is a technology for bringing the Cloud
to where you are.
It's a hybrid and multicloud solution for Kubernetes.
That's the game-changing technology
from Google for managing Cloud workloads--
that's containerization.
Our work with Anthos means that you
can bring that little piece of Google Cloud right
here into Las Vegas and the Meow Wolf installation
or on AWS or Azure or any of the Cloud infrastructures.
- And it all starts with your Omega values.
- Omega values?
- Empowering artists is near and dear to my heart.
I'm an artist, too.
And I know how frustrating it can
be to be mired in the technical minutia when you're trying
to bring something to life.
- It's always in a state.
No matter how it's changing, that's always
a state that can be repeated.
SADA and Google Cloud allow Meow Wolf
to continue to innovate and build
digital experiences for our customers
outside of the exhibition.
- This is a tantalizing first step.
The Omega Mart is one store.
Being able to manage applications,
not just for this one environment,
but for thousands of environments in concert,
is an even bigger lift in utility and capability.
Using Anthos backed by Google's incredible security team
helped the folks at Omega Mart to operate without worry.
They've really got Google's whole systems
behind their back.
[END PLAYBACK]
MILES WARD: Wow.
Like, wow.
I hope you, like me, were as blown away as
could be in that environment.
It is mind-altering and soul-altering.
It is an awakening experience to walk through
such a complicated, nuanced environment.
Nathan, what does it take to build something like that?
How do you pull together a team to create
that kind of an experience?
NATHAN BLOOM: Yeah.
It takes a lot.
And so many teams, so many amazing people working together
all at once to create this huge, crazy thing.
And yeah, it's an experience.
It takes a lot.
It took us years of iterating over the tools and experiences
that we intended to deliver.
Yeah, a lot went into it.
MILES WARD: So as you're doing that build,
you're creating really an event operating
system, a way of coordinating a bunch of-- not only lights
and display elements, but individual computers
that users get to interact with.
A whole tracking system for hundreds
of simultaneous players.
And you're doing the real run-up for that is just
in a super short time window.
Talk about the pressure to get it completed on time.
NATHAN BLOOM: Yeah, we had about three months
from when I arrived in Omega Mart
to complete our final iterations over the tools
that we were delivering--
and also the end user experience and working with those teams
to deliver those things.
So yeah, a very short timeline-- three months.
And that time is super precious, so we
needed to be really on our game and really
have systems in place that were super reliable
and also support in place that was super reliable.
MILES WARD: So I hear from customers all the time
that developer productivity, developer efficiency,
developer speed--
it's just critical.
They all have big goals.
You've got features to ship.
But this is an experience where, if it doesn't work,
it really doesn't work.
Talk to me, Jordan, about the other constraints.
This isn't something that can just run in the Cloud.
JORDAN SNYDER: That's exactly right.
No, we needed to run this on-prem.
We knew that pretty early on.
We knew that we had very little window
for making mistakes when it comes to the responsiveness
of the system.
We don't want it to go down when the internet goes down.
We don't want it to maybe take too long
to respond to a user and their interaction.
Users can really perceive more than 50 milliseconds
of latency.
That's a really low number for returning information
and doing number crunching and figuring things out.
And we've given the user such a dynamic, rich experience
that there are a lot of decisions
being made on the back end at any given time.
And so we needed those to be done very quickly.
Therefore, we knew we needed them to happen on-prem,
in a reliable environment like Anthos.
MILES WARD: So that's the design.
You've got a team of developers familiar with GKE
and the broader Google Cloud platform.
You're using those tools to build other experiences.
But because you have this tight, tight latency budget
and you've got to be available even if the network
connections that are connecting that environment back
to the public Cloud are severed--
you've got to be online.
Otherwise, people get stuck in this environment that's no fun.
How did you find a solution to that?
What was the path to selecting Anthos?
NATHAN BLOOM: Yeah.
We evaluated a bunch of different managed Kubernetes
systems.
And just liked how close to the Kubernetes environments
we had been running with already, like GKE, obviously--
and also we had some custom-built kubeadm clusters
we were running.
And yeah, the API just being what
it is and us already having a lot of tools
in place in heavy use from GCP made
it really attractive for us.
MILES WARD: It echoes exactly what we've
heard from a lot of peers and other customers where they go,
I just want the Google one, but I just want it right there.
So happy that we were able to deliver on that.
Maybe help us-- my team, the folks at SADA,
how were we a part of this cycle?
NATHAN BLOOM: Yeah, huge.
First thing, reached out.
I guess actually, first thing it was through just a rep
that we had--
asked them a couple of questions about Anthos.
And they got us in touch with SADA
and immediately just from discovering
what us consuming Anthos might look like and mapping that out.
But straight down to just nuts and bolts
of how we want it to be architected, how do
we install it.
And even right off the bat, quite a bit of just
troubleshooting with us to get our configuration--
jump box stuff-- set up right, even.
So yeah, heavily involved right away
with SADA, which really made it a lot easier
to get on board with Anthos.
MILES WARD: That's great to hear.
I really appreciate it.
If you look at the nuance of these kinds of systems,
developers that are born in the Cloud,
they have so much of the basics of infrastructure just
get handled by the Cloud provider.
Anthos, you've got a little more to work on,
so it can always be helpful to have folks assist.
You've built this application up,
distributed it now in this incredible environment.
What's the result?
How has this affected the experience
of your customers, the folks that
are coming through the Omega Mart experience?
JORDAN SNYDER: Yeah, Anthos has provided us a really reliable
environment to give our guests this really dynamic experience
as they go through, as their choices actually
affect their environment, as their choices actually
create a new world as they go through this experience.
We wouldn't be able to do that without these high available
services.
MILES WARD: So yeah, I agree.
What I saw when I came into the environment
was not only our crew, who was trying
to document how it works-- and trust me,
that's crazy on its own.
But a whole bunch of other attendees and participants.
Because we would go through--
I would boop the trigger that says
that I've now hacked into the system and taken it over.
And the lights would dim and change.
And everybody was genuinely scared--
fairly freaked out that some serious stuff is going down
and maybe they've touched the wrong thing
or pulled on the wrong box.
So it's really a compelling environment.
And you can tell how quickly that magic illusion would break
down if it just paused and hung and you
had to wait for a lot more than 50 milliseconds
and things felt slow.
So I'm happy about the combined solution
and how it's really delivering on the product promise for you.
So I'm super thankful for Nathan and Jordan
taking the time to connect with our audience,
to walk them through how you use the Anthos to create
such a powerful experience--
and to talk through how SADA helped.
Thank you so much for taking the cycle.
JORDAN SNYDER: Thank you, Miles.
It's been a pleasure to be here and talk to you and everyone
at Google Cloud Next.
Thank you.
NATHAN BLOOM: Yeah, thanks so much,
Miles and everyone for listening.
MILES WARD: Folks, thank you so much for taking the time
and watching this video.
We've built a great project, but we need your feedback.
There's a survey button here someplace.
Take a click on that and let us know exactly how this worked.
We also know that people want to get
started right away with Anthos.
We've built a great program at SADA.
It's just sada.com/anthos.
Looking forward to seeing you in the next project together.
Cheers.