Cloud Platform Week

This week I got to do something out of the ordinary, I attended Google’s CP100A training hosted at Google's very own Atlanta digs (nice place!).  As a Cloud Platform Architect for Autodesk it’s fantastic to get 1:1 time with people deeply familiar with other platforms and learn about them hands on.  I love these events because I learn more about cutting edge technologies and I also learn about the world class ways these technologies are taught to early adopters.  Platforms are only as good as the adoption they get, so instructional material and engagement are just as important.

One of the ancillary things besides Google's Cloud Platform itself that I liked were Google’s Codelabs.  These step-by-step wizards remind me a little bit of Tinkercad Lessons or Wizard dialogs from back in the day.  InstallShield anyone?  Perhaps the more I think about it, I could just be experiencing nostalgia from Windows 95 and Clippy or Self Extracting Zip files created with WinZip.  I found Codelabs very approachable and a nice way to walk through the material.  Having tutorials that start with the big picture and goals, then delve into the details are a great way to go.

Have a look at the syllabus online, you'll discover it basically approached the Google Cloud Platform by having attendees download the source of an example application and experiment with deploying it on a few different technologies:

1. Google App Engine
2. Google Container Engine
3. Google Compute Engine

While doing this a lot of other technologies such as Google Datastore, BigTable and Google BigQuery were discussed as they applied.

After the class I started to think about why we’d go through the same example using 3 different technologies and this got me thinking a little bit about  Google Cloud Platform's past and present.  The following is a bit opinionated but I wanted to take a stab at this for the audience:

1. The Google App Engine debuted on April 7th, 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Engine). It’s very opinionated about how applications are written, but in return applications get infinite scalability.  This becomes of a question of whether the pros outweigh the cons and what the starting point is.  (NoOps)
2. The Google Compute Engine debuted on June 28th, 2012 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Compute_Engine). This was the opposite of opinionated, companies could launch VMs and do whatever they wanted on them.  Of course scalability become their problem but the generic nature of the solution certainly lured in more adoption (DevOps).
3. The Google Container Engine debuted on March 25th, 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Compute_Engine#History). This is the technology that leverages Kubernetes and allows companies to deploy containers and scale them.  This eliminates the language restrictions with App Engine but can provide the scalability benefits of App Engine if done correctly.  Another key consideration of integrating at this layer is: PORTABILITY.  Kubernetes can be run anywhere (Enterprise, AWS, Google Compute Engine, Azure, DC/OS, etc.).   This portability, is a real key and seems to be a competitive advantage for Google.  Note: This is also the most recent development in their offering.

I’m not sure if my analysis is correct or not so I’d love to hear from others, but my gut tells me that Google has got it and bitten on – they’re delivering a solid implementation of Kubernetes with Google Container Engine and an open-sourced platform as well allowing everyone to leverage the languages they want and still build a portable platform.  Of course Google’s Compute Engine isn’t the only Kubernetes environment in town, you can also get started with Tectonic.

I want to give credit to our wonderful instructor Arthur Messenger and the host Andrew Wamberg for the event.  There was no doubting Arthur’s technical expertise, and his story-telling and jokes were second to none.  There is a lot of really great material presented in the course that I’d love to talk about, however the materials we received can’t be distributed so I’d encourage you to attend an online or local event if you can!

The timing of Google’s event is also symbiotic because this week Autodesk is hosting our very own Forge DevCon in beautiful San Francisco to teach everyone about the platform we’re building!  I have no doubt it’ll be an exciting event over the next couple days that showcases the work of a ton of people at Autodesk and our partners, with incredible mindshare and technology represented.

Keep Calm and Compute On.