A new Java runtime was announced for Google App Engine standard: with Java 11. It’s currently in beta, but anybody can already try it out. Another interesting announcement was the fact that the instances running your apps now get double the memory! So with this double dose of great news, I decided to craft a little tutorial to show how to deploy a Micronaut application on App Engine Java 11. And because Apache Groovy is, well, groovy, I’ll go ahead and use Groovy for my programming language, but of course, the same steps apply to Java workloads as well.

Yesterday, we announced new second-generation runtimes for Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3. In addition, App Engine standard instances now run with double the memory. Today, we’re happy to announce the availability of the new Java 11 second-generation runtime for App Engine standard in beta. Now, you can take advantage of the latest Long-Term-Support version of the Java programming language to develop and deploy your applications on our fully-managed serverless application platform.

Based on technology from the gVisor container sandbox, second-generation runtimes let you write portable web apps and microservices that take advantage of App Engine’s unique auto-scaling, built-in security and pay-per-use billing model—without some of App Engine’s earlier runtime restrictions. Second generation-runtimes also let you build applications more idiomatically. You’re free to use whichever framework or library you need for your project—there are no limitations in terms of what classes you can use, for instance. You can even use native dependencies if needed. Beyond Java, you can also use alternative JVM (Java Virtual Machine) languages like Apache Groovy, Kotlin or Scala if you wish.

At the end of December, I was contacted by someone I didn’t know, who asked me some interesting questions, and that led me to quite a bit of introspection.

As a Java Champion and with your career history. I wanted to ask you what you consider are the most important skills for a Java programmer to have in their toolbox, especially a Senior Java programmer? Or maybe even a better question is what skills you developed that helped you become the Java Developer/Groovy Language Developer that you are today.

Google Cloud Storage is the ideal product to store your object files (binary files, pictures, audio/video assets, and more).

Until recently, there was an option in the Google cloud console with a checkbox to quickly make a file or bucket public. However, and I would add “unfortunately”, users tended to inadvertently clicking the checkbox, thus making potentail confidential assets public. So this risky, but easy, option, has been removed to avoid any unwanted data leak.

J’ai eu le plaisir d’encadrer des stagiaires de 3ème récemment chez Google. Nous accueillons des enfants, neveux, nièces, cousins d’employés de Google (donc non :-P, je ne prends pas de stagiaire, pas la peine de demander !!!) pour leur faire découvrir les différents métiers que nous exerçons dans l’entreprise. Et il y en a beaucoup !

L’un de mes stagiaires m’a interviewé lorsque je décrivais mon travail de “Developer Advocate”, au sein de Google Cloud. J’ai trouvé cette interview intéressante, et je me suis dit que ça valait le coup de la partager avec vous, en Français (si, si, j’écris en Français parfois sur ce blog.)

Une fois n’est pas coutume, je vais parler de Google Cloud Platform en français ! Lors de la conférence Voxxed Days Microservices, que j’ai  couverte récemment, j’ai eu l’occasion de répondre à une interview pour InfoQ France.

Interview sur les microservices sur Google Cloud Platform

Voici la liste des questions auxquelles j’ai répondues, et je vous laisserai écouter les réponses sur  InfoQ France !

• Pour ceux qui ne te connaissent pas, peux-tu nous dire qui tu es ?
• Elles sont où les équipes produits ?
• Et les utilisateurs, en France, il y en a beaucoup ?
• Pour les néophytes, les microservices, qu’est-ce que c’est ?
• C’est quoi le “nouveau” par rapport aux architectures dites distribuées, soa, webservices ?
• On va parler de la platforme cloud de google, où ça en est ?
• C’est quoi serverless, le retour du mainframe ?
• Quelles nouveautés ?
• Et Google vis à vis de java ?
• C’est quoi les langages que vous poussez le plus ?
• Le futur des microservices ?

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to be at Devoxx Belgium once again, to meet developers and learn about new things from awesome speakers. Google Cloud Platform had its own booth on the exhibition floor, and the team was running codelabs: 10 laptops were at the disposal of attendees to go through various hands-on tutorials on several GCP products. I took a chance at crafting my own codelab: deploying a Micronaut application, containerized with Jib, to Google Kubernetes Engine.

My friend and former colleague Josh Long wrote a nice series of articles showing the Spring Cloud integration for Google Cloud Platform. The series contains 8 articles, covering:

• the setup & authentication, 
• how to access relational databases, 
• how to connect to Spanner, 
• how to send/receive messages with Pub/Sub, 
• how to use the runtime configuration, 
• how to look into Stackdriver tracing, 
• how to access other services like the machine learning APIs, 
• and last but not least, how to go to production.

So if you’re using Spring and Spring Boot, this is the way to go for getting started on using Google Cloud Platform. For further reference, you can go read the documentation that covers this integration.

Just before heading to Google Cloud Next, I was notified I was listed 4th in JAX London’s Top 20 Java influencers of 2018 on social media! It’s an honor to be listed among famous figures like Josh Bloch, Brian Goetze, Martin Thompson, Arun Gupta, Jessica Kerr, Mario Fusco, Josh Long, Venkat Subramanian, Charles Nutter and many others. You can see the full list of the top influencers here.

I’ll definitely continue to advocate for Java (and Apache Groovy) developers around the world, and share whatever I learn along the way through articles or conference talks. I’m looking forward to meeting you, my fellow Java/Groovy developer friends, at an event near you.

Powerful machine learning APIs are at your fingertips if you’re developing with Google Cloud Platform, as client libraries are available for various programming languages. Today, we’re investigating the Cloud Vision API and its Java SDK, using the Apache Groovy programming language—a multi-faceted language for the Java platform that aims to improve developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax.

At GR8Conf Europe, in Denmark, the conference dedicated to the Apache Groovy ecosystem, I spoke about the machine learning APIs provided by Google Cloud Platform: Vision, Natural Language, Translate, and Speech (both recognition and synthesis). Since it’s a groovy conference, we presented samples and demos using a pretty Groovy language. I wanted to share the underlying examples with a wider audience, so here’s the first of a series of blog posts covering the demos I presented. I’ll start with the Google Cloud Vision API, and I will cover the other APIs in future posts.