At DataXDay 2019, last week, I had the chance to present an updated version of my introductory talk on the serverless compute options on Google Cloud Platform. There’s always something new to cover!

For instance, if I put my Java Champion hat on, I’d like to mention that there are new runtimes for App Engine standard, like the beta for Java 11, and there’s twice the amount of memory as before. On Cloud Functions, we have an alpha for Java as well (currently Java 8, but it’ll be soon moved to Java 11 instead, as customers are more interested in the latest LTS version)

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.

Last week at the Google Cloud Next conference, I had the chance to speak about the Java developer’s journey through the “serverless” offering of Google Cloud Platform, with my colleague Vinod Ramachandran (Product Manager on some of our serverless products):

Serverless Java in 2019 is going to be ubiquitous in your favorite cloud. Well, it’s actually been 10 years since you could take advantage of Java on Google App Engine. But now you can run your apps on the brand-new Java 11 runtime. Not only servlet-based apps but also executable JARs. And what about authoring functions? Until now, you could only use Node or Python, but today, Java is the third runtime available for Google Cloud Functions. We will review the various ways you can develop your Java functions. Last but not least, thanks to serverless containers, containerized Java workloads run serverlessly, without you caring for infrastructure, scaling, or paying for idle machines. Through various demos, we will look at the many ways Java developers will be able to write, build, test, and deploy code in Java on the rich serverless offering of Google Cloud Platform.

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.

At GR8Conf Europe last year, I talked  about how to take advantage of the Google Cloud machine learning APIs  using Apache Groovy.

With Groovy, you can call the Vision API that recognises what’s in your pictures, or reads text.

You can invoke the Natural Language API to understand the structure of your text.

With the Speech-To-Text API, you can get transcriptions of what’s been said in an audio stream, or with Text-To-Spech, you can also generate human-like voices from your own text.

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 ?

At Voxxed Days Microservices, in Paris, I talked about the latest development in serverless solutions on Google Cloud Platform, to deploy functions, apps  and even containers.

I answered an interview  on the theme of microservices, and how this maps to the Google cloud products.

And the video of my presentation was published on YouTube:

Here’s the abstract of the session:

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.

In a matter of a few years, Google Cloud Platform has evolved from a very small set of products or APIs to a wealth of close to a hundred of products, services and APIs that developers can take advantage of.

This week, at the event Le Meilleur Dev de France, I gave an introduction to the whole platform, focusing on three key axis: compute, storage and machine learning. After an introduction on famous users of GCP, like Snapchat, Spotify or PokemonGo, I also gave a few examples of big French companies as well as French startups who have decided to go to the cloud with Google.

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.