A Year in Review

In the last episode for 2016, Mark and Francesc look at all their favourite moments from this year, including their favourite episodes, guests and Cool Things of the Week.

Cool thing of the week
  • Google partners with Improbable to support next generation of video games blog
  • Announcing new Google Cloud Client Libraries for four key services blog
  • Kubernetes 1.5: Supporting Production Workloads blog
Favourite Episodes
Top Downloaded Episodes
Mark’s Favourites
Francesc’s Favourites
Favourite Cool Things of the Week
Francesc’s Favourites

Spotify is now on Google Cloud Platform:

  • Spotify chooses Google Cloud Platform to power data infrastructure blog
  • Announcing Spotify Infrastructure’s Googley Future blog
  • Google’s BigQuery is da bomb - I can start with 2.2Billion ‘things’ and compute/summarize down to 20K in < 1 min. tweet

Kubernetes and Google Container Engine

  • Kubernetes 1.3 on tap for Google Container Engine blog
  • Google Container Engine now on Kubernetes 1.4 blog
  • Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud blog

Education:

  • CP100A: Google Cloud Platform Foundations courses
  • New Google Cloud Platform Education Grants offer free credits to students blog
  • Kubernetes class on Udacity blog
Mark’s Favourites

Multiple General Availabilities

  • Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Datastore are now generally available blog
  • Cloud Router docs
  • Cloud CDN docs
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM) docs

Machine Learning and Big Data

  • How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow blog
  • Decoding the micro-moments of baseball: can you hear the game through data? blog
  • Introducing Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API open beta and our West Coast region expansion blog
  • Powering geospatial analysis: public geo datasets now on Google Cloud blog
  • Introducing the Open Images Dataset blog

Google Cloud Platform Community Slack

We’ll be back on January 18th, 2017 - See you all then!

FRANCESC: Hi, and welcome to episode number 56 of the weekly Google Cloud Platform Podcast. I am Francesc Campoy, and I'm here with my colleague Mark Mandel. Hey, Mark, how are you doing?

MARK: I'm all right. I'm a little sad. It's the last episode of the year.

FRANCESC: I'm also super sad. I'm actually kind of looking forward to a little bit of a break, but, yeah, it's going to be sad not to get to talk to you for, like, three weeks.

MARK: Yeah, it's going to be really sad. I'm going to miss you. I'm going to miss you. I'm going to miss everyone. It's going to be sad.

FRANCESC: Yeah, and we know when we're coming back already, just so you know. We will be back soon.

MARK: January 18th, I believe, is the date we've agreed upon.

FRANCESC: January 18th, which is also a Wednesday. In the meanwhile, you can listen to previous episodes if you want to. But today we do have an episode. Today is our last episode. And we decided to make it a little bit special. So we called the episode "A Year in Review." And that's pretty much what we're going to do.

MARK: Yeah, we're going to talk through all the kind of things we talked about, pick out some of our favorite episodes, some of our favorite cool things of the week and discuss them.

FRANCESC: Some favorite launches, like what happened in 2016 that is worth mentioning today.

MARK: Actually, I thought you said lunches and not launches.

FRANCESC: We can also talk about that.

MARK: I've had some really good lunches.

FRANCESC: Yeah, yeah, we have very good food at the Google office.

MARK: Yup.

FRANCESC: But before that, we have the cool thing of the week-- the last cool thing of the week of the year.

MARK: Cool things.

FRANCESC: The cool things? Oh yeah.

MARK: We have multiple.

FRANCESC: There's two lines. There's there's actually the last--

MARK: There's three.

FRANCESC: Three?

MARK: Three.

FRANCESC: Oh my god. OK, so there's three of them. That's why you had blank lines in the show notes, so we can actually follow. So there's three of them. And they're the three last ones of the year. So I hope they're worth it. The first one is-- I'm going to let you talk about it, because I know you're very excited about it.

MARK: I am. I am. So I think this is pretty exciting. Everyone knows I'm well into games. We have partnered with a company called Improbable. Basically, you can think of that as a, like, massively multiplayer online game as a service. So if you're looking to build a massively multiplayer game online or a large scale simulation or virtual world, any sort of games in that sort of aspect, we've partnered with them such that they have a program, as well, for people to use their platform for a heavily subsidized amount, which is super, super cool. So they run on us, and we provide that power to them, and they provide that power to you. It's super, super cool.

The company name is Improbable. They have a product named Spatial OS. And the partnership literally just got announced right now, which is pretty awesome.

FRANCESC: It looks really cool. The older images I'm seeing and the videos, they look like something I would play. So I'm very excited about seeing all the new games and new companies that are going to be joining this effort and making new cool things on the Google Cloud Platform.

FRANCESC: Yeah, and then, as well as that, we have the new Google Cloud Client Libraries for four key services, which I thought were pretty cool. It looks like we've basically been building these client libraries as the libraries that people can use for all the languages we support for all the services that we have on Google Cloud.

FRANCESC: And you said there's four of them. So there is BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, Stackdriver Logging, and Google Cloud Storage. And they are available for seven languages. So I'm going to start with Go, obviously.

MARK: Obviously.

FRANCESC: And I leave Java for the end. So we have, Go, Java, C#, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

MARK: Yeah. And I think what's really cool about these too is that it is each library is very idiomatic to the language. So if you're using these libraries, it's not like, oh, this is obviously a Go thing who was written by a Java programmer [INAUDIBLE] knows that. It's very much idiomatic to language, so that you know that when you go to use the client, it's exactly the same as you would use any other SDK within your ecosystem.

FRANCESC: Yeah, on my site, I know that the Go team has being heavily involved with these efforts for the Go libraries. So they look really good. I'm very excited about it.

MARK: Excellent. And finally-- pretty exciting-- Kubernetes 1.5 literally just released. Is it really-- like, what is going on? It's the end of the year. So much stuff is happening.

FRANCESC: I guess that since there's a production freeze, and we cannot put things in production, instead we just do open source stuff. I don't know.

MARK: I don't know.

FRANCESC: It's so much cool stuff going on, yeah.

FRANCESC:

MARK: Kubernetes 1.5-- huge number of major themes around stateful sets or pet sets and proof federation support, more simplified cluster deployment, which is great. It's pretty awesome.

FRANCESC: Yeah, I feel like there's kind of a tradition that we've always done an episode every single time there's a new version of Kubernetes. And maybe next year, we should start with that.

MARK: Absolutely, yeah, we should definitely have someone to talk about that.

FRANCESC: Cool, so I guess it's time to go with the main content. And the plan is we're got to start talking about the 2016 episodes. And we're going to be talking about the most downloaded episodes and then our personal favorite episodes, which are not the same. And then at the end, we'll be talking about our favorite cool things of the week, which is kind of a vague term to say all the cool things that happened. So it will be more like themes, what happened, like cool I'm going to say announcements, because apparently I mispronounced launches.

MARK: That's all right. I have an accent too. I quote unquote "mispronounce" things all the time, depending on where you come from. Yeah, no, I think this is really cool. It's something that we can kind of go back and look at what happened at Google Cloud Platform over 2016.

FRANCESC: It's a crazy amount of things.

MARK: It's a crazy amount of things, and it really is kind of a year in review of Google Cloud Platform and what it is and what's happened in the last year. I mean, we're not even going to touch on everything, but sort of some of our highlights, which I think is super exciting and really kind of gives us a little history of what's happened in the past year.

FRANCESC: Yeah, it's kind of crazy to think about, like, not that long ago there were things like GKE was not really a thing.

MARK: No.

FRANCESC: And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, it's totally a thing.

MARK: It's totally a thing now. It's absolutely a thing. So yeah, you were talking about 2016 episodes. So starting there, like, if we go back, and we look at the analytics, and--

FRANCESC: I propose we go backwards from number five to number one.

MARK: Oh, I like it.

FRANCESC: To make it more exciting.

MARK: Make it more exciting, and then we can have a drum roll and, like, long pauses, like reality TV.

FRANCESC: You'll add that in post-production. OK, so on number 5, we have episode 43, which is gRPC at CoreOS with Brandon Phillips. Loved this episode.

MARK: Loved this episode. Love this tech. Super interesting episode to see how a customer is using to gRPC and how they were able to get performance benefit out of it. But again, like, gRPC that's kind of 2016. I feel like that's really--

FRANCESC: That is totally a new thing, and people are very, very excited about the new tech.

MARK: Yeah, really seeing that, and cross-industry I've seen people using that. I think it's a really interesting piece of technology.

FRANCESC: Yeah, number 4, we have episode 37-- GKE 1.3, so two versions ago, with Carter Morgan.

MARK: Yeah, love this. Love this also because Carter Morgan is now a developer advocate. He's part of the developer advocacy team.

FRANCESC: He got he got on the podcast, and since then he could not stop talking.

MARK: Pretty much. So I expect people will be seeing him around and about any podcast about Kubernetes or Container Engine.

FRANCESC: Yeah, GKE and Kubernetes have been a pretty successful thing over the year, yeah. That's for sure.

MARK: Yeah, absolutely, anything about container orchestration and management has been huge.

FRANCESC: Number 3-- it's another open source project that is also incredibly successful-- TensorFlow. Episode 31, TensorFlow with Eli Bixby.

MARK: Yeah, another great episode. TensorFlow makes my head hurt, but it's super, super cool. And Eli gets it to a huge degree. I mean, actually, it's kind of interesting. You look at it, like, out of the top five-- well, actually, technically four, and we'll go back to it-- but four of them are open source work inside Google. And given the history of open source at Google and how we used to do things and how we do things now, it's pretty amazing to see the sort of success we've had across the board.

FRANCESC: Yeah, it's definitely a good thing that we are open sourcing as much technology as we can. I'm very excited about 2017 and seeing what we're going to be open sourcing.

MARK: Yeah, I think we're on a good thing the way we manage our open source products, the way we build communities. The way that, I think, we kind of release it and sort of, like, go with it in a lot of ways, as well, is really huge. It makes me very excited about the future of open source at Google.

FRANCESC: And my favorite piece of-- like, my favorite moment of TensorFlow episode was when Eli explained what a tensor was, and I understood it. And it was like, oh.

MARK: Oh.

FRANCESC: That is new, yeah.

MARK: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

FRANCESC: Yeah, I never, like-- I thought it was too hard. It's like monads, you know?

MARK: Everything comes back to Haskell.

FRANCESC: Yeah. So on number 2, we have number 44-- Cloud Endpoints with Dan Ciruli and Sepehr Ebrahimzadeh. And I am very, very happy with this episode being so successful, because I've been talking lately a lot about Cloud Endpoints and working on a bunch of videos, and you know, like, we're going to be launching it. It's going to be coming GA sometime soon. And it's a lot of really cool things coming on in Cloud Endpoint.

MARK: It's interesting. I personally-- because I don't sit in that microservices space so much-- didn't see this one coming. It was a bit of a surprise for me.

FRANCESC: Yeah, but, it'd been crazy-- a crazy amount of people.

MARK: It's done really well, and I suppose that makes sense, right? Like, generally a lot of people are building APIs. You can't really get away from that in some way, shape, or form, so

FRANCESC: Yeah, if you can-- APIs, actually-- if you count microservices, you have Cloud Endpoint, and you also have GKE, which is used for Cloud Endpoints, for microservices, and also gRPC. So out of the five, four--

MARK: That's fair.

FRANCESC: I said four. I cannot tell what the number one is now.

MARK: Shh. We don't know. We don't know.

FRANCESC: We don't know. So, yeah, and it might also be because that and Sepehr are such cool people.

MARK: Absolutely. Number one.

FRANCESC: Number one.

[DRUMROLL ON TABLE]

MARK: That's our drumroll.

FRANCESC: That's a very sad drumroll-- low budget. And yeah, number one, I'm going to let you say this because I know you're so, so in love with this episode.

MARK: So so our number one has two of my favorite things in it-- Kubernetes, obviously, and John Wilkes.

FRANCESC: Yeah. That was episode 46-- Borg and Kubernetes with John Wilkes. I mean, what can I say?

MARK: It's John Wilkes. So if you haven't listened to this episode, please go back to this episode. It is super, super interesting. John talks us through how Borg works internally at Google. My favorite thing is when he talks about building systems for failure, right? Expecting that things are going to fail and with that expectation, building systems to make sure they stay healthy and they stay up and basically how Kubernetes came out of those lessons learned from Borg.

It's like-- John's one of my all-time favorite people in tech. And so I was super, super happy and super privileged and super honored to just sit in a room and chat with him.

FRANCESC: I got to say, he's awesome.

MARK: He's is.

FRANCESC: I had so much fun recording that episode, and every single time I listen to it again, it's like, oh, that was so much fun.

MARK: That was so good.

FRANCESC: So we said we would interview him again sometime. So maybe 2017.

MARK: Yeah, yeah, I've got I've already got a reminder in the calendar.

FRANCESC: OK, so that was, according to the people's choice.

MARK: Yeah.

FRANCESC: What about our top choice?

MARK: Yeah, so my number three, I picked out episode 52-- a recent one-- the Google Developer Expert Summit.

FRANCESC: That was fun.

MARK: That was fun. I love talking to our GDEs. They're amazing. If you don't know the Google Developer Expert program, it's external people from the community that we sort of highlight and add to our program. They get a lot of benefits. They get to come to us and talk to us and cool stuff. You should totally listen to that episode, because it's really awesome to see the community outside of Google that really appreciate the products we do and like to talk about the products we do. And if there's one in your area, you could talk to them about. It

FRANCESC: Yep. My number 3 episode is actually something we've talked about, which is episode 43-- gRPC CoreOS with Brondon Phillips. I thought it was very interesting, because he was covering some open source project that was not built by Google, which is etcd and many of the things that CoreOS does and how gRPC helped them move from JSON gRPC and why they did this and all the different performance gains they had. It was very interesting. And also Brandon Phillips is a very great communicator. So I thought I learned a lot. And I think that it's a very good, interesting-- very good episode. If you're interested in gRPC, go check it out. It's number 43.

MARK: It's actually cool because it's kind of full circle, like, Kubernetes uses etcd. Etcd now uses gRPC. Like, one thing layer goes into another, which goes into another.

FRANCESC: It's the magic of open source.

MARK: Yeah. Cool, so my number two, I had to do something that at least touched on games, because games, fun. I thought this is a particularly cool one-- episode 23. If anyone's bought games through Humble Bundle, we had one of their teammates there-- Andy Oxfeld-- who had come to speak to us about that. My particular love for this is that they ran on ep-engine, and the big thing for me was how they talked about how the scale that they got, like the immediate spike of traffic that they received at the site for people coming to buy games, wouldn't have been possible if they had come on with just about any other platform, because of the way we can scale at ep-engine.

FRANCESC: Yeah, it was a very fun episode, and also it's like the perfect user case for ep-engine, really, because they have like a huge peak of traffic, and then the rest is, like, not that much. So if you were running on Premise, you're going to need, like, 10 times more, maybe. I don't know how many times--

MARK: Yeah, it'd be so hard.

FRANCESC: --more machines you would need to have just to handle that given traffic.

MARK: And then what would you do with those machines?

FRANCESC: Yep. I don't know, play games or something?

MARK: So what's your number two?

FRANCESC: My number 2 is episode 38, and it's with one of my favorite people, Paul Newson. So we did this episode, Site Reliability and Engineering, with Paul Newson. And it is very interesting because he tells us about how Google does SRE-- Site Reliability Engineering. And it's an amazing thing, talking about SLOs and SLAs and how you don't want to have 100% of availability, because it's a bad idea. And if you could reach that, you're actually missing out on the opportunity of experimenting more, and stuff like that. And it's something that I feel like more people should know about it.

I was reading the SRE book, which--

MARK: The book is fantastic.

FRANCESC: --by the way, we got for free, because we got our offsite last week and every single one of the people on the team got one. And it's an amazing book. Love it. And yeah, he put it in such a nice way that I loved that episode.

MARK: I love that episode too. If you're into UPS or monitoring or any of that kind of stuff, definitely have a listen. It is so worth it. And definitely get the book-- the book is fantastic.

FRANCESC: Yeah, the book is really, really good. OK, it's time for your number one.

MARK: Ooh, my number one-- so I will say I would have said my number one, Borg and Kubernetes with John Wilkes, but we've already covered that. So I'm going to pick something else. I'm going to pick something else. I'm going to go with the episode we did with GPC Next Speakers.

FRANCESC: Oh, that was fun.

MARK: That was loads of fun. So our big premiere conference, Next, we're doing it again next year. We sat down with a bunch of speakers at the event, talked to them about what they were talking about at Next. And some of them were Googlers. Some of them were customers. If you're interested in going to Next next year, it would be well worth listening to the episode so you can get a feel of some of the stuff that probably will be showing and the sort of quality that you can come to expect. It's pretty high quality. It was an amazing, amazing, amazing event.

FRANCESC: And I actually feel like maybe we should also mention that in episode 21, we did the amazing demos from GPC Next with Instrument.

MARK: That's true as well.

FRANCESC: That was a very good episode too.

MARK: I was really close to putting that on the list. I have to admit.

FRANCESC: Yeah, they're kind of a continuation of each other. So they're both really good episodes about all the things we talked about during GPC Next and all the amazing demos they had.

MARK: Yeah.

FRANCESC: Yeah.

MARK: And we were only scratching the surface of the event, just even then.

FRANCESC: Just a tiny little bit to give you an idea of what goes on.

MARK: Now, your number one, I think, is a huge surprise.

FRANCESC: Yeah, it is. It is Node.js with-- no. I love Justin, it was not Node.js. It was episode 25-- Go on the Cloud with Andrew Gerrand and Chris Broadfoot. It was so much fun.

MARK: It was.

FRANCESC: I mean, we talked about tweaking turkeys. Come on.

MARK: Yeah. My favorite one-- of my favorite things about this episode-- a little peek behind the scenes-- we totally did it last minute. Andrew was sitting in the office. He just happened to be in San Francisco, and we're like, we should get Andrew on the podcast. And it was fantastic.

FRANCESC: The best part is I think it was one of the first episodes where at some point I had to stop because we were laughing way too much.

MARK: Yup.

FRANCESC: So yeah, like, that was super fun, but also very interesting talking about all the things about why Go is cool and why Go works so well in the Cloud. and what you can do with it and what APIs are available and stuff like that. So technically very interesting, but also so much fun.

MARK: So much fun. Definitely an episode to listen to if you're interested in Go, or you're thinking about using Go, and you just want to learn more about the ecosystem and what's available in it.

FRANCESC: Or if you want to know what one Catalan sounds when he's speaking with three Australians.

MARK: Yes, there is that as well.

FRANCESC: Yeah, that was fun.

MARK: Excellent, all right, well, I think that sort of covers our list of episodes. I mean, we could probably talk about episodes for hours and hours on end. But why don't we talk about our favorite cool things of the week as kind of a backdrop to all the stuff that's happened inside Google Cloud?

FRANCESC: OK, so the first one is going to go with is all the effort that we have done on education. There's a bunch of things we've done. But the fact that we opened CP100A, which is the Google Cloud Platform Foundations, and you can go check it out on cloud.google.com/training. That is awesome.

There's a bunch of course that are really, really good. There's also can go pass exams if you want to. But on top of that, if you're a student, and you want to use Google Cloud Platform, we also announced Google Cloud Platform education grants that is helping students use our Cloud for free. And so they can learn, and they can experiment. And there's a lot of things that they can do, like if you're a statistics student, then and can't can get to play with things like BigQuery, that is kind of an amazing experience.

And then also some Udacity courses. And one of my favorite ones was the Kubernetes class on Udacity with--

MARK: Some of my favorite people.

FRANCESC: Who are teammates now, we can say-- Kelsey Hightower and Carter Morgan. So yeah, all the effort in education and also improving our docks, and all the effort that we did on basically making our Cloud more friendly to beginners-- I think it's an amazing, amazing effort.

MARK: Absolutely. Now, there's huge, huge things happening in the education space. So that's pretty awesome. Yeah, I definitely am a huge fan of the education grants specifically. I think it's great we're getting into colleges. Awesome. So one of my favorite things is just looking at a number of things we made generally available this year.

FRANCESC: So many things.

MARK: So many things. I'm going to miss some. I know I'm going to miss some, though just rattling some of like, Cloud SQL, Big Table, Cloud Datastore, Router, CDN went live, IAM, so--

FRANCESC: Identity and Access Management.

MARK: Thank you.

FRANCESC: You're welcome.

MARK: I totally blanked on that for a minute-- identity and access management, that went live. That's also a huge thing. I'm sure I'm missing some of the other stuff. But just a huge list of things that went GA this year truly shows I think the investment that is going into Google Cloud and the amount of stuff that people have available.

FRANCESC: The worst part about this is being a developer advocate, you're supposed to know all of these things.

MARK: Yeah, no.

FRANCESC: And it keeps on growing and growing.

MARK: It is growing.

FRANCESC: Yeah, it is very good for our customers, not as much for our team.

MARK: Yeah, yeah.

FRANCESC: Lots of fun. OK, so I'm going to go with-- this these are not really ordered in any specific way, but one of my favorite things we talked about was Spotify. Spotify moving to Google Cloud Platform was awesome. The way our team was involved with them so they could get all the infrastructure together to make sure it was a successful movement-- it was great. And also all the things that they published-- they wrote a bunch of blog posts. And one of my favorite things was Paul [? Amehr, ?] Paul [? Emir, ?] whatever-- he tweeted something saying Google's BigQuery is the bomb. I can start with 2.2 billion things and compute summarize down to 20k in less than one minute. And I think that the fact that someone calls one of your products the bomb surrounded by asterisks, that is pretty awesome.

MARK: Very good. Goal for 2017.

FRANCESC: Get more the bombs.

FRANCESC: Well, there's that, but have Spotify on the Podcast.

FRANCESC: Oh, yes, yes. If you're listening to us, and you work for Spotify, hello, friend.

MARK: Hello.

FRANCESC: We want to interview you. Yeah, I think that that was a huge thing to happen. I'm so happy about it.

MARK: You're so happy about it? I think for me, I'm going to talk about another thing which I love, because so often this is just interesting and quirky and interesting, the amount of stuff that happened around the big data and machine learning stuff that's super cool. We had a variety of open datasets that got released-- the open images dataset, geospatial datasets. We released the Cloud Natural Language API, the Speech API.

FRANCESC: Vision API is also there, I guess. I guess it was right before, but yeah, so many APIs.

MARK: So many APIs. And I love the articles and the stuff that came out of it. The discussion of microments of baseball-- can you hear the game through data? I thought it was really interesting. And by far my favorite is basically the Japanese cucumber farmer who is using TensorFlow to manage his crops, which is phenomenal.

FRANCESC: Yes, it is such an amazing-- I mean, the fact that you get to talk about cucumbers at the Google Cloud Platform Podcast is kind of amazing.

MARK: Yeah, like, you know, like, I think it just goes to show the wide variety of things that are possible, like, once you have the capabilities at your fingertips.

FRANCESC: Oh yeah.

MARK: So that's just-- it just blows my mind.

FRANCESC: And I guess it's time for my last one. And I guess it's not surprising, because I've been playing-- not as much as you. It is about Pokemon GO.

MARK: Woo.

FRANCESC: And Pokemon GO, I think it was a great story. You know, it was an intense story.

MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The hype was real.

FRANCESC: If we take into account that Container Engine was generally available-- we announced it in August 26 in 2015. And a little bit later on, I think it was in June or something that, all of a sudden Pokemon GO is released. And it's running on Kubernetes. And not only it's running on Kubernetes but-- well, on GKE-- it grows to be the biggest cluster ever. It was, like, huge.

And not only that, but on top of that, they're like happy about it. And from the experience, we created this new team, CRE-- customer reliability engineering-- which I think it's a great thing to say, oh, like SREs are cool, but why don't you get access to them as a client? So yeah, let's create a customer reliability engineering, which I think is great. There's a blog post about it. It was very good.

And then also lots of people were running on GKE. I think that we interviewed Tim Kelton from Descartes Lab. And I thought that it was pretty amazing, and they were talking about how they were running their thing on Kubernetes and accessing Bigtable, which is, like, how Googlers do it, right? It is very much the experience that you think people--

MARK: It's like Google for everyone else, which is great.

FRANCESC: Yeah, so I'm very happy about the whole thing, about GKE growing so fast, and people getting so excited, and Pokemon GO, like, basically exploded in popularity, and it's still being successful. So I'm very, very, very happy with that.

MARK: Yeah, no, I totally, totally agree. The velocity of Kubernetes and GKE has not slowed down in the slightest.

FRANCESC: Oh yeah.

MARK: Which is amazingly crazy. And basically Pokemon GO served, what, everybody? Like, just everybody.

FRANCESC: It is pretty amazing.

MARK: Cool. All right, so my final one, I just want to highlight it because it was something I helped create, and it made me feel very special, and I love what's going on there. The Google Cloud Platform Community Slack team-- so it's like community there-- that has grown into such a wonderful community. I'm genuinely proud of it because so often sometimes I just sit back, and I watch it, and I watch the people in the community of the Google Cloud Platform Groups just interact with each other, be nice to each other, help each other out, really just kind of be there for each other, which I think is just a delightful thing.

FRANCESC: Yeah, and I guess we owe a shout out to the podcast channel in the community. They're amazing. I think it's pretty cool to get so many questions of the week and cool-- we don't get that many cool things of the week from them. They should send them too.

MARK: Yeah, we definitely get questions of the week from various people.

FRANCESC: We get questions of the week, and like, they help us so much.

MARK: Yeah, absolutely. So like, just a huge fan. If you're not in the Slack channel, check it out. Everyone there is really lovely. And there's lots and lots of people there looking to help other people out with what they do and how they're building stuff on Google Cloud Platform. It's super cool.

FRANCESC: Yeah, and I think it's a nice way to finish the episode, thanking the whole community for being there and thanking all our audience. Like, I think that we got a crazy amount of audience over this year, to the point that we decided not to take a break in the summer. But we're definitely taking a break now, because we deserve it.

MARK: Yeah, absolutely, no, I just want to second that. Everyone who's listened to us, we love you. It's been a great year of growth for us, and we're super happy about the podcast, and we have huge things planned for the upcoming year.

FRANCESC: Yup.

MARK: I will definitely say, though, if you want to put in the comments, put in the podcast thing, put it in Reddit, reach out to us on Twitter, or whatever, tell us your favorite episodes. Tell us your favorite cool things. We'd love to hear, like, what were your favorite moments, either on the podcast or, like, cool things that happened at Google Cloud. We would love to hear that back from you.

FRANCESC: And if you want to send those as audio--

MARK: Ooh, yeah.

FRANCESC: We're trying to make that a thing, where we get some of the audience talking to us directly. That would be fun. So I don't know how you're going to do that, maybe on Twitter or just post it on SoundCloud or whatever. There's so many ways.

MARK: You can put it on SoundCloud. You can put a file on Dropbox or Google Drive or anything. Just send us the link.

FRANCESC: We'll make it work.

MARK: We'll make it work.

FRANCESC: We'll make it work. So I guess that it is time to say goodbye until January 18.

MARK: Yep.

FRANCESC: And would you like to share your plans until then?

MARK: I'll be around San Francisco just having a nice vacation and getting ready for the craziness that is next year.

FRANCESC: Yes.

MARK: Yes, yes.

FRANCESC: And you said the magic words in there-- Next.

MARK: Yes, so next year there are details on that live already, so you can go to the website. You can buy tickets right now. Also making plans personally for the Game Developer Conference here in San Francisco. I know you have a variety of events, as well.

FRANCESC: Oh yeah, so I'll be coming back. Actually, by the time we publish the next episode, I'll be back to Europe.

MARK: Oh, good.

FRANCESC: Yeah, I'm going to Europe for Christmas. And then I'll be back there for GoLab [INAUDIBLE] in Italy. And then I go to FOSDEM in Brussels at the beginning of February. So yeah, and I after that India for GopherCon, and after that, Next-- fun.

MARK: Sounds like fun.

FRANCESC: Yeah, sounds like lots of fun.

MARK: Sounds like lots of fun. All right, then, Francesc, well, thank you to you for joining me for yet another week.

FRANCESC: Thank you for joining me for a whole year.

MARK: Yeah, and I guess I won't speak to you next week.

FRANCESC: No. Yay.

MARK: All right, then. Well, then I will see you next year.

FRANCESC: See you all next year.

Hosts

Francesc Campoy Flores and Mark Mandel

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