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On March 23, 2023, C2C hosted its second Cloud Adoption Summit in Toronto, Canada. The event, one of C2C’s most well-attended to date, featured a full day of interactive live sessions, including breakouts hosted by C2C partners, a customer panel on lessons learned from the cloud adoption process, and a keynote address from Google Principle Developer Advocate Kelsey Hightower. Feedback from attendees has been unanimous: this was a standout event hosted by a one-of-a-kind community in the cloud space, where guests are free to discuss challenges openly and the opportunities to make authentic, meaningful connections are unmatched. The only way to take full advantage of the Cloud Adoption Summit experience is to attend on site, but for those who couldn’t, or want to relive it, we’ve collected video recordings of the live sessions below: Welcome from C2C and Google Cloud  Opening Keynote Session with Kelsey Hightower  Partner Panel: Industry Insights  Deloitte Keynote  Breakout Session: Automation Anywhere  Breakout Session: Pythian  Breakout Session: Palo Alto Networks  Customer Panel  Extra Credit:  

In a recent AMA with C2C, Google Cloud, and Zazmic, members of the Startups community brought questions, solutions, or roadblocks that they wanted to work through and discuss with the leaders of Zazmic. This AMA (Ask Me Anything) welcomed startups who are currently enrolled in the Google for Startups Cloud Program and have questions or need assistance using Google Cloud tools.At this 2Chat, our speakers covered:Assistance using Google Cloud tools An overview of the Google for Startups Cloud Program Tips on how to scale your companyWatch the full recording here:  Not enrolled in the Google for Startups Cloud Program? You could be eligible for access to startup leaders, Cloud cost coverage (up to $100,000 for each of the first two years), technical training, business support, and Google-wide offers. To receive benefits, you must have an active Google Cloud account.Apply here.Browse our previous Google Cloud Startups content and join the C2C Startups Community to continue the conversation.

FinOps—or cloud financial operations—is the practice of embedding financial accountability, management, and cost optimization within engineering teams. FinOps is growing in importance and relevance among financial and engineering teams alike.A recent Forrester report predicts that over 90% of organizations are overspending on cloud costs due to several factors, including lack of skills and over-provisioned resources. CIOs, business leaders, and the media are all talking about FinOps in 2023. Interest in FinOps is growing at an unprecedented rate, especially given recent economic fluctuations.C2C had the opportunity to host Sasha Kipervarg and Ken Cheney to bring their perspective about FinOps to the C2C community. Sasha is the co-founder and CEO of Ternary, the world's first native FinOps cloud cost optimization tool built for Google Cloud on Google Cloud. Ken Cheney is a business leader and advisor to SaaS and cloud vendors, large enterprise, and the government. During this informal chat, you will learn about the importance of: Accountability and enablement of cloud optimization Implementing this optimization via policies and useful resources (such as Ternary) that can help you:  tag resources (every workload, every cluster)  track untagged resources  track the biggest spenders and stay on top of the fluctuations in these costs  Reporting (the earlier the better) for aggregating spend and arriving at a total cost for various teams Setting reporting to make planning and forecasting easier.Watch the full recording here:  

After hearing the NEXT’22 presentation about validating an organization’s security posture, I was intrigued to find out more, specifically about the trends contributing to the growing complexity and real-world examples of solutions to these challenges. This C2C 2Chat grew out of this interest to find out more about this growing complexity, especially in multicloud environments, and to uncover how Anthos has helped in real-life instances.Google Cloud Innovator Champions and Fellows Jason Quek and Vincent Ledan joined from Sweden and France respectively to elaborate on this topic. Both are Anthos Fellows and as such are passionate about evangelizing about Google Cloud and Anthos and how the latter can help with security problems, including cloud-native security and platform engineering.    This event was a master class in Anthos and security, exploring factors adding complexity to the security landscape and to the very real concerns of organizations worldwide, including:How do I keep my applications running in a highly available manner and protect them against attacks?  How do I secure environments that span multiple clouds and also live on prem?  How can I most effectively secure clusters at scale? It’s easy to secure one or two clusters, but with so many options available for configuration, how do I do so most effectively?Together with my colleague Dimitris connecting from Greece, and our members from Asia Pacific, we were privileged to hear about real-life examples and solutions from our expert panelists from Scandinavia and Central Europe.  I am thrilled to have hosted this chat from my home in Sydney Australia and am in awe of the power of a truly global community like C2C, to bring members together to learn, but also to drive change that ultimately benefits customers (refer to the example and commentary on the final question).0:00 - 06:45 | Welcome and Introductions 07:30 - 12:30 | Challenges modern organizations face contributing to security landscape complexity: Organizations are looking to prevent malicious software supply chains, e.g. rogue containers running in a cluster; ensuring that all development teams use the same level of security; how to create network segregation given a cluster and network policy. We discussed Google’s controls (e.g. binary utilization) that allow management of containers in clusters, without creating bottlenecks in development teams. Platform Engineering teams are focussed on security at scale across multiple clouds,  beyond DevSecOps or even DevOps.  12.45 - 14:45 | How is the Anthos ecosystem responding to the challenges: Defense in Depth - creating multiple layers of defense; Critical functionality that exists within the Anthos ecosystem, like the Anthos Policy Controller based on the OPA Open Policy Agent ensuring that clusters are always pulling the latest security policies available via a controlled, auditable, and central repository that’s always up to date. On the Application side, there’s Anthos Service Mesh, ensuring the right microservices are talking to each other across multi-tenant workspaces. In this sense, a Defense-in-Depth approach with Anthos spans multiple layers of defense, including binary authorization, OPA gateways, and across Service Mesh.  14:45 - 17:45 | Common mistakes: Without these security mechanisms, organizations create opportunities for exposure, configuration mistakes, and developer mistakes in a cluster that might lead to leakage of private data, or the ability to retrieve logs of common shared nodes. It becomes important for developers and not just Kuberneters administrators to understand eviction logic, scheduling logic, and mitigation strategies. 18:00 -  30:00 | Actionable Tips and Examples, Validate security posture: When dealing with a multicloud mesh of clusters, a proven tip is to incorporate, as part of the cluster creation step, pulling out the security policies from a GIT repository.  Create landing zones for each of the environments to provide coverage for the intricacies of each cloud. Once these landing zones are set up, Anthos does the rest, resulting in a Kubernetes compliant cluster.  Use Anthos service mesh. Engage support and problem-solving. Support paths for Google-supported products. Consider the implications of an incubating fast-moving open-source software product like Istio for support and the ability to respond quickly. Reduce complexity and leverage the tools available, e.g. IAM security.  Consider security early on. In this particular example, implementing network security after a few deployments proved very difficult (and costly) Greater investment and focus are needed to effectively stress test and pen test clusters. 31:00 - 33:00 | Examples of container-aware load balancing and traffic encryption between services. 33:00 - 35:00 | Wrap up by Erika 35:00 - 44:00 | Q&A  Question from Ben from Brisbane Australia regarding Gatekeeper policies and book: Answer made reference to a book titled Google Anthos in Action, including a very practical chapter on Security and Policies and real-world use cases. Google Anthos in Action was written by a team of twenty-three Googlers involved with Anthos development and Anthos fellows assisting customers in the field, including our very own speaker Jason Quek, and also Scott Surovich, Google Cloud Fellow and Global Container Engineering Lead at HSBC. Here is the link to look inside the book. Discussion regarding much-needed standardization across public cloud providers: Answer made reference to https://www.pulumi.com/ as an example. Thoughts on how to kick off standardization conversations: we need large customers to band together and push for constructive dialogue across the cloud providers seeking a unified interface. There is a real-world precedent that this approach works. For example, in Germany, a number of banks banded together and negotiated with Google to deliver something specific that involved exposing specific processes that wouldn’t have been possible on a 1:1 negotiation.   43:00 - 44:30 | Closing and thank you Watch a full recording of the event here:  

Intel and Google Cloud technologies are fueling the scalability, performance, and security of the Workspot Cloud PC platform. Organizations can implement these technologies to reimagine end-user computing. For this 2Learn event, C2C invited Intel and Workspot to showcase how end-user computing on Google Cloud enables Workspot to deliver reliable, low-latency cloud PCs to users across the world, any time, from any device. Guests heard how to increase virtual CPU performance by 27% with powerful Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.The speakers explored how Intel leverages Workspot’s: 100% cloud-native approach to VDI Migration on Google Cloud infrastructure Zero-trust security and on-demand scalability Modern approach to VDI Migration with cloud PCs  Cloud adoption, infrastructure framework, and center of excellence migration tools and methodology Watch a full recording of this event below:  Extra Credit:  

The 2022 Cloud Adoption Summit at Google’s offices in London was the banner event of the year for the C2C community. The day-long conference featured over two dozen customer, partner, and Googler speakers and brought in well over a hundred guests. The networking at the event facilitated dozens of connections between organizations in attendance and sparked generative debate on topics ranging from sustainability in the cloud space to how employee upskilling impacts cloud adoption prospects. These connections were unique and irreproducible, but the content presented at the event spoke, and speaks, for itself.In December, we caught up with attendees to hear about their experiences at the event for an exclusive report from the scene. Now, full recordings of the sessions hosted at the event are available for viewing on YouTube. Check the embeds below to find the session you want to see––or see again! Welcome from C2C and Google and Opening Keynote  Industry Insights Panel and Discussion  Cybersecurity with GEMA and Palo Alto Networks  Industry Panel: Change Management with Deloitte  Infrastructure Modernization and Migrating VDI Workload to Google Cloud with Workspot  De-risking RAMP with Cloud IQ and Appsbroker  Customer Panel: What Do We Know Now That We Wish We'd Known When We Started  Extra Credit: Do you want to see more sessions like these and interact live with the speakers and other guests? Come the to the next Cloud Adoption Summit on March 23, in Toronto, Canada!

For this 2Chat event, Google Cloud's Louis Huynh, Head of Strategic Startup Growth and Community, Hannah Parker, Startup Success Manager, and Allison Kornher, Customer Engineer, joined C2C for a live AMA to host a quality discussion about anything you’d want to talk about related to Google Cloud. We encouraged attendees to bring any of the following to the AMA:Questions for the Google Cloud team and fellow attendees Solutions and success stories Roadblocks you're having trouble solving Discussion topics for the startups communityYou can get access to startup experts, Cloud cost coverage (up to $100,000 for each of the first two years), technical training, business support, and Google-wide offers by signing up for our Google Cloud for Startups Cloud Program here. Watch the full recording of the AMA here:  Browse our previous Google Cloud Startups content and join the C2C Startups Community to continue the conversation. Extra Credit:Google for Startups Cloud Program Application Google for Startups Accelerators Cloud Architecture Guidance and Topologies

Are you a cloud architect or administrator, or do you work in SysOps or DevOps? Do you want to create new solutions or integrate existing systems, application environments, or infrastructure with Google Cloud? The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) program is an excellent way to level up your skills.To help you get familiar with this Kubernetes learning pathway, Tim Berry, Head of Cloud Training at Appsbroker, joined this 2Learn event to talk about how to:Use Kubernetes for easy app deployment Accelerate learning through presentations, demos, and hands-on labs Deploy practical solutions, including security and access management, resource management, and resource monitoring Access all the knowledge and skills needed for CKA certificationAppsbroker’s trainings are for engineers, by engineers. They follow the curriculum of the CNCF Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam and offer courses for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users.Visit the Appsbroker YouTube channel to learn more and join the C2C Community to continue this conversation. Watch the full recording of the event here:  

On November 10, 2022, C2C returned to Google’s offices in Chelsea, Manhattan for a 2Gather event all about intelligent automation. The robust event program included a fireside chat with representatives of Granite and Becton, Dickinson, and Company moderated by C2C partner Automation Anywhere, a presentation from partner Palo Alto Networks, a conversation between partner Workspot and their customer MSC, and a panel featuring the speakers from MSC, Workspot, BD, and Granite. Google’s Drew Hodun introduced and moderated the event program, but the majority of the content was driven by the participating customers and partners and the guests in attendance with questions and ideas to share with the speakers and with one another.After a hello and a word on C2C from director of partnerships Marcy Young (@Marcy.Young) and an opening address from Drew, Ben Wiley of Automation Anywhere introduced Paul Kostas of Granite and Nabin Patro of BD. and offered some background about Automation Anywhere’s mission to build digital workforces for organizations that need them, with a particular focus on business processes like data entry, copy and paste, and parsing emails. Ben also mentioned Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud’s joint solutions for office departments like contact centers. Paul made a point of shouting out solutions like AA’s Automation 360 and Google Cloud’s Doc AI, which Granite used to build 80 automations in 9 months, and Nabin touched on how automation helped manage some of the work that went into BD’s manufactured rapid diagnostic test kit for COVID-19. “The technology is forcing us to think differently.” Next, Akhil Cherukupally, and David Onwukwe of Palo Alto Networks took the stage to walk through some of the technical components of the security platforms the company offers organizations navigating the cloud adoption process. Then Workspot’s Olga Lykova (@OlgaLykovaMBA) brought up Google Enterprise Account Executive Herman Matfes and Dung La and Angelo D’Aulisa of MSC for a look back through the history of the companies’ work together. Olga started things off with an origin story about the Citrix leaders who left their company to start a cloud-hosted platform with Workspot, which turned out to be a superior business model. Then she turned to the other guests to explore how Workspot helped MSC build automations on the front end of their business processes and ultimately implement these automations end to end.Speaker Panel at 2Gather: New York CityFinally, Drew, Angelo, Dung, Paul, and Nabin returned to the stage for a panel discussion breaking down all of the issues raised during the previous sessions. A question from Drew about how each organization’s work has impacted its customers prompted Paul to go long on the benefits of Granite’s services. When Angelo gently added, “We’re a Granite customer,” the audience laughed along with the panelists. “Thank you for being a customer,” Paul said. Drew also asked the group about what’s coming next at each company. The answers ranged from the concrete to the philosophical. “The technology is forcing us to think differently,” Nabin observed. In response to a question from a guest in the audience, Paul acknowledged the human impact of automation and stressed the importance of getting people to feel good about automating processes rather than fearing for the future of their jobs.As usual, the conversations did not stop here. The speakers and guests continued to share ideas and brainstorm solutions into the networking reception and even the informal dinner that followed, where Clair Hur (@write2clair) of Vimeo stopped by to explain how the company is cutting costs significantly after migrating from AWS to Google Cloud. More of these stories will be collected in our upcoming monthly recap post. For now, watch the full recording of the New York event here:  Extra Credit:  

Sebastián Moreno (@sebastianmorenoe) is a Google Cloud Partner Engineer who holds seven Google Cloud Certifications. As someone greatly experienced with Google Cloud certifications, Sebastián explains in this event how to prepare for the Professional Cloud Database Engineer certification, including the pitfalls that we may encounter during the preparation of the exams and the best tips to prepare for the exam.The Professional Cloud Database Engineer should be comfortable translating business and technical requirements into scalable and cost-effective database solutions. The tips and tricks in this recording include:Aligning the responsibilities of the certification with your goals Understanding what’s on the exam and how to best prepare Locating the most valuable resources on the webWatch the full recording here: 

@Yuliia Tkachova, the founder and CEO of Masthead Data, discovered a data issue with the power to disrupt companies of all sizes. Find out why she decided to build a business to address the issue and the tips and best practices she has learned as a founder along the way.In this event, she and @hannahparker discuss the most common obstacles and challenges to data quality across businesses of all sizes, what makes data reliable and the importance of having reliable data at scale, how Yuliia navigated what she knew and what she didn’t know and the challenges she encountered on her journey, and tools for success and why Masthead Data relies on BiqQuery and the Google Cloud Platform.Watch the full recording here:  

Google Workspace Chat enables teams and organizations to connect easily and collaborate in real time. Going beyond “conversations in Chat,” however, developers can extend Chat with custom apps that can automate processes, integrate existing solutions, and deliver notifications in line with the way teams are already using Google Chat.@ChasMaxson, @rowanmanson, and Kim Sherrell joined C2C to look closely at Google Chat apps and common use cases, from how to get started using them to how to build your own. Watch a recording of the session here:  Extra Credit:How to Build a Google Chat App with Apps Script Google Workspace Developers YouTube Channel

Did you hear the announcement at Google Cloud Next '22 about the new C3 machine series powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and Google’s custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU)? In case you didn’t, we had Intel’s Nita Sharma, Harshad Sane, and Kshitij Doshi (@Kshitij_Doshi) and Equifax Fellow Vipul Mapara join us to chat more about the announcement and how you can reduce latency and improve workload efficiency on Google Cloud using Intel Instances.In this session, our guests discussed how Google Cloud and Intel are partnering to help their mutual customers optimize their most demanding workloads. The Intel Software Center of Excellence (CoE) for Google Cloud launched as a pilot in North America last year, and the results were dramatic, leading to a now global expansion of the program. Watch a full recording of the presentations and discussion here:  Extra Credit:  

On August 30, 2022, C2C joined forces with our partners at DoiT to host a 2Gather event all about modernizing your organization on Google Cloud. Presented live at Google’s office in the repurposed Spruce Goose hangar in Playa Vista, California, Google Cloud Modernization with DoiT offered a deep exploration of the practices and technologies DoiT uses to help organizations modernize their resources and infrastructure on its Cloud Management Platform. DoiT’s Yuval Drori Retziver (@yuval) delivered the main program, comparing and contrasting the capabilities and advantages of Google Cloud Run and the Google Kubernetes Engine.Yuval prefers Cloud Run’s serverless, pay-per-use model, but he also made a point of mentioning numerous features and benefits of Kubernetes, including liveness, readiness, and startup probes and horizontal pod autoscaling. Even when Yuval offered to skip slides reviewing details familiar to most users, the crowd urged him to cover everything he had prepared. The various options for modernization Yuval described illustrated North America Head of Google Cloud Customer Community Dale Rossi (@Dale Rossi)’s comment that “As a Google Cloud customer, or any customer, it’s a journey.”Watch the full recording here:  Extra Credit:  

Cost is a key issue for startups. If you are just thinking about how to build your company, predicting what you will pay for using Google Cloud can be challenging. Learning how the different products are priced will ensure you’re not met with any surprises when you receive your bill.Fernando Olvera (@ferolvera), Customer Engineering Manager, and Jeremy Massey (@jeremymassey), Startup Success Manager, Google Cloud, joined C2C for a 2Chat event to help you better understand how Google Cloud pricing works, covering topics such as:A Google Cloud pricing overview examining various scenarios How to get a clear understanding of your cloud infrastructure costs Useful pricing resources every Google Cloud customer should know how to find Watch the full video here:   Extra Credit:Resources to Help Forecast Spend on Google Cloud Best Practices for Cost Optimization and Architectural Planning in GCP Browse our previous Google Cloud Startups content and join the C2C Startups Community to continue the conversation!

When startups begin their journeys building on relational databases, they often find that these databases run out of steam as their businesses grow. At this point, re-architecting with a more robust solution can be painful. Most applications require database transactions that meet ACID compliance requirements. The financial services, retail, gaming, and healthcare industries all require that queries for the latest data and updates happen in real time.Cloud Spanner meets these needs by getting you up and running fast and scaling as you grow. Spanner is a fully managed, globally distributed, ACID-compliant database that automatically handles replicas, sharding, and transaction consistency, allowing you to quickly scale to meet any usage pattern and ensure the success of your products.Jack Bradham, Global Solution Manager, Data Management for Spanner and Dylan Zuniga, Cloud Technical Resident at Google, joined C2C for a 2Learn event to explain how Spanner lets you:Experience the benefits of a global OLTP database with unlimited scaling up and down Enjoy high availability with zero scheduled downtime and online schema changes Focus on innovation, eliminating manual tasks with capabilities like automatic sharding and replication Benefit from resources such as sample code Watch the full recording here:  

At a 2Chat event for the C2C Startups community, Martin Gonzalez and @hannahparker got together to provide actionable advice for startup founders at all stages, based on learnings from high-potential startups across the world. Drawing on in-depth analysis, extensive research, and thousands of hours spent with entrepreneurs, the hosts provided practical, universal tips for recognizing and correcting the “people problems” that pose the biggest risks to a startup’s success.At The Effective Founder’s Project: Strategies to Overcome Startups’ Biggest Risks, our speakers covered:Why most startups fail The biggest risks startups face How to overcome these risks with actionable and practical guidanceWatch the full video here:  Extra Credit:Presentation Slide Deck Founders User GuideBrowse our previous Google Cloud Startups content and join the C2C Startups Community to continue the conversation!

Do you have questions about how to start your business? C2C is here to help. At Don’t Mind Your Own Business––Let us Help!, a C2C 2Chat event, experienced serial entrepreneur Louis Huynh, Head of Strategic Startup Growth and Community at Google, dedicated his time to answering startup questions from our community to allow our members to learn from his battle scars and offer them the opportunity to trade stories with their peers.If you weren’t able to attend, you’re in luck: we recorded the session to make it available on demand on our platform. Check out the recording to get tips from someone who has been in your shoes on topics like:Business models Pitching Fundraising Go-to-market strategy Product and customer development OperationsWatch the full video below:  

As a result of a partnership between Google and Canonical, the launch of Ubuntu Pro provides critical integration options for Google Cloud. Customers now have access to expanded security coverage, patching, and compliance features for public clouds using open-source software.The C2C team was pleased to be able to invite Hugo Huang, Product Manager at Canonical and Ubuntu, to give a presentation on Ubuntu Pro and Google Cloud integration options and sit down afterward for a chat with our community. This session introduced the full product portfolio, including segments on:Using the latest Ubuntu features to secure the Open Source software supply chain A hands-on tutorial for an in-place upgrade from Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu Pro A demo to create Ubuntu 22.04 on Google CloudWatch the full recording here:  

In the current startup environment, we are seeing a slowdown in funding. How do fledgling companies get around that? One way is to come up with a great business idea and speed your time to market to get your prototype out. The faster you can build and deploy, the sooner you can get your product in front of customers and VCs.In her presentation for Accelerate Your Time to Market with Serverless, a C2C 2Chat event, Rachel Tsao, (@rachel) Product Manager, Google Cloud, discusses how you can maximize developer productivity and time to market using scalable, containerized applications with Google Cloud Run. Watch the full recording here:  

On June 14, C2C hosted an event in Google’s Cambridge office. We believe in-person connections are invaluable to everyone in our community, especially when our members are able to immediately converse with amazing speakers who are sharing their journeys and business outcomes.The stories from this event—presented on stage from Google Cloud customers, partners, and employees—can all be reviewed below. Introduction from Google Yee-chen Tjie (@yeetjie), Google Cloud Life Sciences Head of Customer Engineering, kicked off the program at C2C Connect Live: Cambridge with a few words about how Google is using 10x thinking to make major unique and substantial investments in Healthcare and Life Sciences technology. Tjie made a point of mentioning Google’s record of solving problems using AI and ML, particularly with AlphaFold 2, the focus of the presentation Luke Ge of Intel gave later in the afternoon.After his opening remarks, Tjie hosted a round of Google trivia, inviting everyone in the audience to stand and then sit down every time they answered one of his true-or-false questions incorrectly. After guessing whether Google Suite was initially offered on CD in 2006 (false), the first Google Doodle was about Coachella because the founders were going (false––they were going to Burning Man), and the English translation of Kubernetes is “cargo ship” (false––it’s “pilot”), Tjie handed the lucky winner a free Google hub device. CISO Healthcare and Life Sciences Reflections Before beginning his presentation, Taylor Lehmann (@taylorlehmann1), Director of the Office of the CISO at Google Cloud, thanked the hosts for the opportunity to join and speak, noting that he had just had his “mind blown” talking to fellow presenter Jonathan Sheffi before the event. Lehmann went on to discuss some of the core principles of invisible security, and his office’s mission to “get to this vision where security is unavoidable.” A big part of this project, he explained, is eliminating the shared responsibility model in favor of what Google calls “shared fate.” Under this model, Google provides blueprints, solutions, and curated patterns to enable customers to manage their own security infrastructures. “If you have a bad day on Google Cloud, it’s a bad day for us too,” he summarized. “If you win on Google Cloud, you win too.” The History and Future of Human Genomics Jonathan Sheffi (@sheffi) formerly a Director of Product Strategy at Veeva Systems and Google Cloud, began his presentation by prodding the audience with an enthusiastic “How’s everyone doing?” and then added “First rule of public speaking, make sure the audience is awake.” The focus of Sheffi’s presentation, the history and future of human genomics, took the audience back to the year 1990, when, in Sheffi’s words, “Nirvana’s Nevermind is a year from coming out, it’s a very exciting time.”Sheffi went on to cover the advents of next-gen sequencing and of public cloud computing, government and pharmaceutical adoption of genomic sequencing, and recent cost-cutting advancements in genomics. When he opened things up to the audience for questions, Michael Preston of Healthcare Triangle shared his own experience seeking treatment for melanoma to ask how genomic sequencing can be used to predict patient reactions to prescribed medications. Sheffi took the question to heart, and acknowledged the need for sequencing and screening processes that take into account data on patient-reported side effects. End-to-End Optimization of AlphaFold2 on Intel Architecture Luke Ge (@Liangwei77ge) an AI Solution Specialist at Intel, opened his presentation by saying, “Yesterday I spent 6 hours on a plane to come to this beautiful city,” prompting a round of applause form the audience. Then he asked “How many of you are using Alphafold 2?” A few hands went up. He followed up with, “How many of you have heard of Alphafold 2?” Many more hands raised.Ge’s presentation explored how analyzing human tissue from DNA to protein structure requires using AI for processing huge sequence data. The Google product that handles this processing is AlphaFold 2. Ge explained how Intel’s computing hardware supports Alphafold 2, including by providing a deep Learning model inference and removing memory bottlenecks in AlphaFold 2’s attention and evoformer modules. At the end of his presentation, Ge demonstrated a model generated using non-optimized versus optimized Alphafold 2 code. The difference was clear. Panel Discussion Tjie moderated the panel discussion with Sheffi and Ge by asking each whether he is a Celtics fan or a Warriors fan. Immediately, the tension in the room rose: Sheffi and Ge are from opposite coasts, making Sheffi a Celtics fan and Ge a Warriors fan. The tension was short-lived, however. When Tjie asked Ge what he considers the best way to choose a compute instance, Sheffi followed up to ask Ge if it’s possible to run multiple sequences on a single instance and maintain performance. Ge said yes.When Tjie opened questions to the audience, several guests rose to ask Sheffi questions about genomic sequencing, more than one of them focusing on use cases for genomic research for patients and caregivers. After several of these questions in a row, Tjie turned to the crowd and said, “I warned Luke that if he picked the Warriors then he would get less questions from the audience.” After the laughs in the room died down, Tjie asked Ge where he sees HCLS problems being solved with AI. Ge did not have to think long before citing computer vision as a solution for detecting cancerous cells. Winding Down Following the presentations, all in attendance broke away to connect during a networking reception. To read more about it, check out the exclusive onsite report linked below in the Extra Credit section. Extra Credit  

Machine Learning is an essential component of every major tech product today. With tools like BigQuery ML, you don’t have to be a data scientist to quickly and easily incorporate ML into your applications.At a recent C2C Deep Dive event hosted by the Google Cloud startups team, Google Cloud AI/ML Specialist Customer Engineers Mike Walker and Rob Vogelbacher explained how you can use BigQuery ML to power insights for you and your customers. There are many built-in algorithms for regression, classification, clustering, forecasting, and recommendations that you can train with just a few lines of SQL. All these help you learn more from your data in a short time and in a cost-effective way. The models you build can be called from BigQuery or from external applications.The recording from this session includes the following topics:(0:00) Introduction from C2C (2:35) What is BigQuery? (6:00) Decoupled storage and compute on BigQuery (8:00) Typical ML Workflow (10:00) BigQuery ML and AI (11:30) BigQuery ML-supported models and features (17:30) BigQuery Use cases (18:30) BigQuery Explainable AI (21:05) AutoML Tables and BigQuery ML (23:25) BigQuery ML Example Models: Miami Housing Dataset (41:30) Audience Q&AWatch the full recording of the conversation below: Extra Credit:  

On May 12, C2C hosted its first east coast event at Google’s New York office. We believe in-person connections are invaluable to everyone in our community, especially when our members are able to immediately converse with amazing speakers who are sharing their journeys and business outcomes.The stories from this event—presented on stage from Google Cloud customers, partners, and employees—can all be reviewed below.  A Warm Welcome from C2C and Google Cloud Opening the event was Marco ten Vaanholt (@artmarco), who leads C2C initiatives at Google Cloud. To kick things off, Marco prompted the audience to get to know each other, and all enthusiastically turned to their table neighbors. After Marco covered the history of C2C and our early adventures in hosting face to face events, Marcy Young (@Marcy.Young), Director of Partnerships at C2C, followed to reiterate our mission statement: we’re here to connect Google Cloud customers across the globe. Since March of 2021, when the C2C online community first launched, our community has grown in size to make valuable connections with people like Arsho Toubi (@Arsho Toubi), Customer Engineer, Google Cloud, who followed Young to introduce C2C’s partner speakers.All three introductory speakers emphasized the excitement of being able to make new connections in person again. As ten Vaanholt put it, peers introducing themselves and initiating new relationships is “the start of community building.” When Toubi announced “I received some business cards, and that was a fun experience I haven’t had in two years,” the room responded with a knowing laugh. Toubi also asked the Googlers in the room to stand up so others could identify them. “These are my colleagues,” she said. “We’re all here to help you navigate how to use GCP to your best advantage.”  Getting to Know AMD and DoiT C2C partners and the sponsors for this event, DoiT and @AMD shared updates of the partnership between the two companies focused on cloud optimization.Michael Brzezinski (@mike.brzezinski), Global Sales Manager, AMD Spenser Paul (@spenserpaul), Head of Global Alliances, DoiTBrzezinski framed the two presentations as a response to a question he received from another attendee he met just before taking the stage, a question about how the two companies work together to enhance performance while reducing cost. One half of the answer is AMD’s compute processors, which Brzezinski introduced one by one. To complete the story of the partnership between the two companies, Spenser Paul of DoiT took the stage with his Labrador Milton. “I’m joining the stage with a dog, which means you won’t hear anything I’m saying from here on,” he said as he took the microphone. “And that’s totally okay.” The key to minimizing cost on AMD’s hardware, Paul explained, is DoiT’s Flexsave offering, which automates compute spend based on identified need within a workload.  A Fireside Chat with DoiT and CurrentSpenser Paul, Head of Global Alliances, DoiT Trevor Marshall (@tmarshall), Chief Technology Officer, CurrentPaul invited Marshall to join him onstage, and both took a seat facing the audience, Milton resting down at Paul’s feet. After asking Marshall to give a brief introduction to Current, Paul asked him why Current chose Google Cloud. Marshall did not mince words: Current accepted a $100,000 credit allowance from Google after spending the same amount at AWS. Why did Current stay with Google Cloud? The Google Kubernetes Engine. “I like to say we came for the credits, but stayed for Kubernetes,” Marshall said. Paul wryly suggested the line be used for a marketing campaign. The conversation continued through Current’s journey to scale and its strategy around cost optimization along the way.When Paul opened questions to the audience, initially, none came up. Seeing an opportunity, Paul turned to Marshall and said, “Selfishly, I need to ask you: what’s going to happen with crypto?” Just in time, a guest asked what other functionalities Current will introduce in the future. After an optimistic but tight-lipped response from Marshall, another moment passed. Marshall offered Paul a comforting hand and said, “We’re all going to make it through,” before fielding a few more questions.  Panel Discussion  All our presenters, with the addition of Michael Beal (@MikeBeal), CEO, Data Capital Management reconvened on stage for a panel discussion. Toubi, who moderated the conversation, began by asking Michael Beal to introduce himself and his company, Data Capital Management, which uses AI to automate the investment process. Beal ran through Data Capital Management’s product development journey, and then, when he recalled the company’s initial approach from Google, playfully swatted Marshall and said, “The credits don’t hurt.” Toubi then guided Beal and Brzezinski through a discussion of different uses cases for High Performance Computing, particularly on AMD’s processors.When Toubi turned the panel’s attention to costs, Paul took the lead to explain in practical detail how DoiT’s offerings facilitate the optimization process. “I have an important question,” said Toubi. “Can DoiT do my taxes?” Then she put the guests on the spot to compare Google Cloud to AWS’s Graviton. Brzezinski was ready for the question. The initial cost savings Graviton provides, he explained, don’t translate to better price performance when taking into account the improved overall performance on Google Cloud. Other questions covered financial services use cases for security, additional strategies for optimizing workloads for price performance, and wish-list items for Google Cloud financing options.Marco ten Vaanholt kicked off the audience Q&A by asking what a Google Cloud customer community can do for the customers on the panel. Marshall said he’s interested in meeting talented developers, and Beal said he’s interested in meeting anyone who can give him ideas. As he put it, “Inspiration is always a very interesting value proposition.” After a couple more questions about estimating cost at peak performance and addressing customer pain points, Toubi asked each panelist to offer one piece of advice for someone considering using Google Cloud who isn’t already. Again, Paul saw a shot and took it. “If you’ve never been to Google before,” he said, “Come for the credits, stay for the Kubernetes.” Winding Down Following the presentations, all in attendance broke away to connect during a networking reception. To read more about it, check out the exclusive onsite report linked below in the Extra Credit section, and to get involved in the customer-to-customer connections happening in person in the C2C community, follow the link to our live event in Cambridge, MA to register and attend. We look forward to seeing you there! Extra Credit 

Looker is a business intelligence platform used for data applications and embedded analytics. Looker helps you easily explore, share, and visualize your company's data so that you can make better business decisions. During this deep dive, Cat Huang and Tema Johnson, Looker customer engineers at Google Cloud, discussed the value of Looker for startup companies, including recommendations for how to choose a data warehouse complete with a product demo. The recording from this session includes the topics listed below, plus plenty of conversation infused in the presentation from open Q&A from community members present at the live event:(0:00) Welcome and introduction from C2C and the Google Startups Team (5:25) Looker (creating a data culture) vs. Data Studio (data visualizations) (9:00) Using Looker and Data Studio together for a complete, unified platform for self-service and centralized BI (10:10) Using looker with a data warehouse like BigQuery (13:15) Serverless big data analytics vs. traditional data warehouses (14:10) Integrated AI and ML services for data analytics (15:30) The power of Looker: in-database architecture, semantic modeling layer, and cloud native (21:05) Live demo: Looker (40:00) Closing comments and audience Q&AWatch the full recording below: Preview What’s NextJoin the Google Cloud Startups group to stay connected on events like this one, plus others we have coming up: 

Machine Learning is an important component of every major tech product today. However, not everything beyond excel sheets is big data, and not all big data problems require ML. The most important function of ML should be to supplement the product.Decision makers in the ML and big data spaces should know how an ML mindset differs from a traditional software development mindset. Hear from startup mentor, program manager, and trained architect KC Ayyagari (@kcayyagari), Senior Customer Engineer at Google Cloud.The recording from this session includes the topics listed below, plus plenty of conversation infused in the presentation from open Q&A from community members present at the live event:(0:00) Welcome and introduction from C2C and the Google Startups Team (3:30) Agenda overview (5:00) What is Machine Learning? (16:55) How ML is different from normal software development and how to represent physical problems in data (42:30) The do’s, don’ts, and focus areas in the ML mindset for managersWatch the full recording below: Preview What's NextJoin the Google Cloud Startups group to stay connected on events like this one, plus others we have coming up: