Aja Hammerly

Aja Hammerly

DevOps at Google Cloud Next

Google Cloud Next is March 8 - 10 in San Francisco. There are many breakout sessions for all sorts of different interests and skill levels. Here are some of the sessions I think will be interesting to DevOps engineers and those in related roles.

Hybrid and Cross Cloud

At meetups and other events, I see a lot of interest in Hybrid Cloud or Cross Cloud workloads. Some companies have already invested in hardware and data center but are interested in using the cloud for new projects or more flexible workloads. I have also heard interest in having multiple providers as a way of reducing risk. If hybrid cloud or cross-cloud is something that interests you check out these breakout sessions.

  • Key considerations for operating in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment As cloud adoption increases and businesses find new and innovative ways to leverage the technology, we’re seeing more hybrid and multi cloud deployments. In this session, we’ll cover key considerations for operating in this cloud environment, including security, self service, agility, serverless and the role of APIs (IaaS APIs, PaaS APIs, service APIs, etc.).

  • Securing enterprise hybrid cloud workloads Support for traditional security appliances in Google Cloud Platform allows for seamless and advanced security in hybrid cloud deployments. In this session, you’ll learn how to deploy and scale a hybrid cloud security solution on GCP.

  • Cloud networking solutions that support hybrid cloud workloads As enterprises extend their network edge into the cloud, they can use a number of cloud networking features that enable the seamless conneciton of an enterprise data center to the cloud. In this session, you’ll learn about Google Cloud Platform features that can help you enhance your data center workloads with cloud based solutions. We’lll cover physical connections to the cloud, options and selection criteria for connection to the cloud and cloud features that facilitate extending your data center to the cloud.

Day to Day DevOps

One of the things I enjoy about conferences is learning how other people approach the kinds of tasks I do on a daily basis. Frequently, I learn about tools that can make things easier. These are some of the talks I am looking forward to at Next.

  • Best practices for Continuous Delivery on Google Cloud Platform Continuous Delivery (and Deploy) is a new look at how we should get our deployable artifacts into production. Google’s been doing this for quite some time with success, and we have opinions and corresponding best practices based on lessons we’ve learned. In this session, we’ll share how Google Cloud Platform users can best take advantage of our tools for continuous delivery to Kubernetes/GKE, GCE and App Engine runtimes, with examples of how Waze operates in this realm.

  • Best practices for managing Container Engine Clusters across multiple teams Your responsibility is to provide services for internal users. How do you run Google Container Engine (GKE) cluster(s) to enable multiple teams to run applications in a heterogeneous environment. Do you create a single cluster and partition with namespaces or do you create a cluster per team? For environments with multiple clusters, how do you federate access control? How do you ensure the right level of access for each cluster. This session will walk through some of the best practices associated with running GKE clusters in large team environments.

  • Ten common causes of downtime and how to avoid them Get rid of user-facing bugs, glitches and catastrophes by applying these ten weird tricks. We’ll share hard-won knowledge from Customer Reliability Engineering to help you understand common pitfalls and how to avoid them. This is a great discussion to join if you design, develop and run highly-available production systems on GCP.

  • Alerting best practices - the thin line between informing and over-informing What are some effective ways to learn that your production services are going south? Is there such a thing as over-alerting? In this session, we’ll cover the do’s and don’ts of good alerting strategies. We’ll go over best practices - both at Google and industry-wide. Then we’ll cover some Stackdriver-specific tips and tricks.

Migration

I have chatted with several folks over the last few years about moving their applications to Google Cloud. Here are two talks that should help you if moving to Google Cloud is in your future.

  • Moving existing applications to Google Cloud Plaftorm Learn how Compute Engine, Container Engine and App Engine relate to other hosting, infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings. You’ll also learn about some unique features of Google Cloud Platform that your existing applications can take advantage of quickly.

  • Securing your data in Google Cloud Platform In this session, we’ll discuss strategies to protect your data on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We’ll cover GCP’s native encryption capabilities, customer-supplied and managed encryption keys, and tools you can use to adopt your security posture in GCP.