Google Cloud Platform Roadshow: Manchester

Welcome landing slide

I had the good fortune to be at Google's Cloud Platform Developer Roadshow, which kicked off in Manchester's TechHub this week. The combination of my early arrival, never having visited the old TechHub building, not being able to get into the new building, the TechHub website still showing the old address, Google showing the new one did make for an interesting rush as I did wonder where I was supposed to be. When I then incorrectly found myself back at the old TechHub offices, I wasn't alone it seemed as I met a few students who also didn't get that memo :)

In the end, we got ourselves back and were rewarded with coffee and breakfast pastries, which given I hadn't had breakfast, more than made up for it. Even if It did mean my name badge curled up almost instantly due to the amount of very brisk walking my 118kg frame (+7kg laptop bag) had done back and forth.

Curled up name-badge worn by Mr Radiator :-/

Having lost my original seat, I then initially got relegated to the cheap seats, so figured I best move :)

Not a great view :-D

Introduction to Beer and Salvation

Doug Ward (@SimplyDoug1987 on twitter) ran through the usual housekeeping and informed us that we mustn't stop to collect personal belongings but to save the beer. I thought that was a good point as nobody usually likes a warm beer. But as as Brad Abrams, Group Product Manager introduced the agenda, the Fireside chat did make me wonder if avoiding warm beers were really the motivation to save them after all :)

Doug Ward keeping house

Keynote

Brad Abrams ran us through a quick whirlwind of the Google platform. I was pretty familiar with this already, though I don't use Google AppEngine much. I overheard Brad talking to a group and mentioning that they are in the process of supporting SQL Server 2008 R2. Not quite clear as to how as yet myself. Still quite intrigued and so I gather, was Mandy Waite when I approached her about it towards the end of the day.

Google's Cloud offering

Developer Advocates Mandy Waite and Laurence Moroney joined Brad after he presented the agenda, to walk us through a number of deep-dive demos of Google's AppEngine, including presenting the new OnDemand pricing and Sustained Use discounts for any usage over 25% of the month on each platform. This is a very useful discount and after I questioned Brad on whether or not it had to run continuously, he confirmed that it didn't. It just had to use 25% of the 10 minute blocks of a whole month of OnDemand use.

New Google AppEngine Pricing Model

For those outside the Microsoft sphere, together with the drop in OnDeman pricing, this suddenly makes the Google AppEngine a very attractive proposition. I intend to cover why in a later blog post, but like other models on the market, this has the ability to create a maximum amount of compute and storage costs that you have to pay per month, but applies it on what you actually use, unlike AWS and Azure, where you either commit to reserved instance pricing, or 6 to 12 month blocks up-front, which hits agility and also fixes your discount to a level above your real OnDemand usage (if you pay up-front and use significantly less than you forecast). See the Moz story for an example (though this appeared to be an issue with technical best-practise and inefficient use of AWS, which in my experience of PR and marketing agencies, is unfortunately all too common an occurrence).

The focus was very much on mobile development and there was a lot of mobile developers in the audience as well as some familiar faces on the Manchester tech scene (See the back of Saftag's head below).

Shaf Chaudry showing sponsors around  before the start

Demos

Mandy and Brad ran through the creation of a Sudoku solver and Meme Maker using Python, this was supplemented with an Andoird App written in Android Studio (which by the way, I really like! It's much better than Eclipse, which I've done a bit of work in before, and brings a lot of Resharper like functions to the IDE - which I really missed in Eclipse). Requests were made through JSON secured with OAuth tokens.

Mandy and Laurence both demo'ed the boilerplate for hosting through the AppEngine API, demonstrating the use of Python scripts and the gcloud CLI tool to manage the OAuth keys (which is a much more long long winded process) and testing functions through Google's Developer Console. I've used this before to generate requests and test access to Calendar info for some .NET projects I've done and to be honest, it's best of breed at the moment in this particular area, but AWS still hold the balance of power across the board IMO.

Brad explained that the environment gives Google developers a free Git instance and runs your unit tests if you have them. This then displays the results in the console for you to check on. This is a pre-ested commit (gated check-in) so if it fails, it doesn't deploy to live. This is nice, but AWS also has a free git instance. The key difference is that Google's Cloud Developer console has in browser editing, which automatically runs the tests again and deploys it to live, but also puts it in the Git repo for your team (or another dev team) to pull later. This is crucial, as cross team development needs up-to-date and common code bases to use and the ability to force changes for DevOps/App Support staff, but still maintain the consistency of the code base is essential!

Brad and Mandy run through the storage of images in buckets for the meme-maker demo app

Conclusion

All in all, there was a good number of take-aways. Given my current working platform (Microsoft) I don't see myself changing off AWS any time soon. That said, the MS hold has more or less lipped away from a large number of small business and start-up community groups. So I can see this featuring very heavily in interaction with those markets going forward.

Google AppEngine definitely offers a good (and quick) alternative to AWS if you want to host OSS platforms. I think they're still a little slow on the release of new language support, as they pretty much had the same languages on offer as two years ago. That said, there are some very nice touches in AppEngine, such as the ability to SSH into your Linux VMs and work on them locally. However, if your main work is PHP, Java and especially Python, you can be up and running with a fast platform, very quickly and cheaply.

All in all, a good half-day. The beers didn't need saving either :)