Forem: GCP Podcast

Supersolid with Kami May

GCP Podcast — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This week, Mark and Jon bring us a fascinating interview with Kami May of Supersolid, a gaming company in London. With the help of Kami May, Supersolid recently launched their first multiplayer game, Snake Rivals. This session-based game puts players in an arena where they can choose from three modes: endless, gold rush, or battle royale.

To produce the game, Supersolid makes use of many GCP products. Snake Rivals is powered by Kubernetes and Agones, which Kami chose because it offers functionality that works well with gaming. It provides server allocation which allows players to continue play even during an update, has the ability to scale, allows labeling, allows for different gaming modes, and more. To reduce latency, Supersolid operates in nine regions. Supersolid uses BigQuery and continuously gathers data so they can make adjustments to make sure game play is efficient, fun, and functional. Kami explains that navigating the world of multiplayer gaming for the first time was tricky, but the Google support team has been very helpful!

Kami May

Kami May is a Senior Server Developer at London-based mobile games studio, Supersolid. Her lifetime passion for video games drove her to join the games industry soon after graduating from university in 2016. Since then, Kami has worked on multiple titles for mobile, PC, and console. Most recently, she’s been bringing Supersolid’s most ambitious project to date - Snake Rivals - to life, powered by Agones on GCP. In her free time she can be found at the top of the ladder on Path of Exile, chasing the 6k MMR dream on Dota 2, or searching for London’s best fried chicken.

Cool things of the week

Keep Parquet and ORC from the data graveyard with new BigQuery features blog
Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI site
Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly’s shortened cloud migration blog

Interview

Supersolid site
Snake Rivals site
Agones site
Kuberentes site
Go site
Cloud Load Balancing site
BigQuery site
Stackdriver site
Supersolid Careers site
Snake Rivals on Google Play site
Snake Rivals on iTunes site

Question of the week

What are best practices for setting up user accounts in Cloud IAM?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be working on blogs and videos at home.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Human has been Nutralised” by cityrocker of Freesound.org
“Laser Automatic Heavy” by dpren of Freesound.org
“Gong Sabi” by Veiler of Freesound.org

FACEIT with Maria Laura Scuri

GCP Podcast — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Halloween! Today, Jon Foust and Brian Dorsey chat with Maria Laura Scuri of FACEIT about ways they are reducing toxicity in gaming. FACEIT is a competitive gaming platform that helps connect gamers and game competition and tournament organizers. In order to do this well, FACEIT has put a lot of energy into finding ways to keep the experience positive for everyone.

Because gaming toxicity can involve anything from verbal jabs to throwing a game, FACEIT uses a combination of data collecting programs and input from players to help identify toxic behavior. In identifying this behavior, FACEIT has to consider not only the literal words spoken or actions made, but the context around them. Is that player being rude to strangers or is he egging on a friend? The answer to this question could change the behavior from unacceptable to friendly banter. Using their own machine learning model, interactions are then given a score to determine how toxic the player was in that match.

The toxicity scores along with their program, Minerva, determine if any bans should be put on a player. FACEIT focuses on punishing player behavior, rather than the player themselves, in an effort to help players learn from the experience and change the way they interact with others in the future.

Maria’s advice to other companies looking to help reduce toxicity on their platforms is to know the context of the toxic event. Know how toxicity can express itself on your platform and find ways to deal with all of them. She also suggests tackling the issues of toxicity in small portions and celebrating the small wins! Her final piece of advice is to focus on criticizing the behavior of the user rather than attacking them personally.

Maria Laura Scuri

Maria is the Director of Business Intelligence at FACEIT, the leading competitive platform for online multiplayer games with over 15 million users. She joined FACEIT as part of the core team in 2013 as an intern assisting with everything from customer support to event management. Her passion for data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence saw her quickly rise through the ranks to her current position, leading the Business Intelligence and Data Science teams.

Maria works side by side with some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Google Cloud. She is the main lead on a number of projects including the inception of an Artificial Intelligence Admin to fight toxicity on the platform. Maria is responsible for implementing best practices around data visualization and tools that allow the FACEIT team to thrive, as well as sourcing and training new talent.

Maria is a huge video games fan. You can find her on League of Legends as “FACEIT Lulu” and on Steam as “Sephariel”.

Cool things of the week

What can Google Cloud do for you? New trainings for business professionals blog
Leave no database behind with Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog
How to orchestrate Cloud Dataprep jobs using Cloud Composer blog
Updates make Cloud AI platform faster and more flexible blog
Use GKE usage metering to combat over-provisioning blog

Interview

FACEIT site
FACEIT blog
FACEIT on Medium site
Steam site
Perspective API site
BigQuery site
Looker site
Cloud Datalab site
Jupyter Notebook site
Cloud AI Platform site
TensorFlow site
Google Cloud Data Labeling site
Google Translation site]
Dealing with CS:GO Free to Play and Addressing Toxicity in Matches blog
Revealing Minerva and addressing toxicity and abusive behaviour in matches blog
One of Europe’s Largest Gaming Platforms is Tackling Toxicity with Machine Learning blog
FACEIT And Google Partner To Use AI To Tackle In Game Toxicity article
FACEIT implement Minerva, an AI to punish toxicity in CSGO blog
FACEIT Takes On Toxicity With Machine Learning article
Exploring Cyberbullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games whitepaper
Toxic Behavior in Online Games whitepaper
A Look at Gaming Culture and Gaming Related Problems: From a Gamer’s Perspective whitepaper
An Analysis of (Bad) Behavior in Online Video Games whitepaper
Toxicity detection in multiplayer online games whitepaper
Jon’s gaming info steam
- BattleNet: Syntax#11906

Question of the week

When I SSH into my VM via different methods (Cloud Console, GCloud, terminal/command prompt) I get a different username… What can I do to make that static?

OS Login

Where can you find us next?

FACEIT will be at Next London and GDC

Brian will be at Super Computing in Denver.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland and Montreal in December.

Massive with Björn Lindberg

GCP Podcast — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re sad to say goodbye to Mark Mandel this week but excited to bring you an interview he and guest host Robert Martin did with Björn Lindberg of Massive Entertainment. The gaming studio is located in Sweden and owned by Ubisoft. Their most recent game, The Division 2, is a “looter shooter” game that was released in March. It can be played solo or users can be matched up to play with or against others.

To keep the game running smoothly, Massive employs a micro-service architecture to divide and conquer the trials of creating and running such a large, intense game. The Division 2 was launched with Google Cloud, a process Björn says was a bit easier than launching on physical hardware. Autoscaling in the cloud has created a simpler, more trustworthy gaming process as well, and by connecting to data centers in multiple regions, they’re able to decrease latency.

Björn Lindberg

Björn Lindberg is working as On-Line technical director at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft owned and operated game studio in Malmö Sweden. He does design and implementation of on-line backend systems for large AAA on-line games such as The Division series of games and World in Conflict.

Interview

Massive Entertainment site
The Division 2 site
Ubisoft site
Terraform site
Grafana site
Compute Engine site

Thank You Mark!

Thank you Mark for everything you’ve done to make this podcast a success! We’ll miss you!

Data Visualization with Manuel Lima

GCP Podcast — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Gabi Ferrara and Jon Foust are back today and joined by fellow Googler Manuel Lima. In this episode, Manuel tells us all about data visualization, what it means, why it’s important, and the best ways to do it effectively.

For Google and its mission, data visualization is especially necessary in faciliatating the accesibility of information. It “makes the invisible visible” because of the way it can decode meaningful data patterns. Working across multiple GCP products, Manuel and his team build advanced visualization models that go beyond graphs and bar charts to things like sophisticated time lines that aid in the progression from data to usable knowledge. They have also created guidelines for things like what kind of graphical language to use, what type of charts users might need, and more. These guidelines, originally used only internally, have now been adjusted and released for use by developers outside Google with the help of the Material.io team.

The guidelines are based around the six data visualazation princples that help users get started. They can be employed to plan and inspire an entire project or to evaluate a specific data visualation chart. Some of the most important principles are to be honest and to lend a helping hand. You can read more in their Medium article, Six Principles for Designing Any Chart.

Manuel Lima

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009,” Manuel Lima is the founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Google, and a regular teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design.

Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various publications and media outlets, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Fast Company, Forbes, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Design Observer, Creative Review, Eye, Grafik, étapes, and El País. His first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His latest, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, covers 1,000 hundred years of humanity’s long-lasting obsession with all things circular.

With more than twelve years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. During the course of his MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Cool things of the week

Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine? New trainings teach you the basics of architecting on Google Cloud blog
Stadia comes next month site
Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for the fourth consecutive time blog
Google Hardware Event
- Pixel 4 is here to help blog
- Meet the new Google Pixel Buds blog
- Nest Mini brings twice the bass and an upgraded Assistant blog
- More affordable and portable: let’s Pixelbook Go blog

Interview

Material.io site
Data Visualization Guides site
Six Principles for Designing Any Chart article
Google’s six rules for great data design article
BigQuery site
Stackdriver site
Google Analytics site

Question of the week

What are the most common products used in cloud gaming?

Cloud Spanner for storing player authentication and inventory or long-term state storage site
Redis is used in Open Match
VM’s have been the most commonly used product for game servers but there has been a shift to Kubernetes
Pub/Sub

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at Full Stack Europe.

Jon will be at Kubecon in November to run a workshop on Open Match.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Jingle Romantic” by Jay_You of Freesound.org

Informatica with Bill Creekbaum

GCP Podcast — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Listen Now!

Happy Independence Day to our American listeners! Mark Mandel is back today as he and Gabi Ferrara interview Bill Creekbaum of Informatica to learn how they work with Google Cloud for a better big data user experience. Mark Mirchandani is hanging around the studio as well, bringing some cool things of the week and helping with the question of the week!

Informatica provides data managing products that offer complete solutions focusing on metadata management, integration, governance, security, data quality, and discoverability. Bill’s job at Informatica is to ensure these products really take advantage of the strengths of Google Cloud Platform. One such example is a product that allows customers to design in Informatica and push their projects to Cloud Dataproc. Informatica also offers similar capabilities in BigQuery. When moving data from on-prem to the cloud, customers can use Informatica and Google Cloud together for a seamless transition, cost savings, and easier data control.

Together, Informatica and Google Cloud can also facilitate the acquisition of high quality data. To have better, more trustworthy output, data inputed needs to be safe to access, have few or no duplicates and null values, and be complete. To achieve this, developers usually use a combination of the Informatica tools Intelligent Cloud Services, Enterprise Data Catalog, and Big Data Management, and the Google tools BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Analytics, Dataproc, and Pub/Sub.

Bill’s closing advice for companies comes in three parts: take stock of the data you’ve got, set goals, and develop a well-rounded team.

Bill Creekbaum

Bill Creekbaum is Sr. Director of Product Management for Cloud, Big Data, and Analytic Ecosystems at Informatica. He is focused on delivering market leading unified data management platforms and services that help customers take advantage of their greatest assets, data. Bill has been in product management and product marketing for more than 20 years and for the past 10 has been focused on successfully delivering SaaS and Cloud Applications to the market. Prior to joining Informatica, Bill has worked at SnapLogic, GoodData, Oracle, Microsoft, Mindjet, and more. See more of Bill’s experience on LinkedIn.

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud + Chronicle: The security moonshot joins Google Cloud blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 135: VirusTotal with Emi Martinez podcast
Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa blog
Kubernetes 1.15: Extensibility and Continuous Improvement blog
Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas blog
See how your code actually executes with Stackdriver Profiler, now GA blog

Interview

Informatica site
Informatica for GCP site
BigQuery site
Cloud Storage site
Cloud Dataproc site
Intelligent Cloud Services site
Enterprise Data Catalog site
Big Data Management site
Google Analytics site
Pub/Sub site
Google Cloud & Informatica: Accelerate your Data-Driven Digital Transformation webinar
Informatica for Google BigQuery data sheet
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for Google BigQuery site

Question of the week

If I want to have my App Engine Application serve any subdomain on my custom domain, how do I do that?

Where can you find us next?

Gabi is done traveling.

Mark Mirch’ is working on Stack Chat.

Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day, and the North American Open Source Summit.

Sound Effect Attribution

“small group laugh 6.flac” by tim.kahn of Freesound.org
“Chewing, Carrot, A” by Inspector J of Freesound.org
“Testtone1000hz” by Jobro of Freesound.org