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Codento Levels Up Serverless Expertise at Google Cloud Nordics Serverless Summit 2023

Authors: Olli-Pekka Lamminen, Google Bard

In November, Codento was thrilled to be invited to attend the Google Cloud Nordics Serverless Summit 2023 in Sunnyvale, California. This two-day event, held at the Google Cloud campus, was packed with exciting updates, in-depth discussions, and valuable networking opportunities.

Cloud-Powered Efficiency: Cost, Performance, and Creativity

The ability to drive down operational costs featured heavily at the Serverless Summit. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model and reduced price for idle instances Cloud Run is one of the most cost effective ways for businesses to run their workloads in a serverless environment. Flexible scaling from zero aligns perfectly with the dynamic nature of serverless applications, ensuring that organisations only pay for the resources they consume. This together with low management overhead and ease of development makes serverless technology accessible and affordable for businesses of all sizes.

Synthetic monitoring with Cloud Ops provides proactive insights into application performance and health, enabling businesses to identify and address potential issues before they impact real users. By simulating user interactions, this monitoring tool proactively identifies and alerts about potential problems, allowing businesses to maintain scalable and responsiveoperations. Together with capabilities like Log Analytics and AIOps, the Cloud Operations suite empowers businesses to prevent and address performance issues proactively, ensuring a consistently positive user experience.

Cloud based development environments, enhanced with Duet AI, bring the power of artificial intelligence to the creative workspace. Duet AI acts as an intelligent assistant, providing real-time feedback and suggestions, enabling creative professionals to enhance their productivity and achieve their visions. Google’s commitment to protecting its customers using generative AI products, like Duet AI and Vertex AI, in the event of copyright infringement lawsuits further reinforces the company’s dedication to innovation and responsible AI development.

Google’s Focus on Developer Experience with Cloud Run

It was evident that Google is placing a strong emphasis enhancing developer experience, focusing on making Cloud Run even more developer-friendly and efficient. The company discussed several new features and enhancements designed to streamline the process of building and deploying serverless applications, all of which are already available at least in preview today. These include:

• Accelerated Build and Deployment: Google is streamlining the build and deployment process for Cloud Run applications with optimised buildpacks, making it easier and faster for developers to get their applications up and running quickly, efficiently and securely.

• Improved Performance and Scalability: Google is continuously improving the performance and scalability of Cloud Run, ensuring that applications can handle even the most demanding workloads. Cloud Run has demonstrated the ability to scale from zero to thousands within mere seconds.

• Ease of Integration with Other Google Cloud Offerings: With Cloud Run integrations, developers can easily take other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Load Balancing, Firebase Hosting and Cloud Memorystore, in use with their serverless applications. Products like Eventarc allow developers to establish seamless communication between serverless applications and other cloud services, facilitating event-driven workflows and real-time data processing.

• Simplified Networking and Security: While Cloud Run integrations make using load balancers a breeze, Direct VPC egress enables serverless applications to directly access resources within a VPC, eliminating the need for a proxy. This direct communication enhances performance and minimises latency. IAP provides a secure gateway for external users to access serverless applications, leveraging Google’s authentication infrastructure to verify user identities before granting access.
• Effortless Workload Migration: Cloud Run and GKE Autopilot can run the same container images without any modifications, and their resource descriptions are nearly identical. This makes it incredibly easy to move your workloads between the two platforms, depending on your specific needs or as those needs evolve.

Project Starline and the Future of Internet in Space

Beyond the technical discussions, we also had the opportunity to explore Project Starline, Google’s experimental 3D video communication technology. Project Starline uses a combination of hardware and software to create a more natural and immersive video conferencing experience.

We also had the pleasure of discussing the future of the internet in space with Vint Cerf, a pioneer in the field of computer networking and often referred to as the ”father of the Internet.” Cerf shared his insights on the challenges and opportunities of building a reliable and accessible internet infrastructure in space.

An Invaluable Experience that Spurs Innovation

Overall, the Google Cloud Nordics Serverless Summit 2023 proved to be an invaluable experience for us. We gained insights into the latest advancements in serverless technology, learned from Google experts, and connected with other industry leaders. We are excited to apply our newfound knowledge to help our customers build and deploy even more innovative serverless applications.

About the Authors

Olli-Pekka Lamminen is an experienced software and cloud architect at Codento, with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. Olli-Pekka is utilising his extensive background and knowledge to design and implement robust, scalable software solutions for our customers. His deep understanding of cloud technologies and telecommunications empowers him to deliver exceptional solutions that meet the evolving needs of businesses.

Google Bard is a powerful language model that can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. It is still under development, but we are excited about its potential to help people in a variety of ways.

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Top 4 Picks by Codento Team –  fooConf, Helsinki

Authors: Codento consultants Samuel Mäkelä, Iiro Niemi, Olli Alm & Timo Koola

On Tuesday November 7th the second installment of fooConf was held at Hakaniemi, Helsinki. We (eight of us!) spent the day in the conference and asked our team what their one pick of the day was.

Here are our top 4 of the fooConf Helsinki 2023!

#1 Adam Tornhill: The business impact of code quality (top pick by Samuel)

To me, Adam Tornhill’s conference talk was quite mind-blowing. His ”10 years of trauma & research in technical debt” not only translated complex research data into clear visualizations about technical debt and code complexity, but also underscored the significant business impact of tackling these challenges. Through his presentation, Tornhill illuminated how addressing technical debt can lead to improved code quality, reduced maintenance costs and ultimately contribute to the overall success of a software project. It was a fascinating blend of in-depth research and practical insights, leaving a lasting impression on how we perceive and approach software development from both technical and business perspectives.

• Book: The code as a crime scene (2nd. ed, 2023)
• White paper: https://codescene.com/hubfs/web_docs/Business-impact-of-low-code-quality.pdf
• Research publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04374
• Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/09/07/the-code-quality-advantage-how-empirical-data-shatters-the-speed-vs-quality-myth/

#2 Mete Atamel: WebAssembly beyond the browser (by Iiro)

Mete Atamel from Google discussed the evolving use of WebAssembly technology outside the browser environment. He emphasized that WebAssembly on the server, particularly with the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), offers a compelling alternative to traditional methods of running applications, such as through virtual machines or containers. This perspective aligns with findings from the CNCF 2022 Annual Survey, which indicates a growing consensus that “Containers are the new normal and Wasm as the future”. Leveraging Wasm with WASI offers several notable benefits over containers, such as faster execution, reduced footprint, enhanced security and portability. However, despite this enthusiasm, it’s important to recognize that we are still some distance from having fully-featured and stable WebAssembly projects for server-side applications. This gap highlights the ongoing development and the need for further innovation in the field.

#3 Guillaume LaForge: Generative AI in practice: Concrete LLM use cases in Java, with the PaL

M API (by Olli)

Guillaume presented hands-on examples on how to utilize large language models via Google PaLM API. PaLM (Pathways Language Model) is a single, generalized language model that can be adjusted to specific domains or sizes (PaLM2). In his presentation, Guillaume utilized Google PaLM APIs and Langchain for building a bedtime story generator in Groovy.

Links below:

• Slideset: https://speakerdeck.com/glaforge/generative-ai-in-practice-concrete-llm-use-cases-in-java-with-the-palm-api

• Bed time stories for kids: https://bed-time-stories.web.app/
• Pathway language model: https://blog.research.google/2022/04/pathways-language-model-palm-scaling-to.html
• Palm2:https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-palm-2-ai-large-language-model/
• Langchain4J https://github.com/langchain4j/langchain4j
• Langchain home https://python.langchain.com/docs/get_started/introduction
• Palm APIs https://developers.generativeai.google/products/palm

#4 Marit van Dijk: Reading Code (by Timo)

Presentation by Marit van Dijk (link to slides) starts with a simple observation: “We spend a lot of time learning to write code, while spending little to no time learning to read code. Meanwhile, we often spend more time reading code than actually writing it. Shouldn’t we be spending at least the same amount of time and effort improving this skill?“.

These questions take us into fascinating topics ranging from how to help our brain understand other programmers and our shared code (see book Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans) to structured practices that build up our code reading capabilities. The practice called “Code Reading Club” is one way to practice code reading systematically in small groups. This presentation made me want to try this with team Codento. Stay tuned, we will tell you how it went!

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