Guests Sharon Fang and Michael Sudakovitch are here this week to talk with Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme about Google’s Active Assist optimization portfolio and managing cloud projects efficiently.

Michael, tech lead at Uber, first employed Active Assist for the company in their security department, but they have since realized how useful Active Assist is in many areas of the resource management space. Responsible architects, Michael points out, continually evaluate their resources and patch, update, or remove as necessary to ensure proper security and optimize spending. Sharon helps us understand resource management further and how Active Assist helps teams find resources that can be changed or even removed for better spending, tighter security, and smaller carbon footprint.

Active Assist will even recommend the removal of entire projects that have become dormant. Michael talks in detail about Uber’s use of Active Assist and how it helped them find vulnerable projects that could be removed for better security. Sharon highlights the effects of Active Assist on reducing CO2 emissions as well, as discontinued projects keep hardware running needlessly. As Michael and his team at Uber began taking advantage of all Active Assist had to offer, Google worked with him to answer questions, tailor resources, and take feedback to improve offerings. The future includes a portfolio expansion of resource life cycle management tools to identify more idol systems like GKE clusters and helping larger customers take advantage of Active Assist at scale automatically.

Together, Sharon and Michael tell us stories about the partnership and interesting findings and results of Uber’s carbon footprint reduction journey.

Sharon Fang

Sharon Fang is a Product Manager for Google Cloud’s Active Assist, which aims to help users optimize their cloud operations with recommendations.

Michael Sudakovitch

Michael is a Tech Lead at Uber’s Engineering Security organization, focusing on securing and optimizing Uber’s Multi-Cloud infrastructure.

Cool things of the week

• Solving internal search problems with Dialogflow blog
• Automating self-service tech support with Tensorflow blog
• Introducing IAM Deny, a simple way to harden your security posture at scale blog
• Supporting healthcare delivery with cloud-native medical imaging blog

Interview

• Active Assist site
• Uber site
• Uber Engineering Blog site
• How ML-fueled recommendations help developers optimize security, price-performance, and carbon reduction blog
• Introducing Unattended Project Recommender: discover, reclaim, or deprecate abandoned projects under your organization blog
• Reduce your cloud carbon footprint with new Active Assist recommendations blog

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Max is sorting out the final blog posts of the year, planning some secret Santa holiday festivities for the team, and prepping cranberry sauces.

Daryl is planning videos for the new year, including a video to help celebrate our 1 millionth subscriber on the Google Cloud Tech YouTube channel and several videos to help people get the most out of Google Cloud IAM features.

Hosts

Max Saltonstall and Daryl Ducharme