Max Saltonstall is back in the co-host seat, joining Mark for a fun chat about Active Assist. Chris Law is our guest this week, and he starts with the story of his arrival at Google and his path to the Active Assist team. Active Assist is Google’s way of helping clients learn about and take advantage of all the cloud features available.

Chris describes the main ways Active Assist helps customers in the real world, from troubleshooting tools that identify problems to analysis software that helps clients determine how changes will effect the project. Active Assist also provides recommendations for cost savings, better security, and performance boosters to help clients proactively build better projects. As companies scale, these features become even more important, Chris tells us, citing examples from real users.

Later, we talk about how machine learning is employed to create these recommendations. We talk transparency and learn how Chris and his team keep open communication with clients as they design and improve client security structures. In the future, the Active Assist team will continue to work with departments across Google Cloud and build more recommendations tools for customers. DataFlow and BigQuery are some of the recommendations projects coming soon. More automation will be introduced as well, helping clients do things like scale automatically based on machine learning analysis done behind the scenes.

Chris Law

Chris has helped to start several companies in the past, everything from Social Networking (Tribe.net) to Aggregate Knowledge, which started out as a Recommendations company and moved into Data Management Platform in the Ads space. He joined Google to see what it’s like to build things at scale.

Cool things of the week


Cloud Next Week 9: Business Application Platform site
From One to More: Why Sharing Our Narrative Matters site
The 2020 Doodle for Google national finalists are here blog
Explore Kids Space: A way to nurture your kid’s curiosity blog


Interview


Active Assist site
IAM Recommender Documentation site
IAM Recommender Service Account Insights site
Committed Use Discounts site


Stack Chat at Home

This week, we talk to Rob Hedgepeth about SkySQL.

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Max is working on quite a few things, from fixing his dishwasher and teaching his family new board games to a new animated Google series with Jen Person.