Google Cloud Platform Tag

Here in Australia, we do a lot of work on Google Cloud Platform for one of the country’s largest ISPs, Telstra. Most of that work involves building data pipelines and running analytics off the back of them for their Media business unit. As you can well imagine, they generate a huge amount of data on a daily basis. We use tools like BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow and Data Studio to wrangle, manage, and understand that data. On one such project for Telstra, we saw an opportunity to delete three code repositories and finally rid ourselves of some of the headaches associated with maintaining those applications, all the while saving money on the operational costs. We were able to replace the system comprising these repos with two new Google Cloud Platform services: In this blog post, I’ll introduce you to those new services that Google have spun up, and how we were able to use them to replace our legacy applications. Who doesn’t like a good spring clean, huh?
23 January, 2018 /

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Intro

Post update: My good friend Lak over at Google has come up with a fifth option! He suggests using Cloud Dataprep to achieve the same. You can read his blog post about that over here. I had thought about using Dataprep, but because it actually spins up a Dataflow job under-the-hood, I decided to omit it from my list. That's because it will take a lot longer to run (the cluster needs to spin up and it issues export and import commands to BigQuery), rather than issuing a query job directly to the BigQuery API. Also, there are extra costs involved with this approach (the query itself, the Dataflow job, and a Dataprep surcharge - ouch!). But, as Lak pointed out, this would be a good solution if you want to transform your data, instead of issuing a pure SQL request. However, I'd argue that can be done directly in SQL too ;-) Not so long ago, I wrote a blog post about how you can use Google Apps Script to schedule BigQuery jobs. You can find that post right here. Go have a read of it now. I promise you'll enjoy it. The post got quite a bit of attention, and I was actually surprised that people actually take the time out to read my drivel. It's clear that BigQuery's popularity is growing fast. I'm seeing more content popping up in my feeds than ever before (mostly from me because that's all I really blog about). However, as awesome as BigQuery is, one glaring gap in its arsenal of weapons is the lack of a built-in job scheduler, or an easy way to do it outside of BigQuery. That said however, I'm pretty sure that the boffins over in Googley-woogley-world are currently working on remedying that - by either adding schedulers to Cloud Functions, or by baking something directly into the BigQuery API itself. Or maybe both? Who knows!
21 January, 2018 /

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Recommendation systems are found under the hood of many popular services and websites. The e-commerce and retail industry use them to increase their sales, the music services provide interesting songs to their listeners, and the news sites rank the daily articles based on their readers interests. If you really think about it, recommendation systems can be used in pretty much every area of daily life. For example, why not automatically recommend better choices to house investors, guide your friends in your hometown without you being around, or suggest which company to apply to if you are looking for a job.

All pretty cool stuff, right!

But, recommendation systems need to be a lot smarter than a plain old vanilla software. In fact, the engine is made up of multiple machine learning modules that aim to rank the items of the interests for the users based on the users preferences and items properties.

In this blog series, you will gain some insight on how recommendation systems work, how you can harness Google Cloud Platform for scalable systems, and the architecture we used when implementing our music recommendation engine on the cloud. This first post will be a light introduction to the overall system, and my follow up articles will subsequently deep dive into each of the machine learning modules, and the tech that powers them.

15 December, 2017 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Every now and then (it started off as being monthly, but that was too much work), we curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to, and publish a newsletter. Read on for this month's edition.
07 December, 2017 /

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Do you recoil in horror at the thought of running yet another mundane SQL script just so a table is automatically rebuilt for you each day in BigQuery? Can you barely remember your name first thing in the morning, let alone remember to click "Run Query" so that your boss gets the latest data refreshed in his fancy Data Studio charts, and then takes all the credit for your hard work? Well, fear not my fellow BigQuery'ians. There's a solution to this madness. It's simple. It's quick. Yes, it's Google Apps Script to the rescue. Disclaimer: all credit for this goes to the one and only Felipe Hoffa. He 'da man!
01 November, 2017 /

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I wasn’t sure what my first day at Shine would look like. I looked for some blog posts that resembled this one for some insights but I figured everyone’s experience is different. I hadn’t worked in this industry before, and my work experience at a laptop repair shop didn’t really count. The only relevant experience I had was the industry project I did in my final year of study and that turned out to be very valuable. I knew I would be thrown into the deep end and have to learn quickly. Since day one, I’ve been surrounded by great mentors, helping with code reviews, best practices to follow, great book suggestions and general insights into how this business works. Anyway, I think enough time has passed now to reflect on this year.
31 October, 2017 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.
24 October, 2017 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.
14 August, 2017 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.
21 July, 2017 /

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