Tag Archives: Events

Six essential security sessions at Google Cloud Next 18



We aim to be the most secure cloud, but what does that mean? If you’re coming to Google Cloud Next '18 next month in San Francisco, now is your chance to identify and understand the technologies and best practices that set Google Cloud Platform (GCP) apart from other cloud providers. There are dozens of breakout sessions dedicated to security, but if time is short, here are six sessions that will give you a solid understanding of foundational GCP security practices and offerings, as well as insight into the cutting-edge security research and development being done by our team.

1. How Google Protects Your Data at Rest and in Transit

First things, first. Come learn how Google protects your data within Google infrastructure, when it’s stored on disk as well as when it moves across our network, for use by various services. Google Cloud Security and Privacy Product Managers Maya Kaczorowski and Il-Sung Lee will also cover additional protections you can put in place such as Customer-Managed Encryption Keys, IPsec tunnels, and Istio. More details are available here.

2. How Google's Security Infrastructure Design Enabled Rapid, Seamless Response to “Spectre” and “Meltdown”

Not content to sit back and wait, Google has a huge team of security researchers that actively push the limits of our systems. This year, researchers found two significant vulnerabilities in modern compute architectures: Spectre and Meltdown. This session will detail those vulnerabilities, and more to the point, how we remediated them transparently, without customer downtime. Learn more here.

3. BeyondCorp Beyond Google

New Google employees always marvel at how they can access Google resources from anywhere, without a VPN. That’s made possible by our BeyondCorp model, and core BeyondCorp technologies such as global scale security proxies, phishing-resistant 2nd factor authentication, and laptop security enforcement are increasingly available to Google Cloud customers. In this session, French resource management provider VEOLIA describes how it built out a BeyondCorp model on Google Cloud to reach 169,000 employees across five continents. Register for the session here.

4. Trust Through (Access) Transparency

'When do you access my data, and how will I know?' is a question that troubles every cloud customer who cares about their data—and one that few cloud providers have an answer for. This talk reviews Google's robust data protection infrastructure, and introduces Google's new Access Transparency product, which gives customers near-real-time oversight over data accesses by Google's administrators. The talk also guides customers through how to audit accesses and mitigate against this risk, together with examples from our customers of where this has successfully been done. Register for the session here.

5. Google Cloud: Data Protection and Regulatory Compliance

Security in the cloud is much more than encryption and firewalls. If you’re subject to regulations, you often need to demonstrate data protection and compliance with a variety of regulatory standards. In this session, we cover recent trends in the data protection space, such as GDPR, and share tools you can leverage to help address your compliance needs. You'll learn how you can partner with Google to enhance data security and meet global regulatory obligations. You can find a full session description here.

6. Shield Your Cloud with Verifiable Advanced Platform Security

Last but not least, you’ll definitely want to attend this session by Googlers Andrew Honig and
Nelly Porter, as they discuss issues facing VM security in the cloud, and an interesting new approach to mitigate against local code gaining escalation privileges. After attending this session, you’ll understand how we prevent workloads running on Google Cloud Platform from being penetrated by boot malware or firmware rootkits. Register for the session here.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Security runs through everything we do at Google Cloud. In addition to these six sessions, there are 31 other breakout sessions dedicated to security, not to mention keynotes and supersessions, hands-on labs, meetups and bootcamps. Don’t delay, register for Next today.

Google Search at I/O 2018

With the eleventh annual Google I/O wrapped up, it’s a great time to reflect on some of the highlights.

What we did at I/O


The event was a wonderful way to meet many great people from various communities across the globe, exchange ideas, and gather feedback. Besides many great web sessions, codelabs, and office hours we shared a few things with the community in two sessions specific to Search:




The sessions included the launch of JavaScript error reporting in the Mobile Friendly Test tool, dynamic rendering (we will discuss this in more detail in a future post), and an explanation of how CMS can use the Indexing and Search Console APIs to provide users with insights. For example, Wix lets their users submit their homepage to the index and see it in Search results instantly, and Squarespace created a Google Search keywords report to help webmasters understand what prospective users search for.

During the event, we also presented the new Search Console in the Sandbox area for people to try and were happy to get a lot of positive feedback, from people being excited about the AMP Status report to others exploring how to improve their content for Search.

Hands-on codelabs, case studies and more


We presented the Structured Data Codelab that walks you through adding and testing structured data. We were really happy to see that it ended up being one of the top 20 codelabs by completions at I/O. If you want to learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data, check out our case studies.



During the in-person office hours we saw a lot of interest around HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, AMP, and many other topics. The in-person Office Hours were a wonderful addition to our monthly Webmaster Office Hours hangout. The questions and comments will help us adjust our documentation and tools by making them clearer and easier to use for everyone.

Highlights and key takeaways


We also repeated a few key points that web developers should have an eye on when building websites, such as:


  • Indexing and rendering don’t happen at the same time. We may defer the rendering to a later point in time.
  • Make sure the content you want in Search has metadata, correct HTTP statuses, and the intended canonical tag.
  • Hash-based routing (URLs with "#") should be deprecated in favour of the JavaScript History API in Single Page Apps.
  • Links should have an href attribute pointing to a URL, so Googlebot can follow the links properly.

Make sure to watch this talk for more on indexing, dynamic rendering and troubleshooting your site. If you wanna learn more about things to do as a CMS developer or theme author or Structured Data, watch this talk.

We were excited to meet some of you at I/O as well as the global I/O extended events and share the latest developments in Search. To stay in touch, join the Webmaster Forum or follow us on Twitter, Google+, and YouTube.

 

Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators

Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content. 

Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.

For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.

The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:

Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.

A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience,  and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.

While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.

Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know -- in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.

Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team

Google I/O 2018 – What sessions should SEOs and Webmasters watch live ?

Google I/O 2018 is starting today in California, to an international audience of 7,000+ developers. It will run until Thursday night. It is our annual developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google.

However, you don't have to physically attend the event to take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity: many conferences and talks are live streamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. You will find the full-event schedule here.

Dozens upon dozens of talks will take place over the next 3 days. We have hand picked the talks that we think will be the most interesting for webmasters and SEO professionals. Each link shared will bring you to pages with more details about each talk, and you will find out how to tune in to the live stream. All times are California time (PCT). We might add other sessions to this list.


Tuesday, May 8th

3pm - Web Security post Spectre/Meltdown, with Emily Schechter and Chris Palmer - more info.
5pm - Dru Knox and Stephan Somogyi talk about building a seamless web with Chrome - more info.


Wednesday, May 9th

9.30am - Ewa Gasperowicz and Addy Osmani talk about Web Performance and increasing control over the loading experience - more info.
10.30am - Alberto Medina and Thierry Muller will explain how to make a WordPress site progressive - more info.
11.30am - Rob Dodson and Dominic Mazzoni will cover "What's new in web accessibility" - more info.
3.30pm - Michael Bleigh will introduce how to leverage AMP in Firebase for a blazing fast website - more info.
4.30pm - Rick Viscomi and Vinamrata Singal will introduce the latest with Lighthouse and Chrome UX Report for Web Performance - more info.


Thursday, May 10th

8.30am - John Mueller and Tom Greenaway will talk about building Search-friendly JavaScript websites - more info.
9.30am - Build e-commerce sites for the modern web with AMP, PWA, and more, with Adam Greenberg and Rowan Merewood - more info.
12.30pm - Session on "Building a successful web presence with Google Search" by John Mueller and Mariya Moeva - more info.



This list is only a sample of the content at this year's Google I/O, and there might be many more that are interesting to you! To find out about those other talks, check out the full list of web sessions, but also the sessions about Design, the Cloud sessions, the machine learning sessions, and more… 

We hope you can make the time to watch the talks online, and participate in the excitement of I/O ! The videos will also be available on Youtube after the event, in case you can't tune in live.


Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist, and the Google Webmasters team

Googlers on the road: FOSSASIA Summit 2018

In a week’s time, free and open source enthusiasts of all kinds will gather in Singapore for FOSSASIA Summit 2018. Established in 2009, the annual event attracts more than 3,000 attendees, running from March 22nd to 25th this year.

FOSSASIA logo licensed LGPL-2.1.
FOSSASIA Summit is organized by FOSSASIA, a nonprofit organization that focuses on Asia and brings people together around open technology both in-person and online. The organization is also home to many open source projects and is a regular participant in the Google Open Source team’s student programs, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

Our team is excited to be among those attending and speaking at the conference this year, and we’re proud that Google Cloud is a sponsor. If you’re around, please come say hello. The highlight of our travel is meeting the students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Here are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Thursday, March 22nd

2:00pm Real-world Machine Learning with TensorFlow and Cloud ML by Kaz Sato

Friday, March 23rd

9:30am BigQuery codelab by Jan Peuker
10:30am  Working with Cloud DataPrep by KC Ayyagari
1:00pm Extract, analyze & translate Text from Images with Cloud ML APIs by Sara Robinson
2:00pm    Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data by Allen Day
2:40pm What can we learn from 1.1 billion GitHub events and 42 TB of code? by Felipe Hoffa2:40pm Engaging IoT solutions with Machine Learning by Markku Lepisto
2:45pm CloudML Engine: Qwik Start by Kaz Sato
3:20pm Systems as choreographed behavior with Kubernetes by Jan Peuker
4:00pm The Assistant by Manikantan Krishnamurthy

Saturday, March 24th

10:30am Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in by Stephanie Taylor
10:30am Zero to ML on Google Cloud Platform by Sara Robinson
11:00am  Building a Sustainable Open Tech Community through Coding Programs, Contests and Hackathons panel including Stephanie Taylor
11:05am Codifying Security and Modern Secrets Management by Seth Vargo
1:00pm    Open Source Education panel including Cat Allman
5:00pm Everything as Code by Seth Vargo

We look forward to seeing you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: FOSDEM 2018

The Google Open Source team is currently enjoying summer weather in Sydney at Linux.conf.au, but soon we return to winter weather and head to Brussels for FOSDEM 2018. FOSDEM is a special event, famous for being non-commercial, volunteer-organized, and free to attend. It’s also huge, attracting more than 5,000 attendees.

FOSDEM logo licensed CC BY 2.0 SE.
This year FOSDEM is particularly special as it falls on top of the 20th anniversary of the open source movement and its steward, the Open Source Initiative. (In case you’re wondering, this September will mark the 35th anniversary of the free software movement.) We’re looking forward to celebrating the occasion!

You’ll find us in the hallways, at satellite events, and at our table in the stands area. You’ll also find some Googlers in the conference schedule, as well as folks sharing their experience of the most recent Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

If you’d like to say hello or chat, swing by our table in Building K. The highlight of our trip is meeting hundreds of the thousands of students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Below are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Saturday, February 3rd
12:30pm  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability for Go by JBD (also at 2:30pm)
3:05pm   Testing and Validating distributed systems by Holden Karau

Sunday, February 4th
10:20am  Regular Expression Derivatives in Python by Michael Paddon
11:30am   Advocating For FOSS Inside Companies a panel including Max Sills
3:00pm    Your Build in a Datacenter by Jakob Buchgraber
4:00pm    Accelerating Big Data Outside of the JVM by Holden Karau

Hope to see you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: Linux.conf.au 2018

It’s summer in Sydney and Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2018 is just a week away. LCA, an annual event that attracts people from all over the globe, including Googlers, runs January 22nd to 26th.

LCA is a cornerstone of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. It’s volunteer-run, administered by Linux Australia, and has been running since 1999. Despite its name, the conference program covers all things FOSS. The event is five days long and includes two days of miniconfs that make the program even more interesting.

The Google Open Source team is escaping “wintery” Northern California and will be hosting a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session and co-hosting an event with GDG Sydney, both focused on our student programs.

A few Googlers ended up with sessions in the program and one is running a miniconf:

Tuesday, January 23rd
All day     Create hardware with FPGAs, Linux and Python Miniconf hosted by Tim Ansell (sold out)
11:40am  Learn by Contributing to Open Source by Josh Simmons
5:15pm    Assembling a balsa-wood Raspberry Pi case by Josh Deprez

Wednesday, January 24th
3:50pm    Securing the Linux boot process by Matthew Garrett

Thursday, January 25th
12:25pm  Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Birds of a Feather session
6:00pm    Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Meetup with GDG Sydney

Friday, January 26th
11:40am  The State of Kernel Self-Protection by Kees Cook
1:40pm    QUIC: Replacing TCP for the Web by Jana Iyengar
2:35pm    The Web Is Dead! Long Live The Web! by Sam Thorogood

Not able to make the conference? They’ll be posting session recordings to YouTube afterwards, thanks in part to students who have worked on TimVideos, a suite of open source software and hardware for recording video, as part of Google Summer of Code.

Naturally, you will also find the Google Open Source team at other upcoming events including FOSDEM. We look forward to seeing you in 2018!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit

This year Google brought over 320 mentors from all over the world (33 countries!) to Google's offices in Sunnyvale, California for the 2017 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year 149 organizations were represented, which provided the perfect opportunity to meet like-minded open source enthusiasts and discuss ways to make open source better and more sustainable.
Group photo by Dmitry Levin used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
The Mentor Summit is run as an unconference in which attendees create and join sessions based on their interests. “I liked the unconference sessions, that they were casual and discussion based and I got a lot out of them. It was the place I connected with the most people,” said Cassie Tarakajian, attending on behalf of the Processing Foundation.

Attendees quickly filled the schedule boards with interesting sessions. One theme in this year’s session schedule was the challenging topic of failing students. Derk Ruitenbeek, part of the phpBB contingent, had this to say:
“This year our organisation had a high failure rate of 3 out of 5 accepted students. During the Mentor Summit I attended multiple sessions about failing students and rating proposals and got a lot [of] useful tips. Talking with other mentors about this really helped me find ways to improve student selection for our organisation next time.”
This year was the largest Mentor Summit ever – with the exception of our 10 Year Reunion in 2014 – and had the best gender diversity yet. Katarina Behrens, a mentor who worked with LibreOffice, observed:
“I was pleased to see many more women at the summit than last time I participated. I'm also beyond happy that now not only women themselves, but also men engage in increasing (not only gender) diversity of their projects and teams.”
We've held the Mentor Summit for the past 10+ years as a way to meet some of the thousands of mentors whose generous work for the students makes the program successful, and to give some of them and the projects they represent a chance to meet. This year was their first Mentor Summit for 52% of the attendees, giving us a lot of fresh perspectives to learn from!

We love hosting the Mentor Summit and attendees enjoy it, as well, especially the opportunity to meet each other. In fact, some attendees met in person for the first time at the Mentor Summit after years of collaborating remotely! According to Aveek Basu, who mentored for The Linux Foundation, the event was an excellent opportunity for “networking with like minded people from different communities. Also it was nice to know about people working in different fields from bioinformatics to robotics, and not only hard core computer science.” 

You can browse the event website and read through some of the session notes that attendees took to learn a bit more about this year’s Mentor Summit.

Now that Google Summer of Code 2017 and the Mentor Summit have come to a close, our team is busy gearing up for the 2018 program. We hope to see you then!

By Maria Webb, Google Open Source 

Talk to Google at Node.js Interactive

We’re headed to Vancouver this week, with about 25 Googlers who are incredibly excited to attend Node.js Interactive. With a mix of folks working on Cloud, Chrome, and V8, we’re going to be giving demos and answering questions at the Google booth. 

A few of us are also going to be giving talks. Here’s a list of the talks Googlers will be giving at the conference, ranging from serverless Slack bots to JavaScript performance tuning.

Wednesday, October 4th

Keynote: Franzi Hinkelmann
9:40am - 10:00am, West Ballroom A
Franzi Hinkelmann, Software Engineer @ Google

Franzi is located in Munich, Germany where she works at Google on Chrome V8. Franzi, like James and Anna, is a member of the Node.js Core Technical Committee. She speaks across the globe on the topic of JavaScript virtual machines. She has a PhD in mathematics, but left academia to follow her true passion: writing code.

Franzi will discuss her perspective on Chrome V8 in Node.js, and what the Chrome V8 team is doing to continue to support Node.js. Want to know what the future of browser development looks like? This is a must-attend keynote.

Functionality Abuse: The Forgotten Class of Attacks
12:20pm - 12:50pm, West Ballroom A
Nwokedi Idika, Software Engineer @ Google

If you were given a magic wand that would remove all implementation flaws from your web application, would it be free of security problems? If it took you more five seconds to say “No!” (or if, worse, you said “Yes!”), then you’re the target audience for this talk. If you’re in the target audience, don’t fret, much of the security community is there with you. After this talk, attendees will understand why the answer to the aforementioned question is an emphatic “No!” and they will learn an approach to decrease their chance of failing to consider an important vector of attack for their current and future web applications.

High Performance JS in V8
5:20pm - 5:50pm, West Ballroom A
Peter Marshall, Software Engineer @ Google

This year, V8 launched Ignition and Turbofan, the new compiler pipeline that handles all JavaScript code generation. Previously, achieving high performance in Node.js meant catering to the oddities of our now-deprecated Crankshaft compiler. This talk covers our new code generation architecture - what makes it special, a bit about how it works, and how to write high performance code for the new V8 pipeline.

Thursday, October 5th

New DevTools Features for JavaScript
11:40am - 12:10pm, West Meeting Room 122
Yang Guo, Software Engineer @ Google

Ever since v8-inspector was moved to V8's repository, we have been working on a number of new features for DevTools, usable for both Chrome and Node.js. The talk will demonstrate code coverage, type profiling, and give a deep dive into how evaluating a code snippet in DevTools console works in V8.

Understanding and Debugging Memory Leaks in Your Node.js Applications
12:20pm - 12:50pm, West Meeting Room 122
Ali Sheikh, Software Engineer @ Google

Memory leaks are hard. This talk with introduce developers to what memory leaks are, how they can exist in a garbage collected language, the available tooling that can help them understand and isolate memory leaks in their code. Specifically it will talk about heap snapshots, the new sampling heap profiler in V8, and other various other tools available in the ecosystem.

Workshop: Serverless Bots with Node.js
2:20pm - 4:10pm, West Meeting Room 117
Bret McGowen, Developer Advocate @ Google
Amir Shevat, DevRel @ Slack

This talk will show you how to build both voice and chat bots using serverless technologies. Amir Shevat, Head of Developer Relations at Slack, has overseen 17K+ bots deployed on the platform. He will present a maturing model, as best practices, for enterprise bots covering all sorts of use cases ranging for devops, HR, and marketing. Alan Ho from Google Cloud will then show you how to use various serverless technologies to build these bots. He’ll give you a demo of Slack and Google Assistant bots incorporating Google’s latest serverless technology including Edge (API Management), CloudFunctions (Serverless Compute), Cloud Datastore, and API.ai.

Modules Modules Modules
3:00pm - 3:30pm, West Meeting Room 120
Myles Borins, Developer Advocate @ Google

ES Modules and Common JS go together like old bay seasoning and vanilla ice cream. This talk will dig into the inconsistencies of the two patterns, and how the Node.js project is dealing with reconciling the problem. The talk will look at the history of modules in the JavaScript ecosystem and the subtle difference between them. It will also skim over how ECMA-262 is standardized by the TC39, and how ES Modules were developed.

Keynote: The case for Node.js
4:50pm - 5:05pm, West Ballroom A
Justin Beckwith, Product Manager @ Google

Node.js has had a transformational effect on the way we build software. However, convincing your organization to take a bet on Node.js can be difficult. My personal journey with Node.js has included convincing a few teams to take a bet on this technology, and this community. Let’s take a look at the case for Node.js we made at Google, and how you can make the case to bring it to your organization.


We can’t wait to see everyone and have some great conversations. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter @googlecloud, or request an invite to the Google Cloud Slack community and join the #nodejs channel.

By Justin Beckwith, Languages and Runtimes Team