>> Live from San Francisco, its the CUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone this is the CUBE's live coverage in San Francisco Google Cloud's big conference, Google Next 2018, #googlenext18, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick bringing you live coverage. Melody Meckfessel, Vice President of cloud engineering at Google is here in the CUBE. She leads a lot of the managing 40,000 plus engineers making them happy and creating great code, friendly environment, doing great work. Just featured her in a story we did about the power of women in Google Cloud. Melody great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's great to be here. >> Today is a lot of developer announcements, we saw a lot of community discussions, new code. You guys talked cloud build. What is some of the news, let's get that out of the way, what's going on here at Google Cloud Next? >> Great. Very excited to announce and demo today, and it was a live demo, I don't know if you saw that, so we had some dramatic excitement waiting for the actual build. Yeah we're very excited to announce Cloud Build, which is a fully managed continuous integration and delivery platform. It lets developers build and test their applications in the cloud at any scale, and it's based on a lot of the lessons learned that we had within Google, iterating over the last two decades with developer and operator tools. Google does some crazy scale internally, and we're really excited to bring that automation and scale out to our customers. >> We had the chance to meet a couple weeks ago, we went deep dive on developers. You have a job focus that's really to kind of keep the developers productive, happy, there's a lot of them at Google and they are tough customers, they want to be coding. They don't want any distractions. They don't want any toil, a word we've been using a lot and hearing a lot here. And so there's techniques that you guys have done within Google, this seems to be the theme of Google Next, taking the best of Google and trying to make it consumable for customers. In this case developers. What is the state of the art to keeping developers happy, making them productive, more cohesive in their work, what are some of the things that you guys are doing, I know there's a lot going on, Google Cloud Build is one. What are some of the things you guys do to keep developers productive and happy? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. What we've found is that there's a tremendous amount of value of automating away, you said toil, the things that developers want to do. So some of the research, industry research that we've done, developers want to write code, they want to do design, they want to work on requirements. They don't want to take care of the plumbing and the pipeline of how their build test and release happens. So we showed some pretty amazing features today around automated canary analysis. So it's almost in a way, we want these tools and the automation to have the developer and the operator's backs. Because we know, we've learned at Google, that when we do that, they take more risks. They move quickly. Because they know that the DevOps tools are going to catch the breakages for them, and we showed a couple of things today around running tasks, identify if they're vulnerability scans, trying to find vulnerability scans before they get pushed out to production. We're trying to move as much as we can into the front part of the pipeline. So what makes developers happy? Well one thing is, give them automation so that they can focus on code. The second thing is, the culture to support and empower them. We've found that 65% of developers believe that they have the ability to choose their own tools. So at GC we want to make that easier for them. >> Wow you mentioned something earlier I want to get into. What's a canary? Explain what that is. Because a lot people, they know what it is, but some people might not know this canary concept. >> So essentially what you're trying to do is take the release that you build and test, make sure it's secure, now you want to start routing traffic to it. So you take that you release it to a small set of production instances, you start routing traffic to it, you look at air rates, you look at traces you sort of see what's going on, if it's good, then you slowly deploy it out to all your production instances. So it's a really safe way, it reduces your risk. Right, you want to catch the errors before they get out. >> Canary in a coal mine. >> Yeah, there you go. >> So it's a great agile way to push code and test it. Well not push code, push users to code. >> That's right. >> And get a feel for does it break. >> Yes. >> And if it breaks you pull back. >> Yes, and we want to find things ahead of time. I know you're talking to Dave Resin, you know the alignment of having shared goals between developers and operators is really important culturally because when you're incented towards minimizing, we call it the MTTR right, the minimum time to respond. So when you do things like canary analysis, you're finding the issues before they roll out and impact your user community. >> It's super valuable. But it sounds so easy. Why don't we just roll it out to like, our top users or the ones who won't leave the platform, and then pull it back? And this is a DevOps principle. If done right, works great. But it's hard to do. How hard is it to do it if you didn't have all these tools? I mean think about, you got to push code, pull the servers back, re push the new code. >> Yeah, you don't want to do that, right? Human error. >> Without automation, without all these tools, how hard is it? >> It's very difficult and time consuming. And we know, as humans, we're prone to error. Right? So it was really fun to show a live demo today of a spinnaker pipeline, showing the canary, pushing it out to production, and then going back to the website and seeing the impact of the code fixes that we put in place. >> Right, so just on the culture side, you've been at Google for a while. And you know we still think of Google, I still think of it as a supersized startup. But you guys have been at it for a while. You've been there for 13 years on LinkedIn, they company's 20 years old. How do you maintain kind of that cool, the colored bikes, the great food, you know go play volleyball outside in the middle of the day, kind of culture as the company just grows and you have so many new people. How do you maintain that baseline culture that's been there and made Google what it is today? >> You know we have a very strong culture within Google. A very strong engineering community. And that engineering community really comes from, and I think this has been consistent for the almost 14 years I've been there, using data to guide our decisions. Right? We've also put things in place to help enable the trust between the humans, which when I talk to customers, this is a challenge. Throw it over the wall to the operators, you know they don't trust each other. We've had blameless post-mortems within the engineering culture for decades. We've abstracted away, it's about learning. It's about continuous improvement. We're a software a company, and everyone's a software company now. How do you accept and learn from failure? But when you create this shared goals, use the data not someone's opinion or someone's title, and then ground. And we're learning, we're always learning. We're always making it better. That inspires people, right? To have that impact together. Now, the culture, the benefits, you know I'm working on writing code, products, I don't know the last time I played volleyball. >> Beautiful court, though. >> It looks great when you come in the building. >> You're the second, Dave also mentioned this blameless post-morten, I'd love to dig a little bit more in, because obviously that must be an institutionalized thing that you guys do. How do you do it without hurting feelings? Because it's still people, and even when it's data-based, you still kind of risk hurting people. So how do you institutionalize it's the data, it's not you, and we're actually trying to use this to learn and grow, not necessarily get on that particular person or that team for something that didn't work. >> Well you know I love this quote, it comes from SRE, if your SLO target is perfection, it's the wrong target. So we know, in software development and systems, that things break. And as humans, we're writing the code. We are writing the services. So we're going to make mistakes. And I think that tolerance and that understanding, we have some structure, right, we track to-dos that came out of the outage, we make sure that they get closed so we don't have the outage again, but when you obstruct that away, and know that maybe I made the mistake this week and maybe someone else on my team's going to make the mistake the next week. But how we learn from it and how we come together as a team is what's important. >> Blameless post-mortem is a great concept. Most people think post-mortem, something bad happened. Someone needs to be charged with a crime. Oh my god, bad things. You're learning, blameless post-mortem is an iteration of learning. >> Mm hmm, continuous improvement. >> So this is a culture, now let's take that to open source, because one of the things that's happening here that's front and center, I mean it's just natural for you guys, the importance of open source. Software development is getting more power. And you mentioned the stats and some of the cycle graphics. They can choose any tool that they want. That's a challenge for companies. Retaining them, keeping them employed, because they can get a job anywhere, they get more power, open source seems to be this balance in the force if you will. It's kind of like open source is now operationalized for that's where recruiting happens, that's where social activity happens, conferences. How important is open source, and how are you guys organizing around it as you build the cloud out, what's the vision? >> I have been so inspired by Google's increased contributions and collaborations to open source. I think we had over, I hope I get these stats right, we were contributing over 30,000 repos last year, 1% of the total contributions in 2017 on GitHub came from Googlers. We're committed to it. And we really believe that Google Cloud platform is living the open cloud. And we do that through open APIs, we do that through collaboration around open source tooling, and by creating this abundance and community ecosystem around it. And if you think about, I'll throw out another stat, 70% of developers feel a connection with each other. That's how they get inspired, that's how they learn. Think about Stack Overflow, you think about GitHub. You think about contributing to a product that you're going to make better, it's incredibly inspiring. >> Co-creation creates a bond. >> Yeah it does, it's connection. So if you look in the DevOps base, we've made some commitments with Bazil, which is we've open-sourced our build system, if you look at the contributions in the Go community in terms of Go working really well on Cloud. And then I showed Spinnaker which is actually a project that Netflix started, with their workloads, and we stocked up an engineering team to contribute to that to make it work for multi-cloud. Right, it's the right thing to do for developers, to have these tools that they can use in different, irrespective of where they're deploying. Now Google Cloud platform is the best platform to deploy to, but choice is really important. >> But it's another piece to the puzzle that you contribute to keeping them happy, right? Their participation in open source is why they still have their day job, and the accolades and kind of the peer feedback that comes from that is an important piece. So to be able to do that while still having the day job has got to be a big piece of what keeps them at Google, keeps them happy. >> It is, and you look at the community aspect around Kubernetes and TensorFlow, and the ecosystem is having such a huge effect on the innovation that's happening. And we all get to be a part of that, that's what's inspiring around Cloud. >> Opens the new competitive advantage, certainly from a retention standpoint, recruiting, and productivity. >> Yeah and productivity, absolutely. >> We believe in open, we're open conduct, we're co-creating content here at Google Next with the best minds at Google. Melody thanks for coming on, we really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, great to see you again. >> It's the CUBE out in the open here on the floor at Google Next, we're got more coverage. Stay with us after this short break.