Let me know what you thing. Feedback and suggestions welcome!

Product Launches & Announcements

Lots of GA announcements (Generally Available, fully-supported):

• Cloud Shell is now GA, and still free. \o/

• Cloud Datastore v1 API now GA. Full independence from App Engine if you want it! This release includes console enhancement, best practices, storage size calculation, clearer limits, and multi-tenancy guidance via namespaces. Also, it is now serving 15 trillion queries per month. Snapchat, Workiva and Khan Academy are among customers that can be named at this point.

• Google Cloud Bigtable is now GA. This is the fully-managed database service built on Google’s internal Bigtable service with Apache HBase client compatibility. It powers Google Search, Analytics, Maps, Gmail and more. Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub and BigQuery are all well integrated with Bigtable and Spotify, FIS and Energyworx are all using it already.

• Cloud SQL Second Generation is now GA. It offers MySQL 5.7, point-in-time-recovery (PITR), automatic storage re-sizing and failover replicas setup with a single click. It’s 7x faster and has 20x more storage capacity than its predecessor. See also the post for competitive benchmarks. Here are short videos on how to use Cloud SQL with App Engine and with Compute engine.

• Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys for Compute Engine goes GA. Get both control over data AND agility of the cloud. Now available in 14 countries.

The Cloud team is also exploring some (relatively) new and important territory :

• “Making ASP.NET apps first-class citizens on Google Cloud Platform”. Showing Microsoft developers lots of love with Windows Server on GCE, ASP.NET image, SQL Server on GCE, Google services via NuGet, Cloud Tools for Visual Studio, Cloud Tools for PowerShell and ASP.NET Core support coming soon. Check out this short one-minute intro video.

Some important product enhancements…

… in Compute Engine :

• Preemptible VMs are now up to 33% cheaper. Read the article for some tips and tricks.

• VM instance sizing recommendations is now in Beta. Look for that “recommendation” column in your GCE instance dashboard to save and optimize your resources.

• Regional Managed Instance Groups is a new feature now available in Beta. GCE can now automatically spread new VMs across zones in the same region equally for better availability. Check out this short one-minute video.

…in Dataflow :

• Enhanced Dataflow streaming pipelines management. At-least-once processing semantics with Drain.

• For all of you Pythonistas out there, support for Python on Cloud Dataflow is going beta.

• “Cloud Dataflow, Apache Beam, six months in“. Apache Beam code is now part of the Cloud Dataflow SDKs and you can “expect the SDK 2.x version-bump for Java to coincide with its first redistribution of Beam later this year”. Check out also this interview of Francis Perry on the Software Engineering Daily podcast.

…in BigQuery:

• In-memory query execution in Google BigQuery. Shuffling petabytes in memory, faster is obviously better.

• Going back a little further, here’s an amazing recap of recent BigQuery updates. Great explanation and lots of resources.

…in other GCP products:

• A new version of Cloud Datalab integrates with TensorFlow and allows to run locally. Local Datalab instances can still access BigQuery or Cloud Storage and a sample code for a machine learning model is included in the Datalab container.

• Mobile support for Stackdriver Error Reporting.

• Python 3 on App Engine flex is now in beta. This offers support for Python 3.4 and 2.7. Check out this one-minute video and read more on the Python developer hub.

• App Engine traffic splitting is an powerful yet very simple feature and there’s now documentation on how to leverage it right from your deployments. HTTP PATCH FTW.

• SSD Persistent Disks now offer 25,000 IOPS. Here’s what it means for your apps and how it compares to the competition.

GCP Podcast

No vacation either for the GCP Podcast with two episodes on Kubernetes 1.3:

• Part I on what’s new in Kubernetes 1.3.

• Part II on GKE.

The two most recent episodes were on SRE‘s (a fascinating conversation about how Google does operations) as well as an interview on the latest on PHP on GCP.

Other Interesting GCP News and tidbits

… in Machine Learning:

• TensorFlow in practice, a podcast interview with Rajat Monga.

• One of the key features of the Cloud Vision API is its SAFE_SEARCH_DETECTION. See how it can work for you (and for any site hosting user-generated content).

• Cloud Vision API powers Disney’s dragonspotting.com mobile website to find Elliot the Dragon in your surroundings! A really cool mobile web app too!

• Google uses DeepMind AI to cut data center energy bills.

• “Structuring unstructured text with the Google Cloud Natural Language API”. Fun with the Natural Language API, the Wikipedia API, AppEngine, Dataflow, and BigQuery.

… in big data:

• Building WePay‘s Webhook delivery system with Google Cloud Pub/Sub. Problem to solve, implementation, and lessons learned.

• Analysing Docker projects on Github with BigQuery.

• What a customer 10TB dataflow pipeline looks like.

… and on other general topics:

• Miles Ward, our Global Head of Solutions has couple of “run the same, everywhere” posts on why Cloud lock-in is bad and what we’re doing to keep our GCP customers away from it. Check out part I and part II. Hint: open source and community key ingredients.

• If you or your colleagues are seasoned AWS users, you’ll certainly find this updated “Google Cloud Platform for AWS Professionals” guide to be helpful.

• “OpenStack embraces Kubernetes to become a whole lot more like Google”

• “Orbitera joins the Google Cloud Platform team”

It all starts with the ability to create your VM using custom machine types rather than having to chose from a pre-defined set of configurations. You can also change the characteristics of an existing machine – more memory, more CPU to adjust to different requirements or when moving from development to production. Then, the boot time has been repeatedly measured as being extremely fast which really relates to how flexible a cloud environment should be.

When running your VM, you can rely on live migration voodoo to keep your services running (while, for instance, Google upgrades the underlying infrastructure) as well as wonderful local SSD performance. Performance, reliability, flexibility. Choose three.

Price is always important and since you don’t have time to become a billing expert, Compute Engine is priced by the minute (so you truly pay for what you use), offers automatic discounts on sustained use and a crazy-cheap option with preemptible VMs. Customers of course benefit from the pricing competition and Google is committed to providing the best value.

Of course there are many other things that make Compute Engine attractive including Google’s networking infrastructure, the new UX-friendly Console with great in-browser SSH support, and of course all the higher-level services such as Container Engine (hosted Kubernetes). But at the end of the day what matters is that innovation and competition are alive and well.

Google works hard to make sure not all Cloud VMs are created equal but you should check out for yourself – you’re just minutes away from SSH’ing into your own Compute Engine VM.

Summer 2016 update: you can not also get sizing recommendations from Google to better optimize your instances, including those you should scale down!

if microservices is the goal then continuous integration and container orchestration are pretty much two required milestones on the journey towards achieving it.

Even if Continuous Integration isn’t yet implemented everywhere, especially in larger organizations, it’s now a pretty mature topic and most agile teams have now moved on to the even more rewarding continuousdeployment practice.

Container orchestration, on the other hand, is still too hard and definitely not yet a mature space. Just a year ago it took Mesos experts (or worse, roll-out-your-own-solution architects) to run a microservices architecture.

Only now with Kubernetes and other emerging solutions are we getting closer to a place where microservices can be conceived without the fear of having to implement the underlying resilient architecture to support them.

Avant de rentrer dans les détails, pour ceux qui sont sur Paris, le Google Cloud Roadshow passera dans la capitale le 7 avril prochain chez Google France (inscriptions).

Urs?

La keynote (YouTube) était assurée par Urs Hölzle, le papa du Cloud de Google, interne comme externe. Pour le contexte, la veille, Urs a été interviewé par Wired. En résumé l’homme qui depuis le début est responsable de la conception des datacenters et du logiciel (GFS, MapReduce, BigTable, Colossus, Dremel, …) qui soutient le cloud le plus important au monde (Search, Maps, YouTube, GMail, …), nous promet un monde nouveau. Rien de moins. Voyons ce qu’il en est.

Pricing

Partant du constat que le pricing dans le cloud est trop complexe et trop cher (surtout par rapport au coût du hardware qui baisse avec la loi de Moore). Du coup, Google annonce des baisses de prix entre 30% et 85% avec l’engagement que les prix continueront à suivre celui de l’infrastructure sous-jacente (ces prix s’appliquent dans toutes les régions, historiquement l’Europe était un peu plus chère). Mieux encore, il n’est plus nécessaire de faire un choix entre instances normales et pré-réservées (moins chères): il suffit d’utiliser une instance au moins 25% du mois pour qu’un rabais supplémentaire de 30% s’applique!
Les détails de pricing sont ici

Nouveaux OS sur Compute Engine

En plus de Debian et CentOS, on compte parmi les images disponibles : RedHat Enterprise Linux et SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (dispo maintenant) et Windows Server 2008 R2 (en Preview pour le moment). Egalement en Preview, un nouveau service : Google Cloud DNS.

Big Data / Big Query

La récente fonctionnalité BigQuery Streaming permet désormais d’injecter 100 000 enregistrements par seconde! De quoi reconsidérer son warehousing ou son sharding.

Productivité du développeur

Trop souvent, dans le cloud, il faut choisir entre productivité (contraintes) et flexibilité (responsabilité). Les outils exposés aux développeurs sont aussi bien souvent des boites noires (“ne jamais laisser un développeur approcher des machines de prod!”). Dans un effort de simplification de l’expérience du développeur, le Cloud Google propose désormais :

• une intégration Git (GitHub ou un repo git privé et hébergé chez Google)
• la navigation depuis les messages d’erreur dans la console Cloud directement vers le code source
• l’édition en mode rapide du code toujours depuis la console
• le git-push-to-deploy avec build (Maven ou Gradle pour Java) et tests intégrés via jenkins et déploiement en production
• un SDK et sa ligne de commande gcloud qui unifie tous outils précédents, supporte des profils multiples et propose de l’auto-complétion sur toutes les plate-formes (Linux, Mac, Windows)

Détails dans ce blog en anglais.

IaaS ou PaaS?

On doit pouvoir faire mieux que la dichotomie classique entre IaaS et PaaS pour éviter un choix trop structurant en début de projet. C’est ce que promet Managed Virtual Machines, de quoi garder l’automatisme de App Engine et d’y intégrer des instances Compute Engine pour y exécuter du code natif ou carrément utiliser une stack logicielle comme node.js ou Dart. Puisqu’il s’agit de VMs Compute Engine, il reste tout à fait possible de s’y connecter en ssh. Pour autant ces machines sont provisionnées pour avoir accès de manière transparente à l’ensemble des autres services Cloud de Google (BigQuery, DataStore, Memcache, Cloud Storage, etc…).

Quand??

“Managed VM” propose un programme de Trusted Tester. Pour le reste, les nouveautés destinées aux développeurs (git, maven, jenkins, …) doivent apparaître dans quelques semaines.

Ces annonces ne sont qu’un début et synonyme de changements profonds internes chez Google. Prochaine étape majeure (enfin, après le roadshow) – Google I/O, fin Juin.

Alors, que pensez-vous de ce nouveau monde?

I chose to build a Docker file for a build image [1] with OpenCV, a computer vision library, and specifically with its Java binding and test its deployment on Google Compute Engine [2]. While very popular, OpenCV isn’t particularly easy to set up and thus makes for a nice use-case for something not completely trivial as a random ‘apt-get install’. Note this is a trusted build, hosted on index.docker.io as a link to the Dockerfile on github and built by the Docker Index system.

After building a binary for OpenCV 2.4.7 together with its Java support (which is not part of the default build and somewhat tedious to generate), I created this simple image that simply places the compiled bits in /opt and places a simple face recognition demo application in the home directory. You’ll note that the build includes the install of an updated version of libc6-dev to satisfy Java OpenCV shared libraries. Docker nicely hides this mess to the user of the image.

Of course, there also needs to be a proper Java installed. This is done by building the OpenCV demo image from another trusted build (alexismp/debian-openjdk) which itself builds off of debian wheezy. As the name implies it installs OpenJDK (7) and configures JAVA_HOME and PATH.

Finally, my OpenCV demo image provisions ANT which is used to run the sample code with a trivial “ant build” command in the demo directory (/home/faceDetect).

Running this software stack on Google Compute Engine is as easy as pulling the build from Docker’s repository from a Docker-enabled virtual machine [1], running docker with shared directories, and moving the result to Google Cloud Storage :

$ sudo docker pull alexismp/opencv-demo-java7-trusted
$ sudo docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
alexismp/opencv-demo-java7-trusted latest 4a9f88286d2e 36 hours ago 783.7 MB (virtual 5.123 GB)
$ sudo docker run \
    -v /tmp:/root \
    -t -i alexismp/opencv-demo-java7-trusted \
    bash
% cd home/faceDetect/
% ant
...
% cp *.png /root/
% exit

$ gsutil mb gs://face-detect/
$ gsutil cp /tmp/*.png gs://face-detect/

The OpenCV test uses face detection (not recognition! :) and creates a PNG images boxing the faces it has detected. Note how simple it is to use the Cloud Storage gsutil command-line to create a new bucket and copy the generated image which at this point is available from a RESTful API.

Being on the Google network with my Compute Engine instance made the pull operations pretty painless with great download speeds and the backup to Google Storage plain trivial. I also used a simple persistent disk with docker installed and configured which is booting in just a few seconds.

The next step is to integrate this functionality and make it available as a generic service, FDaaS, Face Detection as a Service! This will require writing a front-end or an offering an API and tweaking the Java code to deal with more flexible input/output.

Using Docker on the Mac currently required me to setup Vagrant, VirtualBox and Docker itself, something between dependency hell and Russian dolls but I’m told I should really look at boot2docker (which also sounds like an interesting solution for docker in production).

Interested in Docker? Their Getting Started page is pretty good. Start there and move to the equally good documentation when needed. Just remember that this is still a dot (0.x) release and officially not suited for production.

[1]: if you find the Docker vocabulary a bit confusing, you’re not alone. Check out this nicely written post : http://blog.thoward37.me/articles/where-are-docker-images-stored/

[2]: Docker on Google Compute Engine – http://docs.docker.io/en/master/installation/google/

Of course, you’ll hear a lot about the newly released Android 4.4 KitKat from Chet and Romain in a University session, a “What’s new” session, and more (Chet is bringing a tie…). Also covered will be Google Play Games Services with a hands-on lab (by Dan Galpin), an Android performance University session, an “image processing on Android” session by Nicolas Roard, a “Design” by Nick Butcher, and a puzzlers session!

AngularJS is back by popular demand with a lab, a university (both on Monday), a session, and a BOF session with a large portion of the team present at the conference (Igor, Misko, Brad, …). There’s also this related TDD session : “Unit testing JavaScript/CoffeeScript/Dart code with Karma”. The AngularJS BOF/Meetup is scheduled for Wednesday 7pm and I hear it’ll have fine food and drinks…

If you’re curious about how Chrome (Packaged Apps) can help you build rich clients there’s a full university waiting for you (by Jow Marini) and an NFC quickie by François Beaufort. Sam Dutton is back to present on Media APIs and WebRTC progress. Maybe in one of the most important Web sessions, Mike West will help you mitigate the risk of XSS.

The Google Cloud has grown to much more than just App Engine. Ludo will cover Google Compute Engine (infrastructure, VM-based offering), the many new features in App Engine, and how the two can seamlessly play together. Ludo will be busy with another session about how to build scalable RESTful APIs, and finally Martin Gorner with explain BigQuery for dummies (aka Dremel, yet another part of the Google’s Cloud).

If you run a web site or service with mobile users and you’re still in the business of managing your their passwords, I would recommend attending Ian Barber’s “Google Sign-in on mobile devices (Android and iOS)” session.

Finally, Thursday will be “Dart Day” for us starting with the Google keynote by Lars Bak, an industry veteran, author of the HotSpot JVM, of the V8 JavaScript engine and now leading the Dart effort, who will no doubt have a thing or two to say about the future of Web development. Later in the Day, Lars and the team will hold a “Dart – Ask us Anything” session during lunch, will a “Mobile, multi-device, multi-player with HTML5 and Dart” session in the afternoon. The day will end with a 6pm to 8pm happy hours with the Dart team (co-founders Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, Seth Ladd, and a number of other engineers). Make sure to stop by the Google booth early to get your free ticket.

Interviews, Booth, Cloud Credits, Quizz & More!
Similar to last year we’ll be conducting a number of interviews of Google speakers which will later be made available on the Google Developer YouTube channel as well as on Parleys. You are encouraged to ask questions ahead of time using this Moderator link.

We’re also running a Google+ event for Devoxx to share photos, comments and interact with other conference participants.

Devoxx participants, make sure you look for the Google Cloud Credits coupon in your attendee bag and redeem it! Also make sure you try the Google quizz online or at the Google booth, we have a number of nice giveaways for those that do!

And, of course, let’s meet at the Google booth and chat about anything developer!

Devoxx, here we come!

• stocker des données dans le cloud et les partager entre plusieurs utilisateurs
• envoyer des notifications push entre appareils
• utiliser des requêtes continues pour notifier les utilisateurs mobiles de modifications des données
• authentifier les utilisateurs titulaires de comptes Google

Ryan Harter, développeur mobile, a utilisé Mobile Backend Starter pour passer son application Hashnote de 3 000 à 20 000 utilisateurs :

“Le Mobile Backend Starter m’a permis de me concentrer sur mon application Android tout en m’assurant que mon coté serveur était efficace. Ceci dit, cette partie serveur n’est pas une boite noire à tout faire qui m’emprisonne dans une solution spécifique. J’ai fait évoluer ce code serveur pour répondre à des spécificités de mon application Hashnote tout en apprenant comment Google avait implémenté le code initial disponible en Open Source.”

Le Mobile Backend Starter est une application App Engine si bien que vous pouvez supporter des centaines d’utilisateurs concurrents dans la limite de quotas gratuits. Le code source pour l’ensemble de l’application, à la fois la partie backend et les clients Android et iOS clients, est disponible sur Github. Libre à vous d’explorer ce code et d’y intégrer toute modification que vous jugez nécessaire.

Débutez avec Mobile Backend Starter

Vous pouvez essayer Mobile Backend Starter sur un iPhone ou un iPad en quelques étapes (les détails complets se trouvent ici):

1. Déployez la partie serveur sur App Engine
2. Téléchargez et configurez le client iOS (ou bien effectuez un clone du code sur GitHub)
3. Exécutez l’application d’exemple sur un téléphone ou une tablette (note: l’exemple ne fonctionne pas dans le simulateur iOS)

Vous pouvez ensuite utiliser les classes de notre framework pour communiquer avec la partie serveur comme s’il s’agissait de code local iOS. Nous avons en particulier intégré les récents progrès réalisés pour livrer des notifications push fiables et capables d’adresser des milliers de périphériques iOS au travers de l’Apple Push Notification Service.

Les mêmes fonctionnalités sont désormais disponibles pour Android et iOS avec un code coté serveur capable de gérer les spécificités des différentes plate-formes comme l’utilisation de Google Cloud Messaging pour Android et d’APNS pour iOS. Coté Android, vous pouvez suivre ces instructions ou regarder la session Google I/O disponible ici.

– Ecrit par Stuart Reavley, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

• déploiements beaucoup plus rapides
• généralisation de Java 7 (par défaut pour toute nouvelle application)
• amélioration du plugin Maven, développé par l’équipe AppEngine, propose la génération de code Cloud Endpoints et se trouve (avec ses archetypes) dans Maven Central
• nouveau scheduling pour un auto-scaling encore plus efficace (perf et donc $/€)
• amélioration des performance de la console et de ses rapports de charge

Deux autres modifications concernent:

• la facturation (un nouveau système est maintenant en place) avec la suppression des $2.10 de “ticket d’entrée”
• l’introduction du Cloud SDK, une consolidation des outils en ligne de commande des différentes offres de Cloud Google: Storage, Compute Engine, CloudSQL, BigQuery et AppEngine

A partir de cette version les logs contiennent maintenant la version AppEngine.

Rendez-vous maintenant à Google I/O (15-17 mai 2013) pour une version avec son lot de nouveautés.
Ship early ship often!

• A (somewhat naive) lead and creator of the project caught in the middle of politics
• Red Hat’s experience with Netty influencing its current behavior
• VMWare claiming they have lots of open source experience too
• The idea that foundations would solve all the IP and governance issues
• My foundation is better than yours arguments
• The realization that neither Eclipse nor Apache are ideal
• Jenkins’ Kohsuke suggesting nonprofits for shared assets
• The Eclipse Foundation being called once again a trade association
• etc…

Clearly, as Simon Phipps writes in his column, “In an age of open source, it’s hard to acquire a technology” and this brings up what I think is a paradox for any open source believer :

This recent episode will make it even harder for startups to bet on open source to find funding and for companies to be acquired for their open source assets, thus in turn leading to less usage of open source.

In the end, isn’t this underlying a weakness of the greater open source cause or should open source technologies never be a reason to acquire (or sell) a company?

• What’s new with the Android SDK by Tor and Xav, mostly demo-driven.
• Securing the Client Side by Mike West. Get your security straight!
• Putting the App back into Web Apps by Seth Ladd. Dart and more.
• What’s new with Android by Romain & Chet. Covers 4.1 and 4.2.
• The complete 3-hour “Faster Web Sites – Crash course on web performance” part 1, part 2 by Ilya Grigorik. Take your time to go through the 3 hours but you’ll be glad you did!

If you like shorter formats, you might enjoy these 3 to 10-minute interviews with some of the Google speakers.

Améliorer son niveau d’anglais peut être parfois difficile si l’on n’est pas immergé dans un environnement de collègues parlant tous l’anglais. Il est aussi quasi-impossible de rester informé sur les dernières nouveautés technologiques sans maîtriser cette langue. L’apprentissage de la technologie et de l’anglais sont des efforts perpétuels.

Les ingénieurs ont de nombreuses opportunités de lire de la documentation, de communiquer avec des communautés open source, de visionner des vidéos sur YouTube, le tout en anglais et désormais il existe une méthode gratuite pour améliorer ses connaissances techniques et son anglais en même temps.

Apprendre l’anglais sur la chaîne Google Developers sur YouTube
Le principe ici est de rajouter des sous-titres de qualité aux vidéos techniques.

Ces sous-titres permettent :

• d’entraîner vos oreilles à un anglais parlé
• de consulter sur le champ la définition de mots que vous ignorez
• d’apprendre des constructions et des expressions propres à l’anglais parlé

Tout ceci est certainement plus efficace qu’une simple lecture ou écoute de contenu en anglais.

Tout le contenu produit dans le cadre de Google Developers Live (GDL) est proposé avec des sous-titres. Il s’agit d’une initiative de l’équipe Developer Relations de Google dont l’objectif est de promouvoir auprès des développeurs des technologies comme Chrome/HTML5, Android, ou le Cloud. Ces vidéos sont publiées immédiatement après leur passage en direct et les transcriptions manuelles (et donc à priori de qualité) sont habituellement disponibles dans les deux semaines suivantes.

Pour accéder aux sous-titres traduits manuellement, il vous suffit de choisir “Anglais” comme indiqué dans l’image ci-dessus. Si le bouton est rouge, le choix “Anglais” fait référence à une transcription de qualité effectuée par un humain.

Si vous êtes intéressés, il ne vous reste plus qu’à vous abonner à la chaîne Google Developers sur YouTube pour commencer à apprendre votre technologies favorite en même temps que d’améliorez votre anglais. Ces vidéos sont également accessibles depuis l’application YouTube sous Android et iOS.

Quelques vidéos recommandées

• Chrome: The Breakpoint
• HTML5: Chrome Special Event: Movi Kanti Revo—Behind the Divs
• Android: Android Design in Action: Responsive Design
• Cloud: Google BigQuery – New features (JSON, nested/repeated, improved data loading) + Office Hours

Of course, you’ll hear about Android, HTML5/Chrome and Cloud/AppEngine, but let me start with the less obvious Google content at Devoxx :

• Damon, the lead for ROSjava, will talk about “Cloud Robotics” (a good reason to stay until Friday), he has some amazing demos
• Tom will present j2objc, the recently announced Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime (also on Friday)
• Nicolas will be busy presenting on OAuth 2 (a very widely-used technology for Google) together with Tim Bray (the Google keynote speaker) as well as on the Google Drive SDK. Both talks are on Thursday.
• Probably the most hard-core Java talk by Google this year will be given by Jérôme and Nicholas on “Effective Dependency Injection“, a session based on experience refactoring massive projects such as GMail (and GlassFish). Also on Thursday.
• Ian should give a fun talk (a Wednesday BOF) on how to build a Google+ client in Clojure.

As you know Android 4.2 is around the corner, so you should expect a thing or two about this new version and likely even Nexus devices to check out at the Google booth. Scheduled Android content include (mostly duets as you can see) :

• Starting on Monday, Nick and Rich will offer a 3-hour-long Android Hands-on lab.
• On Tuesday, Romain and Chet will cover “Important Android Stuff” in a 3-hour University session. Expect important Android stuff.
• Another duet, Xav and Tor the tools guys, will offer an “Android Tools in Action” and a session on “What’s new in Android Developers’ Tools“.
• On Wednesday, Nick and Rich are back for a live Google Developer Live EMEA Office Hours session from the interview lounge.
• Romain and Chet have two regular 1-hour conference sessions on “What’s new with Android” and a more advanced graphics session titled “For butter or worse“.
• Xav will also cover the new Android build system in a BOF on Tuesday.
• There are many more Android talks from the community!

On the Web / HTML 5 / Chrome front, there’s also plenty of exciting sessions :

• Ilya is holding a 3-hour “Faster Websites: Crash Course on Frontend Performance” University talk on Tuesday and a Chrome DevTools talk on Wednesday.
• Seth will provide an update on the Dart side (Milestone 1 and beyond) in his “Putting the App back into Web Apps” session on Wednesday
• Mike will offer a “Building safe web applications with HTML5” session, surely followed by many (security matters and sells)
• Paul will take a slightly different take on Chrome and HTML 5 with the newly announced Chrome Packaged Apps in a Wednesday evening BOF.
• Sam will cover exciting and bleeding-edge “disruptive media” technologies in HTML 5 such as WebRTC/getUserMedia() as well as “Fast UIs for the mobile web”, with both sessions are scheduled on Thursday.
• Last but not least, the AngularJS team (Igor, Vojta and Misko) are offering no less than a “Building awesome client-side web apps with AngularJS” Hands-on Lab on Tuesday, a “Re-imagining the browser with AngularJS” session on Thursday and a Testacular session on Tuesday.

I’ll have the privilege to help Ludo cover the Cloud content in the “What’s new with Google App Engine and Compute Engine” Thursday session. As the name implies, it’ll provide an update on AppEngine (lots of stuff happen in a year with the monthly releases) but also cover the newly introduced IaaS offering Compute Engine, and how the two play well together.

I also spotted a peculiar “The Future of Software Development Process Methodology Effectiveness” by Chet Haas’ homonym. Certainly a session that will get every agile practitioner happy that the conference is, after all, not agile-free!

Tim will be delivering the Google keynote on Thursday morning – “Life online”. That’s one keynote you don’t want to miss (demos included).

As part of the yearly innovation the Devoxx organizers have decided to bet on NFC Wristbands instead of the traditional conference badges. Google gladly provided a few Nexus devices. In addition to the Android applications for the conference (providing schedule and more) there’s one to interact with the Devoxx NFC Wristband. Check them out!

With all those great speakers around, you should also expect a series of interviews to be posted on the Google Developer YouTube Channel.

Finally, make sure you stop by the Google booth throughout the conference to meet the Googlers present ar Devoxx. The exhibition floor is open from Tuesday to Thursday. See you there!

Peut-être plus important encore que les sujets traités, les intervenants seront les directeurs de l’engineering Google responsable de ces produits. Une occasion donc de leur exposer vos problématiques techniques et stratégiques en matière de PaaS, IaaS et autres BigData.

N’oubliez pas de vous inscrire (gratuit) et de venir à l’heure ce vendredi matin, la salle n’étant pas la plus grande. Vous pouvez également indiqué votre venue sur ce Google+ Event.

With only 23% of people agreeing with the decision (on java.net) and with an “amount of disappointment, and even anger, as Project Jigsaw is deferred for a second time”, I was eager to read the alternate options Oracle would propose.

The part of the Q&A on Maven and OSGi makes for a good read. They’re not related to the Jigsaw change in plans per say but go check them out if you haven’t already. As for the rest, it turns out that everyone loves the new plan…

(Picture removed)

So here’s a short list of additional questions.

Is modularizing the JDK really the best way to prove Jigsaw works?
One of the top questions in the Q&A puts the modularization of the JDK itself as a pre-requisite for jigsaw’s integration in Java 8. While it’s a neat feature, a modular JDK would really mostly serve the JavaME camp, something Oracle, not the broader Java community, is generally interested in. There are many ways to validate the design and the implementation of Jigsaw with real-life Java applications and the JDK is not (by far) the best example of such an app. Modularization of the JDK, an implementation detail, can come later.

How much more time do you need?
The Q&A states that “a lot of progress” was made on Jigsaw, and I trust that to be very true, but what would have been really useful is to assess how much extra time was required to complete the work. Failing to do so simply slams the door on any alternate proposal based on a different release schedule.

Does longer JDK cycles really mean a later Jigsaw?
Speaking of the release cadence, those arguing for longer cycles are really asking for a Java 8 delay because they’re still trying to move to Java 7. So it’s probably safe to say that both those people asking for more frequent releases of Java and those calling for a delayed Java 8 all want Jigsaw earlier than the current 2015 plan. A lot of options would become possible if only Oracle was to reconsider the train model (one that has yet to be implemented anyhow).

By the way, as it stands, DateTime (JSR 310) has become a top-level feature of Java 8. As much as I appreciate its value I can’t help but think about the irony of the situation.

I don’t want to speak for the JavaEE camp but I also don’t believe modularity dropped off of their list of requirements (it was initially slated for Java EE 7). It seems that the requirements of Java EE, arguably one of JavaSE’s very top user and customer, have been ignored. Maybe it will comfort those in the community to know that being a colleague and a top customer comes with no privilege.

This is not a democracy
Of course, whether you and I like it or not, this is not a democracy and just like Twitter can upset its developer ecosystem, Oracle has the right to put its engineering cycles wherever it feels is right. I was hoping that the JDK team at Oracle would try its best to address the community concerns given the promise made less than 2 years ago but instead Java will be moving forward slowly. Very slowly.

(this is still of course my very personal opinion)

Les sujets traités vont de Android à Chrome en passant par Google+, AppEngine, YouTube, Maps et autres APIs Google.

Coté Cloud, il y a par exemple cette courte présentation des différentes solutions de stockage (Cloud Storage, Datastore et Cloud SQL) et de requêtage (REST, SQL, BigQuery). Il y a aussi des formats plus longs comme ce tutorial sur l’API Search d’AppEngine, un tutorial interactif sur l’API Google MAPS, cette session sur le language Dart couplée à une série de questions sur Google Moderator ou encore ces réflexions de Robert Scoble sur le monde des startups.

Coté Android, il y a les Office Hours (horaire Européen) pour poser ses questions et les Friday App Review (ici avec Reto Meier).

Vous trouverez un agenda complet sur le site Google Developer Live ainsi que tous le contenu archivé sur YouTube. Il se passe quelque chose tous les jours!

“Bon, et le contenu en français c’est pour quand?” Stay tuned!

L’API Google Maps est une des toutes premières API proposée par Google et probablement aussi une des plus populaire auprès des développeurs.

Cartes stylisées ou pas, l’usage gratuit de l’API est limité à 25 000 chargements de cartes par jour. Au delà il en coutera $0.50 pour 1000 chargements supplémentaires (après avoir initiallement été de $4). Les détails sont disponibles sur cette page. Il est important de comprendre qu’un chargement de carte (map load) est en réalité une instanciation de l’API Maps et non pas l’affichage de chaque tuile (tile). De telles limites existent également pour le geocoding, l’API Image Street View, etc.

Google estime à moins de 0,5% le nombre de sites concernés par cette règle des 25 000 chargements quotidiens. Dans les faits, les sites qui dépasseront cette limite tous les jours pendant plus de 90 jours consécutifs seront contactés par Google. Pas d’arrêt de service à prévoir en cas de popularité soudaine d’un site ou d’un service. Le meilleur moyen de mesurer sa consommation est de se connecter sur la Console Google API.

Tout ceci est applicable lorsque le site ou service qui utilise l’API Google Maps est librement accessible à tous. Les détails sont disponibles ici. Dans le cas contraire (éditeur de logiciel embarquant l’API par exemple), Google propose Maps API for Business.

Si vous avez besoin d’un “rafraichissement” sur l’API Google Maps, je vous invite à regarder cette présentation récente en français. Au rang des anecdotes, vous y apprendrez par exemple que Google Maps utilise une variante de la projection Mercator ou que ses tuiles sont des images 256×256 pixels. Si vous ne l’avez pas encore fait, la migration vers l’API v3 est fortement encouragée.

Comme pour toutes ses technologies, Google vous invite à poser vos question techniques sur StackOverflow et à suivre sa page Google+.

Enfin coté actualité produit, il y a désormais la possibilité de télécharger des cartes entières pour une utilisation hors-ligne, l’arrivée dans certaines villes du projet helicopter (vues à 45 degrés) et de nouvelles offres SaaS pour l’entreprise : Google Maps Engine, ou Google Maps Coordinate.

Runtime modularity in Java has been promised since JSR 277 was filed in 2005 and I wrote how excited I was about its potential back then. Seven (7!) years, a fair amount of OSGi lobbying and politics, Sun’s acquisition, and a plan B promise later, we’ve come to this day to learn that it’ll be pushed further out to 2015 which really means 2016 for a stable release and probably 2020 for a wide adoption. After being promised Java 8 with Jigsaw in late 2012 by Oracle, we’re now taking another 3-year hit because the project missed “the train”.

About resources and goals
Jigsaw has been Mark Reinhold’s baby project for all this time (Mark is the Chief Architect of Java) and I’m now hearing excuses about staffing issues. “Oracle failed to staff Java modularity effort for years”. Hey, now that’s a much better headline! The reality I believe is that Oracle still doesn’t know why it’s doing Jigsaw and thus giving it the proper priority is hard. Modularize the JRE itself to help with JavaME and JavaFX adoption? Offer a modules system for Java’s longer-term viability? A business case can certainly be put together to shrink down the JRE to get Oracle upper management on board. On the other hand, bringing the JVM, the compiler, and the language together around a modules system seems, sadly, to be falling off of Oracle’s radar.

About that train
The common wisdom is that the Eclipse way of shipping software is the best way to get a community of developers building on a platform. You’ve probably also heard of “release early release often”. Eclipse is a very special project which is really about providing a baseline for the Foundation members to build upon and I’d argue that Eclipse IDE users on the other side are not benefiting much from this release model. When it comes to Java, we’re talking about something that also has a diverse audience and I think developers remain far more important than vendors and that a cadenced release model is actually harmful. It’s easy to agree on shipping software when it’s fully baked but the two-year cycle is really the key issue here. Oracle should be able to declare Jigsaw a strategic goal and deliver it with an extra 6 to 12 months (which, by the way, would still mean 2+ years from now!).

About the community
Jigsaw has been presented for many many years by Sun and later Oracle as a key feature in numerous keynotes and conferences and promised in Java 7, Java 8 (in fact I’ve done my share of such promotion while at Oracle) and now Java 9. That has created a lot of expectations in the community. In fact, it’s not only about Java SE as a large portion of the Java ecosystem is also waiting for a standard modularity solution: JavaME, Java EE (see this sample IBM reaction when modularity had to be removed from EE 7), Groovy and other JVM languages and probably by many developers building non-trivial applications with Java. Surely there’s got to be a better way to convey bad news to the community than “sorry, we’ve missed the train!”. In retrospect, the plan A/plan B approach was a brilliant communication plan with Plan A really not being an option and the community rallying behind Plan B. It’s often about how things are conveyed, not only about what they convey.

About open source
I hear some say that this would not have happened if Java was truly open source with a community, not a company, overlooking its destiny. First, my definition of Open Source remains. IP and governance are (ideally) orthogonal to the license and no simple solution exists for all software projects. But more importantly, this is a sad case of a project’s failed risk mitigation (sadly a very common failure in our industry). To consider that a different governance model would have changed anything is wishful thinking. Innovative carefully crafted designs always come from a very small number of talented engineers and in fact, this may even be a case where going open source and transparent was not a good idea but rather a fatal distraction.

About what’s next
As I wrote above, Oracle has the resources to declare Jigsaw a strategic goal. I can agree that it may be hard to deliver by late 2013 but waiting for 2016 is effectively killing Jigsaw and encouraging everyone to look at alternatives which will jeopardize yet even more Jigsaw’s chances of ever seeing the light of day. In fact, even Oracle is considering profiles in Java 8, an ugly band-aid if you ask me. One you’ll need to painfully tear off to get proper modularity in the platform. Jigsaw really shouldn’t be seen as “a new feature”, to me it’s really the Java reboot some people have been calling for a long time. Only a compatible one.

Now of course this is all my personal take and I don’t pretend to know what’s good for Java nor represent the community at large. So getting some hard data about what the community expects from Jigsaw would be a good start before making any decision. I believe this has not been done so far. The closest I’ve seen is the recent JAXenter poll which isn’t very scientific (self-selected, somewhat biased questions).

So in the end, if the community wants Java 8 with its updated and stripped-down content (Lambda, maybe JSR 310, what else?) in 2013, Oracle and the JCP should deliver just that. Again, it’s about meeting expectations. But shipping a Java 8.5 with Jigsaw sooner than later should also be considered. And if there really needs to be a train release model, it has to be a yearly one and not every release needs to be a major one.

In a world where standing still is perceived as fossilization, bringing proper modularity to Java is what moving Java forward ™ is really about.

Avec ce nouveau programme, Google propose à des individus d’obtenir un titre d’expert à l’année pour l’un des domaines de prédilection de Google (Android, Cloud, HTML5, Chrome, Social, Geo, etc…).

Il ne s’agit bien entendu pas d’un rôle de porte-parole mais plus d’une reconnaissance apportée à une personne à la fois technique, experte et visible (présentations publiques, blog, commits, etc…). Ce titre lui permettra d’entretenir une relation avec Google (contact avec les developer advocates, access aux previews et plus encore) et de présenter lors de conférences développeurs.

Initiallement piloté en Israel et au Japon, le programme est désormais publique et actif en France comme l’indique la page des Experts actifs. Sa gestion est effectuée localement par Google France.

Maj: voici un billet sur GDE rédigé par le responsable du program au niveau mondial.

Pre-requisites

This paper assumes you have a CloudSQL database instance configured and (ideally) populated. You should have authorized your local machine using OAuth and the command-line tool and have the CloudSQL JDBC driver handy (it’s in the AppEngine SDK in lib/impl). If you need help on any of this, consider reading this Getting Started paper.

Here are the values used here :

1. Cloud SQL instance name : scott-tiger:scott
2. Database Name : jpetstore
3. JDBC Driver Class Name : com.google.cloud.sql.Driver
4. JDBC URL : jdbc:google:rdbms://scott-tiger:scott/jpetstore

By default the CloudSQL instance can be accessed with user root and an empty password.

This paper uses NetBeans (7.x) as the IDE and GlassFish (ships with NetBeans) as the local Java Application Server but everything should be easily adaptable for other tools such as Eclipse and other runtimes (tomcat, JBoss, etc).

NetBeans & CloudSQL

The NetBeans IDE offers a JDBC database explorer feature which you can use to access your CloudSQL database instance. In the NetBeans Services tab, chose Databases > Drivers and create a new driver configuration by pointing to the google_sql.jar archive and using com.google.cloud.sql.Driver as the JDBC driver name (should be auto-detected). Right-click this newly created JDBC driver and select “Connect With…” to create a new connection. Provide the username, the password and the full JDBC URL (jdbc:google:rdbms://scott-tiger:scott/jpetstore in my case) and test the connection.

You should now be able to navigate the database schema, view table content, manipulate data, and execute any SQL statement.

WebApp Project

We’ll now create a web application using JPA entities manipulating data from the Cloud SQL instance discussed above. We’ll deploy this application first to GlassFish, then to App Engine.

Within NetBeans, create a (Maven) Web Application project with GlassFish as the default target. Right-click on the project to select the “New Entity Classes from Database” wizard. Create a new data source using the JDBC connection defined in the previous step. Select the tables you want to create JPA entities for and do not check the “Create Persistence Unit” option (we’ll get back to this later). This generates standard JPA 2.0 @Entity-annotated classes for every table selected from CloudSQL.

Here’s a proper persistence.xml that will work with CloudSQL. Notice how this JPA persistence unit uses RESOURCE_LOCAL and not a JTA data source :

<persistence version="2.0">
  <persistence-unit name="CloudSQLPU" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
    <properties>
      <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:google:rdbms://scott-tiger:scott/jpetstore"/>
      <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.user" value="user"/>
      <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.password" value="pw"/>
      <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver" value="com.google.cloud.sql.Driver"/>
    </properties>
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

Once this is setup, you can get a hold of this persistence unit in the servlet created by default the typical way you would in an servlet :

EntityManagerFactory emf = 
        Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("CloudSQLPU");
EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager();

A simple use to exercise the data could be to list all the names stored in the Category table (using its JPA entity representation) :

CriteriaQuery cq = em.getCriteriaBuilder().createQuery();
cq.select(cq.from(Category.class));
List<Category> categories = em.createQuery(cq).getResultList();

for (Category category : categories) {
    out.println(category.getName() + "<br/>");
}

Deploying this simple application to the GlassFish application server shouldn’t require any other changes. Obviously with this architecture, the performance is not ideal given the server is not exactly close to the data. Nevertheless, this demonstrates the standalone capabilities of CloudSQL

Ship it all to the cloud!

A better approach is to probably to use CloudSQL from a Google AppEngine-hosted application where all sorts of optimisations will quick in. To do so, only limited changes to the standard application described above are required.

The first simple change is to add the AppEngine-specific deployment descriptor appengine-web.xml :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <application>MyCloudSQLApp</application>
    <version>1</version>
    <threadsafe>true</threadsafe>
</appengine-web-app>

You’ll also need to change the name of the JDBC driver in persistence.xml (a more elegant solution could be to use Maven profiles to keep the project fully portable) :

- <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver"
-          value="com.google.cloud.sql.Driver"/>
+ <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver"
+         value="com.google.appengine.api.rdbms.AppEngineDriver"/>;

The JDBC URL remains the same.

Finally, you’ll need to bundle JPA / EclipseLink and BeanValidation / Hibernate Validator by making them runtime-scope dependencies. The Servlet and AppEngine SDK API artifacts should use the default scoping. Your mileage may vary when it comes to the implementation versions. Here is my complete set of Maven dependencies :

<dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.eclipse.persistence</groupId>
            <artifactId>eclipselink</artifactId>
            <version>2.3.2</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.eclipse.persistence</groupId>
            <artifactId>javax.persistence</artifactId>
            <version>2.0.3</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.validation</groupId>
            <artifactId>validation-api</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0.GA</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
            <artifactId>hibernate-validator</artifactId>
            <version>4.2.0.Final</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
            <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
            <version>2.5</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.google.appengine</groupId>
            <artifactId>appengine-api-1.0-sdk</artifactId>
            <version>1.7.0</version>
        </dependency>        
    </dependencies>

Make sure the AppEngine application is authorized to access the CloudSQL instance (use the API Console for that). Once this is all done, simply deploy the application to AppEngine :

$ appcfg.sh update target/MyCloudSQLApp-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT

You’ll find the CloudSQL developer documentation here.

Il y a tout d’abord l’arrivée d’AppEngine dans les data centers européens pour améliorer encore la latence des applications web mais aussi pour offrir une conformité en matière de localité des données aux entreprises qui le nécessitent. Cette fonctionnalité sera initialement offerte aux clients “Premier” et sera associée à une facturation en euros.

Le support de SSL sur des noms de domaine personnalisés est proposé avec deux variantes:
– SNI, partageant une même adresse IP pour plusieurs domaines, supporté par la plupart des navigateurs et disponible pour $9 par mois avec 5 certificats.
– VIP, une adresse IP dédiée à l’application permettant de servir un nom de serveur, un nom de domaine complet ou bien de multiples domaines pour $99 par mois.

D’autres nouveautés concernent :
– l’intégration du service PageSpeed pour les applications HRD pour un supplément de $0.39 le Go sortant
– un service intitulé “Cloud Enpoints” offrant une interface simple et authentifiée (Oauth2) en Rest pour des applications web et mobiles
– une limite de taille d’application désormais fixée à 1Go (contre 15Mo précédement)
– la possibilité de stocker et de chercher (rajout à la récente API de Search) selon des points géographiques

L’ensemble des nouveautés sont documentées dans les Release Notes et présentées en qq minutes dans cette vidéo de la conférence.

If you haven’t heard of or tried Cloud IDE yet, it’s a very fine IDE in a browser developed by eXo. While not on-par with your typical Eclipse/NetBeans/IntelliJ desktop solution it goes a long way offering multiple language support, code completion, syntax highlighting and integrated javadocs.

All of this goodness now integrates with AppEngine, both Java and Python. This means that you can start from Cloud IDE, seamlessly integrate with the AppEngine management tools to create the application, debug “locally” using the eXo infrastructure, and ship it to AppEngine. Here’s a short and sweet demo of this at work, all without ever leaving the browser:

Documentation for all of this is here.

Try it out for yourself!

With the new cloud.google.com website it should become clear that it’s much more than that with Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, and more to come. Orthogonal, fully-managed services to built the best cloud apps.

The developer resources remain on : developers.google.com/appengine, developers.google.com/storage and developers.google.com/bigquery/.

Google I/O c’est la conférence Google pour les développeurs qui se tient à la fin du mois (du 27 au 29 juin 2012) à San Francisco.

Une seule keynote
Cette année la conférence dure 3 jours avec une keynote unique le mercredi 27 à 9h00 heure locale (18h en France). Celle-ci devrait durer 2h30 et comme chaque année de nombreuses annonces devraient y être faites.

Les Google Developer Groups de Paris et de Nantes et probablement d’autres encore seront partie prenante avec des événements locaux (connus sous le nom de I/O Extended) pour assister à la retransmission, pour échanger sur les annonces, regarder des sessions techniques, rencontrer des ingénieurs Google de Paris et participer à une session avec des ingénieurs Google en direct de San Francisco.

Inscriptions

* Inscriptions Paris, détails GDG Paris et PAUG.
* Détails et Inscriptions Nantes

En france, les “io-extended” sont organisés en partenariat avec les écoles du réseau Epitech. Toutes ces écoles devraient donc être connectées afin de retransmettre la keynote et les sessions qui suivent.

Posez vos questions!
Utilisez ce Google Moderator pour poser vos questions dès maintenant. La session avec des ingénieurs francophones en direct de I/O sera l’occasion de les passer en revue!

Tenez-vous au courant sur les événements I/O Extended en suivant la page Google+ de I/O Extended France.

The list of products and technologies community-supported on StackOverflow includes Google App Engine, Android, Google+, Maps, Google TV, Chrome, etc… Here are some of the product-specific tags tracked by Google employees :
google-app-engine
gae-datastore
google-maps
google-plus
android
google-tv
google-chrome
google-chrome-extension
google-chrome-devtools
google-drive-sdk

Part of the acceleration was the Devoxx conference for the first time in Paris after 10 yearly occurrences in Antwerp. It was my first time attending such a major developer conference in my home town and I took pride in having had the same shitty weather as in Belgium in November ;)

Joking aside, this 1200-participant event was a success by many metrics, not only was it sold out, but I believe it had the right level of content with labs, university sessions, inspiring keynotes (ok, not all of them), regular sessions, and of course socializing.

I’ve spent most of my time at the conference catching up with friends, meeting many new faces (quick, someone, give me glasses with face recognition!) and explaining my responsibilities in the new job.

Kudos to my colleague Martin Görner who had driven the project on the Google side for many weeks now. Speaking of Martin, you can look at his G+ page to see how active the Google booth was with PAUG and Paris GTUG-selected developer demos. Developers talking to developers!

On a somewhat more personal note, it felt great to see Ludo again (now working on AppEngine) as well as Romain Guy, Android Diva (in a good sense!). Meeting new colleagues (Petra, Nicolas, and others) was another highlight.

Devoxx is turning out to be a wild success across Europe. Can’t wait to spread more Google Developer love in future events!

Here are the highlights :
• It’s 5 GB of free space (and up to 16 TB)
• Client integration is available on Mac OS, Android and Windows (for now)
• It’s search-capable (supporting dozen’s of file formats) and thus much more than an online bunch of disks (OBOD)
• It has integration with Docs, Gmail, G+, Goggles, and more
• Maybe most importantly, it has an SDK