Top 10 GCP sessions from Google I/O 2016

In-between daydreaming about virtual reality and saying Allo to Duo, there were some fantastic Google Cloud Platform sessions and demos at Google I/O this year. In case you weren’t able to attend the show, here are the recordings.

In One Lap Around Google Cloud Platform, developer advocate Mandy Waite, and Brad Abrams walk through the process of building a Node.js backend for an iOS and Android based game. Easily the best bit of the session is a demo that uses Kubernetes and GCP Container Registry to deploy a Docker container to App Engine Flexible Environment, Google Container Engine and an AWS EC2 instance. It’s a simple demo of portability across clouds, a key differentiator for GCP.

Speaking of multi-cloud environments, developer advocate Aja Hammerly presented a great session on Stackdriver, called Just Enough Stackdriver To Sleep Well At Night, which will be music to the ears for any of you who have to carry a pager to support your site or application. In a nutshell, Aja shows how Stackdriver unifies a bunch of different monitoring and management tools into a single solution.

If you’ve made the leap to containers or are thinking about it, you’ll want to check Carter Morgan's session: Best practices for orchestrating the cloud with Kubernetes. This session includes the basics of modern day applications and how containers work. It also covers packaging and distributing apps using Docker and how to up your game by running applications on Kubernetes.

Next, IoT ideas are a dime a dozen, but bringing them to life is another story. In Making sense of IoT data with the cloud, developer advocate Ian Lewis shows how you can manage a large number of devices on GCP and how to ingest, store and analyze the data from those devices.

In Supercharging Firebase with Google Cloud Platform developer advocates Sandeep Dinesh and Bret McGowen use Firebase to build a real-time game that interacts with virtual machines, big data and machine learning APIs on GCP. The coolest part of the demo involves the audience in the room and on the livestream interacting with the game via Speech API, all yelling instructions at the same time to move a dot through a maze. The hallmark of Firebase — real-time data synchronization across connected devices in milliseconds — is on display here and fun to see. For more Firebase tips and tricks check out Creating interactive multiplayer experiences with Firebase, from developer advocate Mark Mandel.

Switching gears to big data and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, developer advocate Felipe Hoffa and software engineer Jordan Tigani, demo the power of Google BigQuery to uncover some intriguing campaign insights in Election 2016: The Big Data Showdown. You'll learn which candidate is spending the most money and how efficient that spending is relative to their mentions on TV, by mashing together various different public datasets in BigQuery. Felipe and Jordan do a nice job showing us how BigQuery can separate the signal from the noise to figure out what it all means.

Figuring out the right storage for each application in your business can be a daunting task on the cloud. Dominic Preuss, group product manager, explains how in Scaling your data from concept to petabytes.

And of course, no event that includes Cloud Platform is complete without demos from developer advocates Kaz Sato on How to build a smart RasPi bot with Cloud Vision and Speech API, and another crowd-pleaser, Google Cloud Spin: Stopping time with the power of Cloud, from Francesc Campoy Flores.

To find more tutorials, talks and demos on GCP beyond the sessions at I/O this year, check out our GCP YouTube channel and weekly podcast, and follow @GoogleCloud on Twitter for all the latest news and product announcements from the Cloud Platform team.