A little light reading: What to read to stay updated on cloud technology

It sometimes feels like keeping up with technology news could be a full-time job, whatever your particular area of interest. We collected this list of useful, interesting and otherwise cool stories for you to catch up on what was new in the bigger Google world in November. Here’s what caught our attention.

Newspaper puts cloud infrastructure, AI into action

The New York Times built a processing pipeline using GCP products to digitize and organize its more than five million physical photos. They are using Cloud Storage to hold the photo scans, Cloud Pub/Sub to provide the data pipeline, services on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to resize images, and a Cloud SQL database to store metadata. Here’s the full story.

Pixel photos get better with machine learning

We also recently got a look at how the Pixel 3 phone incorporates machine learning so the Portrait Mode of the camera can better predict depth when taking photos. Using machine learning allowed Pixel developers to consider multiple “depth cues,” which would be extremely difficult to do with a manually created algorithm. They instead trained a neural network written in TensorFlow to achieve the improved depth. Get all the technical details here.

Want your phone to find the best signal? There’s a network for that

Ever wish your phone could find another, better option when your signal is bad? There’s actually a virtual mobile network service from Google that automatically switches your phone service between Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular networks based on signal strength and speed wherever you are. The news in November was that Google Fi is now available for the majority of Android devices and iPhones.

Get to know the service mesh concept

If you’ve started playing around with Istio—or want to try it—this Medium piece is a great explainer on how to create an Istio-enabled “Hello, world” app. It focuses on routing, in particular, since Istio manages the traffic of your app, and assumes you have some knowledge of containers and Kubernetes.

Need some techie fun in your spare time?

It’s now easier to find and enter one of Google’s three coding competitions: Hash Code, Code Jam, and Kick Start. All the competitions are now global, and the site has a simplified interface. Will you accept the challenge? Sign up to get notifications for the early 2019 start dates.

Anything you would add to this list? Tell us about your recommended reading.