GCP Podcast: Platinum Customers
The Google Cloud Platform Podcast is a weekly podcast, produced by Google, featuring Google Cloud Developer Advocates (and rockstars!) Francesc Campoy Flores and Mark Mandel.
As a GCP developer, I find the podcast incredibly useful. In addition to the Questions and Cool Things of the Week, each episode features an in-depth discussion with a guest (or guests!) about a Google Cloud product, service, customer, or other topic of interest.
Even though it has been running for over a year and a half, I have to admit I that I didn’t start listening regularly until a year after it started. #shame Since then, not only have I listened to every new episode, but I even went back and caught up on all the episodes that I had missed! #redeemed
In some notable episodes, the podcast has featured a topic about how Google manages its cloud and supports its customers, including:
- #38 Site Reliability Engineering with Paul Newson
- #59 SRE II with Paul Newson
- #72 Customer Reliability Engineering with Luke Stone
As a Platinum Customer, one of the features you can receive, in addition to an account manager and a customer engineer, is a Strategic Customer Engineer. The Strategic Customer Engineer, or SCE (“skee”) is
“responsible for customers success on Google Cloud Platform and managing trusted technical advisory relationships with our strategic customers who have chosen Google Cloud Platform.”
Our SCE is Mike Altarace and we love him!
It occurred to me that the topic of the Strategic Customer Engineer and their relationship with the customer might be a nice topic for an upcoming podcast! I mentioned it to Mike in January and he pitched it inside Google.
It did not occur to me when I made the suggestion that they would ask me and Mike to appear as guests on the podcast! Mark replied in February that they liked the topic and wanted to talk more after NEXT. This was fine with me as I was busy preparing my content for Gaining full control over your organization’s cloud resources.
Mark reached back out at the end of May to schedule the podcast recording for June 19th. Once I cleared everything with my organization, we were ready to go!
On the day of the recording, Mike and I were both a bit star-struck meeting Francesc and Marc at the beginning of the session. But once we chatted and both calmed down a bit, I think it went pretty well!
We discussed how Mike and I meet weekly via video Hangouts and stay in touch throughout the week via chat, Slack and email, as well as how we work together to keep each other up-to-speed about relevant activities going on in each of our organizations. For example, that I keep Mike informed about our current priorities and projects and he keeps me current on opportunities to test new Alpha features.
Our podcast episode went live on July 19th, exactly one month after recording! Listen today, and don’t miss this week’s episode, which covers the Customer Engineer.
- #86 Broad Institute and Platinum Customers with Lukas Karlsson and Mike Altarace
- #87 Customer Engineers with Jonathan Cham
I am honored to have been included and had a blast participating in the poadcast. Thanks to Mark, Francesc, Mike, Google, and Broad Institute for making it possible!
