Solutions Engineering with Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace

Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia host this week's episode of the podcast, with a thorough discussion of Solutions Engineering at Google. Our guests, Grace Mollison and Ann Wallace, explain that the Solutions Engineering team is there to help customers choose appropriate products for things like security, analytics, data management, and more. The products are laid out in guides and blueprints so the client can easily understand why products are chosen and how to use them.

Grace and Ann talk later in the podcast about the Solutions Engineering blueprints that Solutions Engineering Architects have begun creating. They describe how the idea came about, how they're built, as well as the types of blueprints that are available and how to use them. The team is still working to create more blueprints and make them even easier to use.

Grace Mollison

Based in London, UK, Grace Mollison leads the Cloud Solutions Architect team in EMEA, where she helps customers to understand how to architect and deploy applications "safely" on the Google Cloud platform. In her spare time she spends time attempting to teach her international team how to speak the Queen's English! Before Google, Grace was a Solutions Architect at AWS where she worked with the AWS ecosystem and customers to ensure well architected solutions.

Ann Wallace

Ann Wallace (she/her) is Security Solutions Manager for Google Cloud where she develops, designs, and packages security solutions for Enterprise Customers. She co-wrote Google's guidance for running PCI compliant workloads on GKE. Before Google, Ann spent 14 years at Nike in various engineering and architecture roles. She volunteers and leads workshops with Women Who Code Portland. When not working, Ann can be found traveling and ultra-trail running with her dog, Cedar.

Cool things of the week

• Father's Day present of the past: 30 years of family videos in an AI archive blog
  • GCP Podcast Episode 214: AI in Healthcare with Dale Markowitz podcast
• Open Match is now 1.0 and ready for deployment in production blog
• Google Data Center Security: 6 Layers Deep video

Interview

• Cloud Solutions site
• Security blueprint: PCI on GKE site
• PCI and GKE Blueprint on GitHub site
• GCP Podcast Episode 116: Solution Architects with Miles Ward and Grace Mollison podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 174: Professional Services with Ann Wallace and Michael Wallman podcast
• Terraform site
• Kubernetes site
• Anthos site
• Anthos security blueprint: Auditing and monitoring for deviation from policy site
• Anthos security blueprint: Enforcing policies site
• Anthos security blueprint: Enforcing locality restrictions for clusters on Google Cloud site
• OnlineBoutique on GitHub site

Tip of the week

How can I get introduced to key products? With Priyanka's new video series!

What's something cool you're working on?

Our guests will be giving talks at virtual summits, including KubeCon and CISO Forum.

Priyanka has been working on a new video series called Google Cloud Drawing Board, as well as a new animation series that will launch next week!