Are you into data? Are you curious for data before making an important work decision - like what budget area to cut - or a personal decision - like what route to take that will save you from getting stuck in rush hour traffic? Most importantly, do you ever think:
There must be a better way to organize this data?
To move it, understand it, and (hopefully) take value from it..?
Hi! My name is Maria and I’m on Google Cloud’s Data Analytics team. Now more than ever, data practitioners, data leaders, and a larger population of people who are simply interested in the topic are looking at their existing workstreams and considering technologies that can simplify, transform, unite, and modernize their data to ultimately improve the way they do business and make decisions.
The Data Analytics track at Google Cloud Next ‘21 tackles all these questions, objectives, and more by bringing different perspectives together and delivering new data knowledge and practices to our wider community. AKA you!
Here are my top 5 data breakout sessions, including my unfiltered opinion about why they’ve made my shortlist. My hope is that this list helps you make sense of the track and inspires you to register for the free event and begin building your very own Google Cloud Next playlist:
Okay so maybe it’s predictable to claim the Data Analytics Keynote address is the number one must-watch data session. But hear me out: this session will be a great starting point to set the foundations of common data challenges we encounter at Google Cloud plus an integrated look at how we solve these challenges with our unified data platform. The whole product gang will be there including Looker, BigQuery, Spanner, and Vertex AI. Having seen a sneak peek of the session, I can confidently say Gerrit Kazmaier (VP & GM of Databases and Analytics at Google Cloud) and Stephanie Wong (Google Cloud Developer Advocate) are a dynamic duo that fuse strategy and Googleyness in a way that makes this keynote unlike any you’ve seen before.
Plus - spoiler: this session will include major announcements.
What good are a slew of information sessions if you aren’t able to experience how the technology works in action?! This live demo session snags second place on my list because not only is it interactive but it also explores an interesting and incredibly topical use case to many enterprises. Without giving too much away, the storyline involves business risk brought on by physical land. ‘Ground up,’ get it? Although it’s listed as “Intermediate”, I would recommend this session to everyone regardless of your expertise level.
Whether it’s heat maps, line maps, 3D maps, or another type altogether, there have been significant data and technological advancements to the world of maps and maps of the world. Surely, it’s not breaking news that Google Maps is at the forefront of geospatial innovations (they have been at this for years) but I would genuinely recommend you come to this session for an inside look of our latest work that lies in the intersection of data maps and data cloud. Sustainability will be a key lens through which this session investigates geospatial technology and its potential for global good.
If nothing else, map visualizations are just plain cool.
Sports data is a huge industry. Period. However behind player stats and team performance rankings many are remiss to remember the data behind the people who make sports entertaining: fans. This session will cover how MLB uses Google Cloud’s comprehensive infrastructure - from Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, Looker, Cloud SQL and more - to ultimately keep ‘America's national pastime’ delightful for viewers both in and outside the stadium. Tune into this session to learn how data delivers the personalized experiences, popular traditions, and creative ideas that deepen audience engagement and stakes in the overall game and industry.
Within the Data Analytics track session catalog, you’ll notice a few sessions labeled “HOL” rather than “Breakout”. HOL or Hands-on Labs are opportunities for you to navigate a particular learning module at your own pace. This specific lab rounds out my “Top 5” list because it focuses on the pain point of many data strategies: an overflow of unorganized data that is often inaccessible, or worse - uncontrollable. It’s certainly clear that you can’t digest data before first ingesting it, and this lab guides you through how to do just that by creating a Dataflow pipeline that can read messages from Pub/Sub, organize them, and store them.
There you have it!
If you’re interested in attending Google Cloud Next, please register here.
Check out the complete session catalogs for Data Analytics, Databases, and AI/ML at those links. You’ll find icons on the bottom right of each session card which you can simply click to add to your own personalized playlist.
Finally, once you’ve made your selections, consider entering the Google Cloud Community’s Ultimate Data Analytics playlist challenge for a chance to win some major swag.
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