google – Made by Mikal

The BeyondCorp papers

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 15, 2023
Post category:Security Zero Trust

Google’s BeyondCorp effort would probably be what we would now call Zero Trust, although I am surprised by how little name recognition BeyondCorp has when I talk to security people about Zero Trust. Perhaps there are subtle differences between the two, but if there are they aren’t obvious to me. I find myself reading the relevant Usenix papers for BeyondCorp, so I figure I’ll post a summary of what I got from each paper here.

The earliest of these papers are quite old now (2014), especially for something the rest of the industry is only starting to talk a lot about at the moment. I wonder if there is a viable business model in watching what papers megacorps like Google publish, and the implementing them as commercialized products before the rest of the market catches on?

Either way, here’s a summary of the various papers from the perspective of an interested bystander…

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A corporate system for continuous innovation: The case of Google Inc

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 26, 2021
Post category:Management

So, one of my kids is studying some business units at university and was assigned this paper to read. I thought it looked interesting, so I gave it a read as well. While not being particularly well written in terms of style, this is an approachable introduction to the culture and values of Google and how they play into Google’s continued ability to innovate. The paper identifies seven important attributes of the company's culture that promote innovation, as ranked by the interviewed employees: The culture is innovation oriented. They put a lot of effort into selecting individuals who will fit well with the culture at hiring time. Leaders are seen as performing a facilitiation role, not a directive one. The organizational structure is loosely defined. OKRs and aligned performance incentives. A culture of organizational learning through postmortems and building internal social networks. Learning is considered a peer to peer activity that is not heavily structured. External interaction -- especially in the form of aggressive acquisition of skills and technologies in areas Google feels they are struggling in. Additionally, they identify eight habits of a good leader: A good coach. Empoyer your team and don't micro-manage. Express interest in employees' success…

Configuring load balancing and location headers on Google Cloud

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 4, 2020
Post category:Google Google Compute Engine

I have a need at the moment to know where my users are in the world. This helps me to identify what compute resources to serve their request with in order to reduce the latency they experience. So how do you do that thing with Google Cloud? The first step is to setup a series of test backends to send traffic to. I built three regions: Sydney; London; and Los Angeles. It turns out in hindsight that wasn't actually nessesary though -- this would work with a single backend just as well. For my backends I chose a minimal Ubuntu install, running this simple backend HTTP service. I had some initial trouble finding a single page which walked through the setup of the Google Cloud load balancer to do what I wanted, which is the main reason for writing this post. The steps are: Create your test instances and configure the backend on them. I ended up with a setup like this: Next setup instance groups to contain these instances. I chose unmanaged instance groups (that is, I don't want autoscaling). You need to create one per region. But wait! There's one more layer of abstraction. We need a backend…

Google book search

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 23, 2007
Post category:Imagemagick

I just noticed that the ImageMagick book appears in Google book search. I'm pleased.

MythTV talk at Google

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 14, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

I'm giving a MythTV talk at Google in the next week (although I can't find it on the events calendar at the moment, I'll update this post when I do) so I've been playing with MythTV 0.21 a little more than I have in the past. Its pretty cool. I'm still writing the talk, so I don't know 100% what it will cover, but I'm thinking it would be good to include some of the stuff from 0.21 as a teaser. Storage groups, the flash player in MythWeb, and the tweaks to the theme system seem like good things to include. Does anyone have other things they think are really cool in 0.21? Oh, and I'll have to cover guide data for the US, so it might be time to catch up with my MythTV email backlog once again. Hopefully in you live near Silicon Valley you can come along to the talk and we can chat afterwards. Update: I found a Google blog post with the details. To quote the most important information: Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Michael's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at…

As pointed out by a friend at work

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 29, 2006
Post category:Link

Trends for "return gift": . Who would have thought that people only return gifts at Christmas?

This would be me pimping tcmalloc

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 16, 2006
Post category:Link

Uber cool Google written malloc implementation saves day at Wikipedia. Rusty objects to the 6mb memory overhead. I guess the overhead is a big deal if you run lots of binaries, which isn't always the case.

Solar panel reflection effects in satellite imagery

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 25, 2006
Post category:Link

Google Blogoscoped has an interesting pointer to a star effect on a Google Earth satellite image. Apparently the consensus is that its the sun reflecting off a solar panel, but it's still nice.

MySQL Camp

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 23, 2006
Post category:Mysql

Kynan and I came along to the MySQL camp, and thru a quirk of fate pretty much ended up running it (the person who was meant to be running it got injured on the first day and had to go off to hospital). In return we wrote the Google Code blog post about the event. Pretty cool, huh?

A MythTV Jabber bot

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 29, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

While I love my wife and kids to distraction, the distraction bit is real. Then again, I'm sure they have a counter argument that I tend to end up deep in thought, and which point you could probably push me off my chair and I wouldn't notice. Anyway, that's mostly beside the point. What is relevant is for the first time in nearly a year (since 18 November 2005 to be exact, but who is counting?) I'm alone. All alone. So, apart from watching the West Wing (which I haven't seen before, and is fantastic), sleeping in, and going to a party tonight, I am coding. What I'm writing is a follow on from my night hacking the other day, which was getting PyXMPP working with Google Talk. What I want is a bot which will take IM messages, and execute them using the MythTV front end. Oh, and it will display text using the on screen display if you ask nicely. So, does anyone have any thoughts on if that sort of thing is useful to them? I think it sounds useful to me, but perhaps I'm odd. Back to hacking.