About this blog
One of the exciting things about working on new technology is that you are frequently the first to encounter new challenges, lessons, and ideas. This site is a place for me to share things that I’ve learned, curiousities, and perspectives on where my little pocket of the industry is going.
About me
I’m a product manager. I work at Google. I have a long history of working in networking, containers, cloud, and Kubernetes, but for the last couple years I’ve been focused on AI-based applications. AI engineering is an new paradigm of software development. It’s the biggest shift in our industry in decades and so there are lots of new challenges and ideas to explore.
About what I do
Product Manager, Gemini Cloud Assist
The first time I saw an LLM demo it became clear to me that troubleshooting was an amazing application of LLMs. In 2022 I was doing personal prototypes and in 2023 I started officialy working on this space using LLMs and vector databases to diagnose and troubleshoot distributed cloud systems. This evolved into a product suite called Gemini Cloud Assist.
For the past two years I’ve been leading different areas of Gemini Cloud Assist - building out an eval platform that reproduces troubleshooting issues, evolving our agent architecture, and designing AI-native interfaces that merge chat and structured UI. It’s been the most exciting and challenging problem spaces that I’ve worked on yet, but also one with incredible potential.
Product Manager, Private Service Connect
At this point cloud-hosted managed services had taken over as the defacto way for enterprises to consume 3rd-party software. But, there was still a thorny challenge in how to connect two independent companies privately and securely within the same cloud. Private Service Connect (PSC) was a new product that helped companies establish these private connections between VPCs.
From a product standpoint PSC was exciting - it had its own P&L, a large and experienced engineering team, and it was just in its infancy. I led and expanded the team, growing revenue by more than 10x in 2 years and growing traffic from Petabits/month to Exabits/month. Now almost every major GCP product and 3rd-party SaaS uses PSC to connect to their customers.
Product Manager, Google Kubernetes Engine
I led the integration of Google’s global networking infrastructure with GKE. Google had a pretty unique global load balancer and we so developed the first multi-cluster, multi-region Ingress controllers. We had some cool demos showing dynamic load balancing across regions and clusters that were pretty advanced for the time.
One of the most exciting things I worked on was co-authoring the new Gateway API design with Tim Hockin and Bowei Du. At this point Ingress was showing its age. There was so much noise about service mesh and many competing service mesh API standards. Fortunately, the community rallied around Gateway and in 2021 we released the v1alpha1 version to the public. We purposefully designed Gateway so that it could be used for ingress gateways and for service mesh. Gateway became adopted by both load balancing and service mesh products as the standard API for the entire industry. The rest was history. Now,there are now 40+ companies and projects that support Gateway.
Docker
Product Manager, Container Networking
I was probably the world’s first container networking product manager. This was when we were still just trying to figure out how to get containers to talk across VMs using VXLAN and hacky iptables rules. We’ve came a long way from docker run -p 80:80. We moved fast and things were messy - from Calico routing to Kuberenetes Services, things evolved very quickly into the “boring” container networking stack that we all know and love today.
I was in the midst of developing a managed L7 ingress proxy for Docker’s container platform when I was introduced to Envoy proxy, and that led me to Google.
Cisco Systems
Systems Engineer, Web Service Provders
My path started with physical switches and routers. I even had some Cisco Catalyst 4900s in my closet. The cloud was just getting started. I designed and sold BGP-based data center Clos networks for many of the early web 2.0 SaaS companies including Facebook, LinkedIn, AirBnB, and Salesforce.