EP214 Reconciling the Impossible: Engineering Cloud Systems for Diverging Regulations

Guest:

• Archana Ramamoorthy, Senior Director of Product Management, Google Cloud

Topics:

• You are responsible for building systems that need to comply with laws that are often mutually contradictory. It seems technically impossible to do, how do you do this?
• Google is not alone in being a global company with local customers and local requirements. How are we building systems that provide local compliance with global consistency in their use for customers who are similar in scale to us?
• Originally, Google had global systems synchronized around the entire planet–planet scale supercompute–with atomic clocks. How did we get to regionalized approach from there?
• Engineering takes a long time. How do we bring enough agility to product definition and engineering design to give our users robust foundations in our systems that also let us keep up with changing and diverging regulatory goals?
• What are some of the biggest challenges you face working in the trusted cloud space?
• Is there something you would like to share about being a woman leader in technology? How did you overcome the related challenges?

Resources:

• Video
• "Compliance Without Compromise" by Jeanette Manfra (2020, still very relevant!)
• "Good to Great" book
• "Appreciative Leadership" book