Google Cloud Platform Podcast: Descartes Labs with Tim Kelton

Descartes Labs (http://www.descarteslabs.com/) is creating an incredible
living atlas of the world from huge datasets leveraging the power of
Google Cloud Platform and Tim Kelton (https://twitter.com/timbuktuu), one
of the co-founders of Descartes Labs, is here to your cohosts
Francesc Campoy (https://twitter.com/francesc) and
Mark Mandel (https://twitter.com/neurotic) all about it.
About Tim
Tim is a co-founder of Descartes Labs focuses on building distributed systems
using cloud architecture to better see how the earth changes every day.
Prior to Descartes Labs, Tim was a Research and Development engineer for
15 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on problem areas such as
deep learning, space systems, nuclear non-proliferation, and counterterrorism.
In his free time, Tim enjoys mountain biking and skiing in the mountains
above Descartes in Santa Fe New Mexico.
Cool things of the week
* Check the transcripts for every episode!
* All Google Cloud Platform episodes on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqJOTOszXDZh3XustjvTsrmQ)
* gRPC Project is now 1.0 and ready for production deployments blog post (http://www.grpc.io/blog/gablogpost)
Interview
* Descartes Labs home page (http://www.descarteslabs.com/)
* Advancing the science of corn forecasting Medium (https://medium.com/@DescartesLabs/advancing-the-science-of-corn-forecasting-350603e3c57f#.omj6hprd7)
* Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer Google Research (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub44824.html)
* Preemptible VMs docs (https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/)
* Managed Instance Groups docs (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-groups/)
* Celery: Distributed Task Queue homepage (http://www.celeryproject.org/)
* “Tatooine” then and now from space: 40th anniversary of filming of Star Wars Medium (https://medium.com/@stevenpbrumby/tatooine-then-and-now-from-space-40th-anniversary-of-filming-of-star-wars-76522db67e20#.skukw6aa9)
Some maps
Three maps of Humboldt, Iowa in July 2016.

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(../images/post/descartes_map1.png)


(../images/post/descartes_map2.png)


(../images/post/descartes_map3.png)

Cloud free image in true color


We detect fields automatically, using machine learning. This is a map of all the fields in Humbolt.


Vegetative health (using NDVI)

Question of the week
What can you get for free on Google Cloud Platform?
* App Engine pricing (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas)
* 28 free instance-hours per day
* Cloud Datastore pricing (https://cloud.google.com/datastore/#pricing)
* 1 GB of storage
* 50k Entity Reads
* 20k Entity Writes
* 20k Entity Deletes
* Vision API pricing (https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing)
* 1k units/month (a unit correspond to a feature e.g. facial detection)
* BigQuery pricing (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing)
* Loading, Copying, and Exporting data is always free
* First TB of processed data in queries is free every month
* PubSub pricing (https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing)
* First 250M Operations: $0.40/Million
(http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GcpPodcast/~4/ltBHl82BxB8)