Google Cloud Speech API on production - google-cloud-platform

As we know, Google Cloud Speech API is in Beta now.
Will it be safe to use it in a application on production server?
I was also searching for the applications which is using Google Cloud Speech API, So far I have found the following,
VoiceBase, Hyperconnect, InterActiveTel
Does anyone know of any other applications that could give us more confidence in using it on production server?

The official definition of GCP launch stages, such as Beta, can be found in our documentation here.
Beta is the point at which we are ready to open a release for any customer to use. There are no SLA or technical support obligations in a Beta release, and charges may be waived in some cases. Products will be complete from a feature perspective, but may have some open outstanding issues. Beta releases are suitable for limited production use cases.
Emphasis is mine: Limited production. Ultimately, it is going to come down to your risk appetite.

As of Tuesday, April 18, the Cloud Speech API has reached General Availability, meaning all features are open to developers and are to be considered stable.

Voicebase provides more than just speech recognition and it is currently used in production by large customers. Take a look at some of the features
http://voicebase.readthedocs.io/en/v2-beta/index.html

Related

Google Cloud Vision API online vs offline pricing

I'm in need of a plug and play text recognition system after having tried some solutions such as Tesseract OCR, Google's Vision API seemed to produce the best results for me.
However I have never used any of their cloud API before but I've noticed it is able to work offline? How would billing work for this? As I understand the online version charges for every 1000 images, wouldn't the offline library circumvent this? What is the quality difference between online and offline?
Both online and offline charge based on the features used. Here is the pricing chart: https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing
Quality should be similar for online and offline. You could run a small experiment with your own files to verify this.

How to inform google on upcoming penetration test

We are running our Software Application partially on google cloud platform and will be running a security review, which includes a penetration test soon.
We are tasked with informing our Hosting providers on this.
How should I do this for Google?
Regards
In general, you are not obliged to inform Google about your pen tests:
If you plan to evaluate the security of your Cloud Platform
infrastructure with penetration testing, you are not required to
contact us. You will have to abide by the Cloud Platform Acceptable
Use Policy and Terms of Service, and ensure that your tests only
affect your projects (and not other customers’ applications). If a
vulnerability is found, please report it via the Vulnerability Reward
Program.
... therefore there's no actual formal way of doing this. Probably a good idea would be to contact Google Cloud Platform Support and re-check that, also to have a record of this action, as you say you were tasked to inform the cloud provider.

WSO2 / Mule vs OpenStack / CloudStack - what are the differences, similarities, benefits?

I've started my journey with cloud related technologies very recently. I'm trying to understand the basics as to be able to prepare the foundation for a basic cloud setup in my Internet of Things oriented company.
While browsing the Internet I've stumbled upon the following two groups of open source projects:
WSO2 / Mule / ...
OpenStack / CouldStack / Eucalyptus / ...
I'm trying to understand:
what kind of service do they offer? (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, other?)
what are the differences between them?
what do they have in common?
how do the play with other cloud related technologies like Amazon AWS?
which one would you recommend to get some basic experience and for some early proof-of-concept? (I'm looking for the easiest option first)
Cloud stack and Open stack are open source softwares designed to manage, deploy virtual machines and networks which can deliver cloud services. Mainly these provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). There are alot of comparisons on the internet on these two. So these softwares needs to be intalled on your hardware and maintain it and you provide a cloud service from it. When it comes Amazon AWS it is a readily available service where you don't do installations or maintain hardware, you just take service from them.
WSO2 and MuleSoft are different from above two and they are software platforms where several products(such as ESB). Both provide cloud platform facilities to deploye their products.
We cannot say which one to use but base on your requirements you may choose one or two (WSO2 products deployed on Amazon AWS or WSO2 products deployed on CloudStack VM's). Since you are willing to set up Internet of things, i think you may need to refer about products provided by above providers. Following source [1] will give you an idea about Iot platform setup by several free open source WSO2 products.
[1] http://wso2.com/landing/internet-of-things/

What is a better mBaaS that supports offline sync and caching?

What is a better mBaaS that supports offline sync and caching?
I am evaluating several mBaaS solutions for my hybrid mobile app under development. I looked at Kinvey, Kii, buddy, and Telerik BackEnd platform. I have also came across some open source solutions like openmobster and dreamfactory. I am looking to store data in sql-lite on mobile app and then sync it back with an online data store. Kinvey has this support, but their pricing model (per user) is not suitable in my scenario. I can see that openmobster does this but, how is what I need to understand? Can I host in on Azure VM or something? Also please suggest if there is any other solution commercial/open source capable of doing offline sync and caching with push notifications and data storage?
DreamFactory could be a good fit for your scenario. It is open source and comes with a full 30 days of free support. After which it's only like $25/month for a developer account - and this isn't even a requirement to use its product. It's specifically a support package.
To address your question a little more in-depth... I don't believe DreamFactory supports offline syncing at the moment, though they plan to very soon. In regards to sql-lite, DreamFactory's (DSP) product has a built in sql-lite driver to connect to that DB. However, it hasn't been tested enough for them to say it is a fully supported RDBMS. One of the beautiful things about DreamFactory is you're able to host the DSP (DreamFactory Service Platform) on Azure and Amazon EC2 instances (cloud solutions), host locally on your own server, or even use its own free hosted edition!
I would definitely take a little time to look into DF. It doesn't seem to me like you have much to lose. Especially, considering it's a free open-source product!
Feel free to ask me any questions you may have about DreamFactory!
-Mark

AVIcode versus AppFabric

I just learned today about the System Center AVIcode product, which is a .net application monitoring tool. I don't know much about it and I was wondering how it would compare to AppFabric. The latter also has monitoring features as well as other useful features. How much do these two product overlap and for which scenario is each one better suited?
Thanks for any insights!
AVIcode (now simply called "APM" feature in System Center 2012 - Operations Manager) and AppDynamics are monitoring products playing in the same space/market.
They both provide visibility into code-level performance issues with your application. If you are interested in AVIcode technology you can watch my talk at TechEd 2012 to see APM in Operations Manager in action http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/MGT302
AppFabric provides hosting and activation services, so it is orthogonal to the above - while it provides some "infrastructure" monitoring capability (i.e. the host running your code being up or down) it doesn't go to the code level showing "what was slow" or "what threw exceptions" in your code.
App Sight is applicable only to .NET framework 4.0 in terms on monitoring WCF transactions and Workflows. It's integrated into IIS Mgr thru extensions.
AVICode monitors a more broader range of .NET frameworks and protocols and is available as standalone or through integration with SCOM.
So the overlap would be the visibility they both provide for apps that leverage WCF and Workflows.
If you're interested in .NET application monitoring you might want to checkout http://www.appdynamics.com/. We're currently in the middle of our .NET beta program and have had a great response so far from users. I can sign you up for a no hassle free trial if you want to have a play and see what visibility we can provide . Drop me a line at appman#appdynamics.com if your keen.