“I am a big fan of data as a living, breathing thing,” said Michael Manoochehri, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, talking about the concept of data as code with theCube show hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Strata 2013. Google uses protocol buffers to move data back and forth, as people are currently starting to realize that data is actually big and one can get access to it as streaming content. Small development teams are now realizing the power of Big Data technology, Manoochehri explained, and as they adopt it, they will change the way we use data in business. The focus of the industry has moved beyond warehousing, “it’s about opening data up and see[ing] what it’s doing.” Discussing what developers are asking from Google, Manoochehri said the main request is accessibility. Developers need a a way to interact with tools without building their own infrastructure. They want to get the data in from one data store to another. Commenting on Amazon targeting the enterprise cloud sector with its recent Redshift launch, he expressed his support for this initiative, as bringing data into the cloud is a good direction. Mentioning a recent survey among CIOs, John Furrier said most of them, when asked if they would get their own data center if they could, said they would, in a heartbeat. Manoochehri explained that when it comes to Big Data, people move from building an infrastructure to gaining access to an existing one and integrating it into their business process. The same happened with mail, he pointed out, as a lot of companies moved from building in-house solutions to using Gmail as a business app. On the issue of security risks for web services, Manoochehri said that “educating people on how to use web services, that’s a challenge.” People need to be educated about security in the cloud, as it is not more sensitive than the security of other in-house solutions — it just needs to be properly understood and applied. Big companies such as Google or Amazon have an army of security experts to secure their web and cloud services, while a small company cannot afford the same level of security. Michael Manoochehri pointed out an inevitability that more people and businesses would move to the web. Tools and technology need to evolve to sustain that move, but the market is getting there. Google’s policy for what’s stored in the cloud cloud is that “everything that’s in the cloud allows customers to move the data out.” Manoochehri added, “We want the cloud to just be the cloud,” to allow for someone to write an app and make it available for everybody. Developers want use cases, he goes on, saying they want the development environment to match their deployments. As far as languages that are well positioned at the moment and have huge traction, Manoochehri mentioned Python, a great language with a lot of usage in for analytics, Go and JavaScript, the latter still being quite big and very accessible. As a general trend, things come from the web and then are filtering out to the rest of the community. On the mobile development front, people will soon use mobile as their main computing environment. That is why browsers are being used as primary mobile interfaces, Firefox OS is a big thing and Ubuntu is moving into this space. As for top development directions in the near future, Manoochehri listed cloud, services and convergence.