About inshorts

Mobile news platform inshorts condenses the latest national and international news into 60-word briefs in English and Hindi. With 10 million downloads so far, it’s expanding to cater to millions more on-the-go Indians reading news on mobile devices.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Across India, hundreds of millions of people turn to their smartphones for news that will enhance their lives and help them achieve their goals. According to Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: “The past few years have seen explosive growth in mobile internet access, and the rapid move to digital media will have profound implications for the practice of journalism, the business of news, media institutions, and thus by extension political and public life in India.” The Institute reports that Indians with internet access have risen from 100 million to 500 million in the past decade alone. The report identifies India’s news industry as “a mobile-first market,” with 66% of Indians citing smartphones as the device they most frequently use to access online news.

Seeing an opportunity to meet the growing need for news on the go, inshorts developed a mobile news platform for Indians on the move who want to stay informed but don’t have time to read long articles. The inshorts solution condenses news, from politics to cricket, into briefs of under 60 words and has been well received, with 10 million downloads since launching in 2013.

To keep the attention of its always-on news consumers and attract more users for continued growth, inshorts knows it must continuously evolve and improve its platform. The company turned to Google Cloud in 2016 in order to free its developers from time-consuming infrastructure maintenance tasks and enable them to focus on creating innovative applications instead. It was also looking for powerful yet cost-effective data and scaling tools to reach more remote corners of India and found this in Google Cloud.

“There’s a new wave of 300 to 400 million first time mobile users projected for India,” says Manish Bisht, Head of Technology at inshorts. “We want to capture those users, and Google Cloud is helping us succeed.”

Freeing up resources for new solutions

By migrating to Google Cloud, inshorts has been able to free up its development team to experiment with new ideas, without worrying about backend management or costs. The company worked with cloud consultancy Searce, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, to define the best solutions for achieving its goals. Searce partners with clients to help them scale their business by leveraging Cloud, AI/ML, and data analytics while reducing the operational IT infrastructure spend. Because it specializes in AI/ML, Anthos, and Cloud Search, inshorts chose it as the ideal partner for futurifying its business on Google Cloud. According to Manish, the Searce team was focused not only on helping inshorts to migrate and adopt a on-demand computing mindset, but helping it to decrease monthly costs as well. “There’s always a positive push from Searce, to help us move forward, and to really put our company’s priorities first,” he says.

Through the application development solutions of Firebase, for example, inshorts is able to test new features in a rapidly shifting market. The product’s ease-of-use and built-in data analytics mean that inshorts can now allocate its developer resources more efficiently across multiple projects, instead of needing an entire team to focus on one project. Product cycles are now just one week long, instead of one month, and each backend and frontend developer in the team of four is able to focus on a separate project, meaning that more work gets done in a shorter time.

Dataflow, which enables real-time data processing, has been a major factor in allowing inshorts to instantly recommend content to users. Previously, the company had managed its own instances, first manually recording what users were doing and later pushing out recommendations. That all changed with Dataflow. “Dataflow freed a lot of our development and instance management time, because we can process data in real time now,” says Manish. “And that means giving users what they want instantly.”

Perhaps one of the biggest time savings came from using Dataproc, which released the inshorts team from the task of managing clusters. “We simply moved to Dataproc, provisioned the machines, and let Google Cloud take over all the management for us,” says Manish. “This one change translated into labor savings of up to six hours a day.”

Where costs are concerned, inshorts is happy to report that Google Cloud has led to not just time savings, but monetary savings as well. The company had begun its cloud journey with a leading provider, but soon found that data analytics services were driving up costs. Meanwhile, the service required high levels of technical expertise to manage the growing infrastructure, which meant it needed to hire a DevOps expert. After switching to Google Cloud products such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Deployment Manager, and Cloud Build, inshorts has now reduced most of its DevOps burden.

“At the time, we were spending around USD100,000 per month in data analysis and data-related fields alone. We had to pursue a cost optimization drive,” recalls Manish. “We had no idea how much we would save just by migrating to Google Cloud. We brought down our costs for the entire infrastructure to around USD20,000 per month.”

The company now uses BigQuery with Looker Studio to analyze and predict its tech expenditure. With Looker Studio, it can easily visualize infrastructure costs and break them down by team, services, and project stakeholders.

Processing millions of images quickly, delivering news instantly

inshorts cites the move to GKE as one of its most important moves. “At one point, we were processing a quarter of a million images per day. Because images are uploaded by our users, traffic is unpredictable; planning the exact amount of compute needed in a given moment is almost impossible. Load balancing itself was no longer enough,” shares Manish. “Google Kubernetes Engine makes life easier for our developers, reducing the need for them to be ever present, and giving them a tool that’s easy to work with.”

The inshorts team moved to GKE primarily to gain this ease of use, where its team can now push a few configurations, then spin up clusters, tell them how to handle the load and what kind of machines to provision, and manage resources effectively. The team has reduced its dependency on DevOps since there’s no need for developers to worry about what size of machines they need for their applications. “The size of machine needed depends on the specific job, and with Google Kubernetes Engine it’s very easy to accommodate a whole range of jobs. We simply optimize our resources, scaling up or down as needed,” says Manish.

As inshorts’ platform becomes more feature-rich and sophisticated, it is taking advantage of the global network of Google Cloud. With its data center in the United States, the platform had begun to experience latency of about 600ms, too great a lag in an age of instant news. Because Google Cloud has regional data centers around the world, inshorts was able to simply move its data center closer to home, bringing down average latency to 100 ms. “We achieved significant app performance improvements thanks to being able to migrate our data center,” says Manish. “The loading was faster; everything was faster.”

Mapping the future with localized news

Being able to develop features even faster is enabling inshorts to pursue its goal of expanding into every corner of India. To capture the wave of new mobile consumers, inshorts realizes that it needs to start by finding out exactly where they are. Using Google Maps Platform, the company has launched a location-based social video app called Public, which offers news that’s highly localized to specific Indian communities and relevant to what they want to read.

As a developing nation, India’s mapping landscape is constantly changing. There were 722 administrative regions when inshorts began its work, but by 2018, 10 new districts had been added to this number. Because Public serves rural and suburban audiences, it’s crucial that it can stay on top of these rapid and sometimes confusing changes. According to Manish, Google Maps Platform not only offers granular geo-location through the Geolocation API but adapts to mapping changes in near real time. It’s a capability that inshorts is harnessing to make the Public app into its next success. “The app is experiencing tremendous growth in the tier two and three cities,” shares Manish, “In the short span of six months, it has already become the category’s number-one ranked app on the Google Play store.”

Tell us your challenge. We’re here to help.

Do you want to fire up a bunch of techies? Talk about multicloud! There is no shortage of opinions. I figured we should tackle this hot topic head-on, so I recently talked to four smart folks—Corey Quinn of Duckbill Group, Armon Dadgar of Hashicorp, Tammy Bryant Butow of Gremlin, and James Watters of VMware—about what multicloud is all about, key considerations, and why you should (or shouldn’t!) do it.

Five important insights came out of these discussions. If you’re on a multicloud journey or considering one, keep reading.

Do: Choose to do multicloud for the right reasons

Don’t do multicloud because Gartner says so, implores Corey Quinn. Before embarking on a multicloud, define a “why” focused on business value journey, says Armon Dadger. For example, you might want to use services from each public cloud because of their differentiated services, according to Tammy Bryant Butow. Armon also calls out regulatory reasons, existing business relationships, and accommodating mergers and acquisitions. On the topic of M&A, Corey points out that if you acquire a company that uses another cloud, it’s usually expensive and difficult to consolidate. It can be smarter to stay put.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xFSDexQhCUY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Don’t: Over-engineer for workload or data portability

Thinking that you’ll build a system that moves seamlessly among the various cloud providers? Hold up, says our group of experts. Armon points out that aspects of your toolchain or architecture may be multicloud—think of some of your workflows or global network routing—but that shifting workloads or data is far from simple. Corey says that trying to engineer for “write once, run anywhere” can slow you down, and ignores the inherent uniqueness that’s part of each platform. Specifically, Corey calls out the per-cloud stickiness of identity management, security features, and even network functionality. And data gravity is still a thing, says James, that causes some to dismiss multicloud outright.

If you’re using multiple public clouds, you take advantage of the distinct value each offers, Armon says. Use native cloud services where possible so that you see the benefits from useful innovations, built-in resilience, and baked-in best practices. The value from that cloud-infused workload may outweigh the benefits of seamless portability.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1VH56_L8f8%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Do: Recognize different stakeholder interests and needs

James smartly points out that many multicloud debates happen because people are arguing from different perspectives. Context matters. If you’re an infrastructure engineer who invests heavily in a given cloud’s identity and access management model, multicloud looks tricky. Or if you’re a data engineer with petabytes of data homed in a particular cloud, multicloud may look unrealistic. James highlights that many developers default to multicloud because their local tools—where all the work happens—are multicloud. A developer’s IDE and preferred code framework(s) aren’t tied to any given cloud. Be aware that groups within your organization will come at multicloud from distinct directions. And this may impact your approach!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=I9sqXDqkKBM%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Don’t: Go it alone

Corey talks about the importance of asking others what worked, and what didn’t. Tammy offers her best practices around sharing results from experiments. It’s about sharing knowledge and tapping into it for community benefit. Others have probably tried what you’re trying, and can help you avoid common pitfalls. If you’ve just made an architectural choice that didn’t work out, share it, and help others avoid the pain. 

Read research from analysts, go to conferences or watch videos to observe case studies, and join online communities that offer a safe place to share mistakes and learn from others.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mrSb5vqOfuI%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Do: Experiment first using techniques like multi-region deployments

If you think you can operate systems across clouds, how about you first try doing it across regions in a specific cloud, suggests Corey. Getting a system to properly work across cloud regions isn’t trivial, he says, and that experience can help you uncover where you have architectural or operational constraints that will be even worse across cloud providers.

This is great guidance if your multicloud aspirations involve using multiple clouds to power one application—versus the more standard definition of multicloud where you use different clouds for different applications—but can also surface issues in your support process or toolchain that fail when faced with distributed systems. Start with muti-region deployments and chaos engineering experiments before aggressively jumping into multicloud architectures.

The Google Cloud take

Do the things above. It’s great advice. I’ll add three more things that we’ve learned from our customers.

1. Don’t fear multicloud. You’re already doing it. You don’t single-source everything. As Corey mentioned, you probably already have one cloud for productivity tools, another for source code, another for cloud infrastructure. You’ll use software and application services from a mix of providers for a single app. You have that experience in your team and have been doing that for decades. What people do rightly worry about is using more than one infrastructure service beneath an application, as that can introduce latency, security, and logistical hurdles. Make sure you know which model your team is considering.
2. Embrace the right foundational components, including Kubernetes. Will everything run on Kubernetes? Of course not. Don’t try to do that. But it also represents the closest thing we have to a multicloud API. Companies are using Kubernetes to stripe a consistent experience across clouds. And this isn’t just to orchestrate containers, but also to manage infrastructure and cloud-native services. Also, consider where you need other fundamental consistency across clouds, including areas like provisioning and identity federation.
3. Use Google Cloud as your anchor. Here’s a fundamental question you have to decide for yourself: Are you going to bring your on-premises technology and practices to the cloud, or bring cloud technology and practices on-prem? We sincerely believe in the latter. Anchor to where you’re trying to get to. We offer Anthos as a way to build and run distributed Kubernetes fleets in Google Cloud and across clouds. By using a cloud-based backplane instead of an on-prem one, you’re offloading toil, leveraging managed services for scale and security, and introducing modern practices to the rest of your team.

We learned a lot about multicloud through these discussions, and it seems like others did too. That’s why we’re going to do a second round of interviews with a new crop of experts so that we can keep digging deeper into this topic. Stay tuned!

Environmental sustainability is a key priority for TELUS, a world-leading communications technology company. It continues to rank in the top 100 most sustainably managed companies in the world, and seeks to make a healthier planet for all by leveraging its global-leading technology, compassion to drive social change and reduce our collective carbon footprint through innovative technologies and sustainable business practices.

TELUS surpassed its sustainability objectives in 2019 and is now on a journey to procure all of its electricity from renewable or low-emitting sources by 2025. Next, it aims to achieve net carbon neutrality for its operations by 2030. TELUS has also been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 21 consecutive years, a feat unmatched by any other North American telecom or cable company. In 2021, it became the first company in Canada to release a Sustainability-linked bond (SLB) framework and complete an SLB offering, formally linking TELUS financing to its environmental performance.

“We’ve spent the last decade becoming a global leader in sustainability, helping make the planet healthier by ensuring that our operations are as environmentally responsible as possible,” said Geoff Pegg, Head of Sustainability and Environment at TELUS.

In part, TELUS’ strategy is focused on three key areas:

1. Seek the best renewable energy options available
2. Focus on migrating workloads to the cloud
3. Embrace a multiplier effect through the use of sustainable partners

Renewable energy impact

Part of this environmental responsibility involves investing heavily in renewable energy sources through power purchase agreements (PPAs) that help renewable energy providers like wind farms and solar companies develop their infrastructure. TELUS executed PPAs with four Alberta-based solar and wind facilities to provide 100 per cent of its electricity load demand in a province where one-third of the grid is powered by coal.

As a technology company, electricity represents a large portion of TELUS’ energy needs: 80 percent of the operational carbon footprint comes from the power requirements for TELUS’ network and administrative buildings, Pegg explains. While TELUS is using renewable energy sources and low-emitting energy grids to power its buildings and network, there’s also the often-forgotten part of the carbon emissions equation: the energy it takes to power data centers. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, data centers represent 1 percent of the global electricity demand and that figure is expected to keep rising as the world increases usage of data-heavy technologies.

“It’s probably no surprise that everyone, whether you’re a business or a consumer, is concerned about reducing carbon emissions,” said Chris Talbott, the Google Cloud Sustainability Lead. “A lot of us think about the carbon emissions associated with our cars or with the electricity that powers our homes, but oftentimes we forget about the carbon emissions that come from the digital services that we use or the networks required to deliver that data.”

As a leader in sustainability, how can TELUS meet the energy demands of its customers while also protecting the environment? One way is through the company’s previously announced collaboration with Google Cloud. The two companies are working together to build a more sustainable world through technology and reduce TELUS’ carbon footprint, create value along the entire supply chain, and optimize industry solutions for social impact through data analytics and machine learning.

Taking a cloud first approach — reducing carbon emissions with green cloud computing

Google became carbon neutral in 2007 and has achieved 100 per cent renewable energy matching every year since 2017. Google has invested in renewable energy to match the electricity we use across our entire operations, including Google Cloud, meaning every workload that TELUS runs on Google Cloud has been matched with renewable energy purchases.

“The operational carbon footprint of running anything on Google Cloud is zero,” Talbott said. Also, by working with Google, TELUS gets the benefit of economies of scale using less electricity. Not only is TELUS leveraging Google data centers, it’s also relying on the digital collaboration made possible by Google Workspace to reduce the amount of travel required by employees attending meetings in different offices. Collaboration tools like Google Meet can reduce the carbon footprint of in-person conferences by 94 percent.

Google compensates for the environmental footprint of any electricity used in the data center and out to the edge network. “You can feel pretty good about using Google Meet because it’s carbon-neutral,” Talbott said.

Multiplier through sustainable partnerships — green cloud computing radiates out

By supporting TELUS in its environmental sustainability efforts, Google Cloud is also enabling TELUS to do the same for its various partnerships. For example, powered by Google Cloud’s infrastructure and data analytics capabilities, TELUS is partnering with Picacity (formerly NXN Digital) and Google Cloud to deliver an ecosystem of integrated smart technologies that enable cities to improve the lives of their residents.

From dynamic traffic signaling that reduces congestion and emissions, to data analytics that create smarter, more efficient city planning, the partnership is transforming the way municipalities operate in our increasingly digital world.The partnership is built on four foundational pillars of infrastructure and environmental sustainability, intelligent transportation, public safety and security, and health. In the case of intelligent transportation, this means sensors, cameras, and other devices are built into or near roads, sidewalks, and bike paths to provide data for innovative software to improve traffic flow in real time. The data can then foster informed decisions about infrastructure, city planning, fleet optimization, and public safety.

All of these environmental measures may seem small when compared with the enormity of the problem that is climate change, but as Talbott said, “Change begins with the small decisions we make every day such as paying attention to the practices of companies that we’ve come to rely on daily in the modern world. They may seem small and in the margins, but at scale, this is how we can make a real impact.”