To fuel the breakthroughs of the future, today’s researchers need easy access to the most innovative cloud technologies. That’s why we are delighted to announce the latest expansion of Google Cloud research credits beyond its previous scope of government and academic research institutions to researchers at nonprofit institutions. This initiative is part of our ongoing efforts to make the advantages of cloud research available to more people everywhere–and to drive more discoveries faster. 

To serve researchers outside of academia, we are now offering nonprofit institutions access to Google’s research credit program. Leading centers of scientific knowledge like the New York Genome Center, Scripps Research Institute, the Vector Institute in Toronto, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) have already benefited from the efficiencies of managing and analyzing their datasets on Google Cloud.

Michael Schmitz, Director of Engineering at AI2, reports that “Google Cloud has been essential for our research program. While we have an on-premise installation for custom hardware, the ability to use Google Cloud for isolated workstations (where researchers always have guaranteed access to a development environment) and bursting with increased need (such as our summer intern surge or a hyperparameter tuning just before our deadline) has been a critical part of conducting our research.”

Also, to better support Ph.D. students, we are updating the terms of Google Cloud credits for use toward advanced research. Now, Ph.D. students can apply for up to $1,000 grants that are renewable over the five years of their programs. We know that the researchers of the future need the best resources now.

Hassaan Maan, Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto/Vector Institute, says “when the pandemic started, I began working on a web-based platform to help researchers analyze genome sequences of the COVID-19 virus in real time and compare with data from labs around the world. Deploying the Covid Genotyping Tool (CGT) platform was challenging, as I had minimal experience hosting web applications and we required a scalable and fine-tuned deployment. Google Cloud’s comprehensive user interface and thorough documentation made for a seamless deployment, and I was able to get the platform up and running in less than two weeks. Google Cloud was a huge factor in the success of this project, and I hope to be able to use it further during my Ph.D. studies.”

To ramp up your own research project with Google Cloud, apply now for free credits in selected countries. To supplement your own learning on Google Cloud, sign up to earn four Google Cloud skills badges that you can share on your social platforms.

With Google Cloud, Autonom8 can run a platform that accelerates and streamlines customer journeys in a scalable, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure, while using advanced optical character recognition to enable intelligent document processing.

About Autonom8

Headquartered in the United States and India, Autonom8 has built a low-code SaaS platform that allows businesses to digitize customer-facing workflows. The business aims to help clients reduce costs and improve interactions with their customers through automation and enablement of customer journeys.

Industries: Technology

Location: United States and India

Google Cloud results:

• Increased margins by up to 30% by switching from a home-grown OCR system to Cloud Vision AI
• Enables one DevOps team member to manage up to 30 customers
• Provides real-time information about customer journeys to enable businesses to respond quickly and accurately
• Ensures use of its platform with containerization in customers’ private data centers
• Reduced operating costs by up to 20% with localized scalability and architecture through GKE

Just as cars are evolving to become autonomous, smart and self-driving, enterprises can gain self-awareness, an ability to learn and an ability to adapt. This is the value proposition put forward by Autonom8, an India- and United States-based enterprise workflow management software business. “We provide a low-code, high-intelligence customer journey automation SaaS platform,” explains ​​Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8.

The Autonom8 platform includes components, such as A8Studio, a drag and drop location from which clients can create customer journeys, a chat platform that enables clients to create chatbots, and an analytics module. “With our platform and services, businesses can reduce costs and improve interactions with their customers by applying automation to accelerate and provide better customer journeys,” adds Padmanabhan.

Demand for Autonom8 is being driven by the changing customer demands of enterprises, including the expectation to interact with them over multiple channels, and the rising cost of building software with experienced developers. These trends place enterprises under growing pressure to increase the productivity of the people they do have, particularly those who are less technically inclined. In addition, changing consumer habits, regulations and the emergence of new technologies mean customer journeys cannot remain static and need to evolve.

Developing a microservices-based SaaS platform

From the start, Autonom8 planned to deliver a SaaS platform and initially deployed on a multinational cloud service, chosen due to the team’s familiarity with its products and the availability of credits. However, the company’s decision to opt for a microservices architecture that enables individual services to scale independently while running in a containerized environment, demanded high-quality container orchestration. To optimize cost, scalability and performance, Autonom8 began evaluating Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

The business then completed a side-by-side comparison between Google Cloud and its incumbent provider of compute, storage and other services. Google Cloud fared favorably, with Vision AI in particular providing powerful machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, supporting a key use case for Autonom8.

In addition, many of Autonom8’s clients at the time are financial institutions in India, and legally required to retain data within the country’s borders. Google Cloud’s global network and local presence means the business could fulfill this requirement easily.

“We decided to evaluate Google Cloud, particularly GKE, from two perspectives. One, from a security perspective, as we sell to banks that audit our platform, and two, as a failover between regions because downtime costs money. We found it a compelling solution.”

— Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8

A seamless move to Google Cloud

Autonom8 began deploying on Google Cloud in 2018, with its architecture comprising storage, compute, serverless, container management and orchestration, and Vision AI. “We looked at our scripting with the previous provider, and using the Google Cloud documentation available online, educated ourselves over a few weeks before moving pieces of our architecture step by step to Google Cloud,” says Padmanabhan. “We did not run into any major issues. It was pretty simple, with our experienced engineers training others in the product.”

According to the CTO, the business had two options when moving to Google Cloud. Autonom8 could either install raw virtual machines and effectively create its own virtualized data center, or rely on managed services for functions such as memory store, registration and authentication to save time and resources over the long term. Autonom8 opted for the latter and has transitioned fully to Google Cloud, with the number of cloud products and services in its architecture rising from five to about 15. While each product and service performs a key role in the delivery of Autonom8’s products and services, Padmanabhan nominates GKE, Vision AI and Cloud SQL as providing the greatest value to the business.

Scalability, real-time monitoring and intelligent document processing at low cost

With GKE, the business can now scale the nodes or containers specific to each microservice in the event traffic to a particular client surges, due to a rebate or promotion. “Through the combination of the architecture and localized scalability we achieve with GKE, we are reducing our operating costs by up to 20%,” says Padmanabhan.

Running an open source TimescaleDB on Postgres in Cloud SQL enables Autonom8 to give its clients the ability to monitor customer journey information in real time. An example of a journey is applying for a bank loan. The customer must take steps including providing income, tax and other financial details that the bank then appraises to help make a decision on the application. “The moment someone applies for a loan, for example, a bank knows about it and can monitor for fraud, bottlenecks, or other abnormalities, and immediately route to a remediation workflow,” explains Padmanabhan. “Cloud SQL enables us to maintain transactional logging and provide real-time data to our dashboards.”

After evaluating alternative services, including developing a home-grown OCR engine, the business turned to Cloud Vision AI to manage the intelligent document processing that comprises much of its transactional volume. “Vision AI is significantly better than the alternatives and the cost of maintaining our version did not make sense, because Google Cloud continues to make improvements over time that enable us to deliver more and more accurate results to our customers,” says Padmanabhan. “Switching from our home-grown service to Vision AI has enabled us to increase our profit margins by up to 30%.”

“Through the combination of the architecture and localized scalability we achieve with Google Kubernetes Engine, we are reducing our operating costs by up to 20%.”

—Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8

Supporting client demands and improving developer efficiency

Google Cloud also enables Autonom8 to meet the demands of businesses that want to run its platform within their own private data centers. “We can undertake the build within Google Cloud and ship our containers to compatible hosts within those clients’ data centers,” explains Padmanabhan. “With our previous provider, we could create containers, but these would not run properly within those data centers.”

Furthermore, Google Cloud documentation and online resources help Autonom8 reduce the training needed for new developers to become productive, with the Google Cloud learning curve taking up just 10% of the overall onboarding cycle.

The organization spends the equivalent of just 3% of its overall annual revenue on DevOps, measured as DevOps Utility Ratio, while the cloud cost of revenue is about USD 1 for every USD 6 in annual recurring revenue, measured as Cloud Utility Ratio. “These two metrics are about what we can do with the people we have,” explains Padmanabhan. “Our current ratio implies that one DevOps person can handle approximately 30 customers. This is made possible by the tools we have, and the comprehensive support from Google Cloud in terms of security patches, intelligent alerts, resource overloading, and more.”

Google Cloud also provides the flexibility for Autonom8 to accommodate the varying service levels required by individual customers based on factors, such as the impact of downtime, as the business can failover seamlessly between regions to mitigate the impact of any issues that may occur.

“Our current ratio implies that one DevOps person can handle approximately 30 customers. This is made possible by the tools we have, and the comprehensive support from Google Cloud in terms of security patches, intelligent alerts, resource overloading, and more.”

—Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8

Integrating Google Workspace with Autonom8 to deliver new capabilities

Autonom8 relies on Google Workspace for communication, collaboration and other workplace productivity requirements, growing its footprint from Gmail when the employee population was four or five, to a range of products including Sheets and Drive as the business grew. “It became natural to use the capabilities in Google Workspace as we matured,” says Padmanabhan. “One of the most interesting capabilities was our ability to integrate Google Workspace into our platform. For example, when someone is running a workflow, they can add data from a Sheet. We’ve added Google Workspace authentication capabilities into our products as well.”

“Everyone is using shared links to Drive and I really like the granular permissions structure,” he adds. “I can open up folders to clients while keeping an internal space within the business to ensure security and privacy.”

With Google Cloud, Autonom8 is now poised to continue growing its business and adding new features and capabilities for clients. “We are extremely excited at the opportunity to step up our offering to clients with Google Cloud,” concludes Padmanabhan.

Google Cloud Results

• Improves performance and reliability, enabling Pantheon to serve larger customers
• Supports 99.95% uptime across 200,000+ websites
• Reduces cloud infrastructure costs by 40%
• Enables future analytics offerings based on machine learning and big data analytics

Nearly every business needs a web presence—but the vast majority of companies don’t want to be involved in the technical aspects of coding, deployment, hosting, security, and scaling websites. To stay focused on the business value and creative aspects of their websites and avoid managing infrastructure, thousands of companies turn to Pantheon, a website operations and hosting platform that powers over 200,000 websites.

Pantheon promises its customers speed, reliability, and scalability plus world-class collaboration and workflow tools. For five years, the company was able to deliver high service levels in all three areas running its platform on bare-metal virtual cloud servers. However, as its business grew, network links began to saturate under heavy load, risking instability. As Pantheon’s business evolved to focus on servicing some of the largest websites in the world, the company wanted to partner with a more innovative cloud services provider.

“We wanted a partner that could give us what we offer to our own customers: the flexibility to scale smoothly and consume services without building them from scratch,” says David Strauss, CTO, Pantheon. “It was time to move beyond custom containers on managed VMs and extend our cloud strategy to include next-generation technologies for container management and analytics.”

Pantheon evaluated several leading cloud providers and determined that Google Cloud Platform would be the best fit for its business and customers. Engineering had the final say, running a battery of functionality and performance tests at the storage, database, and web server layers.

“In every test our engineers did, Google Cloud Platform came in as better, faster, and more cost effective than the competition,” says Niall Hayes, COO, Pantheon. “We compared MariaDB to Google Cloud SQL and Cassandra to Google Bigtable, and container density improved from 250 to 400 containers per server.”

Migrating 200,000+ sites in 2 weeks

Pantheon wanted to make the transition transparent to its customers, so a fast and smooth migration to Google Cloud Platform was essential. With help from Google, Pantheon completed the migration quickly and moved 500TB of databases, code, and files with zero customer impact.

“We migrated over 200,000 websites to Google Cloud Platform in 2 weeks, including 50,000 that are heavily trafficked and actively developed, and nobody noticed,” says Josh Koenig, Co-founder and Head of Products at Pantheon. “The speed was incredible. There was no downtime, and we filed no additional support tickets with Google during the entire process.”

The platform for platforms

For its content management system runtime environment, Pantheon runs its own homegrown container management technology on Google Compute Engine. To automate scaling for other core services such as its routing layer and distributed file system, it uses Google Kubernetes Engine for cluster management and orchestration.

“Google is the clear leader in Kubernetes and container management, which aligns very well with our open source values and our vision for the future,” says Niall. “With Google Kubernetes Engine we get better resource efficiency, and automated operations and autoscaling take a lot of administration off our plate.”

In addition to smooth scaling, Pantheon and its customers benefit from improved performance and reliability thanks to the high-quality private network offered by Google.

Further, the Google partnership with Fastly enables direct connectivity to Google Cloud Platform to improve performance for edge caching. As a result of these improvements, Pantheon raised its availability service level agreement (SLA) from 99.9% to 99.95% and can now take on even larger customers.

“Google’s network topology, both locally and globally, performs better and more reliably than competing solutions, making Google Cloud Platform the best choice for us and for our customers,” says David. “Google beats any other cloud provider as the best platform-for-platforms.”

Adds Josh: “Google has unbelievable technology around persistence and replication between zones and regions, and that is not something we could find anywhere else. This allows us to offer advanced disaster recovery and failover services to our customers.”

Strengthening customer relationships

Pantheon uses Google BigQuery, a fully managed, cloud-based data warehouse, to integrate with Fastly and analyze website traffic on behalf of its customers. Previously, Pantheon was unable to ingest edge data quickly enough from Fastly, limiting its ability to identify issues and provide the best customer service. Today, Fastly streams logs in real time into Google BigQuery for analysis, giving Pantheon a wealth of insights.

“We use Google BigQuery to identify customers that have outgrown their infrastructure or need to right-size for business growth,” says David. “We can have proactive conversations and add a lot of value to the relationships. Soon, we plan to make Google BigQuery available to our customers so they can better understand their own traffic.”

Adds Niall: “Google Cloud Platform is more data-oriented than other cloud providers, making it a better match for our needs and our customers’ strategic initiatives.”

Integrated, granular security

Pantheon appreciates that Google Cloud services are built for public cloud, with granular security as a core design and development requirement. Employees simply use their G Suite credentials to gain access to Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and services.

“We’ve been a G Suite shop for years because of the paperless collaboration benefits,” says Josh. “G Suite connects our distributed company, and it was very natural to use those same logins for Google Cloud Platform.”

Staying competitive and productive

Moving to Google Cloud Platform opens up new possibilities for services Pantheon can offer to customers in the future, including machine learning and big data analytics, to give them a more complete view of how digital experiences are driving their businesses. Internally, engineers can move faster, do more effective capacity planning, and provide better service as Pantheon moves its products upmarket.

Pantheon expected to save 20% on cloud infrastructure costs by moving to Google Cloud Platform, but was able to double that savings with resource optimization and managed services.

“Since moving to Google Cloud Platform, our platform is more secure, reliable, and scalable than ever. We reduced our cloud infrastructure costs by 40%, and our customers’ sites run 45% faster than industry benchmarks,” says Niall. “Our engineers are Google fans for a reason—they’re happier, more efficient, and more productive on Google Cloud Platform.”

The ability to quickly introduce and evolve payment options for products or services is essential for businesses, as nearly 50% of consumers who can’t use a preferred payment method abandon their purchase. At the same time, gift cards, branded credit cards and rewards programs are critical tools that companies rely on to build more loyal and lasting customer relationships. With Highnote, companies have an all-in-one embedded platform to quickly create payment cards and wallets, offer innovative rewards programs and credit, and provide sustainable wage access. It is the first platform that allows enterprises to make card issuance an embedded capability of their product without creating an entirely new (and costly) organization.

Creating an exciting fintech future with Google Cloud

When thinking about building the industry’s first end-to-end embedded finance platform, we quickly realized Highnote would only be successful if it enabled companies to truly innovate and quickly roll out new programs. To do so, the platform would have to be built on scalable infrastructure capable of securely delivering services with speed and reliability while offering easy access to actionable Big Data analytics.

Working closely with the team at the Google for Startups Cloud Program, we successfully implemented Google Cloud as a versatile, future-proof foundation of our platform—and built Highnote from the ground up in just one year. Highnote’s GraphQL-based API platform reinvents the card issuance process. Utilizing the developer-friendly Highnote platform, product and engineering teams at digital enterprises of all sizes can easily and efficiently embed virtual and physical payment cards (commercial and consumer prepaid, debit, credit, and charge), ledger, and wallet capabilities into their existing products. This creates compelling value while growing revenue and building a unique and differentiated brand.

We leverage Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to create a unified and highly secure PCI DSS-compliant platform with GraphQL APIs that provide rapid and flexible money transfers. This gives us a reliable platform to deliver and test customer experiences, respond to outcomes, and make better business decisions. Powered by Google Cloud, our data models and application domains are architected to support configurations and customizations that unlock a diverse set of new use cases across industries, including retail, travel, logistics, healthcare, and sustainable wage access programs.

We are especially proud to highlight our enablement of sustainable wage access, as this program helps the 50% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Embedding this program within payroll systems provides a viable alternative to payday lenders who often charge exorbitant fees and interest rates. In real world terms, this means Highnote helps people access earned wages before payday at no cost.

The other customer we just went live with was Tillful, and their Tillful card helps small businesses build their business credit. This program will help new and emerging businesses as well as underrepresented owners of small businesses by making the credit ecosystem accessible. Highnote’s platform is designed to support multiple use cases across many industries. For example, we also help the trucking and logistics companies to develop fleet and fuel cards, and spend management companies who are looking to uplevel offerings.

Delivering high-performance transactions with Cloud Spanner

Building one of the world’s most modern card platforms would not have been possible without Cloud Spanner. We needed a solution that would keep our massive petabyte databases from buckling and more securely deliver data anywhere in the U.S. Cloud Spanner does all this and more, as it routinely connects purchases from millions of customers to tens of thousands of vendors. We also wanted to reduce overhead by 80% by eliminating manual sharding, partitioning, and optimization of data. These processes are automatic with Cloud Spanner so we can operate at maximum efficiency.

We specifically selected Cloud Spanner as our distributed SQL database management and storage solution because of its outstanding availability, zero plan maintenance downtime, security certifications, and the highest consistency guarantees of any scale-out database. We continue to optimally scale without any downtime or compromises to the integrity or security of our data. This is key for us because we can address unexpected spikes, long-term growth, and new services without costly rearchitecting.

Highnote is designed to perform over billions of transactions on Cloud Spanner, and the average latency of less than 250 ms is a testament to the robustness of Google Cloud services.

Enabling actionable customer insights at scale

BigQuery is another key Google Cloud solution that we rely on to deliver deep insights and visibility for our customers on a highly secure and scalable platform. When building Highnote, we knew we needed a cost-effective solution that excelled at data analytics. This is particularly critical for accurately measuring the performance—whether profitability or efficacy—of any program or card.

Using BigQuery, we successfully run analytics at scale with as much as a 34% lower three-year TCO than cloud data warehouse alternatives. Over the past year, BigQuery has enabled our customers to unlock data-rich capabilities with a ledger that tracks money in real time and serves up complete debit and credit entries for every event across their accounts. Companies also access real time balances for revenue, fees, customer accounts, and available funds management without complicated spreadsheets.

To quickly and efficiently roll out Highnote to our customers, we needed a simple way to automatically deploy, scale, and manage Kubernetes. When selecting a Kubernetes management tool, our top priorities were rapidly spinning up and securely scaling across multiple sites. As part of Google Cloud’s expansive ecosystem, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) was the top choice due to seamless and automatic Kubernetes scaling and management.

We quickly got off the ground with single-click clusters and scaled up by using the high-availability control plane—including multi-zonal and regional clusters—to easily accommodate multiple active-active regions (which other solutions cannot do). As an embedded finance platform, stringent security protocols were obviously a key consideration for us. GKE is secure by default and runs routine vulnerability scans of container images and data encryption. Further security assistance was provided by Google Cloud partners 66degrees and DoiT International to help us rapidly validate VPC PCI compliance and ensure the uninterrupted performance of thousands of transactions per second.

Winning in fintech with Google for Startups

Building the industry’s first end-to-end embedded finance platform would have been extremely challenging without the extensive Google Cloud support. By working closely with our Startups team and Google partners, we had access to Google Cloud services to more easily validate VPC PCI compliance and address most issues before we exited stealth. Their responsiveness is incredible and stands out compared to support services we’ve seen from other technology providers.

Our participation in the Google for Startups Cloud program has been instrumental to our success. With Google Cloud, we are making embedded payments accessible to our customers without a big budget price tag. By doing so, we help unleash the creativity of emerging enterprises by enabling them to innovate with payment services and rewards programs to reach new markets and customers. If companies can dream, we can enable them to realize it on Highnote. Our platform really is that flexible. We’re excited where we can go and grow with Google Cloud.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.