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.”

At Google, we believe that when it comes to solving a problem as big and urgent as climate change, we get more done when we collaborate. From beekeepers in Germany to urban foresters in Los Angeles, we support the work of nonprofits, scientists, and organizations that are working to mitigate the impact of climate change globally, and increase communities’ resilience to its effects.

To this end, we are proud to launch the Climate Innovation Challenge, which will provide Google Cloud research credits to advance a better understanding of climate resilience and promising solutions to address urgent climate challenges. I’m excited about this launch. We need to get smarter about the inevitable impact of our changing climate and how it will reshape our lives, supply chains, and business. Sustainability is a business-critical agenda, and we need intelligent technologies, leadership, and collaboration to drive industry transformations and reach a net-zero world.

The innovation and scale required to solve the toughest climate challenges will come from technology. At Google Cloud, we’re working across industries to increase climate resilience, applying cloud technology to help solve key challenges in the fight against climate change. Nonprofits, scientists, and organizations will be key in developing new research and innovations that will help us better understand how we can accelerate action on climate.

Through the new program, individual climate researchers in higher education and not-for-profit research organizations can apply for Google Cloud credit grants of up to $100,000 to accelerate their projects with Google’s state-of-the-art, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services, from Google Earth Engine (EE) to Google Public Datasets like the one from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We will work with specialist partners in environmental organizations, agriculture, and carbon reduction to help evaluate proposals and select participants. Our first partner is the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). Alongside the cloud credits, we will also provide researchers with access to technical training and mentoring, to help jumpstart their work.

From idea to insight to impact

In 2021, researchers at 500 universities in 47 countries received Google Cloud research credit grants. Others received funding through the Google Cloud Research Innovators Program, which promotes collaboration among a global cohort of scientists and provides them with professional opportunities and technical expertise. Here are some of the Research Innovators who have already advanced their climate research with Google Cloud:

• At CalTech Tapio Schneider and his team built Climate Machine, a next-generation open-source Earth System Model that will integrate more earth and atmospheric data than ever before.
• At UCLA, Bo Zhou uses EE for remote sensor modeling to help bureaus of land management make conservation decisions.
• At the University of New England, James Brinkhoff conducts spatial and temporal analysis for agriculture crop modeling and water use with data from EE.
• At Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Richard Fernandes is developing the LEAF toolbox to map and assess vegetation with satellite data from EE.
• At the University of Toronto, Yuhong He uses EE to map changes occurring in natural and managed ecosystems systems using remote sensing, machine learning, and ecosystem modelings.
• At UCLA, Henry Houskeeper uses machine learning with EE’s satellite imagery to automate detection of kelp forests.
• At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Jonghyun Lee conducts numerical modeling for water resources with Google Colab.
• At Technical University in Dublin, Santos Fernández Noguerol runs functions to collect weather data from governmental agencies, then automatically stores them in Google Cloud Storage buckets for future spatial analysis.
• At the University of Colorado at Denver, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani conducts data science projects with applications for Intelligent Transportation and Earth Sciences.

To apply for a Climate Innovation Challenge grant, click here and include “Climate Innovation Challenge” as the first line of your proposal. We will announce additional focus areas, partnerships, and recipients throughout the year. Click here to learn more about Google Cloud sustainability.

For the fourth consecutive year, Gartner has positioned Google as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (formerly titled as Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service upto 2014 Infrastructure as a Service, or (IaaS).

With our customers and communities adjusting to new ways of working and doing business, Google Cloud has remained focused on building services and platforms that help you be more resilient and derive even more value from your cloud infrastructure. We believe Gartner’s analysis and recognition gives our customers the confidence needed to choose Google as the platform for customer-centric innovation. Here are just a few recent examples.

Ready for the most demanding, mission-critical workloads

Our enterprise-ready cloud provides you the uptime, performance, and scale to run even your most demanding workloads. Examples of recent launches: 

• The largest single-node GPU-enabled VM in the industry with up to 16 NVIDIA A100 instances so that our customers can run their ML workloads 
• The only cloud to support scale-out out 96TB SAP HANA so that customers can confidently bring their most critical workloads to GCP
• Strategic partnerships with leading partners like SAP 
• Several regions and an expanded global network footprint including new subsea cables, Firmina, Dunant, Blue and Raman
• High bandwidth 50/75/100Gbps networking for VMs
• Persistent Disk Extreme (block storage) with 120K IOPS 
• Filestore High Scale scale-out NFS for HPC

Saves you money

Save money with a transparent and innovative approach to pricing and intelligent recommendations. In the past year, we’ve launched several innovations to help you save costs:

• Tau VMs, which offer the best price-performance among leading clouds for scale-out workloads 
• Machine-learning-driven predictive auto-scaling for VMs and GKE Autopilot, enabling infrastructure to scale up and down as needed with minimal waste 
• Standard network tier which routes traffic over the internet for cost optimization 

Open

We have a long history of leadership in open technologies—from projects like Kubernetes, the industry standard in container orchestration and interoperability, to TensorFlow, a platform to help anyone develop and train machine learning models. Here are a few recent improvements we’ve made to ensure your cloud is an open cloud: 

• Extended Anthos to bare metal and Microsoft Azure to support customers who want a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud posture. 
• Announced a new network dataplane for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos that supports eBPF, an open-source Linux kernel technology optimized for Kubernetes. 
• Google Kubernetes Engine (based on the Kubernetes standard) received the top overall score based on 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine.

Secure

Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure uses layers of security to protect your data with advanced technologies and operations, keeping your organization secure and compliant. For example, we offer:

• Confidential VMs and Confidential GKE with in-memory encryption and encryption keys controlled by you, with a single checkbox
• Enhanced security for Cloud Run
• Strong support against DDoS attacks. In 2017, our infrastructure absorbed the largest-known DDoS attack at 2.5Tbps with no impact to customers. 

Sustainable

Google Cloud helps customers transform their business sustainably. We operate the cleanest cloud in the industry to make sure your digital footprint doesn’t leave a carbon one. Here are a few proof points:

• Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and for the past four years has matched 100% of the electricity we consume globally with wind and solar purchases. Everything you run on Google Cloud is net carbon neutral. 
• We continue to innovate towards greater energy efficiency in our data centers, and compared with five years ago, now deliver around seven times as much computing power with the same amount of electrical power.
• Recently we announced new features to help customers reduce the carbon footprint of their applications and infrastructure, including a region picker to help with architecture decisions, and low carbon indicators in the Google Cloud Console.  

Supporting our customers

Most importantly, our field organizations and partner organizations work with a singular focus to ensure customer success. This has made Google Cloud the fastest growing hyperscaler, with a rapidly expanding customer base across all geos and industries.

Since launching Customer Care last year, we consolidated and simplified the post-sales engagement with customers, increased the support channels, created an API to allow programmatic case creation, and combined product specific support into a single package for all of Google Cloud. Enterprises with Customer Care continue to report high levels of satisfaction with their focused technical account managers (TAMs), helping them get the most business value out of Google Cloud.

We are committed to sustaining and accelerating the pace of customer-centric innovation. You can download a complimentary copy of the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services on our website. 

Join us to learn much more about Google Cloud at the upcoming Google Cloud Next ‘21 digital conference.  

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services,  Raj Bala | Bob Gill | Dennis Smith | Kevin Ji | David Wright, 27 July 2021
Gartner, Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine,  Tony Iams | Traverse Clayton | Megan Bain, 12 April 2021
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}