Know Your Org’s Carbon Emission Per Workload with Active Assist
3445
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Last year, we analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across Google Cloud, and found over 600,000 gross kgCO2e in seemingly idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed — which would have a similar impact to planting almost 10,000 trees1. Today, we’re making it easy for you to identify if any of those idle workloads are yours, with new Active Assist sustainability recommendations.
Active Assist is a part of Google Cloud’s AIOps solution that uses data, intelligence, and machine learning to reduce cloud complexity and administrative toil. Under the Active Assist portfolio, we have products and tools like Policy Intelligence, Network Intelligence Center, Predictive Autoscaler, and a collection of Recommendations for various Google Cloud services — all focused on helping you achieve your operational goals. Today, we are broadening the scope of Active Assist to help you achieve your sustainability targets and reduce the carbon footprint of your workloads.
The carbon emissions associated with your cloud infrastructure can be a big part of your overall environmental footprint. Choosing to run on Google Cloud is a great first step — we’ve matched the energy used by our data centers with 100% renewable energy since 2017, and are committed to running our operations on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030. But once you’re running on Google Cloud, if you want to reduce the gross carbon emissions of your workload you can take action to optimize your usage.
Assessing the gross carbon impact of unattended projects
You can now estimate the gross carbon emissions you’ll save by removing these idle projects with Active Assist Unattended Project Recommender, which provides rich utilization insights for all the projects in your organization, and uses machine learning to identify ones that are idle and most likely unattended. The data points Active Assist surfaces as a part of its utilization insights now include the carbonFootprintDailyKgCO2 field, which allows you to estimate carbon emissions associated with any given project. Recommendations also estimate the impact of removing an idle project in terms of kilograms of CO2 reduced per month. The capability is available via the Recommender API, Recommendation Hub, the Carbon Footprint dashboard, and BigQuery export of recommendations, making it easy for you to integrate with your company’s existing tools and workflows.
Introducing the Carbon Sense suite
Increasing the sustainability of digital applications and infrastructure is a priority for 90% of global IT leaders2, and we’ll be continuing to invest across a number of product areas in Google Cloud, including AIOps features like Active Assist’s recommendations, to help you make progress towards your sustainability goals. To make it easy for you to find and consume these new features, we’re bundling our existing and future product work into the Carbon Sense suite — a collection of features that makes it easy to accurately report your carbon emissions, and reduce them. Active Assist joins products like Carbon Footprint, which provides you with the ability to understand and measure the gross carbon emissions of your Google Cloud usage, and our low-carbon signals, which help users choose cleaner regions to run their workloads, in the Carbon Sense suite. Stay tuned for more updates on Carbon Sense in the coming months.
Getting started with sustainability recommendations
To get started with Active Assist sustainability recommendations, check the Carbon Footprint dashboard and Recommendation Hub to review projects that may be idle and assess the carbon emissions associated with them. See recommendations in Google Cloud Console.
To view the recommendations, you will need IAM permissions for Unattended Project Recommender itself and permissions to view resources in a given organization.
You can also automatically export the recommendations from your Organization to BigQuery and then investigate any idle projects with DataStudio or Looker. Or, you can use Connected Sheets to use Google Workspace Sheets to interact with the data stored in BigQuery without having to write SQL queries.
As with any other Recommender, you can choose to opt out of data processing for your organization or your projects at any time by disabling the appropriate data groups in the Transparency & Control tab under Privacy & Security settings.
We hope you use Unattended Project Recommender to reduce the carbon footprint associated with your idle cloud resources, and can’t wait to hear your feedback and thoughts about this feature! Please feel free to reach us at active-assist-feedback@google.com. We also invite you to sign up for our Active Assist Trusted Tester Group if you would like to get early access to new features as they are developed.
1. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator
2. https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/it-leaders-research-21/sustainability-dl-cd.html
4707
Of your peers have already watched this video.
10:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
How Google’s Customer Data Platform Helps Retail Brands Offer Data-driven , Personalized CX
Retail companies need customer insights to deliver personalized experiences that impact revenue generation and cost savings. Watch how Google Cloud’s customer data platform helps brands integrate and build holistic view of data in silos to drive marketing and customer service success.
4896
Of your peers have already watched this video.
11:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Driving Business Transformation in Manufacturing, Industrial, and Transportation Using Google Cloud and AI/ML
Google Cloud partners closely with manufacturing, industrial, and transportation organizations to drive business transformation.
In this video, Mandeep Waraich, Head of Product – Industrial AI, Google Cloud, shares customer stories as well as Google Cloud’s differentiated AI products and solutions.
Waraich covers the current state of automation and industrial efficiency and how artificial intelligence is revealing an entirely new universe of possibilities.
He also speaks about Google Cloud’s approach to bringing these AI technologies to the market, and Google Cloud’s “deploy anywhere” methodology that helps achieve the impact of AI at a global enterprise scale.
Finding Your Favorite Google Cloud Product is Now Easy!
3321
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Welcome to a new way of exploring Google Cloud products. Finding your favorite products and discovering new ones requires a user interface that’s easy-to-use, clear, informative, and delightful. Google Cloud users have primarily used our side menu to navigate, but with almost one hundred products and growing, it’s safe to say our product list has outgrown the side menu. Over time, we have listened long and hard to feedback from Google Cloud users, who have highlighted challenges navigating the console to explore our products. We’ve heard over and over that it’s difficult and time consuming to scroll through the long list of products and remember what each one offers.
That’s why we created a new All products page to help you easily navigate to your favorite Google Cloud products. This page showcases all of the Google Cloud products as well as our key partner products in one, easy-to-navigate place. With one click, you can discover the right product that is right for your solution.
Explore all Google Cloud products
The page is organized into different categories, including Management (ie. IAM, Billing), Compute, Storage, Operations, Security, CI/CD, Artificial Intelligence, Support, and more. Quickly jump to the category of interest through the panel on the left, or you can scroll the entire page. Then you can click each product name to navigate directly to the product homepage. Each product listing also includes a short and long description so you can quickly understand what a product does and whether it fits your needs. This lets you compare categories at-a-glance, saving you the hassle of digging up product overviews elsewhere.
Under each product, you’ll also find a link to documentation and Quickstarts so you can understand it in more depth and try it out right away, removing the extra step of navigating to documentation in another tab.
Customize your navigation
To make navigation even easier, you can pin products directly from the All products page, and they will show up at the top of your side menu. You can also customize your navigation by reordering your pins in the side menu. That way, you can quickly access your most-used products directly from the side menu instead of scrolling through the panel or the All products page.
Save time and get more done faster
With the new All products page you can save time scrolling and cut straight to the good stuff – finding your products, discovering new ones, learning, and getting hands on. Try it out for yourself by heading to the Google Cloud Console. Click the side panel and click “View All products,” or on the home dashboard you’ll see a call out to try out the All products page.
If you have any feedback about this new experience, I want to hear! Reach out to me on Twitter at @stephr_wong or on Linkedin at stephrwong.
Google’s New Climate Innovation Challenge to Fight Energy Crisis and Build Climate Resilience
3422
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
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.
Held Back by Database Scalability, This Financial Services Company Switches to Google Cloud and Cloud Spanner
11589
Of your peers have already read this article.
4:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Azimut Group operates an international network of companies handling investment and asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance. Founded in Milan, Italy in 1988, Azimut Group today has branches in fifteen countries, including Brazil, China, and the USA.
“We have subsidiaries and manage funds all over the world,” explains Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager at Azimut Holding S.p.a. “That means that any technology that we put in place has to cover needs from many different countries.”
“When complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”
—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.
Azimut manages its funds with investment advisors who use information sourced from Bloomberg, Reuters and others. “They use a huge amount of data,” says Simone. “They work with spreadsheets, algorithms, formulae and they analyse data in minutes.” In finance, every second is crucial, which is why Azimut decided to develop a risk management dashboard that can process information even more quickly, then distribute it worldwide.
“When an advisor manages data, that data is used to make immediate decisions on funds, capital movements or whether to sell stock,” says Simone. “They have to be ready to make recommendations for any amount of data that comes to them. For our dashboard, that means that when additional information arrives or complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”
Generating insights at speed
Investors and investment managers make decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. For Azimut Group, information sourced through financial data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters provided only part of the data that the group required.
“We looked to collect information from a range of different providers,” explains Simone, “then analyse it to develop a predictive algorithm that could work faster than an advisor stationed at the terminal. We set ourselves the challenge to try to manipulate that data to add new insights into our matrix, so that every one of our branches across the world can see risk information about the funds in real-time.”
“We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling. With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it.
—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.
The first cloud provider Azimut used to build its system struggled to scale quickly to meet different kinds of data challenges. “If we wanted to add more cores, that was fine,” says Simone. “But the previous cloud provider made it complicated to raise the amount of space in a database infrastructure and scale up to demand. Scaling up for more in-depth analysis would take a day, and our need was immediate.”
That’s why Azimut switched one year ago to Google Cloud Platform to run the 150 VMs on its risk analysis platform. “We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling,” says Simone. “With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it. Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”
The infrastructure of Azimut’s solution handles around 800TB of data per month, and Google’s global network of servers and high-speed connections ensure that it gets to where it’s most needed by the most direct route. Impressed by the speed, security and availability of Google Cloud Platform, Azimut has moved its intranet on to Google Cloud Platform, too, eliminating the need for staff to login with VPNs.
“Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”
—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.
Driving ahead with Noovle
For Azimut, migrating the risk management dashboard is the latest of many Google product collaborations with cloud consultancy Noovle. “Everything started five years ago,” says Simone, “when Noovle assisted us in migrating to Gmail from our on-premise email solution. From G Suite to Google Cloud Platform, we’ve had a great relationship. Noovle provides consultancy services, support for mobility, and external advisors who work on our premises, such as when they trained us how to broadcast our meetings on Google Hangouts. As an independent company, we know we can trust them for transparent advice. All they care about is the best way to get a job done and to help us reach our goals.”
New app, new customers
In a business case comparison, Google Cloud Platform cost Azimut 35% less to run than the previous cloud provider. Now the group is building a major new mobile application on Google App Engine to be released in 2018.
“The new mobile application will allow customers to trade directly, without human advisors, by proposing different investment solutions depending on targets the customers set,” says Simone. “So if a customer aims to make money with investments, they enter their relevant personal information and we carry out the necessary regulatory checks and suggest what they could buy. The entire project will be based on Google Cloud Platform, so customers can control their investments through the app while we manage the fund, using Google Cloud Spanner on the backend.”
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
The Tech Tightrope: How the U.S. State & Local Agencies Strive to Balance between Innovation and Budget
State and local government (SLG) agencies are reeling from a combination of unbudgeted COVID-related expenses and reduced tax revenue caused by unemployment and business closures. Any way you look at it, the situation is challenging. To understand how SLG agencies are coping, Google Cloud collaborated with MeriTalk to survey 200
A Record Breaking Calculation: 100 Trillion Digits of π on Google Cloud!
Records are made to be broken. In 2019, we calculated 31.4 trillion digits of π — a world record at the time. Then, in 2021, scientists at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons calculated another 31.4 trillion digits of the constant, bringing the total up to 62.8 trillion
AI-powered Business Messages for Timely, Engaging and Helpful Conversations with Customers
Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior. 45% of users are
Being Cloud-native Means Sustainability and Growth-native for Nuuly!
They say black never goes out of style. It’s something the team at Nuuly, URBN’s digital rental and resale business, know well. And it’s not just true of the company’s garments but their gadgets, too. “I was having an offhand conversation with a UX designer recently,” Rebecca Sandercock, Nuuly’s strategy
