Serverless for Startups, the Best Way to Succeed: Expert Says
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As Google Cloud has become a choice for more startups, I’ve experienced an increase in founders asking how they should think about cloud services. Though each startup is different and requirements may vary across industries and regions, I’ve seen a few core best practices that help startups to succeed—as well as several traps to avoid.
For example, If you go with a public cloud provider, you’re ideally not starting from ground zero like you would running your own data center, but it’s important not to introduce similar complexity in a virtualized environment. Just because you’re using public cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean you want to manage it.
Instead, you want to leverage platforms that abstract away complexity so your team can focus on delivering value to customers. That’s where serverless comes in. Serverless platforms are fully managed by the provider, offering automatic scaling for workloads, as well as provisioning, configuring, patching, and management of servers and clusters. Freed from these resource-intensive tasks, your technical talent can focus on the things that differentiate your business, not on IT curation.
This applies to not only running stateless applications, but also managing and analyzing data. You should be collecting data points about which features are most popular on your platform, what people are buying, the types of activities that help your customers get their jobs done, and so on. This information is essential to building and executing on a product roadmap that will serve your customers. However, it’s not enough to collect this data, you need to make your data accessible, secure, and easy for your team to analyze—so where do you run and host it?
On Google Cloud, this is where options like Spanner and Cloud SQL can play a large role, as can BigQuery for analysis. You won’t have to worry about standing up infrastructure or patching servers—you can just stream your data to our data management platforms, where it’s available whenever someone needs to run a query. By leveraging a serverless architecture, your startup can be data-driven without having to invest in the traditional complexity of database administration and management—and that can significantly change your playing field.
Serverless is just one of the factors you should consider as you build out your tech stack. To hear my thoughts on a range of other topics relevant to startups — such as security, cloud credits, and the differences among managed services — check out the below video or visit our Build and Grow page.
VMware Engine’s Exciting New Updates: A Google Cloud Journey
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IT leaders today are being asked to simultaneously support their company’s infrastructure, find opportunities for growth, and meet their goals with fewer resources and smaller budgets than before. Recently we highlighted three customers who are leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine to achieve these goals while lowering their TCO and transforming their organization.
It’s because of these successful customer outcomes that we have been awarded the 2023 VMware Cloud Innovation and SaaS Transformation partner achievement award for delivering solutions that accelerate customers’ digital transformation journey. We’re honored to receive this award and continue to stay focused on delivering tremendous value to our customers.
In the past few months, we’ve also made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Today’s post provides a recap of the latest milestones that make it easier for you to migrate and run your vSphere workloads in a cloud-first, enterprise-class VMware environment in Google Cloud.
Back in September 2022, we announced a number of updates including the preview of API/CLI support (which is now available). In February 2023, we also talked about how to use NetApp CVS as datastores for VMware Engine.
Key updates this time around include:
Availability of VMware Engine in Delhi, Santiago and Milan regions: This brings the availability of VMware Engine to 17 regions worldwide, each supporting 4 9’s of uptime SLA for clusters 5 or more, serving the needs of our regional and multi-national customers. In addition, we have also added a second zone in the London region.
Filestore datastore support for VMware Engine: Generally Available in all VMware Engine regions, you can use Filestore High Scale and Enterprise tier instances as external NFS datastores for VMware Engine nodes. Filestore is VMware certified as an NFS datastore with VMware Engine. You can size compute and storage capacity independently to meet your workload requirements for your storage-intensive VMs. You can also leverage vSAN for low-latency VM requirements and scale Filestore from TBs to PBs for the capacity hungry VMs. If interested in this feature, please contact your Google account team.
Stretched private clouds: These private clouds stretch across two data zones and a witness zone all within the same Google Cloud region. Stretched private clouds use vSphere and vSAN stretched clusters to provide compute and storage high availability against zone-level failures. This capability is now available in Frankfurt and Sydney regions. Learn more here.
Zerto solution version 9.5u1 support: This recovery solution allows critical infrastructure and application virtual machines (VMs) to be replicated continuously from your on-premises vCenter to your private cloud. Learn more about setting up Zerto here.
Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (GCBDR): GCBDR is available to protect applications running in VMware Engine, and can be managed within the Google Cloud Console. We recently launched GCBDR under Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service simplifying customers’ purchasing and support experience.
vTPM support: Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds now support the addition of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 virtual cryptoprocessor to a virtual machine. You can add vTPMs to VMs by following VMware instructions or upgrading your existing VMs to include a vTPM. You can read more about this in the VMware blog.
This brings us to the end of our updates this time. For the latest updates to the service, please bookmark our release notes.
Israeli Government Chooses Google Cloud to Power its Cloud-based ‘Project Nimbus’
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Google Cloud today announced that it has been selected by the Israeli government to provide public cloud services to help address the country’s challenges within the public sector, including in healthcare, transportation, and education.
Following a thorough public tender process, Google Cloud was selected for this four-phase project known as “Project Nimbus.” The agreement will deliver cloud services to all government entities from across the state, including ministries, authorities, and government-owned companies. The agreement is also available for higher education, health maintenance organizations and municipalities. The project will run for an initial period of 7 years, and the Israeli government may extend the engagement for up to 23 years in total.
As part of the agreement, Google Cloud will work with the public sector on the formulation of best practices for cloud migration, integration and migration to the cloud, and optimisation of cloud services. Google Cloud will also provide training to the country’s technical government employees and senior leaders to enhance digital skills. Google Cloud announced last month that it will open a Google Cloud region in Israel to make it easier for customers to serve their own users faster, more reliably and securely. The region in Israel will be available to serve not only the government and related entities but also private commercial companies, just like any other Google Cloud region.
The Accountant General of Israel, Mr. Yali Rothenberg, congratulates Google on their winning bid in the first tender of “Project Nimbus”, a multi-year flagship project led by the Israeli Government Procurement Administration, that is intended to provide a comprehensive framework for the provision of cloud services to the Government of Israel.
We are delighted to have been chosen to help digitally transform Israel. This builds on the continued success we are seeing with the public sector globally.
Google Cloud region in Israel
In April, we announced that a new Google Cloud region is coming to Israel to make it easier for customers to serve their own users faster, more reliably and securely. Our global network of Google Cloud regions are the foundation of the cloud infrastructure we’re building to support our customers in the Middle East and around the world. With cloud’s 25 regions (and forthcoming Middle East regions in Qatar and Saudi Arabia) and 76 zones around the world, we deliver high-performance, low-latency services and products for Google Cloud’s enterprise and public sector customers.
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Across industries, CEOs share a top priority—harness technology to jump-start growth, accelerate time to market, and foster innovation. CIOs and other technology leaders recognize that the C-suite depends on them to achieve growth and meet rising expectations for agility.
They increasingly view IT modernization—including migrating to the cloud, adopting new application architectures, and building on cloud-native services—as a way to sustain these goals. To date, however, most companies have not captured the anticipated agility benefits because a number of challenges hinder technology leaders as they push ahead with modernization initiatives.
While many of these challenges are valid, there are some false tradeoffs that can be avoided. New McKinsey research highlights that cloud migration needs to be combined with a comprehensive organizational approach to allow for a much more effective agile transformation. CIOs need to promote the transformation mind-set of focusing on differentiated business value by adopting agile processes, automating policies, and upskilling talent across the entire organization. They need to look beyond technology to change the way their IT organization operates across three foundational elements—people, processes, and policies.
Priorities include upskilling existing talent and creating new roles (such as site reliability engineers, full-stack engineers, and data scientists), revamping procedures by adopting agile
development processes with security integrated into every step, and enforcing policies through automation.
Download this McKinsey research report to understand the practices of leaders versus that of laggards and get the key “unlocks” that can help organizations move to higher levels of business agility as they pursue increased cloud adoption.
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How L&T Financial Services Processes 95% of Motorcycle Loans in Less Than Two Minutes
L&T Financial Services is one of the largest lenders in India. India’s demonetization policy in recent years has led to a shift from cash transactions to digital payments. In 2016, the government withdrew 500 and 1000 rupee notes from circulation and encouraged a heavily cash-based population to deposit their canceled notes in banks. Financial institutions needed to pivot to a new way of doing business to stay competitive. L&T Financial Services modernized its IT infrastructure to keep up with changes and capture digital opportunities.
“Working capital is crucial to stimulate growth in rural communities. Our role as a lender is to provide access to funds. We don’t want to burden borrowers with the complexities of getting a loan. Towards this end, digitization is an important step,” says Dinanath Dubhashi, Managing Director and CEO at L&T Financial Services. “Google Cloud helps us streamline service delivery and identify the right customers. By offering the fastest processing time in the industry, we want to be the go-to lender for all customers.”
L&T Financial Services considered multiple cloud providers before choosing Google Cloud. According to Dinanath, Google Cloud understands both the need for businesses to move fast and the need for IT to modernize at different speeds. “We weren’t forced to abandon existing IT systems and migrate lock, stock, and barrel to Google Cloud on day one.”
L&T Financial Services engaged Google Cloud Professional Services to guide its digital transformation journey. The smooth migration from proof of concept to full-scale deployment on Google Cloud took a matter of months.
“Collaboration: a small idea with big opportunities. G Suite helps us connect remote branches with the head office, easily access shared files to submit and track approvals, and conduct face-to-face discussions to accelerate approval processes.”
—Dinanath Dubhashi, MD and CEO, L&T Financial Services
Digitizing the workforce with G Suite
The move to the cloud at L&T Financial Services started in 2017 when the company introduced G Suite to its 14,500 employees. The legacy email system was cumbersome to use, especially for frontline staff who need email access while they are on the road. Using Gmail, employees can connect with customers and co-workers from anywhere, on any device. Employees save time by scheduling meetings with Calendar, collaborating on Docs, and conducting video calls using Hangouts Meet.
Converting data into credit insights using BigQuery
Taking data intelligence one step further, L&T Financial Services adopts a responsible lending approach by applying algorithm-based data analytics to improve credit standards. Beyond traditional data such as credit score and credit payment history, the company also considers macro-economic indicators for risk audits. For example, a farmer’s ability to pay off the loan of his new tractor depends on a successful planting and harvest. So L&T Financial Services feeds long-term data into BigQuery and runs queries to predict loan defaults based on rainfall and crop yield.
Learning Should be Your Resolution for 2022: Register for Google Cloud Skills Boost
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Start your 2022 New Year’s resolutions by learning at no cost how to use Google Cloud with the following training opportunities:
30 day access to Google Cloud Skills Boost
Register by January 31, 2022 and claim 30 days free access to Google Cloud Skills Boost to complete the Getting Started with Google Cloud learning path.
Google Cloud Skills Boost is the definitive destination for skills development where you can personalize learning paths, track progress, and validate your newly-earned expertise with skill badges.
The Getting Started with Google Cloud learning path will give you the opportunity to earn three skill badges after you complete hands-on labs and courses designed for aspiring cloud engineers and architects. It covers the fundamentals of Google Cloud including core infrastructure, big data and ML, writing gcloud commands, using Cloud Shell, deploying virtual machines, and running containerized applications on GKE.
Cloud OnBoard: half day training on getting started with Google Cloud fundamentals
Attend the Getting Started Cloud OnBoard on January 20 for a comprehensive Google Cloud orientation. Google Cloud experts will show you how to execute your compute, available storage options, how to secure your data, and available Google Cloud managed services.
Cloud Study Jam: expert-guided hands-on lab
Google Cloud experts will walk you through a hands-on lab included in Google Cloud Skill Boost’s Getting Started with Google Cloud learning path when you join our Cloud Study Jam on January 27. Google Cloud experts will also answer questions live via chat during this event.
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