Do you know how much money you could save by adjusting workload requests to better represent their actual usage? If you’re not rightsizing your workloads, you might be overpaying for resources that your workloads aren’t even using or worse, putting your workloads at risk for reliability issues due to under provisioning.

As we’ve previously discussed, setting the resources is the most important thing you can do to increase the reliability of your Kubernetes workloads. In this blog we will help you with the second key finding from the State of Kubernetes Cost Optimization report!

According to our research findings, workload rightsizing is the most important golden signal. Workload rightsizing measures the capacity of developers to properly use the CPU and memory they have requested for their applications. 

Rightsizing is challenging

It can be quite difficult to predict the resource needs of your applications, which historically has not been a concern for developers in traditional data center environments.In traditional data center environments, resources were typically over-provisioned upfront to ensure capacity for peak demand and future growth, so developers didn’t need to focus on accurately predicting resource needs as they were covered by the excess capacity, whereas in cloud environments, resources are consumed on-demand. Finding a balance between efficiency and reliability can often feel like a delicate balancing act.

Tools for workload rightsizing

There are native tools in Cloud Monitoring and the GKE UI you can use to rightsize your workloads running on GKE. 

Rightsizing in the console

The Workload Cost Optimization tab helps you identify workloads that can be optimized by displaying the resources used versus what’s requested.

To take advantage of potential cost savings, you can drill into clusters to see workload level resource recommendations.

To view workload resource recommendations for Deployment objects only:

1. In the GKE Cost Optimization.
2. Select a cluster.
3. Click Workloads > Cost Optimization.
4. Select one Deployment workloads
5. In the workload’s detail page, select Actions > Scale > Edit Resource Requests

Rightsizing with Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring provides built-in VPA scale recommendations metrics that you can use to monitor the performance of your workloads and to identify opportunities to rightsize them without the need to create VPA objects.

To view these metrics:

1. Go to the Cloud Monitoring > Metric Explore console.

2. In the Metric dropdown, select the metrics:

• Memory recommendations: 
  Kubernetes Scale > autoscaler > Recommended per replica request bytes
• CPU recommendations: 
  Kubernetes Scale > autoscaler > Recommended per replica request cores

Rightsizing at scale

If you’re interested in viewing recommendations across clusters and projects, We’ve created a guide that you can use today to help you right-size your GKE workloads at scale. This solution leverages your actual cluster’s metric data and built-in workload recommendations provided by Cloud Monitoring. You can determine the resource requirements for all your workloads without having to create additional VPA autoscaler objects in each of your clusters. The guide walks you through deploying the solution.

In conclusion

In conclusion, rightsizing your workloads is essential for both cost savings and reliability. By following the tips in this blog, you can ensure that your workloads are using the right amount of resources, which will save you money and increase your workload’s reliability.

Links to the solution presented in this blog and other useful tools to help you optimize your cluster are listed below:

• The Right-sizing workloads at scale solution guide
• Setting resource requests: the key to Kubernetes cost optimization
• The simple kube-requests-checker tool
• An interactive tutorial to get set up in GKE with a set of sample workloads

Download the State of Kubernetes Optimization report, review the key findings, and stay tuned for our next blog post.

Businesses migrating their SAP environments to Google Cloud do so for a number of reasons. Most cite the agility, scalability and security advantages of migrating SAP workloads to Google Cloud; many also focus on improved uptime and performance. 

At some point, most businesses also want to explore the idea that there’s a fortune locked up in their business data—and that the cloud holds the key. But leveraging the cloud to transform data into dollars is a process that involves special challenges—and specialized tools to address these challenges. For businesses running SAP environments in the cloud, most of which maintain a significant stake in legacy systems and data stores, the challenges tend to get even bigger.

The promises and pitfalls of APIs

This is where Google Cloud’s advanced data analytics, machine learning and AI capabilities, especially our API (application programming interface) management tools, come into play. Our Apigee API Management Platform is emerging as a star player for many of our SAP customers because it can open the door to innovation and opportunity for SAP systems and data stores.

API management speaks directly to what it really means to get value from business data. By connecting the right data sets with people willing and able to monetize that data, your business can benefit both indirectly (for example, by generating insights that lead to increased sales or better customer experiences) and directly (such as by selling access to your data to another business).

APIs have emerged as a pillar of modern digital business practices because they facilitate precisely these types of transactions. Today, every mobile device, website and application uses APIs to access connected services and data sources. APIs provide connection points between apps, platforms and entire application ecosystems. And by using de-facto standards such as REST (representational state transfer), businesses can utilize APIs to build and deploy innovative applications quickly.

3 reasons legacy systems and modern APIs don’t mix

Google Cloud customers running SAP environments may be ready to find the value in their data, but their SAP systems and data, as well as legacy APIs that don’t adhere to REST or other modern approaches,  may not quite be up to the task. This is because:

• Balancing accessibility, usability and security is a tough task—and the stakes are high. Opening up access to business-critical systems to third-party as well as internal developers could raise significant risks. Even for SAP teams with a high focus on security, the process of providing dependable, programmatic access to legacy SAP systems often involves significant time and effort. And while limiting access and API functionality are both valid ways to mitigate security risk, employing these tactics can slow the pace of innovation and very quickly undermine the reasons for starting this process in the first place.
• Managing APIs across legacy SAP applications and other data stores can be complex, costly and technically challenging. There’s a fundamental mismatch between the “how and why” of modern APIs and the types of programmatic access for which legacy systems were designed. Modern apps, for example, typically deliver API requests in far greater numbers; that’s true for client-side single-page applications as well as for more traditional server-side apps running on modern, elastically scaled app servers. There are also disparities in the size and structure of data payloads between what modern apps were designed to use and what legacy systems were designed to serve.

These examples boil down to the same issue: If your business is running legacy SAP systems or is in the process of migrating away from them, you’ll have serious work to do to make your data accessible for modern use cases and integrations. And asking third-party developers to adjust their methods and skill sets to consume your legacy systems is going to be a very tough sell.

• Monetizing API access presents another set of technical and practical challenges. For many companies, the name of the data game is monetization: actually charging developers for the privilege of accessing your high-value data sources. Getting this right isn’t just a matter of putting a virtual turnstile in front of your existing APIs. Any monetization strategy lives or dies based on its pricing—and this means understanding exactly who’s using your data, when they access it and how they’re using it. Even if you are not charging your developers for API calls, there are also some valuable insights to be gained from more advanced types of analysis, right up to having a unified view of every data flow and data interaction related to your organization’s API traffic. Overall, API monetization demands that APIs be built in a modern style, designed and maintained for developer consumption rather than just, per legacy methods, for exposing a system.

It probably comes as no surprise that an SAP environment, whether or not it’s considered legacy, was designed to focus on SAP system data and not designed to open the data inside an SAP system to other applications. And since these tools don’t build themselves, the question becomes, who will build them?

Apigee: Bridging the gaps with API management

An API management solution such as Apigee can help IT organizations tackle these issues more efficiently. In practice, companies are turning to Apigee for help with three primary SAP application modernization patterns, all of which speak to the challenges of using APIs to create value:

1. Modernizing legacy services. One of Apigee’s most important capabilities involves placing an API “wrapper” around legacy SAP interfaces. Developers then get to work with feature-rich, responsive, thoroughly modern APIs, and the Apigee platform handles the process of translating and optimizing incoming API calls before passing the requests through to the underlying SAP environment.

This approach to API management also gives IT organizations some useful capabilities. Apigee simplifies the process of designing, implementing and testing APIs that can add more functionality on top of legacy SAP interfaces; and it helps manage where, how and when developers work with APIs. This is also the basis for Apigee’s API monitoring and metrics—essential capabilities that would involve significant effort for most IT teams to build themselves.

2. Abstracting APIs from source systems. By providing an abstraction layer between SAP legacy systems and developers, the Apigee platform also ensures a consistent, reliable and predictable developer experience. Through this decoupling of APIs from the underlying source systems, Apigee can adjust to changes in the disposition and availability of systems while carrying on business as usual with developers using its APIs. In this way, SAP enterprises can package and market their API offerings—for example, publishing APIs through a developer portal—and lets them monitor API consumption by target systems.

Decoupling the source system from the developer entry points also shields connected applications from significant backend changes like a migration from ECC to S/4HANA. As you make backend changes to your services, apps continue to call the same API without any interruption. The migration may also provide opportunities for consolidating multiple SAP and non-SAP implementations into S/4HANA or cleaning up core SAP systems by moving out some of the functionality to cloud-native systems. Because Apigee abstracts consuming applications from changes to underlying systems and creates uniformity across these diverse systems, it can de-risk the migration from ECC to S/4HANA or similar consolidation projects.

3. Creating cloud-native, scalable services. Apigee also excels at bridging the often wide gap between SAP applications and modern, distributed application architectures in which microservices play an essential role. In addition to repackaging SAP data as a microservice and providing capabilities to monetize this data, Apigee takes on some essential performance, availability and security functions: handling access control, authentication, security monitoring and threat assessment plus throttling traffic when necessary to keep backend systems running normally while providing applications with an endpoint that can scale to suit any of your workloads.

Needless to say, Apigee’s security capabilities are absolutely essential no matter how you’re using API management tools. But because Apigee also offers performance, analytics and reliability features, it can position companies to jump into a fully mature API monetization strategy. At the same time, it can give IT teams confidence that opening their SAP systems to innovation does not expose mission critical systems to potential harm. 

Conrad Electronic and Apigee: using APIs to drive innovation

We’re seeing quite a few businesses using Apigee to create value from legacy SAP environments in ways that didn’t seem possible before. For an example of how Apigee and the rest of Google Cloud work together to open new avenues for innovation for SAP users, consider Conrad Electronic.

Conrad Electronic combines many years of history as a successful German retailer with a progressive approach to innovation. The company has digitally transformed itself by leveraging an existing, legacy SAP environment alongside Google BigQuery, which provides a single repository for data that once resided in dozens of disparate systems. Conrad Electronic is using Apigee to amplify the impact and value of its transformation on two levels.

First, it’s using Apigee to manage data exchanges with shipping companies and with the procurement systems of its B2B customers, giving these companies an improved retail experience and reducing the friction and potential for error that come with traditional transaction environments.

At the same time, Conrad Electronic uses Apigee to give its own developers a modern set of tools for innovation and experimentation. A small development team ran with the idea, building an easy-to-use tool that gives in-store staff and visitors access to key product, service and warranty information, using their own tablets and other devices.

“APIs give people the freedom and independence to implement their ideas quickly and effectively,” said Aleš Drábek, Conrad Electronics’ Chief Digital and Disruption Officer. “As an effective API management solution, Apigee enables us to harness the power of APIs to transform how we interact with customers and how we transfer data with our B2B customers.”

Explore the possibilities with API management

To learn more about how Apigee can solve the challenges that come with opening up your SAP systems to new business models and methods for innovation, see here. Also for more information on Google Cloud solutions for SAP customers, see here.

Today we’re hosting our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit, a digital event dedicated to helping leading retailers and brands digitally transform their business. For me, this is a personally exciting moment, as I see tremendous opportunities for those companies that choose to focus on their customers and leverage technology to elevate experiences.

Our event includes breakout sessions to help retailers and brands become customer centric, embrace the digital moment and transform their operations. Some of my favorite sessions include: 

• Why Search Abandonment is the metric that matters, highlighting Retail Search, and featuring a conversation with Macy’s
• Driving Consumer Closeness in a Privacy-Centric World, discussing how retailers and brands can create a successful first party data strategy, featuring a conversation with P&G
• The Modern Store: 7 Innovation Hotspots, sharing how retailers and brands can approach store transformation to unlock the most value from technology, featuring a conversation with The Home Depot.   

I’ll be speaking in our Retail Spotlight session, discussing the current retail landscape and our industry approach, followed by conversations with Albert Bertilsson, Head of Engineering – Edge at IKEA Retail (Indga Group) and Neelima Sharma, Senior Vice President, Technology Ecommerce, Marketing and Merchandising at Lowe’s. 

Let me share a bit more about the topics we’ll discuss in that session.

In retail specifically, digital-first shopping journeys are blurring the lines between the physical and digital brand experience. Shoppers want to know what’s available before they visit your stores, and they expect fulfillment options like curbside pickup. We see this when tracking trends for interest in curbside pickup or in-stock items.

This has left many retailers asking how they can get smarter with their data, tackle the $300 billion dollar problem of “search abandonment,” move faster to create new customer experiences, and do a better job of connecting their employees and customers – with confidence.

Our team has been spending time thinking about how we can rise and succeed in this new era together. We continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to our retail customers around the world. And we’re focused on ways we can bring the best of what Google has to offer through cloud integrations.

Our goal is to help retailers become customer-centric and data-driven, capture digital and omni-channel revenue growth, create the modern store and drive operational improvement.

Let’s dig into each of these strategic pillars in a bit more detail. 

Become customer centric and data driven

Customers today expect experiences that are timely, targeted, and tailored for them and their needs, and reject experiences that can’t deliver these features. Data modeling, legacy technology, and siloed systems often prevent retailers from providing that level of personalized experience. 

At Google Cloud, we work with global retailers and our ecosystem partners to activate and bring value from first-party data, particularly in the field of customer data platforms (CDPs). This includes integrations from Google Cloud, such as our business intelligence platform Looker and other popular platforms to power one source of customer data through the organization. We also help retailers modernize their data warehouse with Looker for gathering business intelligence across their organization. This is important not just for consumer data, but inventory, supply chain, and store operations as well. 

Capture Digital and Omnichannel Growth 

We power some of the largest e-commerce sites in the world, helping them scale for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday events. While scale is critically important, it’s also important to consider the quality of the online experience. How do your customers find products? How can you help deliver seamless online and omnichannel experiences? 

To help, we’re building product discovery solutions that bring together the best of our technologies that help retailers drive engagement with their consumers. Retail Search, for example, gives retailers the ability to provide Google-quality search on their own digital properties – search that is customizable for their unique business needs and built upon Google’s advanced understanding of user intent & context. 

The imperative is clear. Recent research found that retailers lose more than $300 billion to search abandonment — when purchase intent is not converted into a sale due to bad search results — every year in the US alone. 

Today, we announced that Retail Search is available to a larger set of retailers. If you are interested in learning more about Retail Search you can contact your sales representative for additional details.

Create the modern store  

With the rise of buying trends like curbside pickup and proximity-based search, our Google Maps Platform team is working on new products and features to help raise inventory awareness for your shoppers. We want to help you make it easier for them to understand what’s available to purchase in their channel of choice.

With Product Locator, each product page connects customers with information they need for local pickup and delivery options. This ensures customers are aware of pickup and delivery options throughout the buying journey—not just checkout. 

Awareness of local inventory can boost a wide range of key metrics for your business. Shopify recently shared that shoppers who opt for local pickup over delivery had a +13% higher conversion rate and that 45% of local pickup customers make an additional purchase upon arrival.

This is just one quick example of how our Google Maps Platform team can improve experiences for your shoppers.

Operational improvement

It can be challenging to operate in a world and at a time when consumer behavior and supply chains are so disrupted and volatile, and where entire retail teams had to go remote during the pandemic and beyond. 

We’re working with retailers to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve consumer experience through chat bots or conversational commerce that solves problems for customers from anywhere. You can learn more about these offerings in our Conversational Commerce with Google breakout session, featuring Albertsons.

As the need for digital transformation continues to accelerate, Google Cloud is helping retailers stay ahead of the curve with solutions for digital and omnichannel growth, data-driven and customer-focused experiences, and operational improvement. For every era of cloud technologies, from the past into the future, Google Cloud is committed to providing solutions to retailers.

Read more about our solutions for retail, and check out additional sessions, including the CPG Industry Spotlight Session How To Grow Brands in Times of Rapid Change – Featuring L’Oréal at our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit.