Whether with the cloud or within their own data centers, enterprises have undergone a period of remarkable consolidation and centralization of their compute resources. But with the rise of ever more powerful mobile devices, and increasingly capable cellular networks, application architects are starting to think beyond the confines of the data center, and looking out to the edge. 

What exactly do we mean by edge? Think of the edge as distributed compute happening on a wide variety of non-traditional devices — mobile phones of course, but also equipment sensors in factories, industrial equipment, or even temperature and reaction monitoring in a remote lab. Edge devices are also connected devices, and can communicate back to the mothership over wireless or cellular networks. 

Equipped with increasingly powerful processors, these edge devices are being called upon to perform tasks that have thus far been outside the scope of traditional IT. For enterprises, this could mean pre-processing incoming telemetry in a vehicle, collecting video in kiosks at a mall, gathering quality control data with cameras in a warehouse, or delivering interactive media to retail stores. Enterprises are also relying on edge to ingest data from outposts or devices that have even more intermittent connectivity, e.g., oil rigs or farm equipment, filtering that data to improve quality, reducing it to right-size information load, and processing it in the cloud. New data and models are then pushed back to the edge; in addition, we can also push configuration, software, and media updates and decentralize processing workload.

Edge isn’t all about enabling new use cases – it’s also about right-sizing environments and improving resource utilization. For example, adopting an edge model can also relieve load on existing data centers. 

But while edge computing is full of promise for enterprises, there are many pieces that are still works in progress. Further, developing edge workloads is very different from developing traditional applications, which enjoy the benefits of persistent data connections and run on well-resourced hardware platforms. As such, cloud architects are still in the early days of figuring out how to use and implement edge for their organizations. 

Fortunately, there are tools you can use to help ease the transition to edge computing — and that likely fit into your organization’s existing computing systems. Kubernetes, of course, but also higher level management tools like Anthos, which provides a consistent control plane across cloud, private data center and edge locations. Other parts of the Anthos family – Anthos Config Management and Anthos Service Mesh — go one step further and provide consistent, centralized management to your edge and cloud deployments. And there’s more to come.

For the remainder of this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into the past and current state of edge computing, and the benefits that architects and developers can expect to see from edge computing. In a next post, we’ll take a deeper look at some of the challenges that designing for edge introduces, and some of the advantages the average enterprise has in adopting the edge model. Finally, we’ll look at the Google Cloud tools that are available today to help you build out your edge environment, and look at some early customer examples that highlight what’s possible today — and that will spark your imagination for what to do tomorrow. 

The evolution of edge computing 

The edge is not a new concept. In fact, it’s been around for the last two decades, spanning many use cases that are prevalent today. One of the first applications for edge was to use content delivery networks (CDN) to cache and serve daily static website pages near clients, for example, web servers in California data centers serving financial data to European customers. 

As connectivity has improved and software evolved, the edge has evolved too, and the focus has shifted towards using edge to distribute services. First, simple services expanded from static HTML to javascript libraries or image repositories. Common functions like image transformation, credit and address validation support services followed. Soon, organizations were deploying more complex cloudlet and clustered microservices installations, as well as distributed and replicated datasets. The term “endpoint” became ubiquitous, and APIs profilerated. 

In parallel, there’s been an explosion of creativity in hardware, microcontrollers and dedicated edge devices. Fit-for-purpose products were deployed globally. Services like Google Cloud IoT Core extended our ability to manage and securely connect these dispersed devices, allowing platform managers to register tools and leverage managed services like Pub/Sub and Dataflow for data ingestion. And with Kubernetes, large remote clusters — mini private clouds in and of themselves — operate as self-healing, autoscaling services across the broader internet, opening the door to new models for applications and architectural patterns. In short, both distributed asynchronous systems and economies have blossomed.

What does this mean for enterprises? For the purposes of this series, edge means you can now go beyond the corporate network, beyond cloud VPCs, and beyond hybrid. The modern edge is not sitting at a major remote data center, nor is it a CDN, cloud provider, or in a corporate data center rack — it’s just as likely to look like 100 of these attached to a thousand sensors.

Edge, in short, is about having hardware and devices installed at remote locations that can process and communicate back the information they collect and generate. The edge management challenge, meanwhile, is being able to push configuration and software/model/media updates to these remote locations when they are connected.

Enable new use cases

Today, we have reached a new threshold for edge computing — one where micro-data-processing centers are deployed as the edge of a fractal arm, as it were. Together, they form a broad, geographically distributed, always-on framework for streaming, collecting, processing and serving asynchronous data. This big, loosely coupled application system lives, breathes and grows. Always changing, always learning from the data it collects — and always pushing out updated models when the tendrils are connected. 

Right now, the rise of 5G is pushing the limits of edge even further. Devices enabled with 5G can transmit using a mobile network — no ISP required — enabling connectivity anywhere within reach of a cell tower. Granted, these networks have lower bandwidth, but they are often more than adequate for certain types of data, for example fire sensors in forests bordering remote towns that emit temperature or carbon monoxide data periodically. Recently, Google Cloud partnered with AT&T to enhance business use of 5G edge technology but there is so much more that can be done. 

Reduce data center investments

In addition to enabling the digitization of a broad range of new use cases, adopting edge can also benefit your existing data center.

Let’s face it: data centers are expensive to maintain. Moving some data center load to edge locations can reduce your data center infrastructure investment, as well as compute time spent there. Edge services tend to have much lower service level objectives (SLOs) than data center services, driving lower levels of hardware investment. Edge installations also tend to tolerate disconnectedness, and thus function perfectly well with lower SLOs — and lower costs. 

Let’s look at an example of where edge can really reduce costs: big data. Back in the day, we used to build monolithic serial processors — state machines — that had to keep track of where they were in processing in case of failure. But time and again, we’ve seen that smaller, more distributed processing can break down big, expensive problems into smaller, more cost-effective chunks. 

Starting with the explosion of MapReduce almost 20 years ago, big-data workloads were parallelized across clusters on a network, and state management was simplified with intermediate output to share, wait for, or restart processing from checkpoints. Those monolithic systems were replaced by cheaper, smarter, networked clusters and data repositories where parallel work could be executed and rendered into workable datasets. 

Flash forward to today, and we are seeing those same concepts applied and distributed to edge data-collection points. In this evolution of big data processing, we are scaling up and out to the point where observation data is so massive that it must first be prefiltered, and then preprocessed down to a manageable size and still be actionable. Only then should it be written back to the main data repositories for more resource-intensive processing and model building.

In short, data collection, cleanup, and potentially initial aggregation happens at the edge location, which reduces the amount of junk data sitting in costly data stores. This increases performance of the core data warehouse, and reduces the size and cost of network transfers and storage! 

The edge is a huge opportunity for today’s enterprises. But designing environments that can make effective use of the edge isn’t without its challenges. Stick around for part two of this series, where we look at some of the architectural challenges typically encountered while designing for the edge and how we begin to address them.

Despite a growing number of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Black and Latinx people remain highly underrepresented in tech. Although comprising 12.6% and 18% of the U.S. labor force respectively, Black professionals hold only 5% of tech positions, while Latinx professionals fill just 6% of tech roles.

Long-standing biases in hiring practices and non-inclusive work environments are the primary contributors to this lack of diversity. Even when underrepresented professionals are successfully recruited, invisible barriers to promotion and layoffs that disproportionally impact Black and Latinx employees make it extremely challenging for tech firms to retain top talent.

We founded Divercity to help employers build diverse workforces that are more inclusive and sustainable. With our comprehensive recruiting and retention platform, tech companies can accurately measure employee diversity and gender parity, seamlessly connect with underrepresented talent, and significantly reduce turnover.

As Divercity continues to grow, we’ll introduce new services and solutions that empower the tech world to build inclusive companies while improving compliance with state and federal equal opportunity laws. We also hope to expand the reach of Divercity to support DEI initiatives in non-tech industries and bolster recruiting underrepresented professionals in other countries as well.

Scaling Divercity with the help of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund

Shortly after founding Divercity, we participated in the 2021 Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator. The incredible support and guidance we received during and after the program highlighted the importance of long-term collaboration with reliable technology partners who actively champion diversity and inclusion.

That’s why we became part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. After completing the program, we used Google Cloud credits and Google for Startups Black Founders Fund funding to cost-effectively trial, deploy, and scale key Google Cloud solutions. In just months, we rolled out new inclusion tracking and recruiting tools on the highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud to expedite the sourcing and hiring of underrepresented talent in the tech industry.

With the support and mentorship of the Google for Startups Cloud Program and the Black Founders Fund, Divercity is well on its way to becoming one of the industry’s most trusted sites for DEI measurement, recruitment, and retention.

Delivering predictive diversity analyses with a 99% accuracy rate

We rely on the expansive Google Cloud ecosystem to power all the services offered on the Divercity platform. Specifically, we leverage Colab to write and execute the sophisticated TensorFlow machine learning (ML) models that deliver our predictive diversity analyses with a 99% accuracy rate.

We also use BigQuery to democratize insights and run analytics at scale with 27% lower three-year TCO than cloud data warehouse alternatives. BigQuery seamlessly integrates with Looker and Data Studio to display company diversity and recruitment data on interactive dashboards—and automatically populate reports with detailed demographic information.

We also accelerate the development, launch, and management of new Divercity tools with Firebase, while taking advantage of key features such as A/B testing and messaging campaigns to boost user engagement.

In the future, we plan to explore how Google Cloud AI and machine learning products such as Vertex AI and AutoML can further refine our diversity score analyses and applicant recruiting pipeline. We’ll also continue leveraging the many resources provided by the Google Black Founders Fund, including opportunities for technical project partnerships, early access to new Google Cloud products and tools, and collaboration with dedicated Google experts.

The Google for Startups Cloud Program and Google Black Founders Fund have been invaluable to our success. Since completing the Black Founders Accelerator program, we’ve been named a top 10 HR tech product by HR Tech Outlook, significantly increased our subscriber base, and received positive feedback from investors. We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we empower tech companies to build more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable workforces.

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.

There were several reasons why Suddora and CustomOnIt shouldn’t have been successes. My friend Adam and I were working in a Michigan video store and knew next to nothing about running a business. We started with an idea to sell sweatbands, like the ones I used to wear in my band, and over several months managed to launch it legitimately. This led us to bail on the video store and move to Vegas—smack in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. We lived on ramen noodles and little else for two years while we got the company going. Our friends took bets on how long we’d stay in business. 

But 11 years later, we have not one but several successful sports apparel businesses, I’m running a bunch of other e-commerce companies (including SweatBands.com), and we’re selling in the United Kingdom and soon in Asia Pacific. 

How did two broke-but-determined guys working in a video store get this far? We always believed in moving ahead, no matter what obstacles came our way—and we learned a lot about how technology like G Suite can make a small business look and operate like a bigger one, and how searching Google for business resources can pay off.

Starting with an idea, a domain and…ramen noodles
In my band days in Michigan, we tried to think of ways to get our name out there. Instead of the usual T-shirts or stickers, I pitched the idea of custom sweatbands since I wore sweatbands when I played guitar. I figured other people might like sweatbands with the names of their bands.

We knew we needed a web domain and email addresses so we could sell online. We found out about G Suite during a Google search, and it seemed like the most pain-free way to get started by buying the domains Customonit.com and Suddora.com (Adam made up that name. “Sudor” is Spanish for “sweat,” which is what the businesses were about, and we added the “d” and the “a” to make the name stand out.).

Even though the company was just me and Adam, we needed to look professional (and also a bit bigger than we actually were). With G Suite, we set up email aliases for various business functions, like help@suddora.com and sales@suddora.com, and arranged to route email from these addresses into our regular Gmail inboxes; that way, customers could easily reach us.

Scaling our business in the Las Vegas heat
Next, we decided to move to Las Vegas because, in the aftermath of the recession, we could live cheaply there. When we got our first big sweatband order from a major NCAA football team,  the momentum started. Now we had to scale up the business so we could handle more orders and deal with suppliers, even though we were still working out of our living room.

We grew to a five-person team, including a customer service person and a designer, and G Suite made it easy to onboard everyone quickly. In addition to giving new employees their own email addresses with the Suddora.com or STbands.com domain names, we routed emails to various people from the “help” and “sales” email aliases we had set up. We also made sure that all of our employees were set up on G Suite, too.

Once orders started to roll in from major fast-food restaurants, football teams, and sports apparel companies, our roles constantly changed. G Suite helped us shave off precious time by helping us manage email less manually—we automatically re-routed emails depending on who’s working on what. If I wanted to take on more sales work, I forwarded emails from sales@suddora.com to my inbox with one click. Same thing with customer service: We never want to lose track of customer service inquiries, which are a high priority.

In 2009, a year after starting the business, Adam and I left our part-time jobs at a local department store to run the business full-time. We promised ourselves that when we hit a revenue target of $15,000 in one month we’d buy a TV for the apartment—and we got that TV!

Going international (without leaving our office)
The business was taking off. We decided to split STbands.com into two websites: Suddora.com for sports sweatbands and CustomOnIt.com for custom apparel and party goods. We recognized that half our customers wanted athletic wear and accessories, while the other half wanted custom items like T-shirts and wristbands. It was a move that would allow each business to thrive.

Creating products and managing suppliers was getting more complicated. Once again, G Suite helped us move our business forward. We used Google search to find suppliers in China, and were able to set up supplier relationships and talk one-on-one with the people making our products—without extensive and time-consuming travel to China. You can accomplish so much with video meetings and chat.

With more suppliers and more customers, we needed to constantly up our game in terms of product design. When we create new designs it generates a ton of files and iterations, which get shared back and forth between pattern designers, photo editors, writers, and marketing professionals. To help centralize these files, we store everything in Google Drive so they can be shared and accessed anytime, from anywhere. For example, we use Sheets to house updated data on our products across all of our e-commerce platforms. 

Lessons learned
Eleven years on, I’m still learning every day about what it takes to run and grow a business. I think what helps is finding tools like G Suite that are so easy to use, you don’t need much ramp-up time to get started—nor do your employees. That means we’re all productive much faster. 

Also, you might be thinking about a million ideas for starting a business. But the truth is, you only need one—an opportunity that makes you think, “Okay, this is going to be big.” So go for it. You can’t afford not to.

As offices reopen, businesses aren’t keeping to a single formula. Many are embracing hybrid models, with employees splitting time between home and the office. Some are staying 100% remote. Others are returning the full workforce to offices with a greater focus on digitization.  

Regardless of their model, one thing is certain: technology is more central than ever to organizations’ ability to work smarter and more effectively. In particular, organizations need technology that can be tailored to specific business needs. For example, a retail store manager may need a way to ensure improved sanitation practices, or office workers may need to create an app to manage desk reservations. 

Google Workspace can help by bringing together everything you need to get things done, all in one place—including the ability to build custom apps and automations with AppSheet. AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code development platform, lets employees–even those with no programming experience–reclaim their time and talent by building custom apps and automations. 

Building solutions with AppSheet is often easier and faster than traditional coding, as AppSheet leverages Google’s machine learning expertise to help you quickly go from idea to solution, helping your business to match the pace and agility that today’s landscape requires. In this article, we’ll explore how you can use AppSheet to create custom solutions that will help your business adapt to shifting business needs. To illustrate, we’ll focus on a use case many businesses face: reservation and management of meeting rooms and other office resources, but this process can easily be adapted for a wide variety of use cases, from apps for retail pickup to incident reporting and more. 

Simplify and centralize with apps

The first thing to consider is whether your solution would be best managed via a custom interface. If you’re trying to simplify a process for someone, such as inspections or inventory tracking, or centralize information, such as resource portals or events calendars, creating a custom app is the way to go.

For this example app, we created a simple Google Sheet to hold our backend data. Sheets are ideal backend data sources when we know the amount of data will not grow exponentially, especially when piloting to a first office or group of users. We can switch our data seamlessly at any time to a scalable Google Cloud SQL database or other database if needed.

The example app has several worksheets to manage the different buildings, rooms, checkpoints and people (including their roles).

We can build an app in AppSheet directly from our Sheet by selecting Tools > AppSheet > Create an App. 

After creating our app, we see an overview of the data that we’ve connected, how pieces of data relate to each other, the views that are presented to the user, and a live interactive preview of the app. Refining the app is intuitive. When you input keywords, for instance, AppSheet surfaces appropriate functionality options that can be further customized. If we have address or location data, it’s automatically turned into a map view that we can further customize.

Our office management app will offer building managers and cleaners administrative features for managing equipment, disinfection schedules, and maintenance information, and it will also offer views for employees to check occupancy and safely reserve desks and equipment.

Opening an office and then a room in the app gives us an overview of both the floorplan and the occupancy and reservations for spaces and equipment in the room.

Users can then reserve spaces and equipment in the app, without having to first search for a form or page in the intranet, or even log onto their work computer. The reservation is an automation routine in AppSheet, which performs pre-configured actions when triggered.

As illustrated in the screenshot above, when the action is triggered either by pressing a button in the app, scanning a QR code, or tapping an RFC tag, the action simply sets the “Reserved by” and “Reserved at” columns to the current user and timestamp.

Streamline with automations

AppSheet Automation, which was recently made generally available, makes it possible to reduce repetitive tasks and streamline processes even further.

In this example, one challenge you may encounter is that users often forget to release a desk or resource when they’re finished, which means those reservations stay blocked until an administrator releases all blocked reservations. However, it’s also important that resources aren’t immediately released, as they first need to be cleaned and disinfected before being made available to new users.

AppSheet Automation can solve this challenge by periodically checking all resources that have been reserved for longer than four hours, then alerting the user to either re-reserve them or release them to be cleaned. If there is no answer, the automation can trigger the resources to be cleaned, then released.

We can configure this as a recurring event, and create a bot that sends the notifications and triggers actions based on the user input (or lack of input).

Optimize for multiple roles

Creating an app for one user is one thing–creating an app that fits the needs of multiple types of users is another. AppSheet has you covered for this kind of complexity because it lets you build multiple roles into a single app. 

In our office management app, for example, the office manager can have a particular view and dashboard, and workers in the office can have their own views and functionalities front and center. This makes it possible to automate tasks for all types of users with a single app. 

Likewise, AppSheet Automation lets you easily react to real-time changes in data, send notifications to groups of users, and initiate additional workflows using data shared between the app and the users. If a group needs to reserve a conference space for an important late-breaking meeting, for example, there might be ripple effects across a number of user groups. The ability to automate all these updates and interactions can ultimately save a lot of time and effort. 

AppSheet also supports advanced features such as QR codes, NFC, and bluetooth sensor integration. This could help users check into locations or workspaces, further streamlining the task of helping people safely navigate and collaborate within the office.

Mission critical solutions, faster than ever

In the past, the type of app explored in this article would have required a central data store, distribution to specific groups of users, management and dashboard capabilities, as well as smartphone sensor integration for NFC and image capturing. This would have necessitated a mammoth implementation project and a team of professional coders.  

But with no-code, you can effectively design and implement these requirements in hours and days rather than months and years. Changes can be made on the fly in any browser, including pushing out new versions to users. Though AppSheet opens up app building and digital automations to any knowledge worker, it also includes robust security and governance controls, ensuring that as you manage getting employees back into office, you don’t neglect IT security. 

Try out your own back-to-the-office app for free today at AppSheet.com, or explore and copy our sample app.

More than 3 billion users stay in touch, share ideas, and get more done together in Google Workspace, across apps like Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and more. And starting today, we’re rolling out a new version designed to help people bring the apps they know and love to use in their personal lives to their work life. The new Google Workspace Essentials Starter Edition is a no-cost solution for business users looking to enhance teamwork and unlock innovation with secure-by-design collaboration. With Essentials Starter, we’re making it easy for employees to choose their own productivity tools and bring modern collaboration to work.

Work easily and securely within your current environment

As the world of work continues to evolve in unprecedented ways, secure collaboration—at speed, at scale, across platforms, on multiple devices—has never been more important. Essentials Starter helps employees and their teams break down silos and work together in new ways, even if their organization still relies on legacy productivity tools that weren’t built for the hybrid era of work. There’s no need for a new email address, file conversions, new plug-ins, or desktop software. All of the tools in Essentials Starter will work quickly and easily within your existing environment. And because we designed Google Workspace to operate on our industry-leading cloud foundation, Essentials Starter provides encrypted and secure access to files, helping keep users safe and their information private.

How Essentials Starter works

1. Sign up with your work email for a no-cost Essentials Starter account. No credit card required and there’s no limited trial period.
2. Invite teammates to collaborate using Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, Drive, and Meet.
3. Unlock innovation with new ways of working with immersive, virtual meetings, and by storing, sharing, and collaborating on 100+ file types, including Microsoft Office, without the need for file conversions.

Collapse the boundaries between people, places, and timezones

In our recently commissioned hybrid work global survey with Economist Impact, when workers were asked what was most important to realize the benefits of hybrid work, their number one choice was “new technologies that allow for time and location flexibility.”*

Google Workspace was born in the cloud and designed for maximum flexibility; to be used from the location and device of your choice. Google Workspace brings chat, files, meetings, and your favorite apps into an intelligent hub so you—and your team—can connect, create, and collaborate from your PCs, tablets, and smartphones, across locations and time zones.

Modern collaboration capabilities

Using the cloud-first approach of Google Workspace, teams can:

• Experience modern collaboration without the burden of version control or email attachments. Brainstorm, build presentations, and glean insights from data using Google Sheets, Slides, and Docs.
• Host secure video meetings to bring everyone together in one place. Conduct one-to-one video meetings (unlimited) and immersive team meetings (3-100 people; up to 60 minutes in duration each).
• Real-time messaging with Google Chat. Share quick updates, files, and high-fives across the team with Google Chat, from one-to-one messages to larger group conversations.
• A dedicated place for team collaboration in Spaces. Spaces are tightly integrated with Google Workspace tools like Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet, providing a better way for people to engage in topic-based discussions, share knowledge and ideas, move projects forward, and build communities and team culture.
• Access work content securely from your devices. With 15 GB of storage in Google Drive, you can store, share, and access work content from your mobile device, tablet, or computer, and Drive for desktop can enable you to sync files and folders to your PC or Mac. Your Drive storage limits remain separate across your personal and Google Workspace Essentials Starter user accounts.
• Work with existing tools without file conversions. Store, share, or co-edit 100+ file types, including Microsoft Office documents and PDFs without the need for file conversions.
• Easily manage your team of collaborators. Add and remove team members effortlessly using a simple dashboard.

Over the past two years, organizations around the world have relied on Google Workspace to reimagine how work happens and enable modern collaboration across their teams to unlock innovation. During a time of enormous uncertainty, our customers have launched game-changing products, reached new audiences, accelerated lifesaving research, and digitally transformed their own customer experiences. Along the way, they’ve used Google Workspace to empower their employees—across homes, offices, and on the frontlines—to connect, create, and collaborate in powerful new ways. And starting today, with Essentials Starter, employees can make the switch from legacy productivity tools and experience the difference with Google Workspace.

Get started today.

^{* Economist Impact survey commissioned by Google in October 2021. The most popular answer when workers were asked about the most important condition needed to achieve the long-term success of hybrid work models was based on 42% of 1,244 respondents.}