Enhancing Developer Productivity with Skaffold v2 GA - Build What's Next
Blog

Enhancing Developer Productivity with Skaffold v2 GA

2848

Of your peers have already read this article.

2:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

For years, Google has been committed to maximizing developer productivity. In 2019, we announced the general availability of Skaffold, a command-line tool that facilitates continuous development and delivery for containerized applications. Today, we’re excited to announce that Skaffold V2 is now generally available.

Skaffold V2 expands Skaffold’s supported platforms and architectures with the introduction of Cloud Run as a supported deployer, and now supports building from and deploying to both ARM and x86 architectures. Skaffold V2 also offers enhanced support for CI/CD and GitOps workflows, with the introduction of the skaffold render phase, verify phase, and kpt integration. Best of all, all existing Skaffold configurations are fully compatible with Skaffold V2, and upgrading from V1 is as easy as running skaffold fix.

Expanded platform support

Since its inception, Skaffold has supported deploying applications to Kubernetes, using either kubectl or Helm deployers. Deploying to Kubernetes with Skaffold unlocks the benefits of improved velocity from source to prod, with reusable building blocks for iterative development and CI/CD.

We’re excited to expand these benefits to Cloud Run, Google’s serverless container runtime. Cloud Run provides a fully managed platform for any containerized application, and includes features such as automatic resource scaling and integrated storage, security, and monitoring solutions.

It’s easy to get started with Skaffold and Cloud Run; all you need is a Cloud Run service config and a few small updates to your skaffold.yaml. Skaffold also powers Cloud Deploy’s support of Cloud Run. Check out our documentation to learn more.

In addition to the new deployment target, the expanded set of compatible image-architecture configurations with Skaffold V2 helps developers ensure that the architecture of the machine on which an image is built is compatible with the architecture of the machine on which the image is intended to be run. Skaffold now intelligently checks the architecture of your local machine as well as the target Kubernetes cluster before building your images, allowing you to deploy to ARM, x86 or multi-arch clusters from a x86 or ARM machine without any manual configuration.

Check out our documentation to learn more about deploying to Cloud Run and managing ARM workloads.

CI/CD and DevOps, simplified

Skaffold helps developers implement CI/CD and DevOps workflows by providing a set of reusable building blocks for repeatable build, tag, and deploy steps. With Skaffold, the same config can be shared in development and production, leveraging Skaffold profiles to implement environment-specific configuration.

With Skaffold V2, the Skaffold render phase is now distinct from the deploy phase. The output of the Skaffold render phase is a manifest, hydrated with tagged image names and templated values, which can then be persisted in source control before deployment as part of a GitOps workflow.

In addition to the render phase, Skaffold V2’s new verify phase helps to configure post-deployment tests. This phase can be used to configure a series of test containers that are then monitored to ensure that the deployment was successful. This allows developers to integrate this verification step into reusable deployment pipelines rather than running these tests manually.

Finally, the introduction of kpt as a supported renderer in Skaffold V2 provides a sophisticated syntax for serially transforming and validating your manifests, unlocking additional customizability and verification in your GitOps workflows. Using Skaffold makes it easy to adopt kpt because you can take advantage of kpt’s transformation and validation functionality without needing to write any separate kpt configuration. It’s as easy as adding a few stanzas to your existing skaffold.yaml. Kpt can also be used alongside Skaffold’s pre-existing integrations with renderers Helm and Kustomize.

Check out our documentation to learn more about the Skaffold render phase, verify phase, and kpt integration.

Upgrading to Skaffold V2

Getting started with Skaffold V2 is easy. If you’re new to Skaffold, check out the V2 installation guide for platform-specific installation instructions.

If you’re an existing Skaffold user, upgrading to Skaffold V2 is simple and requires no manual configuration changes. All of your existing Skaffold configurations will continue to work as-is with Skaffold V2. Simply download the Skaffold V2 binary and run skaffold fix to update your config. Check out the V2 upgrade guide for more details.

Finally, check out our documentation for more detailed instructions on taking advantage of all of the new features introduced in Skaffold V2.

What’s next?

If you’re interested in harnessing the power of Skaffold for serverless workloads, check out our documentation for using Skaffold V2 with Cloud Run.

Also, be sure to check out Cloud Deploy, Google’s fully managed continuous delivery offering, which leverages Skaffold to construct reusable deployment pipelines.

We’re excited to hear from you. As always, you can reach out to us on GitHub and Slack.

How-to

How to Pick a Database that is Suitable for Your Application

7036

Of your peers have already read this article.

2:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Read the post to explore your options within Google Cloud across relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases, along with use cases to pick the best for your application!

Picking the right database for your application is not easy. The choice depends heavily on your use case—transactional processing, analytical processing, in-memory database, and so on—but it also depends on other factors. This post covers the different database options available within Google Cloud across relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases and explains which use cases are best suited for each database option. 

DB Sketch
Click to enlarge

Relational databases 

In relational databases information is stored in tables, rows and columns, which typically works best for structured data. As a result they are used for applications in which the structure of the data does not change often. SQL (Structured Query Language) is used when interacting with most relational databases. They offer ACID consistency mode for the data, which means:

  • Atomic: All operations in a transaction succeed or the operation is rolled back.
  • Consistent: On the completion of a transaction, the database is structurally sound.
  • Isolated: Transactions do not contend with one another. Contentious access to data is moderated by the database so that transactions appear to run sequentially.
  • Durable: The results of applying a transaction are permanent, even in the presence of failures.

Because of these properties, relational databases are used in applications that require high accuracy and for transactional queries such as financial and retail transactions. For example: In banking when a customer makes a funds transfer request, you want to make sure the transaction is possible and it actually happens on the most up-to-date account balance, in this case an error or resubmit request is likely fine.

There are three relational database options in Google Cloud: Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and Bare Metal Solution.

Cloud SQL: Provides managed MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server databases on Google Cloud. It reduces maintenance cost and automates database provisioning, storage capacity management, back ups, and out-of-the-box high availability and disaster recovery/failover. For these reasons it is best for general-purpose web frameworks, CRM, ERP, SaaS and e-commerce applications.

Cloud Spanner: Cloud Spanner is an enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly-consistent database that offers up to 99.999% availability, built specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scale. It is a unique database that combines ACID transactions, SQL queries, and relational structure with the scalability that you typically associate with non-relational or NoSQL databases. As a result, Spanner is best used for applications such as gaming, payment solutions, global financial ledgers, retail banking and inventory management that require ability to scale limitlessly with strong-consistency and high-availability. 

Bare Metal Solution: Provides hardware to run specialized workloads with low latency on Google Cloud. This is specifically useful if there is an Oracle database that you want to lift and shift into Google Cloud. This enables data center retirements and paves a path to modernize legacy applications. 

Non-relational databases

Non-relational databases (or NoSQL databases) store compex, unstructured data in a non-tabular form such as documents. Non-relational databases are often used when large quantities of complex and diverse data need to be organized. Unlike relational databases, they perform faster because a query doesn’t have to access several tables to deliver an answer, making them ideal for storing data that may change frequently or for applications that handle many different kinds of data. 

For example, an apparel store might have a database in which shirts have their own document containing all of their information, including size, brand, and color with room for adding more parameters later such as sleeve size, collars, and so on.

Qualities that make NoSQL databases fast:

  • Eventual consistency: stores usually exhibit consistency at some later point (e.g., lazily at read time)
  • Horizontal scaling, usually using hashed distributions
  • Typically, they are optimized for a specific workload pattern (i.e., key-value, graph, wide-column)
  • Typically, they don’t support cross shard transactions or flexible isolation modes.

Because of these properties, non-relational databases are used in applications that require large scale, reliability, availability, and frequent data changes.They can easily scale horizontally by adding more servers, unlike some relational databases, which scale vertically by increasing the machine size as the data grows. Although, some relations databases such as Cloud Spanner support scale-out and strict consistency.

Non-relational databases can store a variety of unstructured data such as documents, key-value, graphs, wide columns, and more. Here are your non-relational database options in Google Cloud: 

  • Document databases: Store information as documents (in formats such as JSON and XML). For example: Firestore
  • Key-value stores: Group associated data in collections with records that are identified with unique keys for easy retrieval. Key-value stores have just enough structure to mirror the value of relational databases while still preserving the benefits of NoSQL. For example: Datastore, Bigtable, Memorystore
  • In-memory database: Purpose-built database that relies primarily on memory for data storage. These are designed to attain minimal response time by eliminating the need to access disks. They are ideal for applications that require microsecond response times and can have large spikes in traffic. For example: Memorystore
  • Wide-column databases: Use the tabular format but allow a wide variance in how data is named and formatted in each row, even in the same table. They have some basic structure while preserving a lot of flexibility. For example: Bigtable
  • Graph databases: Use graph structures to define the relationships between stored data points; useful for identifying patterns in unstructured and semi-structured information. For example: JanusGraph

There are three non-relational databases in Google Cloud:

  • Firestore: Is a serverless document database which scales on demand and acts as a backend-as-a-service. It is DBaaS that increases the speed of building applications. It is perfect for all general purpose uses cases such as ecommerce, gaming, IoT and real time dashboards. With Firestore users can interact with and collaborate on live and offline data making it great for real-time application and mobile apps.  
  • Cloud Bigtable: Cloud Bigtable is a sparsely populated table that can scale to billions of rows and thousands of columns, enabling you to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. It is ideal for storing very large amounts of single-keyed data with very low latency. It supports high read and write throughput at sub-millisecond latency, and it is an ideal data source for MapReduce operations. It also supports the open-source HBase API standard to easily integrate with the Apache ecosystem including HBase, Beam, Hadoop and Spark along with Google Cloud ecosystem.
  • Memorystore: Memorystore is a fully managed in-memory data store service for Redis and Memcached at Google Cloud. It is best for in-memory and transient data stores and automates the complex tasks of provisioning, replication, failover, and patching so you can spend more time coding. Because it offers extremely low latency and high performance, Memorystore is great for web and mobile, gaming, leaderboard, social, chat, and news feed applications.

Conclusion

Choosing a relational or a non-relational database largely depends on the use case. Broadly, if your application requires ACID transactions and your data structure is not going to change much, select a relational database. 

In Google Cloud use Cloud SQL for any general-purpose SQL database and Cloud Spanner for large-scale globally scalable, strongly consistent use cases. In general, if your data structure may change later and if scale and availability is a bigger requirement than consistency then a non-relational database is a preferable choice.  Google Cloud offers Firestore, Memorystore, and Cloud Bigtable to support a variety of use cases across the document, key-value, and wide column database spectrum.

For more comparison resources on each database check out the overview. For more hands-on experience with Bigtable, check out our on-demand training here and learn about migrating databases to managed services check out this whitepaper.  

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2TZXSnCTd7E%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo. For similar cloud content follow me on Twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev.

Trend Analysis

Enterprises can Push the Limits of Edge Even Further!

7004

Of your peers have already read this article.

2:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Powerful processors in edge devices help them perform heavy duty tasks that are outside the scope of traditional IT. Today, edge for businesses means opportunities that provide means to extend beyond corporate networks, cloud VPCs and hybrid!

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.

Raspi K8s Cluster.jpg
Raspi K8s Cluster

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.

How-to

Business Evolution with API Ecosystems

3459

Of your peers have already read this article.

1:30 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Apigee customers, like CHAMP Cargosystems, have pursued API-first ecosystem models to enter adjacent markets, create new customer interaction models, and rapidly grow their brand reach and partner ecosystems.

During uncertain times, ecosystem partnerships that leverage APIs have proven to help companies scale and address gaps in their businesses. Apigee customers, like CHAMP Cargosystems, have pursued API-first ecosystem models to enter adjacent markets, create new customer interaction models, and rapidly grow their brand reach and partner ecosystems. As a result of building their API ecosystem, they are transacting 300 million electronic exchanges and 20 million shipments per year.

CHAMP selected Apigee to provide an API platform and developer self-service portal option to all of its SaaS customers. Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and portal allows CHAMP and its customers to quickly connect to a variety of backend systems, including in-house, third party apps, marketplace portals and more– thereby accelerating their digitization strategies and opening up new markets through an API ecosystem.

Join this webcast and hear from this leading Enterprise company on how to:

  • Identify new revenue sources and markets using an API management platform
  • Improve time to market while still complying with all industry requirements
  • How to create a proof of concept to grow API adoption throughout your organization
  • Align internal business leaders and partners to see the importance of an API-first platform vision
Case Study

MerPay Platform Scales its Reach to Millions of Users using Cloud Spanner

5288

Of your peers have already read this article.

2:00 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

MerPay, a Japanese mobile payment platform, leverages Cloud Spanner and Google Cloud's managed services to successfully handle its growing traffic, reduce downtime and ensure reliable payment processing.

Editor’s note: To launch a new mobile payment platform, Mercari needed a database solution strong on scalability, availability, and performance. Here’s how Cloud Spanner delivered those results. 

E-commerce companies need to connect customers to their services securely, reliably, with zero downtime. When Mercari, Inc. launched a new mobile payment platform, we chose Cloud Spanner as part of our data portfolio, which provided us with easy scalability to handle millions of new users, a fully managed service that minimized overhead costs, and deep integration with other Google Cloud services. 

Mercari, Inc., Japan’s largest C2C marketplace, launched its app in 2013, which allows 18.2million monthly users to easily and securely buy new and used items. Mercari expanded into the United States and in 2014 and launched Merpay, a mobile payment service that can be used through Mercari in Japan in 2017. With more than 85 million users, Merpay is now accepted at 1.8 million merchants and e-commerce sites in Japan, supporting payments via the DOCOMO ID contactless system and QR code.

Prioritizing availability and scalability

When we started building Merpay, we were looking for a new database. In the past, Mercari had used MySQL with bare metal hardware. Because of the amount of data, we required additional expertise to manage and maintain the hardware, software and MySQL implementation. Having built much of the microservices architecture for our Mercari app using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), it was natural to look at Google Cloud’s managed services when deciding upon our new database infrastructure for Merpay. 

For the database, we were focusing especially on requirements around availability, scalability, and performance. To do a single payment transaction, there were multiple steps each with writes, requiring high-write-throughput and low-latency from the database. Needing a solution that would support reliable payment processing 24/7/365, we chose Spanner, which offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes. 

We worked closely with Google Cloud’s Premium SupportTechnical Account Management (TAM), and Strategic Cloud Engineer and Cloud Consultant teams to implement Spanner, including separating the payment processing— originally one of the functions in Mercari—as a microservice.

A nod to easier nodes and better scale

After launch, the number of Merpay users reached 2 million in only a few months. We had 45 Spanner nodes at the time of launch of Merpay and about 50 nodes four months later. Because we’d optimized the application side during those four months, we didn’t have to add many nodes to keep up with the growing traffic. 

Whenever we needed to scale up the serving and storage resources in our instances, Spanner made it easy to increase nodes as needed in the Cloud Console. To optimize costs, it’s easy to add nodes during a marketing campaign and remove them afterward. Even if the traffic count is different from expected, we can change the number of nodes immediately. That’s one incredible convenience of Cloud Spanner.

Building powerful pipelines

Our data pipelines are used for KPI analytics, fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer support use cases. Because Cloud Spanner integrates so easily with other Google Cloud data services, the data in Spanner is easily accessible for analytics. From the Spanner database for each microservice, we create both batch and streaming data pipelines using Pub/Sub and Dataflow, as well as Apache Flink, and load the data into BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. We’re able to quickly aggregate the data required for data platforms such as BigQuery and Cloud Storage. The original data is stored in Spanner and managed by microservices, but analysis through BigQuery is centrally managed by the Data Platform team. This team determines the confidentiality level of data and centrally manages BigQuery permissions using Terraform. By centrally managing data access permissions on the data platform rather than on individual microservices, we’re able to set appropriate security for individual users.

Our full data portfolio also includes Looker, which we use for product analysis, accounting analysis, test performance visualization, operation monitoring, development efficiency analysis, and HR analysis. We also use DataprocCloud ComposerData Catalog, and Data Studio. The Dataflow template created for the pipeline is also published as OSS

With Spanner and other Google Cloud services, our Merpay platform is flexible, secure, scalable and highly available. As Spanner eliminates overhead, we can devote engineering resources to developing new tools and solutions for our customers. We’re looking ahead at providing cryptocurrency service, for example, and are now working on a project to migrate Mercari’s monolithic system that is still on premises entirely over to Google Cloud.

Read more about Mercari and Merpay. Or check out our recent blog: three reasons to consider Cloud Spanner for your next project.

Blog

Plainsight Vision AI Available for Google Cloud Customers to Unlock Accurate, Actionable Insights

4685

Of your peers have already read this article.

4:00 Minutes

The most insightful time you'll spend today!

Learn how Plainsight makes data visualization a reality with the launch of Enterprise Vision AI on Google Cloud Marketplace to help businesses unlock visual data value!

Data-savvy businesses increasingly rely on images and videos for critical functions, and yet are challenged by the sheer mass of information—more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are created daily. This explosion in visual data has paved the way for the growth of computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to “see” the world similarly to the way people do, but with unblinking consistency, and greater accuracy. 

The transformational impact and value of computer vision solutions are significant and has been a guiding objective for companies and AI developers. And yet, even as the applications for computer vision increase dramatically, architecting and implementing vision AI solutions remain highly complex. Visual data, such as images and video, are made up of thousands of pixels of information that represent millions of different patterns and meanings, which can make interpreting even a single image overwhelming from a computational perspective.

Many organizations struggle with deployments and fail to operationalize vision AI solutions due to development delays, machine learning and data science hiring challenges, inaccurate output, a lack of integration with existing infrastructure, difficulty of use, and high cost. Plainsight, with the power of Google Cloud resources, is addressing all these challenges and helping businesses by enabling the deployment of vision AI within enterprise private networks that can be managed easily and scaled economically.

Plainsight has announced availability of its vision AI platform on Google Cloud Marketplace. Businesses can now easily deploy end-to-end vision AI to private clouds to realize the full value of their video and other visual data for accurate, actionable insights across diverse use cases.

Delivering on the Promise of AI: Seeing What’s Hiding In Plain Sight

For organizations to integrate AI and machine learning into their businesses successfully, the technology must be powerful enough to solve real challenges, yet fast, easy, and accessible enough to ensure the innovation potential is realized. Plainsight on Google Cloud delivers the power of enterprise vision AI that’s quick and easy to use with Google Cloud resources that enable global scale, increased security, bolstered privacy, unified billing, and cost savings. 

To streamline vision AI workflows, Plainsight facilitates the entire pipeline, from visual data ingestion and annotation, through continuous model training, deployment, and monitoring for easier innovation and faster time-to-production. Our platform accelerates vision AI development in a manner that is complete, accurate, and accessible to non-technical business leaders. We believe that AI should be available and accessible to anyone and everyone—so that teams across entire organizations can reap the benefits. 

By integrating Plainsight into their private networks, companies worldwide can now leverage one intuitive platform for centralized control of streamlined vision AI model creation and training with optimized visual data handling for diverse enterprise solutions. These use cases include: social distancing monitoring, medical imaging, drug compound screening, defect detection in manufacturing processes, identifying gas leaks, or even livestock counting and crop health monitoring for agriculture, to name a few.https://www.youtube.com/embed/A7U_0UkjvEg?enablejsapi=1&

We enable customers so they can create successful solutions that enable them to clearly see their business from all angles and to take advantage of the knowledge visual data can reveal by simply and quickly operationalizing practical vision AI applications.

AI-Powered Dataset Creation, Automated Model Training & Easy Deployment Without A Single Line Of Code 

For vision AI applications, success is inextricably dependent on the quality and quantity of the datasets required to train the relevant models. To aid enterprises in this vital stage, the Plainsight platform provides built-in data annotation for the fast and easy creation of datasets. This includes AI-powered features that accelerate the speed and quality of labeling such as SmartPoly, for the automated polygon masking of objects, TrackForward, to predict and automatically label objects from frame to frame in video annotations, and AutoLabel for automated object recognition and labeling based on pre-trained machine learning models, to highlight a few.

vision AI application.gif

In addition, to ensure the success of AI integration, we significantly reduce time-intensive processes with Plainsight vision AI’s automated machine learning with continuous model training and easy deployment capabilities. In just a few clicks, users can leverage optimizations for the most reliable model training without endless experimentation cycles. And, models are easily deployed at scale all within one, easy-to-manage model operationalization process for the business.

Growing With Google Cloud

Plainsight is a vision AI innovation leader, developing solutions that address unmet needs for challenger brands and Fortune 500s across vertical markets. As a team recognized for succeeding where others have failed, our expanding partnership with Google Cloud provides a powerful combination that helps customers see and activate the value of their visual data with a suite of services in a secure and private manner.

Our vision AI Platform simplifies building and operationalizing AI to solve business problems enterprises are facing every day—and the demand is increasing. To accelerate our journey to faster, more accessible AI for enterprises, we knew we needed strong support to grow Plainsight and scale our backend tools to match our vision. 

Google Cloud delivered everything, and more, in one program. The Startup Program by Google Cloud provided the technology and services for scale and the support we needed to maximize the value the Program provided us. The Startup Program has been a springboard for architecting Plainsight vision AI in the cloud, accelerating our goals and optimizing innovation, efficiency, and growth. The team also helped us optimize Google Ads campaigns, fueling adoption of Plainsight. 

After launching the SaaS version of Plainsight Data Annotation in November 2020, we grew our user base by nearly 110x in just three short months. Google Ads has also dramatically increased website traffic, growing new users by nearly 5.75X and page views by over 5X. The Google team helped us identify where Google Cloud offerings could be leveraged instead of developing in-house solutions and offered best practices that enabled us to deliver faster on our initiatives. 

Kubernetes was already the underlying component of our platform and leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as a managed service removed a layer of complexity. By combining GKE and Anthos, we were able to standardize our deployments, aligning to how our customers leverage Anthos for enterprise applications in their own organizations. In addition, as a fast-moving, customer-centric company we use Google Workspace to help us centralize and manage our day-to-day work internally. By leveraging multiple products across Google’s ecosystem, we take advantage of a holistic partnership that has helped our business tremendously as we scale. 

Leveraging Google’s Partners for Strategic Consultation

To facilitate this expansion of our partnership with Google and to maximize our use of Google Cloud services, we are working with DoiT International, a Google Managed Services Provider and 2020 Global Reseller Partner of the Year. DoiT provides us with ongoing technical consultation for cloud-native architecture, Google Cloud Marketplace integration, production-grade Kubernetes support, Google Cloud cost optimization, and technical support. The DoiT team has been invaluable in compiling best practices, tips, and strategies from their vast experience with various cloud customers to ease our Marketplace integration and is providing input for infrastructure strategy to support our continued rapid growth.

Plainsight Delivers Enterprise Vision AI Through The Google Cloud Platform Marketplace

Plainsight vision AI is now available to Google Cloud Customers on Google Cloud Marketplace enabling organizations across industries to deploy private Plainsight instances within their own environments. Marketplace customers will benefit from Google Cloud privacy, security, scalability and unified billing through their Google Cloud account. 

Combining the powerful benefits provided by Google Cloud resources with Plainsight’s vision AI Platform into private networks, enterprises worldwide can now leverage one intuitive platform for centralized control of streamlined vision AI model creation and training with optimized visual data handling for diverse enterprise solutions. 

Through our Google partnership, we’re able to leverage a powerful foundation that allows us to rapidly innovate, scale and accelerate delivery on our vision AI platform capabilities. By executing on our vision to make AI easier, faster and more accessible for all users across entire enterprises, we’re helping businesses see more and by seeing more, they’ll have the power to solve more. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here where you can apply for our Startup Program, and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

More Relevant Stories for Your Company

How-to

App Engine Basics to Help You Build and Deploy Low-latency, Scalable Apps

App Engine is a fully managed serverless compute option in Google Cloud that you can use to build and deploy low-latency, highly scalable applications. App Engine makes it easy to host and run your applications. It scales them from zero to planet scale without you having to manage infrastructure. App

Blog

Best Practices to Protect APIs against 6 Common Threats

APIs are exposed to a set of vulnerabilities that are both, unique and similar to that of software and web apps. Watch the video to learn six common API threats and best practices to protect from unwanted attacks.

E-book

APIs and IT Rationalization: Cost Avoidance and Cost Savings for Enterprise IT

The dynamic and fast-moving business environments of today demands that technology leaders and teams deliver more at a lightning speed, all the while working within the constraints of shoe-string budgets and tight project timelines. Winning in today’s environment requires a more strategic approach to optimize utilization of resources, remove unnecessary

How-to

How to Become a Hero by Metering and Understanding Your Utilization on GKE

It's hard to believe that GKE is already celebrating its fifth birthday. Over these last five years it's been inspiring to see what businesses have accomplished with Google Cloud and GKE—from powering multi-million QPS retail services, to helping a game publisher deploy 1700 times to production in the week of

SHOW MORE STORIES