About Grofers

Grofers is an India-based local mobile e-commerce platform that delivers groceries, fruits and vegetables, cosmetics and electronics. Customers use Grofers’ mobile app to shop for products from local stores in 17 cities in India.

Industries: Services

Location: India

India-based Grofers is a hyperlocal mobile platform that delivers groceries, fruits and vegetables, cosmetics and electronics. Customers use Grofers’ mobile app to shop for products from local stores in 17 cities in India.

In 2015, the number of deliveries Grofers fulfilled was growing at the rate of 10 times a month, and its delivery system struggled under the stress. When traffic spiked on weekends, its database frequently crashed. Fulfilling and delivering orders depended on manual processes such as telephone calls. Grofers needed a solution that would allow it to quickly scale and improve its delivery process.

Building an entire backend in two weeks

When Grofers launched in 2013, the logistics system was entirely manual. Staff at the headquarters called delivery drivers with order details and delivery addresses. Drivers then decided what order to pick up goods from local merchants. With a small number of customers and orders, that wasn’t a problem. But the manual system couldn’t handle growth. Grofers recognized it had to automate the system.

To do that, it turned to Google Cloud Platform. Grofers built a new backend for its delivery system using Google App Engine. When an order arrives, the new system looks at the status of all drivers — including their current location, the order he’s completing, and the pickup and delivery locations on the route. Based on that information, the system calculates the optimal driver for each order and sends the driver the order via a mobile app.

The system also takes advantage of Google Cloud Endpoints, which generates libraries for Javascript, iOS and Android. Grofers used Google Cloud Endpoints to create mobile apps to communicate with its delivery staff.

Scaling fast, dramatically improving delivery metrics

With the new backend and mobile apps, Grofers can scale quickly to keep up with its rapid growth. Grofers now delivers 70,000 orders per day, up from 10,000 before the GCP deployment, and has had 100 percent uptime. Each driver handles an average of 15 orders per day, compared to only five previously, letting Grofers handle more work with less staff. All this has been accomplished at very low cost: Prakash says that GCP costs account for only two percent of the company’s infrastructure spending. Without GCP, Prakash says the backend would be far more expensive and account for up to 50 percent of the company’s infrastructure expenses.

We’re continuing to expand our global footprint — and we’re doing it rapidly. In 2020, we announced our plans to launch a new cloud region to help accelerate the economic recovery and growth of Spain. Today, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Madrid is officially open.

Designed to help meet the growing technology needs of Spanish businesses, the new Madrid region (europe-southwest1) provides low-latency, highly available cloud services with high international security and data protection standards — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. The new Madrid region joins our network of 33 regions throughout the globe, helping local Spanish businesses connect with users everywhere. You can join us at our region celebration on May 25 here.

A cloud built for Spain

Google Cloud’s global network of regions is the cornerstone of our cloud infrastructure, enabling us to deliver high-performance, low-latency, sustainable cloud-based services and products to support our customers across the globe.

Built in partnership with Telefónica, the new Madrid region offers Google Cloud’s unique global infrastructure locally, creating new opportunities for digital transformation across various industries and making it easier for organizations at any stage of their cloud journey to securely deliver faster, more reliable customer experiences.

Accelerating digital transformation also requires cloud services that meet regulatory compliance and digital governance requirements. In particular, highly regulated sectors like government, healthcare, and financial services need additional controls to store data and run workloads locally.

“We welcome the Cloud capabilities that the Google Cloud region is bringing to Spain. It is especially important for the alignment with the security levels that public sector organizations demand and as required in the National Security Scheme. They must take advantage of a cloud that is offered locally with the highest security guarantees. The collaboration with hyperscalers is key. It is also essential to continue advancing with best practices adoption, training, security configurations and supervision” Luis Jimenez, Subdirector del Centro Criptológico Nacional.

Having a new region in Madrid helps remove these barriers to cloud adoption, allowing both Spanish businesses and government entities to meet their availability, data residency, and sustainability needs in Spain while also accelerating their digital transformation.

The Madrid region is launching with three cloud zones to prevent service interruptions, and our standard set of products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, and Cloud Identity. . Customers will also get access to smarter analytics capabilities, AI and ML solutions, and application modernization tools that allow them to unleash the full potential of cloud computing.

At the same time, customers will benefit from controls that enable them to maintain the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, especially those that deal with specific data storage requirements.

“In DIA Group we have always been committed to seeking innovative solutions to improve our customers’ experience while respecting the trust they place on us every day. For this reason we have decided to rely on the new Google Cloud region in Madrid for some of our most critical workloads like our store operations (orders, inventory, product stock, etc). This will guarantee our customers a low-latency service while managing their data within the national borders, as well as optimized performance.” – Carlos Valero, Chief Information Officer, Grupo DIA

“Offering our customers low-latency services while keeping workloads and data management safe, is vital for us. The availability of the new Google Cloud region in Madrid represents a great step forward that will allow us to achieve our goals and meet the expectations of our customers by offering them a premium user experience without neglecting data security and residency.” – Carmen Lopez Herranz, CTO, BBVA

Going beyond with a transformation cloud

At Google Cloud, we’re constantly working to help customers across various industries achieve what was once considered impossible, reinvent themselves, and transform the way they serve their customers using digital technology — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry.

Our transformation cloud is helping businesses become:

Smarter: Google Cloud lets you leverage data for deeper insights with a unified platform that makes it easy to get value from structured or unstructured data, regardless of where it resides.
Open: Google Cloud’s commitment to multicloud, hybrid cloud, and open source provides the freedom to choose the right solutions, allowing developers to build and innovate faster, in any environment.
Connected: Digital transformation isn’t just about technology — it’s about people and culture. In an era where work can happen anywhere, Google Cloud provides the tools needed to be more innovative, productive, and make faster decisions, together.
Trusted: Google Cloud offers strong security capabilities and a zero-trust architecture to help protect data, applications, and infrastructure against potential threats. We also provide specific offerings and work closely with local partners to help address digital sovereignty requirements emerging from both customers and policymakers.

In addition to the launch of our new Madrid cloud region, we’re making other commitments that will pave the way for new business innovations and development in Spain. The Grace Hopper subsea cable landed in September 2021 in Bilbao, connecting Spain and the UK with the United States for increased performance and greater support using the same network that powers Google infrastructure and products.

We’re also helping people develop new skills that will enable society to champion cloud technology and growth in the future. Google has already helped to train more than 1 million people with our Grow with Google program in Spain, and we have future plans to open a center of excellence for cybersecurity in Malaga and support the creation of the AI Lab Granada, in collaboration with Indra Minsait in the coming years.

For more details about the Madrid region, head to our cloud locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions.

Editor’s note: 5G is much more than a network—it’s a platform for innovation with the ability to provide immediate global scale and enable use cases that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. But to achieve this, industry players must come together to drive this growing ecosystem. Today, Erik Ekudden, CTO of Ericsson, and Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google Cloud, share their insights into the potential of edge and 5G.

Experts consider 2021 to be the year that serves as the inflection point between network readiness and 5G availability. However, communications service providers (CSPs) are still faced with the task of modernizing their networks, systems, and infrastructure to maximize the potential of 5G for themselves and for the enterprise customers they serve. As you weigh whether to tackle this challenge, let’s first examine what’s different about 5G and how CSPs can best leverage 5G and the edge together as an even stronger platform for innovation than just 5G alone.

With 5G, applications and mobile networks are no longer isolated

Let’s first address what 5G brings to the table. Faster speeds and lower latency are expected of course, and throughout the evolution from 2G to 3G to 4G, there’s been a step function in performance improvements with each of these. However, with every generation, applications and networks have been like ships passing in the night. Networks have been unaware of what the applications have been doing and applications have been guessing what the network was capable of. 

What’s different this time around is that there is some real innovation happening with the development and rollout of 5G itself. The network is on a path to become more accessible via APIs so that applications can call on and consume what they need from the networks in a more programmable way. This sets us up for more open architectures and ecosystems.

5G leverages a more open architecture 

One key difference with 5G as compared to prior generations is that it’s the most open and flexible network architecture the CSP industry has seen. This is thanks to its service-based approach and the decoupling of hardware and software components. CSPs are now running core network elements in the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and even multi-cloud, which was unthinkable even five years ago.

The flexibility of this more open architecture allows us to push the cloud to the edge while still being able to manage it from a single pane of glass. This is a huge leap forward from traditional networks, which have been domain-specific, managed in silos, and with slow service creation and delivery. Now, hyperscale cloud vendors and network equipment providers are offering solutions that help CSPs break down these silos to enable more flexible, automated networks with improved orchestration, visibility, and control across multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud-provider environments. In addition, the separation of hardware and software provides a much more flexible and cost-effective way to upgrade from one network generation to the next.

To provide solutions that are relevant to enterprises, CSPs must offer capabilities beyond connectivity. Enterprise service orchestration, including exposure of network assets and network slicing, are foundational capabilities to provide value to the application ecosystem and be in control of the network and the delivered services.

Combining 5G and edge to help industries reimagine user experiences

This convergence of compute, storage and networking at the edge coming together for the first time will enable CSPs and enterprises to offer their customers completely reimagined user experiences. Consider, for example, how the automotive industry might enhance how customers shop for a car. As part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ Virtual Showroom at the recent CES 2021 event, consumers were able to experience the innovative new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with their phones, and then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of them—virtually placed on their own driveway or in any open space.

By rendering the model in Google Cloud, then streaming it to mobile devices, visitors could also see what the car looked like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior in incredible detail. That is the true digitization of an industry segment and highlights the device-to-network-to-edge-to-cloud application relationship and how it can impact the user experience.

A programmable network unlocks more application use cases

The programmability of the 5G network will truly enable application developers to utilize all the benefits of the underlying network. Programmability supports ease of use and enables CSPs, integrated software vendors (ISVs) and the ecosystem to have the right network-level APIs exposed so that applications can be optimized based on the network behavior and vice versa. Imagine, for instance, automatically pushing applications from a cloud region to the edge based on network latency and performance metrics.

Finally, 5G’s programmability is also about having the right tools available for developers to build and integrate applications on the network with zero-touch onboarding and validation. With this, we’ve come to the point where the network is now a “platform” for application innovation. 

5G and edge will be all about the ecosystem

One thing is for certain: the shift to 5G will place tremendous focus on the ecosystem, and it needs to be an ecosystem that includes CSPs, public cloud providers, application developers and technology providers, all coming together to optimize the user experiences across industry applications. For instance, Google Cloud and Ericsson recently announced our partnership to deliver 5G and edge cloud solutions for CSPs and enterprise.  In addition, Google Cloud is also teaming up with popular ISVs to deliver more than 200 edge applications from 30-plus partners, all running on our cloud.  

With collaboration across ISVs, cloud providers and network equipment providers, we are enabling the rapid delivery and deployment of new vertical services and applications, leveraging capabilities like Anthos, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as well as multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud provider service orchestration and global edge networks such as those provided by Google and telecom service providers.

As members of the technology ecosystem, we talk about compute, storage and networking, but when it comes down to it, it’s about optimally placing these resources—whether in the cloud, at the provider core, at the edge or anywhere in between—to maximize the end-user experience. The openness and programmability of 5G lends itself to collaboration like never before. We predict that in 2022 and beyond, it will be all about the ecosystem coming together to leverage 5G and the edge to build innovations that we can’t yet imagine.

To learn more, watch the full Ericsson 5G Things CTO Focus fireside chat, where we discuss these topics and more.

Reliably executing tasks on a schedule is critical for everything from data engineering, to infrastructure management, and application maintenance. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Google Cloud Scheduler, our enterprise-grade scheduling service, is now available in more GCP regions and multiple regions can now be used from a single project removing the prior limit of a single region per project.

With many enterprise customers deploying complex distributed cloud systems, Cloud Scheduler has helped solve the problem of single-server cron scheduling being a single point of failure. With this update you are now able to create Scheduler jobs across distinct cloud regions that can help satisfy cross-regional availability and fail-over scenarios. 

Furthermore, you are no longer required to create an AppEngine application in order to use Cloud Scheduler. For existing Cloud Scheduler jobs, it is safe to disable the AppEngine application within the project. Jobs will continue to function without an AppEngine application. 

Creating jobs in different regions is easy. You simply pick the location where you would like your job to run. For example you can specify a location when creating a job through the gcloud command line :

HTTP Targets

  gcloud scheduler jobs create http <job-name> 
--location <cloud-region>
--schedule <cron-schedule> 
--uri <target-uri>

Pub/Sub Topics

  gcloud scheduler jobs create pubsub <job-name> 
--location <cloud-region>
--schedule <cron-schedule>
--topic <topic-name>
(--message-body <message-body> | --message-body-from-file <file-path>)

AppEngine Services

  gcloud scheduler jobs create app-engine <job-name>
--location <cloud-region> 
--schedule <cron-schedule>

Or you can pick a location when creating a job through the Cloud Console:

Google Cloud Scheduler is now available in 23 GCP Regions,  and this number is expected to grow in the future. You can always find an up-to-date list of available regions by running:

  gcloud scheduler locations list

We hope you are as excited about this launch as we are. Please reach out to us with any suggestions or questions in our public issue tracker.