The Unintended Consequences of Scale
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Cloud infrastructure offers so many advantages: on-demand scalability, built-in security, and a bevy of tooling to scale your business at the speed of the Internet.
It enables companies to pursue “blitzscaling,” as Reid Hoffman calls it. Capital expenses that take years or decades to pay off are no longer required to establish global networking, compute capacity, storage resources, and application enablement tooling. By renting these assets from cloud providers, you can translate capital costs to operational costs, help your company to manage resources efficiently, keep expenses aligned with growth trajectory, and develop a portfolio of business-driving technology assets faster than would have previously been possible.
Certainly, this is the message from many founders and venture capitalists: move to the cloud, build a ton of software, scale like crazy, and win. Sounds great, right?
But history has shown us that the process is not quite this simple. Scale can be great and is a prerequisite to many of today’s most exciting business opportunities — but scale also frequently produces unintended consequences. You need to be able not only to achieve scale but also to manage it.
When scale produces bloat
To understand how unforeseen impacts can ripple out from a rapidly-scaled technology, consider the first mass-produced vehicle, the Model T. The first production model was produced in 1908, and less than two decades later, Ford had produced 15 million. This rapid growth profoundly affected urban living for decades.
Thanks to cars, fewer workers needed to live near cities or along major public transportation lines. The ease-of-access to personal transportation led to suburban population centers and, ultimately, urban sprawl. “Sub-cities” extricated homeowners from the density of urban population centers but also created a complex web of unintended consequences: new and often duplicative administrative bodies, new taxes, new zoning laws, and more intricate infrastructure projects. We are arguably still dealing with this fallout today as communities grapple with antiquated zoning laws and, in their attempts to find ways forward, often produce only more sprawl.
If your technology is in the cloud, you may be challenged with similar issues. For example, when developers build software in the cloud, many of the barriers to building software are removed. As a result, developers build a lot of software — but often without a lot of intentional design. This in turn results in companies building a large number of disparate systems and overwhelming app sprawl.
The cloud can help you proliferate technologies so quickly, in other words, that effective management and re-use of resources becomes incredibly tough.
Managing scale
Software assets are often seen as comprising the “brains” of a company — but to effectively grow, you should consider not only brains but also the digital nervous system. You need systems that connect the brains to all of the other important limbs that have to coordinate in order for your company to drive value.
One way of creating this nervous system and managing this complexity is to leverage the facade design pattern: applying an API layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of multiple systems into an elegant, reliable interface that encourages discovery and re-use of applications, functions, and other technology artifacts such as build and deployment pipelines.
For example, too many enterprises build a new digital “road” for each application that needs to authenticate or authorize users. Instead, you can leverage a facade pattern to help establish one “main road” for these purposes, encourage reuse of the road for new projects, and — with API management — monitor and control all traffic along the road. For tasks such as aligning risk and compliance operations or unifying developer onboarding functions, the distinction between reusing elegant roads and continually building new complicated ones could not be more important.
API management tools mean you can establish a single-pane-of-glass view into your network of digital roads and destinations or, if you prefer the biology metaphor, into the nervous system routes connecting your company’s software brains. This view becomes a point at which suspicious API usage patterns can be detected, reported, and handled and through which business-driving insights from legitimate traffic can be gleaned. Rather than dealing with IT sprawl, you can maintain visibility over your assets, control how they are used, roll out experimental digital products and get immediate feedback on adoption, and generate analytics to help you effectively divest from and invest in opportunities as the market demands.
More is not always better
More is not always better, and, in fact, it is sometimes worse.
It’s a time-worn sales axiom that would-be customers are more likely to make a choice when presented with two or three options rather than fifty, for example, and virtually all of us can relate to moments of “analysis paralysis” triggered by too many choices. These dynamics of choice are such that the diminishing marginal utility of each choice can detract from each option: with each choice comes a little stress, and as these stresses accumulate, customer satisfaction suffers. IT systems are no different; if developers building new connected experiences are left to their own designs, rather than encouraged with standardized resources and best practices, their work may add to complexity and customer dissatisfaction.
One need look only at the various open air markets around the world to see this point in action. They may offer many things to see but the experience is anything but efficient. The multitude of shops selling similar and duplicate items, the zigzag layout, and the expected friction from bargaining with each vendor all mean concepts such as market-wide product discovery and product inventory go out the window. If your developer experience mirrors these marketplaces, your efforts to scale are more likely to tangle up your operations than to satisfy customers.
Contrast this experience with luxury retail experiences where product areas are clearly demarcated in different retail spaces, product explanations accompany showcase items, inventory is available locally or ready to ship, clear pricing is readily available, and similar stores are intentionally anchored to strategic physical areas to encourage customer flow among them. The developer programs that cloud efforts are often meant to enable require a similar focus on luxurious experiences.
If your growth strategy creates bloat, internal developers will not use resources efficiently and your ability to share resources with external partners will likely be hamstrung. Applying API facades helps to ensure that your growing software portfolio is not a complicated maze to be navigated but rather a series of technology products for developers to leverage.
Indeed, you should think of the API itself as a product, not just a way of surfacing or connecting technology. The better the product, the more easily it can be managed, the better the experience developers will have using it, and the more control you’ll have harnessing the cloud to extend your business’s footprint.
Groww’s Google Cloud-Powered Platform: The Key to Secure and Successful Investing
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Groww makes investments simple and accessible, using Google Kubernetes Engine to ensure a reliable platform for customers, and makes data-backed decisions to grow its business with BigQuery.
About Groww
Headquartered in Bangalore, Groww is India’s fast-growing online investment platform that offers a simple and easy way to invest in stocks, direct mutual funds, IPOs, ETFs, and digital gold. Its mission is to make investing as intuitive and accessible as ecommerce.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces hardware costs with Preemptable Virtual Machines
- Enables a lean DevOps team with Google Cloud
- Analyzes data effectively and quickly for agile business growth
Investing is one way to ensure financial security. However, the thought of it can be a daunting one, especially for people without any prior experience. With a mission to make investment simple for digital natives in India, Groww was launched in 2016.
“We noticed that many people were on social media, booking cabs, and ordering food online, but the same people were not investing, despite having the means to do so,” says Singh. This observation led to a lightbulb moment for the team, and they realized that in order to appeal to the millennial, mobile-savvy generation, they had to create an investment platform that was as easy to use as an ecommerce platform.
Managing unpredictable spikes with Google Kubernetes Engine
As with any platform, there are bound to be peak and non-peak hours when it comes to traffic. For Groww, regular spikes take place in the early mornings, or in the evenings when people are more relaxed having come home from work. But the nature of the fintech industry is a volatile one. Investors are only human, and their investment decisions can be swayed quickly by the news. As such, spikes in traffic can happen at the most unpredictable times. To cope with this unpredictability, Groww uses Google Kubernetes Engine to scale up and down automatically to meet the required capacity around the clock. This also helps the company save costs, as it pays only for what is needed.
“No matter how much of an expert you are, you can never predict when traffic on the platform will be heavy,” says Singh. “Google Kubernetes Engine helps ensure that we never run out of capacity, without overspending on infrastructure cost.”
More recently, the investment company started using Preemptible Virtual Machines, which run at one third of its hardware cost. It also leverages Anthos to monitor and manage its backend infrastructure and to have better workload visibility. Singh shares, “We are very open to adopting new technologies, and our team is always eager to learn if we can do things better. We believe that technology is always evolving and it’s our responsibility to learn and make use of what’s available out there.”
Despite having so much running in the background, Singh explains that the company keeps a very lean DevOps team. “We’ve only got four or five people in DevOps, and that’s only possible because Google Cloud products are already able to run on their own.”
Making swift, data-backed business decisions
Infrastructure is only part of the equation for a successful business. Outside of operations, the ability to analyze data effectively is arguably the most important component for a startup to thrive. Groww leverages BigQuery to make decisions quickly and efficiently. “With BigQuery, we have a place where we can put all data, fire queries, and build dashboards almost instantly, allowing us to make business decisions quickly,” explains Singh.
The team also uses Looker Studio to clearly visualize the information generated through charts and graphs. The best part? Groww doesn’t need to spend additional time and resources setting up a large data team, since BigQuery does most of the work and in a shorter period of time. The resources saved also enables the team to focus on addressing functional requirements, rather than managing and sizing the data platform.
“From a startup perspective, BigQuery is really helpful because often setting up your own data lake can be very costly, and a distraction when the team is also busy focusing on setting up an infrastructure,” adds Singh.
Ensuring security and compliance with Google Cloud
As a fintech company, security and compliance continue to be top priorities for Groww. It chose Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider because there are three data center replication zones in Mumbai, which means it adheres to financial regulations for keeping its user data within borders.
Moving forward, Groww plans to evolve its platform alongside its users. Singh says, “As we gain more users with different wants and needs, it will be a natural progression that the company evolves. I believe that with Google Cloud, we are well equipped to pave the way to the future.”
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Modern web APIs allow businesses to build compelling experiences that generate, consume, and combine digital assets. They’ve become the foundation upon which digital business is built.
But the path to success can be unclear, rough, and challenging. The game has changed, after all, and this requires tossing out many of the rules by which you run your business.
You’re not alone. Other businesses have struggled down the path toward increased competitiveness, agility, and opportunity—and we, at Google Cloud, are privileged to partner with hundreds of customers across myriad industries as they gear up to go digital.
We’ve seen the successful decisions and strategies that have enabled companies to adapt to new digital realities. But we’ve also seen businesses make decisions that slowed, stymied, or, in some cases, reversed progress toward becoming an agile digital business.
There’s no one path to travel. There are many ways to make your business digital, but there are also many pitfalls. This is the survival guide to help navigate a smarter digital journey.
There’s one bit of advice we can offer above all else: GET STARTED. If you don’t take steps to adapt to the new competitive landscape and to your customers’ expectations, the very survival of your business is at risk.
Download the E-book to know more about the best and worst practices of how a business leads, measures, invests in, and executes an API initiative.
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Why Apigee: Customers Explain How this API Platform Boosts their Business
Apigee customers Expedia, Equinix, Morningstar, Swisscom, Vantiv, Telstra, Fox Broadcasting company, Laterooms.com and partners, SAP and Accenture share why they joined forces with the intelligent API management platform company.
Apigee is helping customers execute businesses commerce with other partners, securely expose assets to external developer communities, secure APIs throughout the digital value chains, open up new revenue streams and do much more.
Here is A Quick Glance at Who Said What
“Through our partnership with Apigee we have been able to create some really amazing implementations using our APIs to commerce with other partners and other types of content interactions in the marketplace and so far, the response in the market has been outstanding,” says Brad Jaehn, VP, Product GoGo.
“Businesses cannot afford to be on an island. It really is all about the interconnections among businesses. And when you are talking about sharing digital assets, you really are talking about APIs. Apigee is essential to provide a way for sharing of APIs, sharing of those assets between those companies,” says Garrett Vargas, Senior Director of Technology, Expedia.
“We mainly choose Apigee for three reasons. One is their experience in the enterprise market. They could really handle big data amounts for big enterprise customers. Second, their experience in telecom and third they really helped us to securely expose our telecom assets to the external developer community,” Heinz Herren, Head of IT.
“One of the primary reasons we selected Apigee was because it could secure APIs throughout the digital value chain. It offered us access control, authentication control, even versioning of APIs so that our customers are selecting the right APIs. It protects them and their assets as well as our assets, backend systems, and processes. Apigee allowed us to do this not only securely but very quickly. So, we are excited to partner with Apigee on the Equinix cloud exchange,” says Brian Lillie, CIO, Equinix.
“We all talk about user experience. It’s the end thing in Silicon Valley. But what about DevX. Vantiv wants to provide clean, open and standard APIs. To the Apigee powered Vantiv platform, enables our community of developers to innovate much faster. rather than having them discover capabilities by various other providers of commerce services, this one-stop shop Vantiv platform powered by Apigee give a clean, open and standard API layer for all commerce services to our developers,” says Navneet Singh, Senior VP, Product, Vantiv.
Watch this short video to know what else Apigee customers and partners are saying about the platform.
Google Cloud is a Leader in Q1 2022’s Public Cloud Container Platform: Forrester
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We’re thrilled to share the news that leading global research and advisory firm Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in the recently published report The Forrester WaveTM: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022. Forrester evaluated the container and cloud-native offerings of a select group of top public cloud container platform vendors across 29 comprehensive criteria.
We are proud that Forrester evaluated the strength and cohesion of our offerings, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, Anthos, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Cloud Code and more, writing that, “Google Cloud is the best fit for firms that want extensive cutting-edge cloud-native capabilities for distributed workloads spanning public cloud, private cloud, and multicloud environments.”
Google Cloud received the highest possible scores in the criteria of service and application catalogs, microservice development support, service mesh support, serverless and FaaS support, DevOps automation, container image support, control plane configuration, hybrid cloud support, container networking, product vision, supporting products and services, market approach, revenue, and breadth of offering. We also achieved the highest score in the Strategy category of all the vendors evaluated.
Google Cloud is all-in on containers and cloud native
The cloud-native tools and technologies created by Google Cloud are already powering the most innovative, scalable and secure apps around the world, from the most exciting digital natives to the most important enterprise industry leaders. Why? Cloud native means building and running modern apps that intentionally take advantage of the global scale, pervasive automation, elastic infrastructure, and secure resiliency of the public cloud.
For enterprises, cloud native in practice means using containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and DevOps automation to build amazing customer-facing apps quickly, to modernize existing business-critical apps safely, and to operate them all on cost-efficient, powerful, and secure cloud infrastructure globally.Over the past decade, Google Cloud’s technology innovation has fueled various domains of the cloud native ecosystem, such as Kubernetes and Go languages as the foundation, Istio for service mesh, Kubeflow for machine learning, Knative for serverless, and Tekton for CI/CD. Long-term investment and practices in cloud-native power its superior product vision and excellent supporting products and services.
The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022
Dedicated to simplicity, speed, and scale for your modern apps
Our mission is to create, integrate, scale, and secure the best open source and commercial cloud-native technologies – backed by a consistent cloud control plane – so you can spend more time dreaming of ways to delight your customers and less time building and operating platforms. We are committed to leading in cloud-native open source communities and making containers and Kubernetes accessible to everyone, from everywhere.
Here are a few recent highlights across our container services and tools, aimed at helping you build and modernize your most important apps with cloud native:
The most scalable fully managed Kubernetes service, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), achieved an overall solution score of 92 out of 100 in Gartner’s Solution Scorecard. In 2021, we introduced GKE Autopilot, a fully managed, security-hardened Kubernetes service optimized for production workloads. This unique mode of operation allows you to focus on your workloads while Google manages your cluster infrastructure. There’s nothing else like it. Then, we made GKE apps even faster with GKE image streaming. With proven scalability to 15K nodes in a single cluster and innovations such as four-way autoscaling, node auto-upgrades, integrated logging and metrics, cost optimization insights, native backup and restore, and multi-instance GPUs to accelerate machine learning workloads, GKE remains the best choice in managed Kubernetes services.
With Cloud Run, we expanded the range of users who benefit from containers to those who don’t know much about them. Introduced in 2019, Cloud Run combines the serverless attributes of autoscaling and developer experience with the flexibility of containers. Developers can use any language, runtime or binary, and deploy code using buildpacks to automatically build container images from source without worrying about provisioning machines and clusters. Cloud Run goes beyond FaaS and beyond earlier generations of serverless computing. Cloud Run runs more legacy workloads, integrates with Cloud Build for secure and compliant builds, offers deeper cost controls and billing flexibility, and encourages portability. We added support for social feeds, collaborative editing, and multiplayer games that use bidirectional streaming. Minimum instances reduce cold-start delays so you can run more latency-sensitive applications. And recently, we launched support for network file systems, allowing developers to share and persist data between multiple containers and services.
Anthos is at the heart of the Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of software and hardware solutions announced in 2021 that extend Google’s container platform services to the data center and the edge. Anthos is how we extend GKE to wherever you need cloud-native apps. Manage clusters on-premises on bare metal and VMware-virtualized servers, on AWS and Azure, and at the edge – all with a Google Cloud-backed control plane for consistent, automated operations at scale. We added a hosted service for configuration management to keep all your clusters in sync, and trimmed our installation footprint and streamlined cluster management with a new multi-cloud API that enables you to use a single API for full lifecycle management of Anthos Kubernetes clusters in AWS or Azure.
Finally, since no public cloud container platform is complete without powerful DevOps tools, we expanded our CI/CD offerings to make your developers even more productive, wherever they build and deploy cloud native apps. Use Cloud Code and Cloud Shell as your go-to cloud-native IDEs. Cloud Build is a fully managed serverless DevOps automation platform for use cases spanning CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, AI/MLOps, and more, across infrastructure GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions and more. Google Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery service that provides one-click release promotion and roll-backs, built-in metrics, and out-of-the-box security. Artifact Registry and Container Analysis provide managed artifact repositories, vulnerability scanning, and help secure the software supply chain.Google Cloud has a solid cloud-native innovation roadmap, targeting simplicity at scale for enterprise clients.
The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022
We are delighted and humbled to be recognized as a Leader in public cloud container platforms by Forrester. Grab your copy of The Forrester WaveTM: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022 today and let us know how we can help you build and modernize your most important apps how you want and where you want.
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Recently, consumer interactions and relationships among suppliers, partners and customers have turned digital and dynamic, requiring a certain degree of technological reimagining for businesses. To stay relevant with times and build resilience with digital transformation, businesses can explore application programming interfaces or APIs to leverage to make existing data value accessible and reusable, hiding underlying technical complexity and enabling businesses to recompose individual digital assets in new ways. Developers use APIs to connect software systems, including connecting existing technologies to new technologies, and to build modern applications. APIs drive operational efficiency by increasing developer productivity, and serve as a catalyst of innovation. With APIs, a business can securely share its data and services with developers, both inside and outside the enterprise, to foster new operational efficiencies, unlock new business models, and enable business transformation.
Download the e-book to learn about expert insights on building resilience with APIs and how Apigee API management is geared towards the helping businesses navigate digital challenges.
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