Whether they’re reading the newspaper on the way to work, or catching up on the latest headlines on their smartphones, readers expect up-to-the-minute news wherever and whenever makes the most sense for them. As a result, media companies are increasingly looking for ways to improve, expand, and simplify their offerings, and they’re increasingly looking to the cloud to do it.

For more than 160 years The Telegraph has been counted on by readers across the United Kingdom and globally for award-winning news and journalism. An early adopter of cloud technology, it’s been a G Suite customer since 2008 and has already been using Google Cloud Platform to analyze digital behaviors to improve engagement and advertising performance since 2016.

Recently, The Telegraph announced it’s migrating fully to Google Cloud. By migrating all their production and pre-production services, they aim to deliver content faster, provide compelling experiences to readers, and reduce environmental impact.

“We are delighted to announce our newest collaboration with Google Cloud,” said Chris Taylor, Chief Information Officer, The Telegraph. “We have always worked closely with Google as they help us to provide our readers with great experiences on our digital products, collaboration software and internet scale through search. Their continued leadership in projects such as Kubernetes are enabling us to build flexible development environments that truly support DevOps.”

Powering the Digital Publishing Ecosystem

The Telegraph produces large volumes of digital content every day. It was imperative for them to find a cloud provider they could trust to support this ecosystem. By working with Google Cloud they have changed the way they see and engage with data: they can collect new information about their products every second and use that to continually hone their strategy. The Telegraph are placing more confidence and trust in the data captured about their content and now have one of the best available pieces of technology for capturing and analyzing the stories they publish in real-time.

Leveraging AI to support journalists

Time is critical when journalists are on a story, and The Telegraph wants to put important data in the hands of its journalists right when they need it. To do this, it will be using AutoML to classify content for journalists and make it more discoverable. For example, a reporter will be able to bring up relevant assets that link to their stories. It will also apply AutoML to classify Telegraph stock photos to help journalists attach compelling visual content to their stories faster.

Building compelling reader experiences with the help of APIs

Readers have an ever-increasing expectation of personalization. To meet this need, The Telegraph launched My Telegraph, currently live in beta, to offer registered readers personalized news experiences based on their interests or the particular journalists they want to follow. My Telegraph was developed on an API management platform provided by Google Cloud’s Apigee. You can learn more about how it’s applying API management to My Telegraph, in this blog post.

Working for environmental good

The Telegraph is the biggest selling quality newspaper in the UK, an accolade which requires it to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Optimal management of print production is important, and by using a combination of the cloud and machine learning, The Telegraph is better able to predict demand for physical newspapers, maximizing sales and minimizing waste. This makes great business sense for The Telegraph but also has great environmental benefit.

There’s a new subsea cable in town: Topaz, the first-ever fiber cable to connect Canada and Asia.

Once complete, Topaz will run from Vancouver to the small town of Port Alberni on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and across the Pacific Ocean to the prefectures of Mie and Ibaraki in Japan. We expect the cable to be ready for service in 2023, not only delivering low-latency access to Search, Gmail and YouTube, Google Cloud, and other Google services, but also increasing capacity to the region for a variety of network operators in both Japan and Canada.

Google is spearheading construction of the project, joined by a number of local partners in Japan and Canada to deliver the full Topaz subsea cable system. Other networks and internet service providers will be able to benefit from the cable’s additional capacity, whether for their own use or to provide to third parties. And, similar to other cables we’ve built, with Topaz we will exchange fiber pairs with partners who have systems along similar routes. This is a longstanding practice in the industry that strengthens the intercontinental network lattice for network operators, for Google, and for users around the world.

Network infrastructure investments like Topaz bring significant economic activity to the regions where they land. For example, according to a recent Analysys Mason study, Google’s historical and future network infrastructure investments in Japan are forecasted to enable an additional $303 billion (USD) in GDP cumulatively between 2022 and 2026.

The width of a garden hose, the Topaz cable will house 16 fiber pairs, for a total capacity of 240 Terabits per second (not to be confused with TSPs). It includes support for Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS), an efficient and software-defined way to carve up the spectrum on an optical fiber pair for flexibility in routing and advanced resilience. We’re proud to bring WSS to Topaz and to see the technology is being implemented widely across the submarine cable industry.

While Topaz is the first trans-Pacific fiber cable to land on the West Coast of Canada, it’s not the first communication cable to connect to Vancouver Island. In the 1960s, the Commonwealth Pacific Cable System (COMPAC) was a copper undersea cable linking Vancouver with Honolulu (United States), Sydney (Australia), and Auckland (New Zealand), expanding high-quality international phone connectivity. Today, COMPAC is no longer in service but its legacy lives on. The original cable landing station in Vancouver — the facility where COMPAC made landfall on Canadian soil — has been upgraded to fit the needs of modern fiber optics and will house the eastern end of the Topaz cable.

Traditional and treaty rights, and local communities, are deeply important to our infrastructure projects. The Topaz cable is built alongside the traditional territories of the Hupacasath, Maa-nulth, and Tseshaht, and we have consulted with and partnered with these First Nations every step of the way.

“Tseshaht is very proud of this collaboration and our partnership with Google, who has been very respectful and thoughtful in its engagement with our Nation. That’s how we carry ourselves and that’s how we want business to carry themselves in our territory.“ — Tseshaht First Nation – Elected Chief Councillor-Ken Watts

“The five First Nations of the Maa-nulth Treaty Society are pleased that we have concluded an agreement with Google Canada and have consented to the installation of a new, high-speed fiber optic cable through our traditional territories. This agreement, in which both Google Canada and our Nations benefit, is based on respect for our constitutionally protected treaty and aboriginal rights and enhances the process of reconciliation. We would also like to acknowledge the sensitivity that Google Canada expressed during our talks in regard to the pain and trauma experienced by our people as a result of residential school experience. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Google Canada.” —Chief Charlie Cootes, President of the Maa-nulth Treaty Society

“Google’s respect towards our Nation is appreciated and has good energy behind it.” —Hupacasath First Nation – Elected Chief Councilor – Brandy Lauder

With the addition of Topaz today, we have announced investments in 20 subsea cable projects. This includes Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Blue, Echo, Havfrue and Raman — all connecting 29 cloud regions, 88 zones, 146 network edge locations across more than 200 countries and territories. Learn about Google Cloud’s network and infrastructure on our website and in the below video.

Many people are visual learners; I am definitely one of them, and judging by the tremendous response you all showed to Google Cloud Sketchnotes on LinkedIn and Twitter, you are too.

-Priyanka Vergadia, Lead Developer Advocate, Google

“A picture is worth a thousand words”

Shortly after I started creating and sharing visual explanations of Google Cloud concepts in late 2020, I began receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from fellow cloud architects and enthusiasts. That feedback led me to think about pulling these sketches together into a reference guide — a one-stop shop for cloud learning fun. So here it is!

🥁 Introducing “Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects”

🤔 What is this book about?

This book is my way of making Google Cloud technical concepts fun and interesting via visual storytelling. It covers Google Cloud essentials from end to end, with a visual explanation of each concept, how it works, and how you can apply it with other concepts to meet the needs of your real-world use case. After reading thousands of pages of Google Cloud documentation and experimenting with virtually every Google Cloud product, I distilled that experience down to this book of accessible, bite-sized visuals.

The sketches are spread across five broad categories:

• Infrastructure, storage, and databases: Run and scale applications seamlessly
• Data analytics and machine learning: Derive actionable insights from data
• Networking: Connect, scale, secure, modernize, and optimize your infrastructure
• Application development and modernization: Build apps using containers and microservices
• Security: Protect data, users, and applications in cloud

🙋‍♀️ Who is this book for?

It is for all cloud enthusiasts. It is for anyone who is planning a cloud migration or new cloud deployment, preparing for cloud certification, or looking to make the most of Google Cloud. If you are a cloud solutions architect, an IT decision-maker, or a data and machine learning engineer, you will find this book a good starting point. In short, this book is for YOU!

When you get the book you’ll not only help yourself, you’ll also help provide meals for schoolchildren who need them. All the books’ proceeds go directly to the awesome folks at Wiley and a charity that fights malnutrition and supports the right to education.

🪜 Next Steps

I hope this book helps you on your Google Cloud journey by making it both easier and more fun. Are you ready to dive in? Order here, learn more about how the idea of the book came about here and please share your thoughts with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Soldiers can now use their CAC cards to log into the service’s newly established Google Workspace account. With it, soldiers who don’t need the full spectrum of information-sharing provided by Army365 can nevertheless find comrades, schedule meetings and coordinate other activities.

“All new entrants to the Army will be provisioned automatically with a Google Workspace account with a new email address … when they receive their CAC card,” Raj Iyer, the service’s chief information officer, said in a social-media post.

“Soldiers will retain their Google account till they fully transition to their first unit after completion of basic training and AIT [advanced infantry training], at which point their commanders will determine if they need an Army365 account.”

The directive applies to all active-duty, reserve, and National Guard soldiers.