Editor’s note: This post was originally published in TechPulse Belgium, where Jack Buser, Google Cloud’s Director of Game Industry Solutions, shared his trends for the industry this year.

The year 2022 will hold many surprises (with a few already dropping!), but there’s one near certainty: By this time next year there will be millions more gamers worldwide. It’s thanks to the industry’s little-noted technology growth drivers, which are getting stronger. 

Games are no longer a niche hobby; it’s global, mainstream entertainment. There were 3.1 billion gamers worldwide in 2020. It’s estimated that by 2024 there will be another 500 million. With a global population of 7.7 billion, that’s nearly half the planet. Revenues in 2021 may reach $175 billion—likely more than movies, music, and books combined. 

It’s a strength unique to the games industry, driven by the way its creators deploy new technology. Advances we see in everything from pricing and emerging markets, to backend computing and delivery suggests it will grow from here, on things like artificial intelligence and planet-scale networks.

Games forever, game better

It’s no surprise that videogames have become a huge business. Playing games is one of our deepest human expressions. There is a 4,500 year old board game that people still play, a testimony to the human love of testing cleverness, honing reactions, building trust, or just enlivening a day.

Video games do all that and for decades game makers have taken the most cutting-edge computing tech to make things better. We’ve seen electronic ping pong become shooting asteroids, to simple (yet iconic) 2D sprites evolve into believable, expressive 3D characters, all leading to today’s immersive worlds hosting tens of millions of players worldwide.

There’s more to come. I work at technology’s cutting edge for games, offering the world’s leading game creators access to powerful cloud computing, a low-latency global network, Machine Learning and AI, and much more. As usual, game innovators are taking up all these tools, building new narratives, new ways to play, new markets, and new jaw-dropping moments.

And game creators aren’t just thinking about players; they’re also thinking about viewers. More and more people are watching eSports, and creators are using the games medium to engage their viewers in increasingly immersive ways.

Streaming like never before 

AI and ML are sharpening games and attracting new players in other ways. These technologies increasingly power everything from network performance to global player matching. The delicate but essential work of encouraging newcomers and discouraging bad actors, optimizing monetization, or building and scaling up new player environments.

Another important area we’re seeing cloud tools being put to use is in coordinating the workflows of global teams of developers. It’s not just a question of building faster anymore, but of collaborating and responding more effectively. The distributed work trends that featured so strongly during the pandemic had already featured in much of the game industry, increasingly it’s an industry standard. This will likely mean even faster and more diverse game development, addressing the needs of new markets where we’re seeing double-digit growth.

Tools like cloud streaming, 5G, and edge computing are likely to accelerate the use of Game Streaming, Augmented Reality, and other types of immersive gameplay. If my metaverse doesn’t have games, count me out! We’re looking at some exciting new developments in coming months with some major industry players. Stay tuned.

A big year for the games industry

As a premier provider of solutions, tools and services to games companies, our engineering job is complex and global. Fortunately, our mission is simple: Help game companies transform to meet new global opportunities with planet scale solutions. Technology has brought the gaming industry to astonishing heights, and is the perfect compliment to great storytelling and creative ingenuity. 

As a decades-long industry veteran, I’ve never been more impressed with what technology can do for our industry. Looking past 2022, when we’ll see more compute, more AI, more AR, and more innovation around healthy and exciting game play, there is just one near certainty: More growth.

With SAP Sapphire kicking off today in Orlando, we’re looking forward to seeing our customers and discussing how they can make core processes more efficient and improve how they serve their customers.

One thing is certain to be top of mind – the global supply chain challenges facing the world today. It’s affecting every business across every industry, from common household items that once filled store shelves and are now on backorder, to essential goods and services like food and medical treatments, which are at risk. Even cloud-native companies are making changes to ensure they have the insights, equipment, and other assets they need to continue serving customers.

We are proud to work with SAP on many initiatives that are driving results for our customers and helping them run more intelligent and sustainable companies. I’d like to highlight three of these important initiatives and how they are helping address global supply chain challenges.

Enabling more efficient migrations of critical workloads

We know a key barrier to entry in the cloud is the ability to easily migrate from on-premises environments. Our cloud provides a safe path to help companies including Johnson Controls, PayPal, and Kaeser Compressor to digitize and solve large, complex business problems, reduce costs, scale without cycles of investment, and gain access to key services and capabilities that can unlock value and enable growth.

Singapore-based shipping company Ocean Network Express (ONE) has become more agile by running their mission-critical SAP workloads on Google Cloud and using our data analytics to improve operational efficiency and make faster decisions. They have gone from an on-premises data warehouse solution that would take a full day loading data from SAP S/4HANA, to using our BigQuery solution that delivers business insights in minutes.

Since The Home Depot moved its critical SAP workloads to Google Cloud, the company has been able to shorten the time it takes to prepare a supply chain use case from 8 hours to 5 minutes by using BigQuery to analyze large volumes of internal and external data. This helps improve forecast accuracy and more effectively replenish inventory by being able to create a new plan when circumstances change unexpectedly with demand or a supplier.

Accelerating cloud benefits through RISE and LiveMigration

At Google Cloud, we have dedicated programs to help migrate SAP and other mission-critical workloads to our cloud with our Cloud Acceleration Program for SAP.

For SAP customers moving to Google Cloud, we provide LiveMigration to provide superior uptime and business continuity. LiveMigration eliminates downtime required for planned infrastructure maintenance. This means that your SAP system continues running even when Google Cloud is performing planned infrastructure maintenance upgrades thus ensuring superior business continuity for your mission critical workloads.

We are also proud to be a strategic partner with the RISE with SAP program, which helps accelerate cloud migration for SAP’s global customer base while minimizing risks along the migration journey. This program provides solutions and expertise from SAP and technology ecosystem partners to help companies transform through process consulting, workload migration services, cloud infrastructure, and ongoing training and support. To secure your mission critical workloads, SAP and Google Cloud can provide a 99.9% uptime SLA as part of the RISE with SAP program.

Many large manufacturers have taken advantage of RISE with SAP to forge a secure, proven path to our cloud, including Energizer Holdings Inc., a leading manufacturer and distributor of primary batteries, portable lights, and auto care products. Energizer has turned to RISE with SAP on Google Cloud to power its move to SAP S/4HANA. The company wants to automate essential business processes, improve customer service, and boost innovation. It had been using a private cloud solution but needed to gain flexibility while better containing costs.

“SAP S/4HANA for central finance will help us automate essential business processes, improve customer service, and fuel innovation that grows our company’s leadership position globally. We selected RISE with SAP to begin our journey to SAP S/4HANA and maintain the freedom and flexibility to move at our own pace,” said Energizer Chief Information Officer Dan McCarthy.

Another example is global automotive distributor Inchcape, which moved its mission-critical sales, marketing, finance, and operations systems and data to Google Cloud. With its diverse data sets now in a single, secure cloud platform, Inchcape is applying Google Cloud AI and ML capabilities to manage and analyze its data, automate operations, and ultimately transform the car ownership experience for millions.

“Google Cloud’s close relationship with SAP and its strong technical expertise in this space were a big pull for us,” said Mark Dearnley, Chief Digital Officer at Inchcape. “Ultimately, we wanted a headache-free RISE with SAP implementation and to unlock value for auto makers and consumers in all our regions, while continuing to have the choice and flexibility to modernize our 150-year old business in a way that works for us.”

A new intelligence layer for all SAP Google Cloud customers

When moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud, companies not only need to migrate safely, they also need to quickly realize value, which we enable with Google Cloud Cortex Framework — a layer of intelligence that integrates with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Google Cloud Cortex Framework provides reference architectures, deployment accelerators, and integration services for analytics scenarios.

Like many large e-commerce companies, Mercado Libre experienced skyrocketing transactions that more than doubled in 2020 as people sheltered at home during the pandemic, and they are anticipating more growth. The Google Cloud Cortex Framework is enabling Mercado Libre to respond, run more efficiently, and make faster, data-driven decisions.

Continued partnership to support organizations around the world

Our longstanding partnership with SAP continues to yield exciting innovations for our customers, and we’re honored to work with them to help customers address the ongoing impact of global supply chain challenges. We’re looking forward to sharing new insights and innovations at SAP Sapphire this week, and to listening and learning from you about your plans and challenges, and how we can best support your transformation to the cloud.

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. 

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.

About DB Corp

DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 62 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.

Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices. However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.

Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues. These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day. DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services. Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.

Expertise in managing large data volumes behind GCP selection

However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery. In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform as a service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp. “We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”

DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services. The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.

The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business. “As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar. “For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.

DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.

Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly. Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.

Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers. Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.