Digital tools offered by cloud computing are fueling transformation around the world, including in Asia Pacific. In fact, IDC expects that total spending on cloud services in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will reach 282 billion USD by 2025.1 To meet growing demand for cloud services in Asia Pacific, we are excited to announce our plans to bring three new Google Cloud regions to Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand — on top of six other regions that we previously announced are coming to Berlin, Dammam, Doha, Mexico, Tel Aviv, and Turin.

When they launch, these new regions will join our 34 cloud regions currently in operation around the world — 11 of which are located in Asia Pacific — delivering high-performance services running on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Enterprises across industries, startups, and public sector organizations across Asia Pacific will benefit from key controls that enable them to maintain low latency and the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, including specific data storage requirements.

“The new Google Cloud regions will help to address organizations’ increasing needs in the area of digital sovereignty and enable more opportunities for digital transformation and innovation in Asia Pacific. With this announcement, Google Cloud is providing customers with more choices in accessing capabilities from local cloud regions while aiding their journeys to hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Daphne Chung, Research Director, Cloud Services and Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.

What customers and partners are saying

From retail and media & entertainment to financial services and public sector, leading organizations come to Google Cloud as their trusted innovation partner. The new Google Cloud regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand will help our customers continue to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems. We will work with our customers to ensure the cloud region fits their evolving needs.

“Kami was born out of the digital native era, where in order to scale globally we needed a partner like Google Cloud who could support us on our ongoing innovation journey. We have since delivered an engaging and dependable experience for millions of teachers and students around the world, so it’s incredibly exciting to hear about the new region coming to New Zealand. This investment from Google Cloud will enable us to deliver services with lower latency to our Kiwi users, which will further elevate and optimize our free premium offering to all New Zealand schools.” – Jordan Thoms, Chief Technology Officer, Kami

“Our customers are at the heart of our business, and helping Kiwis find what they are looking for, faster than ever before, is our key priority. Our collaboration with Google Cloud has been pivotal in ensuring the stability and resilience of our infrastructure, allowing us to deliver world-class experiences to the 650,000 Kiwis that visit our site every day. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in New Zealand, and are looking forward to more opportunities to partner closely on our technology transformation journey.” – Anders Skoe, CEO, Trade Me

“Digital transformation plays a key role in helping Vodafone deliver better customer experiences and connect all Kiwis. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in New Zealand and look forward to working together to offer more enriched experiences for local businesses, and the communities we serve,” said Jason Paris, CEO, Vodafone New Zealand

“Our journey with Google Cloud spans almost half a decade, with our most recent partnership and co-innovation initiatives paving the way for AirAsia and Capital A to disrupt the digital platform arena in the same vein as we did airlines. The announcement of a new cloud region that’s coming to Malaysia – and Thailand too if I may add – showcases Google Cloud’s continuous desire to expand its in-region capabilities to complement and support our aspiration of establishing the airasia Super App at the center of our e-commerce, logistics and fintech ecosystem, while enriching the local community and giving all 700 million people in Asean inclusivity, accessibility, and value. I couldn’t be more excited about this massive milestone and the new possibilities that Google Cloud’s growing network of cloud regions will create for us, our peers, and the common man.” – Tony Fernandes, CEO, Capital A

“Google Cloud’s world-class cloud-based analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools have enabled Media Prima to embed a digital DNA across our organization, deliver trusted and real-time news updates during peak periods when people need them the most, and implement whole new engagement models like content commerce, thereby allowing us to diversify our revenue streams and remain at the forefront of an industry in transition. By allowing us to place our digital infrastructure and applications even closer to our audiences, this cloud region will supercharge data-driven content production and distribution, and our ability to enrich the lives of Malaysians by informing, entertaining, and engaging them through new and innovative mediums.” – Rafiq Razali, Group Managing Director, Media Prima

“Google Cloud’s global network has been playing an integral role in Krungthai Bank’s adoption of advanced data analytics, cybersecurity, AI, and open banking capabilities to earn and retain the trust of the 40 million Thais who use our digital services to meet their daily financing needs. This new cloud region is a fundamentally important milestone that will help accelerate our continuous digital reinvention and sustainable growth strategy within the local regulatory framework, thereby allowing us to reach and serve Thais at all levels, including unbanked consumers and small business owners, no matter where they may be.” – Payong Srivanich, CEO, Krungthai Bank

“Having migrated our operations and applications onto Google Cloud’s superior data cloud infrastructure, we are already delivering more personalized services and experiences to small business owners, delivery riders, and consumers than ever before – and in a more cost efficient and sustainable way. With the new cloud region, we will be physically closer to the computing resources that Google Cloud has to offer, and able to access cloud technologies in a faster and even more complete way. This will help strengthen our mission: to build a homegrown ‘super app’ that assists smaller players and revitalizes the grassroots economy.” – Thana Thienachariya, Chairman of the Board, Purple Ventures Co., Ltd. (Robinhood)

Delivering a global network

These new cloud regions represent our ongoing commitment to supporting digital transformation across Asia Pacific. We continue to invest in expanding connectivity throughout the region by working with partners in the telecommunications industry to establish subsea cables — including Apricot, Echo, JGA South, INDIGO, and Topaz — and points of presence in major cities.

Learn more about our global cloud infrastructure, including new and upcoming regions.

1. Source: Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Whole Cloud Forecast, 2020—2025, Doc # AP47756122, February 2022

Google Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM) lets you protect your cloud data with encryption keys that are stored and managed in a third-party key management system outside Google Cloud’s infrastructure. This allows you to achieve full separation between your encryption keys and your data stored in the cloud, making you the ultimate arbiter of access to your data. We are continuously innovating and developing the functionality of Cloud EKM, so let’s explore some recent updates we’ve made.

New functionality

Available today, we have added several much-anticipated features to Cloud EKM to help meet customer requirements:

Cloud EKM over VPC

Many customers want to incorporate an additional layer of security and reliability when connecting their key manager to the cloud. To help meet this need, we are introducing Cloud EKM support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks. This support allows Cloud EKM to connect via a secured private network, giving customers stricter control over network access to their external key manager. For more information, see Using Cloud EKM with VPC.

Support for asymmetric keys

In addition to symmetric encryption keys, Cloud EKM now recognizes both RSA as well as Elliptic Curve asymmetric keys created in a supported external key manager. With support for asymmetric keys, you can sign approvals granted via Access Approval. Asymmetric keys can add a layer of assurance when granting administrative access to customer data. You can also use the external asymmetric keys to sign data just as you would a cloud native key. For more information, see Asymmetric signing keys.

Protection level organization policy

We’ve made a new organization policy available for Cloud KMS that allows for fine-grained control over what types of keys are used. By using this org policy, you can specify that only specified KMS key types, for example EXTERNAL or EXTERNAL_VPC, may be created. This function can help meet specific requirements for separation of data or data sovereignty, ensuring only externally-managed keys are used with certain workloads. For more information, see Organization policy constraints.

Cloud EKM supports the Google Cloud services which typically store customers’ most sensitive data assets, and we are constantly adding support for more services. For example, we recently added Cloud EKM support for Cloud Storage, allowing customers to leverage Google-scale storage while adhering to local regulations and holding their keys in their own key manager. For a complete list, see our currently supported services, and if you’re interested in using Cloud EKM with a GCP service that is not yet supported, you can make feature suggestions here.

Best practices for Cloud EKM

The newly published Reference architectures for reliable deployment of Cloud EKM services guide provides recommendations for running a highly available and reliable external key manager integrated with Cloud EKM. These recommendations answer some of the most common questions and concerns we’ve heard from customers. The recommendations are aimed at operators of an external key manager, meaning that if a supported partner operates your EKM, you might share some of these responsibilities with a partner, depending on the design of their product and how it integrates with Cloud EKM.

Take encryption into your own hands

Being deliberate about encryption is critical for securing your sensitive data on Google Cloud. We’re always evolving our encryption products to meet your needs and help you achieve your business goals, and we hope that the additional features mentioned in this blog will allow you to make better use of your key management infrastructure. To get started with Cloud EKM, check out our documentation to learn more or try it for yourself in the GCP console.

Small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises are the backbone of the US economy generating more than 44% of GDP¹. Yet these organizations are still underserved when it comes to online financial tools—and dealing with payments is no exception. Complaints include hidden fees, limited capabilities, long-term lease agreements, and poor customer service.

These are the issues that we wanted to solve when we launched Helcim in 2020 in Calgary (Alberta, Canada). We provide a payment service that offers low rates through our interchange plus pricing model, no monthly fee for the core payments offering, and numerous payment options, as well as simple, affordable hardware such as card readers. 

Our digital-first approach makes it easy for owners of small and medium-sized businesses to get started. Online sign-up means no paperwork and near instant access to Helcim’s software and all-in-one platform experience. Merchants can choose from a range of payment solutions from the Helcim app including in-person payments, SMS payment requests, online invoices with pay now buttons, and more. 

To achieve our goals, we built most of the business systems and processes in-house including our technology stack, financial partnerships, marketing, and everything in between. This is something that few startups would dare to do, but it enabled us to build a payments platform offering the rich capabilities and performance SMBs really need.

Taking control with the cloud

Before migrating our infrastructure to Google Cloud, it was hosted at two colocation data centers in Calgary. This model served us well, but as we grew, most of our hardware needed to be replaced to maintain service security and performance.

A successful round of Series A funding also impacted our trajectory. Giving us the fuel we needed to scale and innovate faster. When we considered the choice between making a large capital investment in our existing environment, or to transition to the cloud, the decision was clear: The cloud was the way to go.

We looked at other big names in cloud hosting and tested another platform. But Google Cloud is by far the best environment for us. It’s much easier for a lean technology team to manage, as we embark on our first cloud strategy. It also offers all the tools and advanced machine learning capabilities we need.

Google Cloud also comes with the backing of Alphabet, a business that in the past five years has spent more on research and development than any other organization in the S&P 500². The ability to engage the Google Workspace account team for guidance to improve our everyday processes was another bonus. 

A variety of investment and training programs from Google Cloud also influenced our decision. We participated in Google for Startups Accelerator Canada which gave us access to Google Cloud experts across all our technology domains. This helped accelerate our infrastructure migration while ensuring we optimized every service from day one. We were also eligible for $100,000 USD of Google Cloud credits, covering our Google Cloud costs which helped us get everything up and running cost-effectively. The partnership with the wider Google team has been extremely impactful as we stand everything up for our business.

But ultimately, it’s the sheer depth and breadth of the Google Cloud environment that makes the difference. Here are the Google Cloud tools we currently have at Helcim.

BigQuery

We chose BigQuery because it is easy to aggregate new data and apply the right access controls. It also delivers outstanding performance running our analytics workloads.

Vertex AI

Vertex AI makes the deployment of new models exponentially faster, and with Google Cloud, we can do most of the work through containers instead of proprietary tooling.

GKE

GKE has enabled us to migrate to a fully managed cloud service and avoid a lift-and-shift exercise that would have prevented us from getting the full benefits of a containerized infrastructure. Running a new GKE environment also enabled us to significantly reduce platform latency by 20%-50%. We can now deploy projects in hours instead of days. 

Cloud Storage

We updated our centralized file system to use Cloud Storage, which is faster and more scalable.

Cloud SQL

All of our software today is built on top of MySQL, so CloudSQL was the natural choice for cloud database management.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run is more flexible than other serverless tools and was an easy way to reduce the burden of managing some of our services.

Boosting performance across the business

By migrating to Google Cloud, we transformed our application performance. We were able to decouple the infrastructure between systems and use modern server hardware for our compute and database instances. With very little change to our code, we saw a 50%+ increase in the speed of our entire platform.

Giving developers more control of the technology running their systems via containers means that they can enhance systems through more frequent language updates and by deploying new technologies to optimize workloads.

We can more closely monitor our systems to diagnose issues and fix their root cause faster. Being able to quickly add resources gives us further options if we experience platform latency or increased traffic.

Maintaining momentum with machine learning

Leveraging Vertex AI has significantly reduced the time it takes the team to build and deploy new machine learning models. Greater agility in our data stack has also freed up time for exploratory work in the data team. For instance, by creating low fidelity proxy data for human behavior in the application process, we created a new model that will reduce the number of manually reviewed batches by more than 10%.

We’ve also been able to improve our deployment process and the time to rollback. As a result, breaking changes in production have been reduced from more than five minutes to less than 30 seconds.

Thanks to BigQuery, we can make better use of data to support key business decisions. Previously it was hard to aggregate data from different sources and while maintaining our strict requirements for customer data confidentiality. We also needed specialist SQL knowledge to consume it. By investing in a more modern data stack, the availability of trusted data across the organization has increased exponentially. 

We’ve also overcome the constraints imposed by static hardware environments especially when maintaining a high-availability configuration between two locations. With Google Cloud, we’re no longer constrained by such a rigid arrangement and the deployment velocity of new infrastructure tooling has been reduced from months to days.

Security is another area where Google Cloud excels. From hackers and fraudsters to bots and web attacks, it protects our users, applications, and data, while facilitating compliance with local and regional authorities. We can also integrate more easily with our security partners ensuring that we can empower our team to stay ahead of cyber criminals and other external threats.

Building the payments platform for the future, today

When we look to the future, Google Cloud opens the door to dozens of opportunities to widen our appeal to SMBs while remaining competitive. Its advanced infrastructure for cloud computing, data analytics and ML supports our roadmap to profitability and will help us attract future rounds of funding.

Above all it provides a foundation for growth. We grew 400% in 2021 and raised more capital in the spring of 2022 to grow even faster. In 2022 we were also listed as one of the top payments processors by industry publications such as Nerdwallet and Merchant Maverick. With Google Cloud, we can build on this success, continue to innovate, and help our SMB customers take their payments and e-commerce strategies to the next level. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more. 

To learn more about Google for Startups Accelerators and to apply to a program in your region, visit the website here. 

^{1. Small Businesses Generate 44 Percent Of U.S. Economic Activity
2. Alphabet: Big Value In Big Tech}

Where should you run your workload? It depends…Choosing the right infrastructure options to run your application is critical, both for the success of your application and for the team that is managing and developing it. This post breaks down some of the most important factors that you need to consider when deciding where you should run your stuff!

What are these services?

• Compute Engine – Virtual machines. You reserve a configuration of CPU, memory, disk, and GPUs, and decide what OS and additional software to run.
• Kubernetes Engine – Managed Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. You create a cluster and configure which containers to run; Kubernetes keeps them running and manages scaling, updates and connectivity.
• Cloud Run – A fully managed serverless platform that runs individual containers. You give code or a container to Cloud Run, and it hosts and auto scales as needed to respond to web and other events.
• App Engine – A fully managed serverless platform for complete web applications. App Engine handles the networking, application scaling, and database scaling. You write a web application in one of the supported languages, deploy to App Engine, and it handles scaling, updating versions, and so on. 
• Cloud Functions – Event-driven serverless functions. You write individual function code and Cloud Functions calls your function when events happen (for example, HTTP, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage changes, among others). 

What level of abstraction do you need?

• If you need more control over the underlying infrastructure (for example, the operating system, disk images, CPU, RAM, and disk) then it makes sense to use Compute Engine. This is a typical path for legacy application migrations and existing systems that require a specific OS. 
• Containers provide a way to virtualize an OS so that multiple workloads can run on a single OS instance. They are fast and lightweight, and they provide portability. If your applications are containerized then you have two  main options. 
  • You can use Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE, which gives you full control over the container down to the nodes with specific OS, CPU, GPU, disk, memory, and networking. GKE also offers Autopilot, when you need the flexibility and control but have limited ops and engineering support. 
  • If, on the other hand, you are just looking to run your application in containers without having to worry about scaling the infrastructure, then Cloud Run is the best option. You can just write your application code, package it into a container, and deploy it.  
• If you just want to code up your HTTP-based application and leave the scalability and deployment of the app to Google Cloud then App Engine — a serverless, fully-managed option that is designed for hosting and running web applications — is a good option for you. 
• If your code is a function and just performs an action based on an event/trigger, then deploying it with Cloud Functions makes sense. 

What is your use case? 

• Use Compute Engine if you are migrating a legacy application with specific licensing, OS, kernel, or networking requirements. Examples: Windows-based applications, genomics processing, SAP HANA.
• Use GKE if your application needs a specific OS or network protocols beyond HTTP/s. When you use GKE, you are using Kubernetes, which makes it easy to deploy and expand into hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Anthos is a platform specifically designed for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. It provides single-pane-of-glass visibility across all clusters from infrastructure through to application performance and topology. Example: Microservices-based applications. 
• Use Cloud Run if you just need to deploy a containerized application in a programming language of your choice with HTTP/s and websocket support. Examples: websites, APIs, data processing apps, webhooks.
• Use App Engine if you want to deploy and host a web based application (HTTP/s) in a serverless platform. Examples: web applications, mobile app backends
• Use Cloud Functions if your code is a function and just performs an action based on an event/trigger from Pub/Sub or Cloud Storage. Example: Kick off a video transcoding function as soon as a video is saved in your Cloud Storage bucket.

Need portability with open source? 

If your requirement is based on portability and open-source support take a look at GKE, Cloud Run, and Cloud Functions. They are all based on open-source frameworks that help you avoid vendor lock-in and give you the freedom to expand your infrastructure into hybrid and multi-cloud environments.  GKE clusters are powered by the Kubernetes open-source cluster management system, which provides the mechanisms through which you interact with your cluster. Cloud Run for Anthos is powered by Knative, an open-source project that supports serverless workloads on Kubernetes. Cloud Functions use an open-source FaaS (function as a service) framework to run functions across multiple environments. 

What are your team dynamics like?

If you have a small team of developers and you want their attention focused on the code, then a serverless option such as Cloud Run or App Engine is  a good choice because you won’t have to have a team managing the infrastructure, scale, and operations. If you have bigger teams, along with your own tools and processes, then Compute Engine or GKE makes more sense because it enables you to define your own process for CI/CD, security, scale, and operations. 

What type of billing model do you prefer? 

Compute Engine and GKE billing models are based on resources, which means you pay for the instances you have provisioned, independent of usage. You can also take advantage of sustained and committed use discounts. 

Cloud Run, App Engine, and Cloud Functions are billed per request, which means you pay as you go. 

Conclusion

It’s important to consider all the relevant factors that play a role in picking appropriate compute options for your application. Remember that no decision is necessarily final; you can always move from one option to another.

To explore these points in more detail, please take a look at the “Where Should I Run My Stuff?” video.

For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo &  thecloudgirl.dev. For similar cloud content follow us on Twitter at @pvergadia and @briandorsey