Most enterprise companies enforce strict requirements for how APIs should be exposed to the public internet that require centralized handling of the authentication credentials, the collection of metrics metrics and other classic API management capabilities. Before the introduction of sidecars in Cloud Run, developers either had to implement these requirements within the service itself or add a full-lifecycle API management platform in front of their service as described in a previous blog post.

In this post we want to demonstrate a new way to fulfill the requirement for API management in Cloud Run. Specifically we want to look at how the recently announced multi-container feature in Cloud Run enables a sidecar pattern that can be used by developers of Cloud Run services to add pre-packaged API management capabilities. This includes self-service developer onboarding in a developer portal, credential validation and quota enforcements. As an additional operational benefit the described solution also adds centralized analytics and metrics for APIs that are exposed via Cloud Run.

Our solution for adding API management capabilities for Cloud Run is provided by the following three components:

• The Cloud Run service that hosts a traditional RESTful web application and is fronted by a vanilla Envoy proxy.
• An Apigee Envoy Adapter aka. Remote service that runs in GKE Autopilot and acts as a policy decision point PDP for Envoy’s external authorization filter and is responsible for accepting or rejecting calls to the Cloud Run service.
• An Apigee API Platform that is used to manage the API lifecycle of the Cloud Run service. Apigee also offers a turn-key developer portal where developers can obtain access credentials to access an API.

The user journey of an incoming request to our new Cloud Run Service with API management looks as follows:

1. An API Developer self-registers in the Apigee Developer Portal and obtains access credentials for the API
2. They call the Cloud Run endpoint and provide their credential for authentication
3. In Cloud Run service the Envoy proxy container intercepts the request and initiates a gRPC call to the Apigee Envoy adapter to authenticate the client.
4. The Apigee Envoy adapter verifies the request’s credentials and identifies the corresponding API product as defined in Apigee. The Envoy adapter also verifies the call quota associated with the client and sends the analytics data and access logs back to the control plane.
5. If the credentials are valid and the client hasn’t exhausted their call quota the Apigee Envoy adapter forwards the request to its co-located container in the Cloud Run service.

The step by step instructions for how to configure the architecture above can be found in this blog post. 

Starting from a pre-existing Apigee installation the Apigee Envoy adapter is used to connect back to the Apigee runtime and control plane for accessing the API product definitions to link the incoming requests to the issued credentials and quotas. The Apigee remote service component can be replicated for high availability and is shared between multiple Cloud Run services that require a gRPC target for the sidecar’s external authorization filter.

The Cloud Run service connects to the Apigee Remote Service via an Envoy proxy that acts as a sidecar to the main application. The configuration for the envoy proxy can either be embedded within a customized Envoy image or mounted via the secret manager integration of cloud run as shown in the diagram above. Externalizing the configuration simplifies the maintenance and upgrade of the sidecar container as it can just pull the latest patch version of Envoy regularly.

The newly added API management capability is transparent for the primary application container within the Cloud Run service and does not require any changes in the application source code. Once the Cloud Run service is re-deployed with the sidecar in place, consuming applications can start to use credentials that they obtained via the Apigee API Management platform or the API developer portal to consume the Cloud Run service. At an operations level the platform operators will start to see requests to the Cloud Run service popping up in Apigee’s analytics dashboards and be able to track consumption and exposure at an API product level.

Next Steps

If you are interested in trying the multi-container support for Cloud Run yourself, check out the release announcement with many more use case descriptions. For another example and a detailed walkthrough on how to use sidecars in Cloud Run to report custom metrics to Google Cloud managed service for Prometheus you can head over to this tutorial in the Cloud Run documentation. Lastly, if you’re interested in the broader picture of how the latest features in Cloud Run are moving serverless forward, then make sure you check out this video.

The software development process requires complex, cross-functional collaboration while continuously improving products and services. Our customers who build software say that they value Google Workspace for its ability to drive innovation and collaboration throughout the entire software development life cycle. Developers can hold standups and scrums in Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces, create and collaborate on requirements documentation in Google Docs and Sheets, build team presentations in Google Slides, and manage their focus time and availability with Google Calendar.

Development teams also use many other tools to get work done, like tracking issues and tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, managing workloads with Asana, and incident management in PagerDuty. One of the benefits of Google Workspace is that it’s an open platform tailored to improve the performance of your tools by seamlessly integrating them together. We’re constantly expanding our ecosystem and improving Google Workspace, giving you the power to push your software development even further.

Make software development more agile

Google Workspace gives you real-time visibility into project progress and decisions to help you ship quality code fast and stay connected with your stakeholders, all without switching tools and tabs. By leveraging applications from our partners, you can pull valuable information out of silos, making collaborating on requirements, code reviews, bug triage, deployment updates, and monitoring operations easy for the whole team. This allows your teams to stay focused on their priorities while keeping everyone aligned, ensuring collaborators are always in the loop.

Plan and execute together

When combined with integrations, Google Workspace makes the software development planning process more collaborative and efficient. For example, many organizations use Asana—a leading work management platform—to coordinate and manage everything from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. To make the experience more seamless, Asana built integrations so users can always have access to their tasks and projects with Google Drive, Gmail, and Chat. With these integrations for Google Workspace, you can turn your conversations into action and create new tasks in Asana—all without leaving Google Workspace.

“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana

To date, users have installed the Asana for Gmail add-on over 2.5 million times, as well as over 3.8 million installs of the Asana for Google Workspace add-on for Google Drive.

Start coding quickly

Google Workspace makes it easy for product managers, UX designers, and engineers to agree on what they’re building and why. By bringing all stakeholders, decisions, and requirements into one place—whether it’s a Gmail or Google Chat conversation, or a document in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—Google Workspace removes friction, helping your teams finalize product specifications and get started right away.

Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With this integration, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.

Speed up testing

Integrations like Jira for Google Chat accelerate the entire QA process in the development workflow. The app acts as a team member in the conversation, sending new issues and contextual updates as they are reported to improve the quality of your code and keep everyone informed on your Jira projects.

Ship code faster

Developers use Jenkins—a popular open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery tool—to build and test products continuously. Along with other cloud-native tools, Jenkins supports strong DevOps practices by letting you continuously integrate changes into the software build.

With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications directly in Google Chat.

Proactively monitor your services

Improving the customer experience requires capturing and monitoring data sources to improve application and infrastructure observability. Google Workspace supports DevOps teams and organizations by helping stakeholders collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. When you integrate Datadog with Google Chat, monitoring data becomes part of your team’s discussion, and you can efficiently collaborate to resolve issues as soon as they arise.

The integration makes it easy to start a discussion with all the relevant teams by sharing a snapshot of a graph in any of your Chat spaces. When an alert notification is triggered, it allows you to notify each Chat space independently, precisely targeting your communication to the right teams.

Improve service reliability

Orchestrating business-wide responses to interruptions is a cross-functional effort. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, it’s important to proactively manage service-impacting events. Google Workspace supports response teams by ensuring that urgent alerts reach the right people by providing teams with a central space to discover incidents, find the root cause, and resolve them quickly.

PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. See and share details with link previews, and perform actions by creating or updating incidents. By keeping all conversations in a central space, new responders can get up to speed and solve issues faster without interrupting others.

Accelerate developer productivity

Integrating your DevOps tools with Google Workspace allows your development teams to centralize their work, stay focused on what’s important—like managing their work—build code quickly, ship quality products, and communicate better during service impacting incidents. For more apps and solutions that help centralize your work so you and your teams can connect, create, and get things done, check out Google Workspace Marketplace, where you’ll find more than 5,300 public applications that integrate directly into Google Workspace.

In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

Vinayak Bhavnani, Co-Founder and CTO of India-based bus transport technology company Chalo, shares how Google Maps Platform is used to improve visibility for commuters and bus operators across India by visualizing geospatial data.

Effective public transport networks contribute to the local economy and help make cities safe, pleasant, and sustainable. In India, buses make up around 90% of the public transport offering, but when you talk to the people who ride them every day, you find that there’s a lot of room for improvement. Heavy traffic means there are rarely any fixed schedules and it’s impossible to know exactly when your bus is coming. We’ve found that people tend to wait at a bus stop for up to 30 minutes a day, which creates a lot of frustration and wasted time.

When we founded Chalo, our aim was to make the daily city commute a more positive experience. Reliability is synonymous with visibility: when you know exactly when the bus is coming, you can plan your day better. If you’re in your office, for example, and see the next bus is in 10 minutes, you can be at the stop at the exact time it arrives, instead of waiting around. To enable this, we base our solutions on richly-detailed geospatial data provided by Google Maps Platform.

Eliminating wait times and increasing revenue with geospatial data

In India, bus passengers tend to have fewer resources. The Chalo App, which can be downloaded for free, allows them to see exactly where their bus is on its route and when it will arrive at their nearest stop. They also tend to be late adopters of mobile technology, meaning we had to create an interface that was user-friendly, reassuring and adapted to all age groups and backgrounds. One of the main reasons we opted for Google Maps Platform is that it’s very present in India and other emerging markets and is familiar to our users, which inspires trust. At the same time, we like the fact that Google Maps Platform provides rich geospatial data while being simple to implement and work with. We use the Geocoding API, Reverse Geocoding, and the Directions API to enable location search and provide directions.

We also worked with MediaAgility to identify the Google Maps Platform products most suited to our needs and the best practices to be followed. This helped to ensure that our business objectives could be met efficiently.

The Chalo App also enables digital ticketing, alongside the Chalo Card, a payment card for those who don’t own a smartphone. India, like the rest of the world, is gradually moving away from cash payments, but the public transport system is proving slow to catch up, meaning people still must have cash in hand when they board the bus. Digital ticketing not only makes commuting more convenient, it also helps protect passengers, drivers and conductors during the COVID-19 health crisis by limiting physical contact. 

Chalo also offers solutions aimed at bus operators that help them improve their services and their bottom line. In major Indian cities, buses are run by a combination of public and private agencies and small private individual bus operators, with the majority of the latter only operating one or two buses. The market is very fragmented and there’s not much incentive for bus operators to invest in infrastructure or customer experience – especially when they have little to no visibility on where their fleet is at a given time, how many kilometers it travels in a day, or how much money it takes. 

The Chalo dashboard provides operators with a map-based real-time overview of bus locations, alongside scheduling features and route, ticketing, and passenger statistics. Geospatial intelligence and insight into passenger demand enable operators to explore new avenues of revenue and adapt routes and services to passenger needs. Operators who’ve partnered with Chalo report an average improvement of 10% to 30% of their bus fleet operations.

Chalo is currently powering about 100 million rides a month on 15,000 buses in 37 cities. We’d like to see the number of rides increase tenfold over the next few years. To do that, we’re looking to broaden our offer and expand to other parts of the country and across international borders. A pilot is underway in Bangkok, and we’re considering expansion into South-East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Having access to detailed geospatial data anywhere in the world via Google Maps Platform, without having to make any major investments or changes to our technology stack, will make this considerably easier. 

At the same time, we’re exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the accuracy of our scheduling features and we’re introducing video-based solutions for people-counting on buses. Our aim is to continually improve our offering and optimize our services. We’re looking forward to working closely with Google to make that happen.  

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.