Traveloka is an Indonesian tech company currently focusing on the travel and lifestyle markets. Our customers, the majority of which come from Southeast Asia, visit the site mainly to book flights, hotels, transportation, lifestyle experiences (e.g. theme parks, movie tickets, beauty and spa treatments, and restaurant vouchers), and much more. We aim to serve more customers across the globe as part of our giant expansion plans.

In past blog posts, my colleagues have written about how Traveloka is using Google Cloud for data provisioning and stream analytics. Today, I’m sharing how we use Apigee API Management Platform from Google Cloud, a key part of my role as an engineering manager in charge of the after-sales and affiliation domain.

Extending the global footprint with Apigee

Expanding to markets globally means dealing with a lot of unique and challenging factors in each country. Thinking about different government regulations, currencies, payment systems, and customer service expectations is only the beginning.

Problems arose when partners who had connected with our flights API wanted to add another service, like accommodation. They felt like they were working with a different company. We turned to Google Cloud and found an answer.

There’s a lot of potential obstacles given how differently each country’s marketplace operates, which is why we use APIs and a partner integration approach to better distribute our inventory, thus helping us to scale our business quickly in a competitive space.

When we started Traveloka, we were serious about building a product that would be better than our competitors. Better in terms of inventories, services, and also pricing.

We also knew that we wanted to have the best strategies for increasing our exposure within and outside of Southeast Asia. With all the right features needed (security, high performance, monitoring, and low development and maintenance costs), Apigee helps us execute on our business plan, by making it quick and easy to work with the partners that make the Traveloka platform a success. 

API Gateway: Make Or Buy?

When we started, we built our own API gateway with our first version of API specifications. Before that, we looked into several API gateway products (including Apigee), did some research, some POCs, and had several meetings with vendors.

However, since we were just starting to dip our toes into the API business and didn’t have enough use cases to justify the purchase, we decided to build our own system with the bare minimum requirements. 

It used to take up to three months to deploy a new API for a partner. Now that we have the Apigee developer portal, it just takes a few days.

After a while, other Traveloka products that also wanted to have their API exposed rebuilt the same thing. Problems arose when partners who had connected with our flights API wanted to add another service, like accommodation. They felt like they were working with a different company. Different standards, different security practices, different formats—it wasn’t an optimal way to work.

About a year and a half after the release, we started to understand the scale, needs, and the limitations of our own platform. We were convinced that a better solution was needed to support our business growth. We then met with Apigee team again, at the Google Cloud Summit 2018 in Jakarta.

Aside from standardizing our APIs, Apigee supports benchmarking, a fantastic developer portal, a sandbox environment, and great monitoring and analytics. Apigee gives us remarkable speed and agility. It enables us to scale quickly, which is vital to executing our business plan to offer more services in more regions. 

I also like the rate-limiting feature that lets us limit the throughput rate from one API to another. The fact that we can do this not only per URL, but also per partner, gives us a lot of flexibility.

For example, if partner A has a throughput of 100 calls per second, but partner B needs 500, we can easily meet those differing needs and manage our traffic efficiently. When we evaluated API gateways, Apigee was the only one that enabled us to limit to that level of granularity. 

Our APIs are meant for B2B, not for the public. Because of the requirements, we need a high level of security. Apigee helps us in managing the security with its SSL handshake features as well as the authentication and authorization methods. 

Aggressive Growth with Apigee

Before we had Apigee, sharing APIs with partners was a laborious process. We exposed approximately 20 APIs through a shared document that listed our APIs with the types of the requests and responses they need to handle. Partners could see what was available and how they could integrate into our staging. More work was required before they could come in and try APIs in our sandbox.

It used to take up to three months to deploy a new API for a partner. Now that we have the Apigee developer portal, it just takes a few days.

The developer portal enables our partners to view all of our APIs and try them out in the sandbox. The simplicity in creating and managing proxies is also a huge time saver. Right now, we have two B2B partners onboarded to the developer platform, and a few more still working manually through our old, in-house platform.

We expect to transition them over and add 20 new partners to the Apigee platform this year. Because it now takes us as little as two weeks to onboard a new partner from first establishment to go live, we’re ramping up quickly. We estimate that we saved at least a year of development time by deploying the Apigee platform as opposed to building one in-house.

Rapid Learning, Rapid Onboarding

Our developers are very happy with Apigee and feel the portal makes Traveloka look more professional. Equally important, the Apigee learning curve for developers and partners has been short. In just one week our partners know how to use all our APIs. If you compare that to the previous process of referring to a Google Doc and building their own servers to connect to our staging, it’s incredibly easy.

We look forward to exploring other ways that the Apigee platform can help Traveloka; we see strong potential to use even more features to help Traveloka grow and stay competitive.

Mailjet allows companies to create, send, and track millions of emails to their customers and prospects around the world each month. The company’s offerings range from routing these emails to tailor-made tools that allow clients to design and send marketing campaigns with messages related to sales, user clubs, coupons and discounts, and promotions, as well as transactional emails such as purchase confirmations, shipping confirmations, e-tickets, or password resets.

“All of our services are accessible through programming interfaces. We use the same APIs for ourselves and for our customers. This is part of our unique selling point, which is to make life easier for developers and marketers,” explains François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager at Mailjet.

The company scrupulously monitors its service quality to help ensure that emails sent on behalf of its customers don’t trigger spam filters, and that they obtain the best possible open and click rates.

From hosting to the cloud

In its early years, Mailjet used hosted servers. This model had several disadvantages. It was impossible to instantly activate or deactivate computing power; the company could not be charged for actual, to-the-minute usage; and it lacked the flexibility to add disk space or scale servers in real time.

At the beginning of 2016, Mailjet decided to switch to the public cloud in order to improve technical and economic flexibility. “This two-year evolution required us to review our developments. If we use a virtual machine even for just one hour, our computer code must be able to support it in order to preserve the consistency and integrity of the data and processes,” says Fanuel.

“We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Google Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor.”

—François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager, Mailjet

Mailjet and Google were already partners. The marketing and transactional email specialist is one of only three providers in the world, and the only one in Europe, accredited by Google to send bulk emails through Google Cloud Platform. The choice—based on three main factors—was obvious.

Financial and technical considerations

Factor 1: the right price proportionality. “We are able to activate Google Compute Engine virtual machines on demand, without needing to reserve these instances. While the machine remains active, a sliding-scale price is applied, which is particularly attractive to us,” explains Fanuel.

Factor 2: the quality and level of technical communication. Mailjet has direct access to Google Cloud Platform engineers when required. The company has its own IP addressing infrastructure, which is the foundation of its service quality. “We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Google Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor.” Since then, via specific tunnels, Mailjet IP addresses have been ported directly into Google Compute Engine.

Factor 3: conformity to international data regulations. Mailjet is the only email service provider to be ISO 27001 certified and GDPR-ready, enabling the company to offer its clients the highest level of data security and privacy. Google Cloud Platform is also ISO 27001 certified, which was an important factor for Mailjet.

Power through minimalism

In mid-2016, Mailjet replaced its 30 or so email sending servers installed at a hosting company with smaller Google Compute Engine virtual machines, using the automatic load-balancing function. “Using smaller virtual machines—but more of them—optimized our computing power.” This precision mechanism accompanied an increase in activity for the company, with the number of emails sent doubling every year. As for the company’s some 300 TB of data, this is stored in Google Cloud Storage.

The flexibility and power of Google Cloud Platform helps ensure that Mailjet can adapt to peaks in activity that can reach up to 20 times the normal flow—our customers usually send their messages at the same times and during the same peak periods. “Previously, we had to reserve a lot of computing power with our hosting company, equivalent to 150 servers. Moving to an on-demand infrastructure means we can avoid paying a disproportionate fixed annual cost.”

Google Cloud Platform also provides Mailjet with the infrastructure needed to process events centrally, which facilitates technical support. A new analytics dashboard in the making will provide customers access to their campaigns’ key metrics in real time—a circulation report, open rates, and click-through rates, as well as invalid email addresses— regardless of the volume of emails at stake.

From distribution to development

Following routing operations, the development environment is currently being ported to Google Cloud Platform, and will eventually represent 100 virtual servers. “The addition of any new code is iteratively tested in Google Cloud Platform. We benefit from machines that are custom made for our needs, from machines with one core and 3 gigabytes of memory, up to machines with 64 cores.”

Mailjet uses the Google Cloud Interconnect virtual private network to tailor sending flows by geographical location. “For customers who only use our routing service, we will soon have worldwide load balancers. This will help ensure their API requests are received and their emails are sent to Europe and America from one single IP point, thus avoiding transatlantic latency issues.”

Mailjet also uses the Google Identity Aware Proxy authentication tool. All its employees around the world benefit from unique, more secure access, whether they use Google Sites intranets, or the development, or production environment. “Google Cloud Platform delivers on all the promises of a public cloud: service customization, real-time computing power adjustment during periods of high and low demand, and instant activation of computing resources. For us, it’s the best possible ratio between price, performance, availability, and quality,” concludes Fanuel.

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.

Industries: Technology

Location: India

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.”

In 2013, long before the world was discussing clean energy and sustainable practices, two IIT Madras graduates — Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta — had an idea to develop India’s first-ever electrical scooter.

This was at a time when auto manufacturers were still focusing on fossil-fuel-driven vehicles and ‘eco-friendly’ mobility solutions were more a trendy alternative catering to a niche market.

The duo founded Ather Energy in 2013 and launched their first fully-electric scooter, the Ather S340, in Bengaluru in 2016. Since then, the company has released several new models into the market and is planning to expand to eight more cities by the end of the year.

To support the smooth running of their vehicles, lower costs, improve time to market, and create great customer experience, Ather turned to Google Cloud.

Read the Full Story on YourStory

As an IT architect or IT professional, you are essential to the success of your organization, responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the IT systems that your businesses and governments rely on. As if that wasn’t enough, you’ve also got to constantly learn and adapt to keep up with the demand of an ever-changing IT landscape — especially when technologies like generative AI suddenly emerge and become a crucial part of your business. Did you know that 77% of companies are using or plan to use AI in the future? And that’s growing year over year. Then there are the constant firedrills, a contributing factor in 40% of IT professionals being at risk of burnout. So, the fundamental question you’re asking yourself is: how can I do my job successfully, but with less toil and stress?

Well, we come with good news! First, Google Cloud has a plethora of ways to help you evolve your IT landscape quickly, easily, and effectively. And second, our upcoming event, Google Cloud Next ‘23 from August 29th to 31st, is exactly what you need to learn more about capitalizing on those opportunities. But if you’re still on the fence about going, let’s power through five scenarios that might be on your plate right now, and how Next ‘23 can help you  

#1 — Architect infrastructure for AI workloads 

Chances are good that you’ve been asked to spin up new resources to run emerging AI-based applications on. At Next ‘23, we’ll show you how you can innovate, scale and optimize workloads quickly, safely, and cost effectively with purpose-built infrastructure that has AI efficiencies baked-in. Google is an AI-first company, so our AI-optimized infrastructure is built to deliver the global scale and performance demanded by our own products such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Play, and Android, all of which serve billions of users. It’s also designed for intensive workloads like training and serving large language models like PaLM 2, the basis of generative AI features and tools Bard and the PaLM API. 

Google’s deep experience in AI and cloud computing means that Google Cloud is uniquely positioned to present one of the strongest AI infrastructure offerings on the market. Here’s a few ways you can learn about our AI infrastructure during Next ‘23: 

• Watch our exciting spotlight session “What’s next for architects and IT professionals,” where our GMs will explore what’s coming for infrastructure and AI/ML. 
• Attend our “Build your organization’s future on Google AI and machine learning infrastructure” breakout session, or check out dozens of others on AI/ML. 
• Visit our AI Innovation pavilion within our Demo Showcase. 
• Get hands on (literally!) with some of our AI infrastructure at our Hardware-verse.
• Upgrade your AI/ML skillsets with our live training workshops at the Innovators Hive.

#2 — Build and run modern container-based applications quickly and securely 

Your org has no doubt been using containers and Kubernetes for years, but are they Google Cloud containers and Kubernetes? Google Cloud provides one of the best places to run modern containerized workloads, packaging more than a decade’s worth of experience launching several billion containers per week into our offerings, so that developers and businesses of many sizes can tap the latest in container innovation. 

IT pros who are building modern, container-based applications often choose Google Cloud because of its managed services and range of database options, so developers can quickly build applications securely and at scale. For these types of use cases, here’s where you should spend some time during Next ‘23: 

• Watch our GM Spotlight session “What’s next for IT operations,” which will dive deep into everything from containers to AI. 
• Learn how legendary gaming company CAPCOM is running Street Fighter 6 on Google Cloud in this breakout session “The future of modern enterprise applications with Google Kubernetes Engine,” and browse all our other great container sessions. 
• Come and mingle with your friends and peers in our Innovators Hive Community Hub.
• Watch our Innovator Hive Lightning Talk “How to run ML workloads in GKE with Cloud TPU and GPU.”
• Visit our Containers area at the Demo Showcase.

#3 — Boost traditional enterprise applications with high reliability, scale, and price-performance

Cloud-native workloads are great and all, but traditional enterprise workloads such as ERP, databases, web apps, and mainframes continue to be the lifeblood of the organization. These workloads will likely not disappear. They are evolving into more modern versions of themselves — often with major opportunities for modernization using data analytics and AI. Now more than ever, CIOs have to ensure these workloads are healthy and thriving.     

Google Cloud ensures that our platform design and choices are centered on real-world workloads like SAP and VMware. We simplify the migration and modernization decision-making process so customers can get to the cloud confidently with an intuitive set of options and prescriptive solutions that deliver better reliability, security, scale, performance, and cost. At Next ‘23, there are a ton of ways to learn more about solving these challenges: 

• No matter what you’re looking to deploy or migrate, we’ve got a breakout session for you. For starters, check out “How Sabre migrated their apps and data centers to Google Cloud with speed and ease,” “Accelerate innovation with SAP on Google Cloud,” or any of these others.
• Explore how our customer ADT successfully migrated their VMware estate to Google Cloud by visiting their interactive story in our Demo Showcase.
• Click through Migration Center, our unified service for end-to-end migration and modernization, as well as other demos at our Architect’s Corner of Innovators Hive.

#4 – Run on high performance, distributed infrastructure

Google Cloud’s infrastructure isn’t limited to what we run in our data centers. If your business or government needs infrastructure designed for sovereignty, scale, security, and high-intensity compute workloads, we’ve got exactly what you need:

• For governments and highly regulated businesses, we have unique offerings and services including Google Distributed Cloud Hosted and Google Cloud Sovereign Solutions for organizations with specific sovereignty and security needs. 
• For Telecommunications, we have purpose-built telecom offerings to help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) digitally transform their networks with hybrid cloud principles and identify new revenue opportunities. In addition, we have Google Distributed Cloud Edge which provides an open, Kubernetes-based offering tuned for telecom network workloads.

• Telecoms should also be sure to check out “How Google Cloud helps shape and transform Telecom Network deployment and monetization models” and live on the edge at the Demo Showcase. 
• And for Distributed Cloud, make sure you attend “Running AI at the edge to deliver modern customer experiences” and “Mind the air gap: How cloud is addressing today’s sovereignty needs”, or visit our area at the Demo Showcase.

#5 — Save money and help meet sustainability ambitions

Everyone knows that AI can help you do more, faster, but did you know that our AI-assisted recommendations and cost optimization tools can help you save money and  to plan for strong financial resiliency? Take control of your cloud spending and optimize costs through APIs, Cloud Scheduler, and with Committed Use Discounts (CUDs). Complementary to these cost optimization capabilities, we’ve also built a collection of tools to help you accurately report on the carbon emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage and take action to reduce your carbon footprint and costs. Looking to learn more at Next ‘23, here’s what you need to explore:

• For sustainability, register for our “GreenOps: Drive carbon and cost efficiencies with a new wave of developer tools” breakout session.
• And for cost savings, check out “Creating a FinOps culture change through cloud automation” and “Unlock cloud value for everyone with Google Cloud FinOps tools”, and also visit our cost optimization area at the Demo Showcase.

So, what do you think: are any of those challenges on your plate right now? If they are, we hope you’ll join us at Next ‘23 starting on August 29th, so that we can show you how we live up to your motto: your cloud, your way. See you soon!