Black Knight is a leading provider of technology, data, and analytics to the mortgage industry, catering to both large and mid-tier banks in the United States. Over the past few decades, we tended to manage customer integrations on a case-by-case basis. Whenever a bank needed to connect with a Black Knight app, we’d launch another integration project. Lather, rinse, repeat. Needless to say, this was inefficient; we knew we had to do something to centralize this process.

Building versus buying an API management platform
To start, we created some homegrown API solutions. Despite being largely successful with one of these solutions, we saw that technology advances were outpacing our capacity to update our solutions in-house. We knew we needed to move toward an API platform that would support RESTful architecture and that would fully enable mobile solutions. It also had to be extremely secure. Knowing how complicated such a platform would be to build ourselves, we decided that our developers were better off focusing on providing core solutions to Black Knight clients; engaging with an outside provider was the right way for us to advance our API strategy. 

After a lengthy proof-of-concept process, we went into production with the Apigee API Management Platform from Google Cloud in 2018. In our opinion, Apigee was the most complete, robust, technically sound and full-featured option from among all of the API management tools we evaluated. Its ease of use was the deciding factor for our developers, and the Apigee analytics capabilities provided considerable insight into the anatomy of an API call—something the other platforms we considered didn’t do as well. 

Choosing Apigee meant that we didn’t have to focus on developing and maintaining a tool or spend enormous amounts of money trying to keep up with security patching. For a large company like Black Knight, an API management tool is something we don’t want to spend a lot of time on. We know that Google Cloud devotes tremendous resources to it, and it would be difficult to replicate that in-house. 

Black Knight has more than 150 client-facing applications. Almost half of them now are built with APIs that are externally facing, and many of these apps use APIs that integrated with other Black Knight applications. Add to that the huge number of applications out there that come from clients and third-party vendors, and suddenly, we had a management challenge from an API perspective.

Driving cultural change
We came to Apigee with the goal of containing and empowering our huge ecosystem of APIs, customers, third parties, and internal users.  

Given Black Knight’s size, our developers and customers understandably each have different business goals, so getting everyone to come to a centralized platform is a great opportunity. My role is to help people consider other options so they can be open to the benefits that Apigee brings us.

Now that we’ve engaged with Apigee for over a year, we see two big benefits. First, the huge reduction in point-to-point integrations has produced tremendous efficiencies for us and our customers, who now get instant integration once they’ve been authorized for a particular API. Second, Apigee’s capacity for mobile enablement lets us satisfy our customers’ needs for secure mobile apps.  

Simplifying security
From a technical perspective, security is complicated for mobile apps. We’re often accessing sensitive information on a mobile device that can’t always be trusted. This kind of scenario requires us to implement a number of security precautions to help ensure confidential information remains protected.  

The Apigee API management platform addresses these needs in the simplest way possible. It solves complex problems related to security without having to deploy a new API proxy each time we need to support a particular mobile device upgrade. Our back-end applications remain protected because Apigee helps manage security, requests, access tokens, and authorizations. Today, our back-end applications work with Apigee to communicate with mobile devices or servers coming over the internet. 

Apigee has also enabled us to do a better job sharing a variety of APIs. The developer portal lets us stitch together APIs and get more creative about how we can innovate and build new solutions based on these collections of APIs. At this point, anybody that has a nondisclosure agreement with us can register for the developer portal. The nature of our business is such that we can’t just open up our APIs to anybody, but it’s available to our contracted third parties.

Our Apigee journey has been exciting, and we’re making great progress. I’m looking forward to what innovations we will come up with next, thanks to the way Apigee enables us to create, implement, and deliver.

This week, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is launching the first preview of its new Rubin Science Platform (RSP) for an initial cohort of astronomers. The observatory, which is located in Chile but managed by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson, AZ and SLAC in California, is jointly funded by the NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy. The platform provides an easy-to-use interface to store and analyze the massive datasets of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will survey a third of the sky each night for ten years, detecting billions of stars and galaxies, and millions of supernovae, variable stars, and small bodies in our Solar System.

The LSST datasets are unprecedented in size and complexity, and will be far too large for scientists to download to their personal computers for analysis. Instead, scientists will use the RSP to process, query, visualize, and analyze the LSST data archives through a mixture of web portal, notebook, and other virtual data analysis services. An initial launch with simulated data, called Data Preview 0, builds on the Rubin Observatory’s three-year partnership with Google to develop an Interim Data Facility (IDF) on Google Cloud to prototype hosting of the massive LSST dataset. This agreement marks the first time a cloud-based data facility has been used for an astronomy application of this magnitude.

Bringing the stars to the cloud

For Data Preview 0, the IDF leverages Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Compute Engine to provide the Rubin Observatory user community access to simulated LSST data in an early version of the RSP. The simulated data were developed over several years by the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration to imitate five years of an LSST-like survey over 300 square degrees of the sky (about 1,500 times the area of the moon). The resulting images are very realistic: they have the same instrumental characteristics, such as pixel size and sensitivity to photons, that are expected from the Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera, and they were processed with an early version of the LSST Science Pipelines that will eventually be used to process LSST data. “This will be the first time that these workloads have ever been hosted in a cloud environment. Researchers will have an opportunity to explore an early version of this platform,” says Ranpal Gill, senior manager and head of communications at the Rubin Observatory.

Broadening access for more researchers

Over 200 scientists and students with Rubin Observatory data rights were selected to participate in Data Preview 0 from a pool of applicants that represents a wide range of demographic criteria, regions, and experience level. Participants will be supported with resources such as tutorials, seminars, communication channels, and networking opportunities—and they will be free to pursue their own science at their own pace using the data in the RSP. 

“The revolutionary nature of the future LSST dataset requires a commensurately innovative system for data access and analysis paired with robust support for scientists,” says Melissa Graham, lead community scientist for the Rubin Observatory and research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Washington. “I’m personally excited to enhance my own skills by using the RSP’s tools for big data analysis, while also helping others to learn and to pursue their LSST-related science goals during Data Preview 0.” 

At the same time, the fact that the RSP is hosted in the cloud provides researchers at smaller institutions access to state-of-the-art astronomy infrastructure that is comparable to that of the largest national research centers.

The launch benefits the observatory too: the development team can learn what researchers are interested in while also testing and debugging the platform. Graham says that “the platform is still in active development so researchers using it will be able to follow along in the progress, and provide feedback on ways that we can optimize the development of the tools.”

Next steps

The LSST aims to begin the ten-year survey in 2023-24 and expects it to include 500 petabytes of data. Through the cloud, Google aims to help make this extraordinary project scalable and accessible to researchers everywhere. To learn more about Data Preview 0, watch this video.

Want to ramp up your own research in the cloud? We offer research credits to academics using Google Cloud for qualifying projects in eligible countries. You can find our application form on Google Cloud’s website or contact our sales team.

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.”

Founded in 2014, Swiggy started small, delivering food to a few neighborhoods in Bengaluru, India. As the company grew, the team wanted a mapping technology that could help expand the service throughout India.

Swiggy needed a scalable mapping platform that covered a wide geographic area and offered tools to help the company to build an efficient mobile app and website for customers and delivery staff.

Customers find restaurants and order from them using the Android app, iOS app, or the website. Swiggy worked with Google Maps Partner Media Agility and used a variety of Google Maps Platform APIs to develop web and mobile apps that incorporate relevant local restaurant details.

Google Maps Platform Results

• Built a hyper-local delivery service that is growing throughout India at a rate of 25 percent per month
• Deliveries are made quickly, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and retention—users have been so satisfied that nearly 80 percent of its orders are from repeat customers
• Drivers seamlessly handle tens of thousands of orders per day

In order to guarantee fast food delivery, Swiggy returns only restaurants within four to five kilometers of the customer’s location. The Directions API is used by drivers to easily route to restaurants and customers. The customer can track the progress of the delivery and estimated arrival time using a mobile app or the website.

“Google Maps provides the most accurate and reliable data, which is crucial for us because maps and location are central to our business. We also knew Google’s intuitive interface would provide a great customer experience with little to no learning curve… Google Maps’ ability to provide customer location and the distances of nearby restaurants is the backbone of our success, because it ensures a reliable, consistent customer experience,” said Aman Jain, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy.