For over a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications or the public sector, a rapidly growing number of organizations located or operating in Canada are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and deliver awesome experiences to their users, all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. To support this growing customer base, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open. 

As you’d expect, we’re thrilled about this news, but we aren’t the only ones that have been looking forward to this launch. We asked some of our customers operating in Canada for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:

“Our alliance with Google is truly distinctive in the Canadian market as we are working together to co-innovate and create new services for key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, security, and the connected home. The new cloud region in Toronto marks another key milestone that will propel TELUS’ digital leadership by further leveraging the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of Google Cloud to support improved customer experience and build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities.”—Hesham Fahmy, Chief Development Officer, TELUS 

“We’re simplifying, modernizing and digitizing Scotiabank to enhance the customer experience for our 25 million customers across the globe. By leveraging powerful cloud-based services including Google Cloud, we’re able to put the most advanced software engineering, data analytics and machine learning tools in the hands of our talented employees. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in Toronto and look forward to the opportunities the Toronto Cloud Region will present to our Technology team.”
—Michael Zerbs, Group Head Technology & Operations, Scotiabank 

“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical  contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions. At Natural Resources Canada, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.”
—Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada 

“At Accenture, we bring together technology and human ingenuity to create and respond to change. We’re thrilled to join forces with Google Cloud and their newest region in Toronto with an important mutual goal: to accelerate cloud innovation in Canada. Our clients already know us for our deep industry intelligence, cloud-first expertise and market-renowned delivery. We’re now combining that with Google’s human-centric design to bring even more opportunities to our clients across all industries.”
—Jeffrey Russell, President of Accenture in Canada. 

“We are thrilled to see Google’s commitment to Canada. We look forward to helping our joint customers transform their operations, leveraging Google Cloud’s latest data center in Toronto. At Deloitte, we believe cloud is THE opportunity to reimagine everything.”
—Terry Stuart, Deloitte Chief Digital Officer, Canada. 

“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”
—Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice 

Toronto joins 27 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with our Montreal region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.

We’re working to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily—wherever you might be in the country. The past year has proved how important easy access to digital infrastructure, technical education, training and support are to helping businesses respond to the pandemic. We’re particularly proud of the teams who faced the unique challenges of building a cloud region during this time to help our customers and community accelerate their digital transformation.  

To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions. We’re currently hosting our first ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada to bring the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’ve recently received Protected B accreditation with Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which is crucial for healthcare, education, and regulated industries adopting cloud services. We’re also pleased to announce the preview of Assured Workloads for Canada—a capability which allows you to secure and configure sensitive workloads in accordance with your specific regulatory or policy requirements. 

For help migrating to Google Cloud, please contact our local partners. For additional details on Google Cloud regions, please visit our locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions. You can always contact us to help you get started or access our many educational resources. We’re excited to see what you build next with Google Cloud.

AgroStar has launched a cloud-based mobile app that is helping to boost crop yields and encourage best practices for small farmers in India. Launched as an on-premises ecommerce platform selling farm tools in 2008, the firm turned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to expand its offering. It now uses cloud-based analytics and is deploying ML models to provide timely advice in five languages on everything from seed optimization, crop rotation, and soil nutrition to pest control.

A 2018 survey underscored the demand for agricultural planning for Indian farmers. While farming remains a dominant sector in India, employing half of its labor force, 70 percent of small farmers – those cultivating fewer than three acres – said their crops are damaged by unforeseen weather and pests. An even higher number – 74 percent – say they lack access to farming-related information.

Widening that gap is the relative lack of access to new, higher yield seeds and improved soil analyses for small farmers, who must otherwise rely on traditional methods. “It could take a few years for innovative information to trickle down from universities to small, grassroots farmers,” says Pritesh Gudge, AgroStar Software Engineer. “Today, just by clicking through our Android application, farmers learn about new, effective farming practices and receive advice customized to their crop and soil.”

Connecting a million farmers in the cloud

Operating in the Indian states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Orissa, Bihar, and Karnataka, AgroStar is closing the knowledge gap with a full-service, cloud-based SaaS solution – the only one of its kind in India. It combines agronomy, data science, and analytics to help farmers by providing a variety of resources.

AgroStar has reached over a million farmers through its Android app, the AgroStar Agri-Doctor. The mobile client is available as a web-based or full-featured native app. Both provide access to the firm’s knowledge base hosted on GCP, a Q&A forum that connects farmers to each other to help understand and better solve problems and to learn about innovative practices and products. Farmers can also click through to follow local and national market trends that help forecast crop prices.

In addition to the self-service knowledge base, AgroStar provides access to agronomy experts who use cloud-based analytics tools and historical data to provide season-and locale-specific advice to each farmer. “We are now tracking thousands of calls in 5 languages each day,” says Pritesh.

The AgroStar app also provides links to purchase and then track the delivery of farm tools and supplies such as cultivators and fertilizers. An in-house platform manages fulfillment centers and a doorstep delivery network simplifies the supply chain while giving farmers what they need, when they need it. By procuring directly from the manufacturers and primary distributors of farm supplies, Agrostar is achieving cost savings, which it passes on to farmers.

Build fast, pivot faster

From the start, the human and environmental variables of farming in India, not to mention the volume of AgroStar’s few hundred thousand monthly active users, made a highly scalable cloud-based solution inevitable. Farmers rely on the firm’s Agri-Doctor app to provide advice in multiple languages on topics that range widely throughout three growing seasons, each with distinct crop nutrition and rotation cycles and farm implementation requirements.

“For farmers, the focus keeps changing every month, and every season,” says Pritesh. “To serve our growing community, we needed a platform that could process images at high volume, fulfill tools and seed orders across thousands of miles, and respond to multilingual queries. We quickly moved away from spreadsheets and server-based solutions – we needed to build fast and pivot faster.”

Ending late-night deployments

The firm’s first cloud experience was with an AWS solution. At the time, AWS was the only cloud provider in India, but AgroStar wanted to find a solution that was easier to use and offered better integration with Android devices. “Deployment and processing costs were very high, and the developer tools and documentation were not as intuitive as we needed,” says Pritesh.

When GCP service arrived in India in October 2017, AgroStar embarked on a platform re-implementation that made possible dramatic changes in the way it developed and deployed its solution. Using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for crop advice management and Compute Engine for its production application services, the firm built the backend for the Agri-Doctor discussion forum in only three weeks. The platform’s microservice architecture is implemented in Python and Golang and deployed on GCP.

AgroStar began to realize significant efficiencies in its build, deploy, and test cycles. “We previously needed to work overnight to deploy to production,” says Pritesh. “Now using Google for Kubernetes containers and a rolling update strategy, we can deploy during the day without any problems or interruptions to service.”

The move to GCP streamlined AgroStar’s stack. “We were running 12 independent instances on AWS,” says Pritesh. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, we are deployed on a single cluster at a cost savings of $1,300 per month and growing.”

Improving customer response times by 85 percent

With a managed deployment capability, AgroStar can devote more time and resources to executing on its platform and Agri-Doctor app development plan. A strategic goal was managing customer response times as the firm grew its base. GCP has helped the firm meet that goal, achieving an 85 percent improvement in customer response times even as traffic grew significantly.

“With our on-premises solution, we could handle around 100 customers daily, which took 30 to 50 minutes for each customer,” says Pritesh. “We now handle thousands of customers daily, taking only 4 to 5 minutes for each one.”

AgroStar used Firebase to implement its Agri-Doctor app. A real-time cloud database, Firebase provides an API that enables the Agri-Doctor advice forum to be synchronized across all its far-flung mobile clients, effectively sharing knowledge base updates with one million users in near real time.

Using cloud tools to manage and monitor

Cloud Pub/Sub, Kafka, and Cloud Dataflow manage data ingestion and queueing of event and transaction data to the analytics layer. BigQuery fetches and persists data to Cloud Storage. Cloud SQL and dashboards powered by Tableau deliver farmer crop and soil profiles within minutes.

Cloud IAM helps AgroStar control access to all its cloud resources. And Stackdriver, the integrated logging aggregation capability for GCP, helps monitor and speed debugging on every tier of the AgroStar solution.

Machine learning to enhance yields

AgroStar is developing a variety of ML components to improve responsiveness and extend its platform offerings.

To speed up the diagnosis of and treatment for crop blight, AgroStar is building a deep learning pipeline using TensorFlow. The pipeline relies on GoogLeNet models that use multi-layered convolutional visual pattern recognition. It will assess uploaded images to support a disease-detection capability on the mobile app. Based on the commercially successful AI algorithms that automated postal code processing, GoogLeNet offers improved performance and computational efficiencies by using a creative layering technique that distinguishes them from older, sequential recognition engines.

To improve its customer search experience, AgroStar is developing an ML pipeline that shrinks fetch times by suggesting tags mapped to stored data. Processed using TPUs, Cloud Natural Language and Video AI, the tags provide a metadata layer that supports queries in any of the ten natural languages that AgroStar farmers can use.

The AgroStar search pipeline consists of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models of Recurrent Neural Networks. Recurrent networks exhibit “memory” through iterative processing and are distinguished from feedforward networks by a feedback loop connected to their past decisions, ingesting their own outputs moment after moment as input.

Implementing a recommendation engine

The firm is also adapting the Random Forests TensorFlow AI model to develop a crop and product recommendation engine. The model is trained by consuming numerical (rainfall, humidity, water availability per acre) and categorical (soil type, water sources) parameters to suggest appropriate products by season, region, and locale.

To simplify the product suggestion experience, AgroStar developers are testing Cloud Dialogflow, the Google Cloud conversational interface, to build a chatbot capability into its mobile app. The bot will track a farmer’s crop schedules and answer simple questions by linking to the recommendation engine.

AgroStar is also extending its analytics platform with AI-powered sales planning and forecasting. Using linear regression models implemented in TensorFlow and powered by Cloud ML Engine, the capability will enhance supply chain logistics as the company scales its operations across India.

To provide a credit on-demand offering for a range of seed-to-harvest cycle products, AgroStar is attempting to use Vision API to create an AI model that will convert uploaded photos of customer application records into standard data formats. The firm’s credit policy features a grace period in which farmers begin paying back loans after harvested crops go to market.

A versatile and friendly development ecosystem

AgroStar credits the convivial tools and documentation that GCP offers and its incremental, pay-as-you-go pricing model for both the firm’s success and its ability to manage growth.

“What Google Cloud offers is extremely good documentation and extremely simple-to-use tools and interfaces across all services,” says Pritesh. “It helped us initially deploy our platform and at every scale that we have required since then, and its cost effectiveness enabled us to staff up to meet new feature milestones.”

About Tencent Africa

Tencent Africa is dedicated to making every day easier for customers and brands. Opening its doors in 2013 as WeChat Africa, the company is responsible for WeChat operations on the continent.

Industries: Technology

Location: South Africa

About Siatik Systems

Founded in 2008, South Africa-based Siatik Systems is a leading Google Cloud Platform solutions provider with a focus on cloud integration services, information technology consulting services, and bespoke software engineering solutions.

Industries:

Location:

As one of Africa’s leading technology companies, Tencent Africa is responsible for WeChat operations on the continent. WeChat Africa has successfully launched a number of features including the WeChat Wallet, a mobile payment service for smartphones, which enables seamless and secure transactions for friends to send money to one another, cash money out at Standard Bank ATMs, use at accredited retailers, and make purchases from any SnapScan merchant in South Africa. Under the new name, Tencent Africa recently launched two new mobile products, JOOX, a mobile music streaming application, and VOOV, a social live streaming application.

When China’s Tencent brought its hugely popular instant messaging service WeChat to South Africa, it faced a near saturated market. To gain traction, Tencent Africa had to showcase WeChat’s versatility as a platform that goes far beyond just instant messaging. Engaging with local financial partners helped WeChat launch a WeChat Wallet to facilitate electronic payments, while providing exclusive content from South African cultural figures helped bring the platform extra publicity.

As WeChat started to grow its customer base, its on-premises infrastructure was stretched beyond its limits and the company looked for a cloud-based solution. After evaluating all its options, Tencent Africa found Google Cloud Platform best suited its needs.

“We’re a growing business and constantly upgrading our infrastructure. Getting new servers was becoming quite expensive so we wanted a cloud-based solution to reduce costs,” says Christoff Albertyn, Head of Technology at Tencent Africa. “When we did some latency testing, Google came out on top, so it made sense to go with them. Everybody loves Google, it’s a great brand. Just knowing a company like Google is behind it gives you peace of mind.”

Building a platform to scale

Instant messaging services need a stable infrastructure, the ability to scale at speed, and lightning fast performance. When Tencent Africa built an Official Accounts API to run a number of services on WeChat, to help companies engage with users on the platform, latency was its main concern. The Official Accounts services had to deliver replies over WeChat in under five seconds or the connection would drop.

Between the API on-premises servers in South Africa and WeChat’s main servers in China, Tencent Africa’s services regularly hit the limits of the permissible response time. In addition, by 2015, WeChat was starting to garner more customers across South Africa and Tencent Africa had to provision more servers. The on-premises servers were simply being asked to do too much, and expansion was proving expensive, so the company looked for a cloud-based solution.

Before committing to anything, Tencent Services did a thorough latency test of several cloud-based solutions. Google Cloud Platform came top. Tencent also engaged the help of Siatik, a Google Partner, to gauge what solutions best fit the company’s needs and help implement them. Siatik customers span both the public and private sectors and its consultants are regularly engaged in the health care, education, financial and technology industries. In order to provide leading technology solutions, it partners with industry leaders, such as Google, to provide best-of-breed infrastructure and cloud platform solutions to its customers.

“Siatik was a great partner to work with,” says Christoff. “Any questions I had, I could just pick up the phone and whatever it was they’d help me out. They were also able to get some of the team from Google to come to our offices and see how we worked, which was really good.”

With a simple, clean interface in Google Compute Engine, the company was able to spin up virtual instances very quickly and begin migrating its stack to Google. When it became more comfortable with Google Cloud Platform features, Tencent used Google Cloud SQL and Google BigQuery to manage its data streams, and Google Cloud Storage to store them safely.

From day one, it was very smooth. The interface was amazing—Google must have spent a long time perfecting it because it was so easy to use says Christoff. “I set up the first virtual machine in no time without any struggles.”

In addition to powerful hardware from Google Compute Engine, the fast, global network from Google helped to speed up performance. With the infrastructure ported over to Google, Tencent also brought in G Suite as an office productivity solution, which eased the pressure on its servers even more. Throughout the process, Siatik were on hand to advise and provide technical guidance whenever any issues came up.

What I really like is how quickly you can spin servers up. There’s no messing about and the interface is really easy to use, says Christoff. “You can have a virtual machine running in just a few minutes. It’s very impressive.”

Cutting costs, raising expectations

Google Cloud Platform helped Tencent Africa to slash its latency. Before the migration, pings to the Chinese servers and back would regularly take 180 milliseconds. Afterwards, this fell to around 35 milliseconds, helping to ensure smooth service to Tencent’s South African customers. Google offers innovative pricing, such as per-minute billing and sustained use discounts, which helped significantly cut server costs compared to an equivalent on-premises solution.

As its customer base grew, and Tencent Africa began to release new products, the ease of use of Google Compute Engine meant that spinning up new servers took minutes instead of hours and allowed the company to scale up and down at speed. Exploring products such as Kubernetes for rapid deployment or TensorFlow for machine learning, Tencent Africa continues to evolve and experiment with new products to keep WeChat a growing success in South Africa.

“Initially, we just used per-minute billing, but when I saw how much work we were doing with Google BigQuery and Google Cloud SQL, we started to generate sustained-use discounts, which helped save us a lot of money,” says Christoff. “The other great thing is, Google Cloud Platform monitors how you’re using it and tells you what else you can do to reduce costs.”