Editor’s note: Today we hear from Jon White and Angela Donohoe from BPAY Group. BPAY Group is best known for BPAY, the leading electronic bill payment system in Australia, handling one-third of the market. Learn how BPAY Group is positioning the organization for the future by using APIs to streamline workflows for existing customers and new businesses.

BPAY has been a leader in the bill payment industry in Australia for 22 years and provides a secure, fast, and convenient way to connect individuals, businesses, and banks to help people stay on top of their bills.

One of the reasons that BPAY is the preferred bill payment service for so many Australians is our commitment to human-centered design. We’re continuously talking with customers and looking at ways that we can deliver better experiences, products, and services, such as peer-to-peer payments. During these conversations, we noticed some ways that our processes were causing friction for existing or potential customers.

For example, we traditionally used a batch processing system to handle requests between billing companies and banks. But that could cause headaches for some customers, as an error in even one request could cause the whole batch to be rejected. Plus, many “neobanks” (new types of digital-only banks) wanted to work with real-time transactions instead of batch processes, which take longer to complete.

We realized that APIs had the potential to solve many of the challenges impacting customers while opening the doors for future product and business development. We developed a few customer-facing APIs and tested them in closed betas. This experiment went far better than we expected, and we realized that there was a huge appetite for APIs among our biller customers.

While we had developed many APIs for internal systems, developing APIs that were easy to consume by our customers was a new challenge. We needed to move away from our home-grown API development approach and make our API environment more powerful, versatile, and easier to use. The API experts at The Singularity worked with us to develop a strong API strategy. We decided that we would need to support our new strategy with a scalable API management platform.

After a rigorous search, we landed on the Apigee API Management Platform. Apigee was the only solution that met all our technology and business requirements. With Apigee, we have a solid foundation for APIs that will help us deliver more value for all customers.

Creating a custom development environment

BPAY is a trusted brand in Australia, so it was very important to us that we maintain our reputation for excellent customer experiences. When setting up our developer portal, we started with a closed pilot and used developer feedback to make the portal as convenient and simple to use as possible. The Apigee developer portal has many built-in features to help us customize experiences, and if we run into roadblocks, the Apigee team at Google listens and helps us create the custom experience we want.

The developer portal has already proven to be extremely popular. In its first month live, we registered 104 developers in the sandbox environment and 10 developers in the production environment. That was before we even started marketing our developer portal, so we expect those numbers to rise quickly.

Breaking new ground with APIs

We’ve already released four foundational APIs, with a goal of eventually releasing dozens. Our APIs are helping us create smoother experiences for customers. We mentioned that when processing a batch of payment files, one mistake could cause the entire batch to get rejected. Our APIs now enable businesses to validate all payment information before submitting a batch file, dramatically reducing the chances of errors. They can even use our APIs to automatically generate batch files in the right format for different banks.

While APIs improve service for current customers, they also open the doors for new areas of business. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services, which enable customers to spread out payments across weeks or months, are already popular in retail spaces. After releasing our first APIs, we connected with two BNPL billing services. These companies use our APIs to validate customers’ bill payment information and then pay the bill in full on behalf of customers. This was a completely new use case for us, one that could not have been implemented without our APIs.

The payment service NoahPay also adopted our APIs to validate payment information and let customers pay bills using funds from their WeChat accounts. This is an exciting new market for us, as it’s one of the first examples of how we can connect to international digital wallets through our new APIs. It’s also a great way to introduce users of WeChat, a messaging app used by more than 1 billion people in China, to the BPAY brand.

Planning for the future of bill pay

We have big plans for APIs in the future, and Apigee helps make these plans a reality. We plan to establish a generous freemium monetization model that will allow customers to make up to 200,000 API calls for free each month with tiered payment plans above that. This will enable us to open the doors for smaller organizations while providing optimal support for larger businesses and banks that might need to make millions of calls. Having powerful end-to-end monetization features built in to Apigee means that we can process monetized transactions with ease.

Built-in reporting functionality will also help us make sure that we’re understanding the market’s need for APIs and always providing our customers with valuable services and support.

Apigee greatly streamlines creating self-service API environments. Even as we grow our business, our internal teams will be able to continue providing excellent customer service without needing extra staff to answer questions, help with integration support, and constantly check API security. APIs are the way of the future, and Apigee prepares us meet the challenges that come along with it.

When developing services with Compute Engine, our customizable compute service that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google’s infrastructure, you’ll likely find yourself frequently switching between your code editor, terminal, and the Google Cloud Console.

Cloud Code is a set of IDE plugins for popular IDEs like VS Code and IntelliJ that make it easier to develop applications that use Google Cloud services. And now, Cloud Code makes it easy to develop with Compute Engine by incorporating common workflows with your favorite IDE’s user interface.

Specifically, this new integration between Compute Engine and Cloud Code makes it easier to manage your commonly used virtual machines in the IDE, view details about them, connect to them over SSH, upload your application files to them, and view their logs.

Before you begin

Let’s demonstrate how the new integration works in Cloud Code for VS Code. Install Cloud Code for VS Code, and once installed, open its icon on the activity bar on the left and find “Compute Engine”:

Cloud Code for Jetbrains IDEs (such as IntelliJ) could be installed similarly, and you will find Compute Engine in the list of your IDE tool windows.

View your VMs

Cloud Code makes it easy to see all relevant VMs in your GCP project and view details needed to effectively work with the VM from the IDE. To start working with a Compute Engine VM in the IDE, navigate to Cloud Code’s new Compute Engine explorer. From there, you can see all the VMs in your current Cloud project. Clicking on a VM will display details such as machine type, boot image, IP address and more. You can also right click on a VM for a quick link to the Google Cloud Console where you can take additional action.

Connect to your VMs over SSH

Once you’ve found the VM you want to work with, Cloud Code makes it easy to connect to that VM over SSH. Again, find the VM you want to connect to in Cloud Code’s Compute Engine explorer, right click it, and select “Open SSH”. Cloud Code will then establish an SSH connection from your IDEs terminal into the VM. If there’s any difficulty establishing a connection, Cloud Code can run a troubleshooting diagnostic to help resolve the issue.

Many organizations maintain VMs that don’t have a public IP address, making it difficult to establish an SSH connection to them. For those VMs that use Identity-Aware Proxy, Cloud Code can still securely connect to them over SSH, even without a public IP address.

Upload files to your VMs

You might want to try a debug version of your application, run a script, or try a new code in an environment identical to production, in this case on a development VM instance which might not have access to full source code or is not a part of your CI/CD pipeline. Cloud Code provides an easy way to upload your code files into a VM instance.

Find the VM you want to connect to in Cloud Code’s Compute Engine explorer, right click it, and select “Upload File via SCP”. Choose a file from your local system and Cloud Code will upload it to a VM instance using SCP. Once upload completes, Cloud Code offers to open a new SSH connection to access the files and work with them on a remote VM instance. Again, if there’s any difficulty establishing a connection, Cloud Code can run a troubleshooting diagnostic to help resolve the issue.

View your VM logs

As you’re working with your VM, you can right click it and select to view the VM instance logs. From Visual Studio Code this will open a logs viewer in the IDE. From IntelliJ, the logs viewer in the Cloud Console will be opened. If you’ve configured application logs to be collected with Cloud Logging, you can also view those in these logs viewers as well.

Get Started

We invite you to try out Compute Engine with Cloud Code to better streamline your development workflow. To learn more, check out the Compute Engine documentation for Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. If you’re new to development with IDEs, you can take the first step by installing Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ.

We’re thrilled to share the news that leading global research and advisory firm Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in the recently published report The Forrester Wave^TM: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022. Forrester evaluated the container and cloud-native offerings of a select group of top public cloud container platform vendors across 29 comprehensive criteria. 

We are proud that Forrester evaluated the strength and cohesion of our offerings, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, Anthos, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Cloud Code and more, writing that, “Google Cloud is the best fit for firms that want extensive cutting-edge cloud-native capabilities for distributed workloads spanning public cloud, private cloud, and multicloud environments.” 

Google Cloud received the highest possible scores in the criteria of service and application catalogs, microservice development support, service mesh support, serverless and FaaS support, DevOps automation, container image support, control plane configuration, hybrid cloud support, container networking, product vision, supporting products and services, market approach, revenue, and breadth of offering. We also achieved the highest score in the Strategy category of all the vendors evaluated.

Google Cloud is all-in on containers and cloud native 

The cloud-native tools and technologies created by Google Cloud are already powering the most innovative, scalable and secure apps around the world, from the most exciting digital natives to the most important enterprise industry leaders. Why? Cloud native means building and running modern apps that intentionally take advantage of the global scale, pervasive automation, elastic infrastructure, and secure resiliency of the public cloud. 

For enterprises, cloud native in practice means using containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and DevOps automation to build amazing customer-facing apps quickly, to modernize existing business-critical apps safely, and to operate them all on cost-efficient, powerful, and secure cloud infrastructure globally.Over the past decade, Google Cloud’s technology innovation has fueled various domains of the cloud native ecosystem, such as Kubernetes and Go languages as the foundation, Istio for service mesh, Kubeflow for machine learning, Knative for serverless, and Tekton for CI/CD. Long-term investment and practices in cloud-native power its superior product vision and excellent supporting products and services.The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022

Dedicated to simplicity, speed, and scale for your modern apps

Our mission is to create, integrate, scale, and secure the best open source and commercial cloud-native technologies – backed by a consistent cloud control plane – so you can spend more time dreaming of ways to delight your customers and less time building and operating platforms. We are committed to leading in cloud-native open source communities and making containers and Kubernetes accessible to everyone, from everywhere. 

Here are a few recent highlights across our container services and tools, aimed at helping you build and modernize your most important apps with cloud native:

The most scalable fully managed Kubernetes service, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), achieved an overall solution score of 92 out of 100 in Gartner’s Solution Scorecard. In 2021, we introduced GKE Autopilot, a fully managed, security-hardened Kubernetes service optimized for production workloads. This unique mode of operation allows you to focus on your workloads while Google manages your cluster infrastructure. There’s nothing else like it. Then, we made GKE apps even faster with GKE image streaming. With proven scalability to 15K nodes in a single cluster and innovations such as four-way autoscaling, node auto-upgrades, integrated logging and metrics, cost optimization insights, native backup and restore, and multi-instance GPUs to accelerate machine learning workloads, GKE remains the best choice in managed Kubernetes services.

With Cloud Run, we expanded the range of users who benefit from containers to those who don’t know much about them. Introduced in 2019, Cloud Run combines the serverless attributes of autoscaling and developer experience with the flexibility of containers. Developers can use any language, runtime or binary, and deploy code using buildpacks to automatically build container images from source without worrying about provisioning machines and clusters. Cloud Run goes beyond FaaS and beyond earlier generations of serverless computing. Cloud Run runs more legacy workloads, integrates with Cloud Build for secure and compliant builds, offers deeper cost controls and billing flexibility, and encourages portability. We added support for social feeds, collaborative editing, and multiplayer games that use bidirectional streaming. Minimum instances reduce cold-start delays so you can run more latency-sensitive applications. And recently, we launched support for network file systems, allowing developers to share and persist data between multiple containers and services.

Anthos is at the heart of the Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of software and hardware solutions announced in 2021 that extend Google’s container platform services to the data center and the edge. Anthos is how we extend GKE to wherever you need cloud-native apps. Manage clusters on-premises on bare metal and VMware-virtualized servers, on AWS and Azure, and at the edge – all with a Google Cloud-backed control plane for consistent, automated operations at scale. We added a hosted service for configuration management to keep all your clusters in sync, and trimmed our installation footprint and streamlined cluster management with a new multi-cloud API that enables you to use a single API for full lifecycle management of Anthos Kubernetes clusters in AWS or Azure.

Finally, since no public cloud container platform is complete without powerful DevOps tools, we expanded our CI/CD offerings to make your developers even more productive, wherever they build and deploy cloud native apps. Use Cloud Code and Cloud Shell as your go-to cloud-native IDEs. Cloud Build is a fully managed serverless DevOps automation platform for use cases spanning CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, AI/MLOps, and more, across infrastructure GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions and more. Google Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery service that provides one-click release promotion and roll-backs, built-in metrics, and out-of-the-box security. Artifact Registry and Container Analysis provide managed artifact repositories, vulnerability scanning, and help secure the software supply chain.Google Cloud has a solid cloud-native innovation roadmap, targeting simplicity at scale for enterprise clients.The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022

We are delighted and humbled to be recognized as a Leader in public cloud container platforms by Forrester. Grab your copy of The Forrester Wave^TM: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022 today and let us know how we can help you build and modernize your most important apps how you want and where you want.

Today, retail customers have more digital-first, convenient ways of shopping than ever before. And APIs are one of the critical pieces of technology that have made this possible by giving retailers the ability to transform their systems and processes in an efficient and quick way. 

APIs have allowed retailers to be more accessible to their remote customers with services such as order online and pick up in-store, curbside pickup, fulfilment of orders through delivery partners, and personalized recommendations while shopping online etc. These capabilities have been especially important over the last year, as the world has changed at a rapid pace.  With many changes to customer interactions yet to come, APIs will continue to play a pivotal role in helping retailers to further personalize digital experiences and streamline their operations.

In Google Cloud’s State of API Economy 2021 report, 32% of organizations reported increasing their digital transformation investments, while 16% stated they would completely change their strategies to become digital-first companies. Moreover, by early 2021, online sales had already reached levels previously predicted for 2022, and APIs will become the foundation for business resilience and growth in retail over the next five years. 

APIs are at the forefront of retail innovation

Retailers leverage APIs to experiment and connect teams for faster collaboration, helping them to use data for revolutionary experiences that increase customer engagement. 

They allow retailers to innovate in new ways internally, externally, and across market borders. Modern digital experiences are built from a variety of data and functionality, throughout the entire supply chain, across multiple systems, and often belonging to a variety of services across distribution channels. APIs are the digital nervous system connecting everything together. They help retailers enhance internal efficiency, partner at scale, and leverage cutting-edge services such as machine learning—all because they make various kinds of technological value interoperable and easy for developers to access and reuse. In our research, 52% of retailers said APIs accelerate innovation by enabling partners to leverage digital assets at scale while 36% say they see APIs as strategic assets for creating business value.

Let’s take a look at some retail use cases and real world examples that are powered by APIs.

Deliver personalized customer experiences

Retailers are using APIs to create interactive and predictive personalized experiences.These range from “magic” mirrors that reflect personalized clothing, accessory, and even makeup suggestions; to smartphone alerts that encourage shoppers to check out special items while they’re browsing in the store; offers of coupons; and more. Behind the scenes APIs interconnect between the store and consumer data, business intelligence, and application security to bring these innovative experiences to life. 

Streamline retail operations

APIs can help any retail business to operate more efficiently, from human resources, customer service, and distribution, to invoicing, marketing, and compliance. For example, APIs make it super easy and simple to onboard, manage and train employees and contractors. They can help connect various internal and external third-party systems for use cases like tracking real-time package status and gathering consumer shopping insights.

Conrad Electronic, German retailer of electronic products, demonstrates how API management can lead to enhanced efficiency. They used Apigee to build a tool that provides store employees and visitors with product, service, and warranty information on their mobile devices. The company was able to not only use data to enhance offers and services to their customers, but also streamline operations because more than 60% of their customers were using the API-enabled tool.

Power the future of retail with APIs

APIs are key to driving innovation across all areas of retail. They are enabling retailers to not only implement continuous digital transformation but also develop tools that navigate disruptions as they occur.

Retailers are already harnessing the power of APIs to prepare for:

• Borderless channels across markets that allow for the free flow of products and shopping experiences in the way consumers want them.
• Interactive and intelligent merchandising that evolves in realtime to predict consumer needs and bolsters buying decisions.
• Autonomous and virtual shopping experiences that develop deeper consumer interactions and product insights.

To learn more about how APIs can help drive innovation, download our latest eBook. In this eBook, you’ll find more retail-specific API use cases, detailed real world examples and insights into how APIs are shaping the future of retail.

Manage APIs effectively

As you grow your API program, and start powering business-critical applications and front-end experiences with APIs, you need an effective way to manage and scale them. This is where Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform can help. Top retailers across the globe use Apigee to gain control over and insights into their APIs and enables them to manage end-to-end API lifecycle. Click here to learn more about Apigee.