Google has long looked to Israel for globally impactful technologies including popular Search features, Waze, Live Caption, Duplex and flood forecasting. At our Decode with Google 15RAEL event last week, we celebrated 15 years of Google innovation in Israel and our longstanding support of the country’s vibrant startup ecosystem. 

Over the years, we’ve expanded our enterprise investments in the country, too. In addition to our over a decade long investment in the space, Google has acquired Israeli-based companies like Alooma, Elastifile and Velostrata, and Uri Frank joined Google Cloud last month to lead our server chip design team from our offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa. 

As we continue to meet growing demand for cloud services in Israel, we’re excited to announce that a new Google Cloud region is coming to Israel to make it easier for customers to serve their own users faster, more reliably and securely.

Our global network of Google Cloud regions are the foundation of the cloud infrastructure we’re building to support our customers. With cloud’s 25 regions and 76 zones around the world, we deliver high-performance, low-latency services and products for Google Cloud’s enterprise and public sector customers. With each new Google Cloud region, customers get access to secure infrastructure, smarter analytics tools, an open platform and the cleanest cloud in the industry. 

Having a region in Israel will help accelerate innovation for customers of all sizes, including PayBox, a digital wallet application owned by Discount Bank, one of Israel’s largest banks. “When we acquired PayBox, our goal was to improve the security and the user experience for its products, but we also wanted to keep the startup’s agility and innovation. Google Cloud has enabled us to do just that,” said Sarit Beck-Barkai, Managing Director of PayBox at Discount Bank.

“We are very excited that leading vendors like Google are investing and launching a local cloud region in Israel. This will make a significant change in the technology landscape of the public-sector, enterprise and SMB markets in Israel. Matrix is proud to be a major part of the transition to the cloud,” said Moti Gutman, CEO at Matrix, technology services company and Google Cloud partner. 

“In the last year, Panorays more than tripled its customer base and scaled its infrastructure, practically at the click of a button. Google Cloud made it easy for us to scale without worrying about DevOps, which meant that our engineers could focus on developing new and better features for our customers. The new region launching in Israel will allow us to serve our local customer base even better, as we’ll be able to experience higher availability and deploy resources in specific regions, thus reducing latency.” said Demi Ben-Ari, Co-founder and CTO, Panorays, a third-party security platform and Google Cloud customer.

“This new cloud region will provide even better access and growth potential for our mutual customers with tech hubs in the region. We are serving hyper growth companies who need Google Cloud’s services and will benefit greatly from this regional presence,” said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO of DoiT International.

When it launches, the Israel region will deliver a comprehensive portfolio of Google Cloud products to private and public sector organizations locally. We look forward to welcoming you to the Israel region, and we’re excited to support your growing business on our platform. 

Learn more about our global cloud infrastructure, including new and upcoming regions, here.

Today we’re announcing the HarbourBridge Schema Assistant, which provides a guided schema-design workflow for migrating from MySQL or PostgreSQL to Spanner. HarbourBridge imports dump files (from mysqldump or pg_dump) or directly connects to your source database, and converts the source database schema to an equivalent Spanner schema. The new Schema Assistant capability displays the source schema and Spanner schema side-by-side, highlights errors and walks you through a series of steps to validate and optimize your Spanner schema. It also produces a browsable assessment report with an overall migration-fitness score for Spanner, a table-by-table detailed analysis of type mappings and a list of features used in the source database that aren’t supported by Spanner. It supports editing of table and column names, column types, primary keys and constraints, as well as dropping of tables, columns, foreign keys and secondary indexes.

The new Schema Assistant complements HarbourBridge’s existing data and schema migration capabilities and is a critical step towards our goal of building a complete open-source migration toolkit. HarbourBridge continues to support command-line schema and data migration and turn-key Spanner evaluation.

Complementing the bulk data migration capabilities of HarbourBridge, we are also announcing the ability to migrate change events from MySQL to Cloud Spanner.

Supported Features in Schema Assistant

1. Global type mapping. Users can customize the global mapping for how types should be mapped to Spanner consistently across the schema. For example, mapping large integers in source schema to Spanner’s NUMERIC.
2. Local type mapping. Users can override the custom type mapping for a given table/column.
3. Session management. A session keeps track of all the changes made to the schema mapping.
4. Customization of secondary indexes. Users can add, edit and delete secondary indexes to optimize their Spanner performance.
5. Customization of foreign keys and interleaved tables. Table interleaving is an important design consideration when migrating to Cloud Spanner as explained in more detail in this blog post.

Features in the pipeline

We are already working to further expand the supported set of schema editing features and welcome your feedback. We are particularly excited to expand the Schema Assistant’s design recommendations for optimizing Spanner schemas e.g. in-depth recommendations for primary key design.

HarbourBridge is open source and we gladly accept contributions from the wider community.

Commercial trucks often travel partially empty because many shippers don’t have enough cargo to fill an entire container or trailer. Although offering available space to other shippers helps minimize carbon emissions and reduce operating costs, most trucking companies can’t efficiently schedule, track, or deliver multiple freight loads.

Companies have always struggled to ship over-the-road freight efficiently. However,recent economic events have created an unprecedented logistics and transportation crisis that continues to disrupt supply chains, delay deliveries, and significantly raise the price of basic goods. Since some stores can’t keep their shelves fully stocked, many people across the country are finding it more difficult than ever to buy the things they need at an affordable price.

Although exacerbated by the pandemic, many of these supply chain issues have existed for decades. That’s why, in 2015, Flock Freight was started with the mission of reducing waste and inefficiency from the supply chain by reimagining the way freight moves. First to market with advanced algorithms that enable pooling shipments at scale, we create a new standard of service for shippers, increase revenue for carriers and reduce the impact of carbon emissions through shared truckload (STL) service.

Our technology helps lower prices compared to full truckload (FTL) by enabling shippers to only pay for the space they need—and maintain full control over pickup and delivery dates. Flock Freight also optimizes travel routes to speed up deliveries compared to traditional less than truckload (LTL), while eliminating unnecessary shipping hub transfers to minimize damage to cargo.

Today, thousands of shippers and trucking companies across the U.S. use Flock Freight to schedule shared truckloads, lower shipping costs, quickly deliver and track goods, and reduce their carbon footprint by up to 40%. Flock Freight further offsets carbon emissions by buying carbon credits for every FlockDirect™ guaranteed shared truckload shipment—at no extra cost to shippers.

Moving Flock Freight to Google Cloud

We founded Flock Freight with a small team based in southern California. We soon realized we needed a more scalable and affordable technology stack to support our rapidly growing platform and team. After joining the Google for Startups Cloud Program and consulting with dedicated Google startup experts, we decided to move all our data and applications to Google Cloud.

The highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud now enables thousands of Flock Freight customers to move their freight faster, cheaper, and with less damage than traditional shipping methods. Specifically, we rely on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to support the combinatorial optimization and machine learning (ML) algorithms and services that identify, pool, and schedule shared truckloads. We also leverage GKE to rapidly develop, deploy, and manage new applications and services.

In addition, we leverage Cloud SQL to automate database provisioning, storage capacity management, and other time-consuming tasks. Cloud SQL easily integrates with existing apps and Google Cloud services such as GKE and Pub/Sub. Lastly, we use Compute Engine to create and run virtual machines, optimize resource utilization, and lower computing costs by up to 91%. These cost savings allow us to shift more resources to R&D and rapidly develop new solutions and services for our customers.

Building a greener, more resilient, and responsive supply chain

The Google for Startups Cloud Program and dedicated Google startup experts were instrumental in helping us manage cloud infrastructure cost and maintaining very high SLAs, helping Flock Freight to focus on developing a comprehensive shipping platform that powers shared truckloads and drives positive industry change.

We especially want to highlight the Google Cloud research credits we relied on to launch Flock Freight and make rapid progress toward transforming the shipping industry. To this day, we continue to work with Google Cloud Managed Services partner DoiT International International to further scale and optimize operations on Google Cloud.

We’re proud of the results we’re delivering for our customers. For example, a home improvement importer now enjoys faster, safer, and easier shipping with 99.9% damage-free service and a 97.5% on-time delivery rate. A packaging supplier continues to maintain a 99% on-time delivery streak and decrease carbon emissions by 37%, while a mineral water company consistently reduces delivery expenses upwards of 50%.

Nationwide demand for shared truckloads continues to increase as the shipping industry works to lower costs and alleviate supply chain disruptions. With the Flock Freight platform, companies are building a more sustainable and resilient supply chain by efficiently combining multiple shipments into shared truckloads.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.