With the novel coronavirus COVID-19 sweeping across continents and fatalities climbing every day, it was only a matter of time before countries closed their borders to contain its spread.

In the wake of this decision, travel and tourism, the linchpins of many economies, were among the worst affected.

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 22 percent fall in international tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2020, and could see an annual decline of between 60 percent and 80 percent when compared with 2019.

The impact on the economy and to livelihoods that are dependent on tourism and hospitality has been significant. Prior to the pandemic, the outlook was quite different. Research by UNWTO in 2018 estimated that India would have 50 million outbound tourists by 2020.

Technology was also set to play a huge part in that growth. A Google Travel study showed that 74 percent of travellers were planning their trips on the Internet, and technologies like AI, IoT and VR were all set to be key trends this year.

Now, as borders slowly reopen and travel restrictions are gradually lifted, technology could once again be the game-changer. Manoj Sharma CTO, Cleartrip.com spoke to YourStory about the industry’s road to recovery and how technology will aid that journey.

Read the Full Story on YourStory

When moving software applications from on-premise hardware to the cloud, it often “just works,” but it’s never guaranteed. This is especially the case for applications that are hardware intensive. This blog post examines what happened when a media company took software for real-time video broadcasts into the cloud. We’ll share how we, Google Cloud, collaborated with media software provider Vizrt to meet the demanding requirements of an eSports broadcaster. Together, we delivered a solution that not only met but exceeded the expected performance from a cloud-based deployment.

Video broadcasting in the cloud

Video broadcasts are a very hardware-intensive workflow. By needing to process and store data streams in near-real-time, broadcasts stress GPU, memory, disk, and CPU. In addition, the performance requirements quickly increase as producers add additional video streams into the mix, such as in this case, an eSports broadcast.

Vizrt’s customer wanted to increase their broadcast production by doubling the amount of camera feeds from 8 to 16, to have a more compelling and elaborate production.

At the heart of the eSports broadcasters’ production was Viz Vectar Plus, Vizrt’s software-based 4K switcher. While the client wanted to move more of its production into the cloud, Viz Vectar Plus was designed initially for on-premise hardware. So, when they tried a straightforward “lift and shift ” to the cloud, it surprised no one that the software didn’t run as well. They turned to Google Cloud and Vizrt to make it run the way they needed it to. 

Troubleshooting lift and shift

Initially, we suspected that the issue could be in the design of the cloud deployment, i.e., the configuration of the VM hosting the software. So the focus of our troubleshooting was to find a cloud configuration that 1) made sure the software worked to spec and 2) did so optimally considering costs, robustness, and performance. Furthermore, we wanted to ensure that all components met performance specifications, particularly throughput, IOPS, and network bandwidth, as this was a video media application. Only after we validated the cloud deployment would we ask Vizrt to investigate the code itself. We would:

1. Set up a test environment.
2. Benchmark the environment.
3. Test various configurations.
4. Validate that the vendor software was optimally using the configuration.  

This high-level methodology is straightforward. However, we approached the details in a particular order, considering we were optimizing for broadcast video. We honed in on the optimal cloud configuration by testing the following elements, prioritized in order of expected impact:  

1. VM type: The VM type largely dictates the available memory and CPU configurations. However, because this was a VM workflow, we had to pick N1’s. Today, they are the only VM type that can be attached to GPUs, which are practically a requirement for broadcast video.  
2. Disk type: Video broadcasts require high I/O speeds to handle high-quality video streams. We went from an HDD to a much-faster SSD. 
3. CPU size: We increased the VM CPU cores from 16 in increments up to 32. Increasing CPU size indeed increased performance, but did not return the level of performance we needed.
4. SSD size: We increased the SSD size (and the accompanying higher IOPS and throughput that comes with increasing the size) enabling more simultaneous recordings. Again, this only partially worked. 
5. Disk count. We noticed read/write problems when the application was reading/writing with a single drive. There are two typical ways to approach this: 1) Separate read/writes tasks among two discs and 2) striping the data streams across discs. Implementing these had improved but marginal improvements in performances.  

After our testing, we arrived at the following optimal configuration:

• VM: n1-standard-32 instance w/ 500Gb boot drive
• GPU: 1 T4 GPU 
• SSD: 1 persistent disk with 1TB*

* We would later determine that two SSDs for separate read and write operations would be more optimal

This configuration was able to produce between 6 – 12 streams. Compared to the on-premise target of 8 streams, this was about as good but was not the customer’s target of 16. So we would need Vizrt to take the ball from here to optimize the software itself.

Optimizing media applications for cloud

We provided Vizrt our recommended configuration, performance notes, and the following best practices that are generally applicable to cloud-based video workloads:

• Separate read and write operations to two different disks to enable higher performance for both operations. 
• A second 1 TB SSD persistent disk can be attached to the VM instance to increase performance.

With this information, Vizrt engineers worked their magic, providing daily patches to test; with each daily iteration the overall solution was found quickly. Not only were they able to meet the broadcaster’s request of 16 feeds, but they were also able to go even further to 44. Over a 5x improvement by optimizing for the cloud! 

Teamwork in troubleshooting 

Because of the specialized nature of media and entertainment, workflow situations across multiple companies are common as specialized applications hand their work from one to another. 

“By working in partnership with Google Cloud we managed to build a system that can scale in ways that probably none of us thought would be possible. This allowed Viz Vectar Plus to run fully in the cloud using NDI and opened up amazing possibilities for making shows,” Dr. Andrew Cross, President R&D, Vizrt Group. “We ended up with great feedback from the customer, who were appreciative of how Google Cloud and Vizrt collaborated on a solution.”

The results speak for themselves: A satisfied customer with over a 5x improvement in results. That’s what we call a good game.

At Google Cloud, we believe that the protection of our customers’ sensitive data is paramount, and encryption is a powerful mechanism to help achieve this goal. For years, we have supported encryption in transit when our customers ingest their data to bring it to the cloud. We’ve also long supported encryption at rest, for all customer content stored in Google Cloud.

To complete the full data protection lifecycle, we can protect customer data when it’s processed through our Confidential Computing portfolio. Confidential Computing products from Google Cloud protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware isolated environment that is encrypted with keys managed by the processor and unavailable to the operator. These isolated environments help prevent unauthorized access or modification of applications and data while in use, thereby increasing the security assurances for organizations that manage sensitive and regulated data in public cloud infrastructure.

Secure isolation has always been a critical component of our cloud infrastructure; with Confidential Computing, this isolation is cryptographically reinforced. Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing products leverage security components in AMD EPYC™ processors including AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology.

Building trust in Confidential Computing through industry collaboration

Part of our mission to bring Confidential Computing technology to more cloud workloads and services is to make sure that the hardware and software used to build these technologies is continuously reviewed and tested. We evaluate different attack vectors to help ensure Google Cloud Confidential Computing environments are protected against a broad range of attacks. As part of this evaluation, we recognize that the secure use of our services and the Internet ecosystem as a whole depends on interactions with applications, hardware, software, and services that Google doesn’t own or operate.

The Google Cloud Security team, Google Project Zero, and the AMD firmware and product security teams collaborated for several months to conduct a detailed review of the technology and firmware that powers AMD Confidential Computing technology. This review covered both Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) capable CPUs, and the next generation of Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) capable CPUs which protect confidential VMs against the hypervisor itself. The goal of this review was to work together and analyze the firmware and technologies AMD uses to help build Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing services to further build trust in these technologies.

This in-depth review focused on the implementation of the AMD secure processor in the third generation AMD EPYC processor family delivering SEV-SNP. SNP further improves the posture of confidential computing using technology that removes the hypervisor from the trust boundary of the guest, allowing customers to treat the Cloud Service Provider as another untrusted party. The review covered several AMD secure processor components and evaluated multiple different attack vectors. The collective group reviewed the design and source code implementation of SEV, wrote custom test code, and ran hardware security tests, attempting to identify any potential vulnerabilities that could affect this environment.

Working on this review, the security teams identified and confirmed potential issues of varying severity. AMD was diligent in fixing all applicable issues and now offers updated firmware through its OEM channels. Google Cloud’s AMD-based Confidential Computing solutions now include all the mitigations implemented during the security review.

“At Google, we believe that investing in security research outside of our own platforms is a critical step in keeping organizations across the broader ecosystem safe,” said Royal Hansen, vice president of Security Engineering at Google. “At the end of the day, we all benefit from a secure ecosystem that organizations rely on for their technology needs and that is why we’re incredibly appreciative of our strong collaboration with AMD on these efforts.”

“Together, AMD and Google Cloud are continuing to advance Confidential Computing, helping enterprises to move sensitive workloads to the cloud with high levels of privacy and security, without compromising performance,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. ”Continuously investing in the security of these technologies through collaboration with the industry is critical to providing customer transformation through Confidential Computing. We’re thankful to have partnered with Google Cloud and the Google Security teams to advance our security technology and help shape future Confidential Computing innovations to come.”

Reviewing trusted execution environments for security is difficult given the closed-source firmware and proprietary hardware components. This is why research and collaborations such as this are critical to improve the security of foundational components that support the broader Internet ecosystem. AMD and Google believe that transparency helps provide further assurance to customers adopting Confidential Computing, and to that end AMD is working toward a model of open source security firmware.

With the analysis now complete and the vulnerabilities addressed, the AMD and Google security teams agree that the AMD firmware which enables Confidential Computing solutions meets an elevated security bar for customers, as the firmware design updates mitigate several bug classes and offer a way to recover from vulnerabilities. More importantly, the review also found that Confidential VMs are protected against a broad range of attacks described in the review.

Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio

The Google Cloud Confidential VMs, Dataproc Confidential Compute, and Confidential GKE Nodes have enabled high levels of security and privacy to address our customers’ data protection needs without compromising usability, performance, and scale. Our mission is to make this technology ubiquitous across the cloud. Confidential VMs run on hosts with AMD EPYC processors which feature AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). Incorporating SEV into Confidential VMs provide benefits and features including:

Isolation: Memory encryption keys are generated by the AMD Secure Processor during VM creation and reside solely within the AMD Secure Processor. Other VM encryption keys such as for disk encryption can be generated and managed by an external key manager or in Google Cloud HSM. Both sets of these keys are not accessible by Google Cloud, offering strong isolation.

Attestation: Confidential VMs use Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) attestation. Every time a Confidential VM boots, a launch attestation report event is generated and posted to customer cloud logging, which gives administrators the opportunity to act as necessary.

Performance: Confidential Computing offers high performance for demanding computational tasks. Enabling Confidential VM has little or no impact on most workloads.

The future of Confidential Computing and secure platforms

While there are no absolutes in computer security, collaborative research efforts help uncover security vulnerabilities that can emerge in complex environments and help to prevent Confidential Computing solutions from threats today and into the future. Ultimately, this helps us increase levels of trust for customers.

We believe Confidential Computing is an industry-wide effort that is critical for securing sensitive workloads in the cloud and are grateful to AMD for their continued collaboration on this journey.

To read the full security review, visit this page.

Acknowledgments 

We thank the many Google security team members who contributed to this ongoing security collaboration and review, including James Forshaw, Jann Horn and Mark Brand.

We are grateful for the open collaboration with AMD engineers, and wish to thank David Kaplan, Richard Relph and Nathan Nadarajah for their commitment to product security. We would also like to thank AMD leadership: Ab Nacef, Prabhu Jayanna, Hugo Romero, Andrej Zdravkovic and Mark Papermaster for their support of this joint effort.

Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) engages with customers to ensure effective and efficient operations in the cloud, from the time they begin considering how cloud can help them overcome their operational, business or technical challenges, to the time they’re looking to optimize their cloud workloads. 

We know that all parts of the cloud journey are important and can be complex.  In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on the migration process and how PSO engages in a myriad of activities to ensure a successful migration.

As a team of trusted technical advisors, PSO will approach migrations in three phases:

1. Pre-Migration Planning
2. Cutover Activities
3. Post-Migration Operations

While this post will not cover in detail all of the steps required for a migration, it will focus on how PSO engages in specific activities to meet customer objectives, manage risk, and deliver value.  We will discuss the assets, processes and tools that we leverage to ensure success.

Pre-Migration Planning

Assess Scope

Before the migration happens, you will need to understand and clarify the future state that you’re working towards.  From a logistical perspective, PSO will be helping you with capacity planning to ensure sufficient resources are available for your envisioned future state.

While migration into the cloud does allow you to eliminate many of the considerations for the physical, logistical, and financial concerns of traditional data centers and co-locations, it does not remove the need for active management of quotas, preparation for large migrations, and forecasting.  PSO will help you forecast your needs in advance and work with the capacity team to adjust quotas, manage resources, and ensure availability. 

Once the future state has been determined, PSO will also work with the product teams to determine any gaps in functionality.  PSO captures feature requests across Google Cloud services and makes sure they are understood, logged, tracked, and prioritized appropriately with the relevant product teams.  From there, they work closely with the customer to determine any interim workarounds that can be leveraged while waiting for the feature to land, as well as providing updates on the upcoming roadmap.  

Develop Migration Approach and Tooling

Within Google Cloud, we have a library of assets and tools we use to assist in the migration process.  We have seen these assets help us successfully complete migrations for other customers efficiently and effectively.

Based on the scoping requirements and tooling available to assist in the migration, PSO will help recommend a migration approach.  We understand that enterprises have specific needs; differing levels of complexity and scale; regulatory, operational, or organization challenges that will need to be factored into the migration.  PSO will help customers think through the different migration options and how all of the considerations will play out.

PSO will work with the customer team to determine the best migration approach for moving servers from on-prem to Google Cloud. PSO will walk customers through different migration approaches, such as refactoring, lift-shift, or new installs. From there, the customer can determine the best fit for their migration. PSO will provide guidance on best practices and use cases from other customers with similar use cases. 

Google offers a variety of cloud native tools that can assist with asset discovery, the migration itself, and post-migration optimization. PSO, as one example, will help work with project managers to determine the best tooling that accommodates the customer’s requirements for migrating servers. PSO will also engage Google product team to ensure the customer fully understands the capabilities of each tool and the best fit for the use case. Google understands from a tooling perspective, one size does not fit all, thus PSO will work with the customer on determining the best migration approach and tooling for different requirements. 

Cutover Activities

Once all of the planning activities have been completed, PSO will assist in making sure the cutover is successful.

During and leading up to critical customer events, PSO can provide proactive event management services which deliver increased support and readiness for key workloads.  Beyond having a solid architecture and infrastructure on the platform, support for this infrastructure is essential and TAMs will help ensure that there are additional resources to support and unblock the customer where challenges arise.

As part of event management activities, PSO liaises with the Google Cloud Support Organization to ensure quick remediation and high resilience for situations where challenges arise.  A war room is usually created to facilitate quick communication about the critical activities and roadblocks that arise.  These war rooms can give customers a direct line to the support and engineering teams that will triage and resolve their issues.

Post-Migration Activities

Once cutover is complete, PSO will continue to provide support in areas such incident management, capacity planning, continuous operational support, and optimization to ensure the customer is successful from start to finish.

PSO will serve as the liaison between the customer and Google engineers. If support cases need to be escalated, PSO will ensure the appropriate parties are involved and work to get the case resolved in a timely manner. Through operational rigor, PSO will work with the customer in determining if certain Google Cloud services will be beneficial to the customer objectives. If services will add value to the customer, PSO will help enable the services so it aligns with the customer’s goal and current cloud architecture. In cases where there are missing gaps in services, PSO will proactively work with the customer and Google engineering teams to close the gaps by enabling additional functionality in the services.  

PSO will continue to work with the engineering teams to consistently review and provide recommendations on the customer’s cloud architecture in ensuring the most optimal and cost efficient design along with adhering to Google’s best practices guidelines. 

Aside from migrations, PSO is also responsible for providing continuous training of Google Cloud to customers. To ensure consistent development of Google Cloud, PSO will work with the customer to jointly develop a learning roadmap to ensure the customer has the necessary skills to succeed in delivering successful projects in Google Cloud.

Conclusion

Google PSO will be actively engaged throughout the customer’s cloud journey to ensure the necessary guidance, methodology, and tools are presented to the customer. PSO will engage in a series of activities from pre-migration planning to post migration in key areas such as capacity planning to ensure sufficient resources are allocated for future workloads to providing support on technical cases for troubleshooting. PSO will serve as a long-term trusted advisor who will be the voice of the  customer and provide the reliability and stability of the customer’s Google Cloud environment.

Click here if you’d like to engage with our PSO team on your migration. Or, you can also get started with a free discovery and assessment of your current IT landscape.

Editor’s note: Earth Day reminds us that we all can contribute to creating a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable future. Google Cloud is excited to celebrate innovative startup companies developing new technology and driving sustainable change. On this year’s Earth Day we’re highlighting Enexor BioEnergy and their initiative to produce clean, sustainable energy from plastic and agro-waste with the help of Google Cloud solutions.

Picture a world without electricity where billions of people burn dangerous fuels and trash from landfills to cook meals and heat their homes. Children constantly cough, choking on toxic smoke that lingers in houses and sickens entire families. Because there are no pumps or purification plants, contaminated water is hauled in buckets from dirty rivers and polluted wells. Without power or lights, hospitals and emergency medical clinics can only provide basic services during the day.

Although it is 2022, this harsh life is a reality for billions of people living in developing countries around the world.

Producing clean energy from plastics and organic-waste

This Earth Day, let’s imagine what life would be like in these countries if people had access to safe and inexpensive bioenergy. In this world, indoor air is fresher. Clean water runs from faucets, while homes, businesses, and schools have electricity. Doctors and nurses have the power to treat patients 24 hours a day and save lives with advanced medical equipment. Local economies boom and entrepreneurs thrive.

This is the sustainable future Enexor BioEnergy and its partners are building—one village at a time. With the Enexor Bio-CHP™ system, we produce clean and sustainable energy from discarded plastics, organic, and biomass-waste such as rice and corn husks, seaweed, coconuts, and other biomatter while offsetting significant Carbon emissions. The Bio-CHP can be commissioned and easily installed in just a single day, with multiple systems installed side-by-side when more power is needed. By being offered under its novel Energy-as-a-Service business model, Enexor ensures that the Bio-CHP can generate immediate environmental positive impact and customer adoption.

Each Bio-CHP unit generates enough energy to power over 100 homes—and provides much-needed renewable electricity and thermal power for schools, businesses, manufacturing facilities, water pumps, Wi-Fi systems, and telecommunications towers. The Bio-CHP creates clean energy by safely oxidizing plastics and biomatter in a secure container using a high-temperature system to power a micro-turbine. This produces bioenergy, significantly reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

By solving a community’s waste issues while providing more affordable renewable energy, the Bio-CHP also creates new economic opportunities and improved outcomes where it is installed. This includes using its inexpensive power to expand local services and offerings, and empowering local community clean up efforts by incentivizing waste collection via blockchain-enabled digital currencies and services such as PayGo. Additionally, the Bio-CHP is an ideal solution for businesses who desire to maximize their own sustainability efforts, gain greater energy resiliency, and save money on their current energy and waste costs.

Engaging in Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change

When developing the Bio-CHP, we realized we needed a reliable and experienced partner to help us incorporate the best in class machine learning and artificial intelligence into our technology. That’s why we joined the Google for Startups Accelerator and participated in the Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change.

The accelerator introduced us to other companies working to create a sustainable future and opened new opportunities for collaboration and partnerships. The accelerator also continues to give our small team access to the best of Google Cloud’s people, programs, and solutions. We especially want to highlight Google Cloud’s dedicated startup experts and the incredible technical support they provide, as well as the Google Cloud research credits we used to explore new solutions.

As an example, Enexor is developing a predictive maintenance tool that automatically adjusts Bio-CHP operations to match fuel composition. Another tool in development proactively identifies and flags potential Bio-CHP system and component failures—before they occur.

Google Cloud’s dedicated startup experts work closely with Enexor to develop predictive models for these tools and Enexor also used the Google Cloud research credits that were provided to build these advanced models on TensorFlow, Vertex AI, Cloud CDN and AutoML. Since each system is remotely monitored from Enexor’s global headquarters in Tennessee, predictive maintenance tools also increase the safety, reliability, and efficiency of Bio-CHP in off-grid locations.

Generating 13 billion kWh of clean power by 2040

In the future, Enexor plans to explore additional Google Cloud solutions such as BigQuery to crunch larger datasets, Google Data Studio to build dashboards, and perhaps even Google Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to more efficiently process machine learning (ML) workloads.

These solutions will help Enexor to achieve three primary goals by 2040: to generate 13 billion kWh of clean power, reduce 120 million tons of CO₂, and provide one million people with access to clean and sustainable energy. With each Bio-CHP system, Enexor annually reduces up to 2,000 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent emissions by decreasing methane emissions released from landfills, offsetting fossil fuel-based power generation with carbon credits and minimizing waste disposal transportation emissions.

Enexor is now preparing to deploy the Bio-CHP in Accra, Ghana where it will convert organic and plastic manufacturing waste into sustainable energy. Enexor is also looking forward to working with the local Accra community and NGOs to collect discarded plastics and organic waste diverting it from ending in the rivers and oceans and instead using them as renewable fuel sources. We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we celebrate Earth Day 2022 and think about the sustainable future Enexor is helping to empower.

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.