Google Cloud Infrastructure: What Changed in the Last One Year and What’s in the Future?
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This past year brought both new challenges and successes for our customers around the world. We thought life was going to return to normal… and then it didn’t. Despite the uncertainty, it was exciting to see customers make huge transformations in when, where, and how they run their businesses, with cloud infrastructure as a major enabler.
According to IDC, “by 2024, 50% of organizations will use applications built on abstraction provided by managed services including cloud-native technologies to enable consistency in running in any and many locations.”1 Over the past year we were honored to work with so many of you to start to make this prediction a reality.
Let’s take a deeper look at where our infrastructure progressed in 2021, and where we’re headed in the new year.
Google Cloud is recognized by independent experts for its leadership
For the fourth consecutive year, Google Cloud was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services.
The Forrester Wave for AI infrastructure placed Google at the topmost position, a testament to Google’s investments in tomorrow’s AI-first world.
Google Cloud also won the HPC Wire Editor’s Choice award for the best use of HPC in the cloud.
We made it easier to migrate enterprise applications
To support enterprises in their transformation journeys we focused on expanding our support for enterprise applications in our cloud. The Home Depot just wrote about its successful migration of SAP to Google Cloud, highlighting how crucial it is to have good processes and strong partnerships. For other companies using SAP applications we also launched Filestore Enterprise, which delivers 99.99% regional availability backed by an SLA.
Our partner NetApp deepened its integration with Google Cloud to enable easier and faster Windows-based application migration, and provided flexible deployment options to modernize workloads. We also added new Network Connectivity Center partners to include companies like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and VMware, so as you migrate over time you can easily connect all your networking resources together in one place.
For those of you considering migration to cloud, Forrester dove deeper into the economics of migrating enterprise applications to cloud. (Spoiler alert: companies are finding major cost savings and performance benefits!) It’s so important to us that companies trust that their biggest, most complex applications will run smoothly and securely with us, and we’re pleased at the progress we’ve made toward supporting more enterprise applications this year.
We also made it easier for you to migrate VMware workloads to the cloud by expanding Google Cloud VMware Engine to 12 regions worldwide and enabling several new capabilities across networking, compliance, and scale. Customers such as Mitel and Carrefour migrated their VMware estates to Google Cloud to transform their applications with Google services to increase agility, save money (up to 45%) and reduce energy costs (about 35%) compared to running on-premises.
For High Performance Computing (HPC), we continued to add capabilities such as optimized VM images for HPC, enhanced integration with schedulers such as SchedMD, Slurm, and Altair PBSPro.
New cost and performance options
To further support customers doing high performance computing for things like real-time advertising, dynamic e-commerce, and gaming, we launched a new VM family: Tau VMs. Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors. We are seeing companies such as Nylas switching from other cloud platforms to Google Cloud to make the most of Tau VMs.
That isn’t the only VM advancement we made. For customers with higher levels of fault tolerance and looking for greater cost efficiencies, we launched Spot VMs, which open up access to Google Cloud’s idle capacity so you can run your application at the lowest price possible. With Spot VMs, you save anywhere from 60-91% off the price of on-demand VMs.
We also launched more options for the highest performance ephemeral block storage — 6TB and 9TB Local SSDs, which offer greater IOPS per dollar when attached to general purpose N2 Compute Engine VMs.
Distributed cloud brings us closer to you
For years, the industry has been telling companies, “move to cloud!” but not all workloads can move to the public cloud immediately or entirely. Factors include industry- or region-specific compliance and data sovereignty needs, low latency or local data-processing requirements, or the need to run applications close to other services.
In October, we expanded our distributed cloud strategy and announced Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions that extend Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to data centers and the edge. This is a major step forward in our ability to meet you where you are, in private data centers and at the edge, and we’re excited to see how this helps you as we move into 2022.
Data protection and security that never sleeps
This year we worked hard to help improve your data protection capabilities. We doubled down on our Actifio acquisition by launching several releases that deepened its integration with Google Cloud. For customers with containerized applications, we took a big step forward with the launch of Backup for GKE. We’re particularly excited about how this new option for GKE users allows you to more easily meet your service-level objectives, automate common backup and recovery tasks, and show reporting for compliance and audit purposes.
We also enhanced Cloud Storage with data protection features like custom region selection for dual-region buckets. Previously, Google Cloud assigned dual-region pairs for you to choose from. With this release, you can select your own region pairs that meet your regulatory or compliance requirements, or optimize your app performance. We also launched Turbo Replication for dual-region buckets, which replicates 100% of your data between regions in 15 minutes or less, backed by a Service Level Agreement, a first from a leading cloud provider.
Security is a key area of focus for us and we partnered with Palo Alto Networks to deliver their industry-leading Intrusion Detection System (IDS) solution natively on Google Cloud. With the recent Apache Log4j vulnerability, we automatically updated Cloud IDS to help detect exploit attempts and protect our customers’ environments quickly. We also integrated Cloud Armor with reCAPTCHA Enterprise to deliver a best-in-class bot and fraud management solution to prevent volumetric attacks. Cloud Armor is deployed with our Cloud Load Balancer and Cloud CDN, extending its security benefits at the network edge for traffic coming into Google Cloud.
We made it easier to build and manage applications
Developers want to focus on code, not configuring, managing or scaling infrastructure. To help, we worked on simplifying networking with new services such as Private Service Connect, which allows you to connect VPCs to applications and services securely without configuring all the network underlay. To make it easier to run workloads in hybrid environments, we introduced BYOIP so you don’t need to change your IP address, and we enhanced Cloud Load Balancer with advanced traffic management, regional and hybrid app delivery to load balance traffic between on-prem and cloud workloads. We also introduced IPv6, DNS policy manager, Cloud Domains, GKE Gateway Controller, eBPF data plane, and Service Directory, all with the goal of making networking easier for developers.
We continue to invest in visibility and observability for efficient day 2 operations. Network Intelligence Center now has dynamic reachability within the Connectivity Tests module, interconnect and VPN visualization in Network Topology, and the Firewall Insights module, which provides visibility into firewall rules to ensure they are being used appropriately and as intended.
And while not new this year, developers continue to tell us how much they love the ease of architecting storage using Cloud Storage. See how easy it is to configure a dual-region bucket. As a result, developers can treat a continent like a single bucket, dramatically simplifying the application programming model. Google Cloud is unique in offering this capability among major public cloud vendors.
We continue to be the most sustainable cloud for you
Another area Google has invested in deeply and that is becoming increasingly important to more organizations is sustainability. Many cloud providers have a vision for a sustainable future, and many aim to match their electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy by 2025 or 2030. We accomplished 100% renewable energy in 2017, which means we’re the only hyperscale cloud to do this today and on data centers that are twice as energy efficient as the average data center.
We also announced a number of new features like our new Carbon Footprint tool. Every Google Cloud user — that means you! — can see the gross carbon emissions associated with the services you use in Google Cloud. This means picking the data center that meets your sustainability goals, and reducing the overall emissions tied to your infrastructure and applications. And we have some pretty big goals for the future. For more, don’t miss our full sustainability recap.
A big thank you to our customers
While we were busy building out our infrastructure in 2021, we’d be nowhere without the partnership of our amazing customers. It’s hard to pick from all the exciting stories we heard this year, but here are just a few: Pega migrated its SAP applications to Google Cloud with zero downtime. Paypal exited its non-strategic data centers and achieved major cost savings. And Wix used our network to serve tens of millions of requests per day.
I’m proud to look back at how our cloud infrastructure has evolved this year to support each of our customers on their transformation journey. As we head into 2022 I’m excited to continue to partner with you to solve your most difficult challenges together.
Interested in hearing more about Google’s vision for the future? Listen to Thomas Kurian’s thoughts from Google Cloud Next ‘21.
1. IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2022 Predictions
Serverless for Startups, the Best Way to Succeed: Expert Says
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As Google Cloud has become a choice for more startups, I’ve experienced an increase in founders asking how they should think about cloud services. Though each startup is different and requirements may vary across industries and regions, I’ve seen a few core best practices that help startups to succeed—as well as several traps to avoid.
For example, If you go with a public cloud provider, you’re ideally not starting from ground zero like you would running your own data center, but it’s important not to introduce similar complexity in a virtualized environment. Just because you’re using public cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean you want to manage it.
Instead, you want to leverage platforms that abstract away complexity so your team can focus on delivering value to customers. That’s where serverless comes in. Serverless platforms are fully managed by the provider, offering automatic scaling for workloads, as well as provisioning, configuring, patching, and management of servers and clusters. Freed from these resource-intensive tasks, your technical talent can focus on the things that differentiate your business, not on IT curation.
This applies to not only running stateless applications, but also managing and analyzing data. You should be collecting data points about which features are most popular on your platform, what people are buying, the types of activities that help your customers get their jobs done, and so on. This information is essential to building and executing on a product roadmap that will serve your customers. However, it’s not enough to collect this data, you need to make your data accessible, secure, and easy for your team to analyze—so where do you run and host it?
On Google Cloud, this is where options like Spanner and Cloud SQL can play a large role, as can BigQuery for analysis. You won’t have to worry about standing up infrastructure or patching servers—you can just stream your data to our data management platforms, where it’s available whenever someone needs to run a query. By leveraging a serverless architecture, your startup can be data-driven without having to invest in the traditional complexity of database administration and management—and that can significantly change your playing field.
Serverless is just one of the factors you should consider as you build out your tech stack. To hear my thoughts on a range of other topics relevant to startups — such as security, cloud credits, and the differences among managed services — check out the below video or visit our Build and Grow page.
How Ather Energy is leveraging the Cloud to build and scale smart mobility solutions for India
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In 2013, long before the world was discussing clean energy and sustainable practices, two IIT Madras graduates — Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta — had an idea to develop India’s first-ever electrical scooter.
This was at a time when auto manufacturers were still focusing on fossil-fuel-driven vehicles and ‘eco-friendly’ mobility solutions were more a trendy alternative catering to a niche market.
The duo founded Ather Energy in 2013 and launched their first fully-electric scooter, the Ather S340, in Bengaluru in 2016. Since then, the company has released several new models into the market and is planning to expand to eight more cities by the end of the year.
To support the smooth running of their vehicles, lower costs, improve time to market, and create great customer experience, Ather turned to Google Cloud.
Read the Full Story on YourStory
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Indian Retailer Figures Optimizes Hyperlocal Delivery to Increase Customer Experience
Anyone who follows the Indian e-commerce scene knows that one of the largest challenges these companies face is hyperlocal delivery.
That was a problem facing Wellness Forever, a retail chain of pharmacies with 150-plus stores across India.
“Exactly a year ago, we started our journey of hyperlocal deliveries. This optimization was a big time challenge for us to understand how to optimize this,” Palani Subbiah, CTO, Wellness Forever.
The problem in front of Wellness Forever was to identify which customer could can be sold from which store, so that a delivery could be made within 90 minutes.
“We handle a large amount of customer data and we wanted to use insights to help and improve the customer satisfaction index,” says Subbiah.
To do that Wellness Forever leveraged Google Big Query to run massive amount of data to come up with the operational insights. They also used Firebase and Google Maps.
“By 2021, we are going to have about 450 stores. Those stores are going to be not only a physical store, which is a digital store.
Google Cloud Introduces Enterprise-grade Scheduler across All GCP Regions
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Reliably executing tasks on a schedule is critical for everything from data engineering, to infrastructure management, and application maintenance. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Google Cloud Scheduler, our enterprise-grade scheduling service, is now available in more GCP regions and multiple regions can now be used from a single project removing the prior limit of a single region per project.
With many enterprise customers deploying complex distributed cloud systems, Cloud Scheduler has helped solve the problem of single-server cron scheduling being a single point of failure. With this update you are now able to create Scheduler jobs across distinct cloud regions that can help satisfy cross-regional availability and fail-over scenarios.
Furthermore, you are no longer required to create an AppEngine application in order to use Cloud Scheduler. For existing Cloud Scheduler jobs, it is safe to disable the AppEngine application within the project. Jobs will continue to function without an AppEngine application.
Creating jobs in different regions is easy. You simply pick the location where you would like your job to run. For example you can specify a location when creating a job through the gcloud command line :
HTTP Targets
gcloud scheduler jobs create http <job-name>--location <cloud-region>--schedule <cron-schedule>--uri <target-uri>
Pub/Sub Topics
gcloud scheduler jobs create pubsub <job-name>--location <cloud-region>--schedule <cron-schedule>--topic <topic-name>(--message-body <message-body> | --message-body-from-file <file-path>)
AppEngine Services
gcloud scheduler jobs create app-engine <job-name>--location <cloud-region>--schedule <cron-schedule>
Or you can pick a location when creating a job through the Cloud Console:
Google Cloud Scheduler is now available in 23 GCP Regions, and this number is expected to grow in the future. You can always find an up-to-date list of available regions by running:
gcloud scheduler locations list
We hope you are as excited about this launch as we are. Please reach out to us with any suggestions or questions in our public issue tracker.
Indonesia moves towards advanced education with Cloud, ML & Mobile Development
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Indonesia is leading the way for digital transformation in Southeast Asia. According to Google’s e-Conomy South East Asia report, the country’s 2030 Gross Merchandise Value – the value of online retailing to consumers – could be twice the value of the whole of Southeast Asia today.
This growth means that many companies need more qualified IT graduates and employees with digital skills than they have today. Fast-growing tech companies need more qualified IT graduates, and employees with digital skills. According to the World Bank, Indonesia needs an additional nine million people with digital skills by 2030. The shortage of technical talent reiterates the need to invest in a reliable skills pipeline.
Following years of digital talent developments in Indonesia, Google has become a supporter of Bangkit, an academy designed to produce high-caliber technical talent for Indonesian technology companies and startups. Bangkit has facilitated a multi-stakeholder collaboration between Google, government, industry, and universities across Indonesia.
Last year, the President of Indonesia and the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research, and Technology, acknowledged Bangkit’s significant impact, with 3,000 students completing nearly 15,000 courses and specialisations.
Building on last year’s success, Bangkit started its 2022 program in February, offering three learning paths to students:
- Cloud computing with Google Cloud, preparing students for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Some of the course components are also available online
- Mobile development with Android, preparing students for the Google Associate Android Developer exam. An online version is available here.
- Machine learning with Tensorflow, getting students ready to take the Tensorflow Developer certification. Some of the online courses are available here for others.
Bangkit 2022 has enrolled 3,100 university students who will take a five month study course, obtaining university study credit, as well as industry certifications. The program accepts diverse cohorts of people who are passionate about preparing for a tech career in the near future, with support and encouragement for women, people with disabilities, and students from across Indonesia to apply.
Since its pilot in 2019, Bangkit has been guided by three principles:
- Industry-led: provides curriculum and instructors from industry experts, including Google, GoTo and Traveloka. Instructors include key figures such as Laurence Moroney (Google, Lead AI Advocate), Google Developer Experts, and other committed professionals.
- Immersive: combines online learning methods conducted in both individual and group settings.
- Interdisciplinary: contains knowledge and best practices in tech, soft skills, and English to provide complete career readiness.
The program runs from February to July 2022, and has a 900-hour curriculum throughout the 18-week learning experience.
Benefits for students participating in Bangkit include:
- Study credit conversion
- Job opportunities at our career fair
- Google Cloud, TensorFlow and AAD exam vouchers
- Incubation funds and mentorship support from industry
Towards the end of Bangkit 2022, students will team up for the Capstone Project challenge to propose solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems, such as environmentalism, accessibility, and more. The top 15 teams will be selected to receive funding to incubate their capstone projects. These education and career-preparedness offerings are provided at no cost.
Google is partnering with industry, governments, universities, and employers to help meet the skill demands of today. From supporting the State of Ohio to offer tech skills to residents, to working with the University of Minnesota-Rochester to create a customized health sciences degree program, Google is here to help our partners prepare those they serve for a cloud-first world.
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