Getting started with Kubernetes is often harder than it needs to be. While working with a cluster “from scratch” can be a great learning exercise or a good solution for some highly specialized workloads, often the details of cluster management can be made easier by utilizing a managed service offering. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) allows for an easier end-to-end developer experience with convenient tooling and built-in integrations along with the convenience of offering Kubernetes clusters as a managed service.

GKE is the most mature container orchestration service available today, delivering a fully-managed service and hands-off experience with the GKE Autopilot mode of operation. GKE provides industry-first capabilities such as release channels, multi-cluster support, unique four-way auto scaling, node auto repair, and can support up to 15K nodes in a single cluster. 

Our modern, end-to-end platform is built on cloud-native principles you are already familiar with and prioritizes speed, security, and flexibility, in ways that are highly differentiated from other cloud platforms. 

We have put together a new reference guide for you as you begin your journey developing on GKE. It covers every step of your journey from writing, running, operating, to managing code. Even if it isn’t your first time using GKE, this e-book will be a valuable resource highlighting important considerations and best practices. By implementing the technical recommendations, following the steps, and utilizing the tools described, you can reach the following goals:

• Write, deploy, and debug code faster with Cloud Code and Cloud Shell
• Continuously integrate and deliver updates with Cloud Build
• Run easily, securly, cost effectively at scale with GKE
• Monitor and troubleshoot with Google Cloud’s operations suite 

Kick-start your journey by downloading the e-book and join us live June 22 at 9am PDT for our half-day Cloud OnBoard event: Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine. 

When public health officials in Quebec set out to provide COVID-19 vaccination services for their 8 million residents in February 2021, they needed an easy-to-use, scalable solution to schedule appointments online. To make it simple for Quebecers to register for vaccines, the goal was to use Clic Santé, a familiar online portal built on Google Cloud and already in use to schedule flu vaccines and other health-related services. Trimoz Technologies, the portal’s creator, prepared to meet high-volumes of traffic by creating a seamless appointment scheduling experience.

To meet demand, Trimoz relied on Google Cloud – optimizing it for the expected surges. As an enterprise solutions provider to the public sector in Canada, Google Cloud scaled to meet the ongoing surges in traffic to the Clic Santé portal, with the stability and reliability the portal needed. At its peak surge, Clic Santé scheduled 365,000 appointment schedules in a single day, and on average, continues to handle a volume of roughly 50,000 appointments per day. Since launching their appointment scheduling service, Clic Sante has been able to deploy up to a over dozen new appointment functionalities each month with no service interruptions, while maintaining up to 3,000 vaccination and 1,500 pharmacies sites to serve the population.

“Thanks to our talented and agile team and the flexibility of Google Cloud, we performed hundreds of new releases and added new features and functionalities, without interrupting our services and while maintaining flawless security. We found extraordinary capacity to resolve complex problems with simple solutions
Stéphane Lajoie
CEO of Trimoz Technologies

Google Cloud services that helped build a more secure, flexible and scalable portal used by millions

The main components of Clic Santé are hosted using different services to give the team at Trimoz more flexibility with their platform functionality. The portal’s user interface, for example, was built using AppEngine, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, that hosts websites and automatically scales up and down based on the load. AppEngine allows the portal to deploy its web interface without having to manage the infrastructure. Trimoz implemented Cloud SQL, another PaaS solution, to run instances of relational-type databases without needing to manage the infrastructure. Changing the number of instances based on active users gave them more freedom to scale as needed without affecting portal users.

Various healthcare organizations (CIUSSS and CISSS) required appointment-level metrics gathered from Clic Santé to track progression towards their vaccination goal. To handle this, Trimoz uses BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse service from Google Cloud. This service handles data storage economically and allows for future analysis as needed so Trimoz can ensure all data, at rest and in motion, is encrypted to protect the platform and its users.

A reliable, user-friendly vaccination experience for Quebec

Through the partnership between Trimoz and Google Cloud, the vaccine appointment-scheduling portal handles 80,000 connections on average per day, with zero service interruptions. It also provides a user-friendly interface that can handle swells of traffic as needed. This reliability of the solution was one factor among many that helped reach the goal of vaccinating “75% of the admissible population” three weeks early., making Quebec’s population one of the most vaccinated populations in the world.

The performance and scalability of the platform will now allow Trimoz Technologies to expand into new markets like pharmacies, other healthcare organizations in other Canadian provinces, U.S. or European markets.

Clic Santé in numbers:

• More than 7,000,000 unique users
• 50,000 appointments set in average per day
• Peak of 365,000 daily appointments
• 80,000 connections per day in average
• 100% uptime of the Clic Santé platform
• 4 to 12 new production releases per month

Google Cloud is already widely available for public sector organizations in Canada. We are actively expanding with new regions and solutions with the highest compliance and standards and are committed to providing Canada with the quality service they need from a public sector cloud provider.

To learn more, visit the Google Cloud for Canada public sector solutions page.

According to a recent Accenture report, large businesses deploy an average of 500 different applications. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, with the majority of respondents signaling plans to acquire even more applications. No surprise, all these applications present a number of integration challenges, which the impending wave of generative AI in software development only promises to further intensify.

Two years ago, we introduced Apigee Integration as an add-on capability to Apigee API Management. From conversations with customers, it’s become clear that you want to access these capabilities directly from the Google Cloud console. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Application Integration, a standalone Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) designed to help you connect your applications visually, with no code. Best of all, you can now get started with Application Integration with no upfront financial commitment, even if you’re not an existing Apigee customer. 

What is Application Integration?

As a cloud-native product, Application Integration helps you automate business processes by connecting any application — both home-grown and third-party SaaS — with simple point-and-click configurations, so you can quickly and easily construct, maintain, and scale your integrations. Application Integration offers the following features:

Visual integration designer: An Intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows anyone to build workflows with no complex coding or manual processes. With the visual integration designer, anyone can simply drag-and-drop individual control elements (such as edges, forks, and joins) to build custom integration patterns of any complexity.

Plug-and-play connectors: A library of 75+ pre-built connectors makes it easy to connect to a number of Google Cloud services (e.g., BigQuery, Pub/Sub) and many third-party applications, including Salesforce, MongoDB, and NetSuite. 

Automated triggers and transformations: With built-in triggers, you can execute integrations on an API call, Cloud Pub/Sub event, Salesforce events, or using Cloud Scheduler. An intuitive data mapping editor and comprehensive mapping functions enable you to address complex data transformation requirements in no time.

Unified platform: Whether you’re building APIs in Apigee, ingesting data using Pub/Sub, receiving events from Cloud Storage using EventArc, or something else, Application Integration works seamlessly with other integration services to provide comprehensive capabilities for your use case. 

Customer praise for Application Integration

In the enterprise, different teams adopt applications to support a task in their business processes. However, the need for information exchange among these teams can spawn complex integrations that require a lot of arduous planning.

Application Integration abstracts these development complexities, so customers  can focus on building value. OVO Energy uses Application Integration to automate communications in their critical business processes. “We were looking for an integration solution that was very low-code yet configurable, robust, and scalable,” said Chris Parker, Product Manager at OVO Energy. “We needed a simple solution that allowed us to get data from multiple parts of the company, supplement an existing data point with relevant information and funnel it to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” added Graham Vosper, Technology lead at OVO Energy.

But changes in business processes are inevitable, forcing continuous shifts to existing integrations – sometimes even rendering them obsolete. “Using Application Integration was very simple. With just a couple of clicks, our team quickly adapted to this new product and became productive,” said Graham.

A growing library of connectors in Application Integration makes it easy to connect to new applications and ensures any changes in connecting to the end application is automatically supported. OVO Energy has taken notice. “Configurability and traceability in Application Integration allows our developers to build and maintain our integrations without in-depth skills. We now have much better visibility into our information flow and failure rates,” said Graham. 

Get started today

Today’s integration problems require a comprehensive approach that spans applications, systems, and data. Application Integration is part of Google Cloud’s Integration Services portfolio, designed to address your end-to-end integration needs. The portfolio covers a wide range of use cases like data integration, API Management, and event-driven architectures. You can get started with Application Integration with no financial commitment by using the free tier. Learn more, explore a sample e-commerce integration, or jumpstart your development with quickstart tutorials.

Google Cloud Results

• Reduced smart parking/smart city IoT installation and operational support effort by more than half
• Enabled development of a Smart Cloud IoT platform in just four months
• Democratised data access and use across the organisation
• Built core infrastructure in under 4 months

Smart Parking’s core product is a sensor-based system called SmartPark, used in environments such as shopping centres, airports, commercial parking operations, universities, and municipal streets.

Smart Parking has deployed over 50,000 sensors worldwide to support parking systems. It estimates at least 70% of production-scale and currently operating smart parking environments globally are using its technologies.

“Our products include ground sensors that use an advanced combination of infrared and magnetic technologies to reliably register a vehicle’s arrival and communicate to a gateway,” says Brian Granatir, Technical Team Lead, Smart Parking. This enables operators to gain live insights into parking environment usage and manage capacity. They can also provide automated guidance and signage to tell customers how many vacant spaces are available on each level of a parking structure or street area of a city.

Additional functionality enables parking operators to identify whether vehicles parked in limited-time spots have overstayed. The operators may notify inspectors who can undertake enforcement actions such as issuing infringement notices.

Another Smart Parking mobile product enables parking operators to photograph licence plates to identify vehicles that have overstayed. The business is also developing applications that enable users to view the number of parking spots available in nearby parking structures.

Smart Parking is extending its operations into smart city developments. The business views this as a natural progression as its parking systems establish a powerful common foundation from which to deliver many other services. “Parking is just part of a very complex ecosystem that requires sophisticated interoperability and generalised analytics,” John Heard, Chief Technology Officer, Smart Parking, explains.

“The biggest trend in the space is towards the Internet of Things (IoT)–the integration of a large number of generic and specialised devices,” Heard adds. “This has led us to shift from the idea of our devices being the centre of the universe. Instead, we put data intelligence at the core.”

In October 2016, Smart Parking decided to develop a SmartCloud platform that would enable cities to manage and react to information from a connected network of IoT devices. The business wanted to start by rolling out the platform based on an event-driven architecture that could connect any device that sends or receives a sequence of data events to existing Smart Parking customers.

The platform would enable Smart Parking to address a wide range of highly complex and interrelated interactions. “Internally, we use the example that if everyone leaves a parking structure at 3pm, what will be the impact on traffic?” Heard says. “So, how can we correlate multiple factors to answer a larger question?”

Heard’s team elected to deploy SmartCloud on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), due primarily to its support for sophisticated big data management and machine learning in a serverless architecture. Furthermore, Google technologies were proven to operate at scale and GCP had baked-in best practices that could manage internet-scale datasets in near real time.

“By running on Google, we were able to develop SmartCloud at an incredible pace,” Granatir says. “We built the core infrastructure in under four months.” Furthermore, GCP enables the SmartCloud platform to operate at metropolis scale, combining streams of distributed data to deliver an unprecedented view of the events and interactions taking place in a city.

Smart Parking now uses a wide range of GCP services to deliver SmartCloud. Google Cloud Dataflow provides processing and Google BigQuery provides management and analytics of big data. Google Cloud Pub/Sub provides real-time messaging and Google Cloud Functions enables a serverless environment to enable delivery of streaming data. Google Cloud IoT Core connects, manages, and ingests data from Smart Parking devices while Google Cloud Identity & Access Management enables Smart Parking to control access to information. Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Google Cloud Functions also support the event-driven architecture.

Installation time and operational burdens cut by at least half

Using Google Cloud IoT Core has cut Smart Parking’s parking and smart city system installation times by at least half and eliminated the need to build a registration system, a device authorisation system, and a feedback loop for each project. This delivers a streamlined and simpler methodology for site installations, which flows on to a dramatic decrease in the operational burdens involved in monitoring and maintaining deployments of all scales.

Using GCP has revolutionised Smart Parking’s software development processes. “We’re building and deploying systems at a speed I could never have imagined before Google Cloud Platform,” Granatir says. Furthermore, using GCP has made data accessible to anyone within the Smart Parking business, and this is being extended to customers via SmartCloud information services.

This democratised approach has already realised considerable benefits. “One of our project managers was experimenting with the Google Data Studio service for visualising data and was able to make a query about utilisation efficiency,” Heard adds. “We found that simply changing the maximum stay time by a small amount could hugely impact the percentage of parking utilisation and, therefore, throughput.

“This is an illustration of a significant insight by someone who simply had a hunch and quick access to mountains of live and accurate data.”

Transition to a data-intelligence company

Using GCP has enabled Smart Parking to chart a path from a sales and maintenance organisation to a smart cities data-intelligence company. “How? Simply by providing amazing services that focus on massive data volumes and sharing documentation that helps us leverage best practices,” Heard says. “Because of Google Cloud Platform and its pricing, we don’t walk in the shadow of giants, we ride on their shoulders.”

Smart Parking is now looking to further extend its use of Google services to add value to its smart parking and future smart city clients. “With Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, we could gain the ability to identify trends across every customer parking site and make recommendations to operators,” Heard says. “For example, we could provide data-driven insight and advice to operators about how to adjust their parking spot time limits and guidance about how to transform throughput and convenience while increasing revenue.”

Heard concludes, “As a result of being able to dramatically decrease our traditional development burdens by using GCP, we now have a number of exciting new capabilities we have been able to bring in to our roadmap and expand the journey we are able to open up for our customers as well.”

While many companies are writing brand-new Kubernetes-based applications, it’s still quite common to find companies who want to migrate existing workloads. A common source platform for these applications is Cloud Foundry. However, getting an existing Cloud Foundry application running on Kubernetes can be non-trivial, especially if you want to avoid making code changes in your applications, or taking on big process changes across teams. That is, if you’re not using Kf to do a lot of that heavy lifting for you. 

Kf is a Google Cloud service that allows you to easily move existing Cloud Foundry workloads to Kubernetes with minimal disruption to your existing processes. 

Kf features a command line interface (CLI) also named kf, that replaces the existing Cloud Foundry cf command line utility. The kf CLI implements the most commonly used cf functionality, including the ability to manage bindings, services, apps, routes and more. 

For example, to deploy an existing application you would simply issue the kf push command. 

On the server side Kf is built on several open source technologies. In some cases these technologies are also the Google Cloud implementation. For instance GKE is our managed Kubernetes offering,  and provides the platform for managing and running the applications. Routing and ingress is handled by Anthos Service Mesh, Google Cloud’s managed Istio-based service mesh. Finally, Tekton provides on-cluster build functionality for Kf. Developers don’t have to worry about any of those technologies, as Kf abstracts them away.

Kf primitives such as spaces, bindings and services are implemented as custom Kubernetes resources and controllers. The custom resources effectively serve as the Kf API and are used by the kf CLI to interact with the system. The controllers use Kf’s CRDs to orchestrate the other components in the system.

The beauty of this approach is that developers who are familiar with existing workflows can largely replicate those workflows with the kf CLI. On the other hand, platform operators who are more familiar with Kubernetes can use kubectl to interact with the CRDs and controllers. 

For instance if you wanted to list the apps running on your Kf cluster you could issue either of the following commands:

  kf apps
kubectl get apps -n space-name

Notice that CF / Kf spaces get mapped one to one to Kubernetes namespaces.

To get a list of all the custom resources you can examine the api-resources in the kf.dev API group.

  kubectl api-resources --api-group=kf.dev
NAME                      SHORTNAMES   APIGROUP   NAMESPACED   KIND
apps                                   kf.dev     true         App
builds                                 kf.dev     true         Build
clusterservicebrokers                  kf.dev     false        ClusterServiceBroker
routes                                 kf.dev     true         Route
servicebrokers                         kf.dev     true         ServiceBroker
serviceinstancebindings                kf.dev     true         ServiceInstanceBinding
serviceinstances                       kf.dev     true         ServiceInstance
spaces                                 kf.dev     false        Space

With Kf developers can continue to work with a familiar interface and platform operators can use declarative Kubernetes practices and tooling such as Anthos Config Management to manage the cluster. It’s really the best of both worlds if you’re looking to manage your existing Cloud Foundry applications on Kubernetes. 

If you’d like to learn more about Kf check out the video I just released on YouTube.  It reviews some of the concepts discussed here, and includes a short demo. If you’d like to get hands on, try the quick start. And, of course, you can always read the documentation.