As the saying goes, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” Some organizations find it challenging to predict what cloud resources they’ll need in months or years ahead. Every organization is on its own unique cloud journey. To help, we’re developing new ways for customers to consume and pay for Google Cloud services. We’re doing this by removing barriers to entry, aligning cost to consumption and providing contractual and product flexibility. Read on to learn how we’re rolling out several new go-to-market programs across these key areas to help our customers purchase and consume Google Cloud services more easily.

Removing barriers to entry with Google Cloud Flex Agreements

Many customers choose multi-year commitments because they provide better line-of-sight into IT spend and budgeting. However, these commitments can create difficulty for those who don’t have clear visibility into their future cloud consumption needs. That’s why today we’re launching Flex Agreements, which enable customers to migrate their workloads to the cloud with no up-front commitments. As part of this new licensing option, Google Cloud customers still get access to unique incentives, such as monthly spend discounts¹, committed use discounts, cloud credits, and access to professional services, based on monthly spend and workloads migrated to Google Cloud.

Flex Agreements are just one example of how we are removing barriers to help customers start using Google Cloud. In 2022, we launched the Innovators Plus annual subscription, which gives developers a curated toolkit to accelerate their expertise, including access to live and on-demand training through Google Cloud Skills Boost, Google Cloud credits, and more. 

We also recently expanded trials for Google Cloud products. For example, the new Spanner free trial instance is good for 90 days, allowing developers to create Google Standard SQL or PostgreSQL databases, explore Spanner capabilities, and prototype applications—with no commitment or contract needed. 

Contractual and feature flexibility  

Contractual flexibility has always been one of our core principles. Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), for example, provide discounted prices in exchange for a commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified term. Last year, we introduced Flexible CUD, spend-based commitments that offer predictable and simple flat-rate discounts that apply across multiple virtual machine families and regions.

In addition to contractual flexibility, our customers also need the flexibility to choose features and functionality based on their stages of cloud adoption and the complexity of their business requirements. Therefore, over the next few quarters, we will launch new product pricing editions—Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus—in parts of our cloud portfolio. This new commercial packaging model will help give customers more choice and flexibility to optimize their cloud spend.

For customers running workloads such as those in regulated industries like banking and public sector, the higher-end Enterprise Plus tier will offer compute, storage, networking and analytics services with high availability, multi-region support, regional failover and disaster recovery, advanced security, and a broad range of regulatory compliance support. The Enterprise pricing tier will include a broad range of features designed for customers with workloads that demand a high level of scalability, flexibility, and reliability. The Standard pricing tier will offer cost-efficient and easy-to-use managed services that include all essential capabilities such as autoscaling to meet the core workload requirements of customers.

Align costs to consumption with autoscaling

At Google Cloud, a core requirement for the products we build is providing customers industry-leading capabilities to automatically scale (autoscale) services up and down to match capacity with real-time demand. Autoscaling improves uptime, reduces infrastructure costs, and removes the operational burden of managing resources.  

Many Google Cloud products include autoscaling capabilities to help customers manage unplanned variations in demand. For example, Dataflow vertical and horizontal autoscaling, in combination with granular adaptive resource configuration (aka “right-fitting”), has resulted in up to 50% saving in infrastructure costs for streaming by automatically choosing the right number of instances required to run the jobs and dynamically re-allocating more or fewer instances during the runtime of jobs. Bigtable also provides native autoscaling capabilities, and Spanner’s autoscale is an open source tool that works across regional and multi-regional Spanner deployments. 

Similarly, we added multiple features such as Cluster Autoscaler, Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, Vertical Pod Autoscaling, and Node Auto-Provisioning to GKE for elasticity and cost efficiency. 

For L.L.Bean, the ability to quickly scale capacity to meet changing usage patterns (e.g., during the holidays), as well as to rapidly perform load tests to test capacity, are “night and day” with Google Cloud compared to L.L.Bean’s legacy on-premises IT system.

“We won’t have to pay for peak capacity to have it available during peak shopping times. We just scale capacity up or down as needed.” — Randy Dyer, Enterprise Architect, L.L.Bean

We are now taking these capabilities to the next level by enabling autoscaling in BigQuery at a more granular level so you never pay more than what you use. This allows you to provision additional capacity in smaller increments, so you never overprovision and overpay for underutilized capacity. BigQuery customers can now try the new BigQuery autoscaler (currently in public preview) in their Google Cloud console.

A commitment to flexibility and choice

At Google Cloud, we remain deeply committed to the success of our customers and partners, and we are uniquely positioned to help organizations transform their business. By providing you with more flexibility and choice in how to purchase our products, we are empowering you to be more efficient and resilient.

Join Google Data Cloud & AI Summit to hear the latest announcements around innovations in Google Data Cloud for databases, data analytics, business intelligence, and AI. Gain expert insights, new solutions, and strategies that can help you transform customer experiences with modern apps, boost revenue, and reduce costs.

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While many of us are navigating the shift to hybrid work, every team’s experience is unique. Distributed work is taking many different forms—from the fully remote to a specific mix of in-person and in-office—but there are potential gaps across all the places that people work. Google Workspace helps teams bridge these gaps by providing tools for them to connect, create and collaborate securely wherever they are. Today, we’re taking this one step further by announcing new ways to bring Miro’s intuitive whiteboard experience to Google Workspace so that teams can ideate and innovate more immersively.

With a shared commitment to extending inclusive, flexible collaboration experiences for all, we’re partnering with Miro to bring whiteboarding capabilities into Google Meet. We’re also deepening the existing experience within Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, making it easier for teams to ideate and co-create asynchronously and in real time. 

Deepening collaboration in meetings 

With the new Miro experience in Meet, you’ll get an immersive side-by-side video and whiteboard experience that’s ideal for brainstorming, sketching, and iteration during meetings. This approach fosters idea generation and participation from all team members, even if they’re in different locations. And using a Miro whiteboard in Meet is seamless: simply attach the Miro whiteboard to the meeting in Google Calendar or select a board during a meeting to share and collaborate in real-time. These new experiences will be available in early 2022.

Seamlessly integrate content from Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides 

Real-time collaboration across a distributed team often spans multiple files—from brainstorming in documents, to project management in spreadsheets, to presenting your ideas in slides. Miro integrates with Google Drive, so teams can easily access and embed their Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides into Miro’s infinite canvas, making it easier to visualize and manage all the pieces of a project from one shared space. You can also save your Miro boards to Drive, and Docs, Sheets, and Slides automatically sync across both applications, so you’re always working with the latest content.

Start using Miro in Google Workspace today

The Miro app for Workspace is one of the growing number of 3rd-party applications you can use to bring the apps and services you use every day to your Google Workspace experience. Try the Miro app in Workspace with your existing credentials, or sign up for Workspace and Miro to start using the free versions together. And stay tuned for future innovation as we partner with Miro on delivering visual collaboration capabilities that are mission critical for the hybrid workplace.

As offices reopen, businesses aren’t keeping to a single formula. Many are embracing hybrid models, with employees splitting time between home and the office. Some are staying 100% remote. Others are returning the full workforce to offices with a greater focus on digitization.  

Regardless of their model, one thing is certain: technology is more central than ever to organizations’ ability to work smarter and more effectively. In particular, organizations need technology that can be tailored to specific business needs. For example, a retail store manager may need a way to ensure improved sanitation practices, or office workers may need to create an app to manage desk reservations. 

Google Workspace can help by bringing together everything you need to get things done, all in one place—including the ability to build custom apps and automations with AppSheet. AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code development platform, lets employees–even those with no programming experience–reclaim their time and talent by building custom apps and automations. 

Building solutions with AppSheet is often easier and faster than traditional coding, as AppSheet leverages Google’s machine learning expertise to help you quickly go from idea to solution, helping your business to match the pace and agility that today’s landscape requires. In this article, we’ll explore how you can use AppSheet to create custom solutions that will help your business adapt to shifting business needs. To illustrate, we’ll focus on a use case many businesses face: reservation and management of meeting rooms and other office resources, but this process can easily be adapted for a wide variety of use cases, from apps for retail pickup to incident reporting and more. 

Simplify and centralize with apps

The first thing to consider is whether your solution would be best managed via a custom interface. If you’re trying to simplify a process for someone, such as inspections or inventory tracking, or centralize information, such as resource portals or events calendars, creating a custom app is the way to go.

For this example app, we created a simple Google Sheet to hold our backend data. Sheets are ideal backend data sources when we know the amount of data will not grow exponentially, especially when piloting to a first office or group of users. We can switch our data seamlessly at any time to a scalable Google Cloud SQL database or other database if needed.

The example app has several worksheets to manage the different buildings, rooms, checkpoints and people (including their roles).

We can build an app in AppSheet directly from our Sheet by selecting Tools > AppSheet > Create an App. 

After creating our app, we see an overview of the data that we’ve connected, how pieces of data relate to each other, the views that are presented to the user, and a live interactive preview of the app. Refining the app is intuitive. When you input keywords, for instance, AppSheet surfaces appropriate functionality options that can be further customized. If we have address or location data, it’s automatically turned into a map view that we can further customize.

Our office management app will offer building managers and cleaners administrative features for managing equipment, disinfection schedules, and maintenance information, and it will also offer views for employees to check occupancy and safely reserve desks and equipment.

Opening an office and then a room in the app gives us an overview of both the floorplan and the occupancy and reservations for spaces and equipment in the room.

Users can then reserve spaces and equipment in the app, without having to first search for a form or page in the intranet, or even log onto their work computer. The reservation is an automation routine in AppSheet, which performs pre-configured actions when triggered.

As illustrated in the screenshot above, when the action is triggered either by pressing a button in the app, scanning a QR code, or tapping an RFC tag, the action simply sets the “Reserved by” and “Reserved at” columns to the current user and timestamp.

Streamline with automations

AppSheet Automation, which was recently made generally available, makes it possible to reduce repetitive tasks and streamline processes even further.

In this example, one challenge you may encounter is that users often forget to release a desk or resource when they’re finished, which means those reservations stay blocked until an administrator releases all blocked reservations. However, it’s also important that resources aren’t immediately released, as they first need to be cleaned and disinfected before being made available to new users.

AppSheet Automation can solve this challenge by periodically checking all resources that have been reserved for longer than four hours, then alerting the user to either re-reserve them or release them to be cleaned. If there is no answer, the automation can trigger the resources to be cleaned, then released.

We can configure this as a recurring event, and create a bot that sends the notifications and triggers actions based on the user input (or lack of input).

Optimize for multiple roles

Creating an app for one user is one thing–creating an app that fits the needs of multiple types of users is another. AppSheet has you covered for this kind of complexity because it lets you build multiple roles into a single app. 

In our office management app, for example, the office manager can have a particular view and dashboard, and workers in the office can have their own views and functionalities front and center. This makes it possible to automate tasks for all types of users with a single app. 

Likewise, AppSheet Automation lets you easily react to real-time changes in data, send notifications to groups of users, and initiate additional workflows using data shared between the app and the users. If a group needs to reserve a conference space for an important late-breaking meeting, for example, there might be ripple effects across a number of user groups. The ability to automate all these updates and interactions can ultimately save a lot of time and effort. 

AppSheet also supports advanced features such as QR codes, NFC, and bluetooth sensor integration. This could help users check into locations or workspaces, further streamlining the task of helping people safely navigate and collaborate within the office.

Mission critical solutions, faster than ever

In the past, the type of app explored in this article would have required a central data store, distribution to specific groups of users, management and dashboard capabilities, as well as smartphone sensor integration for NFC and image capturing. This would have necessitated a mammoth implementation project and a team of professional coders.  

But with no-code, you can effectively design and implement these requirements in hours and days rather than months and years. Changes can be made on the fly in any browser, including pushing out new versions to users. Though AppSheet opens up app building and digital automations to any knowledge worker, it also includes robust security and governance controls, ensuring that as you manage getting employees back into office, you don’t neglect IT security. 

Try out your own back-to-the-office app for free today at AppSheet.com, or explore and copy our sample app.