We introduced the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability designation earlier this year to showcase those partners committed to help global businesses and governments accelerate their sustainability programs. These partners build solutions that enhance the capabilities and ease the adoption of powerful Google Cloud technologies, such as Google Earth Engine and BigQuery, allowing customers to leverage data-rich solutions that help reduce their carbon footprints.

Today, we’re pleased to announce growth of the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program, with 12 new partners joining the initiative and bringing their climate, ESG, and sustainability platforms to Google Cloud. These partners include:

Aclima is pioneering an entirely new way to diagnose the health of our air and track climate-changing pollution. Powered by its network of roving and stationary sensors, Aclima measures air pollution and greenhouse gasses at unprecedented scales and with block-by-block resolution.

Sustainability at Airbus means uniting and safeguarding the world in a safe, ethical, and socially and environmentally responsible way. Airbus has a comprehensive sustainability strategy built on four core commitments, which guide the company’s approach to the way it does business and how it designs its products and services: Lead the journey toward clean aerospace, respect human rights and foster inclusion, build the business on the foundation of safety and quality, and exemplify business integrity.

Atlas AI is a predictive analytics platform that analyzes, monitors, and forecasts regions of growth, vulnerability, and opportunity around the world to offer insight into where organizations can grow most successfully, and where investment can boost historically underserved communities. Atlas AI’s platform has been used to expand water and sanitation infrastructure, promote new electrification, target community health services, and broaden internet access in countries across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

BlueSky Resources makes sense of sensors from both public and private sources by harmonizing inputs from ground, aerial and space based inputs. Expertise in atmospheric science and cloud technology allows BlueSky to provide understanding and insights related to the correlation of emissions insights to assets and activities. This powerful combination of data, climate science and delivery of insights is enabling focused sustainability impact across clients in various industries including energy, waste management, industry and natural resource management.

Electricity Maps provides companies with actionable data quantifying the carbon intensity and origin of electricity. This data is available on an hourly basis across 50+ countries and more than 160 regions. Electricity Maps’ mission is to organize the world’s electricity data to drive the transition toward a truly decarbonized electricity system.

FlexiDAO is a global climate tech company based in the Netherlands and Spain. The company works closely with other critical stakeholders to co-create the international standard around energy-related emissions compliance. Thanks to FlexiDAO’s end-to-end 24/7 Carbon-free Energy platform, companies can quantify and confidently showcase their contribution to society’s decarbonization.

LevelTen Energy helps organizations achieve carbon-free energy usage targets (on an annual and 24/7 basis) by delivering access to the world’s largest clean energy marketplace, and the software, data, analytics, and expertise required for efficient transactions. The LevelTen Platform connects energy buyers and over 40 sustainability advisors with more than 1,800 carbon-free energy projects in 24 countries across North America and Europe.

Ren is a SaaS platform built on Google Cloud that enables companies with global supply chains to source the cleanest energy possible. Despite using country-sized amounts of energy, most companies have no idea how to transition to renewables due to complex financial, technical, and logistical challenges. Ren unlocks cost savings, provides the cleanest energy possible, and ensures companies meet their carbon commitments on time.

Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation unit in Google, builds products to radically improve quality of life in cities for all. Delve is a product that helps real estate teams design more sustainable buildings and neighborhood blocks, faster. Mesa automates building controls to deliver savings and comfort to commercial building owners and tenants. With these products and others, Sidewalk Labs helps commercial real estate developers, building owners and city planners make more sustainable choices for the built environment that are better for communities and the planet.

Tomorrow.io is The World’s Weather and Climate Security Platform, helping countries, businesses, and individuals manage their weather and climate security challenges. The platform is fully customizable to any industry impacted by the weather. Customers around the world use Tomorrow.io to dramatically improve operational efficiency. Tomorrow.io was built from the ground up to help teams prepare for the business impact of weather by automating decision-making and enabling climate adaptation at scale.

UP42 is a geospatial developer platform and marketplace bringing together industry-leading data and ready-to-use processing algorithms. The platform enables organizations to build, run, and scale geospatial products. With the ability to choose from a wide range of high-resolution commercial and open satellite data, aerial, weather, and others, solution providers can apply best-in-class machine learning and/or processing modules to gain valuable geospatial insights and streamline their processes.

Woza is a sustainable innovation platform that leverages deep geospatial knowledge and existing best-in-class technologies to develop a new generation of streamlined analytics workflows focused on sustainability. Companies in agri-food, energy, and public sector are partnering with Woza to accelerate their journey to Industry 4.0.

Adding expertise to accelerate sustainability use cases

New partners in the initiative join our existing Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability partners like Carto, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet Labs PBC bringing a wealth of industry knowledge, offering solutions for sustainability challenges ranging from first-mile sustainable sourcing and spatial finance to fleet electrification and rich geospatial visualizations.

CARTO is the world’s leading Location Intelligence platform, enabling organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioral marketing, strategic store placements, and much more. The company’s solutions extend the geospatial capabilities available in BigQuery, while leveraging the near limitless scalability that Google Cloud provides. When it comes to sustainability, CARTO’s platform is trusted by a wide range of organizations, including Greenpeace, Vizzuality, Litterati, Indigo, WWF, the Marine Conservation Institute, The World Bank, and the Institute for Sustainable Cities.

Climate Engine leverages data from Google Earth Engine and other ecosystem partners to help organizations improve their climate change-related risk planning in areas such as water use, agriculture, storm risk, and wildfire spread. By linking the economy and the environment, organizations can understand how environmental risks are affecting their markets and discover opportunities to reduce their emissions and potential supply chain or operational disruptions from climate-related events.

Geotab is advancing security, connecting commercial vehicles to the cloud, and providing data-driven analytics to help customers better manage their fleets. Processing billions of data points daily, Geotab helps businesses improve and optimize fleet productivity, enhance safety, and achieve sustainability goals and stronger compliance.

Geospatial solutions provider NGIS built a SaaS-based first-mile sustainable sourcing solution called TraceMark using Google Cloud’s geospatial platform and technologies from other ecosystem partners. Several global CPG firms have already used TraceMark to modernize their geospatial workflows and help facilitate the use of space-based data for supply chain sustainability transformation.

Planet Labs PBC operates the largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites in history, with approximately 200 satellites in orbit. Planet’s mission is to image the whole earth’s landmass every day to make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. As a Public Benefit Corporation, Planet’s Public Benefit Purpose is to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change.

How the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program works

If you are a Google Cloud partner with sustainability solutions and expertise to share, the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program is open for applications. Entry into the program requires that the partner solution delivers quantifiable results for climate mitigation, adaptation, or reporting needs. To apply for the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability designation, the solution must:

• Be available on Google Cloud
• Address ESG risk, and assist customers in achieving ESG targets and/or support typical ESG goal frameworks, such as the United Nations’ SDGs
• Demonstrate repeatability
• Meet minimum Google Cloud application development best practices, including security, performance, scalability, availability, and carbon footprint reporting for available services
• Have Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Reporting enabled
• Have at least one public customer case study available.

The selection process begins with an evaluation of the solution. If a partner meets the above criteria, Google Cloud provides a suggested roadmap for tier progression within the program and then issues a formal acknowledgement of participation in the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program. Together, Google Cloud sustainability partners can deliver platforms that are helping businesses and governments accelerate progress aligned to their environmental goals.

Google Cloud will showcase the validated solutions on the Google Cloud Partner Directory Listing, Google Cloud Ready Sustainability Partner Advantage page, and — if applicable — via the Google Cloud Marketplace. We hope to help customers better understand how these technologies can help them meet their ESG goals, find the right solution for their particular challenge, and implement a solution faster.

Prospective partners can visit the Partner Portal to learn more about the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability program or complete an application.

Editor’s note: PedidosYa is the market leader for online food ordering in Latin America, serving 15 markets and over 400 cities. It’s also one of the largest brands within the German multinational company Delivery Hero SE. With over 20 million app downloads, PedidosYa provides the best online delivery experience through 71,000+ online partners, including restaurants, shops, drugstores, and specialized markets. 

Having constant access to fresh customer data is a key requirement for PedidosYa to improve and innovate our customer’s experience. Our internal stakeholders also require faster insights to drive agile business decisions. Back in early 2020, PedidosYa’s leadership tasked the data team to make the impossible possible. Our team’s mission was to democratize data by providing universal and secure access while creating a comprehensive information ecosystem across PedidosYa. We also had to achieve this goal while keeping costs under control— even during the migration stage and removing operational bottlenecks. 

Challenges with legacy cloud infrastructure

PedidosYa first built its data platform on top of AWS. Our data warehouse ran on Redshift, and our data lake was in S3. We used Presto and Hue as the user interfaces for our data analysts. However, maintaining this infrastructure was a daunting task. Our legacy platform couldn’t keep up with the increasing analytics demands. For example, the data stored on S3 complemented by Presto/Hue required high operational overhead. This was because Presto and our IAM (identity access management) didn’t integrate well in our legacy ecosystem. Managing individual users and mapping IAM roles with groups and Kerberos was operationally time-consuming and costly. Further, sharding access on the S3 files was far too complicated to enable seamless ACLs (access control lists).  

There were also challenges with workload management. Our data warehouse had batch data loaded overnight. If one analyst scheduled a query to run during the overnight ETL (extract, transform, load) workload, it would disrupt the current ETL task. This could stop the entire data pipeline. We’d have to wait until data engineers intervened with a manual fix.

It was also difficult to understand whether a query error was due to performance issues or platform resource exhaustion. This lack of clarity affected our data analysts’ ability to autonomously improve querying efficiency. Data team members needed to manually inspect personal queries looking for performance issues. Also,  the current architecture was prone to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation; it was seen as an unlimited and free resource. As a result, it was impossible to disentangle the infrastructure from different stakeholder teams, as all had very different needs. 

The decision to modernize our data warehouse

Given the growing challenges from our legacy platform, our tech team decided to transform our analytics environment with a modern data warehouse. They required the following key criteria from their next data platform: 

• Scalability – The ability to grow with elastic infrastructure.
• Cost control – Cost management and transparency. These factors promote efficiency and ownership—both key aspects of data democratization.
• Metadata management – Intuitive data platform focusing on users’ previous SQL knowledge. Plus, being able to enrich the informational ecosystem with metadata,  to diminish data gatekeepers.
• Ease of management – The team needed to reduce operational costs with a serverless solution. Data engineers wanted to focus on their key roles rather than acting as database administrators and infrastructure engineers. The team also wanted much higher availability, and to reduce the impact of maintenance windows and vacuum/analysis.
• Data governance and access rights – With a growing employee base with varying data access requirements, the team needed a simple yet comprehensive solution to understand and track user access to data.

Migrating to Google Cloud

After exploring other alternatives, we concluded Google Cloud had an answer to each of our decision drivers. Google Cloud’s serverless, managed, and integrated data platform, coupled with its seamless integration across open-source solutions, was the perfect answer for our organization. In particular, the natural integration with Airflow as a job orchestrator and Kubernetes for flexible on-demand infrastructure was key.  

We  used Dataflow together with Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions for our data ingestion requirements, which has made our deployment process with Terraform seamless. Because we set up everything in our environment programmatically, operation time has diminished. Google Cloud reduced the deployment process from about 16 hours in our legacy platform to 4 hours.  This is partly due to the friendliness of automating the deployment (such as schema check, load test, table creation, build.) process with Terraform, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and BigQuery on GCP. Input messages processed with Dataflow allow us to abstract and plan the schema changes according to the needs of the functional team. For example, schema changes raise an alarm, and then we can modify the raw layer table schema. By doing this, we ensure that backend modifications that we don’t control do not affect upper layers.

A key reason why we picked Google Cloud was because of its advanced cost and workload management coupled with its transparent log analytics. This information gives us a complete view into any query performance issues to make improvements on the fly. Further, we achieved a significant amount of cost savings by consolidating multiple tools to BigQuery.With BigQuery, we’ve been able to reduce our total cost per query by 5x.

This was due to a number of reasons:

• Automating pipeline deployment made it much simpler to maintain the data processing processes. 
• Analysts are conscious about what queries they’re running, resulting in running better, more optimized queries. 
• Analysts use a Data Studio dashboard to see their queries and all the associated costs. As a result, there’s a lot more transparency for each persona.

 With these changes, we can easily manage and assign costs associated with each workload with their own cost centers using specific Google Cloud projects.

Change management is always challenging. However, BigQuery is intuitive and doesn’t have a steep learning curve from Hue/Hive on SQL basics. BigQuery also allowed the team to expand its capabilities and enabled them to properly work with nested structures, avoiding unnecessary joins and improving query efficiency. Additionally, we now use Data Catalog as our unique point of truth for metadata management. This allows our team to break the data access barriers and enable federation of data across the organization. By using Airflow to orchestrate everything, we keep track of every data stream. With this information, each end user can see their regularly used data entities’ status via the dashboard. This also adds transparency to our everyday data processes.

Finally, with Google Cloud’s IAM rules applied across the different products, data sharing and access is close to a noOps experience. We have programmatically implemented access according to roles and level access within the company. This allows certain pre-validated roles to view more sensitive information. These solutions help drive a more automated data governance experience. 

Up next: Google Cloud AI/ML

The new stack based on BigQuery has created significant productivity gains. Freed from the burden of operational management, PedidosYa’s data team can now focus on adding value through data tools and products.  

• Our data engineers are better equipped to integrate constantly changing transactional and operational data.
• The dataOps team can automate the infrastructure and provide autonomy to the end user.
• Our data quality team can focus on bringing added value to data stakeholders. 
• Data scientists and data analytics can spend more time analyzing data and less time asking data gatekeepers for data access.

PedidosYa can now democratize data access with a well-governed architecture. We are still at the beginning of our journey, but we are closer to achieving our vision of building a data-driven organization. Up next: expanding our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

Tune in to Google Cloud’s Applied ML Summit on June 10th, 2021, or listen on-demand later, to learn how to apply groundbreaking machine learning technology in your projects.

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.