How Mailjet Sends 1.5 billion Emails a Month with Google Cloud
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Mailjet allows companies to create, send, and track millions of emails to their customers and prospects around the world each month. The company’s offerings range from routing these emails to tailor-made tools that allow clients to design and send marketing campaigns with messages related to sales, user clubs, coupons and discounts, and promotions, as well as transactional emails such as purchase confirmations, shipping confirmations, e-tickets, or password resets.
“All of our services are accessible through programming interfaces. We use the same APIs for ourselves and for our customers. This is part of our unique selling point, which is to make life easier for developers and marketers,” explains François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager at Mailjet.
Google Cloud Results
- Provides development, testing, and distribution infrastructure for Mailjet
- Smoothly absorbs up to 20X normal computing power
- Offers technical and economic flexibility on a pay-per-use basis, depending on the computing power consumed
The company scrupulously monitors its service quality to help ensure that emails sent on behalf of its customers don’t trigger spam filters, and that they obtain the best possible open and click rates.
From hosting to the cloud
In its early years, Mailjet used hosted servers. This model had several disadvantages. It was impossible to instantly activate or deactivate computing power; the company could not be charged for actual, to-the-minute usage; and it lacked the flexibility to add disk space or scale servers in real time.
At the beginning of 2016, Mailjet decided to switch to the public cloud in order to improve technical and economic flexibility. “This two-year evolution required us to review our developments. If we use a virtual machine even for just one hour, our computer code must be able to support it in order to preserve the consistency and integrity of the data and processes,” says Fanuel.
“We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Google Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor.”
—François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager, Mailjet
Mailjet and Google were already partners. The marketing and transactional email specialist is one of only three providers in the world, and the only one in Europe, accredited by Google to send bulk emails through Google Cloud Platform. The choice—based on three main factors—was obvious.
Financial and technical considerations
Factor 1: the right price proportionality. “We are able to activate Google Compute Engine virtual machines on demand, without needing to reserve these instances. While the machine remains active, a sliding-scale price is applied, which is particularly attractive to us,” explains Fanuel.
Factor 2: the quality and level of technical communication. Mailjet has direct access to Google Cloud Platform engineers when required. The company has its own IP addressing infrastructure, which is the foundation of its service quality. “We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Google Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor.” Since then, via specific tunnels, Mailjet IP addresses have been ported directly into Google Compute Engine.
Factor 3: conformity to international data regulations. Mailjet is the only email service provider to be ISO 27001 certified and GDPR-ready, enabling the company to offer its clients the highest level of data security and privacy. Google Cloud Platform is also ISO 27001 certified, which was an important factor for Mailjet.
Power through minimalism
In mid-2016, Mailjet replaced its 30 or so email sending servers installed at a hosting company with smaller Google Compute Engine virtual machines, using the automatic load-balancing function. “Using smaller virtual machines—but more of them—optimized our computing power.” This precision mechanism accompanied an increase in activity for the company, with the number of emails sent doubling every year. As for the company’s some 300 TB of data, this is stored in Google Cloud Storage.
The flexibility and power of Google Cloud Platform helps ensure that Mailjet can adapt to peaks in activity that can reach up to 20 times the normal flow—our customers usually send their messages at the same times and during the same peak periods. “Previously, we had to reserve a lot of computing power with our hosting company, equivalent to 150 servers. Moving to an on-demand infrastructure means we can avoid paying a disproportionate fixed annual cost.”
Google Cloud Platform also provides Mailjet with the infrastructure needed to process events centrally, which facilitates technical support. A new analytics dashboard in the making will provide customers access to their campaigns’ key metrics in real time—a circulation report, open rates, and click-through rates, as well as invalid email addresses— regardless of the volume of emails at stake.
From distribution to development
Following routing operations, the development environment is currently being ported to Google Cloud Platform, and will eventually represent 100 virtual servers. “The addition of any new code is iteratively tested in Google Cloud Platform. We benefit from machines that are custom made for our needs, from machines with one core and 3 gigabytes of memory, up to machines with 64 cores.”
Mailjet uses the Google Cloud Interconnect virtual private network to tailor sending flows by geographical location. “For customers who only use our routing service, we will soon have worldwide load balancers. This will help ensure their API requests are received and their emails are sent to Europe and America from one single IP point, thus avoiding transatlantic latency issues.”
Mailjet also uses the Google Identity Aware Proxy authentication tool. All its employees around the world benefit from unique, more secure access, whether they use Google Sites intranets, or the development, or production environment. “Google Cloud Platform delivers on all the promises of a public cloud: service customization, real-time computing power adjustment during periods of high and low demand, and instant activation of computing resources. For us, it’s the best possible ratio between price, performance, availability, and quality,” concludes Fanuel.
Autonom8: Achieving growth and profits for businesses with Google Cloud
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With Google Cloud, Autonom8 can run a platform that accelerates and streamlines customer journeys in a scalable, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure, while using advanced optical character recognition to enable intelligent document processing.
About Autonom8
Headquartered in the United States and India, Autonom8 has built a low-code SaaS platform that allows businesses to digitize customer-facing workflows. The business aims to help clients reduce costs and improve interactions with their customers through automation and enablement of customer journeys.
Google Cloud results:
- Increased margins by up to 30% by switching from a home-grown OCR system to Cloud Vision AI
- Enables one DevOps team member to manage up to 30 customers
- Provides real-time information about customer journeys to enable businesses to respond quickly and accurately
- Ensures use of its platform with containerization in customers’ private data centers
- Reduced operating costs by up to 20% with localized scalability and architecture through GKE
Just as cars are evolving to become autonomous, smart and self-driving, enterprises can gain self-awareness, an ability to learn and an ability to adapt. This is the value proposition put forward by Autonom8, an India- and United States-based enterprise workflow management software business. “We provide a low-code, high-intelligence customer journey automation SaaS platform,” explains Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8.
The Autonom8 platform includes components, such as A8Studio, a drag and drop location from which clients can create customer journeys, a chat platform that enables clients to create chatbots, and an analytics module. “With our platform and services, businesses can reduce costs and improve interactions with their customers by applying automation to accelerate and provide better customer journeys,” adds Padmanabhan.
Demand for Autonom8 is being driven by the changing customer demands of enterprises, including the expectation to interact with them over multiple channels, and the rising cost of building software with experienced developers. These trends place enterprises under growing pressure to increase the productivity of the people they do have, particularly those who are less technically inclined. In addition, changing consumer habits, regulations and the emergence of new technologies mean customer journeys cannot remain static and need to evolve.
Developing a microservices-based SaaS platform
From the start, Autonom8 planned to deliver a SaaS platform and initially deployed on a multinational cloud service, chosen due to the team’s familiarity with its products and the availability of credits. However, the company’s decision to opt for a microservices architecture that enables individual services to scale independently while running in a containerized environment, demanded high-quality container orchestration. To optimize cost, scalability and performance, Autonom8 began evaluating Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
The business then completed a side-by-side comparison between Google Cloud and its incumbent provider of compute, storage and other services. Google Cloud fared favorably, with Vision AI in particular providing powerful machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, supporting a key use case for Autonom8.
In addition, many of Autonom8’s clients at the time are financial institutions in India, and legally required to retain data within the country’s borders. Google Cloud’s global network and local presence means the business could fulfill this requirement easily.
“We decided to evaluate Google Cloud, particularly GKE, from two perspectives. One, from a security perspective, as we sell to banks that audit our platform, and two, as a failover between regions because downtime costs money. We found it a compelling solution.”
— Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8
A seamless move to Google Cloud
Autonom8 began deploying on Google Cloud in 2018, with its architecture comprising storage, compute, serverless, container management and orchestration, and Vision AI. “We looked at our scripting with the previous provider, and using the Google Cloud documentation available online, educated ourselves over a few weeks before moving pieces of our architecture step by step to Google Cloud,” says Padmanabhan. “We did not run into any major issues. It was pretty simple, with our experienced engineers training others in the product.”
According to the CTO, the business had two options when moving to Google Cloud. Autonom8 could either install raw virtual machines and effectively create its own virtualized data center, or rely on managed services for functions such as memory store, registration and authentication to save time and resources over the long term. Autonom8 opted for the latter and has transitioned fully to Google Cloud, with the number of cloud products and services in its architecture rising from five to about 15. While each product and service performs a key role in the delivery of Autonom8’s products and services, Padmanabhan nominates GKE, Vision AI and Cloud SQL as providing the greatest value to the business.
Scalability, real-time monitoring and intelligent document processing at low cost
With GKE, the business can now scale the nodes or containers specific to each microservice in the event traffic to a particular client surges, due to a rebate or promotion. “Through the combination of the architecture and localized scalability we achieve with GKE, we are reducing our operating costs by up to 20%,” says Padmanabhan.
Running an open source TimescaleDB on Postgres in Cloud SQL enables Autonom8 to give its clients the ability to monitor customer journey information in real time. An example of a journey is applying for a bank loan. The customer must take steps including providing income, tax and other financial details that the bank then appraises to help make a decision on the application. “The moment someone applies for a loan, for example, a bank knows about it and can monitor for fraud, bottlenecks, or other abnormalities, and immediately route to a remediation workflow,” explains Padmanabhan. “Cloud SQL enables us to maintain transactional logging and provide real-time data to our dashboards.”
After evaluating alternative services, including developing a home-grown OCR engine, the business turned to Cloud Vision AI to manage the intelligent document processing that comprises much of its transactional volume. “Vision AI is significantly better than the alternatives and the cost of maintaining our version did not make sense, because Google Cloud continues to make improvements over time that enable us to deliver more and more accurate results to our customers,” says Padmanabhan. “Switching from our home-grown service to Vision AI has enabled us to increase our profit margins by up to 30%.”
“Through the combination of the architecture and localized scalability we achieve with Google Kubernetes Engine, we are reducing our operating costs by up to 20%.”
—Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8
Supporting client demands and improving developer efficiency
Google Cloud also enables Autonom8 to meet the demands of businesses that want to run its platform within their own private data centers. “We can undertake the build within Google Cloud and ship our containers to compatible hosts within those clients’ data centers,” explains Padmanabhan. “With our previous provider, we could create containers, but these would not run properly within those data centers.”
Furthermore, Google Cloud documentation and online resources help Autonom8 reduce the training needed for new developers to become productive, with the Google Cloud learning curve taking up just 10% of the overall onboarding cycle.
The organization spends the equivalent of just 3% of its overall annual revenue on DevOps, measured as DevOps Utility Ratio, while the cloud cost of revenue is about USD 1 for every USD 6 in annual recurring revenue, measured as Cloud Utility Ratio. “These two metrics are about what we can do with the people we have,” explains Padmanabhan. “Our current ratio implies that one DevOps person can handle approximately 30 customers. This is made possible by the tools we have, and the comprehensive support from Google Cloud in terms of security patches, intelligent alerts, resource overloading, and more.”
Google Cloud also provides the flexibility for Autonom8 to accommodate the varying service levels required by individual customers based on factors, such as the impact of downtime, as the business can failover seamlessly between regions to mitigate the impact of any issues that may occur.
“Our current ratio implies that one DevOps person can handle approximately 30 customers. This is made possible by the tools we have, and the comprehensive support from Google Cloud in terms of security patches, intelligent alerts, resource overloading, and more.”
—Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8
Integrating Google Workspace with Autonom8 to deliver new capabilities
Autonom8 relies on Google Workspace for communication, collaboration and other workplace productivity requirements, growing its footprint from Gmail when the employee population was four or five, to a range of products including Sheets and Drive as the business grew. “It became natural to use the capabilities in Google Workspace as we matured,” says Padmanabhan. “One of the most interesting capabilities was our ability to integrate Google Workspace into our platform. For example, when someone is running a workflow, they can add data from a Sheet. We’ve added Google Workspace authentication capabilities into our products as well.”
“Everyone is using shared links to Drive and I really like the granular permissions structure,” he adds. “I can open up folders to clients while keeping an internal space within the business to ensure security and privacy.”
With Google Cloud, Autonom8 is now poised to continue growing its business and adding new features and capabilities for clients. “We are extremely excited at the opportunity to step up our offering to clients with Google Cloud,” concludes Padmanabhan.
Why Indian Enterprises Need to Embrace The Cloud-First Imperative to Accelerate Digital Transformation
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Digital transformation is rewriting the rules of business both in India and worldwide. Digital customer experiences deliver easy, effective, and emotional touchpoints that focus operations on what the customers value. Around half of Indian decision makers prioritize the improvement of CX and the simplification of operations, as top priorities in their business agenda, according to a Forrester Consulting study of 360 business and technology decision makers of Indian enterprises.
According to the study, forward-thinking enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud to support their business as they attempt to keep pace with evolving customer needs. As a result, cloud has become a strategic priority, and ensuring its support in the marketplace will only enable digital business and accelerate innovation.
The study reveals that:
- Public cloud is a key enabler for the transformation of digital business.
- Security, inconsistent monitoring tools, and legacy applications are top barriers to public cloud expansion.
- Enterprises are expanding their adoption of the public cloud and want to gain a competitive edge.
Download this study to understand why more and more organizations are moving applications to the cloud in order to take advantage of scalability, lower capital costs, ease of operations, and the resilience offered by the public cloud.
Google Cloud’s 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects
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Many people are visual learners; I am definitely one of them, and judging by the tremendous response you all showed to Google Cloud Sketchnotes on LinkedIn and Twitter, you are too.
-Priyanka Vergadia, Lead Developer Advocate, Google
“A picture is worth a thousand words”
Shortly after I started creating and sharing visual explanations of Google Cloud concepts in late 2020, I began receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from fellow cloud architects and enthusiasts. That feedback led me to think about pulling these sketches together into a reference guide — a one-stop shop for cloud learning fun. So here it is!
🥁 Introducing “Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects”
🤔 What is this book about?
This book is my way of making Google Cloud technical concepts fun and interesting via visual storytelling. It covers Google Cloud essentials from end to end, with a visual explanation of each concept, how it works, and how you can apply it with other concepts to meet the needs of your real-world use case. After reading thousands of pages of Google Cloud documentation and experimenting with virtually every Google Cloud product, I distilled that experience down to this book of accessible, bite-sized visuals.
The sketches are spread across five broad categories:
- Infrastructure, storage, and databases: Run and scale applications seamlessly
- Data analytics and machine learning: Derive actionable insights from data
- Networking: Connect, scale, secure, modernize, and optimize your infrastructure
- Application development and modernization: Build apps using containers and microservices
- Security: Protect data, users, and applications in cloud
🙋♀️ Who is this book for?
It is for all cloud enthusiasts. It is for anyone who is planning a cloud migration or new cloud deployment, preparing for cloud certification, or looking to make the most of Google Cloud. If you are a cloud solutions architect, an IT decision-maker, or a data and machine learning engineer, you will find this book a good starting point. In short, this book is for YOU!
When you get the book you’ll not only help yourself, you’ll also help provide meals for schoolchildren who need them. All the books’ proceeds go directly to the awesome folks at Wiley and a charity that fights malnutrition and supports the right to education.
🪜 Next Steps
I hope this book helps you on your Google Cloud journey by making it both easier and more fun. Are you ready to dive in? Order here, learn more about how the idea of the book came about here and please share your thoughts with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
AI-powered Business Messages for Timely, Engaging and Helpful Conversations with Customers
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Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior.
- 45% of users are spending more time on messaging services because of the pandemic
- 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly
With the rise in demand for messaging, consumers expect communication with businesses to be speedy, simple, and convenient. For businesses, keeping up with customer inquiries can be a labor-intensive process, and offering 24/7 support outside of store hours can be costly.
To help businesses seamlessly deliver helpful, timely, and engaging conversations with customers when and where they need help, we introduced AI-powered Business Messages.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcgP3RHjBLY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
What is AI-powered Business Messages?
With AI-powered Business Messages, you can connect with your customers in their moment of need, in the places they’re looking for answers—such as Google Search, Google Maps, or any brand-owned channel. For instance, check out how Walmart customers in the US are able to receive real-time information on product availability, straight from a search results page.
People turn to Google when they are searching for answers to their questions, looking to buy something, or trying to accomplish a particular task with one of our many tools. In fact, 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.
At Google, we know how important it is for interactions with a brand to be personalized, helpful, and simple. With AI-powered Business Messages, customers are able to chat with virtual agents that understand, interact, and respond in natural ways.
We are also combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when it’s really needed. This approach saves your customers precious time, while also saving you money. And with Business Messages automatically handling many customer inquiries in the background, businesses have the option to distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs.
Getting started with conversational AI is easy with Bot-in-a-Box
We know it can be difficult to get started with AI. That’s why we are utilizing existing Google AI tools like Dialogflow—part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI—to create the capability within Google’s Business Messages called Bot-in-a-Box, which makes getting started with Conversational AI easy. Bot-in-a-Box allows for fast and effective adoption of automation for businesses of all sizes.
Enabling Business Messages with Bot-in-a-Box can be as simple as leveraging an existing customer FAQ document you already have, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document. And since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialogflow working together, your chat bot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code.
Bot-in-a-Box also supports other critical journeys like “Custom Intents.” That means that your bot is able to understand the different ways customers express a similar question and respond accurately by using machine learning capabilities.
Finding success
In April 2021, Wake County courthouses in North Carolina partnered with Tango Technology to implement Business Messages when it became apparent that being able to provide the public and attorneys with around-the-clock access to information would significantly reduce the pressure on courthouse staff. Using Bot-in-a-Box, Tango Technology was able to customize a solution for Wake County Courthouse, Justice Center, and Clerk of Superior Court in just four days.
“With the combination of Google’s Business Messages, GCP, and Dialogflow, we were able to spin up an AI-driven bot for the courts in days. And the technology stack allows us to continually improve by adding functionality in an agile process.”— Mike Lotz, Co-Founder, Tango Technology
With Business Messages, North Carolina courthouses saw a 37% decrease in the call volume handled by courthouse staff. With 398,298 fewer phone calls during the first year of operation, the AI-based messages helped Wake County Courthouse work more efficiently and productively.
We’ve seen many brands benefiting from AI-powered Business Messages. For instance, Levi’s saw a 30% increase in off-hours shoppers and surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores after implementing Business Messages. They also drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s website chat.
Bring Google’s conversational AI to your storefront with Business Messages
Google’s Business Messages makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to engage their existing or potential customers in a virtual conversation, when and where they need it.
To learn more, watch our Cloud Next session here or visit us at g.co/businessmessages. We have specialized services to help you get started and can share the wisdom of our channel partners and dedicated experts who specialize in unleashing the potential of conversational AI.
Go Green with Google’s Latest Tool and Pick the Most Sustainable Cloud Region
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As a Google Cloud customer, your carbon footprint is already carbon neutral: Google first achieved carbon neutrality in 2007, and has been purchasing enough solar and wind energy to match 100% of its global electricity consumption since 2017. Now, Google is targeting a new sustainability goal: operating on carbon-free energy (CFE) 24/7, everywhere, by 2030.
We want to empower you to make more sustainable decisions and progress with us towards this 24/7 carbon-free future. Earlier this year, we published the carbon characteristics of our Google Cloud regions. Later, we introduced a simple tool to help you pick a Google Cloud region, taking variables like price, latency and sustainability into account. Our next question was: what’s the best way to surface that sustainability info when you’re actually picking a region for your cloud resources?
Starting today, we are indicating regions with the lowest carbon impact inside Cloud Console location selectors. Available today for Cloud Run and Datastream, you’ll see it roll out to more Google Cloud offerings over time:
Regions that feature the “Lowest CO2” and the leaf have a CFE% of at least 75%, or, if the information is not available for this region yet, a grid carbon intensity of maximum 200 gCO2eq/kWh. You can read more about how we calculate these metrics in our documentation.
Before releasing this feature, we ran experiments to measure its impact: Users who were exposed to the enhanced region picker were 19% more likely to select a “low carbon” region for their Cloud Run service—a significant lift. These results show that by displaying carbon information in context of when you make the decision of picking a region, we are helping you make more sustainable decisions.
By sharing and displaying carbon information of Google Cloud regions, together we’re making tangible progress towards our goal of a carbon-free future. Learn more about Carbon free energy for Google Cloud regions.
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