Whether they’re reading the newspaper on the way to work, or catching up on the latest headlines on their smartphones, readers expect up-to-the-minute news wherever and whenever makes the most sense for them. As a result, media companies are increasingly looking for ways to improve, expand, and simplify their offerings, and they’re increasingly looking to the cloud to do it.

For more than 160 years The Telegraph has been counted on by readers across the United Kingdom and globally for award-winning news and journalism. An early adopter of cloud technology, it’s been a G Suite customer since 2008 and has already been using Google Cloud Platform to analyze digital behaviors to improve engagement and advertising performance since 2016.

Recently, The Telegraph announced it’s migrating fully to Google Cloud. By migrating all their production and pre-production services, they aim to deliver content faster, provide compelling experiences to readers, and reduce environmental impact.

“We are delighted to announce our newest collaboration with Google Cloud,” said Chris Taylor, Chief Information Officer, The Telegraph. “We have always worked closely with Google as they help us to provide our readers with great experiences on our digital products, collaboration software and internet scale through search. Their continued leadership in projects such as Kubernetes are enabling us to build flexible development environments that truly support DevOps.”

Powering the Digital Publishing Ecosystem

The Telegraph produces large volumes of digital content every day. It was imperative for them to find a cloud provider they could trust to support this ecosystem. By working with Google Cloud they have changed the way they see and engage with data: they can collect new information about their products every second and use that to continually hone their strategy. The Telegraph are placing more confidence and trust in the data captured about their content and now have one of the best available pieces of technology for capturing and analyzing the stories they publish in real-time.

Leveraging AI to support journalists

Time is critical when journalists are on a story, and The Telegraph wants to put important data in the hands of its journalists right when they need it. To do this, it will be using AutoML to classify content for journalists and make it more discoverable. For example, a reporter will be able to bring up relevant assets that link to their stories. It will also apply AutoML to classify Telegraph stock photos to help journalists attach compelling visual content to their stories faster.

Building compelling reader experiences with the help of APIs

Readers have an ever-increasing expectation of personalization. To meet this need, The Telegraph launched My Telegraph, currently live in beta, to offer registered readers personalized news experiences based on their interests or the particular journalists they want to follow. My Telegraph was developed on an API management platform provided by Google Cloud’s Apigee. You can learn more about how it’s applying API management to My Telegraph, in this blog post.

Working for environmental good

The Telegraph is the biggest selling quality newspaper in the UK, an accolade which requires it to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Optimal management of print production is important, and by using a combination of the cloud and machine learning, The Telegraph is better able to predict demand for physical newspapers, maximizing sales and minimizing waste. This makes great business sense for The Telegraph but also has great environmental benefit.

Secret Manager is a Google Cloud service that provides a secure and convenient way to store API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. It is the central place and single source of truth to manage, access, and audit secrets across Google Cloud. Since its launch, Secret Manager has helped secure millions of workloads and continues to provide industry-first features like replication policies and support for VPC perimeters. This blog post explores new Secret Manager capabilities and integrations that will help keep your secrets safer.

New tier, free of charge

No, you’re not dreaming – Secret Manager now has a tier that is free of charge! With this tier, each month per billing account you can have up to:

• 6 secret versions
• 3 rotation events
• 10,000 API calls

This enables you to experience the value of Secret Manager with minimal financial risk and pairs nicely with existing services that offer a free tier like Cloud Run and Cloud Functions. For existing Secret Manager customers, this change will go into effect next billing cycle. Learn more about the Secret Manager free tier in the documentation.

Increased SLA

To meet the growing availability and reliability requirements of our customers, the Secret Manager SLA is now 99.95%! With this update, Secret Manager guarantees that all valid requests will succeed 99.95% of the time. This means you can depend on Secret Manager for even your most critical workloads. Additional details are available in the updated Secret Manager SLA.

Geo-expansion

In addition to the free tier and increased SLA, Secret Manager is now available in all public Google Cloud regions! With Secret Manager’s replication policies, you can choose the specific regions in which to replicate your secret, which means you can store secret payloads in geographical proximity to your workloads or users to reduce latency. This is also very useful if you have legal or regulatory requirements to store data in a particular locality. For more information, check out the list of Secret Manager locations in the documentation.

Compliance certifications

For customers wishing to use Secret Manager to store and process regulated data, Secret Manager is validated for compliance use cases including ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. Combined with the increased SLA and geographical availability, this makes Secret Manager suitable for use with regulated workloads.

Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK)

Secret Manager has always encrypted payloads in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256. For customers that want additional control over the keys used to encrypt their secret payloads, Secret Manager now supports Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK). Secret Manager CMEK supports software-backed keys via Cloud KMS, hardware-backed keys via Cloud HSM, and even externally-managed keys via Cloud EKM. Learn how to enable CMEK support for Secret Manager in our tutorial.

Expiration and TTLs

While it was previously possible to expire access to a secret using IAM conditions, the underlying secret would continue to exist. Secret Manager now supports auto-expiring secrets which permanently deletes a secret at a specified timestamp or TTL. Since it is also possible to update a secret’s TTL, services can “lease” a secret and renew their lease on a periodic basis. If the service does not extend the lease by updating the TTL, the secret is automatically deleted.

Expiring secrets can be used in combination with IAM conditions to more safely expire secrets. For more information on expiring secrets and safety measures, see the guide on creating and managing expiring secrets.

Etags and server-side filtering

For customers that create or manage Secret Manager secrets via the API or an SDK, concurrency controls and performance are extremely important. This is why Secret Manager now supports Etags and server-side filtering! Etags help prevent concurrent modifications to the same secret by providing optimistic concurrency controls, while server-side filtering can dramatically reduce payload size and client-side computational overhead. Together, these enable stronger consistency guarantees and performance improvements to your applications. Learn more about Secret Manager Etags and Secret Manager server-side filtering in the documentation.

Code, build, run, deploy, monitor, and orchestrate

Secrets – like API keys, passwords, and certificates – are an integral part of most modern software applications. It is crucial that developers, operators, and security teams are empowered to build, operate, and observe software securely. That is why Secret Manager is now integrated with popular tools and technologies used throughout the application development lifecycle:

• Code – Software engineers can create and access secrets directly from their preferred IDEs with Cloud Code. In VS Code, IntelliJ, or the Cloud Shell Editor, developers can browse secrets and insert code snippets for access secrets, all from the comfort of their local IDE.
• Build – Release engineers can access secrets as part of CI builds using the Cloud Build Secret Manager integration. This could be used, for example, to authenticate to a Docker registry or communicate with the GitHub API. For customers that use other CI systems, there is also a GitHub Action for accessing Secret Manager secrets.
• Run (on serverless) – Developers can mount secrets to be available as environment variables or via the filesystem through the native Cloud Run Secret Manager integration. Since the secrets are resolved in Cloud Run’s control plane, developers can use this integration to avoid a tight coupling between their applications and Secret Manager to enable hybrid cloud deployments or better local development experiences.
• Run (on Kubernetes) – Developers can mount secrets from GKE, Anthos, or any Kubernetes cluster using the Secret Manager CSI driver. This vendor-agnostic driver exposes secrets via environment variables or the filesystem and enables hybrid cloud deployments using the same interface as other public cloud providers and HashiCorp Vault.
• Deploy – To complement the existing Secret Manager Terraform integration, operators can now manage Secret Manager via Kubernetes Config Connector (KCC). KCC allows operators to manage Google Cloud resources through Kubernetes and the familiar Kubernetes APIs.
• Monitor – With the Secret Manager Cloud Asset Inventory (CAIS) integration, security teams can understand secret usage across specific projects, folders, or the entire organization.
• Orchestrate – Secret Manager Event Notifications enable DevOps and security teams to subscribe to Pub/Sub topics for when secrets or secret versions are changed. This enables customers to create deeply-integrated workflows, such as creating a ServiceNow ticket when a new secret version is added. Additionally, Secret Manager Rotation Scheduling enables DevOps teams to build automatic rotation flows like the ones described in the rotation guide.

Best practices

The Secret Manager best practices guide ensures customers get the maximum security benefits from Secret Manager. Security is non-binary, and this guide covers nuanced topics like access controls, coding practices, and secret administration. While not an exhaustive list, the Secret Manager best practices guide answers some of the most common questions and concerns around using Secret Manager in production deployments.

Towards seamless security

Secrets management is an important part of every organization’s security toolkit. With Secret Manager, you can easily manage, audit, and access secrets like API keys and credentials across Google Cloud, Anthos, and on-premises. These new features and integrations make it easy to adopt Secret Manager whether you are a hobbyist working on a side project or a large enterprise with thousands of employees.

To get started, check out the Secret Manager documentation.

Founded in 1930 and headquartered in Jordan, Arab Bank is one of the oldest banks in the Middle East. Operating out of 28 countries, we’ve earned our customers’ trust with a prudent approach to operations and respect for the cultures and customs in the region. 

With a few exceptions where cloud providers have hosted their datacenter in a Middle Eastern or North African country, the banking sector, in general, in the region has been slow to adopt cloud technology for a number of reasons, including concern about data security, maturity and security controls of cloud services (PaaS and SaaS), and regulations in place. But on the other hand, we saw the opportunity to accelerate our development and testing using the cloud, as well as to partner with the fintech community and digital service providers to integrate their solution in the banking ecosystem. We needed more flexibility to connect with the outside world, and a more open architecture to help us drive our internal innovation at a faster rate with the help of the fintech industry. By collaborating with Google Cloud, we reached those goals and accelerated app development and testing through products like Apigee and Anthos. We’re now offering innovative apps and services to our customers and employees that leverage new technological capabilities to give more agility and flexibility, and to optimize our workloads.

Embracing the cloud in a regulated industry 

To get started with the cloud, we needed to create internal awareness about cloud technology, the API layer, containers and their benefits amongst our leaders and staff. Google helped us educate and get buy-in from key functions by organizing open technology demonstration sessions and discussion panels. When considering potential cloud providers we had four decision criteria: maturity of security controls, ease of use, cost, and scalability / agility for new deployments and continuous innovation. This last factor was critical, and we were impressed by Google Cloud’s innovation roadmap, both via direct conversations and at Google’s Next conference, where we met a lot of people passionate about technology, innovation and building something new.  

Going back to our journey, given the above-mentioned regional limitations, we started to develop a hybrid cloud approach. This helped us continue to operate on-premises for a number of services in production, particularly those that have personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data attached, and to leverage the cloud for development, testing and production workloads that don’t contain customer data. 

In the short term, we didn’t anticipate that our many jurisdictions would allow data to be transported to other countries. But cloud tools will allow us to tokenize or anonymize customer data while maintaining customer data on-premises. This applies to many digital journeys such as customer onboarding, credit facility online applications, or marketplace navigation. In the coming years, we predict our API integration with partners will accelerate and enrich the overall digital value proposition of our business segments, namely consumer banking, small and medium-size businesses and large corporate and institutional clients. 

Building connections and cornerstones in the cloud

The first move in our digital transformation was to implement Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, to connect to the world’s digital banking ecosystem. Apigee provides the security, sharing, mediation policies, and developer portal capabilities for us to successfully meet Open Banking standards while focusing on innovation.  

On the back of the Apigee implementation, we created an accelerator program to incubate Fintech ideas that can, in turn, integrate into our digital platforms and be offered to our customers. We also developed various banking APIs, all designed and documented in accordance with PSD2 and Open Banking regulations, and made them available to our partners. These APIs exposed on our API development portal offer the needed code structure for fintech companies to design creative solutions around them.

Next, we adopted Anthos, Google Cloud’s managed application platform. Anthos has become a cornerstone of our operations because it works across hybrid cloud, offering integration of microservice containers and fueling collaborative opportunities with external parties. Our current Anthos infrastructure includes several hundreds of  microservices now running on containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and on-premises. We now use the cloud for collaboration, development and testing, but not for production, which is done on-premises. 

Along the way, Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) helped us through the entire cloud setup process, and with the adoption of Anthos. We originally built on the cloud tools through an iterative process, learning from our successes and errors along the way. Now that we have a better sense of how Anthos operates, we’re building a fresh infrastructure atop a sound, stable, and resilient foundation that will let us scale easily as we work to transform Arab Bank into a digital-first enterprise, that is our ambition. 

Currently products running on Anthos include customer acquisition and onboarding via mobile apps, and our Arabi-Pay app, which allows customers to instantly pay each other via WhatsApp or other messaging platforms. Leveraging Anthos, our instant loan service for Arab Bank salaried employees can grant and disburse loans up to $7,000 in less than seven minutes.

In addition, we’ve built a number of digital journeys for our Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) customers, such as our SME client digital onboarding process and paperless SME lending platform.

While some may think that digital adoption in this part of the world can be slow, as customer contact remains anchored in our customs, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital banking services and electronic payments, inspiring more confidence to buy and pay online. Thanks to our rich and user-friendly banking app that relies on Apigee and Anthos for critical customer journeys, over 90% of new-to-bank customers are using our mobile apps. Within the next 18 months, we predict that number will be closer to 100%. 

Of course, with higher customer adoption comes the challenge of potential service interruptions. A single moment of downtime can be highly visible to many digital customers. But Google Cloud’s Anthos and Apigee give us the flexibility to resume processes at a fast rate, so any interruptions are almost invisible to our customers. In fact, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, though our branches could be open only for limited hours each day, our consumer clients in particular were able to take advantage of our digital services in a very self-sufficient manner. Being well positioned with Google Cloud, we could also keep our internal teams and external partners connected and productive. Without Google Cloud, continuing the digital transformation of the bank at the pace we wanted would have been a big challenge. 

Collaborating across borders and time zones

With Google Cloud, our ability to collaborate and partner has transformed significantly. We operate 24/7 now because our developers are scattered across multiple geographies and different time zones. Because testing and deployment can run around the clock, including on weekends, we currently deploy a new digital journey in a few weeks, faster than ever before. This has given our organization a spirited mindset that prioritizes innovation, and raised the bar in terms of our operating model.  

Another consideration about Google Cloud tools is the elimination of inefficient processes typically seen in a software development lifecycle. We now build in a completely agile manner, from design squads until deployment in production. Compared to where we were two years ago, when we had an annual maximum of two systems releases in production, we now have close to monthly releases of our digital packages. In addition, we also  supplement those monthly releases with additional ad-hoc releases and fixes in between. As a result, we have removed internal silos and improved tremendously the collaboration between the product and sales teams, operations, IT Dev Factory and Infrastructure, as well as our supporting functions.

Through the agile process facilitated by APIs, we introduced Design Thinking workshops involving external customers and prospects early on to understand their true pain points better and emotions during the existing journeys and how to make new digital journeys frictionless. As a result, the relevance of our products for various customer personas has improved tremendously. 

Transcending banking 

With Google Cloud, we can offer our customers so much more than just banking. We’ve become more digitally relevant to their lives. For example, we recently launched a mortgage app that helps customers all the way from home selection through mortgage negotiations and closing, and even to getting the home decorated. It’s an end-to-end journey in which API integration with key regional players was a cornerstone to our success. 

For other digital products, we have an extensive roadmap of lifestyle-based solutions relevant to each segment and age group. We’ve only scratched the surface of the services we can provide, and we see the cloud as the future for everything we want to do.

Read more about Google Cloud’s Open Banking solution to learn how you can simplify and accelerate the process of delivering open banking as required by PSD2. You can also view our video on Open Banking, powered by Apigee API Management.

The ability to gain real-time insights from IoT data can redefine competitiveness for businesses. Intelligence allows connected devices and assets to interact efficiently with applications and with human beings in an intuitive and non-disruptive way. After your IoT project is up and running, many devices will be producing lots of data. You need an efficient, scalable, affordable way to both manage those devices and handle all that information. 

IoT Core is a fully managed service for managing IoT devices. It supports registration, authentication, and authorization inside the Google Cloud resource hierarchy as well as device metadata stored in the cloud, and the ability to send device configuration from other GCP or third-party services to devices. 

Main components

The main components of Cloud IoT Core are the device manager and the protocol bridges:

• The device manager  registers devices with the service, so you can then monitor and configure them. It provides:
  • Device identity management 
  • Support for configuring, updating, and controlling individual devices
  • Role-level access control
  • Console and APIs for device deployment and monitoring
• Two protocol bridges (MQTT and HTTP) can be used by devices to connect to Google Cloud Platform for:
  • Bi-directional messaging
  • Automatic load balancing
  • Global data access with Pub/Sub

How does Cloud IoT Core work?

Device telemetry data is forwarded to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, which can then be used to trigger Cloud Functions as well as other third-party apps to consume the data. You can also perform streaming analysis with Dataflow or custom analysis with your own subscribers.

Cloud IoT Core supports direct device connections as well as gateway-based architectures. In both cases the real time state of the device and the operational data is ingested into Cloud IoT Core and the key and certificates at the edge are also managed by Cloud IoT Core. From Pub/Sub the raw input is fed into Dataflow for transformation, and the cleaned output is populated in Cloud Bigtable for real-time monitoring or BigQuery for warehousing and machine learning. From BigQuery the data can be used for visualization in Looker or Data Studio and it can be used in Vertex AI for creating machine learning models. The models created can be deployed at the edge using Edge Manager (in experimental phase). Device configuration updates or device commands can be triggered by Cloud Functions or Dataflow to Cloud IoT Core, which then updates the device.  

Design principles of Cloud IoT Core

As a managed service to securely connect, manage, and ingest data from global device fleets, Cloud IoT COre is designed to be:

• Flexible, providing easy provisioning of device identities and enabling devices to access most of Google Cloud
• IThe industry leader in IoT scalability and performance
•  Interoperable, with supports for the most common industry-standard IoT protocols

Use cases

IoT use cases range across numerous industries. Some typical examples include:

• Asset tracking, visual inspection, and quality control in retail, automotive, industrial, supply chain and logistics
• Remote monitoring and predictive maintenance in oil & gas, utilities, manufacturing, and transportation
• Connected homes and consumer technologies.
• Vision intelligence in retail, security, manufacturing, and industrial sectors
• Smart living in commercial, residential, and smart spaces 
• Smart factories with predictive maintenance and real-time plant floor analytics

 For a more in-depth look into Cloud IoT Core check out the documentation.  

https://youtube.com/watch?v=76v16P-Wqe4%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo. For similar cloud content follow me on Twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev.

Founded in 2006, PaGaLGuY started as a forum that enabled students, typically aged between 20 and 30 to discuss and seek advice on academic issues. By 2011, PaGaLGuY had increased its traffic to about 250,000 page views per month. The business is now one of India’s largest education networks and provides an app that users can download to their Android and iOS devices.

Over the past six years, PaGaLGuY has extended its service to include video advice from experts on education topics and grown the number of views of its pages to 1.5 million per day. As Head of Technology for the business, Sandeep Kalidindi has played a key role in ensuring PaGaLGuY is as engaging as possible to users. “Because the product is advertising based, the greater the user engagement, the greater the advertising revenue,” Kalidindi explains.

Google Cloud Platform Results

• Supported growth to 1.5 million page views per day and demand spikes that see requests increase from about 90 per second to about 1,200 per second
• Reduced API latency from about 1 second to about 40 milliseconds
• Reduced system administration time from three to four days per week to 30 minutes every two weeks

In 2015, PaGaLGuY’s senior management team decided to deliver an even more relevant experience for users of the education network. “The core thing we had to do was personalise the experience for each and every student that visited PaGaLGuY,” Kalidindi says. “So we had to capture each student’s data to customise what they see when they open the site.”

The business also found traffic to the network was straining its infrastructure. During demand peaks, created by exams involving as many as 5 million students, PaGaLGuY would be inaccessible for periods of 30 minutes to one hour. Furthermore, average API latency had climbed to an unacceptable 1 second, compromising performance.

PaGaLGuY needed to access extensive compute resources to undertake its planned change. Had the business relied on a physical technology architecture to undertake the transformation, it would have had to purchase capacity equivalent to 16 new servers. “There was no way with a small team we could grow to that extent in a short time,” Kalidindi says. “This was the right moment for us to explore cloud services.”

The business established two primary requirements the selected cloud service needed to meet. First, PaGaLGuY had to be able to scale the platform with costs rising only in proportion to the increase in resources consumed. Accordingly, the business would have to minimise the number of employees required to manage the cloud environment. Second, the platform had to give PaGaLGuY easy access to student data and the ability to undertake prompt, granular analysis.

PaGaLGuY reviewed available public cloud services and determined that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was the best fit for its business. “Google Cloud Platform was considerably more mature than the alternatives, with a high degree of automation and a suite of managed services,” Kalidindi says. PaGaLGuY management then discussed with Google how to optimise cost, performance and availability of its personalised education network on GCP.

With assistance from Google and business transformation specialists Searce, PaGaLGuY was able to deliver the platform into production on GCP in 10 months. “Searce was very proactive in ensuring the environment met our needs and allowing us to gain priority access to Google services in development,” Kalidindi says. “Their team was integral to the success of the migration.”

PaGaLGuY has been running in production in GCP for two years. The education network’s GCP architecture comprises a scalable back-end built on Google App Engine; a managed environment for its containerised applications in Google Kubernetes Engine; messaging-oriented middleware through Google Cloud Pub/Sub; a relational database in Google Cloud SQL; a managed data analytics warehouse running in Google BigQuery; stream and batch data processing through Google Cloud Dataflow; and object storage in Google Cloud Storage.

PaGaLGuY has leveraged GCP services to break down its platform application from a monolithic build to a series of microservices running in Google App Engine that enable independent deployment cycles, minimise test and quality assurance overheads and provide clearer monitoring and logging.

Running on GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to add new personalisation features and grow fourfold without having to add any new engineers or administrators to accommodate the increased traffic. The business has also used the platform to seamlessly collect and aggregate students’ data for analysis, reporting and delivering a more targeted user experience. Furthermore, PaGaLGuY has been able to provide its management team with direct access to Google BigQuery to scrutinise data rather than require them to wait at least a day to view reports created by the product or technology teams.

Support demand peaks of 1,200 requests per second

“Thanks to Google Cloud Platform, we can easily support demand peaks that see requests per second rise from an average 90 per second to about 1,200 per second for as long as 45 minutes,” Kalidindi says. Due to GCP’s scalability, PaGaLGuY can ensure its education network remains available and performance remains consistent during those periods.

Latency cut to 40 milliseconds

The business has also reduced average API latency from 1 second to about 40 milliseconds. Furthermore, using GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to automate most of its processes and reduce system administration requirements from three to four days a week across its team members to about half an hour per week.

The performance of GCP has transformed PaGaLGuY’s culture and processes. “Once our team was exposed to Google Cloud Platform and understood the superiority of the platform, our mindset changed from ‘let us do everything on our own’ to ‘let us do what we do best’ and delegate the remainder,” Kalidindi says. The quality of the service provided by GCP means PaGaLGuY effectively considers the cloud provider as part of its team. “We are always eager to see what new services are being launched and are extremely excited about what Google Cloud Platform can provide as part of its roadmap.” he concludes.