During uncertain times, ecosystem partnerships that leverage APIs have proven to help companies scale and address gaps in their businesses. Apigee customers, like CHAMP Cargosystems, have pursued API-first ecosystem models to enter adjacent markets, create new customer interaction models, and rapidly grow their brand reach and partner ecosystems. As a result of building their API ecosystem, they are transacting 300 million electronic exchanges and 20 million shipments per year.

CHAMP selected Apigee to provide an API platform and developer self-service portal option to all of its SaaS customers. Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and portal allows CHAMP and its customers to quickly connect to a variety of backend systems, including in-house, third party apps, marketplace portals and more– thereby accelerating their digitization strategies and opening up new markets through an API ecosystem.

Join this webcast and hear from this leading Enterprise company on how to:

• Identify new revenue sources and markets using an API management platform
• Improve time to market while still complying with all industry requirements
• How to create a proof of concept to grow API adoption throughout your organization
• Align internal business leaders and partners to see the importance of an API-first platform vision

Google Cloud Results

• Replaced conflicting, time-consuming paper logs with a near real-time, transparent app
• Scaled rapidly and easily to accommodate new teams thanks to Google App Engine
• Enables photographic and video communication to replace confusing text
• New factory solution rolled out in just 15 days

In 1877, Pietro Barilla set up a small bakery to make pasta and baked goods for the people of Parma, Italy. Today, Barilla applies its 140 years of baking knowledge on a global scale, with six major manufacturing sites in Italy and an international network employing over 8,000 people. As the world’s leading producer of pasta, Barilla knows that when it comes to making quality food, great communication is key. That’s why the company plans to become a completely digital, looking to technology to improve the way it works.

Teams at the Barilla factory in Cremona work along a production line more than one-kilometer long, staffed by three shifts of workers a day. When one shift handed over to the next or requested machine maintenance teams, they used paper notebooks and unofficial instant messaging to communicate. That meant there was no authoritative, real-time record of events, communication was messy, oversight was poor, and teams had to hold daily morning meetings to synchronise notes.

Barilla worked with the Google Cloud Partner Injenia to create a solution, beginning with a consultative process on the factory floor.

“We had the idea to to start from the bottom and work up,” says Cristiano Boscato at Injenia. “Barilla’s top staff were brilliant about letting us do it. Eight of us from Injenia spent months on the factory lines with Barilla workers, collecting ideas on Google Docs, making presentations with Slides and collecting feedback with Forms. The CollaborAction app we created is the result of an amazing partnership.”

Co-designing a team social network

“Everything at the Cremona plant was managed offline, with paper,” explains Alessandra Ardrizzoia, Digital Engagement Senior Manager at Barilla. “Workers on the line would track events in notebooks, the shift leader would have another notebook, and the leader of the maintenance team would have yet another notebook. Everybody wrote their own text description of events, so there would be mismatches in the information going around.”

To resolve this, teams would meet at 8:30am every day to reconstruct a consistent narrative. In addition, machine maintenance workers were already using instant messaging to communicate with the line. Barilla and Injenia looked for a solution that could deliver a searchable, single version of events, with the ease of use of a mobile messaging application.

After consulting factory workers for ideas, Injenia created CollaborAction, a custom-built app that brought G Suite collaboration tools together on an Google App Engine platform, using Google Cloud SQL to index files. Google+, Google Drive and Hangouts were not only highly available and easy-to-use, they also “helped with fast adoption, with interfaces that workers could already relate to.” Meanwhile Google App Engine enabled the Injenia team to deliver updates and new versions at speed, as part of a feedback process with workers who offered suggestions through a link to Forms embedded in the app.

Google+ provides an intuitive social media dashboard that workers felt comfortable with. Now teams use company tablets placed at intervals along the line to log in, report issues to other teams, photograph problems, schedule maintenance, give status updates through Hangouts chat, and have visibility on the whole process as it takes place.

“Everyone in the Cremona plant was really happy with the new social collaboration process. Because they were involved in designing the solution, they felt involved and really engaged with the process,” says Alessandra. “And now that everyone is aligned with CollaborAction, all the work in the plant is more effective. They are more agile and can use their time in more added-value activities.”

Optimization and a national roll-out

Created in Cremona, now CollaborAction connects over 1,000 users in six of Barilla’s factories in Italy. “The pilot at Cremona took one month, and adoption has been easier and faster in every plant we’ve taken it to,” says Cristiano. “We have another five or six plants more, and it takes no more than 15 days to introduce. That’s incredible.”

Because CollaborAction is a mobile app built on Google App Engine, scaling to meet new demand has been simple. Now maintenance teams use the app on smartphones, line workers use it on tablets, and shift leaders use it on laptops, so the entire team is aligned in close to real-time on a single version of events. And now teams communicate with video and photographs as well as text, there’s less room for confusion, as Alessandra explains. “It’s no problem understanding what’s happening in a video or picture, compared to a message that just says ‘something is going wrong.’ On a production line, where one part leads into the next, that speed makes a difference, and means we don’t have to throw as much food away when something breaks down.”

“Now we’re collecting feedback from all of the plants using CollaborAction and using it to create a standardised solution that we can apply across all of our plants,” says Alessandra. “We’re side-by-side with the workers in that sense, trying to address their needs with new features. It’s a way to make the workers feel like part of the solution, and that the app represents their needs and their voice.”

Solving a universal problem

By the end of 2018, Barilla and Injenia aim to have deployed CollaborAction to 2,700 employees at 18 factories worldwide. Barilla has already collected more than 50,000 posts with the app, including around 20,000 photographs and videos, and is now considering ways to apply Cloud Machine Learning Engine to create a maintenance chatbot or direct IoT connection with machinery.

“CollaborAction hasn’t just made our maintenance processes faster and more efficient, its also exponentially increased the knowledge and understanding employees have about their work,” says Alessandra. “It’s improving team spirit, too, such as when employees use CollaborAction to arrange to play soccer. It’s become the main communication tool for the entire plant.”

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.

When Bigbasket was founded in December 2011, it guaranteed to deliver goods within a one-hour delivery slot of its customers’ choosing or it would refund them 10 percent of their orders. The company also introduced an express service, delivering groceries within 90 minutes of an order being placed.

Bigbasket needed a mapping platform that could help it meet its delivery times, and offer a familiar interface to customers. MediaAgility, a digital consulting company, recommended Google Maps Platform to Bigbasket.

When customers use the Bigbasket mobile app to place orders, they select their locations on a Google Map. The prices and availability of groceries varies according to location, so a customer’s location determines the cost of the order and what can be ordered.

Google Maps Platform Results

• Bigbasket handles more than one million orders per month, and delivers in more than two dozen cities in India
• Bigbasket now has more than four million customers
• Orders are delivered on time, increasing customer loyalty

It is also used to determine driver routes. Bigbasket used the Maps Javascript API to build a web-based app for the company’s backend that tracks all orders and delivery progress. Dispatchers use the Directions API to match drivers with orders and customers, and the Distance Matrix API to get estimate the time of arrival for deliveries. As dispatchers track the progress of deliveries on the map, they can tweak routes as necessary.

“We’ve built Bigbasket from the ground up using Google Maps Platform. It makes sure we have the right customer locations and deliver to them on time. We couldn’t have started Bigbasket without Google Maps. It helps us to be fast and efficient, and make sure our customers get what they’ve ordered quickly,” said Pramod Jajoo, Chief Technology Officer, Bigbasket