Vinayak Bhavnani, Co-Founder and CTO of India-based bus transport technology company Chalo, shares how Google Maps Platform is used to improve visibility for commuters and bus operators across India by visualizing geospatial data.

Effective public transport networks contribute to the local economy and help make cities safe, pleasant, and sustainable. In India, buses make up around 90% of the public transport offering, but when you talk to the people who ride them every day, you find that there’s a lot of room for improvement. Heavy traffic means there are rarely any fixed schedules and it’s impossible to know exactly when your bus is coming. We’ve found that people tend to wait at a bus stop for up to 30 minutes a day, which creates a lot of frustration and wasted time.

When we founded Chalo, our aim was to make the daily city commute a more positive experience. Reliability is synonymous with visibility: when you know exactly when the bus is coming, you can plan your day better. If you’re in your office, for example, and see the next bus is in 10 minutes, you can be at the stop at the exact time it arrives, instead of waiting around. To enable this, we base our solutions on richly-detailed geospatial data provided by Google Maps Platform.

Eliminating wait times and increasing revenue with geospatial data

In India, bus passengers tend to have fewer resources. The Chalo App, which can be downloaded for free, allows them to see exactly where their bus is on its route and when it will arrive at their nearest stop. They also tend to be late adopters of mobile technology, meaning we had to create an interface that was user-friendly, reassuring and adapted to all age groups and backgrounds. One of the main reasons we opted for Google Maps Platform is that it’s very present in India and other emerging markets and is familiar to our users, which inspires trust. At the same time, we like the fact that Google Maps Platform provides rich geospatial data while being simple to implement and work with. We use the Geocoding API, Reverse Geocoding, and the Directions API to enable location search and provide directions.

We also worked with MediaAgility to identify the Google Maps Platform products most suited to our needs and the best practices to be followed. This helped to ensure that our business objectives could be met efficiently.

The Chalo App also enables digital ticketing, alongside the Chalo Card, a payment card for those who don’t own a smartphone. India, like the rest of the world, is gradually moving away from cash payments, but the public transport system is proving slow to catch up, meaning people still must have cash in hand when they board the bus. Digital ticketing not only makes commuting more convenient, it also helps protect passengers, drivers and conductors during the COVID-19 health crisis by limiting physical contact. 

Chalo also offers solutions aimed at bus operators that help them improve their services and their bottom line. In major Indian cities, buses are run by a combination of public and private agencies and small private individual bus operators, with the majority of the latter only operating one or two buses. The market is very fragmented and there’s not much incentive for bus operators to invest in infrastructure or customer experience – especially when they have little to no visibility on where their fleet is at a given time, how many kilometers it travels in a day, or how much money it takes. 

The Chalo dashboard provides operators with a map-based real-time overview of bus locations, alongside scheduling features and route, ticketing, and passenger statistics. Geospatial intelligence and insight into passenger demand enable operators to explore new avenues of revenue and adapt routes and services to passenger needs. Operators who’ve partnered with Chalo report an average improvement of 10% to 30% of their bus fleet operations.

Chalo is currently powering about 100 million rides a month on 15,000 buses in 37 cities. We’d like to see the number of rides increase tenfold over the next few years. To do that, we’re looking to broaden our offer and expand to other parts of the country and across international borders. A pilot is underway in Bangkok, and we’re considering expansion into South-East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Having access to detailed geospatial data anywhere in the world via Google Maps Platform, without having to make any major investments or changes to our technology stack, will make this considerably easier. 

At the same time, we’re exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the accuracy of our scheduling features and we’re introducing video-based solutions for people-counting on buses. Our aim is to continually improve our offering and optimize our services. We’re looking forward to working closely with Google to make that happen.  

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

The name Kitabisa means “we can” in Bahasa Indonesia, the official language of Indonesia, and captures our aspirational ethos as Indonesia’s most popular fundraising platform. Since 2013, Kitabisa has been collecting donations in times of crisis and natural disasters to help millions in need. Pursuing our mission of “channeling kindness at scale,” we deploy AI algorithms to foster Southeast Asia’s philanthropic spirit with simplicity and transparency.

Unlike e-commerce platforms that can predict spikes in demand, such as during Black Friday, Kitabisa’s mission of raising funds when disasters like earthquakes strike is by definition unpredictable. This is why the ability to scale up and down seamlessly is critical to our social enterprise.

In 2020, Indonesia’s COVID-19 outbreak coincided with Ramadan. Even in normal times, this is a peak period, as the holy month inspires charitable activity. But during the pandemic, the crush of donations pushed our system beyond the breaking point. Our platform went down for a few minutes just as Indonesia’s giving spirit was at its height, creating frustrations for users.

A new cloud beginning

That’s when we realized we needed to embark on a new cloud journey, moving from our monolithic system to one based on microservices. This would enable us to scale up for surges in demand, but also scale down when a wave of giving subsides. We also needed a more flexible database that would allow us to ingest and process the vast amounts of data that flood into our system in times of crisis.

These requirements led us to re-architect our entire platform on Google Cloud. Guided by a proactive Google Cloud team, we migrated to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for our overall containerized computing infrastructure, and from Amazon RDS to Cloud SQL for MySQL and PostgreSQL, for our managed database services.

The result surpassed our expectations. During the following year’s Ramadan season, we gained a 50% boost in computing resources to easily handle escalating crowdfunding demands on our system. This was thanks to both the seamless scaling of GKE and recommendations from the Google Cloud Partnership team on deploying and optimizing Cloud SQL instances with ProxySQL to optimize our managed database instances.

A progressive journey to kindness at scale

While Kitabisa’s mission has never wavered, our journey to optimized performance took us through several stages before we ultimately landed on our current architecture on Google Cloud.

Origins on a monolithic provider
Kitabisa was initially hosted on DigitalOcean, which only allowed us to run monolithic applications based on virtual machines (VMs) and a stateful managed database. This meant manually adding one VM at a time, which led to challenges in scaling up VMs and core memory when a disaster triggered a spike in donations.

Conversely, when a fundraising cycle was complete, we could not scale down automatically from the high specs of manually provisioned VMs, which was a strain on manpower and budgetary resources.

Transition to containers
To improve scalability, Kitabisa migrated from DigitalOcean to Amazon Web Services (AWS), where we hoped deploying load balancers would provide sufficient automated scaling to meet our network needs. However, we still found manual configurations to be too costly and labor-intensive.

We then attempted to improve automation by switching to a microservices-based architecture. But on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) we hit a new pain point: when launching applications, we needed to ensure that they were compatible with CloudFormation in deployment, which reduced the flexibility of our solution building due to vendor locking.

We decided it was “never too late” to migrate to Kubernetes, which is a more agile containerized solution. Given that we were already using AWS, it seemed natural to move our microservices to Amazon Elastics Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). But we soon found that provisioning Kubernetes clusters with EKS was still a manual process that required a lot of configuration work for every deployment.

Unlocking automated scalability
At the height of the COVID-19 crisis, faced with mounting demands on our system, we decided it was time to give Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) a try. Since Kubernetes is a Google-designed solution, it seemed likeliest that GKE would provide the most flexible microservices deployment, alongside better access to new features.

Through a direct comparison with AWS, we discovered that everything from provisioning Kubernetes clusters to deploying new applications became fully automated, with the latest upgrades and minimal manual setups. By switching to GKE, we can now absorb any unexpected surge in donations, and add new services without expanding the size of our engineering team. The transformative value of GKE became apparent when severe flooding hit Sumatra in November 2021, affecting 25,000 people. Our system easily handled the 30% spike in donations.

Moving to Cloud SQL and ProxySQL

Kitabisa was also held back by its monolithic database system, which was prone to crashing under heavy demand. We started to solve the problem by moving from a stateful DigitalOcean database to a stateless Redis one, which freed us from relying on a single server, giving us better agility and scale.

But the strategy left a major pain point because it still required us to self-manage databases. In addition, we were experiencing high database egress costs due to the need to execute data transfers from a non-Google Cloud database into BigQuery.

In December 2021, we migrated our Amazon RDS to Cloud SQL for MySQL, and immediately saved 10% in egress costs per month. But one of the greatest benefits came when the Google Cloud team recommended using the open source proxy for MySQL to improve the scalability and stability of our data pipelines.

Cloud SQL’s compatibility allowed us to use connection pooling tools such as ProxySQL to better load balance our application. Historically, creating a direct connection to a monolithic database was a single point of failure that could end up in a crash. With Cloud SQL plus ProxySQL, we create layers in front of our database instances. It serves as a load balancer that allows us to connect simultaneously to multiple database instances, by creating a primary and a read replica instance. Now, whenever we have a read query, we redirect the query to our read replica instance instead of the primary instance.

This configuration has transformed the stability of our database environment because we can have multiple database instances running at the same time, with the load distributed across all instances. Since switching to Cloud SQL as our managed database, and using ProxySQL, we have experienced zero downtime on our fundraising platform even when a major crisis hits.

We are also saving costs. Rather than having a separate database for each different Kubernetes cluster, we’ve merged multiple database instances into one instance. We now group databases according to business units instead of per service, yielding database cost reductions of 30%.

Streamlining with Terraform deployment

There’s another key way in which Google Cloud managed services have allowed us to optimize our environment: using Terraform as an infrastructure-as-a-code tool to create new applications and upgrades to our platform.

We also managed to automate the deployment of Terraform code into Google Cloud with the help of Cloud Build, and no human intervention. That means our development team can focus on creative tasks, while Cloud Build deploys a continuous stream of new features to Kitabisa.

The combination of seamless scalability, resilient data pipelines, and creative freedom is enabling us to drive the future of our platform, expanding our mission to inspire people to create a kinder world in other Asian regions.

We believe that having Google Cloud as our infrastructure backbone will be a critical part of our future development, which will include adding exciting new insurtech features. Now firmly established on Google Cloud, we can go further in shaping the future of fundraising to overcome turbulent times.

Electric vehicles already account for one in seven car sales globally, and with new gas and diesel cars being phased out across the world, global sales are forecast to reach 73 million units in 2040. But with power grids becoming increasingly dependent on variable energy sources such as wind and solar, rising demand from electric vehicles risks overstraining grids at peak times, potentially leading to power outages.

At Kaluza, we believe that our platform has a vital role to play in helping power grids and utility companies to stabilize their networks, while at the same time delivering more affordable, cleaner energy to the consumer. Powered by Google Cloud, the advanced algorithms behind our Kaluza Flex solution automatically charge electric vehicles when the power supply is at its cheapest and greenest, helping to accelerate the global transition towards a zero-carbon future. 

Decarbonizing the grid with low-cost smart charging programs

Launched by OVO Energy in 2019, Kaluza has taken its deep understanding of the energy market to partner with some of the world’s major energy suppliers and vehicle manufacturers, including AGL in Australia, Fiat and Nissan in the UK, and Mitsubishi Corporation and Chubu in Japan, to launch smart charging programs that help customers save money while reducing their carbon footprint.

A good example of this is Charge Anytime, which we recently launched with OVO Energy in the UK. With this tariff, customers use Kaluza to smart-charge their electric vehicle, and pay just 10p per kWh — a third of their household electricity rate — to do so. This means that if the customer plugs in their vehicle to charge when they get home from work at, say, 6:00 p.m. — a time when both demand and the carbon intensity on the grid are at their highest — their vehicle will then be smartly charged at the lowest cost and greenest periods throughout the night, ready for when they need it in the morning. 

This smart charging reduces the energy company’s costs by enabling them to take advantage of lower wholesale electricity prices. These savings are then passed on to the end customer through tariffs such as Charge Anytime, saving customers hundreds of pounds a year and reducing their carbon footprint. Meanwhile, the National Grid is able to reduce the strain on the network during peak hours, while simultaneously using up the excess renewable energy that might otherwise have gone to waste. 

Optimized charging schedules, fueled by Google Cloud

Behind Kaluza’s smart charging solution lies some sophisticated technology, all of which is built on Google Cloud. Our core optimization engine gathers real-time data from a wide range of sources, including battery and charging data from the electric vehicles, and data from the energy suppliers and grid operators, such as the carbon intensity, and price forecasts. 

After passing through our real-time data backbone, that data is stored in BigQuery where it’s used to train and validate our smart charging optimization models. These models are then deployed with Google Kubernetes Engine so that whenever a customer plugs in an electric vehicle, data from that vehicle passes in real-time through our optimization engine to calculate the ideal charging schedule for that vehicle, ensuring it uses the cheapest, least carbon-intensive energy available.

Customer interface: easy to use, simple to build

Of course, the customer isn’t aware of any of this complexity. All they need to do is open their charging app and use Kaluza’s intuitive interface to set what time they want their car to be ready and how much charge they want in their battery. Then they simply plug in their car, and our algorithms take care of the rest. 

Customers can also use Kaluza to view breakdowns of how much carbon and money they’ve saved, along with insights around things like billing and battery life, all of which is backed by Cloud SQL. 

With Google Cloud, we were able to roll out this end-user app very quickly. Instead of having to build a different version of the app for each operating system, we were able to build an OS-agnostic version using Flutter, which then builds the app for each platform, enabling us to get to market faster. 

This has been a benefit of our architecture in general. With Google Cloud taking the complexity out of otherwise time-consuming development processes, we’ve been able to experiment with and validate propositions rapidly, and roll out new products and features at speed, to ensure that we remain at the vanguard of a rapidly evolving sector. 

Giving energy companies full visibility with BigQuery and Looker

As for the grid operators and energy companies, the Kaluza platform allows them to visualize how many participating electric vehicles are plugged into the network at any one time. BigQuery and Looker Studio dashboards provide granular insights, such as how many vehicles are idle, how many are charging, and how well our optimization engine is working. 

The platform also allows companies to view those vehicles on an aggregate level, and identify any issues. Google Cloud machine learning capabilities can even allow grid operators to use this aggregate view to forecast how much energy will be required at any one time, and dial the power generation up or down accordingly. 

Ultimately, these insights help network operators and utility companies to optimize energy usage, and balance out the peaks and troughs of supply and demand, ensuring that excess renewable energy is captured, while carbon-intensive fuel use is reduced. 

Feeding energy back into the grid with bidirectional charging

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), or bidirectional, charging is something that we are very excited about, and have begun rolling out in the UK, as we prepare to launch in other global markets. Built on the same Google Cloud architecture as the rest of Kaluza Flex, V2G not only enables smart charging, but allows electric vehicles to feed stored energy back into the grid. 

Imagine an electric vehicle battery that can store 40 kWh of energy, but only uses 5 kWh a day. That leaves 35 kWh a day that can be charged to the battery during times of low demand, when energy is cheapest and greenest, then fed back into the network during peak periods, removing the need for more fossil fuels to be burned to meet demand. 

Not only does V2G go further than conventional smart charging to make use of renewable energy when it’s abundant and support the balancing of the energy system, it also results in even lower energy prices for the customer, as they are effectively selling energy back to the grid. For example, as part of a large domestic V2G trial made in partnership with OVO and Nissan, Kaluza saved customers an average of £450 a year, with some customers saving up to £800/year by selling surplus energy back to the grid — transforming their homes into mini power stations.

With Kaluza Flex, we have a platform that offers benefits for all parties, from the grid operators, through to energy retailers and vehicle manufacturers, and all the way to the customer. Now, our aim is to bring this exciting offering to as many markets as possible, a goal which is made easier thanks to the scalable infrastructure and time-saving solutions of Google Cloud. 

As more people make the switch to electric vehicles, our goal is to ensure that smart charging becomes standard practice, as we help to deliver on the potential of electric vehicles to contribute to a greener, decarbonized future.

Do hamburgers really come from Hamburg? This may still be a matter of debate, but the popularity of American-style burger joints not just in Hamburg but all over Germany, is clear. Germany’s top two fast food companies are both burger chains. One of them is BURGER KING®, a global brand that welcomes more than 11 million customers worldwide every day. The company arrived in Germany in 1976, when its first restaurant opened in Berlin. It now operates more than 100 restaurants across Germany, with franchisees operating more than 600 restaurants of their own.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important. That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

Previously a subsidiary of the U.S. business, BURGER KING® Germany became an independent company in 2015. As a result, it needed to develop its own IT infrastructure, and the changeover needed to happen fast. “We had to put in place systems that would work for the entire network of franchisees and enable us to easily roll out campaigns,” explains Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager at BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH.

With the help of Google Cloud Premier partner Cloudwürdig, BURGER KING® Germany chose Google Cloud and G Suite as the right combination to suit its needs.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important,” says Oliver. “That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

Building a franchisee platform in just three months

When a business has multiple franchisees, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page, especially in the fast-paced fast food environment. “We have to collate data from all our franchisees and produce reports quickly in order to react to changes in customer behavior,” explains Oliver. “That means processing every transaction that takes place in our restaurants.” Following the restructure, BURGER KING® Germany also needed to build a secure invoicing system with data storage and optimize its communication channels.

“Using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

With support from Witter-IT, BURGER KING® Germany chose Cloudwürdig to build its BKD Connect internal platform on Google Cloud. Thanks to the ready-to-go tools on Google Cloud, it was able to put its invoicing system and data warehouse in place in just three months.

For the BURGER KING® Germany data warehouse, Cloudwürdig built an ETL pipeline that channels ticket data for every sale into BigQuery. “Data is gathered from the restaurants,” says Oliver, “and using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

As the ticket data for every transaction is stored in BigQuery, the marketing team can easily see exactly which products are selling well. That’s crucial for tweaking promotions as well as monitoring the supply chain to make sure enough produce is delivered to restaurants in response to changes in demand.

“Thanks to BigQuery, we have a speedy data pipeline that enables us to react on the same day to changes in the market and eliminate bottlenecks in production,” says Oliver.

Switching to G Suite to improve communication

To enable franchisees to sign in to its BKD Connect Platform, BURGER KING® Germany needed a secure authentication system. To solve that problem, it chose to provide franchisees with G Suite accounts. “It’s really easy to set up a new franchisee on the platform. I just create a new G Suite account and Drive folder for it, and it’s ready to go,” says Oliver. G Suite also helps the franchise network to run efficiently, as daily reports are automatically saved to Drive and shared to the appropriate regional network. “Thanks to that system, it’s much easier for any team at headquarters to access the information it needs,” Oliver explains.

BURGER KING® Germany also recently extended its use of G Suite across the whole company. “Following an evaluation of our previous email and productivity software, I made the decision to switch solely to G Suite,” says Oliver. BURGER KING® Germany employees now use Gmail, Calendar, and Drive for their day-to-day productivity needs. “We only just completed the migration, but already, everyone’s happy,” says Oliver. “It’s so easy to share a file using Drive or set up a meeting on Calendar.”

“We’re big fans of Hangouts Meet, and we have two rooms here at our Hanover headquarters equipped with Hangouts Meet hardware,” Oliver adds. “The speech quality is good, and it’s helpful to be able to see every participant, especially when you’re running a meeting with multiple franchisees.”

Optimizing infrastructure to power innovative campaigns

The BURGER KING® app, available for iOS and Android, helps the company to deliver a great customer experience. Through their MyBK accounts, guests can access coupons and special promotions. “We had a really interesting campaign for Easter: guests used the app to hunt for virtual Easter eggs,” explains Oliver. “We knew it was going to be big, and our previous back end wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic.”

To enable the marketing campaign to go ahead, BURGER KING® Germany moved the back end of the app, along with its website, to Google Cloud. For developing and running its web and app back ends, it now uses App Engine and virtual machines on Compute Engine, as well as Memorystore and Cloud Functions. For monitoring and logging, it uses Stackdriver, and Cloud CDN and Cloud DNS to easily handle its traffic.

“We ran the campaign without any performance issues, even though we were receiving several million hits a day,” says Oliver. Since migrating the back end to Google Cloud, the marketing team also launched the popular “Escape the Clown” campaign. “That campaign blew our minds!” says Oliver. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Google Cloud, because it required a lot of back end capacity.”

To develop the app infrastructure it needs, BURGER KING® Germany relies on Cloudwürdig. “Working with Cloudwürdig is great because the team has the same agile mindset as us,” says Oliver. “When we have a new idea, we just set up a meeting, and in a couple of days the new infrastructure is in place. For Escape the Clown, it only took a few weeks to get everything ready to launch.”

Leveraging integrated tools to grow the business

Using Google Cloud together with G Suite enables BURGER KING® Germany to run its franchise network efficiently, while keeping its IT team lean. “Google Cloud and G Suite are the perfect fit for the way of working at BURGER KING® Germany,” says Oliver. “Many of the company’s operatives are often on the road, visiting restaurants and franchisees. With these tools, they can work flexibly and react quickly to the situation on the ground.”

“In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants. With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

It also helps to keep infrastructure costs under control. “With Google Cloud, we only pay for what we use, which is really important for us,” Oliver explains. “It means we can scale up quickly if we see an opportunity to react to a trend in customer behavior and launch a new marketing campaign that resonates with the moment. When it’s finished, we can then scale down again, and that definitely saves us money.”

BURGER KING® is now working with Cloudwürdig to add more functionality to the BURGER KING® app using Google Kubernetes Engine. “We like to work with customers long-term to support their digital transformation. BURGER KING® Germany is a great example of how one project can develop into a great collaboration,” says Benny Woletz, Managing Director of Cloudwürdig.

BURGER KING® also plans to expand its presence in Germany and gain a greater market share by further tailoring both its marketing and the way it runs its restaurants to answer its guests’ needs. “In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants,” says Oliver. “With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”