We’re excited to share the news that leading global research and advisory firm Forrester Research has named Google AppSheet a Leader in the recently released report The Forrester Wave™: Low-code Platforms for Business Developers, Q4 2021. It’s our treasured community of business developers—those closest to the challenges that line-of-business apps can solve—who deserve credit for not only the millions of apps created with AppSheet, but also the collaborative approach to no-code development that has helped further our mission of empowering everyone to build custom solutions to reclaim their time and talent. 

AppSheet received the highest marks possible in the product vision and planned enhancements criteria, with Forrester noting in the report that “AppSheet’s vision for AI-infused-and-supported citizen development is unique and particularly well suited to Google. The tech giant’s deep pockets and ecosystem give AppSheet an advantage in its path to market, market visibility, and product roadmap.”

“Features for process automation and AI are leading,” remarking that, “The platform provides a clean, intuitive modeling environment suitable for both long-running processes and triggered automations, as well as a useful range of pragmatic AI services such as document ingestion.”

Many enterprise customers including Carrefour Property – Carmila, Globe Telecom, American Electric Power, and Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) choose AppSheet as their business developer partner, along with thousands of other organizations in every industry. We are honored to serve these customers and to be a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Low-code Platforms for Business Developers. We look forward to continuing to innovate and to helping customers on their digital transformation journey. To download the full report, visit here and enter your email address. To learn more about AppSheet, visit our website.

The software development process requires complex, cross-functional collaboration while continuously improving products and services. Our customers who build software say that they value Google Workspace for its ability to drive innovation and collaboration throughout the entire software development life cycle. Developers can hold standups and scrums in Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces, create and collaborate on requirements documentation in Google Docs and Sheets, build team presentations in Google Slides, and manage their focus time and availability with Google Calendar.

Development teams also use many other tools to get work done, like tracking issues and tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, managing workloads with Asana, and incident management in PagerDuty. One of the benefits of Google Workspace is that it’s an open platform tailored to improve the performance of your tools by seamlessly integrating them together. We’re constantly expanding our ecosystem and improving Google Workspace, giving you the power to push your software development even further.

Make software development more agile

Google Workspace gives you real-time visibility into project progress and decisions to help you ship quality code fast and stay connected with your stakeholders, all without switching tools and tabs. By leveraging applications from our partners, you can pull valuable information out of silos, making collaborating on requirements, code reviews, bug triage, deployment updates, and monitoring operations easy for the whole team. This allows your teams to stay focused on their priorities while keeping everyone aligned, ensuring collaborators are always in the loop.

Plan and execute together

When combined with integrations, Google Workspace makes the software development planning process more collaborative and efficient. For example, many organizations use Asana—a leading work management platform—to coordinate and manage everything from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. To make the experience more seamless, Asana built integrations so users can always have access to their tasks and projects with Google Drive, Gmail, and Chat. With these integrations for Google Workspace, you can turn your conversations into action and create new tasks in Asana—all without leaving Google Workspace.

“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana

To date, users have installed the Asana for Gmail add-on over 2.5 million times, as well as over 3.8 million installs of the Asana for Google Workspace add-on for Google Drive.

Start coding quickly

Google Workspace makes it easy for product managers, UX designers, and engineers to agree on what they’re building and why. By bringing all stakeholders, decisions, and requirements into one place—whether it’s a Gmail or Google Chat conversation, or a document in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—Google Workspace removes friction, helping your teams finalize product specifications and get started right away.

Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With this integration, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.

Speed up testing

Integrations like Jira for Google Chat accelerate the entire QA process in the development workflow. The app acts as a team member in the conversation, sending new issues and contextual updates as they are reported to improve the quality of your code and keep everyone informed on your Jira projects.

Ship code faster

Developers use Jenkins—a popular open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery tool—to build and test products continuously. Along with other cloud-native tools, Jenkins supports strong DevOps practices by letting you continuously integrate changes into the software build.

With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications directly in Google Chat.

Proactively monitor your services

Improving the customer experience requires capturing and monitoring data sources to improve application and infrastructure observability. Google Workspace supports DevOps teams and organizations by helping stakeholders collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. When you integrate Datadog with Google Chat, monitoring data becomes part of your team’s discussion, and you can efficiently collaborate to resolve issues as soon as they arise.

The integration makes it easy to start a discussion with all the relevant teams by sharing a snapshot of a graph in any of your Chat spaces. When an alert notification is triggered, it allows you to notify each Chat space independently, precisely targeting your communication to the right teams.

Improve service reliability

Orchestrating business-wide responses to interruptions is a cross-functional effort. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, it’s important to proactively manage service-impacting events. Google Workspace supports response teams by ensuring that urgent alerts reach the right people by providing teams with a central space to discover incidents, find the root cause, and resolve them quickly.

PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. See and share details with link previews, and perform actions by creating or updating incidents. By keeping all conversations in a central space, new responders can get up to speed and solve issues faster without interrupting others.

Accelerate developer productivity

Integrating your DevOps tools with Google Workspace allows your development teams to centralize their work, stay focused on what’s important—like managing their work—build code quickly, ship quality products, and communicate better during service impacting incidents. For more apps and solutions that help centralize your work so you and your teams can connect, create, and get things done, check out Google Workspace Marketplace, where you’ll find more than 5,300 public applications that integrate directly into Google Workspace.

Organizations are currently modernizing their businesses in order to meet the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape. In effect, business leaders must evaluate the best way to mitigate the challenges which plague their cloud operations, all while meeting customers’ growing expectations around digital experience (DX) through agility, automation, and proactive incident avoidance. 

In this commissioned study, “Modernize With AIOps To Maximize Your Impact”, Forrester Consulting surveyed organizations worldwide to better understand how they’re approaching artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in their cloud environments, and what kind of benefits they’re seeing. 

Within this July 2021 study, you’ll see that AIOps systems and principles are here to help. It covers how AIOps increases efficiency and productivity across day-to-day operations, and how businesses are taking note. In fact, 91% of respondents have implemented AIOps to address at least one cloud operations issue, and expansion is set to skyrocket. Those that wait to act, risk losing out on the efficacy of their cloud investment and falling behind their more efficient competitors.

As you can see in the image above, there is a plethora of great information in this complimentary study. So, if you’re looking to enhance your cloud operations and/or adopt AIOps within your organization, be sure to download this free study today.

Scale-out workloads demand the best combination of performance and price to bring down the cost of delivering applications, all while providing an excellent user experience. We are excited to announce a new virtual machine (VM) family, Tau VMs, coming to Google Cloud. Tau VMs extend Compute Engine’s VM offerings with a new option optimized for cost-effective performance of scale-out workloads. 

T2D, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC^TM processors and leapfrogs the VMs for scale-out workloads of any leading public cloud provider available today, both in terms of performance and workload total cost of ownership (TCO). The x86 compatibility provided by these AMD EPYC processor-based VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture. 

As illustrated below, Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance (est. SPECrate2017_int_base) compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors.

What our customers and partners are saying

Snap
“At Snap, it is critical for our business to continue improving our scale-out compute infrastructure for key Snapchat capabilities like AR, Lenses, Spotlight and Maps,” said Cody Powell, Senior Engineering Manager, Snap Inc. “We were impressed when we tested Google Cloud’s new Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine. While it’s early days, we believe we can gain double digits in infrastructure performance improvements for key workloads—enabling us to do more with less and invest even more in new features for our amazing Snapchat community.”

Twitter
“High performance at the right price point is a critical consideration as we work to serve the global public conversation,” said Nick Tornow, Platform Lead, Twitter. “We are excited by initial tests that show potential for double digit performance improvement. We are collaborating with Google Cloud to more deeply evaluate benefits on price and performance for specific compute workloads that we can realize through use of the new Tau VM family.”

DoiT
“DoiT partners with leading cloud vendors who are focused on growth and cost optimization,” said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO, DoiT International. “In our preliminary testing of Google’s new Tau VMs with the Coremark benchmark, we were thrilled to see the incredible performance at 50% better than a comparable ARM-based offering from another leading public cloud. With Tau VMs, Google Cloud has set a new bar for price-performance, making the cloud even more accessible to digital-native companies. We are excited to bring Google’s Tau VMs to our joint customers.”

Designed for demanding scale-out workloads 

Tau VMs bring the benefit of Google’s long-standing experience engineering platforms for scale-out workloads to our customers. They come in multiple predefined VM shapes, with up to 60vCPUs per VM, and 4GB of memory per vCPU. They offer up to 32 Gbps networking bandwidth and a wide range of network attached storage options, making Tau VMs ideal for scale-out workloads including web servers, containerized microservices, data-logging processing, media transcoding, and large-scale Java applications. 

Google Kubernetes Engine support

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the de facto standard for organizations looking for advanced container orchestration, delivering the highest levels of reliability, security, and scalability. GKE supports Tau VMs on day 1, helping you optimize price-performance for your containerized workloads. You can add Tau VMs to your GKE clusters by specifying the T2D machine type in your GKE node-pools. 

Pricing

Tau VMs will be priced to support significant TCO and price-performance improvements for your cloud applications. A 32vCPU VM with 128GB RAM will be priced at $1.3520 per hour for on-demand usage in us-central1. 

Coming soon to a Google Cloud region near you

If you are interested in trying out T2D VMs when they become available in Q3 2021 please sign-up here.

Google Cloud is proud to support our customers with the cleanest cloud in the industry. For the past four years, we’ve matched 100% of our electricity use with renewable energy purchases, and we were the first company of our size to commit going even further by running on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030.  As we work to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy, we help you take immediate action to decarbonize your digital applications and infrastructure. We’re also working with our customers across every industry to develop new solutions for the unique climate change challenges that organizations face. Today, we’re excited to expand our portfolio of carbon-free solutions and announce new partnerships that will help every company build a more sustainable future. 

First, we’re launching Carbon Footprint, a new product that provides customers with the gross carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage. Now available to every GCP user for free in the Cloud Console, this tool helps you measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of your cloud usage. Of course, the net operational emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage is still zero. With growing requirements for Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, companies are looking for ways to show their employees, boards and customers their progress against climate targets. Using Carbon Footprint, you have access to the gross energy related emissions data you need for internal carbon inventories and external carbon disclosures, with one click. 

Built in collaboration with customers like Atos, Etsy, HSBC, L’Oréal, Salesforce, Thoughtworks and Twitter, our Carbon Footprint reporting introduces a new standard of transparency to support you in meeting your climate goals. You can monitor your gross cloud emissions over time, by project, by product and by region, giving IT teams and developers metrics that can help them reduce their carbon footprint. Our detailed calculation methodology is published so that auditors and reporting teams can verify that their cloud emissions data meets GHG Protocol guidance.

“The power of knowledge combined with the power of technology innovation plays a vital role in proactively responding to the climate crisis we are facing. With Google Carbon Footprint reporting, Atos feeds emissions data in our Decarbonization Data Platform, demonstrating potential emissions reductions from the Google Cloud Platform to our customers. This reporting opens up new levels of emissions transparency, trajectory planning, and data insight to support our customers in meeting, and potentially accelerating towards, their climate goals.”—Nourdine Bihmane, Head of Decarbonization Business Line, Atos

“The capability to measure and understand the environmental footprint of our Public Cloud usage is among the key axis of our sustainable tech roadmap. With Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we are now able to directly follow the impact of our sustainable infrastructure approach and architecture principles.”—Hervé DUMAS, Sustainability IT Director, L’Oreal

While digital infrastructure emissions are just one part of your environmental footprint, accurately accounting for IT carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against the carbon reduction targets required to avert the worst consequences of climate change. To help you account for emissions beyond our cloud and across your organization, we’re excited to partner with Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, integrating our Google Cloud Platform emissions data into their carbon accounting platform. 

“As we face unprecedented climate challenges, companies across the globe need to embed sustainability into the core of their business in order to meet growing customer and stakeholder expectations, and reduce their environmental impact. Together, Google Cloud and Salesforce Sustainability Cloud can help our joint customers accelerate their path to Net Zero, leveraging data-driven insights and visualizations to track and reduce their carbon emissions to drive sustainable change.”—Ari Alexander, GM of Salesforce Sustainability Cloud. 

From information to action

With the gross energy-related emissions footprint of data associated with your Google Cloud usage now available, we’re committed to providing tools to not only measure your carbon footprint, but help you reduce it. We recently launched low-carbon region icons to help you choose cleaner regions to locate your Google Cloud resources. New users who see the icons are over 50% more likely to choose clean regions over others, ensuring their applications emit less carbon over time. 

For current Google Cloud users, we’re pleased to announce that Active Assist Recommender will include a new sustainability impact category, extending its original core pillars of cost, performance, security, and manageability. Starting with the Unattended Project Recommender, you’ll soon be able to estimate the gross carbon emissions you’ll save by removing your idle resources. Unattended Project Recommender uses machine learning to identify, with a high degree of confidence, projects that are likely abandoned based on API and networking activity, billing, usage of cloud services, and other signals, and provides actionable recommendations on how to remediate those abandoned projects. By deleting these projects, not only can you reduce costs and mitigate security risks, but you can also reduce your carbon emissions. In August, Active Assist analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across our platform, and over 600,000 gross kgCo2e was associated with projects that it recommended for cleanup or reclamation. If customers deleted these projects they would significantly reduce future gross carbon emissions. Check out this blog to learn more about Active Assist.

Solutions for climate resilience 

Many of our customers face difficult questions about how their business impacts the natural environment today, and how it will be affected by climate change in the future. Answering these questions requires rich datasets about the planet, better analytics tools and smarter models to predict potential outcomes. For over a decade Google Earth Engine has supported scientists and developers with hyperscale computing power and the world’s largest catalog of satellite image data. Today, we are delighted to announce the preview of Earth Engine as part of Google Cloud Platform. Now, you can access Earth Engine and combine it with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery. By extending Earth Engine’s powerful platform to enterprises through Google Cloud, we are bringing the best of Google together. 

Over the past year we’ve worked with a number of organizations to use Earth Engine technology with tools like BigQuery and the Cloud AI Platform to develop new solutions for responsible commodity sourcing, sustainable land management and carbon emissions reduction. Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, thus  helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. This new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability.

As we work with our customers to accelerate their sustainability initiatives, earth observation data is proving critical to effectively plan for the long-term impacts of climate change. To extend our geospatial and sustainability use cases we’re also expanding our partnerships with CARTO, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet to bring their data and core applications to Google Cloud.

These partners will each make their existing platforms and datasets available globally on Google Cloud, giving you low-latency and reliable access to critical data and applications that will inform your sustainability initiatives. By integrating water availability, agricultural data, weather risks, and extensive daily satellite imagery into Earth Engine and BigQuery, you can achieve more ambitious goals for the sustainability of your business and our planet.

Committing to help you meet your climate goals

With each of these tools, we’re working to reduce the barriers you face in adopting more sustainable technology practices. We understand that building more sustainable applications and infrastructure is not easy. You face competing priorities, technical challenges, and the perception that climate action is costly. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, we are making a sustainability pledge to you: teams across Google Cloud are committing to eliminating the barriers you face in building a more sustainable digital future for your organization, and will help you take action today to realize your climate goals. We’ll do this in a number of ways: 

1. In digital transformation projects and workshops, sustainability teams will always have a seat at the planning table, so we can work together on using cloud technology to build a more sustainable future. 
2. We’re putting low-carbon signals natively into our products to help developers choose more sustainable options early in their application development. 
3. We’ll ensure carbon impact is measured consistently with other key performance indicators. Leveraging the social cost of carbon, the ROI models and value assessments you conduct with Google Cloud will project your emissions impact too. 
4. We’ll be transparent about our carbon impact, by publishing third-party reviewed reports and methodologies, so you can trust the data for your own reports and disclosures. 
5. We’ll continue to work with the industry on best practices, including educational resources like Sustainable IT – Decoded, a new masterclass created in partnership with Intel, that shares the expertise of sustainability thought leaders. 

For the next decade we need to work together to avert the worst consequences of climate change. We’ve made tremendous progress in building technology that helps everyone do more for the planet, and we’re excited to see what you do with it. Visit this page to learn more about Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts.