Rollouts Made Simple: Cloud Deploy’s Deploy Hooks
919
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery platform that automates the delivery of your application. Recently, we’ve heard from users that they want Cloud Deploy to also perform self-defined pre- and post-deployment operations to reduce the amount of additional toil required for each rollout. Examples of such operations include database schema updates, application infrastructure deployment, and network configuration adjustment.
Today, we are pleased to announce the public preview availability of Cloud Deploy deploy hooks. With this launch, Cloud Deploy now offers an easy way to define and execute pre- and post-deployment operations as part of a rollout.
Deploy hooks
The ability to run user defined actions immediately before and after deployment is a powerful feature that allows DevOps organizations to build out complete CI/CD pipelines to meet their specific deployment needs.
With the introduction of deploy hooks in Cloud Deploy, you can now take advantage of this capability by configuring your delivery pipeline to include pre-deploy and post-deploy actions. These actions take advantage of the custom actions defined through Skaffold. When enabled, two new jobs — predeploy and postdeploy — will be performed when deploying a rollout into a target.
Deploy hooks are supported for all target types (GKE, Cloud Run, Anthos, and Multi-Target) and can be used with all deployment strategies, such as canary deployments.
As enabled, deploy hooks can be used in a variety of ways, such as:
- Performing a database migration prior to deployment
- Performing infrastructure deployment prior to application deployment
- Interacting with third-party platforms post deployment, such as sending out an email or updating an open task tracker
Like other rollout jobs, Cloud Deploy provides the same observability and control for predeploy and postdeploy jobs. This includes the ability to view logs and perform control over individual jobs, such as retry, terminate, or ignore — all within the same rollout details interface.
Interested in exploring deploy hooks for yourself? Get started now with our quickstart and documentation!
The future
Comprehensive, easy-to-use, and cost-effective DevOps tools are key to building an efficient software delivery capability, and it’s our hope that Cloud Deploy will help you implement complete CI/CD pipelines. Stay tuned as we introduce exciting new capabilities and features to Cloud Deploy in the months to come.
In the meantime, check out the product page, documentation, quickstarts, and tutorials. Finally, If you have feedback on Cloud Deploy, you can join the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you!
Groww’s Google Cloud-Powered Platform: The Key to Secure and Successful Investing
2931
Of your peers have already read this article.
4:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Groww makes investments simple and accessible, using Google Kubernetes Engine to ensure a reliable platform for customers, and makes data-backed decisions to grow its business with BigQuery.
About Groww
Headquartered in Bangalore, Groww is India’s fast-growing online investment platform that offers a simple and easy way to invest in stocks, direct mutual funds, IPOs, ETFs, and digital gold. Its mission is to make investing as intuitive and accessible as ecommerce.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces hardware costs with Preemptable Virtual Machines
- Enables a lean DevOps team with Google Cloud
- Analyzes data effectively and quickly for agile business growth
Investing is one way to ensure financial security. However, the thought of it can be a daunting one, especially for people without any prior experience. With a mission to make investment simple for digital natives in India, Groww was launched in 2016.
“We noticed that many people were on social media, booking cabs, and ordering food online, but the same people were not investing, despite having the means to do so,” says Singh. This observation led to a lightbulb moment for the team, and they realized that in order to appeal to the millennial, mobile-savvy generation, they had to create an investment platform that was as easy to use as an ecommerce platform.
Managing unpredictable spikes with Google Kubernetes Engine
As with any platform, there are bound to be peak and non-peak hours when it comes to traffic. For Groww, regular spikes take place in the early mornings, or in the evenings when people are more relaxed having come home from work. But the nature of the fintech industry is a volatile one. Investors are only human, and their investment decisions can be swayed quickly by the news. As such, spikes in traffic can happen at the most unpredictable times. To cope with this unpredictability, Groww uses Google Kubernetes Engine to scale up and down automatically to meet the required capacity around the clock. This also helps the company save costs, as it pays only for what is needed.
“No matter how much of an expert you are, you can never predict when traffic on the platform will be heavy,” says Singh. “Google Kubernetes Engine helps ensure that we never run out of capacity, without overspending on infrastructure cost.”
More recently, the investment company started using Preemptible Virtual Machines, which run at one third of its hardware cost. It also leverages Anthos to monitor and manage its backend infrastructure and to have better workload visibility. Singh shares, “We are very open to adopting new technologies, and our team is always eager to learn if we can do things better. We believe that technology is always evolving and it’s our responsibility to learn and make use of what’s available out there.”
Despite having so much running in the background, Singh explains that the company keeps a very lean DevOps team. “We’ve only got four or five people in DevOps, and that’s only possible because Google Cloud products are already able to run on their own.”
Making swift, data-backed business decisions
Infrastructure is only part of the equation for a successful business. Outside of operations, the ability to analyze data effectively is arguably the most important component for a startup to thrive. Groww leverages BigQuery to make decisions quickly and efficiently. “With BigQuery, we have a place where we can put all data, fire queries, and build dashboards almost instantly, allowing us to make business decisions quickly,” explains Singh.
The team also uses Looker Studio to clearly visualize the information generated through charts and graphs. The best part? Groww doesn’t need to spend additional time and resources setting up a large data team, since BigQuery does most of the work and in a shorter period of time. The resources saved also enables the team to focus on addressing functional requirements, rather than managing and sizing the data platform.
“From a startup perspective, BigQuery is really helpful because often setting up your own data lake can be very costly, and a distraction when the team is also busy focusing on setting up an infrastructure,” adds Singh.
Ensuring security and compliance with Google Cloud
As a fintech company, security and compliance continue to be top priorities for Groww. It chose Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider because there are three data center replication zones in Mumbai, which means it adheres to financial regulations for keeping its user data within borders.
Moving forward, Groww plans to evolve its platform alongside its users. Singh says, “As we gain more users with different wants and needs, it will be a natural progression that the company evolves. I believe that with Google Cloud, we are well equipped to pave the way to the future.”
3248
Of your peers have already watched this video.
24:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Building Cloud-native Apps at Scale with Kubernetes and Other Dev Tools
Developer productivity is directly linked to customer value generation, higher levels of customer satisfaction and faster time to market. To help build cloud-native applications that cater to customer demands and at scale, experts at Google Cloud share insights on CI/CD tools, processes and interfaces for deploying and developing Google Kubernetes Engine applications. Watch the video on Modernizing App Development and Delivery with the Google Cloud Golden Path from Next ’21 to also learn about developer tools like Cloud Code and Skaffold.
4051
Of your peers have already watched this video.
2:20 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Telstra Leverages APIs To Accelerate Digital Transformation
Telstra is Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, offering a full range of communication services and competing in all telecommunications markets.
In Australia, it provides 17.7 million retail mobile services, 4.9 million retail fixed voice services and 3.6 million retail fixed broadband services.
But owing to legacy infrastructure the company was unable to boost business efficiency and agility. To address these challenges, the company decided to leverage the Apigee platform.
“One of the key challenges that Apigee helped us solve was ensuring greater efficiency. Efficiency in business is absolutely critical. The more efficient you become the quicker you can solve problems and hence lower costs of solving those problems,” says David Freeman, General Manager of API enablement, Telstra.
Freeman also highlights that the Apigee platform has helped Telstra reduce the cycle time of delivery from months to days and sometimes even minutes. It also empowered the organization to efficiently track their developer community as well.
“Apigee was not only able to take systems and services and turn them into APIs but it also provided an analytics capability where we could keep an eye on the developer community, we could see what the developers were doing with APIs. On top of that, it also provided a great way to monetize APIs. This ensures that our developers can quickly and easily consume APIs,” says Freeman.
Watch this short video and get greater insights into how Apigee is helping Telstra accelerate digital transformation.
3225
Of your peers have already watched this video.
2:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Simplified Document Processing with AppSheet Automation
Move over legacy, time-consuming systems and processes to update data from documents and invoices into disparate data systems. AppSheet integrates no-code development with Google Cloud’s state-of-the-art Document AI to automate the data extraction and validation from invoices, documents, receipts, etc.
You can end all ‘guesstimates’ and rely on the accuracy of the intelligent document processing feature, and set custom triggers for automation events or the way data is displayed from its unstructured source. Watch the video to understand how your business can save time and resources with automation and seamlessly manage high-volume, unstructured data.
Private Services Connect in Google Cloud Regions Enables Customers to Consume Services Faster
4618
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
At Google Cloud, we believe in making it simple and secure to consume services whether they’re from Google, a third party or customer-owned. With Private Service Connect, we have adopted a service-centric approach to our network that abstracts the underlying networking infrastructure. And today, we are announcing Private Service Connect is generally available in all Google Cloud regions.
Private Service Connect allows you to create private and secure connections from your cloud networks to services like Cloud Storage or Cloud Bigtable and third-party services like Elastic, MongoDB or Snowflake. It creates service endpoints in your VPCs that provide private connectivity and policy enforcement, allowing you to easily connect to services across different networks and organizations.
Customers told us they want to consume services faster while making sure that the connectivity is private and secure. In the past, achieving this was a challenge: networking teams had to negotiate IP address blocks, mutually agree on policies and coordinate as applications evolved to newer versions. With Private Service Connect, you can delegate the consumption and delivery of services to different teams without having to coordinate between teams.
How it works
Private Service Connect makes it easy to consume services by leveraging service endpoints that are locally managed. The services can be in different projects or managed by different organizations. Access to the service is controlled by strict governance and IAM policies. Application teams and developers can focus on delivering their services easily by exposing their ‘service attachment’. No more worrying about networking constructs—Private Service Connect takes care of connecting to the service on the Google backbone for them.
Benefits to our partners
Being able to consume services from a variety of software vendors and service providers makes it possible for enterprises to innovate faster. For that, developers need to be able to compose services from third-party vendors, Google managed services, as well as their own services. To help, third-party partners can use Private Service Connect to deliver multi-tenant services securely and at massive scale, and make the connectivity to their services appear as if they are running on the enterprises’ network. Private Service Connect will also integrate with Service Directory to register many producer services, making service consumption even simpler.
“In today’s environment, where seamless access to real-time market information and the ability to handle increasingly vast volumes of data is essential, our clients are demanding native connectivity in the cloud. Google’s Private Service Connect offers the performance and reliability required by the types of mission critical apps that rely on Bloomberg’s tick for tick market data feed, B-PIPE.” —Cory Albert, Global Head of Cloud Strategy, Enterprise Data at Bloomberg
“One of the key goals for Elastic on Google Cloud is to monitor and protect our customers’ data. Google Cloud’s Private Service Connect with Elastic Cloud furthers our commitment to our customers that together we make it quick, easy and secure to gain insights and intelligence from their data.” —Uri Cohen, Product Lead for Elastic Cloud
“MongoDB’s partnership with Google is an integral part of our strategy to support modern apps and mission-critical databases and to become a cloud data company. Private Service Connect allows our customers to connect to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud seamlessly and securely and we’re excited for customers to have this additional and important capability.”—Andrew Davidson, VP of Cloud Product, MongoDB
Check out the Google Cloud Console to try it today.
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
What’s New in Retail: Bits from Google Cloud’s Retail & Consumer Goods Summit
Today we’re hosting our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit, a digital event dedicated to helping leading retailers and brands digitally transform their business. For me, this is a personally exciting moment, as I see tremendous opportunities for those companies that choose to focus on their customers and leverage technology to elevate
How PLAID’S Multi-cloud Approach with Anthos Clusters on AWS Drives Higher Business Growth
Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Naohiko Takemura, Head of Engineering, and Kosukex Oya, Engineer, both from Japanese customer experience platform PLAID. The company runs its platform in a multicloud environment through Anthos clusters on AWS and shares more on its experiences and best practices. At PLAID, our mission is to maximize the value
Swiggy: Delivering Local Food Within 40 Minutes
Founded in 2014, Swiggy started small, delivering food to a few neighborhoods in Bengaluru, India. As the company grew, the team wanted a mapping technology that could help expand the service throughout India. Swiggy needed a scalable mapping platform that covered a wide geographic area and offered tools to help
How Smart Parking Transformed into a Data-Intelligent Business
Google Cloud Results Reduced smart parking/smart city IoT installation and operational support effort by more than halfEnabled development of a Smart Cloud IoT platform in just four monthsDemocratised data access and use across the organisationBuilt core infrastructure in under 4 months Smart Parking’s core product is a sensor-based system called
