To help improve your security posture, improve the reliability of your applications, and reduce configuration drift in your environment, we’re excited to announce a new Anthos reference architecture.

Written in collaboration across our product, engineering, support, and field teams, this new reference architecture helps you plan, deploy, and configure the required components for Anthos hybrid environments.

Anthos hybrid environments give you the flexibility to deploy on-premises components that run container-based workloads and VMs using Anthos clusters on VMware and Anthos clusters on bare metal. You can continue to utilize existing investments in your on-premises infrastructure, and start to add components like Anthos Config Management. When you’re ready to bring everything together, you can add additional Google Cloud-based services like Artifact Registry, Cloud Monitoring, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).

The following sneak peek covers some of our best practices for architecting an Anthos hybrid environment. For more detailed guidance and planning information, see the full Anthos hybrid environment reference architecture.

When you design and deploy an Anthos hybrid environment, we recommend that you use two or more on-premises computing customer sites and two or more Google Cloud regions. In your sites, run multiple clusters. This approach is recommended for several reasons, such as:

• Disaster recovery. If one cluster or site fails, you can continue to run workloads.
• Multiple environments, like production and staging, to test infrastructure changes.
• Different cluster types in each environment: admin clusters and user clusters. This approach separates administrative resources, which is a security best-practice.

The following diagram shows an example of an Anthos hybrid environment that’s spread across customer sites and regions, with different clusters for admin and user workloads and for production and staging:

In each site, you can use Anthos clusters on VMware or Anthos clusters on bare metal. For both products, we recommend the following:

• Use a highly available (HA) control plane with three members for continued control plane availability concurrently with operating system upgrades, control plane software updates, or single-machine hardware or kernel failures.
• Deploy two admin clusters so that admin cluster configuration changes and updates can be tested in the staging environment first.

The following diagram shows an example of Anthos clusters on bare metal with control plane and worker nodes spread across physical machines. With Anthos clusters on VMware, the control plane and worker nodes are spread across VMware VMs:

Configure your on-premises clusters and applications to send logging and monitoring data back to Google Cloud for analysis and review. Different personas should only be granted access to the environments they need. The following diagram shows how application developers and application or platform operators can then view logging and monitoring data in Google Cloud:

Use Anthos Config Management to manage Kubernetes objects in your clusters. Anthos Config Management is a GitOps-style tool that uses a Git repository or Open Container Initiative (OCI) as its storage mechanism and source of truth. Git provider workflows allow multiple stakeholders to participate in review of changes.

As shown in the following diagram, a common Anthos Config Management deployment uses one folder containing configuration for all clusters. Use separate additional folders to hold configuration data, one for application:

Plan and implement a way to secure the network traffic in your Anthos hybrid environment. The following services help with authentication, connectivity, and communication in a cluster:

• Anthos Identity Service connects clusters to on-site identity providers to authenticate local access.
• Connect gateway and workforce identity federation can provide secure cloud-mediated access to mobile workforce clusters without using a VPN.
• Workload Identity provides on-premises workloads with managed short-lifetime credentials for access to cloud resources.
• Anthos Service Mesh encrypts and controls communication between services in the same cluster.

The following diagram shows how Anthos Service Mesh can control the flow of traffic between services within your clusters:

You don’t have to implement all these cloud-based services as part of your initial on-premises deployments. As you become more comfortable and want to expand your capabilities, you can add in some of these hybrid offerings. But, we hope that this blog post has given you some ideas to think about when you start to plan and design your own Anthos hybrid environments.

For more detailed guidance and planning information, see the full Anthos hybrid environment reference architecture. Let us know what you think!

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

Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.

This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.

At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.

Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.

Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.

They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.

With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.

Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”  

In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:

• BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
• Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
• Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
• Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.

Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.

“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”

Today, retail customers have more digital-first, convenient ways of shopping than ever before. And APIs are one of the critical pieces of technology that have made this possible by giving retailers the ability to transform their systems and processes in an efficient and quick way. 

APIs have allowed retailers to be more accessible to their remote customers with services such as order online and pick up in-store, curbside pickup, fulfilment of orders through delivery partners, and personalized recommendations while shopping online etc. These capabilities have been especially important over the last year, as the world has changed at a rapid pace.  With many changes to customer interactions yet to come, APIs will continue to play a pivotal role in helping retailers to further personalize digital experiences and streamline their operations.

In Google Cloud’s State of API Economy 2021 report, 32% of organizations reported increasing their digital transformation investments, while 16% stated they would completely change their strategies to become digital-first companies. Moreover, by early 2021, online sales had already reached levels previously predicted for 2022, and APIs will become the foundation for business resilience and growth in retail over the next five years. 

APIs are at the forefront of retail innovation

Retailers leverage APIs to experiment and connect teams for faster collaboration, helping them to use data for revolutionary experiences that increase customer engagement. 

They allow retailers to innovate in new ways internally, externally, and across market borders. Modern digital experiences are built from a variety of data and functionality, throughout the entire supply chain, across multiple systems, and often belonging to a variety of services across distribution channels. APIs are the digital nervous system connecting everything together. They help retailers enhance internal efficiency, partner at scale, and leverage cutting-edge services such as machine learning—all because they make various kinds of technological value interoperable and easy for developers to access and reuse. In our research, 52% of retailers said APIs accelerate innovation by enabling partners to leverage digital assets at scale while 36% say they see APIs as strategic assets for creating business value.

Let’s take a look at some retail use cases and real world examples that are powered by APIs.

Deliver personalized customer experiences

Retailers are using APIs to create interactive and predictive personalized experiences.These range from “magic” mirrors that reflect personalized clothing, accessory, and even makeup suggestions; to smartphone alerts that encourage shoppers to check out special items while they’re browsing in the store; offers of coupons; and more. Behind the scenes APIs interconnect between the store and consumer data, business intelligence, and application security to bring these innovative experiences to life. 

Streamline retail operations

APIs can help any retail business to operate more efficiently, from human resources, customer service, and distribution, to invoicing, marketing, and compliance. For example, APIs make it super easy and simple to onboard, manage and train employees and contractors. They can help connect various internal and external third-party systems for use cases like tracking real-time package status and gathering consumer shopping insights.

Conrad Electronic, German retailer of electronic products, demonstrates how API management can lead to enhanced efficiency. They used Apigee to build a tool that provides store employees and visitors with product, service, and warranty information on their mobile devices. The company was able to not only use data to enhance offers and services to their customers, but also streamline operations because more than 60% of their customers were using the API-enabled tool.

Power the future of retail with APIs

APIs are key to driving innovation across all areas of retail. They are enabling retailers to not only implement continuous digital transformation but also develop tools that navigate disruptions as they occur.

Retailers are already harnessing the power of APIs to prepare for:

• Borderless channels across markets that allow for the free flow of products and shopping experiences in the way consumers want them.
• Interactive and intelligent merchandising that evolves in realtime to predict consumer needs and bolsters buying decisions.
• Autonomous and virtual shopping experiences that develop deeper consumer interactions and product insights.

To learn more about how APIs can help drive innovation, download our latest eBook. In this eBook, you’ll find more retail-specific API use cases, detailed real world examples and insights into how APIs are shaping the future of retail.

Manage APIs effectively

As you grow your API program, and start powering business-critical applications and front-end experiences with APIs, you need an effective way to manage and scale them. This is where Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform can help. Top retailers across the globe use Apigee to gain control over and insights into their APIs and enables them to manage end-to-end API lifecycle. Click here to learn more about Apigee.