The value of streaming analytics comes from the insights a business draws from instantaneous data processing, and the timely responses it can implement to adapt its product or service for a better customer experience. “Instantaneous data insights,” however, is a concept that varies with each use case. Some businesses optimize their data analysis for speed, while others optimize for execution cost. 

In this post, we’ll offer some tips on estimating the cost of a job in Dataflow, Google Cloud’s fully managed streaming and batch analytics service. Dataflow provides the ability to optimize a streaming analytics job through its serverless approach to resource provisioning and management. It automatically partitions your data and distributes your worker code to Compute Engine instances for parallel processing, optimizes potentially costly operations such as data aggregations, and provides on-the-fly adjustments with features like autoscaling and dynamic work rebalancing. 

The flexibility that Dataflow’s adaptive resource allocation offers is powerful; it takes away the overhead of estimating workloads to avoid paying for unutilized resources or causing failures due to the lack of processing capacity. Adaptive resource allocation can give the impression that cost estimation is unpredictable too. But it doesn’t have to be. To help you add predictability, our Dataflow team ran some simulations that provide useful mechanisms you can use when estimating the cost of any of your Dataflow jobs. 

The main insight we found from the simulations is that the cost of a Dataflow job increases linearly when sufficient resource optimization is achieved. Under this premise, running small load experiments to find your job’s optimal performance provides you with a throughput factor that you can then use to extrapolate your job’s total cost. At a high level, we recommend following these steps to estimate the cost of your Dataflow jobs: 

1. Design small load tests that help you reach 80% to 90% of resource utilization
2. Use the throughput of this pipeline as your throughput factor
3. Extrapolate your throughput factor to your production data size and calculate the number of workers you’ll need to process it all
4. Use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate your job cost

This mechanism works well for simple jobs, such as a streaming job that moves data from Pub/Sub to BigQuery or a batch job that moves text from Cloud Storage to BigQuery. In this post, we will walk you through the process we followed to prove that throughput factors can be linearly applied to estimate total job costs for Dataflow.  

Finding the throughput factor for a streaming Dataflow job

To calculate the throughput factor of a streaming Dataflow job, we selected one of the most common use cases: ingesting data from Google’s Pub/Sub, transforming it using Dataflow’s streaming engine, then pushing the new data to BigQuery tables. We created a simulated Dataflow job that mirrored a recent client’s use case, which was a job that read 10 subscriptions from Pub/Sub as a JSON payload. Then, the 10 pipelines were flattened and pushed to 10 different BigQuery tables using dynamic destinations and BigQueryIO, as shown in the image below.

The team ran 11 small load tests for this job. The first few tests were focused on finding the job’s optimal throughput and resource allocation to calculate the job’s throughput factor. 

For the tests, we generated messages in Pub/Sub that were 500 KB on average, and we adjusted the number of messages per topic to obtain the total loads to feed each test. We tested a range of loads from 3MB/s to 250MB/s. The table below shows five of the most representative jobs with their adjusted parameters:

In order to ensure maximum resource utilization, we monitored the backlog of each test using the backlog graph in the Dataflow interface. We recommend targeting an 80% to 90% utilization so that your pipeline has enough capacity to handle small load increases. We considered 86% to 91% of CPU utilization to be our optimal utilization. In this case, it meant a 2.5MB/s per virtual CPU (vCPU) load. This is job #4 on the table above. In all tests, we used n1-standard-2 machines, which are the recommended type for streaming jobs and have two vCPUs. The rest of the tests were focused on proving that resources scale linearly using the optimal throughput, and we confirmed it.

Using the throughput factor to estimate the approximate total cost of a streaming job

Let’s assume that our full-scale job runs with a throughput of 1GB/s and runs five hours per month. Our throughput factor estimates that 2.5MB/s is the ideal throughput per worker using the n1-standard-2 machines. To support a 1GB/s throughput, we’ll need approximately 400 workers, so 200 n1-standard-2 machines.

We entered this data in the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator and found that the total cost of our full-scale job is estimated at $166.30/month. In addition to worker costs, there is also the cost of streaming data processed when you use the streaming engine. This data is priced by volume measured in gigabytes, and is typically between 30% to 50% of the worker costs. For our use case, we took a conservative approach and estimated 50%, totaling $83.15 per month. The total cost of our use case is $249.45 per month.

Finding the throughput factor for a simple batch Dataflow job

The most common use case in batch analysis using Dataflow is transferring text from Cloud Storage to BigQuery. Our small load experiments read a CSV file from Cloud Storage and transformed it into a TableRow, which was then pushed into BigQuery in batch mode. The source was split into 1 GB files. We ran tests with file sizes from 10GB to 1TB to demonstrate that optimal resource allocation scales linearly. Here are the results of these tests:

These tests demonstrated that batch analysis applies autoscaling efficiently. Once your job finds an optimized resource utilization, it scales to allocate the resources needed to complete the job with a consistent price per unit of processed data in a similar processing time.

Let’s assume that our real scale job here processes 10TB of data, given that our estimated cost using resources in us-central1 is about $0.0017/GB of processed data. The total cost of our real scale job would be about $18.06. This estimation follows this equation: cost(y) = cost(x) * Y/X, where cost(x) is the cost of your optimized small load test, X is the amount of data processed in your small load test, and Y is the amount of data processed in your real scale job. 

The key in this and the previous examples is to design small-load experiments to find your optimized pipeline setup. This setup will give you the parameters for a throughput factor that you can scale to estimate the resources needed to run your real scale job. You can then input these resource estimations in the Pricing Calculator to calculate your total job cost. 

Today at Google Cloud Next we are announcing innovations that will enable data teams to simplify how they work with data and derive value from it faster. These new solutions will help organizations build modern data architectures with real-time analytics to power innovative, mission-critical, data-driven applications. 

Too often, even the best minds in data are constrained by ineffective systems and technologies. A recent study showed that only 32% of companies surveyed gained value from their data investments. Previous approaches have resulted in difficult to access, slow, unreliable, complex, and fragmented systems. 

At Google Cloud, we are committed to changing this reality by helping customers simplify their approach to data to build their data clouds. Google Cloud’s data platform is simply unmatched for speed, scale, security, and reliability for any size organization with built-in, industry-leading machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and an open standards-based approach.

Vertex AI and data platform services unlock rapid ML modeling 

With the launch of Vertex AI in May 2021, we empowered data scientists and engineers to build reliable, standardized AI pipelines that take advantage of the power of Google Cloud’s data pipelines. Today, we are taking this a step further with the launch of Vertex AI Workbench, a unified user experience to build and deploy ML models faster, accelerating time-to-value for data scientists and their organizations. We’ve integrated data engineering capabilities directly into the data science environment, which lets you ingest and analyze data, and deploy and manage ML models, all from a single interface.

Data scientists can now build and train models 5X faster on Vertex AI than on traditional notebooks. This is primarily enabled by integrations across data services (like Dataproc, BigQuery, Dataplex, and Looker), which significantly reduce context switching. The unified experience of Vertex AI let’s data scientists coordinate, transform, secure and monitor Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) from within a single interface, for their long-running, self-improving, and safely-managed AI services.

“As per IDC’s AI StrategiesView 2021, model development duration, scalable deployment, and model management are three of the top five challenges in scaling AI initiatives,” said Ritu Jyoti, Group Vice President, AI and Automation Research Practice at IDC. “Vertex AI Workbench provides a collaborative development environment for the entire ML workflow – connecting data services such as BigQuery and Spark on Google Cloud, to Vertex AI and MLOps services. As such, data scientists and engineers will be able to deploy and manage more models, more easily and quickly, from within one interface.”

Ecommerce company, Wayfair, has transformed its merchandising capabilities with data and AI services. “At Wayfair, data is at the center of our business. With more than 22 million products from more than 16,000 suppliers, the process of helping customers find the exact right item for their needs across our vast ecosystem presents exciting challenges,” said Matt Ferrari, Head of Ad Tech, Customer Intelligence, and Machine Learning; Engineering and Product at Wayfair. “From managing our online catalog and inventory, to building a strong logistics network, to making it easier to share product data with suppliers, we rely on services including BigQuery to ensure that we are able to access high-performance, low-maintenance data at scale. Vertex AI Workbench and Vertex AI Training accelerate our adoption of highly scalable model development and training capabilities.”

BigQuery Omni: Breaking data silos with cross-cloud analytics and governance

Businesses across a variety of industries are choosing Google Cloud to develop their data cloud strategies and better predict business outcomes — BigQuery is a key part of that solution portfolio. To address complex data management across hybrid and multicloud environments, this month we are announcing the general availability of BigQuery Omni, which allows customers to analyze data across Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. Healthcare provider, Johnson and Johnson was able to combine data in Google Cloud and AWS S3 with BigQuery Omni without needing data to migrate. 

This flexible, fully-managed, cross-cloud analytics solution allows you to cost-effectively and securely answer questions and share results from a single pane of glass across your datasets, wherever you are. In addition to these multicloud capabilities, Dataplex will be generally available this quarter to provide an intelligent data fabric that enables you to keep your data distributed while making it securely accessible to all your analytics tools.

Spark on Google Cloud simplifies data engineering 

To help make data engineering even easier, we are announcing the general availability of Spark on Google Cloud, the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for the Google Cloud data platform. This allows data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to use Spark from their preferred interfaces without data replication or custom integrations. Using this capability, developers can write applications and pipelines that autoscale without any manual infrastructure provisioning or tuning. This new service makes Spark a first class citizen on Google Cloud, and enables customers to get started in seconds and scale infinitely, regardless if you start in BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataplex, or Vertex AI.

Spanner meets PostgreSQL: global, relational scale with a popular interface

We’re continuing to make Cloud Spanner, our fully managed, globally scalable, relational database, available to more customers now with a PostgreSQL interface, now in preview. With this new PostgreSQL interface, enterprises can take advantage of Spanner’s unmatched global scale, 99.999% availability, and strong consistency using skills and tools from the popular PostgreSQL ecosystem. 

This interface supports Spanner’s rich feature set that uses the most popular PostgreSQL data types and SQL features to reduce the barrier to entry for building transformational applications. Using the tools and skills they already have, developer teams gain flexibility and peace of mind because the schemas and queries they build against the PostgreSQL interface can be easily ported to another Postgres environment. Complete this form to request access to the preview.

Our commitment to the PostgreSQL ecosystem has been long standing. Customers choose Cloud SQL for the flexibility to run PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server workloads. Cloud SQL provides a rich extension collection, configuration flags, and open ecosystem, without the hassle of database provisioning, storage capacity management, or other time-consuming tasks.

Auto Trader has migrated approximately 65% of their Oracle footprint to Cloud SQL, which remains a strategic priority for the company. Using Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and Looker to facilitate access to data for their users, and with Cloud SQL’s fully managed services, Auto Trader’s release cadence has improved by over 140% (year-over-year), enabling an impressive peak of 458 releases to production in a single day.

Looker integrations make augmented analytics a reality

We are announcing a new integration between Tableau and Looker that will allow customers to operationalize analytics and more effectively scale their deployments with trusted, real-time data, and less maintenance for developers and administrators. Tableau customers will soon be able to leverage Looker’s semantic model, enabling new levels of data governance while democratizing access to data. They will also be able to pair their enterprise semantic layer with Tableau’s leading analytics platform. The future might be uncertain, but together with our partners we can help you plan for it. 

We remain committed to developing new ways to help organizations go beyond traditional business intelligence with Looker. In addition to innovating within Looker, we’re continuing to integrate within other parts of Google Cloud. Today, we are sharing new ways to help customers deliver trusted data experiences and leverage augmented analytics to take intelligent action. 

First, we’re enabling you to democratize access to trusted data in tools where you are already familiar. Connected Sheets already allows you to interactively explore BigQuery data in a familiar spreadsheet interface and will soon be able to leverage the governed data and business metrics in Looker’s semantic model. It will be available in preview by the end of this year. 

Another integration we’re announcing is Looker’s Solution for Contact Center AI, which helps you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of your customers’ full journey by unlocking insights from all of your company’s first-party data, such as contextualizing support calls to make sure your most valuable customers receive the best service. 

We’re also sharing the new Looker Block for Healthcare NLP API, which provides simplified access to intelligent insights from unstructured medical text. Compatible with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), healthcare providers, payers, and pharma companies can quickly understand the context and relationships of medical concepts within the text, and in turn, can begin to link this to other clinical data sources for additional AI and ML actions. 

Bringing the best of Google together with Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud

We are thrilled to announce the preview of Google Earth Engine on Google Cloud. This launch makes Google Earth Engine’s 50+ petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial data sets available for planetary-scale analysis. Google Cloud customers will be able to integrate Earth Engine with BigQuery, Google Cloud’s ML technologies, and Google Maps Platform. This gives data teams a way to better understand how the world is changing and what actions they can take — from sustainable sourcing, to saving energy and materials costs, to understanding business risks, to serving new customer needs. 

For over a decade, Earth Engine has supported the work of researchers and NGOs from around the world, and this new integration brings the best of Google and Google Cloud together to empower enterprises to create a sustainable future for our planet and for your business.

At Google Cloud, we are deeply grateful to work with companies of all sizes, and across industries, to build their data clouds. Join my keynote session to hear how organizations are leveraging the full power of data, from databases to analytics that support decision making to AI and ML that predict and automate the future. We’ll also highlight our latest product innovations for BigQuery, Spanner, Looker, and Vertex AI.

I can’t wait to hear how you will turn data into intelligence and look forward to connecting with you.

Dr. Elliot Smith cannot be accused of lacking ambition. A high achiever with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and a specialist in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, Smith aims to deliver top quality healthcare to anyone in the world — regardless of their location or wealth.

Dr. Smith has already made strides on this journey with his Brisbane, Queensland-headquartered business, Maxwell MRI. “I saw there was a big gap in the market around automating the diagnosis of health conditions,” he says. “Existing processes were typically manual and involved a lot of people.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can remove a key obstacle to scaling out medicine and improve the efficiency and accuracy of diagnosing conditions, the healthcare entrepreneur believes.

“Our grand vision is to build an AI doctor that anyone can receive affordable support from and connect to in order to obtain results,” explains Dr. Smith.

Maxwell MRI presently enables clinicians to submit anonymised MRI scans to a machine learning enabled AI platform to help diagnose prostate cancer. The service is sold to clinicians who can then charge a per-session fee to clients. As well as obtaining results for individual cases, the MRI scans and associated information is used to ‘train’ the platform to deliver accurate diagnoses faster and in a more affordable way than existing systems do.

Dr. Smith and his team started by running a number of functions and processes on a single server with graphics processing units (GPUs) and sizable hard disk capacity. However, this infrastructure could not scale to support the planned growth of the business. Each case Maxwell MRI processes involves about 200MB of data in MRI scans alone. Once supplementary data, blood test result, pathology results and genetic information is included, this load can reach more than 1GB of data per patient.

The business aimed to process 150,000 cases by the end of 2018. This required a service that could deliver massive scale in data storage and compute, and could easily be accessed from any location. “We wanted to move from three GPUs to 30 GPUs without having to buy more servers or other associated equipment, so the cloud was the natural next step,” says Dr. Smith.

Maxwell MRI evaluated Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and determined that the managed services component of GCP would remove the burden of infrastructure deployment and administration. In addition, Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine would enable the business to scale to as many GPUs as needed to meet demand.

Maxwell MRI started with some small experiments to determine that GCP met all its requirements and completed its migration to the platform in February 2017. “We really started to scale up the data we had and consequently our computing requirements at that time,” Dr. Smith says.

The Maxwell MRI platform features an upload service that enables clinicians to upload imaging and associated data. This service triggers several different upload pipelines that clean and standardise data. They then write imaging data to Google Cloud Storage, and more structured data to a combination of Google Cloud Datastore and Google Cloud Spanner.

The platform then converts the information into records that can be used to ‘train’ new machine learning configurations or run evaluations through existing machine learning pipelines.

“The tasks we perform including segmenting various anatomical regions for analysis and sending those results back into Google Cloud Storage,” says Dr. Smith. “This then commences that repeated process of running Google Cloud Dataflow pipelines and machine learning algorithms, and presenting those outcomes back to the clinicians.”

Existing Literature Validated

The data processed and analysed to date has, Dr Smith says, enabled Maxwell MRI to help validate existing literature that indicates clinicians lack confidence in existing early-stage testing procedures for prostate cancer. This prompts them to move quickly to the biopsy stage to assure themselves their diagnosis is valid. “New technologies have a lot of potential to rectify this situation and guide treatment to be more accurate, specific and cost-effective,” he says.

Results Delivered in 10-15 Minutes

More specifically, using GCP has enabled Maxwell MRI to guarantee to clinicians that results will be delivered within minutes. “Clinicians are used to getting results back in two days to a week,” says Dr. Smith. “We’re saying that with our platform running on GCP we’ll deliver you results in 10 to 15 minutes, regardless of the number of patients coming in.”

Running on GCP has enabled the business to accelerate its development cycles, test new ideas easily on a subset of data, test in parallel and deliver new services considerably faster than in another environment. In addition, the flexible GCP charging model aligned with the ability to scale compute capabilities quickly and easily has enabled the fledgling business to control its costs.

Google technologies are poised to play an integral role in the business’s future. “With Google available, it doesn’t make sense for us to use our own infrastructure,” Dr. Smith says. “Our expertise in AI, machine learning and clinical engagement complements cloud platform specialties of infrastructure, managed services and ease of use. We see a bright future ahead in helping to transform healthcare globally.”