Three New Features in Cloud SQL for SQL Server Extends its Functionality - Build What's Next
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Three New Features in Cloud SQL for SQL Server Extends its Functionality

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Google Cloud announces three functionalities for Cloud SQL for SQL Server as a response to the requests from its enterprise customers. Read the blog to get started with Cross-region Replica, Active Directory Integration and SQL Server 2019.

As a product with a long history in the database ecosystem, SQL Server offers numerous native capabilities that help provide scalability and security to its users.  However, it can be time consuming and complex to take advantage of these features. Google Cloud SQL for SQL Server saves your team time by eliminating much of the unnecessary toil (OS patching, version upgrades, replica setup etc.) while still allowing you to leverage the functionality you’re used to. Three new features for Cloud SQL for SQL Server take its functionality even further. 

A few months ago, we announced Active Directory (AD) integration had entered preview; now, it is generally available. Equally exciting, we are releasing Cross-Region Replicas (based on SQL Server’s Always On Availability Groups) in preview.  Finally, you can try out this great new functionality in our managed database service with the latest release of SQL Server 2019, which is now generally available.  

Simple and Secure Windows Authentication with Active Directory

As one of the most requested and critical security capabilities for Cloud SQL for SQL Server, we are pleased to now provide Windows Authentication via Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory as generally available. Customers should feel confident onboarding their business critical production workloads to the managed service while still maintaining the authentication best practices they rely on today.  While identities can be created and managed directly within the managed AD service, many customers choose to establish a trust relationship with their existing on-prem AD footprint to leverage existing identity objects.

What is Cross-Region Replica for SQL Server?

Bringing parity in the Cloud SQL portfolio alongside MySQL and PostgreSQL, Cross-region replica makes it easy to create a fully managed read replica in a different region than that of the primary instance. You can create a replica in any Google Cloud region.  The difference for SQL Server is the Availability Group based architecture that paves the way for the service to continue to offer more core compatibility with the SQL Server features our customers depend on. Cloud SQL greatly simplifies the traditional process of provisioning Availability Groups and streamlines it into a few-step workflow.

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Using read replicas will allow you to horizontally scale your read workloads. For example, you can configure a reporting dashboard to work against a read replica, and because it’s only reading, it will not affect the primary instance. You can also promote replicas to be Cloud SQL instances and that could help you reduce your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). It can help you with the RPO because the data is constantly replicated and the replica is probably more up to date than your latest backup. It can help you with RTO because promoting the replica, especially in an automated way, is a relatively short process. To get started, check out the documentation for Cross-Region Replica

What’s new in SQL Server 2019?

Providing the most current major and minor versions is a key aspect of maintaining compatibility and security for your database workload. Cloud SQL provides an easy provisioning experience that will now allow you to select from four editions of SQL Server 2019 similar to our current SQL Server 2017 options of Enterprise, Standard, Web, and Express. A few key considerations as you are evaluating the new version should be:

  • Compatibility level – A newly created database on a Cloud SQL for SQL Server 2019 Databases instance has a compatibility level of 150 by default.  
  • Accelerated Database Recovery – Allows instances to reduce the availability impact of restarts and shutdowns.
  • TempDB changes – While we recently provided you more control to manage your tempdb files, 2019 also brings optimization to improve performance as well.
  • Intelligent query processing – SQL Server 2019 provides direct improvements to the query engine itself which may improve overall query processing and performance.
  • Many other performance improvements – capabilities such as verbose truncation warnings, resumable index build, and others.  Learn more about supported features here.

To get started, check out documentation for  SQL Server 2019

In conclusion

These three features have been the most common requests from our enterprise customers. Finally, you can bring your own Active Directory domain for SQL Server authentication and authorization, use the latest features from SQL Server 2019 and scale your read workloads as well as leveraging the cross regional replicas for faster disaster-recovery.

To get started, check out the documentation for Cross-Region ReplicaActive Directory, and SQL Server 2019. All are available with any new instance created via the console or API, simply follow the instructions in the documentation.

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Cart.com to Transform e-Commerce for Brands Globally

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Cart.com supported by the Startup Program by Google Cloud and Google Cloud solutions is set out to democratize e-commerce by empowering brands of all sizes with its unified platform to unlock customer data and business value. Read now!

The ecommerce playing field has been hard to navigate for most retailers, and Cart.com is on a mission to change that. Traditionally, retailers needing to run their online store, order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, and other essential activities have had to cobble together systems to get the capabilities they need – much less having access to analytics across these functions. The result is costly, siloed ecommerce operations that are difficult to manage and scale.

It’s clearly not a formula for success, yet that’s the reality facing most retailers. Cart.com, in contrast, has set out to democratize ecommerce by giving brands of all sizes the full capabilities they need to take on the world’s largest online retailers. Our end-to-end environment empowers retailers to keep more of their revenue, set up proven strategies for managing all aspects of their business, and act on valuable insights from customer data every step of the way.

Together with our talented team, we’re building a unified ecommerce platform that already provides value to many leading or up and coming brands including Whataburger, GUESS, Dr. Scholl’s, Rowing Blazers, and Howler Bros. 

We’re excited about the opportunity ahead as we reimagine traditional approaches to online sales, fulfillment, marketing, accessing growth capital, providing a unified view of all ecommerce and marketing analytics, and other activities. Expectations for Cart.com are high, and we are building a company that can scale to $100B in revenue and beyond. Supported by the Startup Program by Google Cloud and Google Cloud solutions, we’re establishing a technology platform to transform all aspects of ecommerce for brands worldwide. 

Partner in disruption

At Cart.com, we’re currently targeting an underserved market. Our ideal customer is beyond demonstrating product-market-fit and is now at an inflection point seeking a growth opportunity. Typically, those companies are generating between $1M and $100M in annual revenue. We’ve seen an enthusiastic response from brands and retailers as well as investors, with backing from investors in just over a year totaling $143 million in three funding rounds.

Our strategy is to build an integrated ecommerce model that combines best-of-breed solutions, many of which we gain through acquisitions and then build upon to provide a streamlined and fully integrated experience for our brands. We’ve made seven acquisitions so far to round out our online store, order fulfillment, marketing services, customer service, and we have launched some integral partnerships including easy access to growth capital through our relationship with Clearco and product protection for customers on every purchase with Extend. Instead of acquiring a data company, we’re building our data platform on Google Cloud, across each operating function for a single-view for brands to harness actionable data. We see Google Cloud as the leader for data management, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Other reasons why we’re building our business on Google Cloud include scalability, excellence, security, reach, and data analytics that are far superior to other environments.

We also feel a cultural and mission alignment with Google Cloud and envision leaning into a long-term partnership of marketing, selling, and disrupting the disruptors together. Equally important to us are the investments Google Cloud is willing to make in early-stage companies like ours. The support through the Google Cloud for Startups program has been outstanding.

Built on Google Cloud

A wide range of Google Cloud solutions provide the foundation for our platform. For instance, Cloud Pub/Sub keeps our services communicating with one another. We rely on fully managed relational databases, like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner, to securely handle the huge volume of brand and shopper data generated every day.

Cloud Run allowed us to develop inside of containers before our Kubernetes infrastructure was ready to go. Now, we are taking advantage of all the capabilities in Google Kubernetes Engine. BigQuery integrates with all Google Cloud solutions and offers true data streaming natively out of the box, along with Dataflow for advanced analytics. We also use Container Registry to store and manage our Docker container images. Right now, we’re testing Cloud Composer to evaluate using it for data workflow orchestration instead of Apache Airflow.

The openness of the Google Cloud environment is further enabled by Anthos, which we may deploy soon to perform data integrations quickly as we acquire more companies over the next year. For example, if we acquire a company using Azure, we can easily align it with our Google Cloud ecosystem.

Enabling ecommerce 2.0

Recently, our team has been experimenting with Google Cloud Vertex AI and the fully managed services of AI deployment and ML operations. The capabilities would save us substantial time in the management of the ML lifecycle which allows us to focus more on developing proprietary AI that will transform commerce at scale.

Because Google Cloud is so far ahead in data science, our teams benefit from deep Google Cloud expertise as we look to provide brands with unmatched insights into customers to improve services and revenue. We’re also planning to test Recommendations AI among other tools to deploy customer product recommendations and personalization as turnkey productized offerings. Moving forward, we will likely use Bigtable to aid in serving machine learning to hundreds of thousands of brands due to its low latency and scalability.

Fanatical about brand success

We know that our work with Google Cloud for Startups and use of Google Cloud solutions for best-in-class data management, analytics, ML, and AI will enable us to offer even more transformative services to brands.

We also see the opportunity to use our platform and customer insights to break down barriers between brands, enabling retailers to share information and work better together when it’s in their best interests. What we’re building today on Google Cloud is fundamentally changing what’s possible for retailers of any size everywhere. 

As a startup, when recruiting talent or working with prospective customers, it helps to share our success with Google Cloud. We view them as an extension of the Cart.com team. It also validates our business as we continue building a more integrated, holistic approach to commerce that opens new opportunities and drives growth for brands worldwide.

For more details about Cart.com’s vision for unified ecommerce, check out our video.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

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NCR’s Emerald Leverages Google Cloud to Help Grocers Boost Operational Agility

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NCR and Google Cloud team up to transform grocers' legacy retail systems and drive operational agility to cater to their consumers' evolved shopping habits. The NCR Emerald platform leverages Google Cloud's scalability and helps grocers curb Capex.

In recent years, the grocery industry has had to shift to facilitate a wider variety of checkout journeys for customers. This has meant ensuring a richer transaction mix, including mobile shopping, online shopping, in-store checkout, cashierless checkout or any combination thereof like buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS).  

What’s more, in the past year and a half alone grocers have had to enable consumers new ways to shop for essentials. This has included needing to rapidly integrate or build on-demand delivery apps, offer curbside pickup with near-instant fulfillment as well as support touchless and cashless checkout experiences. Searches on Google Maps for retailers in the US with curbside pickup options have increased by 9000% since March 2020, and we believe these trends from 2020 will continue to define the future of grocery shopping.

The future of grocery will require agility and openness

Firstly, the need to rapidly adapt to changing consumer habits will be the new normal. Grocers will increasingly look to digitally transform legacy retail systems and modernize point of sale (POS) platforms to deliver and scale omnichannel experiences as quickly as possible. This necessitates a more agile and open architectural approach to technology – one built on microservices and leverages APIs so that new applications and experiences can be built, integrated and delivered faster.

Automation and data-driven retailing will be table stakes

In order for retailers to blend what they’re offering in the store with digital experiences more efficiently, they will also need to automate more. For example, with automation and business intelligence, grocers can take labor that might have been tied up with tender operations and checkout and redistribute those resources to restocking shelves, curbside pick-up or improving customer experiences. 

Automation and access to real-time in-store inventory & supply chain data can also help grocers avoid the supply chain challenges seen in the early days of COVID-19. Grocers will need to find ways to leverage automation to ingest, organize, and analyze data from physical store networks, digital channels, distribution centers to better forecast demand and manage future fluctuations.

How NCR and Google Cloud are helping grocers adapt to disruption with operational agility

Helping grocers improve operational agility to address changing consumer shopping habits and to thrive during times of disruption is something that NCR and Google Cloud have teamed up to do. NCR has over 135 years of experience in retail, having invented the cash register and are continuing to help grocers innovate. NCR Emerald builds upon the company’s leadership in POS software and has turned it into a unified platform that helps grocers operate the entire store from front to back. The solution supports cashier-led checkout, self-checkout, integrated payments, merchandising, and enables regional managers and corporate employees access to the analytics and tools needed to optimize loyalty programs and promotions.

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NCR has invested in a comprehensive, agile, and API-led retail architecture that lets grocers continually innovate and design new experiences as customers and the industry evolve. By running Emerald on Google Cloud, NCR can offer the solution on a subscription basis, helping grocers lower upfront capital expenditures and ensuring scalability. What’s more, NCR can tap into Google Cloud’s strength in data, analytics, and openness to deliver three key imperatives. Let’s take a look at each of these below.

Run the way grocers need to while leveraging Google Cloud as a single source of logic

Traditionally the POS system lived in the store. If disaster strikes, people still need access to food and essentials so the grocery store still needs to operate. It hardly gets more mission-critical than that. NCR Emerald is built on microservices, leveraging Kubernetes for front-of-house compute, and VMs (See graphic 1 below). This makes it easy to support lightweight clients accessible by store employees via any range of mobile devices, computer terminals, self-service kiosks, peripheral devices like receipt printers as well as legacy applications.

What’s unique is that because Emerald runs on Google Cloud, it supports all those in-store and digital touchpoints mentioned above, but also allows grocers to run lean. Emerald leverages Google Cloud as a single source of truth and operates a lot of what it does out of logic. Every sales transaction coming from every channel, including e-commerce, can be logged via NCR’s Hosted Service and centralized in BigQuery and Bigtable as a transaction data master. This enables the grocer to manage any transactional use case very consistently, whether it e supporting customers who want to purchase in one store and return in another, offering digital receipts or the ability to exchange online purchases in store. Emerald on Google Cloud can help retailers extend capabilities through the power of the cloud but not need to live exclusively in the cloud. In other words, the solution allows grocers the ability to run the way they need to.

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Enable data-driven and real-time decision making for grocers

Store managers, regional managers, category managers, and others all require different cuts of the data to do their jobs effectively. However, data silos persist and how data is formatted and arranged can still remain pretty static. Therefore allowing users with different roles the ability to view and analyze that data quickly and in different ways continues to be a challenge. 

As mentioned above, Emerald leverages Google Cloud data management solutions as the central repository for transactional, behavioral, and merchandising data. Every transaction from every store and every channel can be stored via NCR Hosted Service on BigQuery and Bigtable. NCR Analytics then harnesses the advanced analytical and data visualization capabilities of Looker to help grocers get a consolidated view of their business across all channels and then allow employees to slice and dice the data they way they need to. NCR Analytics also leverages the power of Google Cloud AI and machine learning to add another level of intelligence to the retailer’s data. For example, store managers can visualize how well they’re using their real estate and see how productive lanes 1-3 are compared with 7-10 or compare self-service versus manned lanes. By mapping to the retailer’s own catalog, they can also break down category-level performance and trends.

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NCR Analytics takes advantage of Google Cloud’s data pipeline to reduce processing time, with scaling and resource management provided out of the box. By letting the cloud store and process the data, NCR is providing the ability for retailers to analyze their data in near real-time across all platforms – a real game changer in the grocery business.

Open APIs let grocers continually enrich the retail experience

Finally, Emerald is built on an API-first architecture managed through Apigee. It uses the power of Apigee as an open API platform to expose how Emerald can work with other NCR applications like loyalty and promotions, and third party applications like mobile ordering and order delivery to enrich the grocery experience for employees and customers. Every API that Emerald uses is available on Apigee, allowing them to share code samples and giving developers the ability to run scripts. This approach can allow retailers the ability to innovate in a fraction of the time and cost, speeding up 3rd party integrations up front and as businesses grow. 

Take, for example, Northgate Market, a chain of 40 stores in California, that were able to transform its digital operations and enable experiences that set it apart from competitors – quickly and simply with Emerald. It took less than 6 months to go from contract to live deployment in the first store. Since then, Northgate Market has been able to extend their intelligence by leveraging the power of Looker and NCR Analytics.

Learn more about how NCR has been able to leverage an open, cloud-enabled architecture to help customers innovate across the retail, hospitality, and banking industries on the webinar “Role of APIs in Digital Transformation”. You can also learn more about how Northgate uses e-commerce to transform customer experience and gain consumer insights.

Case Study

Quantum Metric Increases Business 10-fold

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Would your company like access to a system which you can ask: "Show me high-loyalty customers, located in specific geographic areas, who visited the web site at least five times, based on specific campaigns, and never booked a seat on a flight.” Read this.

At Quantum Metric, we’re in the business of bringing our customers business insights that are based on customer experience data and analytics for mid-market and Fortune 500 companies.

Our software, powered by big data, machine intelligence, and Google Cloud, helps our customers identify, quantify, prioritize and measure opportunities to improve digital experiences.

As companies move to a more agile product lifecycle, including continuous deployment and continuous integration, they’re finding that it’s critical to receive perpetual quantified feedback and insights from their data in real time to understand where the largest opportunities exist. 

Each year, billions of customer interactions are captured through browsers or mobile apps on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. This data, fed into the Quantum Metric platform, can show if a customer had a password problem they couldn’t solve or struggled when trying to purchase something and abandoned their cart.

It also can show if the customer tried in vain to complete an online change to their service provider’s subscription, to reach tech support, or couldn’t find the size or color they were looking for while shopping online.

Most importantly, the Quantum Metric platform quantifies the business value of the issue, helping organizations prioritize where they can make the largest impact to their business.

Success overwhelms our initial architecture
Initially, the Quantum Metric experience analytics software ran on a MySQL open source relational database management system (RDBMS). The MySQL RDBMS worked great for simple queries, when there was a specific question to ask of the data.

Soon, though, we knew we needed to offer more advanced data science capabilities. Our bigger customers wanted to ask questions across very large data sets—days, weeks, months, and years worth of data. They wanted to pose iterative questions using complex filters to answer their most challenging business questions. 

With more complex queries across more data, response times from our RDBMS went from 100 to 500 milliseconds to as long as 20 minutes.

That delay was slowing down our ability and time to insights, which also reduced the value we could provide to our customers, since iterative exploration and analysis requires real-time query responses. Because of the need for real-time responses, there were certain questions that we just weren’t able to ask of the data. It became clear that we needed a much more robust data warehouse solution. 

There were also operational challenges with MySQL and massive-scale data ingestion. We spent a lot of time into the wee hours of the night and morning handling errors and recovering databases.

We tried to address these challenges by sharding, partitioning, and indexing the data to optimize for the types of questions customers were asking. But the problems were escalating and happening more often, from once a month across the customer base to monthly for at least 20 different customers.

We could tune the platform for today and tomorrow’s workload, with good guesses at where indexes could be used, but we simply couldn’t continue to horizontally scale MySQL in a cost-efficient and operationally efficient manner. 

Speed breeds innovation
Once we started exploring options that could better scale with our business, we looked at NoSQL technologies like Cassandra (a partitioned row-store database), MySQL’s Column Store (a columnar store database), and Vertica (a columnar store database)—each with unique ways of handling data storage and accessibility.

But with high volumes of complex queries across large data stores, all of these solutions began to fail, bogged down with multiple, simultaneous users. We could have solved the problems with more raw compute and storage, but it would have been prohibitively expensive to run and require a large team to operate. 

We then decided to try BigQuery, and it was transformative.

We connected our front end to BigQuery via APIs. Once data is 15 minutes old, it is automatically extracted, loaded, and transformed (ETL) to BigQuery.

We continuously update the legacy MySQL RDBMS so its data is integrated with BigQuery data when queries require real-time data. Most query response times are within 100-200 milliseconds, matching what we initially experienced with MySQL.

When traffic from our customers scales up, we can now scale on-demand to accommodate it, thanks to BigQuery’s hundreds of thousands of CPUs. Our customers no longer run into slow response times, and we’ve gained confidence that we can offer them—and their users—advanced insights and better experiences without delay.

More importantly, with this scale of query power, we were able to build data science algorithms into the platform, which iteratively query BigQuery based on the results, and help quantify the impact of a specific issue to a specific segment of users. Adding these capabilities was possible because of the massive scale of BigQuery. 

In addition to new insights and fast response times, we wanted our customers to be able to ask complex questions using very simple language.

For example: “Show me high-loyalty customers, located in specific geographic areas, who visited the web site at least five times, based on specific campaigns, and never booked a seat on a flight.”

This was exactly the kind of query that was used by a major U.S. airline to understand the multi-million dollar impact of a failure affecting their most valuable customers: their high-loyalty members.

And this was all done while maintaining the highest standard of care of customer data and privacy by default, using multiple layers of encryption of data in transit, at rest, and a unique military-grade encryption approach. This approach encrypts PII, including even session cookies, with a RSA-2048 key available only to a select few and used for use cases such as fraud analysis.   

It’s no exaggeration to say that BigQuery has totally transformed our business. It provides the petabyte scale and speed we were missing, in addition to taking care of operational maintenance, a task that was burying our team with MySQL.

We’re now able to support some of the largest companies in the world that require real-time, petabyte-scale analytics. That lets them serve more customers faster with higher quality, and take advantage of BigQuery’s power and scale to innovate.

There are other cloud solutions that can address petabyte analytics, but the most unique value proposition of BigQuery was its on-demand scaling and operational management, with extremely cost-effective pay-as-you-go billing. While today we are at a scale where we have round-the-clock querying needs, our early days had very sporadic query loads where we needed instant scale, then a long lull of nothing. The unique business model of BigQuery’s pay-by-bytes-scanned allowed us to have access to a massive-scale querying platform without breaking the bank. 

Using BigQuery powers better customer experience and reduces purchasing friction
Among the many features of Quantum Metric is the ability to replay online customer sessions. In the example below from a mobile e-commerce site, each action is displayed chronologically. Why did this customer’s transaction fail?

Diving deeper, the session replay shows that the user tried to change the item quantity in the checkout cart, which resulted in a failed API call. Powered by BigQuery, Quantum Metric can then show how many other end users had this issue, with a simple click of “Show More Errors Like This.”

With BigQuery’s massive scale, Quantum Metric will then quantify the impact of that issue, so companies can prioritize which issues need attention immediately. If this is the issue that’s impacting the business the most, our customer can use a single click to open a Jira ticket, forwarding the discovery to their product and engineering teams. Those teams can then re-engineer the experience in near-real time, addressing the failed API call and cutting out the frustrating time it takes for engineers to reproduce the issue.

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Once we had a powerful back end in BigQuery, we realized that Quantum Metric’s platform could be used to ask complex questions from vast datasets. We built some of the processes that data scientists use to formulate those queries right into our product.  

For example, we added one series of processes to our platform to help customers understand whether a suspect issue is really impacting end-user experience. Is it something that should be prioritized and fixed? Does this really affect the user experience? Does it have financial impact? These and other questions can be pre-defined as a complex query in Quantum Metric to let our customer quickly gain insight on how an issue is impacting the business. Customers were blown away when they heard this was possible. It was the holy grail for what they were looking for in data science. It really sets us apart from our competition.

Today, with every company heavily dependent on data, those companies that can uncover and act on insights fastest are the ones that will succeed. BigQuery gives us the data warehouse platform we need to provide our customers with fast, reliable technology tools. It frees us from having to deal with the minutiae of technology infrastructure operations, so we can focus on finding and extracting the magic in customer data. With the power and scale of BigQuery, combined with the real-time capture of every user experience with 100% fidelity, we’re able to offer a self-service analytics platform that provides insights into digital journey friction points and acts as the indisputable arbitrator of truth. 

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Memorystore for Redis Read Replicas to Scale App Read Requests by 6X

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Google Cloud announces public preview of Memorystore for Redis Read Replicas which helps scale application read requests by 6x in just a click of a button. Read the blog to understand how this impacts organizations' performance at no cost!

Modern applications need to process large-scale data at millisecond latency to provide experiences like instant gaming leaderboards, fast analysis of streaming data from millions of IoT sensors, or real-time threat detection of malicious websites. In-memory datastores are a critical component to deliver the scale, performance, and availability required by these modern applications. 

Memorystore makes it easy for developers building applications on Google Cloud to leverage the speed and powerful capabilities of the most loved in-memory store: Redis. Memorystore for Redis standard tier instances are a popular choice for applications requiring a highly available Redis instance. Standard tier provides a failover replica across zones for redundancy and provides fast failover with a 99.9% SLA. However, in some cases, your applications will require more read throughput from a standard tier instance. One of the common patterns customers use to scale read queries in Redis is leveraging read replicas.

Introducing Memorystore for Redis Read Replicas

Today we are excited to announce the public preview of Memorystore for Redis Read Replicas, which allows you to seamlessly scale your application’s read requests by 6X with the click of a button.

With read replicas, you can easily add up to five replicas and leverage the read endpoint to automatically load balance read queries across all the available replicas, increasing read performance linearly with each replica added. Additionally, Memorystore’s support for Redis 6 introduced multi-thread I/O, increasing performance significantly for M3 and higher configurations. Combined, you can achieve read requests of more than a million requests per second. 

You will benefit from this new functionality in several ways. You will be able to scale on demand with up to five read replicas and use read endpoint with any redis client to easily load balance read queries across multiple replicas. This new functionality will also improve availability with automatic distribution of replicas across multiple zones. With read replicas, you will also be able to minimize application downtime with fast failover to the replica with the least replication lag. In the future, Memorystore will also easily enable read replicas on existing standard tier instances to increase read throughput. 

You can learn more about how to configure and use read replicas in the Read Replicas Overview

Improving performance with Read Replicas and Redis 6

With the launch of read replicas, you can easily increase the read throughput of a Memorystore instance. You can further enhance the read performance by leveraging Redis version 6 along with read replicas.

To understand why combining read replicas and Redis 6 can significantly improve your application’s read performance, let’s look at the various Memorystore configurations that you can use with your applications today. Memorystore Basic and Standard offerings  provide different capacity tiers. The capacity tier determines the single node performance of a basic and standard tier instance. 

The table below outlines the configuration of the various capacity tiers:

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Up until version 5, Redis processed commands using a single thread. The processing involved reading the request, parsing the request, processing the request, and writing the response back to the socket. This approach means that all of the processing, which includes writing the response, was sequentially processed by a single vCPU regardless of the number of vCPUs available in the instance.

Redis 6 introduced I\O threading which allows writing the response using parallel threads. This functionality enables Redis 6 to more effectively leverage available vCPUs, thereby increasing the overall throughput compared to lower versions. Memorystore for Redis version 6 leverages I\O threading and automatically configures the optimal number of I\O threads to achieve the best possible performance for the various capacity tiers. We have also improved the overall network throughput for all redis versions by leveraging improvements in the Google Cloud infrastructure. Together these improvements deliver significant performance improvements and come at no additional cost to you. 

So what can you expect from using Redis 6? As outlined in the table, Redis version 5 and lower uses a single thread to process the write requests for all tiers while Redis 6 uses a larger number of I\O threads at higher capacity tiers which provides substantially incremental throughput for higher capacity tiers.

For example, using a Redis 6 standard tier instance with a capacity of 101 GB (M5), we have observed up to a 200% improvement in read/write performance compared to version 5, though the actual value you’ll see is dependent on your workload. You can get the benefits of Redis 6 by upgrading an existing instance or by deploying a new instance.

By enabling read replicas on an instance using Redis 6, you can further improve the read performance. Read throughput scales linearly with the number of replicas so you can increase your read queries on an instance by up to 500% using five read replicas. By combining Redis 6 and read replicas, you can see a 10X increase in read performance compared to a version 5 standard tier instance with no read replicas.

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We are excited about the launch of read replicas but this is just one step in our journey to deliver the scale you need at the best price-performance. You can learn more about read replicas pricing on our Memorystore pricing page and get started using the Read Replicas Overview.

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Pay-Go Option for MongoDB on Google Cloud Helps Customers Scale as Required

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Did you know that Forbes migrated to Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas in 6 months to scale their website and achieve record-breaking growth! To know more of the merits of Google Mongo Partnership, read the post on Pay-as-you-go option!

As the volume and velocity of data grows daily, business success depends on the ability to manage it effectively and transform it into actionable insights. Since 2019, Google Cloud and MongoDB have worked together to give businesses the secure, global, and highly performant infrastructure, the sophisticated data intelligence, and the developer-centric tools they need to power modern, data-driven cloud applications. Our partnership with MongoDB continues to deliver richer yet simpler ways to lead with software.

With MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, developers can build upon a solid foundation that enables them to work with data the way they want in support of global-scale applications. For example, Forbes, a large business media brand, migrated its platform to Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas in just six months. The company’s new cloud infrastructure helped the website scale to accommodate record-breaking growth even while making development more nimble. MongoDB’s document model meant developers could build new features quickly, easily incorporate changes, and better handle a growing diversity of data types. It also allowed for more powerful tools, such a machine-language trending story recommendation engine for journalists. Results have been impressive, including:

  • 58% faster build time for new products and fixes
  • Accelerated release cycle by 4x
  • Reduced total cost of ownership by 25%
  • 28% increase in subscriptions from new newsletters

The Forbes team is already looking ahead, with plans for improved personalization, loyalty, and management of first-party data. “Our decision to migrate to Google Cloud was made based on the toolset that it offers, scalability, and developer friendliness,” says Vadim Supitsky, Forbes CTO.

Over the course of the partnership between MongoDB and Google Cloud, we have continually added new benefits for our mutual customers, such as the ability to to integrate MongoDB Atlas with Google Cloud products; leveraging BigQuery to create a managed, serverless, scalable architecture; rich data connectivity; and flexible scaling. We’ve also made it easier to migrate MongoDB on-premises instances to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.

Making MongoDB on Google Cloud even more flexible with Pay-Go


That’s why we’re excited to see yet another reason for companies to choose MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud: A new pay-as-you-go option, available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. With this new offering, developers now have a simplified subscription experience, and enterprises have a simplified way to procure MongoDB in addition to privately negotiated offers already supported on the Google Cloud Marketplace. There are no up-front commitments required to use MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, and customers pay only for the resources they use and scale based on their needs. Here are just a few of the benefits of this new service:

  • Spin up a MongoDB Atlas cluster on the Google Cloud Console within a few minutes
  • No need for a separate credit card payment: You can use your Google Cloud Billing account for your MongoDB Atlas environment
  • Receive a single bill for Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas
  • Apply Google Cloud committed spend to MongoDB transactions through Google Cloud Marketplace
  • Get started with MongoDB Atlas with 512 MB of storage for free. Atlas free tier clusters are perfect for learning MongoDB or prototyping applications

We’re excited to see even further growth in our continuing partnership with three new developments: First, because resellers are such an important force, we are pleased to share that reseller partners can now make MongoDB Atlas available via the Google Cloud Marketplace. Second, MongoDB and Google Cloud have expanded our joint reach to 28 global regions after adding Toronto, Canada, and Santiago, Chile. And third, we’ve made a joint commitment to early stage companies through MongoDB for Startups and the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Pay-Go is great for startups because it’s easy to scale and you only pay for what you use. Similarly, MongoDB and Google are helping startups get off the ground with our respective programs, which both include credits and support.

Better together


Your company’s transformation hinges on new cloud database capabilities. The first step to building all-new digital experiences is to select the operational database that will power your application and, in essence, run your business.The partnership between MongoDB and Google Cloud gives you the benefits of a modern database service in a tightly integrated, cloud-native way. Since the beginning of our collaborative journey, we have made significant enhancements to the experience for our mutual customers, and we continue to work toward providing a rich developer experience for MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.

Discover how customers choose MongoDB and Google Cloud to power the future of customer innovation. For more information on how to get started, visit MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Marketplace.

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