When we launched Partner Advantage, we committed to making it predictable and easy for partners to drive business with us. Since launch, those commitments have been validated by channel experts like CRN, which gave Partner Advantage a 5-Star award for 2022, and by the fact that our partners have seen impressive growth* across virtually every facet of their business.

I am pleased to announce that our commitments endure today with the launch of Consumption Packs for Deal Acceleration Funds and Partner Services Funds (DAF and PSF for partners). Inspired by partner feedback, these new packages are designed to accelerate all stages of a customer’s journey to the cloud, and make it even easier and faster for partners to do business with us.

Consumption Packs are purpose-built so that partners can plan and initiate customer projects much more quickly, with predictable funding. They include assets and templates that allow partners to deliver Google Cloud designed and validated infrastructure, application migration and modernization plans to customers faster than ever–particularly for customers beginning their journey to the cloud. Based on learnings gathered from thousands of customer deployments, these turnkey packs have been designed by our partners and Google Cloud Partner Engineering and Professional Services’ teams.

Here’s a brief look at Consumption Packs in action:

• Consumption Packs offer pre-approved, curated templates and assets to simplify and shorten the process for most common projects.
• For Deal Acceleration Funds (DAF), packages include everything partners need to conduct assessments, workshops and proofs-of-concept so they can quickly meet customers where they are on their journey to the cloud.
• For Partner Services Funds (PSF), packages are structured so that partners can develop cloud ready foundation and migration plans that align with Google Cloud priority solution areas.
• Packages have pre-determined funding levels to enable faster deployments.

Partners still have the option to engage with Google Cloud Partner Advantage and their customers through customized requests, as they always have. This is ideally suited for projects that require a tailored approach to meet unique customer requirements.

We are launching nine consumption packs today focused on key enterprise workloads, with a vision toward introducing additional packages to cover more solutions. Partners can explore Consumption Packs now by visiting the Partner Advantage portal.

We welcome your continued feedback and suggestions, and look forward to helping our customers achieve new levels of growth and success, together.

See you in the cloud.

• The Google Cloud Business Opportunity For Partners, a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting, October 2021

Pierogies might just be the ultimate comfort food. But when Mrs. T’s Pierogies — the leading manufacturer of frozen pierogies in the US — learned it needed to transition its existing on-premises SAP ECC to S/4HANA, the company sought a little comfort for itself. 

Founded in 1952, Mrs. T’s Pierogies now produces more than 650 million pierogies a year. Moving that many pierogies requires a powerful ERP system — and an equally powerful IT infrastructure on which to run it. Mrs. T’s realized that the SAP-mandated transition of its ERP solution to SAP S/4HANA was an opportunity to move its SAP systems to Google Cloud and gain real-time analytics capabilities for faster sales forecasting, more effective trade promotions, and more sophisticated planning.

From necessity to opportunity

Mrs. T’s successfully ran its SAP ECC solution on its own on-premises servers for years. But after SAP decided to sunset the product, Mrs. T’s realized that it faced multiple challenges, including: 

• Migrating its SAP ECC 6.0 system from an on-premises leagcy OS to a cloud-based Linux environment
• Moving data from its SAP DB2 database to HANA
• Transitioning from ECC to SAP S/4HANA

That complex transition needed to take place with little or no downtime, since nearly all of the company’s invoices, warehouse movements, and transfer orders used the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) protocol. Missing even a few hours of EDI transactions would put significant revenue at stake. Adding to the challenge: Some Mrs. T’s customers would not accept an invoice past five days, which left little room for error. Mrs. T’s chose Rackspace Technology, a longtime Google Cloud partner, to oversee the move. 

Mrs. T’s could have chosen to run S/4HANA on its legacy hardware but saw migration to Google Cloud as an opportunity to improve key aspects of its business, in particular data analytics. Historically, sales planning and forecasting involved time-consuming manual processes. But the speed, availability, and scalability of Google Cloud meant that Mrs. T’s could take advantage of S/4HANA’s embedded analytics capabilities. Migrating could also open the door to leveraging Google Cloud’s native integration of SAP data to power Google tools such as BigQuery, Google Cloud AI Building Blocks, and more. 

The move to Google Cloud also gave Mrs. T’s an opportunity to update its disaster recovery process. Previously, the company backed up to tape. So, if its SAP systems went down, a member of the IT department would have to drive the most recent tape backups an hour to its cold site, where the disaster recovery partner would load the SAP backup tape, boot the system up, switch network connections to that site, and cross their fingers. Not only would downtime be significant, but restored data would be limited to the periodic tape backup. 

“Everything just worked”

Once Mrs. T’s decided to migrate to Google Cloud, the company worked with Rackspace Technology to implement the system. The first phase focused on moving the SAP production environment from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud and updating its database to HANA, which took place over 12 weeks. The switchover occurred over a weekend and was all but invisible to users. “We came in on Monday and everything just worked,” recalls Timothy Coyle, Director of Information Systems & Technology. In a second four-month phase, the company transitioned from ECC to S/4. 

The move to Google Cloud paid dividends immediately. Batch transactions occurred twice as fast and on-screen end-user transactions rendered instantly. The upgrade also gave the finance team access to embedded analytics and monitoring for the first time. With everything now in the cloud, disaster recovery could be dynamic and nearly instantaneous, with a worst-case scenario of just 5 to 10 minutes of downtime. 

“Mrs. T’s needed a skilled and experienced partner that could move its SAP environment to Google Cloud with no negative impacts to its business. We knew this migration was a key initiative in Mrs. T’s digital transformation journey,” says Chuck Britton, Google Partner Development Manager at Rackspace. “We also knew that running SAP on Google Cloud would give the business the fast and flexible analytical capabilities it needed for its SAP data.” 

From ideation to production, Mrs. T’s migrated from its legacy on-premises infrastructure to a modern SAP S/4HANA solution on Google Cloud in only seven months, with minimal downtime and zero disruptions. Now that the migration is complete, Mrs. T’s has a flexible, highly scalable environment to run the SAP applications and data that fuel the business. Says Coyle, “Our strategic intent for IT is to make processes simpler, people more productive, and infrastructure more secure. This project fits right square in the middle of that strategic philosophy.”

Learn more about ways in which Google Cloud can transform your SAP experience and about Rackspace Google Cloud solutions for SAP customers.

Where should you run your workload? It depends…Choosing the right infrastructure options to run your application is critical, both for the success of your application and for the team that is managing and developing it. This post breaks down some of the most important factors that you need to consider when deciding where you should run your stuff!

What are these services?

• Compute Engine – Virtual machines. You reserve a configuration of CPU, memory, disk, and GPUs, and decide what OS and additional software to run.
• Kubernetes Engine – Managed Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. You create a cluster and configure which containers to run; Kubernetes keeps them running and manages scaling, updates and connectivity.
• Cloud Run – A fully managed serverless platform that runs individual containers. You give code or a container to Cloud Run, and it hosts and auto scales as needed to respond to web and other events.
• App Engine – A fully managed serverless platform for complete web applications. App Engine handles the networking, application scaling, and database scaling. You write a web application in one of the supported languages, deploy to App Engine, and it handles scaling, updating versions, and so on. 
• Cloud Functions – Event-driven serverless functions. You write individual function code and Cloud Functions calls your function when events happen (for example, HTTP, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage changes, among others). 

What level of abstraction do you need?

• If you need more control over the underlying infrastructure (for example, the operating system, disk images, CPU, RAM, and disk) then it makes sense to use Compute Engine. This is a typical path for legacy application migrations and existing systems that require a specific OS. 
• Containers provide a way to virtualize an OS so that multiple workloads can run on a single OS instance. They are fast and lightweight, and they provide portability. If your applications are containerized then you have two  main options. 
  • You can use Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE, which gives you full control over the container down to the nodes with specific OS, CPU, GPU, disk, memory, and networking. GKE also offers Autopilot, when you need the flexibility and control but have limited ops and engineering support. 
  • If, on the other hand, you are just looking to run your application in containers without having to worry about scaling the infrastructure, then Cloud Run is the best option. You can just write your application code, package it into a container, and deploy it.  
• If you just want to code up your HTTP-based application and leave the scalability and deployment of the app to Google Cloud then App Engine — a serverless, fully-managed option that is designed for hosting and running web applications — is a good option for you. 
• If your code is a function and just performs an action based on an event/trigger, then deploying it with Cloud Functions makes sense. 

What is your use case? 

• Use Compute Engine if you are migrating a legacy application with specific licensing, OS, kernel, or networking requirements. Examples: Windows-based applications, genomics processing, SAP HANA.
• Use GKE if your application needs a specific OS or network protocols beyond HTTP/s. When you use GKE, you are using Kubernetes, which makes it easy to deploy and expand into hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Anthos is a platform specifically designed for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. It provides single-pane-of-glass visibility across all clusters from infrastructure through to application performance and topology. Example: Microservices-based applications. 
• Use Cloud Run if you just need to deploy a containerized application in a programming language of your choice with HTTP/s and websocket support. Examples: websites, APIs, data processing apps, webhooks.
• Use App Engine if you want to deploy and host a web based application (HTTP/s) in a serverless platform. Examples: web applications, mobile app backends
• Use Cloud Functions if your code is a function and just performs an action based on an event/trigger from Pub/Sub or Cloud Storage. Example: Kick off a video transcoding function as soon as a video is saved in your Cloud Storage bucket.

Need portability with open source? 

If your requirement is based on portability and open-source support take a look at GKE, Cloud Run, and Cloud Functions. They are all based on open-source frameworks that help you avoid vendor lock-in and give you the freedom to expand your infrastructure into hybrid and multi-cloud environments.  GKE clusters are powered by the Kubernetes open-source cluster management system, which provides the mechanisms through which you interact with your cluster. Cloud Run for Anthos is powered by Knative, an open-source project that supports serverless workloads on Kubernetes. Cloud Functions use an open-source FaaS (function as a service) framework to run functions across multiple environments. 

What are your team dynamics like?

If you have a small team of developers and you want their attention focused on the code, then a serverless option such as Cloud Run or App Engine is  a good choice because you won’t have to have a team managing the infrastructure, scale, and operations. If you have bigger teams, along with your own tools and processes, then Compute Engine or GKE makes more sense because it enables you to define your own process for CI/CD, security, scale, and operations. 

What type of billing model do you prefer? 

Compute Engine and GKE billing models are based on resources, which means you pay for the instances you have provisioned, independent of usage. You can also take advantage of sustained and committed use discounts. 

Cloud Run, App Engine, and Cloud Functions are billed per request, which means you pay as you go. 

Conclusion

It’s important to consider all the relevant factors that play a role in picking appropriate compute options for your application. Remember that no decision is necessarily final; you can always move from one option to another.

To explore these points in more detail, please take a look at the “Where Should I Run My Stuff?” video.

For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo &  thecloudgirl.dev. For similar cloud content follow us on Twitter at @pvergadia and @briandorsey