WebGL-powered Features to Build Next-generation Mapping Experience
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At Google I/O 2021, we announced the beta release of Tilt and Rotation, and Webgl Overlay View, which give you a fundamentally new way to build mapping experiences. You may be familiar with the existing Overlay View feature of the Maps JavaScript API that lets you render in a transparent layer that sits on top of the map. For years, developers have been using Overlay View to draw in two dimensions over the top of the map, but for as much as you can do with Overlay View, it only allows you to render on a transparent layer that effectively floats above the map.
In contrast, WebGL Overlay View gives you direct hooks into the lifecycle of the exact same WebGL rendering context we use to render the vector basemap. This means that for the first time ever, you can performantly render two and three dimensional objects directly on the map, enabling you to build experiences that were previously impossible with the Maps JavaScript API.https://www.youtube.com/embed/9eycQLef6iU?enablejsapi=1&
Today, we’re going to give you a quick overview of the new WebGL-powered features of the Maps JavaScript API, so that you have all the knowledge you need to get started creating next generation mapping experiences.
What is WebGL?
WebGL is a low-level browser API, originally authored by the Mozilla Foundation, that gives you access to the rendering and processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) on client devices, such as mobile phones and computers, in your web apps. On its own, the browser is not able to handle the heavy computation needed to render objects in 3D space, but using WebGL it is able to pass those processes off to be handled by the GPU, which is purpose built to handle such computations.
To learn more about WebGL, check out the documentation from the Khronos Group, the designers and maintainers of WebGL.
Requirements
To use WebGL Overlay View, you’ll need a Map ID with the vector map enabled. It’s also strongly recommended that you enable Tilt and Rotation when you create your Map ID, otherwise your map will be constrained to the default top-down view – in short, you won’t be able to move your map in three-dimensions.
To learn more about using Map IDs and the vector map, see the documentation.
Setting Tilt and Rotation
To load your map with a set tilt and rotation, you can provide a value for the `tilt` and `heading` properties when you create the map:
const mapOptions = {mapId: "15431d2b469f209e",tilt: 0,heading: 0,zoom: 17,center: {lat: -33.86957547870852,lng: 151.20832318199652}}const mapDiv = document.getElementById("map");const map = new google.maps.Map(mapDiv, mapOptions);
Tilt is specified as a number or float in degrees between 0 and 67.5, with 0 degrees being the default straight down view and 67.5 being the maximum tilt. The available maximum tilt also varies by zoom level.
The rotation is set in the heading property as a number or float between 0 and 360 degrees, where 0 is true north.
You can also change the tilt and rotation programmatically at runtime whenever you want by calling `setTilt` and `setHeading` directly on the map object. This is useful if you want to change the orientation of the map in response to events like user interactions.
map.setTilt(45);map.setHeading(180);
In addition, your users can manually control the tilt and rotation of the map by holding the <shift> key and dragging with the mouse or using the arrow keys.
For more information on Tilt and Rotation, see the documentation.
Adding WebGL Overlay View to the Map
WebGL Overlay View is made available in the Maps JavaScript API by creating an instance of `google.maps.WebglOverlayView`. Once an instance of the overlay is created, you simply need to call `setMap` on the instance to apply it to the map.
const webglOverlayView = new google.maps.WebglOverlayView;webglOverlayView.setMap(map);
To give you access to the WebGL rendering context of the map and handle any objects you want to render there, WebGL Overlay View exposes a set of five hooks into the lifecycle of the WebGL rendering context of the vector basemap.
Here’s a quick rundown:
- `onAdd` is where most of your pre-processing should be done, like fetching and creating intermediate data structures to eventually pass to the overlay. The reason to do all of that here is to ensure you don’t bog down the rendering of the map.
- `onRemove` is where you’ll want to destroy all intermediate objects, though it would be nice if you did it sooner.
- `onContextRestored` is called before the map is rendered and is where you should initialize, bind, reinitialize or rebind any WebGL state, such as shaders, GL buffer objects, etc.
- `onDraw` is where we actually render the map, as well as anything that you specify in this hook. You should try to execute the minimal set of draw calls to render your scene. If you try to do too much here you’ll bog down both the rendering of the basemap and anything you’re trying to do with WebGL, and trust me, no one wants that.
- `onContextLost` is where you’ll want to clean up any state associated with pre-existing GL state, since at this point the WebGL context will have been destroyed, so it’ll be garbage.
To implement these hooks, set them to a function, which the Maps JavaScript API will execute at the appropriate time in the WebGL rendering context lifecycle. For example:
webglOverlayView.onDraw = (gl,coordinateTransformer) => { //do somerendering }
For more information on using WebGL Overlay View and its lifecycle hooks, check out the documentation.
Creating Camera Animations
As part of the beta release of WebGL Overlay View, we’re also introducing `moveCamera`, a new integrated camera control that you can use to set the position, tilt, rotation, and zoom of the camera position simultaneously. Like `setTilt` and `setHeading`, `moveCamera` is called directly on the `Map` object.
By making successive calls to `moveCamera` in an animation loop you can also create smooth animations between camera positions. For example, here we are using the browser’s `requestAnimationFrame` API to change the tilt and rotation each frame:
const cameraOptions = {tilt: 0,heading: 0}function animateCamera () {cameraOptions.tilt += 1;cameraOptions.heading += 1;map.moveCamera(cameraOptions);}requestAnimationFrame(animateCamera);
Plus, all of these adjustments, including zoom, support floats, which means not only can you control the camera like never before, you can also do it with a high degree of precision.
For more information on `moveCamera`, see the documentation.
Give it a tryYou can try the new WebGL-powered features of the Maps JavaScript API right now by loading the API from the beta channel. We’ve got a new codelab, and documentation with all the details, as well as sample code and end-to-end example apps to help you get started. Also, be sure to check out our feature tour and travel demos to learn more and play with a real implementation of these features.
And let us know what you think by reporting through our issue tracker. We need your bug reports, your feature requests, and your feedback to help us test and improve the new WebGL-based map features.
Have fun building with the map in 3D—we can’t wait to see the amazing things you’ll build.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
Discovery’s Massive Workspace Migration Fuels Innovation and Collaboration
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In the past two decades, Discovery has moved from a purely cable business based in the U.S. to a global media and entertainment powerhouse. Like many other businesses in the industry, we’ve had to adjust to the unique shifts in people’s behaviors and preferences, almost all of which result from the rise in streaming.
We have always been consumer-obsessed at Discovery, with a corporate culture built on the desire to entertain and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds with exceptional content. As we’ve grown, we have also learned just how important it is to be staff-obsessed, giving our employees the best possible experiences so they can continue to innovate and deliver the world-class content our customers expect.
In 2019, we decided one way to fuel innovation and collaboration among employees was to bring in Google Workspace. Selected for its intuitive, easy-to-use, and constantly evolving tools, Google Workspace enables teams to seamlessly create, connect, and collaborate anywhere, anytime.
Given the scope of our ambitions, and recognizing the challenges of migrating 16,500 global employees to a new collaboration solution, we worked with Google Cloud premier partner SADA to get the job done.
Change management amid a massive migration
We began the move to Google Workspace by migrating our document storage system from a legacy cloud provider to Google Drive. This included 86 million items amounting to about two petabytes of data migrated with minimal disruptions. A few months later we completed our move to Google Workspace by migrating 1.2 million calendar invites and 20,800 mail accounts, including thousands of collaborative inboxes and delegated accounts.
In addition to the technical support and Google Workspace expertise that SADA provided, they also partnered with our project team on the change management strategy. Despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, our training team and SADA were able to offer outstanding educational opportunities to assist our workforce in the transition and to get the most out of Google Workspace. This included collaborating on over 240 global webinars in seven languages.
Discovering the power of transformative tools
Discovery has many types of end users, from finance professionals and marketing teams to producers and content developers. The fact that Google Workspace has been well-received across the company is a testament to the power of the solution.
Many of our teams have taken advantage of collaborative Gmail accounts and shared drives, providing them with a centralized location to seamlessly communicate and work together on team-focused projects. Our internal communications team is especially happy with the real-time collaborative editing experience within Docs as they work on company-wide emails, announcements, and other projects.
These collaboration tools have allowed us to stay agile amid global lockdowns and will continue to do so as we adapt to a more flexible working environment.
The value of partnership
While we were comfortable with our legacy collaboration suite, one of the biggest benefits of switching to Google Workspace has been Google Cloud’s and SADA’s partnership. They provide us with regular updates on product roadmaps, upcoming features, and more.
This is just the beginning as we plan to grow, deliver new content, and lead the media and entertainment industry with the help of these two great partners and their solutions.
To learn more about Discovery’s journey with Google Workspace, read the full case study.
10 Reasons that Make Google Cloud the Champion of IaaS
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When you choose to run your business on Google Cloud you benefit from the same planet-scale infrastructure that powers Google’s products such as Maps, YouTube, and Workspace.
We have picked 10 ways in which Google Cloud Infrastructure services outshine alternatives in the market in how they simplify your operations, save money, and secure your data.
1. Custom Machine Types means no wasted resources
Compute Engine offers predefined machine types that you can use when you create a VM instance. A predefined machine type has a preset number of vCPUs and a preset amount of memory; each type is billed at a set price as described on the Compute Engine pricing page.
If predefined machine types don’t meet your needs, you can create a VM instance with a custom number of vCPUs and custom amount of memory, effectively building a custom machine type. Custom machine types are available only for general-purpose machine families. When you create a custom machine type, you are deploying a custom machine type from the E2, N2, N2D, or N1 machine family on GCP. No other leading cloud vendor offers custom machine types so extensively.
Custom machine types are a good idea for workloads that aren’t a good fit for the predefined machine types and for workloads that require more processing power or memory but don’t need all of the upgrades provided by the next machine type level. This translates into lower operating costs. They are also useful for controlling software licensing costs that are based on the number of underlying compute cores.
Jeremy Lloyd, Infrastructure and Application Modernization Lead at Appsbroker, a Google partner:
“Custom machine types coupled with Google’s StratoZone data center discovery tool provides Appsbroker with the flexibility we need to provide cost efficient virtual machines matched to a virtual machine’s actual utilization. As a result, we are able to keep our customers’ operating costs low while still providing the ability to scale as needed.”
2. Compute Engine Virtual Machines are optimized for scale-out workloads
For scale-out workloads, T2D, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and leapfrogs VMs for scale-out workloads of any leading public cloud provider today, both in terms of performance and price-performance. Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any leading public cloud vendor (source). The x86 compatibility provided by these AMD EPYC processor-based VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture. Sign up here if you are interested in trying out T2D instances in Preview.
For SAP HANA, Google Cloud has demonstrated with SAP how we can run the world’s largest scale-out HANA system in the public cloud (96TB). With such innovation, you are covered as your business grows exponentially.
3. Largest single node GPU-enabled VM
Google is the only public cloud provider to offer up to 16 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in a single VM, making it possible to train very large AI models. Users can start with one NVIDIA A100 GPU and scale to 16 GPUs without configuring multiple VMs for single-node ML training, without crossing the VM layer.
Additionally, customers can choose smaller GPU configurations—1, 2, 4 and 8 GPUs per VM—providing the flexibility to scale their workload as needed.
The A2 VM family was designed to meet today’s most demanding applications—workloads like CUDA-enabled machine learning (ML) training and inference, for example. This family is built on the A100 GPU which offers up to 20x the compute performance compared to the previous generation GPU and comes with 40 GB of high-performance HBM2 GPU memory. To speed up multi-GPU workloads, the A2 VMs use NVIDIA’s HGX A100 systems to offer high-speed NVLink GPU-to-GPU bandwidth that delivers up to 600 GB/s. A2 VMs come with up to 96 Intel Cascade Lake vCPUs, optional Local SSD for workloads requiring faster data feeds into the GPUs and up to 100 Gbps of networking. A2 VMs provide full vNUMA transparency into the architecture of underlying GPU server platforms, enabling advanced performance tuning. Google Cloud offers these GPUs globally.
4. Non-disruptive maintenance means you worry less about planned downtime
Compute Engine offers live migration (non-disruptive maintenance) to keep your virtual machine instances running even when a host system event, such as a software or hardware update, occurs. Google’s Compute Engine live migrates your running instances to another host in the same zone without requiring your VMs to be rebooted. Live migration enables Google to perform maintenance that is integral to keeping infrastructure protected and reliable without interrupting any of your VMs. When a VM is scheduled to be live-migrated, Google provides a notification to the guest that a migration is imminent.
Live migration keeps your instances running during:
- Regular infrastructure maintenance and upgrades
- Network and power grid maintenance in the data centers
- Failed hardware such as memory, CPU, network interface cards, disks, power, and so on. This is done on a best-effort basis; if a hardware component fails completely or otherwise prevents live migration, the VM crashes and restarts automatically and a hostError is logged.
- Host OS and BIOS upgrades
- Security-related updates
- System configuration changes, including changing the size of the host root partition, for storage of the host image and packages
Live migration does not change any attributes or properties of the VM itself. The live migration process transfers a running VM from one host machine to another host machine within the same zone. All VM properties and attributes remain unchanged, including internal and external IP addresses, instance metadata, block storage data and volumes, OS and application state, network settings, network connections, and so on. This has the benefit of reducing operational and maintenance overhead, helps you build a more robust security posture where infrastructure can be consciously revamped from a known good state and minimizes risks for advanced persistent threats.
Refer to Lessons learned from a year of using live migration in production on Google Cloud from the Google engineering team.
5. Trusted Computing: Shielded VMs guard you against advanced, persistent attacks
Establishing trust in your environment is multifaceted, involving hardware and firmware, as well as host and guest operating systems. Unfortunately, threats like boot malware or firmware rootkits can stay undetected for a long time, and an infected virtual machine can continue to boot in a compromised state even after you’ve installed legitimate software.
Shielded VMs can help you protect your system from attack vectors like:
- Malicious guest OS firmware, including malicious UEFI extensions
- Boot and kernel vulnerabilities in the guest OS
- Malicious insiders within your organization
To guard against these kinds of advanced persistent attacks, Shielded VMs use:
- Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS: Helps ensure that firmware is signed and verified
- Secure and Measured Boot: Helps ensure that a VM boots an expected, healthy kernel
- Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM): Establishes root-of-trust, underpins Measured Boot, and prevents exfiltration of vTPM-sealed secrets
- Integrity Monitoring: Provides tamper-evident logging, integrated with Stackdriver, to help you quickly identify and remediate changes to a known integrity state
The Google approach allows customers to deploy Shielded VMs with only a simple click, thereby easing implementation.
6. Confidential Computing encrypts data while in use
Google Cloud was a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium. Along with encryption of data in transit and at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK), Confidential VM adds a “third pillar” to the end-to-end encryption story by encrypting data while in use. Confidential Computing uses processor-based technology that allows data to be encrypted in use while it is being processed in the public cloud. Confidential VM allows you to to encrypt memory in use on a Google Compute Engine VM by checking a single checkbox.
All Confidential VMs support the previously mentioned Shielded VM features under the covers—you can think of Shielded VM as helping to address VM integrity, while Confidential VM addresses the memory encryption aspect which relies on CPU features. With the confidential execution environments provided by Confidential VM and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), Google Cloud keeps customers’ sensitive code and other data encrypted in memory during processing. Google does not have access to the encryption keys. In addition, Confidential VM can help alleviate concerns about risk related to either dependency on Google infrastructure or Google insiders’ access to customer data in the clear.
See what Google Cloud partners say about Confidential Computing here.
7. Advanced networking delivers full-stack networking and security services with fast, consistent, and scalable performance
Google Cloud’s network delivers low latency, reduces operational costs and ensures business continuity, enabling organizations to seamlessly scale up or down in any region to meet business needs. Our planet-scale network uses advanced software-defined networking and security with edge caching services to deliver fast, consistent, and scalable performance. With 28 regions, 85 zones, and 146 PoPs connected by 16 subsea fiber cables around the world, Google Cloud’s network offers a full stack of layer 1 to layer 7 services for enterprises to run their workloads anywhere. Enterprises can be assured that they have best-in-class networking and security services connecting their VMs, containers, and bare metal resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments with simplicity, visibility, and control.
Google Cloud’s network has protected customers from one of the world’s largest DDoS attacks at 2.54 Tbps. With our multi-layer security architecture and products such as Cloud Armor, our customers ran their business with no disruptions. Furthermore, our recent integration of Cloud Armor with reCAPTCHA Enterprise adds best-in-class bot and fraud management to prevent volumetric attacks. Cloud Armor is deployed with our Cloud Load Balancer and Cloud CDN, extending the secure benefits at the network edge for traffic coming into Google Cloud so customers have security, performance, and reliability all built in. Furthermore, we are excited to offer Cloud IDS in preview, which was co-developed with security industry leader, Palo Alto Networks, to run natively in Google Cloud.
Our advanced networking capabilities also extends to GKE and Anthos networking. With the GKE Gateway controller, customers can manage internal and external HTTPS load balancing for a GKE cluster or a fleet of GKE clusters with multi-tenancy while maintaining centralized admin policy and control. Unlike other Kubernetes offerings, we offer eBPF dataplane which brings powerful tooling such as Kubernetes network policy and logging to GKE. eBPF is known to kernel engineers as a “superpower” for its unique architecture to load and unload modules in kernel space, and now this capability is built in with Google Cloud networking.
For observability and monitoring, our customers deploy Network Intelligence Center, Google Cloud’s comprehensive network monitoring, verification and optimization platform. With four key modules in Network Intelligence Center, and several more to come, we are working towards realizing our vision of proactive network operations that can predict and heal network failures, driven by AI/ML recommendations and remediation. Network Intelligence Center provides unmatched visibility into your network in the cloud along with proactive network verification. Centralized monitoring cuts down troubleshooting time and effort, increases network security and improves the overall user experience.
8. Regional Persistent Disk for High Availability
Regional Persistent Disk is a storage option that provides synchronous replication of data between two zones in a region. Regional Persistent Disks can be a great building block if you need to ensure high availability of your critical applications as they offer cost-effective durable storage and replication of data between two zones in the same region.
Regional Persistent Disks are also easy to set up within the Google Cloud Console. If you are designing robust systems or high availability services on Compute Engine, Regional Persistent Disks combined with other best practices such as backing up your data using snapshots enable you to build an infrastructure that is highly available and recoverable in a disaster. Regional Persistent Disks are also designed to work with regional managed instance groups. In the unlikely event of a zonal outage, Regional Persistent Disks allow continued I/O through failover of your workloads to another zone. Regional Persistent Disks can help meet zero RPO and near-zero RTO requirements and other stringent SLAs that your critical applications might require by maximizing application availability and protection of data during events such as host/VM failures and zonal outages.
9. Cloud Storage’s single namespace for dual-region and multi-region means managing regional replication is incredibly simple
Similar to how Persistent Disk makes data more available by replicating data across zones, Cloud Storage provides similar benefits for object storage. Cloud Storage within a region is cross-zone by definition, reducing the risk that a zonal outage would take down your application. Cloud Storage adds to this by also providing a cross-region option that can protect against a regional outage and gets your data closer to distributed users. This comes in the form of Dual-region or Multi-region settings for a bucket. These are the simplest to implement cross-region replication offerings in the industry—just a simple button or API call to enable them. In addition to being simple to implement, they offer an added advantage of using a single bucket name that spans regions.
This is unique in the industry. Competitive offerings currently require setting up and managing two distinct buckets, one in each region and they don’t offer the strong consistency properties Cloud Storage offers across regions. Operations and app development are burdened by this design. Google’s single namespace approach dramatically simplifies application development (the app runs on single region or dual/multi-region without any changes), and provides simpler application restarts and testing for DR.
10. Predictive autoscaling
Customers use predictive autoscaling to improve response times for applications with long initialization times or for applications with workloads that vary predictably with daily or weekly cycles. When you enable predictive autoscaling, Compute Engine forecasts future load based on your Managed Instance Group’s history and scales out the MIG’s in advance of predicted load, so that new instances are ready to serve when the load arrives. Without predictive autoscaling, an autoscaler can only scale a group reactively, based on observed changes in load in real time.
With predictive autoscaling enabled, the autoscaler works with real-time data as well as with historical data to cover both the current and forecasted load. Forecasts are refreshed every few minutes (faster than competing clouds) and consider daily and weekly seasonality, leading to more accurate forecasts of load patterns.
For more information, see How predictive autoscaling works and Checking if predictive autoscaling is suitable for your workload.
These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud infrastructure apart. Bring your applications and let the platform work for you.
Get started by learning about your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the thousands of customers who have embarked upon this journey.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Dheeraj Konidena (Google) for contributing to this article.
Beyond Traditional Learning: AI-based Online Learning Platform and Google Cloud Solutions Push Learners to Get Ahead
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The combination of a vital need for IT experts among businesses and a digital skills gap is making lifelong learning increasingly critical. Beyond professional development, learning new skills offers additional rewards from building peer connections to boosting your creativity. That’s why in 2020 Krishna Deepak Nallamilli and I launched KIMO.ai to reimagine how people approach learning, especially in developing markets. Our team is building the artificial intelligence needed to generate individual learning paths through a wide range of quality digital learning content.
Google Cloud and its Startup Program have been instrumental in connecting our team with the tools, people, processes, and best practices to grow our business.
Existing learning platforms lack engagement
Outside of traditional education settings, massive open online learning courses (MOOCs)—often modeled after university courses—can provide a flexible and affordable way to upskill or reskill. But the vast majority of people who participate in MOOC programs fail to complete courses. Based on our research, the challenge with existing learning platforms is a lack of engagement, primarily caused by limited direction on which skills to learn, whether AI, fintech, blockchain, or other in-demand disciplines.
We’ve also received feedback that many corporate learning management systems–developed as online training systems to upskill employees–tend to be poorly designed and time-consuming to use.
Overall, a significant challenge with most existing learning platforms is that they’re generic. For example, suppose you’re interested in learning about AI. In that case, you need AI-related coursework that applies to your industry and the job you want because AI in medicine is vastly different from AI in financial services. Today’s online learning options typically take a one-size-fits-all approach and fail to capture the nuances of what learners really need to get ahead.
Building a future-proof learning platform
The commitment to highly personalized, accessible learning inspired KIMO.ai, a platform that we believe is the future of education. Depending on your goals, current skills, location, and other factors, our AI-based platform will identify which coursework (and where to find those classes) to build the skills you need. The more personalized, relevant learning recommendations even take into account people’s preferences for podcasts, MOOCs, books, articles, videos, courses, publications, and more.
In a mix of cooperation and competition we call “coopetition,” KIMO.ai will regularly recommend courses from other established online learning systems if, based on our automated assessment, it’s the best option for a learner. There’s also the option to access free content only.
Google cultural alignment fosters trust
Our platform started with one developer exploring NLP models and Google APIs. As we’ve grown our team and launched our beta to 110,000 users in developing markets, we discovered there is a lot of interest in our platform, and we believe we can make a significant impact. In feedback forums, we also learned that we need to focus our efforts on the mobile experience to improve engagement since 99% of the beta testers use mobile devices.
Beyond our team’s high level of trust in Google Cloud solutions, our team also appreciates the cultural alignment with Google. We value Google’s developer-centric approach and rely on tools like Dataflow for batch data processing and Cloud TPU to reliably run machine learning models with AI services on Google Cloud. We also build all of our deployments on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which makes it easy to manage all our containerized workloads
On the front end, Google App Engine makes it easy to deploy apps and experiment, and it integrates seamlessly with Firebase for authentication and more. BigQuery is our serverless data warehouse that efficiently scales to support the millions of articles, videos, and other learning resources we need to analyze to provide the targeted coursework recommendations our learners require.
As we grow our business having a network of trusted advisors is also extremely valuable. By working closely with DoIT International, the 2020 Google Cloud Global Reseller Partner of the Year, our team has access to their cloud, Kubernetes, and machine learning expertise. DoIT has already helped us quickly resolve IT issues and create analytics dashboards that give us insights to continually enhance our services.
Building for a growing industry
The dynamic edtech market is growing rapidly and estimated to become an $11B industry by 2025. We’re proud to be part of the next wave of personalized education that has the potential to empower people in developing markets and beyond to grow their skills with coursework tailored to their exact needs and how they like to learn. This year, we will deliver our platform to at least 400,000 more people. We’re excited to see how they use it and where it takes them.
If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application 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.
Google Meet on Glass: A New Way of Collaborating Teams with Video Meetings in Real-time
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Open beta now available to all Google Workspace customers
Seeing is believing. For many service technicians, trainers, and other frontline workers, the ability to share a real-time view of what they can see with their virtual clients or teams can make all the difference. That’s what we’ve heard from global participants in the closed beta of Google Meet running on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 that we announced last year.
Starting today, we’re making Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 (Meet on Glass) more broadly available through an open beta. Any Google Workspace customer around the world can now give their employees, suppliers, and partners greater sight with Glass—using the simple and intuitive Google Meet environment they’re already used to. With Meet on Glass, meeting participants can experience a first-person view of the Glass wearer’s perspective and collaborate with the entire video meeting in real time.
Making it easier to solve hard problems
Customers who’ve been testing Meet on Glass are linking their teams across geographies to collaborate in new ways and solve problems together. In the US, real estate services group CBRE has implemented Meet on Glass to allow employees at job sites to connect with HQ teams and project managers. Connecting the whole team with live video from the frontline is allowing faster decision making and clearer communications between team members.
To be successful, remote assistance via video call must be simple and seamless. CBRE and other early customers have shared that they don’t want their workers to have to become technical experts to use video collaboration in this way. Ease of use—both for Google Meet and for Glass—and speed to join a video meeting are top priorities for them. And with Google Workspace integration, their teams can now join Calendar events directly from Glass with just a few taps. No complex signing in or scanning codes are required; users simply choose from their calendar on Glass to instantly join the meeting.
Getting Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2
The Meet team is working with the community of Google Workspace partners to enable Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 for customers in North America, Europe, and Australia. Customers in Japan can now also get Glass through a first-of-its-kind partnership with NTT DOCOMO, which can provide Meet on Glass directly to its customers in Japan. After extensive testing, NTT DOCOMO chose Google Meet on Glass as the preferred solution for their business customers who want frontline collaboration solutions for their enterprises.
Meet on Glass is one of the ways we’re bringing powerful new video conferencing experiences to customers around the world, regardless of the devices they’re using to connect and collaborate with their teams. When combined with our Google meet hardware and peripherals, the possibilities for real-time connection and problem solving are even greater. And it’s part of our ongoing commitment to creating innovative and immersive meeting experiences that help people feel like they’re working together, not just meeting together.
Sign up now to participate in the Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 open beta.
Partner Delivery Excellence: Empowering Partners Deliver Customer value with Google Cloud
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With growing demand for Google Cloud, customers are increasingly expecting more reliable advisory and implementation skills from Google Cloud Systems Integrator (SI) Partners. Our model for professional services remains differentiated, with a heavy co-dependence on our SI Partner ecosystem to drive success for our customers. Therefore, enabling and nurturing strong delivery capabilities in our Partners is a responsibility we take seriously. The Google Cloud Global Services Delivery and Global Partner Ecosystem & Channels team jointly made significant investments earlier this year to underscore our commitment in this area. That’s why we’ve created the expanded Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio, a rich set of resources to help Google Cloud Partners deliver high-quality Google Cloud projects. Whether you’re a Partner just getting started with Google Cloud or have prior experience, we have the resources you need to succeed and we’ll meet you where you are in this journey.
Here are some of the key offerings in the Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio:
Stage: Building delivery skills | Pre-engagement
- Delivery Readiness Index (DRI): a framework that enables SI Partners to receive customized, individual level delivery enablement recommendations based on each consultant’s delivery readiness, assessed across training, certifications, delivery skills validation and prior delivery experience.
- Delivery Navigator (coming soon): A delivery management platform consisting of delivery methods, work management tools, and dashboards that enables Google PSO and Partners to drive a high-quality, globally consistent project experience. You’ll hear more about this in an upcoming blog post.
Stage: Develop delivery expertise | Preparing for a delivery project
- Delivery Runbooks: Workload-level detailed delivery guides which include reference architectures, detailed migration steps, validation guidelines, common troubleshooting tips and more.
- Delivery Bootcamps: In-person or hybrid mode multi-day sessions conducted by experienced Google Cloud Consultants and customizable to the specifics of a Google Cloud project for a customer.
- Use case learning: Self-paced learning in the form of bite-sized lectures to build foundational delivery skills at the workload level, with quiz based assessment to validate knowledge gained.
- Delivery labs: Hands-on labs, hosted on our Qwiklabs platform, that complement use-case learning to build and test core delivery skills through a series of practical delivery scenario challenges.
Stage: Leverage Google delivery SMEs | During active project delivery
- Onboarding accelerator: Enables Partners with advisory services to onboard customers on Google Cloud foundations and migrate the first workload quickly and efficiently, by imparting knowledge and best practices from the Technical Onboarding Center. Supported workloads span Infrastructure & Application modernization, Analytics & AI and Databases.
- Delivery Helpdesk: In-the-moment implementation support for Partners during a live Google Cloud project through a standard case management process. Google Global Services Delivery teams well versed in the technology area will advise and help Partners resolve the issue at hand.
- Delivery Assurance Services: Project-level safeguarding services that are delivered in the context of an active Partner-led customer project.
Stage: Leverage Google delivery expertise independent of projects | Build, scale and optimize Google Cloud practices
- Tooling advisory: Assessment of Partner tools with detailed recommendations to enhance tools architecture for better scale, security, ease of use and, where applicable, pointers to Google Cloud open-source tools and best practices.
- Resident Experts: We are selectively introducing this offering of specialists from Google Cloud Consulting teams embedded with Partners for a fixed period of time and with defined scope and deliverables. Partners can leverage these experts to build core delivery capabilities in new areas like generative AI, sharpen existing Google Cloud capabilities in adjacent solution areas like Data & Analytics or have access to expertise to define a comprehensive automation strategy for Google Cloud migration practices.
We are confident that the Partner Delivery Excellence portfolio brings forth much of what’s needed for our Partners to not only deliver high-quality services but also profitably grow their Google Cloud services business quickly and efficiently.
To learn more about the portfolio or to share your feedback or suggestions, please contact your Google Cloud Partner representative.
If you are attending Partner Summit during Google NEXT in August, we look forward to seeing you in the breakout series where we have a dedicated session on this topic.
Thank you for reading. And thank you for your partnership!
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