Education is about more than just imparting information. For the Geneva Business School (GBS), education is about teaching the necessary skills to adapt, survive, and thrive in the world after pupils have graduated. With a diverse, international student body spread out over five campuses, the school prides itself on fostering leadership, communication, and productivity skills as well as academic achievement. In 2016, GBS began searching for ways to help its students work together and improve communication. To do that, it turned to Google Workspace for Education.

“We wanted our content stored in a digital environment where the students could collaborate on projects even when working remotely,” says Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director at Geneva Business School. “For us the solution was Google Workspace.”

Improving collaboration, increasing accountability

Prior to 2016, GBS’ online course components were designed to be worked on individually. Students could download course materials from extranet sites to work offline on traditional word processing and spreadsheet software. If they were working together, they had to be physically in the same room or would communicate over email. GBS places a strong emphasis on collaborative work, but in such a fragmented setup, it could be hard for professors to work out exactly who had contributed what in each group.

“In just a few clicks you can get a really good picture of the whole class. Whenever we tried this before Google Classroom, we would enter the grades manually and it took forever.”

Sabrina Espasandin, Instructional Designer and Google Trainer, Geneva Business School

For GBS, the solution came from its Barcelona campus, which has a reputation as something of an innovation hub, says Sabrina Espasandin, Instructional Designer and Google Trainer at the school. “It’s smaller than the main campus in Switzerland so there’s more scope for experimenting with new technologies,” she says. GBS wanted to do more than just upgrade its email. The objective was to build an entire online platform enabling students, faculty, and staff to not only communicate with each other, but also to use it as a productivity platform for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

Connecting students and professors with Google Classroom

After evaluating its options, the Barcelona campus chose to implement Google Workspace for Education in early 2016, largely because of the widespread adoption of Google tools by students in their personal lives. “Most of our students were very familiar with Google tools and how Google works,” says Carlos. “It made the transition much easier for them.” With such a radical change, GBS also made sure to provide adequate training for everybody to help them overcome any issues that might arise during the transition. “There was a little pushback from people who had been using the same tools for a long time,” says Sabrina. “But once they saw for themselves the benefits of the new system, we turned sceptics into believers.”

The core of the new system was Google Classroom, a single, online destination where teachers and students could quickly and easily interact with each other no matter where they were. Gmail replaced the traditional email system, easing the load on the campus servers. Live editing in Docs, Sheets, and Slides meant that students could work on projects and presentations at the same time without having to email multiple versions, which could get buried in long threads.

“It’s changed the whole way we work. Students would post questions online, and other students would answer them before the teacher got there. It means the knowledge comes from the class, not just from the professor.” –

Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director, Geneva Business School

The faculty used Sites as an opportunity to update their course materials from static slideshows that had to be downloaded for offline viewing, into animated, interactive pages online. Meanwhile, Forms proved itself useful as a way for professors to setup quizzes online and, in conjunction with Google Classroom, to help automate the marking process and quickly analyze results.

A new platform, a new way of working

The online hub that GBS built in Barcelona with Google Classroom and Google Workspace was very quickly seen as a success. So much so, that within six months, the school rolled out Google Workspace to all of its other campuses. As of Q3 2018, GBS has activated more than 2,300 user accounts. The students benefit from instant communication, frictionless collaboration, and the ability to work on projects outside the classroom. It also means they are in a better position to answer each other’s questions without having to wait for a response from their teacher.

Meanwhile, GBS’ teachers no longer have to deal with an extranet that required them to upload all their own content in an overly complicated way or spend hours bulk-creating new email addresses at the start of each year. “The time saved in administrative tasks has been massive,” says Sabrina. “User creation is a breeze compared to the past.” In addition, the faculty found a new efficiency with rote tasks, such as grading analysis, which allowed them to spend more time focusing on students and assessing their specific needs.

“In just a few clicks you can get a really good picture of the whole class,” says Sabrina. “Whenever we tried this before Google Classroom, we would enter the grades manually and it took forever.”

“We’ve built a very personalized online platform designed to engage students and reduce dropout rates. With Google, we hope to bring the collaborative spirit we have in our normal classes to our online classrooms.” –

Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director, Geneva Business School

Meanwhile, Professors have found that, despite fears of an always-online culture, the collaborative nature of the new platform empowers students to help each other instead of just relying on help from the faculty.

“It’s changed the whole way we work,” says Carlos. “Students would post questions online, and other students would answer them before the teacher got there. It means the knowledge comes from the class, not just from the professor.”

With all of GBS migrated to Google Workspace, the search is on for the next leap forward. The school is currently working hard to provide some of its courses entirely online, for students who wish to work remotely but still benefit from GBS’ superior teaching and strong reputation. The content for the new modules will be hosted on Sites, while Google Classroom will serve as a central hub for teacher-student communication. GBS is working to personalize the modules for teachers and students alike. For example, every teacher will have access to a classroom roster that provides quick links to students’ digital portfolios, also hosted on a Google Site.

Building on the knowledge it has acquired in the last two years with various Google tools, the school is trying to make online learning more effective, as well as develop more in-depth measurements of student growth and progression. As it becomes more comfortable with Google Workspace and Google Classroom, GBS can look forward to exploring its new metrics with tools such as Google Data Studio.

“We’ve built a very personalized online platform designed to engage students and reduce dropout rates,” says Carlos. “With Google, we hope to bring the collaborative spirit we have in our normal classes to our online classrooms.”

Whether with the cloud or within their own data centers, enterprises have undergone a period of remarkable consolidation and centralization of their compute resources. But with the rise of ever more powerful mobile devices, and increasingly capable cellular networks, application architects are starting to think beyond the confines of the data center, and looking out to the edge. 

What exactly do we mean by edge? Think of the edge as distributed compute happening on a wide variety of non-traditional devices — mobile phones of course, but also equipment sensors in factories, industrial equipment, or even temperature and reaction monitoring in a remote lab. Edge devices are also connected devices, and can communicate back to the mothership over wireless or cellular networks. 

Equipped with increasingly powerful processors, these edge devices are being called upon to perform tasks that have thus far been outside the scope of traditional IT. For enterprises, this could mean pre-processing incoming telemetry in a vehicle, collecting video in kiosks at a mall, gathering quality control data with cameras in a warehouse, or delivering interactive media to retail stores. Enterprises are also relying on edge to ingest data from outposts or devices that have even more intermittent connectivity, e.g., oil rigs or farm equipment, filtering that data to improve quality, reducing it to right-size information load, and processing it in the cloud. New data and models are then pushed back to the edge; in addition, we can also push configuration, software, and media updates and decentralize processing workload.

Edge isn’t all about enabling new use cases – it’s also about right-sizing environments and improving resource utilization. For example, adopting an edge model can also relieve load on existing data centers. 

But while edge computing is full of promise for enterprises, there are many pieces that are still works in progress. Further, developing edge workloads is very different from developing traditional applications, which enjoy the benefits of persistent data connections and run on well-resourced hardware platforms. As such, cloud architects are still in the early days of figuring out how to use and implement edge for their organizations. 

Fortunately, there are tools you can use to help ease the transition to edge computing — and that likely fit into your organization’s existing computing systems. Kubernetes, of course, but also higher level management tools like Anthos, which provides a consistent control plane across cloud, private data center and edge locations. Other parts of the Anthos family – Anthos Config Management and Anthos Service Mesh — go one step further and provide consistent, centralized management to your edge and cloud deployments. And there’s more to come.

For the remainder of this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into the past and current state of edge computing, and the benefits that architects and developers can expect to see from edge computing. In a next post, we’ll take a deeper look at some of the challenges that designing for edge introduces, and some of the advantages the average enterprise has in adopting the edge model. Finally, we’ll look at the Google Cloud tools that are available today to help you build out your edge environment, and look at some early customer examples that highlight what’s possible today — and that will spark your imagination for what to do tomorrow. 

The evolution of edge computing 

The edge is not a new concept. In fact, it’s been around for the last two decades, spanning many use cases that are prevalent today. One of the first applications for edge was to use content delivery networks (CDN) to cache and serve daily static website pages near clients, for example, web servers in California data centers serving financial data to European customers. 

As connectivity has improved and software evolved, the edge has evolved too, and the focus has shifted towards using edge to distribute services. First, simple services expanded from static HTML to javascript libraries or image repositories. Common functions like image transformation, credit and address validation support services followed. Soon, organizations were deploying more complex cloudlet and clustered microservices installations, as well as distributed and replicated datasets. The term “endpoint” became ubiquitous, and APIs profilerated. 

In parallel, there’s been an explosion of creativity in hardware, microcontrollers and dedicated edge devices. Fit-for-purpose products were deployed globally. Services like Google Cloud IoT Core extended our ability to manage and securely connect these dispersed devices, allowing platform managers to register tools and leverage managed services like Pub/Sub and Dataflow for data ingestion. And with Kubernetes, large remote clusters — mini private clouds in and of themselves — operate as self-healing, autoscaling services across the broader internet, opening the door to new models for applications and architectural patterns. In short, both distributed asynchronous systems and economies have blossomed.

What does this mean for enterprises? For the purposes of this series, edge means you can now go beyond the corporate network, beyond cloud VPCs, and beyond hybrid. The modern edge is not sitting at a major remote data center, nor is it a CDN, cloud provider, or in a corporate data center rack — it’s just as likely to look like 100 of these attached to a thousand sensors.

Edge, in short, is about having hardware and devices installed at remote locations that can process and communicate back the information they collect and generate. The edge management challenge, meanwhile, is being able to push configuration and software/model/media updates to these remote locations when they are connected.

Enable new use cases

Today, we have reached a new threshold for edge computing — one where micro-data-processing centers are deployed as the edge of a fractal arm, as it were. Together, they form a broad, geographically distributed, always-on framework for streaming, collecting, processing and serving asynchronous data. This big, loosely coupled application system lives, breathes and grows. Always changing, always learning from the data it collects — and always pushing out updated models when the tendrils are connected. 

Right now, the rise of 5G is pushing the limits of edge even further. Devices enabled with 5G can transmit using a mobile network — no ISP required — enabling connectivity anywhere within reach of a cell tower. Granted, these networks have lower bandwidth, but they are often more than adequate for certain types of data, for example fire sensors in forests bordering remote towns that emit temperature or carbon monoxide data periodically. Recently, Google Cloud partnered with AT&T to enhance business use of 5G edge technology but there is so much more that can be done. 

Reduce data center investments

In addition to enabling the digitization of a broad range of new use cases, adopting edge can also benefit your existing data center.

Let’s face it: data centers are expensive to maintain. Moving some data center load to edge locations can reduce your data center infrastructure investment, as well as compute time spent there. Edge services tend to have much lower service level objectives (SLOs) than data center services, driving lower levels of hardware investment. Edge installations also tend to tolerate disconnectedness, and thus function perfectly well with lower SLOs — and lower costs. 

Let’s look at an example of where edge can really reduce costs: big data. Back in the day, we used to build monolithic serial processors — state machines — that had to keep track of where they were in processing in case of failure. But time and again, we’ve seen that smaller, more distributed processing can break down big, expensive problems into smaller, more cost-effective chunks. 

Starting with the explosion of MapReduce almost 20 years ago, big-data workloads were parallelized across clusters on a network, and state management was simplified with intermediate output to share, wait for, or restart processing from checkpoints. Those monolithic systems were replaced by cheaper, smarter, networked clusters and data repositories where parallel work could be executed and rendered into workable datasets. 

Flash forward to today, and we are seeing those same concepts applied and distributed to edge data-collection points. In this evolution of big data processing, we are scaling up and out to the point where observation data is so massive that it must first be prefiltered, and then preprocessed down to a manageable size and still be actionable. Only then should it be written back to the main data repositories for more resource-intensive processing and model building.

In short, data collection, cleanup, and potentially initial aggregation happens at the edge location, which reduces the amount of junk data sitting in costly data stores. This increases performance of the core data warehouse, and reduces the size and cost of network transfers and storage! 

The edge is a huge opportunity for today’s enterprises. But designing environments that can make effective use of the edge isn’t without its challenges. Stick around for part two of this series, where we look at some of the architectural challenges typically encountered while designing for the edge and how we begin to address them.

The holiday season is upon us! If you are making your list and checking it twice, we’ve got a few learning gifts you can tick off the list and share with others too. For the season of giving, we’ve wrapped up some of our most popular training and certification opportunities and made them available at no-cost.

This December we’re aiming to offer something for everyone, whether you’re just getting started with cloud, or knee deep in preparing for a professional certification exam. Start with the fundamentals to gain a deeper understanding of cloud whether you’re in a business or technical role. Perhaps you’re looking to flex your data analytics and ML muscle with BigQuery and SQL, earn a Google Cloud skill badge, or enhance your technical cloud skills. Or jump into a hot topic like sustainability and learn about Google’s commitment to a clean cloud, and how to use sustainability tools. Read on to find something on your learning wishlist.

We also have a variety of learning formats to fit your needs. Complete hands-on labs, view courses and webinars, or jump into competitions like the Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge or our most popular #GoogleClout Challenge of 2022 – and let the fun begin!

Are you ready to learn? Take a look at the training we’ve recommended below to work towards your goals as we head into the new year, with new skills, to make the most of new opportunities.

We’re giving plenty of learning gifts to choose from this month, so take your pick from the topics below:

ML, AI and data analytics

Who it’s for: ML, AI and data engineers
What you’ll take away: A deeper understanding of working in BigQuery and SQL.
Level: Foundational
Start learning now:

• Introduction to SQL for BigQuery and Cloud SQL – Get started with this one hour and 15 minute hands-on lab to learn fundamental SQL querying keywords, which you will run in the BigQuery console on a public dataset, and how to export subsets of a dataset into CSV files, then upload to Cloud SQL. You’ll also learn how to use Cloud SQL to create and manage databases and tables, with hands-on practice on additional SQL keywords that manipulate and edit data.

• Weather Data with BigQuery – In this 45 minute lab, you’ll use BigQuery to analyze historical weather observations, and run analytics on multiple datasets.
• Insights from Data with BigQuery – Earn a shareable skill badge when you complete this five hour quest. It includes interactive labs covering the basics of BigQuery, from writing SQL queries, creating and managing database tables in Cloud SQL, and querying public tables to loading sample data into BigQuery.
• The Google Cloud Fly Cup Challenge – This is a three-stage competition in the sport of drone racing in the Drone Racing League (DRL). You will use DRL’s race data to predict outcomes and give performance improvement tips to pilots (these are the best drone pilots in the world!). There’s a chance to win exclusive swag, prizes, and an expenses paid trip to the DRL World Championship. Registration closes on December 31, 2022.

CI/CD

Who it’s for: Software Developers
What you’ll take away: Take part in our most popular #GoogleClout challenge of 2022! Build a simple containerized application.
Level: Fundamental
Start learning now:

• GoogleClout – CI/CD in a Google Cloud World – Flex your #GoogleClout in this cloud puzzle that challenges you in a lab format to create a Cloud Build Trigger to rebuild a containerized application hosted on a remote repository. Register it in the Artifact Registry and deploy. You’ll be scored on your results and earn a badge to share.

Preparing for Google Cloud certification

Who it’s for: Cloud engineers and architects, network and security engineers and Google Workspace administrators
What you’ll take away: Explore the breadth and scope of the domains covered in the cloud certification exams, assess your exam readiness and create a study plan.
Level: Foundational to advanced
Start learning now:

• Preparing for Google Cloud certification – These courses are for Associate Cloud Engineers, Professional Cloud Architects, Professional Cloud Network Engineers, Professional Cloud Security Engineers, and Google Workspace Administrators preparing for Google Cloud certification exams. You’ll also earn a completion badge when you finish the course.
• Preparing for the Cloud Architect certification exam – Join this 30 minute on-demand webinar to learn about resources to maximize your study plan, and get tips from a #GoogleCloudCertified Professional Cloud Architect.

Intro to Google Cloud for technical professionals

Who it’s for: Software Developers
What you’ll take away: Boost your Google Cloud operational and efficiency skills to drive innovation by navigating the fundamentals of compute, containers, cloud storage, virtual machines, and data and machine learning services.
Level: Foundational
Start learning now:

• Getting Started with Google Cloud Fundamentals – This on-demand webinar takes a little less than three hours to complete. Navigate Compute Engine, container strategies, and cloud storage options through sessions and demos. You’ll also learn how to create VM instances, and discover Google Cloud’s big data and machine learning options.

Intro to Google Cloud for business professionals

Who it’s for: Business roles in the cloud space like HR, marketing, operations and sales
What you’ll take away: A deeper understanding of cloud computing and how Google Cloud products help achieve organizational goals.
Level: Foundational
Start learning now:

• Cloud Digital Leader learning path -There are four courses in this learning path covering digital transformation, innovating with data, infrastructure and application modernization, and Google Cloud security and operations.

• Preparing for the Cloud Digital Leader certification exam – In this 30 minute webinar continue your learning journey by preparing for the Google Cloud Digital Leader certification exam. The webinar covers all the resources we’ve made available to help you prepare.

Sustainability

Who it’s for: Software Developers
What you’ll take away: Learn how the cleanest cloud in the industry can help you save your cloud bill, and save the planet.
Level: Foundational
Start learning now

• A Tour of Google Cloud Sustainability -Work through this one hour, hands-on lab, to explore your carbon footprint data, use the Cloud Region Picker, and reduce your cloud carbon footprint with Active Assist recommendations.

Keep connected and learning with us in 2023

Accelerate your growth on Google Cloud by joining the Innovators Program. No-cost for users of Google Cloud (including Workspace), it’s for anyone who wants to advance their personal and professional development around digital transformation, drive innovation, and solve difficult business challenges.

Continue your learning with Google Cloud in 2023 by starting an annual subscription¹ with Innovators Plus benefits. Gain access to $500 in Google Cloud credits, live learning events, our entire on-demand training catalog, a certification voucher, access to special events, and other benefits.

Build your skills, reach your goals and advance your career with 12 no-cost ways to learn Google Cloud!

1. Start an annual subscription on Google Cloud Skills Boost with Innovators Plus for $299/year, subject to eligibility limitations.