The Google Maps Platform Android SDK supports extensions for reactive programming, which helps you write code to handle asynchronous operations.

Write reactive and responsive mapping applications with Google Maps Platform

In mobile apps, asynchronous events can happen at any point in time: user touch events, waiting for network calls to complete, or receiving push notifications, to name a few. As an app developer, accounting for these events and composing them with other asynchronous events can be challenging. Reactive programming is an alternative to passing callbacks for different events and helps simplify the process of working with asynchronous events. In reactive programming, events are modeled as a stream, emitting items over time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TmJvOZfBVQ%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

There are two libraries you can use to write reactive code: Kotlin Flows and RxJava. The next two videos show you how to use each one.

Writing reactive and responsive mapping applications using Kotlin

If you’re a Kotlin developer looking to use Coroutines and Flows, the KTX library allows you to use Kotlin Flows to receive events. The Maps KTX library includes extension functions that return Kotlin Flow objects, so you can listen to events in a reactive manner. Unlike suspending functions, which return a single value, Kotlin Flows can return several values over time. For example, you can use a Flow to receive camera event changes over time. To get started using Kotlin Flows in your app, include the Maps KTX library in the dependencies section in your build.gradle file.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cotx1ZmEYg8%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

Creating reactive maps on Android with RxJava

Integrate Google Maps Platform SDKs with popular Android library RxJava. RxJava is the Java implementation of Reactive Extensions, which is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences. One thing RxJava does is allows you to convert callback-based asynchronous code into a chain of transformations. Learn how this works and the other ways you can use RxJava in the third video in this series.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AgGE7fAMrdA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

​​We hope you learn more about reactive programming concepts to help you build responsive and reactive mobile apps in this three-part YouTube series. Have ideas for helpful videos you’d like to see on our channel? Leave a comment on any of our videos. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest updates, tutorials, customer stories, and more.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

To help improve your security posture, improve the reliability of your applications, and reduce configuration drift in your environment, we’re excited to announce a new Anthos reference architecture.

Written in collaboration across our product, engineering, support, and field teams, this new reference architecture helps you plan, deploy, and configure the required components for Anthos hybrid environments.

Anthos hybrid environments give you the flexibility to deploy on-premises components that run container-based workloads and VMs using Anthos clusters on VMware and Anthos clusters on bare metal. You can continue to utilize existing investments in your on-premises infrastructure, and start to add components like Anthos Config Management. When you’re ready to bring everything together, you can add additional Google Cloud-based services like Artifact Registry, Cloud Monitoring, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).

The following sneak peek covers some of our best practices for architecting an Anthos hybrid environment. For more detailed guidance and planning information, see the full Anthos hybrid environment reference architecture.

When you design and deploy an Anthos hybrid environment, we recommend that you use two or more on-premises computing customer sites and two or more Google Cloud regions. In your sites, run multiple clusters. This approach is recommended for several reasons, such as:

• Disaster recovery. If one cluster or site fails, you can continue to run workloads.
• Multiple environments, like production and staging, to test infrastructure changes.
• Different cluster types in each environment: admin clusters and user clusters. This approach separates administrative resources, which is a security best-practice.

The following diagram shows an example of an Anthos hybrid environment that’s spread across customer sites and regions, with different clusters for admin and user workloads and for production and staging:

In each site, you can use Anthos clusters on VMware or Anthos clusters on bare metal. For both products, we recommend the following:

• Use a highly available (HA) control plane with three members for continued control plane availability concurrently with operating system upgrades, control plane software updates, or single-machine hardware or kernel failures.
• Deploy two admin clusters so that admin cluster configuration changes and updates can be tested in the staging environment first.

The following diagram shows an example of Anthos clusters on bare metal with control plane and worker nodes spread across physical machines. With Anthos clusters on VMware, the control plane and worker nodes are spread across VMware VMs:

Configure your on-premises clusters and applications to send logging and monitoring data back to Google Cloud for analysis and review. Different personas should only be granted access to the environments they need. The following diagram shows how application developers and application or platform operators can then view logging and monitoring data in Google Cloud:

Use Anthos Config Management to manage Kubernetes objects in your clusters. Anthos Config Management is a GitOps-style tool that uses a Git repository or Open Container Initiative (OCI) as its storage mechanism and source of truth. Git provider workflows allow multiple stakeholders to participate in review of changes.

As shown in the following diagram, a common Anthos Config Management deployment uses one folder containing configuration for all clusters. Use separate additional folders to hold configuration data, one for application:

Plan and implement a way to secure the network traffic in your Anthos hybrid environment. The following services help with authentication, connectivity, and communication in a cluster:

• Anthos Identity Service connects clusters to on-site identity providers to authenticate local access.
• Connect gateway and workforce identity federation can provide secure cloud-mediated access to mobile workforce clusters without using a VPN.
• Workload Identity provides on-premises workloads with managed short-lifetime credentials for access to cloud resources.
• Anthos Service Mesh encrypts and controls communication between services in the same cluster.

The following diagram shows how Anthos Service Mesh can control the flow of traffic between services within your clusters:

You don’t have to implement all these cloud-based services as part of your initial on-premises deployments. As you become more comfortable and want to expand your capabilities, you can add in some of these hybrid offerings. But, we hope that this blog post has given you some ideas to think about when you start to plan and design your own Anthos hybrid environments.

For more detailed guidance and planning information, see the full Anthos hybrid environment reference architecture. Let us know what you think!

At Google Cloud, we’re committed to making artificial intelligence (AI) accessible to everyone and easier to harness for new use cases.  That’s why we’re excited to announce the general availability of our intuitive, new visual user interface for Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text (STT) API, right in Google Cloud Console, which makes the API much simpler and easier for developers to use.  

The STT API lets developers convert speech into text by leveraging Google’s years of research in automatic speech recognition and transcription technology. As advancements in AI continue to bring speech to new interfaces and devices, the STT API helps developers add speech functionality to their applications in order to better meet consumer demands. 

The STT API covers a wide variety of use cases, from dictation and short commands, to captioning and subtitles. Getting the most of STT, however, can be a complicated process. To achieve the highest accuracy on any AI use case requires careful testing and tuning. 

Previously, developers building on the STT API had to do this work manually by carefully experimenting with our API. Just to get started, developers needed familiarity with GCP integration concepts and had to either build their own tools or manage various scripts and API calls to fully understand the API documentation.  These actions required cumbersome and time-consuming effort and made measuring, customizing, and improving models even more difficult.  

Today’s announcement significantly simplifies the process, facilitating iteration and integration of models into developers’ applications by letting developers perform every API function from within the Google Cloud Console.  These tools will make it easier for developers to integrate the STT API with their products or services. This update also gives developers the ability to manage and quickly iterate on their STT model customizations with Model Adaptation.

Model Adaptation allows developers to customize STT specifically for their domains or use cases. Developers can maintain lists of words and weights that will be applied to either every request or just single requests, depending on their needs. Model adaptations are reusable and composable, so once developers have seen good results in the STT Cloud Console, they can deploy to their entire solution. 

The Speech-to-Text Cloud Console and Model Adaptation API is available now in all Google Cloud regions and languages and is accessible to all GCP users with no additional cost to that of the underlying API usage. The STT API supports over 70 languages in 120 different local variants. If you’re a developer looking for an easy to use, easy to integrate, and high-quality STT experience, sign up for our free trial and try our new interface on your own datasets today!

ANZ Bank is one of Australia’s top four banks and the largest bank in New Zealand by market capitalization. Headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria, we operate in more than 32 markets across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Pacific, Europe, America and the Middle East. Our Payment team deals with all payment transaction types by providing highly secure, mission critical payment services to retail, institutional and international customers. The core payment platform is based on microservices architecture to support discreet payment processing requirements such as continuous volume growth, industry service level agreement (SLA) and complex payment orchestration and more. The API platform leverages APIs to perform specific business functions under the payment orchestration layer, which need to be resilient, scalable and heavy on security controls.

Simplifying our technology landscape

At ANZ, our mission is to improve the financial wellbeing and sustainability of our customers through reliable payment services. Over the past 12 months, we looked to simplify our technology landscape, to free up time so we could focus on implementing more customer-focused banking services. We needed an API management solution that would align to our API-first strategy, while also maintaining our high performance, security, and regulatory standards.

Specifically, the solution needed to:

• Simplify channel interactions with our platform;
• Improve developer experience and enable self-service;
• Ensure resilient fault tolerance;
• Improve our payment API security posture;
• Enable API-first digital enablement for both our internal and external payments customers;
• Have a scalable and transparent pricing model that ensured sustainable API programme growth.
  

Core focus on security and compliance

To meet our security and regulatory compliance standards an API solution would need to offer functionality including:

• Providing coarse-grained and fine-grained authorization and domain specific entitlements for API requests;
• Bundling APIs based on the nature of the channel;
• Integrating easily with established identity providers;
• Establishing patterns for connecting trusted upstream and downstream systems;
• Providing support for the industry standard OAuth 2.0 authorization protocol as per enterprise security standards.

We reviewed Apigee against other API management solutions and gateways, and determined it was the best fit for our needs. Not only did Apigee deliver on all our mission-critical requirements, but it also provided strong ease of use, feature-completeness and support for multiple coding languages.

Enabling smooth developer onboarding, processes and troubleshooting

Using Apigee has greatly improved developer onboarding and reduced the tedious steps involved in knowledge transfer and upskilling. The platform is easy for developers to use, and is backed by great documentation and video resources. These resources provide clear guidance about how to execute certain processes and troubleshoot as needed.

Overall, Apigee has delivered the features we need to manage the publication and consumption of APIs efficiently. We are now running eighteen APIs in production, including two APIs that enable payments through connection to our transaction database, and others that enable supporting services in the payment services platform team.

Our engineers and testers have found it easy to use the interface and Apigee API Management to deploy and test proxies. In addition, out of the box policies allow for fine-grained access control to handle and build proxies of varying degrees of complexity. These policies allow us to control security, manage traffic, mediate transformations and implement custom functionality via scripts.

We can now implement our fine-grained entitlement-based access control requirements, onboard new customers to the cloud and streamline payment channel onboarding. With Apigee, we are also integrating with other API management tools at the bank, in part to enable self-service for API providers and consumers by building a developer portal.

Thanks to Apigee, we are well positioned to adopt a decentralized API team model that will see different teams within payments and beyond create APIs, and ramp up to full production of our API-centric model in the near future. This is a key component of the bank’s broader cloud and API-first strategy that is designed to help ANZ become a more agile and adaptive technology organization. With the right components in place, can we help ANZ create opportunities and propositions that colleagues and customers love, ultimately helping ANZ realize its vision across Australia, New Zealand and international markets.