Founded in 2006, PaGaLGuY started as a forum that enabled students, typically aged between 20 and 30 to discuss and seek advice on academic issues. By 2011, PaGaLGuY had increased its traffic to about 250,000 page views per month. The business is now one of India’s largest education networks and provides an app that users can download to their Android and iOS devices.

Over the past six years, PaGaLGuY has extended its service to include video advice from experts on education topics and grown the number of views of its pages to 1.5 million per day. As Head of Technology for the business, Sandeep Kalidindi has played a key role in ensuring PaGaLGuY is as engaging as possible to users. “Because the product is advertising based, the greater the user engagement, the greater the advertising revenue,” Kalidindi explains.

Google Cloud Platform Results

• Supported growth to 1.5 million page views per day and demand spikes that see requests increase from about 90 per second to about 1,200 per second
• Reduced API latency from about 1 second to about 40 milliseconds
• Reduced system administration time from three to four days per week to 30 minutes every two weeks

In 2015, PaGaLGuY’s senior management team decided to deliver an even more relevant experience for users of the education network. “The core thing we had to do was personalise the experience for each and every student that visited PaGaLGuY,” Kalidindi says. “So we had to capture each student’s data to customise what they see when they open the site.”

The business also found traffic to the network was straining its infrastructure. During demand peaks, created by exams involving as many as 5 million students, PaGaLGuY would be inaccessible for periods of 30 minutes to one hour. Furthermore, average API latency had climbed to an unacceptable 1 second, compromising performance.

PaGaLGuY needed to access extensive compute resources to undertake its planned change. Had the business relied on a physical technology architecture to undertake the transformation, it would have had to purchase capacity equivalent to 16 new servers. “There was no way with a small team we could grow to that extent in a short time,” Kalidindi says. “This was the right moment for us to explore cloud services.”

The business established two primary requirements the selected cloud service needed to meet. First, PaGaLGuY had to be able to scale the platform with costs rising only in proportion to the increase in resources consumed. Accordingly, the business would have to minimise the number of employees required to manage the cloud environment. Second, the platform had to give PaGaLGuY easy access to student data and the ability to undertake prompt, granular analysis.

PaGaLGuY reviewed available public cloud services and determined that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was the best fit for its business. “Google Cloud Platform was considerably more mature than the alternatives, with a high degree of automation and a suite of managed services,” Kalidindi says. PaGaLGuY management then discussed with Google how to optimise cost, performance and availability of its personalised education network on GCP.

With assistance from Google and business transformation specialists Searce, PaGaLGuY was able to deliver the platform into production on GCP in 10 months. “Searce was very proactive in ensuring the environment met our needs and allowing us to gain priority access to Google services in development,” Kalidindi says. “Their team was integral to the success of the migration.”

PaGaLGuY has been running in production in GCP for two years. The education network’s GCP architecture comprises a scalable back-end built on Google App Engine; a managed environment for its containerised applications in Google Kubernetes Engine; messaging-oriented middleware through Google Cloud Pub/Sub; a relational database in Google Cloud SQL; a managed data analytics warehouse running in Google BigQuery; stream and batch data processing through Google Cloud Dataflow; and object storage in Google Cloud Storage.

PaGaLGuY has leveraged GCP services to break down its platform application from a monolithic build to a series of microservices running in Google App Engine that enable independent deployment cycles, minimise test and quality assurance overheads and provide clearer monitoring and logging.

Running on GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to add new personalisation features and grow fourfold without having to add any new engineers or administrators to accommodate the increased traffic. The business has also used the platform to seamlessly collect and aggregate students’ data for analysis, reporting and delivering a more targeted user experience. Furthermore, PaGaLGuY has been able to provide its management team with direct access to Google BigQuery to scrutinise data rather than require them to wait at least a day to view reports created by the product or technology teams.

Support demand peaks of 1,200 requests per second

“Thanks to Google Cloud Platform, we can easily support demand peaks that see requests per second rise from an average 90 per second to about 1,200 per second for as long as 45 minutes,” Kalidindi says. Due to GCP’s scalability, PaGaLGuY can ensure its education network remains available and performance remains consistent during those periods.

Latency cut to 40 milliseconds

The business has also reduced average API latency from 1 second to about 40 milliseconds. Furthermore, using GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to automate most of its processes and reduce system administration requirements from three to four days a week across its team members to about half an hour per week.

The performance of GCP has transformed PaGaLGuY’s culture and processes. “Once our team was exposed to Google Cloud Platform and understood the superiority of the platform, our mindset changed from ‘let us do everything on our own’ to ‘let us do what we do best’ and delegate the remainder,” Kalidindi says. The quality of the service provided by GCP means PaGaLGuY effectively considers the cloud provider as part of its team. “We are always eager to see what new services are being launched and are extremely excited about what Google Cloud Platform can provide as part of its roadmap.” he concludes.

Accelerating digital transformation

Digital transformation is what propels businesses and industries forward. Organizations of all sizes—from startups to global enterprises—focus on digital transformation not only to make scaled improvements, but also to drive significant change and fully embrace the digital age. The pandemic has jump started and pushed many organizations into full gear to digitize their business models and transform with increased business agility, resiliency, and velocity, while driving new innovation and business values for the customers.

However, according to the Boston Consulting Group, only about 30% of companies navigate a digital transformation successfully. Many large scale digital transformation programs failed because of lack of clear business priorities, top-down executive sponsorship, or dedicated resources and commitment to see it through.

Laying the foundation for digital transformation success

Digital transformation drives foundational change in how an organization operates, optimizes internal resources, and delivers value to customers; however, this doesn’t just happen overnight. Digital transformation requires a programmatic approach through an incremental yet agile, cost-effective, value-driven, and sustainable strategy to drive successful transformation across the organization.

One of the critical factors foundational to success is Cloud FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations). Cloud FinOps is an operational framework and cultural shift that brings technology, finance, and business together to drive financial accountability and accelerate business value realization through cloud transformation. In the context of Digital Transformation, it requires new ways of working and operating models to drive behaviors and cultural change that foster cross-functional collaboration, drive accountability, provide greater cost transparency, and promote a blameless culture.

Most importantly, Cloud FinOps serves as an enabling function to drive successful digital transformation programs and enable business agility by breaking down the boundaries between technology, finance, and business teams. Through this cross-functional team collaboration, technology leaders partner with finance and business leaders to better understand the technology investments to create sustainable business outcomes. By doing so, business priorities become more clear and the focus shifts to value creation, customer-centricity, and innovation.

As such, companies are reinventing their business models to fund value streams and connect cloud technology investments to strategic business outcomes. With the increased visibility of the cloud costs, finance teams are also gaining greater accuracy in tracking cloud spend against budgets. Organizations can align the TCO of the technology services to the value metrics to make better informed future investment decisions and forecast demand.

Cloud FinOps to accelerate business value realization

The successful deployment and implementation of Cloud FinOps building blocks will enable organizations to accelerate digital transformation beyond cost savings, including the ability to:

• Accelerate business value realization and innovation
• Drive financial accountability and visibility
• Optimize cloud usage and cost efficiency
• Enable cross organizational trust and collaboration
• Prevent cloud spend sprawl
• Break down of departmental silos

Organizations that are successful in digital transformation most often have established processes to measure and track business value. One of the key building blocks of Cloud FinOps is “Measurement & Realization.” By establishing a robust value measurement approach to track and monitor the business value metrics toward business goals, we are bringing technology, finance, and business leaders together through the discipline of Cloud FinOps to show how digital transformation is enabling the organization to create new innovative capabilities and generate top-line revenue.

Business value metrics fall across several factors: cost efficiency, resiliency, velocity, innovation, and sustainability. We suggest assigning KPIs to the following metric categories:

Cost efficiency: Measure cost efficiency through infrastructure savings, migration, and support costs. Customers will commonly start with metrics such as cost of compute and storage per day-week-month, and evolve to unit metrics such as cost per customer served or cost per transaction, where the cost of an application stack is aligned to customer drivers.

Resiliency: Enhance operational resiliency with improvement in service quality and security risk posture. Traditional measures such as system service level and the frequency and duration of critical downtime events are effective measures of IT durability. Customers can also augment these metrics by associating a cost per minute of downtime events, reflecting not only the direct impact of these events but opportunity costs as well.

Velocity: Decrease time to market by accelerating fluidity in product and service delivery. By moving to a cloud-based microservices architecture, customers commonly achieve benefits of increasing software release frequency, as well as being able to run many more test scenarios prior to release, resulting in higher quality code. As an example, our recent Google’s State of DevOps Report 2021, shows that elite performers have 973x more frequent code deployment and release frequency than the low performers.

Innovation: Enable a culture of rapid experimentation to drive innovation and cloud transformation. With cloud technology, companies can avoid the financial constraints of fixed cost investments and lengthy procurement lead times. As a result, the marginal cost of experimentation and time from ideation to experimentation can drop significantly while the number of experiments per unit of time can grow dramatically.

Sustainability: Embed true environmental and social sustainability metrics across the organization by adopting a circular economy strategy and building sustainability into everything we do – from running applications on zero net emissions virtual machines to reducing carbon footprint with enhanced productivity and collaboration services. According to Accenture, companies with average on-premise to cloud migrations can drive 65% energy reduction and carbon emission reduction of 84%1.

Getting started

The Cloud FinOps journey starts with defining or updating your metrics. Since business goals and strategic imperatives will likely change over time, it is important to review the Cloud FinOps metrics whenever the goals change. The review of metrics should include the changes in business goals when there are changes in the internal priorities of the team. Executive leaders need to identify dependency relationships between technology and business outcomes to improve the impact of metrics on decision making and to better prioritize and invest in evolving business and technology capabilities. Defining good metrics is not just about aligning to business goals and demonstrating value. It is also important to help prioritize strategic initiatives, guide effective resource allocation, and generate awareness across the organization to drive a shift in mindset with the new way of operating in the cloud.

The pandemic has accelerated the need for companies to modernize their digital capabilities. With technology-driven disruptions across all industries, it has never been more important for organizations to transform themselves, embrace an agile mindset, and make bold investments in cloud technology and capabilities to achieve sustainable business outcomes.

So, where are you now in your cloud FinOps journey, and how do you move beyond the challenges ahead? Google can help you start the conversation and accelerate your path to maximizing business value with the cloud.

No matter where you are on the cloud transformation journey, through an interactive session with Google, we can bring executives across the organization together to work toward a shared vision and a plan to accelerate and realize business value in the cloud. If you are interested in more information, please contact us.

Special thanks to Pathik Sharma, Bruce Warner, Jon Naseath, and Nihar Jhawar for their contributions and sharing their domain expertise to this important Cloud FinOps topic.

Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade, cloud-native VMware experience that is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure. By enabling a consistent VMware experience, the service allows customers to adopt Google Cloud rapidly, easily, and with minimal modifications to their vSphere workloads, bringing the best of VMware and Google Cloud together on one platform for a variety of use-cases. These include rapid data center exit, application lift and shift, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, or modernization at your own pace.

Here are seven ways VMware Engine outshines alternatives for running your VMware workloads in the cloud, simplify your operations, and help you innovate faster:

1. Dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking
   Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes come with redundant switching and dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription of bandwidth, unlike other options where there is generally oversubscription. This is especially important when it comes to running latency-sensitive workloads.
2. Four 9’s of availability in a single zone
   The service offers 99.99% uptime SLA for a cluster in a single Zone with five to 16 nodes and FTT=2 or more without the need for stretched clusters, which is higher than the alternatives. Further, dedicated connectivity for core service functions such as vSAN and vMotion enables better solution stability and availability. This enables the service to support the needs of enterprise workloads that require high availability.

Note: “Cluster” means a deployment of three or more dedicated bare metal nodes running VMware ESXi and associated networking managed via management interfaces.

3. Global networking without complex routing
   Google Cloud VMware Engine networking is built based on Google Cloud’s powerful networking architecture. With simplified regional and global routing modes—which allow a VPC’s subnets to be deployed in any region where our service is available—you can architect global networks without the need or overhead of creating and connecting regional network designs. You get instant, direct Layer 3 access between them. In alternative cloud environments, you may have to configure special networking between regions, often requiring VPN-based tunnels over the WAN to enable global uniform network communication. This adds to the deployment and operational complexity, in addition to cost.
4. Integrated multi-VPC networking
   Users often have application deployments in different VPC networks, such as separate dev/test and production environments or multiple administrative domains across business units. The service supports “many-to-many” access from VPC networks to Google Cloud VMware Engine networks with multi-VPC networking, allowing you to retain existing deployed architectures and extend them flexibly to your VMware environments. In addition, by providing multi-VPC networking, you can pool their VMware needs—say for QA and dev—to a smaller set of clusters, effectively reducing their costs.

For more information about the end-to-end networking capabilities and services available in Google Cloud VMware Engine, please refer to the Private Cloud Networking for Google Cloud VMware Engine whitepaper. Here, you’ll find details about network flows, configuration options, and the differentiated benefits of running your VMware workloads in Google Cloud.

5. Unified, cloud-integrated model
   Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed Google first-party service, operated and supported by Google and its world-class team. With fully integrated identities, billing, and access control, you have a simpler end-to-end experience that is different from other services. You access Google Cloud VMware Engine service via the Google Cloud console, like any other Google Cloud service. You can also access other native Google Cloud services privately from your VMware private cloud running in Google Cloud VMware Engine over local connections.
6. Flexibility in third-party ecosystem compatibility
   With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can set up existing VMware on-premises third-party tools or products that require additional privileges by using a solution user account. This uniquely enables operational consistency, ensuring that the tools you have invested in and used over the years work on Google Cloud VMware Engine. Furthermore, in key areas such as vSAN data encryption, you have the choice of not only using Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)—which is turned on by default on vSAN datastores—but also external KMS providers such as HyTrust, Thales, and Fortanix.
7. Dense nodes with high storage:core and memory:core ratios and fast provisioning
   Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes are dense. Each node is powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and comes with 36 cores, 72 hyperthreaded cores, 768 GB memory, 19.2 TB NVMe data and 3.2 TB NVMe cache storage. This, along with oversubscription, leads to high consolidation ratios and compelling storage:core per dollar and memory:core per dollar. In addition, you can rapidly spin up these nodes in a VMware private cloud often in under an hour, enabling on-demand, VMware-consistent capacity in Google Cloud for your needs.

These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure apart. In addition, migrating to Google cloud can save you up to 38% in TCO. Get started by learning about Google Cloud VMware Engine and your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the customers who have embarked upon this journey.

The authors would like to thank the Google Cloud VMware Engine product team for their contributions on this blog.

Every year at CES, people from around the world experience the latest and greatest that consumer tech has to offer. In 2021, CES will be in an all-digital format for the first time.

So how can a virtual show like CES create immersive experiences for attendees tuning in remotely? That’s an interesting challenge for the cloud, and of course, every challenge presents an opportunity.

Google Cloud and 5G help enterprises deliver new experiences

Earlier in 2020, we announced our enterprise telecommunications strategy to deliver workloads to the network edge on Google Cloud, and during our SearchOn event last October, we announced how cloud streaming technology can power augmented reality (AR) in consumer search results.

Now, we’re merging the best of both worlds: Technology built for consumer search can take advantage of our enterprise edge capabilities. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, this past year accelerated our support for enhanced consumer experiences across the board in novel ways. For example, we attempted to address questions such as how potential buyers can make a purchasing decision when they can’t see the product up close. This question becomes even more critical when considering a large purchase such as a new car.

That’s exactly what Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and Google Cloud are working together to solve. As part of FCA’s Virtual Showroom CES event, you can experience the new innovative 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with your phone. You can then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of you—conveniently in your own driveway or in any open space. Check out what the car looks like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior with incredible details.

“As we continue our journey towards becoming a customer-centric mobility company, FCA is adopting emerging technologies that enable us to accelerate and deliver at the speed of our customers’ expectations,” said Mamatha Chamarthi, Chief Information Officer, FCA – North America and Asia Pacific. “Through our collaborative partnership with Google, we are able to expand our efforts to provide an immersive customer experience.”

Harnessing the power of edge with 5G

In order to create a mixed-reality experience with a 3D car model, computer-aided design (CAD)-based data sources that represent a 3D vehicle with highly detailed geometry, depth, texture, and lighting were used. High-fidelity models, such as cars with full interiors, often mean large files (GBs in size). Traditionally, depending on your connection, this can result in long waiting times as assets are downloaded onto your phone. In addition, while mobile phones are more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer, they are no match for the power we have in the cloud. We still want to bring these high end experiences to everyone, regardless of their respective device or geographical location.

We solve this problem by rendering the model in Google Cloud, then streaming it to the devices.

Specifically, the Cloud AR tech uses a combination of edge computing and AR technology to offload the computing power needed to display large 3D files, rendered by Unreal Engine, and stream them down to AR-enabled devices using Google’s Scene Viewer. Using powerful rendering servers with gaming console grade GPUs, memory, and processors located geographically near the user, we’re able to deliver a powerful but low friction, low latency experience. This rendering hardware allows us to load models with tens of millions of triangles and textures up to 4k, allowing the content we serve to be orders of magnitude larger than what’s served on mobile devices (i.e., on-device rendered assets). Doing so leverages high-speed 5G connectivity and streams directly from Google Cloud’s distributed edge, delivering a rich, photorealist immersive experience. Customers like FCA benefit from Google’s years of investment and expertise in streaming technology (have you tried playing Cyberpunk2077 on Stadia yet?). With the expansion of 5G networks, not only will streaming enable the experience for anyone anywhere, but it will also cut the wait time of downloading large assets required for detailed AR/VR experiences, ultimately providing instant gratification.

Applications and experiences are at the core of a winning edge proposition

We’re working to make these capabilities available to all enterprise customers to enable innovative use cases such as leveraging AR to help design teams collaborate, technicians perform machine diagnostics, creating next-generation, live video experiences for sports events, enabling new customer experiences across many industries, and supporting our customers in their digital transformation. Stay tuned!

To see the Jeep Wrangler 4xe come to life whether you’re attending CES or not, scan the QR code below, or check out the FCA CES website. Depending on your OS, device, and network strength, you will see either a photorealistic, cloud-streamed AR model or an on-device 3D car model, both of which can then be placed in your physical environment.