Editor’s note: Technology today lets companies of any size take on entire industries simply with an innovative business model plus digital distribution. Take Shine, a French startup whose platform helps freelancers manage their finances — and their administrative commitments. Here, Raphael Simon, Shine’s CTO and co-founder, talks about why Shine built a new bank on Google Cloud Platform, and in particular Cloud Spanner.

More and more people are deciding to take the plunge and start a freelance career. Some of them by choice, others out of necessity. One of their biggest pain points is dealing with administrative tasks.

In some countries, especially in Europe, the administrative burden of being a freelancer is similar to what a company of 10 or more people deals with. A freelancer doesn’t necessarily have the time or skills to manage all this paperwork. So we are building a new bank for freelancers from the ground up that helps automate administrative tasks associated with their business.

Shine’s banking services and financial tools make it as easy to work as a freelancer as it is to work for a larger company. We deal with administrative tasks on behalf of the freelancer so that he or she can focus on their job: finding and wowing clients.

Building our infrastructure 

As a new bank, we had the opportunity to build our infrastructure from the ground up. Designing an infrastructure and choosing a database presents tough decisions, especially in the financial services world. Financial institutions come under tremendous scrutiny to demonstrate stability and security. Even a tiny leak of banking data can have tremendous consequences both for the bank and its clients, and any service interruption can trigger a banking license to be suspended or a transaction to be declined.

At the same time, it’s vital for us to optimize our resources so we can maximize the time we spend developing user-facing features. In our first six months, we iterated and validated a prototype app using Firebase, and secured our seed funding round (one of the largest in Europe in 2017).

Based on our positive experience with Firebase, plus the ease-of-use and attractive pricing that Google Cloud offered, we decided to build our platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

We were drawn to GCP because it has a simple, consistent interface that is easy to learn. We chose App Engine flexible environment with Google Cloud Endpoints for an auto-scaling microservices API. These helped us reduce the time, effort, and cost in terms of DevOps engineers, so we could invest more in developing features, while maintaining our agility.

We use Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) to help control developer access to critical parts of the application such as customer bank account data. It was quite a relief to lean on a reliable partner like Google Cloud for this.

Database decisions 

Next came time to choose a database. Shine lives at the financial heart of our customers’ businesses and provides guidance on things like accounting and tax declaration. The app calculates the VAT for each invoice and forecasts the charges they must pay each quarter.

Due to the sensitivity of our customers’ data, the stakes are high. We pay careful attention to data integrity and availability and only a relational database with support for ACID transactions (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) can meet this requirement.

At the same time, we wanted to focus on the app and user experience, not on database administration or scalability issues. We’re trying to build the best possible product for our users, and administering a database has no direct value for our customers. In other words, we wanted a managed service.

Cloud Spanner combines a globally distributed relational database service with ACID transactions, industry-standard SQL semantics, horizontal scaling, and high availability. Cloud Spanner provided additional security, high-availability, and disaster recovery features out-of-the-box that would have taken months for us to implement on our own. Oh, and no need to worry about performance — Cloud Spanner is fast. Indeed, Cloud Spanner has been a real asset to the project, from the ease-of-use of creating an instance to scaling the database.

Cloud Spanner pro tips 

We began working with Cloud Spanner and have learned a lot along the way. Here are some technical notes about our deployment and some best practices that may be useful to you down the road:

• Cloud Spanner allows us to change a schema in production without downtime. We always use a NOT NULL constraint, because we generally think that using NULL leads to more errors in application code. We always use a default value when we create an entity through our APIs and we use Cloud Dataflow to set values when we change a schema (e.g., adding a field to an entity). 
• With microservices, it’s generally a good practice to make sure every service has its own database to ensure data isolation between the different services. However, we adopted a slightly different strategy to optimize our use of Cloud Spanner. We have an instance on which there are three databases — one for production, one for staging and one for testing our continuous integration (CI) pipeline. Each service has one or more interleaved tables that are isolated from others services’ tables (we do not use foreign-keys between tables from different services). This way our microservices data are not tightly “coupled”. 
• We created an internal query service that performs read-only queries to Cloud Spanner to generate a dashboard or do complex queries for analytics. It is the only service where we allow joins between tables across services. 
• We take advantage of Cloud Spanner’s scalability, and thus don’t delete any data that could one day be useful and/or profitable. 
• We store all of our business logs on Cloud Spanner, for example connection attempts to the application. We append the ‘-Logs’ suffix to them. 
• When possible, we always create an interleave. 

 In short, implementing Cloud Spanner has been a good choice for Shine:

• It’s saved us weeks, if not months, of coding. 
• We feel we can rely on it since it’s been battle-tested by Google. 
• We can focus on building a disruptive financial services product for freelancers and SMBs.

And because Cloud Spanner is fully managed and horizontally scalable, we don’t have to worry about hardware, security patches, scaling, database sharding, or the possibility of a long and risky database migration in the future. We are confident Cloud Spanner will grow with our business, particularly as we expand regionally and globally. I strongly recommend Cloud Spanner to any company looking for a complete database solution for business-critical, sensitive, and scalable data.

The city of South Bend, Indiana has announced they are working with Google Cloud to connect 500 local job seekers with no-cost access to Google Cloud Skills Boost through Upskill SB. This initiative will train, upskill, and certify residents in cloud computing skills to create pathways to technical jobs.

As companies, nonprofits, and governments increasingly leverage cloud computing technology to strengthen their organizations, skilled cloud talent is in high demand both nationally, in Indiana, and in South Bend. According to Lightcast, there were 27,180 unique cloud roles open in the U.S. as of October 2022. Cloud skills are the most in-demand skill set by IT departments: more than one-third of tech learners said professionals with cloud skills are the most challenging to find.

“This partnership with Google Cloud will help residents get on a no-cost path to a cloud computing career at a time when the field is rapidly growing,” said Caleb Bauer, Executive Director of Community Investment for the City of South Bend. “This will help residents prepare to take the next step in their career with Google Cloud Skills Boost and will pave the way to build in-demand skills.”

Google Cloud Skills Boost is the destination for all Google Cloud learning and training opportunities. Local colleges and universities are also able to offer free access to Google Cloud Skills Boost for students through  the Google Cloud Higher Education program. Students can request access to free online labs, quests, and courses. Faculty can take advantage of free Google Cloud Computing Foundations curriculum and coach their students to prepare for Google Cloud certifications.

“Google is proud to offer no-cost access to Google Cloud Skills Boost for jobseekers in South Bend,” said Alice Kamens, Workforce Development lead at Google Cloud. “Through this partnership, we’re advancing our work to ensure everyone has access to the technical training needed to pursue cloud computing careers.”

Those interested in learning more about the program or applying for Upskill SB should visit the Google Cloud page on Upskill SB. Scholarship recipients need access to a computer, hand-held device or smartphone and the internet.

Building a strong brand in today’s hyper-competitive business environment takes vision. It also requires a flexible, easily managed approach to digital asset management (DAM), so marketing professionals and other stakeholders can easily share, store, track, and manipulate assets to build the brand.

Many of today’s leading companies, including JetBlue, Slack, TripAdvisor, Lyft, and HealthONE, rely on Brandfolder to deliver consistent, organized, and efficient brand experiences. Brandfolder provides an easy-to-use platform that can scale across an entire company with little end-user training, empowering customers to distribute digital assets wherever they are needed. Customers also gain much greater insight into how those assets are used, and how to use them more effectively in marketing campaigns and brand messaging.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform.”

—Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science, Brandfolder

Brandfolder is constantly advancing its development efforts to introduce new data-driven features without complicating the user experience. Big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are key to meeting customers’ unique business needs, and essential for Brandfolder to compete in the fast-moving DAM industry. To enhance these capabilities, Brandfolder sought a public cloud provider that could help it scale its data pipeline cost effectively while providing access to advanced AI technologies.

After graduating from the Techstars startup accelerator program in 2013, Brandfolder tried two other cloud providers before standardizing on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We saw a difference with Google Cloud from the very beginning because the interactions felt like a strategic relationship,” says Jim Hanifen, Head of Product at Brandfolder. “Google gave us startup credits and a lot of face-to-face support, which we hadn’t experienced with other cloud providers. We decided to move our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform.”

Building an ML platform for brand intelligence

After performing an initial lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines (VMs) onto Compute Engine, Brandfolder built an ML platform using GCP managed services to seamlessly deliver its data products. The platform leverages Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage as the data lake, Cloud Dataproc for cloud-native Apache Spark computing clusters, Cloud Composer as the batch job scheduler, Cloud Pub/Sub as the backbone data pipeline, Container Registry to store Docker images, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the application orchestrator. Cloud Dataflow brings data into the data lake and into BigQuery for analysis.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform,” says Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science at Brandfolder, who describes the architecture in a detailed blog. “We simply ingest raw application and event data on one end and output an ML service on the other.”

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost. We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

—Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering, Brandfolder

For many general use cases, Brandfolder does not need to build custom ML models, and instead relies on pre-trained API models from GCP. For example, it uses Vision API and Video Intelligence API to auto-tag creative assets on import to enable fast, intuitive searches across images and videos. When more product- and brand-specific modeling is required to address unique customer use cases, Brandfolder builds and trains custom ML models using its GCP pipeline or Cloud AutoML, a suite of products built on Google transfer learning and neural architecture search technology. For example, if a Brandfolder customer makes different types of grills, Brandfolder can use AutoML Vision to train a model to recognize the different grills.

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost,” explains Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering at Brandfolder. “We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

Industry-leading security and performance

Google Cloud’s security model helps Brandfolder give existing and prospective customers peace of mind that their data will be protected. Cloud Identity & Access Management (Cloud IAM) provides enterprise-grade access control, while Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) enables remote users to work more securely without the hassles of a VPN client. GCP also isolates cloud resources into projects, making it easy to assign permissions and keep data and VMs organized and segregated.

“With Google Cloud, everything begins and ends with security, which makes things very easy for us,” says Jim. “If we’re under a security review, we can submit a Google security white paper. If a potential customer has security concerns, we tell them we are hosted on GCP, and those concerns go away.”

To give customers even better application performance for accessing their brand assets, Brandfolder uses Cloud Memorystore, an in-memory data store service for Redis, to cache data and provide sub-millisecond data access for production applications.

“It was much easier for us to use Cloud Memorystore versus running Redis on our compute instances,” says Brett. “The high availability, replication across zones, and automatic failover with no data loss are big for us.”

Global private network interconnects between Google Cloud and the Fastly content delivery network (CDN) dramatically reduce latency, allowing Brandfolder’s customers to deliver and update even very large creative assets quickly around the world.

“What’s beautiful about the relationship between Google and Fastly is that if one of our customers uploads a new version of an asset, we can propagate that out to Fastly, and the new version will automatically show up in all the places where it’s referenced,” says Brett.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter. Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

—Jim Hanifen, Head of Product, Brandfolder

Improving employee and customer productivity

Brandfolder also uses Google solutions for real-time collaboration and productivity, using G Suite to connect employees with intuitive, cloud-based apps. Teams use Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts Meet every day to move the business forward. Many of Brandfolder’s customers are also G Suite users, and Brandfolder offers a plug-in that allows them to view their creative assets inside of Docs and pull images in as needed. Customers can also log into Brandfolder with their G Suite credentials, making the solution even easier to use.

“We’ve been using G Suite since the beginning, and it’s helped us collaborate efficiently to build a successful, growing company,” says Jim. “Our teams expect to have that kind of close collaboration, and everyone here enjoys the G Suite experience.”

Driving 99 percent annual business growth

With automated tagging and other innovative AI-based features, Brandfolder is helping customers locate and distribute assets faster. As a result, Brandfolder is building customer loyalty and increasing sales, growing its business by 99 percent year-over-year. Since moving to GCP, Brandfolder has been able to scale its analytics and data pipeline 50x without a corresponding increase in costs and has not had to expand its development team.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter,” says Jim. “Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

To fuel the breakthroughs of the future, today’s researchers need easy access to the most innovative cloud technologies. That’s why we are delighted to announce the latest expansion of Google Cloud research credits beyond its previous scope of government and academic research institutions to researchers at nonprofit institutions. This initiative is part of our ongoing efforts to make the advantages of cloud research available to more people everywhere–and to drive more discoveries faster. 

To serve researchers outside of academia, we are now offering nonprofit institutions access to Google’s research credit program. Leading centers of scientific knowledge like the New York Genome Center, Scripps Research Institute, the Vector Institute in Toronto, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) have already benefited from the efficiencies of managing and analyzing their datasets on Google Cloud.

Michael Schmitz, Director of Engineering at AI2, reports that “Google Cloud has been essential for our research program. While we have an on-premise installation for custom hardware, the ability to use Google Cloud for isolated workstations (where researchers always have guaranteed access to a development environment) and bursting with increased need (such as our summer intern surge or a hyperparameter tuning just before our deadline) has been a critical part of conducting our research.”

Also, to better support Ph.D. students, we are updating the terms of Google Cloud credits for use toward advanced research. Now, Ph.D. students can apply for up to $1,000 grants that are renewable over the five years of their programs. We know that the researchers of the future need the best resources now.

Hassaan Maan, Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto/Vector Institute, says “when the pandemic started, I began working on a web-based platform to help researchers analyze genome sequences of the COVID-19 virus in real time and compare with data from labs around the world. Deploying the Covid Genotyping Tool (CGT) platform was challenging, as I had minimal experience hosting web applications and we required a scalable and fine-tuned deployment. Google Cloud’s comprehensive user interface and thorough documentation made for a seamless deployment, and I was able to get the platform up and running in less than two weeks. Google Cloud was a huge factor in the success of this project, and I hope to be able to use it further during my Ph.D. studies.”

To ramp up your own research project with Google Cloud, apply now for free credits in selected countries. To supplement your own learning on Google Cloud, sign up to earn four Google Cloud skills badges that you can share on your social platforms.

With the novel coronavirus COVID-19 sweeping across continents and fatalities climbing every day, it was only a matter of time before countries closed their borders to contain its spread.

In the wake of this decision, travel and tourism, the linchpins of many economies, were among the worst affected.

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 22 percent fall in international tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2020, and could see an annual decline of between 60 percent and 80 percent when compared with 2019.

The impact on the economy and to livelihoods that are dependent on tourism and hospitality has been significant. Prior to the pandemic, the outlook was quite different. Research by UNWTO in 2018 estimated that India would have 50 million outbound tourists by 2020.

Technology was also set to play a huge part in that growth. A Google Travel study showed that 74 percent of travellers were planning their trips on the Internet, and technologies like AI, IoT and VR were all set to be key trends this year.

Now, as borders slowly reopen and travel restrictions are gradually lifted, technology could once again be the game-changer. Manoj Sharma CTO, Cleartrip.com spoke to YourStory about the industry’s road to recovery and how technology will aid that journey.

Read the Full Story on YourStory