Since 2007, PrestaShop has helped companies unlock the power of e-commerce through its open-source platform. Over 300,000 merchants worldwide use the PrestaShop platform to grow their business and serve online shoppers.

“Our open-source strategy to ecommerce enablement sets us apart,” says Rémi Paulin, Ph.D., Data Architect at PrestaShop. “Customization is becoming more crucial to retailers, and our open-source platform allows companies to continually evolve their sites and services to stand out from competitors.”

As PrestaShop grew, it wished to derive more value from its data, but the company ran into issues caused by a legacy, siloed architecture that negatively impacted data consistency and accessibility.

Let’s look at how PrestaShop works with Google Cloud and partners Fivetran and Hightouch to gain more control over data, enable a beyond-BI data strategy, and increase employee engagement from less than 10% to more than 40%.

Improving trust in data

Core systems at PrestaShop, including SQL and NoSQL databases, and SaaS Applications, were siloed; each presenting its own data, often captured from different sources such as support tickets, marketing engagement, purchase activity, and product usage. This setup made data overall inconsistent as no single system would contain a source of truth, resulting in many inefficiencies, poor collaboration across teams, and a reluctance to use data to support key decisions.

“Not long ago, less than 10% of the company regularly relied on data, so we were missing opportunities to make more data-driven decisions,” says Paulin. “Data was underutilized, and people were rapidly losing trust in data.”

PrestaShop set out to design a new architecture to address past challenges, such as lack of data consistency, and improve data accessibility.

“Google Cloud, along with Hightouch and Fivetran, allowed us to build a modern stack to solve these challenges and support our beyond-BI data strategy.”

Building a modern data stack

The first step was to build a robust data ingestion pipeline. After considering several vendors, PrestaShop chose to work with Fivetran to extract data from SaaS applications, including Zendesk, HubSpot, and GitHub, to load into BigQuery. They also use Datastream to stream Change Data Capture (CDC) data from transactional databases into BigQuery in real-time.

“Fivetran and Datastream are no-ops, efficient and highly reliable, and relieve our Data Engineers of management tasks. This brings us a high degree of confidence to build the rest of the stack atop these services,” says Paulin.

PrestaShop relies on several Google Cloud solutions, including Dataflow, and a managed Spark service by Ascend.io, for data transformation. It also uses Looker for its semantic modeling capacities and as a self-serve data platform.

As the company continued on its journey to transform how it manages and benefits from data, it engaged Hightouch to enable data accessibility through activation. Sitting on top of Looker, Hightouch unlocks all data models for operational intelligence. For example, in just a few days, the team built a customer knowledge model combining data from multiple sources and used Hightouch to sync data from the semantic layer to Zendesk via Reverse ETL. This allowed the care team to make more data-informed decisions, speeding up the time to resolve support tickets submitted through Zendesk by 33%.

“Hightouch feels like a natural extension of Looker and reinforces the position of the semantic data model as the single source of truth,” says Paulin. “It powers a variety of Data Activation use cases, supporting our beyond-BI strategy by providing teams with access to data when and where they need it to improve everyday operations. This has a big impact on the company, bolstering employee trust in available data.”

Becoming data-driven

In less than six months, PrestaShop managed to get the entire data stack up and running, build over 30 data models and engage over 120 employees with a small team of only two Data Engineers.

“Data is now accessible to every stakeholder within the company, regardless of their technical abilities,” says Paulin.

PrestaShop has already seen much progress in its shift to a more data-driven company and is excited to roll out more self-service intelligence capabilities in the future.

“Google Cloud drives home a culture of simplicity around our data stack, which is essential for us, especially given the small size of our engineering team,” says Paulin. “Fivetran and Hightouch share this culture of simplicity. Together, they offer strong foundations to support our data needs.”

Dashboards, which the company had always had an appetite for, are seamlessly created today. Before moving to Looker, a full-fledged dashboard would take an average of six weeks to develop. Now, it takes less than two days – and a simple dashboard can be created autonomously by business users in as little as 15 minutes.

Furthermore, data usage goes beyond dashboards. Thanks to Looker’s self-service exploration capabilities, many stakeholders can now glean insights surrounding product issues and business opportunities. Thanks to Hightouch, teams can activate their data to make better and smarter operational decisions.

“This is a big leap forward and one of many to come as we continue to add new models, activate our data, and onboard more users,” says Paulin. “Given our global reach and unique approach to e-commerce enablement, we know this is just the start of the great things we can accomplish with Google Cloud, Fivetran, and Hightouch.”

Check out Fivetran on Google Cloud Marketplace, or sign up for a free Hightouch workspace to learn more about what partners can do for your business.

Compute Engine lets you create and run virtual machines (VMs) on Google’s infrastructure, allowing you to launch large compute clusters with ease. When it comes to getting started with Compute Engine, our customers have lots of questions—but some questions come up more often than others. 

We looked at an internal list of the most popular Compute Engine documentation pages over a 30-day period to find out what topics were explored by users again and again. Here are the top four questions users have about Compute Engine, in order.

1. What are the different machine families

Compute Engine lets you select the right machine for your needs. You can choose from a curated set of predefined virtual machine (VM) configurations optimized for specific workloads, ranging from small-level purpose to large-scale use cases or create a machine type customized to your needs with our custom machine type feature. 

Compute Engine machines are categorized by machine family, including: 

• General-purpose: Best price-performance ratio for a variety of standard and cloud-native workloads 
• Compute-optimized: Highest performance per core for compute-intensive workloads, such as ad serving or media transcoding  
• Memory-optimized: More compute and memory per core than any other family for memory-intensive workloads, such as SAP HANA or in-memory data analytics 
• Accelerator-optimized: Designed for your most demanding workloads, such as machine learning (ML) or high performance computing (HPC)

Read the documentation to learn more about each machine family category.

2. How to connect to VMs using advanced methods

In general, we recommend using the Google Cloud Console and the gcloud command-line tool to connect to Linux VM instances. However, some of our customers want to use third-party tools, or require alternative connection configurations. 

In these cases, there are several methods that might fit your needs better than the standard connection options:

• Connecting to instances using third-party tools (e.g. Windows PuTTY, Chrome OS Secure Shell app), or MacOS or Linux local terminal) 
• Connecting to instances without external IP addresses
• Connecting to instances as the root user Manually connecting between instances and running commands as a service account

Read the documentation to learn about advanced methods for connecting Linux VMs.

3. How to set up OS Login

OS Login lets you use IAM roles and permissions to manage access and permissions to VMs. 

OS Login is the recommended way to manage users across multiple instances or projects. OS Login provides:

• Automatic Linux account lifecycle management
• Fine-grained authorization using Google IAM without having to grant broader privileges
• Automatic permissions updates to prevent unwanted access
• Ability to import existing Linux accounts from Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

You can also add an extra layer of security by setting up OS Login with two-factor authentication or manage organization access by setting up organization policies.

Read the documentation to learn how to configure OS login and connect to your instances.

4. How to manage SSH keys in metadata 

Compute Engine allows you to manually manage SSH keys and local user accounts by editing public SSH key metadata.

You can add  public SSH keys to instance and project metadata using: 

• The Google Cloud Console The gcloud command-line tool 
• API methods from the Google Cloud Client Libraries

Read the documentation to learn how to manually manage SSH keys and local user accounts in metadata.

Don’t see your question here? Check out the Compute Engine documentation for all of our recommended guides, tutorials, and resources.

Google Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM) lets you protect your cloud data with encryption keys that are stored and managed in a third-party key management system outside Google Cloud’s infrastructure. This allows you to achieve full separation between your encryption keys and your data stored in the cloud, making you the ultimate arbiter of access to your data. We are continuously innovating and developing the functionality of Cloud EKM, so let’s explore some recent updates we’ve made.

New functionality

Available today, we have added several much-anticipated features to Cloud EKM to help meet customer requirements:

Cloud EKM over VPC

Many customers want to incorporate an additional layer of security and reliability when connecting their key manager to the cloud. To help meet this need, we are introducing Cloud EKM support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks. This support allows Cloud EKM to connect via a secured private network, giving customers stricter control over network access to their external key manager. For more information, see Using Cloud EKM with VPC.

Support for asymmetric keys

In addition to symmetric encryption keys, Cloud EKM now recognizes both RSA as well as Elliptic Curve asymmetric keys created in a supported external key manager. With support for asymmetric keys, you can sign approvals granted via Access Approval. Asymmetric keys can add a layer of assurance when granting administrative access to customer data. You can also use the external asymmetric keys to sign data just as you would a cloud native key. For more information, see Asymmetric signing keys.

Protection level organization policy

We’ve made a new organization policy available for Cloud KMS that allows for fine-grained control over what types of keys are used. By using this org policy, you can specify that only specified KMS key types, for example EXTERNAL or EXTERNAL_VPC, may be created. This function can help meet specific requirements for separation of data or data sovereignty, ensuring only externally-managed keys are used with certain workloads. For more information, see Organization policy constraints.

Cloud EKM supports the Google Cloud services which typically store customers’ most sensitive data assets, and we are constantly adding support for more services. For example, we recently added Cloud EKM support for Cloud Storage, allowing customers to leverage Google-scale storage while adhering to local regulations and holding their keys in their own key manager. For a complete list, see our currently supported services, and if you’re interested in using Cloud EKM with a GCP service that is not yet supported, you can make feature suggestions here.

Best practices for Cloud EKM

The newly published Reference architectures for reliable deployment of Cloud EKM services guide provides recommendations for running a highly available and reliable external key manager integrated with Cloud EKM. These recommendations answer some of the most common questions and concerns we’ve heard from customers. The recommendations are aimed at operators of an external key manager, meaning that if a supported partner operates your EKM, you might share some of these responsibilities with a partner, depending on the design of their product and how it integrates with Cloud EKM.

Take encryption into your own hands

Being deliberate about encryption is critical for securing your sensitive data on Google Cloud. We’re always evolving our encryption products to meet your needs and help you achieve your business goals, and we hope that the additional features mentioned in this blog will allow you to make better use of your key management infrastructure. To get started with Cloud EKM, check out our documentation to learn more or try it for yourself in the GCP console.

We’re continuing to expand our global footprint — and we’re doing it rapidly. In 2020, we announced our plans to launch a new cloud region to help accelerate the economic recovery and growth of Spain. Today, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Madrid is officially open.

Designed to help meet the growing technology needs of Spanish businesses, the new Madrid region (europe-southwest1) provides low-latency, highly available cloud services with high international security and data protection standards — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. The new Madrid region joins our network of 33 regions throughout the globe, helping local Spanish businesses connect with users everywhere. You can join us at our region celebration on May 25 here.

A cloud built for Spain

Google Cloud’s global network of regions is the cornerstone of our cloud infrastructure, enabling us to deliver high-performance, low-latency, sustainable cloud-based services and products to support our customers across the globe.

Built in partnership with Telefónica, the new Madrid region offers Google Cloud’s unique global infrastructure locally, creating new opportunities for digital transformation across various industries and making it easier for organizations at any stage of their cloud journey to securely deliver faster, more reliable customer experiences.

Accelerating digital transformation also requires cloud services that meet regulatory compliance and digital governance requirements. In particular, highly regulated sectors like government, healthcare, and financial services need additional controls to store data and run workloads locally.

“We welcome the Cloud capabilities that the Google Cloud region is bringing to Spain. It is especially important for the alignment with the security levels that public sector organizations demand and as required in the National Security Scheme. They must take advantage of a cloud that is offered locally with the highest security guarantees. The collaboration with hyperscalers is key. It is also essential to continue advancing with best practices adoption, training, security configurations and supervision” Luis Jimenez, Subdirector del Centro Criptológico Nacional.

Having a new region in Madrid helps remove these barriers to cloud adoption, allowing both Spanish businesses and government entities to meet their availability, data residency, and sustainability needs in Spain while also accelerating their digital transformation.

The Madrid region is launching with three cloud zones to prevent service interruptions, and our standard set of products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, and Cloud Identity. . Customers will also get access to smarter analytics capabilities, AI and ML solutions, and application modernization tools that allow them to unleash the full potential of cloud computing.

At the same time, customers will benefit from controls that enable them to maintain the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, especially those that deal with specific data storage requirements.

“In DIA Group we have always been committed to seeking innovative solutions to improve our customers’ experience while respecting the trust they place on us every day. For this reason we have decided to rely on the new Google Cloud region in Madrid for some of our most critical workloads like our store operations (orders, inventory, product stock, etc). This will guarantee our customers a low-latency service while managing their data within the national borders, as well as optimized performance.” – Carlos Valero, Chief Information Officer, Grupo DIA

“Offering our customers low-latency services while keeping workloads and data management safe, is vital for us. The availability of the new Google Cloud region in Madrid represents a great step forward that will allow us to achieve our goals and meet the expectations of our customers by offering them a premium user experience without neglecting data security and residency.” – Carmen Lopez Herranz, CTO, BBVA

Going beyond with a transformation cloud

At Google Cloud, we’re constantly working to help customers across various industries achieve what was once considered impossible, reinvent themselves, and transform the way they serve their customers using digital technology — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry.

Our transformation cloud is helping businesses become:

Smarter: Google Cloud lets you leverage data for deeper insights with a unified platform that makes it easy to get value from structured or unstructured data, regardless of where it resides.
Open: Google Cloud’s commitment to multicloud, hybrid cloud, and open source provides the freedom to choose the right solutions, allowing developers to build and innovate faster, in any environment.
Connected: Digital transformation isn’t just about technology — it’s about people and culture. In an era where work can happen anywhere, Google Cloud provides the tools needed to be more innovative, productive, and make faster decisions, together.
Trusted: Google Cloud offers strong security capabilities and a zero-trust architecture to help protect data, applications, and infrastructure against potential threats. We also provide specific offerings and work closely with local partners to help address digital sovereignty requirements emerging from both customers and policymakers.

In addition to the launch of our new Madrid cloud region, we’re making other commitments that will pave the way for new business innovations and development in Spain. The Grace Hopper subsea cable landed in September 2021 in Bilbao, connecting Spain and the UK with the United States for increased performance and greater support using the same network that powers Google infrastructure and products.

We’re also helping people develop new skills that will enable society to champion cloud technology and growth in the future. Google has already helped to train more than 1 million people with our Grow with Google program in Spain, and we have future plans to open a center of excellence for cybersecurity in Malaga and support the creation of the AI Lab Granada, in collaboration with Indra Minsait in the coming years.

For more details about the Madrid region, head to our cloud locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions.