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.

This past year brought both new challenges and successes for our customers around the world. We thought life was going to return to normal… and then it didn’t. Despite the uncertainty, it was exciting to see customers make huge transformations in when, where, and how they run their businesses, with cloud infrastructure as a major enabler. 

According to IDC, “by 2024, 50% of organizations will use applications built on abstraction provided by managed services including cloud-native technologies to enable consistency in running in any and many locations.”¹ Over the past year we were honored to work with so many of you to start to make this prediction a reality.

Let’s take a deeper look at where our infrastructure progressed in 2021, and where we’re headed in the new year.

Google Cloud is recognized by independent experts for its leadership

For the fourth consecutive year, Google Cloud was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services.

The Forrester Wave for AI infrastructure placed Google at the topmost position, a testament to Google’s investments in tomorrow’s AI-first world. 

Google Cloud also won the HPC Wire Editor’s Choice award for the best use of HPC in the cloud.    

We made it easier to migrate enterprise applications

To support enterprises in their transformation journeys we focused on expanding our support for enterprise applications in our cloud. The Home Depot just wrote about its successful migration of SAP to Google Cloud, highlighting how crucial it is to have good processes and strong partnerships. For other companies using SAP applications we also launched Filestore Enterprise, which delivers 99.99% regional availability ​​backed by an SLA. 

Our partner NetApp deepened its integration with Google Cloud to enable easier and faster Windows-based application migration, and provided flexible deployment options to modernize workloads. We also added new Network Connectivity Center partners to include companies like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and VMware, so as you migrate over time you can easily connect all your networking resources together in one place. 

For those of you considering migration to cloud, Forrester dove deeper into the economics of migrating enterprise applications to cloud. (Spoiler alert: companies are finding major cost savings and performance benefits!) It’s so important to us that companies trust that their biggest, most complex applications will run smoothly and securely with us, and we’re pleased at the progress we’ve made toward supporting more enterprise applications this year.

We also made it easier for you to migrate VMware workloads to the cloud by expanding Google Cloud VMware Engine to 12 regions worldwide and enabling several new capabilities across networking, compliance, and scale. Customers such as Mitel and Carrefour migrated their VMware estates to Google Cloud to transform their applications with Google services to increase agility, save money (up to 45%) and reduce energy costs (about 35%) compared to running on-premises. 

For High Performance Computing (HPC), we continued to add capabilities such as optimized VM images for HPC, enhanced integration with schedulers such as SchedMD, Slurm, and Altair PBSPro.    

New cost and performance options

To further support customers doing high performance computing for things like real-time advertising, dynamic e-commerce, and gaming, we launched a new VM family: Tau VMs. Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors.  We are seeing companies such as Nylas switching from other cloud platforms to Google Cloud to make the most of Tau VMs.

That isn’t the only VM advancement we made. For customers with higher levels of fault tolerance and looking for greater cost efficiencies, we launched Spot VMs, which open up access to Google Cloud’s idle capacity so you can run your application at the lowest price possible. With Spot VMs, you save anywhere from 60-91% off the price of on-demand VMs. 

We also launched more options for the highest performance ephemeral block storage — 6TB and 9TB Local SSDs, which offer greater IOPS per dollar when attached to general purpose N2 Compute Engine VMs. 

Distributed cloud brings us closer to you

For years, the industry has been telling companies, “move to cloud!” but not all workloads can move to the public cloud immediately or entirely. Factors include industry- or region-specific compliance and data sovereignty needs, low latency or local data-processing requirements, or the need to run applications close to other services. 

In October, we expanded our distributed cloud strategy and announced Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions that extend Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to data centers and the edge. This is a major step forward in our ability to meet you where you are, in private data centers and at the edge, and we’re excited to see how this helps you as we move into 2022.

Data protection and security that never sleeps

This year we worked hard to help improve your data protection capabilities. We doubled down on our Actifio acquisition by launching several releases that deepened its integration with Google Cloud. For customers with containerized applications, we took a big step forward with the launch of Backup for GKE. We’re particularly excited about how this new option for GKE users allows you to more easily meet your service-level objectives, automate common backup and recovery tasks, and show reporting for compliance and audit purposes. 

We also enhanced Cloud Storage with data protection features like custom region selection for dual-region buckets. Previously, Google Cloud assigned dual-region pairs for you to choose from. With this release, you can  select your own region pairs that meet your regulatory or compliance requirements, or optimize your app performance. We also launched Turbo Replication for dual-region buckets, which replicates 100% of your data between regions in 15 minutes or less, backed by a Service Level Agreement, a first from a leading cloud provider. 

Security is a key area of focus for us and we partnered with Palo Alto Networks to deliver their industry-leading Intrusion Detection System (IDS) solution natively on Google Cloud. With the recent Apache Log4j vulnerability, we automatically updated Cloud IDS to help detect exploit attempts and protect our customers’ environments quickly. We also integrated Cloud Armor with reCAPTCHA Enterprise to deliver a best-in-class bot and fraud management solution to prevent volumetric attacks. Cloud Armor is deployed with our Cloud Load Balancer and Cloud CDN, extending its security benefits at the network edge for traffic coming into Google Cloud. 

We made it easier to build and manage applications

Developers want to focus on code, not configuring, managing or scaling infrastructure. To help, we worked on simplifying networking with new services such as Private Service Connect, which allows you to connect VPCs to applications and services securely without configuring all the network underlay. To make it easier to run workloads in hybrid environments, we introduced BYOIP so you don’t need to change your IP address, and we enhanced Cloud Load Balancer with advanced traffic management, regional and hybrid app delivery to load balance traffic between on-prem and cloud workloads. We also introduced IPv6, DNS policy manager, Cloud Domains, GKE Gateway Controller, eBPF data plane, and Service Directory, all with the goal of making networking easier for developers.

We continue to invest in visibility and observability for efficient day 2 operations. Network Intelligence Center now has dynamic reachability within the Connectivity Tests module, interconnect and VPN visualization in Network Topology, and the Firewall Insights module, which provides visibility into firewall rules to ensure they are being used appropriately and as intended. 

And while not new this year, developers continue to tell us how much they love the ease of architecting storage using Cloud Storage. See how easy it is to configure a dual-region bucket. As a result, developers can treat a continent like a single bucket, dramatically simplifying the application programming model. Google Cloud is unique in offering this capability among major public cloud vendors.

We continue to be the most sustainable cloud for you

Another area Google has invested in deeply and that is becoming increasingly important to more organizations is sustainability. Many cloud providers have a vision for a sustainable future, and many aim to match their electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy by 2025 or 2030. We accomplished 100% renewable energy in 2017, which means we’re the only hyperscale cloud to do this today and on data centers that are twice as energy efficient as the average data center.

We also announced a number of new features like our new Carbon Footprint tool. Every Google Cloud user — that means you! — can see the gross carbon emissions associated with the services you use in Google Cloud. This means picking the data center that meets your sustainability goals, and reducing the overall emissions tied to your infrastructure and applications. And we have some pretty big goals for the future. For more, don’t miss our full sustainability recap.

A big thank you to our customers

While we were busy building out our infrastructure in 2021, we’d be nowhere without the partnership of our amazing customers. It’s hard to pick from all the exciting stories we heard this year, but here are just a few: Pega migrated its SAP applications to Google Cloud with zero downtime. Paypal exited its non-strategic data centers and achieved major cost savings. And Wix used our network to serve tens of millions of requests per day. 

I’m proud to look back at how our cloud infrastructure has evolved this year to support each of our customers on their transformation journey. As we head into 2022 I’m excited to continue to partner with you to solve your most difficult challenges together. 

Interested in hearing more about Google’s vision for the future? Listen to Thomas Kurian’s thoughts from Google Cloud Next ‘21.

^{1. IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2022 Predictions}

The typical smart factory is said to produce around 5 petabytes of data per week. That’s equivalent to 5 million gigabytes, or roughly 20,000 smartphones.

Managing such vast amounts of data in one facility, let alone a global organization, would be challenging enough. Doing so on the factory floor, in near-real-time, to drive insights, enhancements, and particularly safety, is a big dream for leading manufacturers. And for many, it’s becoming a reality, thanks to the possibilities unlocked with edge computing.

Edge computing brings computation, connectivity, and data closer to where the information is generated, enabling better data control, faster insights, and actions. Taking advantage of edge computing requires the hardware and software to collect, process, and analyze data locally to enable better decisions and improve operations.

At Hannover Messe 2022, Intel and Google Cloud will demonstrate a new technology implementation that combines the latest generation of Intel processors with Google Cloud’s data and AI expertise to optimize production operations from edge to cloud. This proof-of-concept project is powered by the Edge Insights for Industrial platform (EII), an industry-specific platform from Intel; and a pair of Google Cloud solutions: Anthos, Google Cloud’s managed applications platform, and the newly-launched Manufacturing Data Engine.

Edge computing exploits the untapped gold mine of data sitting on-site and is expected to grow rapidly. The Linux Foundation’s “2021 State of the Edge” predicts that by 2025, edge-related devices will produce roughly 90 zettabytes of data. Edge computing can help provide greater data privacy and security, and can accomodate the reduced bandwidth needs between local storage and the cloud.

Imagine a world in which the power of big data and AI-driven data analytics is available at the point where the data is gathered to inform, make, and implement decisions in near real-time.

This could be anywhere on the factory floor, from a welding station to a painting operation or more. Data would be collected by monitoring robotic welders, for example, and analyzed by industrial PCs (IPCs) located at the factory edge. These edge IPCs would detect when the welders are starting to go off spec, predicting increased defect rates even before they appear, and adding preventive maintenance to correct the errors without any direct intervention. Real time, predictive analytics using AI could substantially prevent defects before they happen. Or the same IPCs could use digital cameras for visual inspection to monitor and identify defects in real-time, allowing them to be addressed quickly.

Edge computing has powerful potential applications in assisting with data gathering, processing, storage and analysis in many manufacturing sectors, including automotive, semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods. Whether modeling and analysis is done and stored locally or in the cloud, or is predictive, simultaneous, or lagged, technology providers are aligning to meet these needs. This is the new world of edge computing.

The joint Intel and Google Cloud proof of concept aims to extend the Google Cloud capabilities and solutions to the edge. Intel’s full breadth of industrial solutions, hardware and software, are coming together in this edge-ready solution, encompassing Google Cloud industry-leading tools. The concept shortens the time to insights, streamlining data analytics and AI at the edge.

The Intel-Google Cloud proof of concept demonstrates how manufacturers can gather and analyze data from over 250 factory devices using Manufacturing Connect from Google Cloud, providing a powerful platform to run data ingestion and AI analytics at the edge.

In this demonstration in Hannover, Intel and Google Cloud show how manufacturers can capture time-series data from robotic welders to inspect welding quality and show how predictive analytics can benefit the factory operators. In addition, the video and image data is captured from a factory camera to show how visual inspection can highlight anomalies on plastic chips with model scoring. The demo also features zero-touch device onboarding using FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) to illustrate the ease with which additional computers could be added to the existing Anthos cluster.

By combining Google Cloud’s expertise in data, AI/ML and Intel’s Edge Insight’s for Industrial platform that was optimized to run on Google Anthos, manufacturers can run and manage their containerized applications at the edge, in on-premise data center, or in public clouds using an efficient and secure connection to the Manufacturing Data Engine from Google Cloud. It forges a complete edge-to-cloud solution.

Simplified device onboarding is available using Fido Device Onboard (FDO)—an open IoT protocol that brings fast, secure, and scalable zero-touch onboarding of new IoT devices to the edge. FDO allows factories to easily deploy automation and intelligence in their environment without introducing complexity into their OT infrastructure.

The Intel-Google Cloud implementation can analyze that data using localized Intel or third-party AI and machine learning algorithms. Applications can be layered on the Intel hardware and Anthos ecosystem, allowing customized data monitoring and ingestion, data management and storage, modeling, and analytics. This joint PoC facilitates and support improved decision making and operations, whether automated or triggered by the engineers on the front lines.

Intel collaborates with a vibrant ecosystem of leading hardware partners to develop solutions for the industrial market by using the latest generation of Intel processors. These processors can run data intensive workloads at the edge with ease.

Putting data and AI directly into the hands of manufacturing engineers can improve quality inspection loops, customer satisfaction, and ultimately the bottom line.

The new manufacturing solutions will be demonstrated in person for the first time at Hannover Messe 2022, May 30–June 2, 2022. Visit us at Stand E68, Hall 004, or schedule a meeting for an onsite demonstration with our experts.

The partnership between Google Cloud and SAP is entering a new chapter. Over the years, our close partnership with SAP and our mutual dedication to customers has inspired us to do some of our most unique and innovative work—such as building Fast Restart and Memory Poisoning Recovery capabilities for S/4HANA workloads, offering real-time access to our advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities, and developing integrations with the industry’s best cloud security and network infrastructure.

With an expanded, strategic partnership, we are capitalizing on one of the cloud’s most valuable benefits: enabling customer choice without driving up cost or complexity. Customers have shared that they appreciate what Google Cloud has done over the years to support their ability to choose—from our support for multi-cloud environments to our track record with open-source technologies like Kubernetes, to name a couple of examples. 

“We chose Google Cloud to support our SAP implementation. Our decision had a lot to do with the relationship between Google Cloud and SAP and also for the applications and services that are offered by Google Cloud, like BigQuery, which are helping to enable data and analytics within our organization.”— Sam Moses, Vice President of Corporate Systems, The Home Depot

Now, we’re placing this same emphasis on customer choice, flexibility, and freedom to help SAP customers get greater ROI from their cloud investments in three ways:

• Execute seamless business transformations that deliver all of the benefits of modern, cloud-native applications and services—quickly, economically, and without disrupting day-to-day operations
• Migrate critical business systems to the cloud, in order to lock in OpEx savings and refocus their IT teams on strategic business technology initiatives
• Augment existing business systems with cloud capabilities in AI, ML, and analytics

The cornerstone of our expanded partnership is the RISE with SAP program—a comprehensive set of tools, technology, and expert support for a fast, predictable, cost-effective path to business transformation with SAP in the cloud. RISE is also designed to meet every SAP customer on their own terms, whether they’re undertaking an enterprise-wide cloud migration or pursuing an incremental or hybrid-cloud approach. 

To support customers taking advantage of RISE with SAP, Google Cloud will work even more closely with SAP to accelerate customers’ cloud migrations and business process modernization across several key areas. This includes ensuring global availability of multiple SAP services and products—such as SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP HANA Cloud—on Google Cloud’s reliable, scalable infrastructure and high-speed network. Google Cloud is also committed to bringing SAP’s solution for RPA in manufacturing to the Google Cloud Marketplace to support business process modernization. 

Additionally, integrating our AI, ML, and analytics capabilities with key SAP solutions will help companies augment their business systems with sophisticated capabilities and technologies so they can draw more value out of the data stored with them.

“We can deliver our 160 key business insights two or three orders of magnitude faster with BigQuery. When you think about our marketing campaigns and month-end finance processes, we’re talking about jobs that used to take five to eight hours to complete that are now running in seconds.”— Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI, ATB Financial

Join us on the journey ahead

There’s so much more to come from SAP and Google Cloud. Learn more about our commitment to enabling digital transformation and hear more from customers about their SAP on Google Cloud deployments.

With nearly 2,300 stores, The Home Depot is the world’s largest home-improvement chain — a brand that professional contractors and DIYers alike have come to depend on. The home improvement industry continues to experience unprecedented demand and dramatic increases in online ordering accompanied by expanding consumer expectations for things like curbside pickup and same day delivery. The Home Depot’s decision to migrate to cloud-based infrastructure, including the migration of the company’s SAP applications on Google Cloud which began in 2017, has set it up for success in an increasingly digital world, and helped the company adapt to changing market conditions quickly. 

Interconnected retail at scale

Building on a strong customer-first philosophy, The Home Depot aims to create what it calls interconnected retail—allowing customers to shop however, whenever, and wherever they want. “So many companies are focused on omni-channel retail,” explains Sam Moses, Vice President of Corporate Systems. “At The Home Depot, we wanted to take it to the next level. Interconnected retail puts the customer at the center of everything and enables them to shop in store, online, or both. Customers can begin a transaction online and continue in-store, or vice-versa.”

To support this strategy, the company’s SAP environment needed to be more agile. Running  everything on-premises, from central finance to POS systems, meant that The Home Depot’s IT teams experienced redundancy and repetitive, manual processes. Their data warehouse needed an upgrade to process and analyze growing and increasingly diverse data sets. The Home Depot chose to migrate its SAP environment to Google Cloud to support both the velocity and scale needed for the business as well as critical analytics capabilities needed for its bold digital initiatives. “We chose Google Cloud to support our SAP implementation. Our decision had a lot to do with the relationship between Google Cloud and SAP and also for the applications and services that are offered by Google Cloud, like BigQuery, which are helping to enable data and analytics within our organization,” Moses explains.

After migrating its SAP applications—including S/4HANA, its customer activity repository (CAR), general ledger, e-commerce system, enterprise data warehouse and more to Google Cloud, the company now has the speed, scale and flexibility to tackle enormous spikes in the business, all while staying fully available for their customers. Additionally, The Home Depot was able to transform its financial systems and make them more agile to deliver critical information across multiple business functions in real time.

Maximizing data insights to support customer experiences

By migrating to Google Cloud, The Home Depot is leveraging Google Cloud analytics to build   the industry’s most efficient supply chain including more robust demand forecasting, supplier lead times, estimated delivery times and more, all while maintaining better security than before. “We experienced unprecedented change in our customers’ behavior and their buying patterns, which puts a lot of pressure on our supply chain,” explains Moses. “So having the ability to leverage data and analytics gives us insights to know exactly what it is that our customers need.” 

The company’s analysts now use BigQuery ML for machine learning directly against the company’s BigQuery data and use AutoML to determine the best model for predictions. The Home Depot’s engineers have also adapted BigQuery to monitor, analyze, and act on application performance data across all its stores and warehouses in real time—capabilities that were not as seamless in the on-premises environment.

With hundreds of projects on Google Cloud, The Home Depot’s cloud journey is well on track, but the company is always looking to the future. “As our customers’ needs have continued to evolve, and as technology has continued to evolve, our relationship with Google will continue to advance — to be able to innovate together, to be able to find new solutions together, to better serve our customers.”

Learn more about how The Home Depot is renovating its retail operation with SAP on Google Cloud.