Journey to Transformation and Modernization with Google's Distributed Cloud - Build What's Next

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Journey to Transformation and Modernization with Google’s Distributed Cloud

Google Cloud has been leading the way of helping businesses make most from their cloud investments to drive digital transformation through modern application platforms that cater to today’s customer needs. Watch the video from the Next ’21 to explore three areas where companies are supported by Google Cloud throughout their cloud evolution journey–cloud migration and modernization, extension of services and engineering practices to hybrid and multicloud environments, and delivery of high performance with planet scale distributed infrastructure. Also, learn how Google Cloud is equipped for more complex and unique use cases, from datacenter to the edge. Hear the strategies and customer stories that can help your business modernize people, processes, and applications to fully leverage Google’s distributed cloud!

Case Study

The Fantastic Story of How BMG Enables a Micropayments Strategy So Music Artists Get Paid

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BMG has the tough job of ensuring music artists get paid royalty every time their music is bought, downloaded or streamed. Here's how it does that today, seamlessly, and across the world. And how it's cloud platform now allows it to create additional channels of revenue.

The music industry is rapidly changing. Only 20 years ago, the availability of music and the infrastructure that was required to make an album a sales success were incredibly complex and expensive. With the decline of physical sales and a fundamental shift to digital, music streaming now accounts for more than half of all sales globally.

At the same time, technology has democratized music-making; in many ways, it has made the musical landscape more diverse. Artists can upload their music with the click of a button. But while it’s easier for creators to share their songs with audiences, getting paid has become more fragmented.

Although music is booming, people no longer buy it outright. Instead, listeners download music digitally or subscribe to streaming services to have their libraries with them at all times. To monetize digital content effectively, artists need to know when, where, and how often their songs are played on each service. To help them navigate this complicated royalties landscape and maximize their profits, Berlin-based international music company BMG provides customized, transparent, and fair services to songwriters and artists.

With publishing and recording divisions under one roof, the subsidiary of international media giant Bertelsmann works with both emerging artists and established stars, including John Legend, Kylie Minogue, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards. With the MyBMG web and mobile application, clients can view and analyze their royalty details in real time and collect payment. When a new record is released, BMG uses data to maximize its impact and revenue for its creators.

“We make sure that everyone who uses our clients’ music knows who needs to be paid the associated royalties, then we collect these royalties and share them out quickly and transparently,” explains Sebastian Hentzschel, Chief Information Officer at BMG. “When our artists release new music, we make sure that it’s marketed and promoted effectively around the world.”

“We needed a scalable solution for our royalty workloads that was intuitive for our developers. We also wanted a partner, not a client-vendor relationship. With autoscaling via BigQuery, excellent customer support, and a clean and simple user interface, Google Cloud ticks every box for us.”

Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology, BMG

Getting up to speed with a new way of paying artists

In this digital world, artists aren’t just paid every time a fan buys an album—they’re paid a small amount, or royalty, for each song downloaded or streamed by a listener. So, when the industry shifted to digital, the volume of data that BMG needed to handle grew exponentially. “One CD sale is equivalent to about 1,500 streamed songs or plays,” says Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology at BMG. “That means IT departments have to process 1,500 times the amount of data to calculate payments for artists, and this makes scalable micropayment processing very important.”

Until 2019, BMG’s infrastructure was entirely hosted on-premises. Hardware limitations made it challenging to scale on-demand, making it harder to handle the data peaks that royalty processing can bring. “With our on-premises infrastructure, we were going to hit a ceiling in a few years,” says Gaurav. “We still managed to process royalty payments for our clients, but it was increasingly time consuming and expensive. To keep focusing on our clients, rather than our infrastructure, we decided to migrate to Google Cloud.”

From the outset, Gaurav and his team had a clear vision for the partnership: “Most importantly, we needed a scalable solution for our royalty workloads that was intuitive for our developers. We also wanted a partner, not a client-vendor relationship,” he says. “With autoscaling via BigQuery, excellent customer support, and a clean and simple user interface, Google Cloud ticks every box for us.”

Keeping artists happy with business-as-usual payouts during migration

To move applications to the cloud while keeping payment cycles on track for its artists, BMG teamed up with Google Cloud partner Rackspace Technology. “We selected Rackspace Technology because it combines strong technical muscle and a global footprint, with the customer service of a local boutique firm,“ shares Gaurav.

BMG’s own technology team put together the outline for the Google Cloud architecture, which they passed on to Rackspace Technology for optimizations and the ultimate stamp of approval. Whenever Gaurav and his developers needed support, Rackspace Technology was ready to go. “So far, we’ve migrated 17 applications successfully, and Rackspace Technology has been 100% spot-on with each suggestion,” says Gaurav. “I can’t recall a single flaw in a Rackspace Technology-approved architecture, and that really says something.”

When BMG began its migration in August 2019, the team developed an ambitious two-year plan. Only 14 months later, however, the project is more than 75% complete. Among the solutions that BMG is using today are Cloud Storage to securely store 130 TB of data, and Cloud SQL as its standard database technology. The web applications run on Compute EngineApp Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

“After successfully moving a few applications, it was clear that with the strong teamwork of BMG and Rackspace Technology, together with the ease of use of Google Cloud, we could speed up the project without sacrificing quality,” says Gaurav. “We’re set to complete our migration six months before schedule, helping us to quickly move out of our hybrid environment.”

“Our income-tracking teams are very savvy on the data, and the simplicity of Google Cloud empowers them to self-serve analytics, rather than wait for IT. Our teams are much more productive.”

Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology at BMG

Royalty reporting and processing with BigQuery and Dataproc

So far, all of BMG’s critical workloads are up and running on Google Cloud. Royalty calculations, for example, which require incredible processing power and the collection of many micropayments to ensure full and timely payout, run entirely on Dataproc with output stored on BigQuery for downstream integration and reporting.

Enabling more harmonious workflows through self-serve analytics

As the new beating heart of BMG’s royalty reporting, BigQuery changed the rhythm of collaboration company-wide. In the past, income tracking teams had to contact IT departments if they needed deeper data insights for their work. By integrating Data Catalog with BigQuery, BMG has made the data more accessible to all teams. This helps them detect missing income and new revenue streams independently, maximizing profits for artists.

“Our income-tracking teams are very savvy on the data, and the simplicity of Google Cloud empowers them to self-serve analytics, rather than wait for IT,” says Gaurav. “Our teams are much more productive.”

“Google Cloud enables us to be more client focused and deliver better features faster. We believe it’s just the beginning. We offer rights and royalty services for music publishing, recorded music, neighboring rights, and books. Without scalability limitations, it’s absolutely conceivable to offer our platform as a service to other companies or industries, such as gaming. Google Cloud has opened a world of possibilities.”

Sebastian Hentzschel, Chief Information Officer, BMG

With a leaner IT environment, BMG can focus its effort on the needs of its clients. Beyond improvements in royalty processing, it can concentrate on app development, releasing new features and enhancements more frequently. By hosting applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, and Compute Engine, BMG has built a CI/CD pipeline with automated deployments and testing to significantly speed up workflows.

“In our old system, it could take several weeks to set up an environment,” says Gaurav. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, any of our developers can complete the process in a few clicks. Having that autonomy makes our developers more motivated and self-driven.”

“Google Cloud enables us to be more client focused and deliver better features faster,” adds Sebastian. “We believe it’s just the beginning. We offer rights and royalty services for music publishing, recorded music, neighboring rights, and books. Without scalability limitations, it’s absolutely conceivable to offer our platform as a service to other companies or industries, such as gaming. Google Cloud has opened a world of possibilities.”

With the migration almost complete, BMG is looking forward to its next technology project. It plans to leverage AutoML to further scale and automate royalty tracking with machine learning. On the marketing side, advanced analytics will help BMG determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns around the world, further increasing profits for artists. By connecting Google Data Studio to BigQuery, BMG will increase the quality of its analyses, helping musicians better understand the reach of their music around the world.

In the end, Gaurav shares, helping musicians is what it all comes down to. “We’re a new kind of music company because we build our services around our artist, songwriter, and publisher clients, not the other way around,” he says. “Google Cloud is helping us maintain strong relationships with our clients, and that’s music to our ears.”

Case Study

Beany’s Cloud-Based Accounting Solutions Transform Small Business Finance

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Beany, a financial services company, has integrated with Google Cloud to streamline accounting and financial planning for small businesses. This innovative solution will improve efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility for small business owners.

Many people start a small business that aligns with their passions, but soon discover the day-to-day running of a business is very different than anticipated. Dealing with accounting, finance, and other daily activities can quickly overwhelm even the most promising of new businesses.

Recognizing the unique challenges facing small businesses, we founded Beany. With our personalized accounting platform, small business owners can relax knowing that we will look after all their compliance and advisory needs. Business owners who use Beany also benefit because they end up freeing more time to focus on what they enjoy and do best—likely the main reasons they started their business in the first place. We prepare financial statements, minimize tax and keep an eye that our clients are paying the right amount at the right time. We also advise on business purchase and sale, valuations and forecasting for banks. In fact, we do everything that a business owner needs from their accountant, including a help desk filled with domain experts to provide free & unlimited advice and support. 

As we expand our team, we’ll continue to introduce new solutions, services, and integrations that make it even easier for small businesses to prioritize business planning, balance budgets, and keep up with ever-changing tax laws. We also plan to launch Beany in new markets and extend our global footprint beyond New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.    

Migrating and scaling Beany

Beany was initially developed and hosted on a virtual private server (VPS) with limited capabilities. As our subscriber base grew, we realized we needed a more scalable, secure solution to eliminate downtime and deliver a reliable customer experience. We also understood it would be challenging for our small engineering team to cost-effectively test and deploy new features without a more agile development environment. 

With that in mind, we chose the secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud to power Beany and help us scale our innovative accounting platform. We now use Compute Engine to cost-effectively create virtual machines (VMs) that automatically select optimal amounts of processing and memory. 

In addition, we encrypt, store, and archive everything on highly secure Cloud Storage, leveraging a combination of solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) for hot, nearline, and coldline data. With Cloud Storage, we can replicate data between regions in under 15 minutes to enable rapid recovery and business continuity. This has been really useful moving images to data centers on the other side of the planet quickly as we primarily operate out of Sydney and London. 

We also connect, create, and collaborate on Google Workspace using Google Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Meet. Beany smoothly integrates with Google Sheets to provide live reporting from our application direct to our sales, marketing and support staff. It also makes sharing account data with our accounting clients easy and secure.

Analyzing financial data with Google Cloud AI and machine learning

Joining the Google for Startups Cloud Program gave us immediate access to Google Cloud credits which we use to cost-effectively trial and deploy additional Google Cloud solutions. We continue to evaluate Cloud Code which will help our developers more efficiently create, deploy, and integrate applications directly on Google Cloud. We’re also exploring how Google Cloud AI and machine learning products such as Vertex AI and AutoML can further revolutionize accounting with advanced financial analyses and end-to-end automation of business processes.

We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we grow our team and introduce new services and solutions that enable small businesses to streamline operations, lower costs, and increase profits. It’s exciting to help small business owners manage accounting and financial planning so they can spend more time doing what they love and realize their business vision.

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Beany team members

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Research Reports

AI in Manufacturing Already A Mainstream: Google Cloud Study

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Google Cloud's latest research unveiled nearly 76 percent of the manufacturers across 7 countries turned to AI and other digital enablers during the pandemic. The study also found that 66 percent of manufacturers relied on AI for daily operations.

While the promise of artificial intelligence transforming the manufacturing industry is not new, long-ongoing experimentation hasn’t yet led to widespread business benefits. Manufacturers remain in “pilot purgatory,” as Gartner reports that only 21% of companies in the industry have active AI initiatives in production

However, new research from Google Cloud reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic may have spurred a significant increase in the use of AI and other digital enablers among manufacturers. According to our data—which polled more than 1,000 senior manufacturing executives across seven countries—76% have turned to digital enablers and disruptive technologies due to the pandemic such as data and analytics, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI). And 66% of manufacturers who use AI in their day-to-day operations report that their reliance on AI is increasing.

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The top three sub-sectors deploying AI to assist in day-to-day operations are automotive/OEMs (76%), automotive suppliers (68%), and heavy machinery (67%).

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In fact, Bryan Goodman, Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cloud, Ford Global Data & Insight and Analytics shares, “Our new relationship with Google will supercharge our efforts to democratize AI across our business, from the plant floor to vehicles to dealerships. We used to count the number of AI and machine learning projects at Ford. Now it’s so commonplace that it’s like asking how many people are using math. This includes an AI ecosystem that is fueled by data, and that powers a ‘digital network flywheel.’”

Moving from edge cases to mainstream business needs

Why are manufacturers now turning to AI in increasing numbers? Our research shows that companies who currently use AI in day-to-day operations are looking for assistance with business continuity (38%), helping make employees more efficient (38%), and to be helpful for employees overall (34%). It’s clear that AI/ML technology can augment manufacturing employees’ efforts, whether by providing prescriptive analytics like real-time guidance and training, flagging safety hazards, or detecting potential defects on the assembly line.

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In terms of specific AI use cases called out by the research, two main areas emerged: quality control and supply chain optimization. In the quality control category, 39% of surveyed manufacturers who use AI in their day-to-day operations use it for quality inspection and 35% for product and/or production line quality checks. At Google Cloud, we often speak with manufacturers about AI for visual inspection of finished products. Using AI vision, production line workers can spend less time on repetitive product inspections and can instead focus on more complex tasks, such as root cause analysis. 

In the supply chain optimization category, manufacturers said they tapped AI for supply chain management (36%), risk management (36%), and inventory management (34%).

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In our day-to-day work, we’re seeing many manufacturers rethink their supply chains and operating models to better accommodate for the increased volatility that has been brought about by the pandemic and support the secular trend of consumers asking for increasingly individualized products. We’ll share more on deglobalization in the third installment of our manufacturing insights series.

AI use differs by geography, but not for the reasons you may think

The extent to which AI is already being used today varies quite strongly between geographies, according to our research. While 80% and 79% of manufacturers in Italy and Germany respectively report using AI in day-to-day operations, that percentage plummets in the United States (64%), Japan (50%) and Korea (39%).

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It’s tempting to state this disparity is due to an “AI talent gap.” Although the most common barrier, just a quarter (23%) of manufacturers surveyed believe they don’t have the talent to properly leverage AI. Cost, too, does not appear to be a roadblock (21% of those surveyed). Rather, from our observations, the missing link appears to be having the right technology platform and tools to manage a production-grade AI pipeline. This is obviously the focus of our efforts and others in the space, as we believe the cloud can truly help the industry make a step change.

Looking ahead: The Golden Age of AI for manufacturing

The key to widespread adoption of AI lies in its ease of deployment and use. As AI becomes more pervasive in solving real-world problems for manufacturers, we see the industry moving away from “pilot purgatory” to the “golden age of AI.” The manufacturing industry is no stranger to innovation, from the days of mass production, to lean manufacturing, six sigma and, more recently, enterprise resource planning. AI promises to bring even more innovation to the forefront. 

To learn more about these findings and more, download our infographic here and our full report here


Research methodology
The survey was conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of Google Cloud, from October 15 – November 4, 2020, among 1,154 senior manufacturing executives in France (n=150), Germany (n=200), Italy (n=154), Japan (n=150), South Korea (n=150), the UK (n=150), and the U.S. (n=200) who are employed full-time at a company with more than 500 employees, and who work in the manufacturing industry with a title of director level or higher. The data in each country were weighted by number of employees to bring them into line with actual company size proportions in the population. A global post-weight was applied to ensure equal weight of each country in the global total.

Blog

Google Cloud’s Professional Service Organization: How it Accelerates Operational Health Review Cloud Migration

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Operational Health Review (OHR) and Google Cloud's Professional Service Organization (PSO) ensure value generation during and after cloud migration. Read to learn about each of their roles in accelerating customers' cloud journey.

Introduction

The Google Cloud Professional Services Organization’s (PSO) mission is to help our customers get the most out of Google products. PSO is responsible for customer success by sharing our technical expertise in order to unlock business value from the cloud by providing cloud strategy and best practice advice, implementation guidance, and training using our proven methodology

In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on Operational Health Reviews and how PSO engages in a myriad of activities to ensure the overall success and health of a customer engagement while ensuring we are meeting customer expectations and objectives, managing risk, and ultimately delivering value during or after the Google Cloud migration. We will discuss the assets, methodology, and tools that we leverage to ensure this success.

What is an Operational Health Review and what purpose does it serve?

Operational Health Reviews (OHR) are regular reviews to proactively address the below topics: 

  • A customer’s support experience
  • Analysis of trends in key operational metrics
  • Analysis of trends in Google Cloud usage
  • Status reports for high-priority cloud projects
  • Discussion of upcoming events
  • Discussion of potential opportunities for training
  • Review of feature requests

The core aim of an OHR is to measure progress and advise customers on the overall health of the account and migration progress while providing recommendations as a team on what adjustments should be considered to ensure continued success. During the OHR, we will address any pain points as well as identify and remediate any negative trends in support interfaces and usage metrics. 

The intention of the activity is to also perform a blameless reflection for continuous improvement. This supports the effort to maintain common ground and obtain mutual optimism for the next phase of the customer’s journey on Google Cloud. 

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the activities that go into an OHR. 

Support experience

One of the Google Cloud’s Support Organization’s goals is to simplify and streamline our customer’s support experience with a scalable and flexible set of offerings built with the customer needs at the center. This includes supporting an ongoing partnership model, with a proactive and collaborative approach. Premium Support is our top-tier support model which is a paid support offering designed for enterprises that run mission critical workloads and require fast response times, platform stability, and increased operational efficiencies. As part of this offering, customers are provided with a Technical Account Manager (TAM) who is in charge of delivering frequent touchpoints, including OHRs. 

During the support experience section of an OHR, some of the following topics may be reviewed:

  • Case volume by priority
  • Case volume by product
  • Cases linked to Google Cloud incidents
  • Escalated cases or incidents
  • Case initial response time (IRT)
  • Case IRT SLO Met Rate
  • Case total resolution time (TRT) hours
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The purpose of this activity is to better understand the efficiency of both the customer’s and Google’s cloud operations from a support trend perspective. The goal is to celebrate any positive trends, but also to identify potential negative trends and proactively determine a remediation strategy. 

Status reports for high-priority cloud projects

The purpose of this part of the OHR is to ensure the senior management stakeholders have continued visibility into the status of all their high-priority cloud initiatives with an easy-to-read, sometimes color-coded assessment on the status of each project. The assessment [Figure 1] may include, but is not limited to potential identified risks, key next steps, key stakeholders, and a mitigation plan for any high priority issues that may occur during their migration engagement. Additionally, the TAM may also cover any upcoming milestones or events, as well as any potential anticipated future blockers [Figure 2]. 

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Review trends in Google Cloud usage

This part of the OHR is meant to provide the customer with a holistic view of their overall Google Cloud usage. The purpose is to provide understanding around what products are being used on Google Cloud and also where cost is generally being allocated for overall cost management and budget tracking purposes. This can help customers with their overall cost optimization efforts. Some of the metrics we may cover in this section are:

  • Current Google Cloud usage by service
  • Google Cloud growth trends
  • Google Cloud growth trends by service
  • Google Cloud growth trends by project
  • Review of used and available service credits
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Feature request review and advocacy

TAMs will work with customers to help identify product needs and advocate for feature requests with Google Product Management and Engineering teams. While feature request advocacy is an ongoing activity, during the OHR, the TAM will review any high priority feature requests that have previously been submitted, providing updates on status including potential release dates. 

When a feature is coming up for the release, the TAM can help the customer prepare for implementation (providing early Preview access, coordinating a meeting with the Product Manager to review the feature, etc.) and then continue to provide support until the feature is successfully implemented in the customer environment. Similarly, if a high priority or technical blocking feature is not yet coming available, the TAM can help offer an alternative solution that can unblock the customer in the short term. 

The OHR is also a great time for the TAM to work with the customer to ensure they have early access to new and exciting features that are in Alpha or Beta, and that would be beneficial to the customer and their environment. 

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Training strategy

Training is a primary component to ensuring the overall success in adopting Google Cloud. During the OHR, a review of training metrics will be provided. This may include tracking metrics to determine how the customer is tracking towards an initially agreed upon learning plan or coming up with additional upskilling strategies as necessary. Additionally, throughout an engagement, the customer’s TAM will provide opportunities for both free and paid Google Cloud training

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Conclusion 

PSO is the voice of customer health, maintaining priority to proactively and strategically guide large enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud, both during and after the migration process. The OHR is an efficient and effective way to maintain alignment, ensure expectations and objectives are being met, manage risk, and overall ensure the success of the customer.

Learn more about our methodology and get started with Google Cloud by completing a free discovery and assessment of your migration. Alternatively, if you’d like to engage directly with our PSO team on your migration, contact us!

Blog

Attract Investor Funding by Harnessing the Power of Cloud Operations, Billing, and Customer Care

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In this blog, you will discover how to maximize your startup investment by effectively utilizing Cloud Operations, Cloud Billing, and Customer Care services. Find invaluable insights and best practices to help you achieve long-term success.

More and more startups are choosing to build their business on Google Cloud, and if yours is one of them — welcome! And even though Google Cloud is easy to use, there’s still a lot to learn, starting with how to create and activate your account, and how to create projects, folders, and organizations as part of Google Cloud’s resource hierarchy. If you prefer, you can also watch our video on how to get started with Google Cloud.

Once you’ve mastered those concepts, you’re ready to learn how to get the most out of your investment in Google Cloud. In this blog, we’ll show you how to manage and monitor your cloud resources with Google Cloud’s  operations suite, administer your billing with Cloud Billing, and improve the support you receive with Google Cloud Customer Care. Whether you’re new to Google Cloud or an experienced user, these services will help improve your experience. 

Let’s get started!

Improve the performance and reliability of your applications with the operations suite

Sometimes you want to check how your deployment is behaving, or if there is something happening with your server, database, or application that is affecting your customers. With so many tools to check, finding and solving the issue can become overwhelming very quickly. This is where Google Cloud’s operations suite comes in. 

This suite of products for integrated monitoring, logging, and tracing managed services for applications and systems running on Google Cloud and beyond. It can help you visualize and monitor incidents with dashboards and Metrics Explorer, manage and analyze log data in real-time all in one place with Cloud Logging, visualize metrics at scale with Cloud Monitoring, manage latency with Cloud Trace, and perform performance and cost management with Cloud Profiler.

Learn more about the operations suite in the video below:

Manage budgets and alerts with Cloud Billing

Google Cloud billing management is easier than you might think. Google Cloud charges for compute resources monthly on a consumption basis, which is different from the traditional upfront purchase model. With the right tools and resources, you can more easily manage your costs and optimize your use of Google Cloud resources.

One of the most important things to do is to set up billing and alerts. This will help you avoid unexpected charges and ensure that you are only paying for the resources you use. You can also use budgets and alerts to track your costs and help ensure that you are staying within your budget.

You can also view your costs through console billing reports, monthly invoices or build customized dashboards on BigQuery, Google Data Studio, or a BI tool of your preference. This allows you to see where your costs come from and identify areas where you can save money. You can also use cost management to optimize your use of Google Cloud resources and get the most out of your investment.

Finally, Google Cloud offers a variety of discounts and optimization options. These can help you save money on your overall costs. For example, you can get a discount if you commit to using Google Cloud for a certain period of time. You can also save money by using preemptible VMs, which are VMs that are available at a lower price but can be terminated at any time.

Google Cloud Customer Care

To meet customer needs and deliver a better experience, we’ve reenvisioned our Customer Care portfolio, a scalable set of offerings built with your needs at the center, so you can simplify and streamline your support experience. 

Choose from the core offerings:

  • Basic – the support tier you receive when you sign up on Google Cloud. You can use this at no cost but support is offered for billing issues only.
  • Standard – simple, flexible way to ensure that your workloads run smoothly on Google Cloud. Standard enables you to receive technical help from Google experts with a four hour response time and 8 hours response time during 5 days a week availability.
  • Enhanced – rapid response times and additional services to boost your productivity and help you run in Google Cloud efficiently. There is both case and phone support for technical issues, with a one-hour response time. There is 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues. You can also have add-ons or value-add services like Technical Account Adviser Service and Event management.
  • Premium – the highest value support offering, supplying incredibly fast response times, a named Technical Account Manager, Customer Aware support and additional services. There is case and phone support for technical issues and also third-party technology support, with a 15-minute response time and a 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues.

Watch the video to find out how to purchase support, create support cases and learn more about support.

Supercharge your growth with the Google for Startups Cloud Program

Growing a startup requires technology that can keep up with and enhance your ideas. The Google for Startups Cloud Program provides the tech you need to help develop better software and deliver innovative experiences with confidence. At the same time, you’ll help boost your team’s capabilities with expert cloud guidance, Google Cloud credits, training opportunities, and more.

The program has two tiers:

  • Start: for pre-seed startups that have not yet received equity funding. Get up to $2,000 USD in Google Cloud credit that’s valid for two years toward Google Cloud services and even toward a Cloud Customer Care plan with unlimited access to technical support, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, and more.
  • Scale: for seed to series A startups with verified equity funding. Get Google Cloud and Firebase costs covered up to $100,000 USD a year for your first two years, unlimited access to technical support when credits are applied to a Cloud Customer Care plan, partnerships with Google Cloud Startup Customer Engineers and a dedicated Startup Success Manager, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, co-marketing for select startups, and more. 

Once enrolled, Google startup experts will recommend Google products and services that can help your startup grow in the cloud. Learn more about the Google for Startups program, eligibility criteria, credit usage and migration incentives in the our Startup Programs video linked down below.

That’s a wrap!

Let’s recap: The operations suite includes tools to monitor incidents, analyze log data in real-time, manage latency, and more. Cloud Billing offers billing management tools and resources to help you save costs and make the most of your resources. If you need help, Cloud Customer Care services are available to streamline your support experience. Also, if you’re a startup, don’t forget to check the Google for Startups Cloud Program!

The Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups series has many detailed videos and handbooks to support you on all steps of your startup growth journey. Check out our full playlist on the Google Cloud Tech channel and website. Don’t forget to subscribe to stay up to date.

See you in the cloud!

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Accelerating AI Inference at Scale: Introducing Google Cloud TPU v5e

Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure makes it possible for businesses to train, fine-tune, and run inference on state-of-the-art AI models faster, at greater scale, and at lower cost. We are excited to announce the preview of inference on Cloud TPUs. The new Cloud TPU v5e enables high-performance and cost-effective inference for

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