May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month —a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of Asian and Pacific Island heritage. This feature highlights three AAPI founders from the Google For Startups community.

Read on to learn how these three founders built their businesses, leverage Google tech, and suggestion they have for aspiring entrepreneurs.

CultivatePeople 

Founder: Lola Han

Description: CultivatePeople’s compensation software, Kamsa, provides global market pay rate data and helps companies make data-driven salary decisions so they can attract and retain their most valuable asset: employees. 

Why GCP: “CultivatePeople began using GCP when integrating SSO/SAML authentication after  our SaaS product became a high priority. We were able to exceed our clients’ expectations and increase their level of trust in our platform’s capabilities. We’re currently investigating additional machine learning products, such as Cloud AutoML, that will allow us to quickly deliver exciting features.” 

Note from the Founder: “I grew up with immigrant parents who value stability and are risk-averse. My parents discouraged me from starting my own company because they didn’t want to see me struggle financially or see my health suffer (due to stress). I felt strongly about what CultivatePeople could do, so I started the company as a sole founder in 2017 and watched it double in size year over year since. While the ones I love most may not have cheered me on initially, it was important for me to hang on to the encouraging words of former bosses, executives, and founders to keep me focused on my mission. 

My advice for other AAPI founders is to be a “silent assassin” and believe in the mission and values of your organization. Always remember to stop along the way and: 

 1) Enjoy the journey by celebrating wins and giving yourself credit;

2) Follow your intuition—it’s (almost) always right; 

3) Recognize and invest in your people regularly (ie. give increases more than once a year, if warranted);

4) Give regular words of affirmation to employees on even small achievements.”

Swit

Founder: Josh Lee and Max Lim

Description: Swit is a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management by allowing teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.

Why GCP: “Swit is a cross-category hybrid work tool for chat and tasks. This functionality requires more complicated and heavier architecture for performance. So, configuring and managing virtual machines was really challenging to scale up our systems, while handling occasional unexpected traffic surges and frequent updates. Eventually we divided our monolithic architecture into 35 microservices when we launched our official product. The migration to GKE took around one month, and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems became able to offer high scalability and enough resilience to keep its uptime no matter what happened. Now we’re operating 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability with remarkably low downtime – less than 0.00001%/year.”

Note from the Founder: “As an AAPI founder based in Silicon Valley, I feel proud of the work ethics and diligence fellow Korean American entrepreneurs and professionals have long demonstrated here. Especially with K-pop breaking into the mainstream, I feel even more proud of our culture that strives toward an absolute perfection molded through years of training and dedication. The mission-driven culture of Silicon Valley coupled with Google’s edging technology and creativity really helped us build a product that not only encompasses verticals but also transcends cultures. Swit is growing at an unprecedented rate, and we hope  to join the long list of successful AAPI entrepreneurs here. Swit’s close network with the AAPI community wouldn’t have been possible without Google support. We are grateful for this collaborative environment, and we hope to become the next-generation ambassador for collaboration after Google.” 

Check out more from Swit in their founder story.

WISY 

Founder: Min Chen

Description: Wisy develops technology to bring digital efficiency into the physical world, supporting consumer products businesses and making them thrive in the new economy. All of us have a bad experience when we can’t find the product we want to buy. That is a $1.9T problem in the consumer-packaged goods industry that Wisy is solving with AI and analytics to help manufacturers and retailers sell more by reducing out-of-stocks and waste at a global scale.

Why GCP: “GCP has an intuitive, easy to use interface, was lower cost, and offered preemptible instances with flexible compute options. Some of the reasons why Wisy decided to use GCP include instance and payment configurability, privacy and traffic security, cost-efficiency, and Machine Learning.

Wisy has been able to advance quickly with product development, as well as collaborate better and iterate faster in the creation of our AI models, while reducing costs by 40%. At Wisy, we are solving a problem that affects everyone who shops at a store.“

Note from the Founder: “Two years ago, I moved to San Francisco to expand my second startup, Wisy. This is when I learned that my name ‘Min’ stands for ‘minority.’ I was born in China, raised in a Black community in Panama, received scholarships to attend both Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley. I worked for 20 years in several countries, but I have never felt so discriminated against due to my race, ethnicity, gender and age than during my time in Silicon Valley. However, this is also the place I learned that my diverse life experience is my competitive advantage. My background enables me to recruit and relate to people in different countries, create scalable and flexible products for multinational customers, and run global operations efficiently.

My recommendation to AAPI founders is to find strength in their multicultural background. Don’t hide what makes you unique, do not limit yourselves, and do not let others limit you. You will lose your edge when trading authenticity for validation. Be proud and own your story.”

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.To learn more about how you can help #StopAsianHate during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond, visit their website here.

Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery platform that automates the delivery of your application. Recently, we’ve heard from users that they want Cloud Deploy to also perform self-defined pre- and post-deployment operations to reduce the amount of additional toil required for each rollout. Examples of such operations include database schema updates, application infrastructure deployment, and network configuration adjustment. 

Today, we are pleased to announce the public preview availability of Cloud Deploy deploy hooks. With this launch, Cloud Deploy now offers an easy way to define and execute pre- and post-deployment operations as part of a rollout.

Deploy hooks

The ability to run user defined actions immediately before and after deployment is a powerful feature that allows DevOps organizations to build out complete CI/CD pipelines to meet their specific deployment needs.

With the introduction of deploy hooks in Cloud Deploy, you can now take advantage of this capability by configuring your delivery pipeline to include pre-deploy and post-deploy actions. These actions take advantage of the custom actions defined through Skaffold. When enabled, two new jobs — predeploy and postdeploy — will be performed when deploying a rollout into a target. 

Deploy hooks are supported for all target types (GKE, Cloud Run, Anthos, and Multi-Target) and can be used with all deployment strategies, such as canary deployments.

As enabled, deploy hooks can be used in a variety of ways, such as:

• Performing a database migration prior to deployment
• Performing infrastructure deployment prior to application deployment
• Interacting with third-party platforms post deployment, such as sending out an email or updating an open task tracker

Like other rollout jobs, Cloud Deploy provides the same observability and control for predeploy and postdeploy jobs. This includes the ability to view logs and perform control over individual jobs, such as retry, terminate, or ignore — all within the same rollout details interface.

Interested in exploring deploy hooks for yourself? Get started now with our quickstart and documentation!

The future

Comprehensive, easy-to-use, and cost-effective DevOps tools are key to building an efficient software delivery capability, and it’s our hope that Cloud Deploy will help you implement complete CI/CD pipelines. Stay tuned as we introduce exciting new capabilities and features to Cloud Deploy in the months to come. 

In the meantime, check out the product page, documentation, quickstarts, and tutorials. Finally, If you have feedback on Cloud Deploy, you can join the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you!

Application developers are the backbone of the modern cloud economy. The role of developers is felt in the seen and the unseen, from the smartphone apps we use every day to the network optimization that is powering a sustainable future. Given your importance in transforming so many fundamental aspects of society and industry, you’re facing more pressure than ever to remain innovative in the face of changing markets and industries. With limited time, shrinking budgets, increasingly complex environments, and compounding operational responsibilities, it’s no wonder that one of our most popular developer sessions last year at Next was focused on burnout.

Google remains a consistent advocate and ally of developers, from our ongoing contributions to open source projects like TensorFlow and Kubernetes to our free learning paths and certifications. The Application Developer spotlight session at Next ‘23 will lay out our aspiration to build a new way to cloud for developers. We favor “shifting down” instead of “shifting left,” to give you a cloud experience that is easy, fast, and secure.

An easy way to get started — with a trial at no charge for new users

Whether you’re just starting to create a new application, or laying the groundwork for your burgeoning developer career, navigating a new platform and its services can pose formidable challenges. Key details, like the more suitable Google Cloud service for running a dynamic website or estimating the cost of an application, may seem elusive. Moreover, as you transition from design to execution, it’s crucial to understand functional aspects like which APIs should be enabled or the IAM roles necessary for managing your services.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Jump Start Solutions to streamline your introduction to Google Cloud. These application and infrastructure solutions shift many of the tasks at the initial learning and researching phase down to the platform. Jump Start Solutions adhere to best practice principles and can be launched with a single click. Plus, new Google Cloud customers can take advantage of the $300 credit sign up trial. Whether you’re looking to explore, learn, or find a launching pad for creating production-ready applications, Jump Start Solutions are an easy starting point. Each solution comes with an estimated cost, comprehensive reference architecture, and tutorials.

The Generative AI document summarization solution in the Google Cloud Console

Some of our 14 solutions available today include a generative AI-powered document summarization app and an AI-powered image processing app. These are just the beginning of a wide range of solutions which help you lay a secure and stable foundation from which to build, innovate, and grow.  

Speeding up your development with AI and automation 

Imagine training a generative AI model using the best practices, documentation, and architecture guidance of Google Cloud and applying that to your coding experience. No longer will you have to leave your IDE to research how to complete a coding task, no more repeating low-value manual tasks, and no more hunting for expert guidance.    

Duet AI is now in preview across many services in Google Cloud to help shift the burden of researching, coding, and testing, down to the platform. A few of the ways developers can use Duet AI include:

• Code Completion and Code generation in your IDEs. You get recommendations as you type for full functions and code blocks based on comments, fixes for errors found in the code, and generation of unit tests for code directly in your IDE.
• Chat assistance so you can use natural language to ask questions about code bases and APIs, and retrieve coding best practices. Chat assistance is available across many Google Cloud products, such as in the Cloud Console, Cloud Workstations, BigQuery, Spanner, and Apigee.

Duet AI in Google Cloud supports 20+ programming languages such Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and SQL. Thanks to Cloud Code, you can use Duet AI with many popular IDEs such as VSCode, and JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, and Webstorm. And, with Duet AI’s source citations, suggestions provided by Duet AI are automatically flagged when directly quoting at length from a source to help you comply with any license requirements.

Enterprise companies like Wayfair who are committed to enhancing developer productivity are already using Duet AI, and are excited about how it makes life easier for their developers.

“At Wayfair, developer productivity is top of mind for us. We are excited to incorporate Duet AI in our efforts to have developers across Wayfair build applications incredibly fast! With Duet AI, we can increase developer productivity, and joy at the same time.” – Mark Quigley, Director of Engineering Enablement, Wayfair

Shifting down interoperability

Modern application development stacks are a mosaic of in-house creativity and essential third-party applications such as CRM, ERP, or payment systems. What is the lifeblood linking these siloed pieces? Integration. Building integrations demands time-consuming development work, niche skills, and deep understanding of third party systems like SAP or Salesforce. These compounding complexities can delay delivery and increase budget costs. We envision a world where platforms shoulder the burden of integration, liberating developers to innovate with their regained time. 

Today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of Application Integration – a no-code integration platform as a service (iPaaS) designed to empower you to weave together your applications. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface transforms the complex task of integration into a simple point-and-click journey. With 75+ pre-built connectors you can link Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage with third-party applications like Salesforce, MongoDB, Oracle, and SAP.

Building an integration flow using connectors, visual designer, and automated triggers

Further, Duet AI in Application Integration can shift even more work away from you and onto the platform. Using natural language, you can generate a recommended list of integration flows. Because Duet AI pulls context from your environment, it generates flows using your existing APIs and assets. To further harden your integration flows, Duet AI automatically generates documentation and test cases in a single click.

Using Duet AI to build integration flows, documentation, and tests with natural language

Secure, platform-driven application development 

With the world’s attention on how AI will shape the future, the challenges created by distributed workforces continue to be felt. Developer teams need help with onboarding, access to consistent tools and libraries, and development environments powerful enough for today’s workloads.

We recently announced the general availability of Cloud Workstations, powerful, secure and customizable development environments available anywhere, using a browser, local IDE, or terminal. Cloud Workstations can shift the burden of provisioning, scaling, managing and securing developer environments down to the platform. And like many other services across Google Cloud, you can use Duet AI in Cloud Workstations to help make you more efficient with everything from writing code to implementing best practices.

While the reality of geographically dispersed and rapidly growing development teams highlights the need to address traditional concerns, such as platform and data security, even greater scrutiny is placed on the software supply chain.    

An expanded partnership with GitLab for secure DevOps

Google Cloud continues to grow at a fast pace and that means we are constantly welcoming many new developers to our platform. We know the tools you choose for software development are an important factor in your success. We want to make it easy to use the tools you love. Today we announced that Google Cloud and GitLab are partnering to offer a secure DevOps solution that can shift the work to connect our technologies down to the platform while giving you integrated source management, artifact management, CI/CD, and enhanced security features. 

Developers already using Google Cloud gain access to GitLab’s comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform and GitLab customers gain access to Google Cloud’s Secure Software Supply Chain technologies like Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA), software bill of materials (SBOM), and Binary Authorization policies.

We can help you gain value from Google Cloud faster with deeply integrated partner tooling. That’s exactly what we are doing with our expanded GitLab partnership. Learn more on GitLab’s blog. You can also sign up to stay informed about the latest partnership developments.

Start shifting down with Google Cloud

At the heart of Google Cloud is a simple, yet powerful idea: to empower you to do what you excel at — coding exceptional software. In the fast-paced era of digital transformation, we understand the mounting pressures that developers face, which is why we believe it’s the responsibility of platforms to shoulder the burdens hindering your creative process. We’re helping you by streamlining your onboarding experience, optimizing your coding efficiency, and shifting the weight of security from you to the platform. We’re not alone in this journey; we’re collaborating with partners like Gitlab at our side. So if you’re an application developer, check out Google Cloud. It’s the new way to cloud on the cloud platform that’s designed to make your life easier.