Getting started with Kubernetes is often harder than it needs to be. While working with a cluster “from scratch” can be a great learning exercise or a good solution for some highly specialized workloads, often the details of cluster management can be made easier by utilizing a managed service offering. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) allows for an easier end-to-end developer experience with convenient tooling and built-in integrations along with the convenience of offering Kubernetes clusters as a managed service.

GKE is the most mature container orchestration service available today, delivering a fully-managed service and hands-off experience with the GKE Autopilot mode of operation. GKE provides industry-first capabilities such as release channels, multi-cluster support, unique four-way auto scaling, node auto repair, and can support up to 15K nodes in a single cluster. 

Our modern, end-to-end platform is built on cloud-native principles you are already familiar with and prioritizes speed, security, and flexibility, in ways that are highly differentiated from other cloud platforms. 

We have put together a new reference guide for you as you begin your journey developing on GKE. It covers every step of your journey from writing, running, operating, to managing code. Even if it isn’t your first time using GKE, this e-book will be a valuable resource highlighting important considerations and best practices. By implementing the technical recommendations, following the steps, and utilizing the tools described, you can reach the following goals:

• Write, deploy, and debug code faster with Cloud Code and Cloud Shell
• Continuously integrate and deliver updates with Cloud Build
• Run easily, securly, cost effectively at scale with GKE
• Monitor and troubleshoot with Google Cloud’s operations suite 

Kick-start your journey by downloading the e-book and join us live June 22 at 9am PDT for our half-day Cloud OnBoard event: Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine. 

In the past six months, Mynd Property Management has doubled in size—in part by hiring, but also through acquisitions that help build our business. It’s an exciting time to be at Mynd—every week brings new people who need to be set up with email and network access, which can also be a bit hectic. To speed onboarding, we use G Suite Enterprise to get our new people working as soon as they walk through the door.

Streamlined onboarding
We started using G Suite when we launched the business because it fit our overall approach to technology—that is, deploying cloud tools that are flexible for our employees and easy for IT to manage. Good thing we picked G Suite, because given the pace of our acquisitions—13 at last count—we have our hands full with combining business systems and keeping people productive. Onboarding is literally 80 percent of our daily work! 

Some people on our team don’t have technical backgrounds, so we are careful to only introduce new software tools once people are prepared to use them. With G Suite, people need very little ramp-up time because it is an intuitive, integrated solution. In one of our in-person training sessions, we showed an accountant how to open up a Microsoft Excel file in Google Sheets, and he started working on it right away, without much help.

We’re a remote-first company, so working in the cloud is second nature to us. About 75 percent of our total workforce are remote full-timers. G Suite tools are optimized for mobile, so they’re especially useful for the 50 full-time property managers who work solely on mobile devices in the field. 

Better meetings, easier file storage
In Mynd’s early days, we used G Suite Basic, but upgraded to G Suite Enterprise after Google Cloud Premier Partner Suitebriar showed us the benefits of using tools like Hangouts Meet and shared drives in Google Drive. They’ve really helped us scale the business, so we can stay productive even in the midst of acquisitions—and of course, onboard people more quickly. 

Many G Suite tools have become things we can’t live without. Our executives got first crack at using Hangouts Meet Hardware, and loved it so much—especially the recording feature—that now all of our conference rooms have it. 

Google Drive got the same love from everyone. It’s all we need for file sharing and storage, which means we don’t have to pay for another storage solution. Drive also helps with onboarding; as soon we assign an employee a Google Account, she or he automatically gets access to the shared drives (in Drive) that they need to do their jobs. 

Customizing the tech stack
As much as we love G Suite, we still like to use some non-G Suite tools. It helps that we can tailor G Suite to fit in our technology stack any way we want. We’d never get that control and customization from other vendors in the productivity space.

For example, we love using Slack for internal chat and messaging, so we turned off Hangouts Chat. We like that we can control these channels, and that G Suite is not an all-or-nothing product. That means we’re not afraid to try out new G Suite features, since we can roll them back if they’re not right for us. 

The result of our day-to-day G Suite use is that we don’t suffer much down time even during acquisitions. We can pull relevant data from users’ old systems and easily automate user creation from start to finish. When we merge with companies that already use G Suite, we can move their data over to the business in less than a week.

When we recently moved over 80 new employees and 50 different web domains to G Suite, it was much less challenging than we expected. Since we don’t plan to slow down on acquisitions, we breathe easier knowing that G Suite keeps everyone working in the middle of so much change.

Every day, individual people and creative teams combine Google Workspace with Adobe Creative Cloud to bring their best ideas to life and delight their customers or friends, across photography, design, video, 3D design, and more. In fact, Adobe’s add-on for Google Workspace has had over a million installs and counting. By partnering with Adobe, we’re helping people boost creative collaboration wherever and however they work together. And they can benefit from a potential tenfold increase in productivity that results from things like shared libraries and styles across all the apps they use. 

We started integrating Adobe apps with Google Workspace last year by introducing Adobe XD integration into Flutter, enabling developers to simplify the design-to-development workflow, and letting creative teams design apps in XD and convert those designs into Flutter code with the click of a button. 

Next, we brought together Adobe Creative Cloud and Gmail to make it easier to share links to your creative assets with external teams and stakeholders through email. With this integration, you can search for your Creative Cloud assets and attach public links to synced files, libraries, and creations made on mobile devices without leaving Gmail. You can also save any attachments received in Gmail directly to Creative Cloud in a few clicks.

This year we are furthering our collaboration with Adobe with some exciting new capabilities. We’re integrating Adobe Creative Cloud with Docs and Slides, and launching Adobe Creative Cloud for Chrome.

The integration of Adobe Creative Cloud with Docs and Slides will give creative and business stakeholders a single source of truth and a powerful new way to manage brand assets. With easy access to Creative Cloud Libraries inside both Adobe Creative Cloud (with apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, XD, and more) and inside Google Workspace (with apps like Gmail, Docs, and Slides), marketing and product design teams can seamlessly share work, get feedback, and stay connected along the way. Learn more about this integration.

Adobe Creative Cloud for Chrome is a new extension that lets designers draw inspiration from the web’s most beautiful designs and artwork. Whether you’re looking for color combinations, patterns, vector shapes, or gradients extracted from images, the new Chrome extension helps you capture them from the source and apply them to your own design work. Adobe Capture features are available on mobile, on desktop for Photoshop and Creative Cloud Libraries, and now on the web, so wherever and whenever inspiration strikes, you’ll be ready to capture the moment. This feature became available in May. Learn more

These new integrations between Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Workspace and Google Chrome let creatives focus on what they do best: ideate, create, and innovate. Creative teams of 1 or 100 have fast, seamless access to the digital assets and editor tools that bring their work to life. And they’re ready to capture inspiration from the web whenever and wherever it strikes using Google Chrome. We’re committed to boosting creative collaboration in Google Workspace with Adobe as a trusted partner. Start using  Google Workspace and Creative Cloud today.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior.

• 45% of users are spending more time on messaging services because of the pandemic 
• 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly

With the rise in demand for messaging, consumers expect communication with businesses to be  speedy, simple, and convenient. For businesses, keeping up with customer inquiries can be a labor-intensive process, and offering 24/7 support outside of store hours can be costly.  

To help businesses seamlessly deliver helpful, timely, and engaging conversations with customers when and where they need help, we introduced AI-powered Business Messages.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcgP3RHjBLY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

What is AI-powered Business Messages?

With AI-powered Business Messages, you can connect with your customers in their moment of need, in the places they’re looking for answers—such as Google Search, Google Maps, or any brand-owned channel. For instance, check out how Walmart customers in the US are able to receive real-time information on product availability, straight from a search results page.

People turn to Google when they are searching for answers to their questions, looking to buy something, or trying to accomplish a particular task with one of our many tools. In fact, 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.

At Google, we know how important it is for interactions with a brand to be personalized, helpful, and simple. With AI-powered Business Messages, customers are able to chat with virtual agents that understand, interact, and respond in natural ways.

We are also combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when it’s really needed. This approach saves your customers precious time, while also saving you money. And with Business Messages automatically handling many customer inquiries in the background, businesses have the option to distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs. 

Getting started with conversational AI is easy with Bot-in-a-Box

We know it can be difficult to get started with AI. That’s why we are utilizing existing Google AI tools like Dialogflow—part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI—to create the capability within Google’s Business Messages called Bot-in-a-Box, which makes getting started with Conversational AI easy. Bot-in-a-Box allows for fast and effective adoption of automation for businesses of all sizes. 

Enabling Business Messages with Bot-in-a-Box can be as simple as leveraging an existing customer FAQ document you already have, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document. And since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialogflow working together, your chat bot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code. 

Bot-in-a-Box also supports other critical journeys like “Custom Intents.” That means that your bot is able to understand the different ways customers express a similar question and respond accurately by using machine learning capabilities.

Finding success 

In April 2021, Wake County courthouses in North Carolina partnered with Tango Technology to implement Business Messages when it became apparent that being able to provide the public and attorneys with around-the-clock access to information would significantly reduce the pressure on courthouse staff. Using Bot-in-a-Box, Tango Technology was able to customize a solution for Wake County Courthouse, Justice Center, and Clerk of Superior Court in just four days.

“With the combination of Google’s Business Messages, GCP, and Dialogflow, we were able to spin up an AI-driven bot for the courts in days. And the technology stack allows us to continually improve by adding functionality in an agile process.”— Mike Lotz, Co-Founder, Tango Technology

With Business Messages, North Carolina courthouses saw a 37% decrease in the call volume handled by courthouse staff.  With 398,298 fewer phone calls during the first year of operation, the AI-based messages helped Wake County Courthouse work more efficiently and productively.

We’ve seen many brands benefiting from AI-powered Business Messages. For instance, Levi’s saw a 30% increase in off-hours shoppers and surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores after implementing Business Messages. They also drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s website chat. 

Bring Google’s conversational AI to your storefront with Business Messages

Google’s Business Messages makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to engage their existing or potential customers in a virtual conversation, when and where they need it. 

To learn more, watch our Cloud Next session here or visit us at g.co/businessmessages. We have specialized services to help you get started  and can share the wisdom of our channel partners and dedicated experts who specialize in unleashing the potential of conversational AI.

Organizations are currently modernizing their businesses in order to meet the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape. In effect, business leaders must evaluate the best way to mitigate the challenges which plague their cloud operations, all while meeting customers’ growing expectations around digital experience (DX) through agility, automation, and proactive incident avoidance. 

In this commissioned study, “Modernize With AIOps To Maximize Your Impact”, Forrester Consulting surveyed organizations worldwide to better understand how they’re approaching artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in their cloud environments, and what kind of benefits they’re seeing. 

Within this July 2021 study, you’ll see that AIOps systems and principles are here to help. It covers how AIOps increases efficiency and productivity across day-to-day operations, and how businesses are taking note. In fact, 91% of respondents have implemented AIOps to address at least one cloud operations issue, and expansion is set to skyrocket. Those that wait to act, risk losing out on the efficacy of their cloud investment and falling behind their more efficient competitors.

As you can see in the image above, there is a plethora of great information in this complimentary study. So, if you’re looking to enhance your cloud operations and/or adopt AIOps within your organization, be sure to download this free study today.