Google Cloud Results

• Reduced API management costs 34%
• Develops new features in days versus months
• Fixes issues quickly by writing code
• Manages 15B API calls per month without outages

Austin, Texas-based Bazaarvoice switched to Apigee for its API platform because of its competitive pricing and feature set. But another benefit soon became apparent to Bazaarvoice engineers: the ability to write code on the Apigee platform and “own our destiny,” says Kurtis White, Senior Development Manager in Research and Development for Bazaarvoice.

Bazaarvoice specializes in consumer-generated content marketing solutions that connect brands, retailers, and consumers. APIs do the heavy lifting in making those connections. For example, the Conversations API, the heart of the Bazaarvoice platform, lets the company’s retail clients aggregate and leverage users’ product reviews and ratings. With the Conversations API, API keys are passed along in each query string and enable Bazaarvoice customers to access the relevant customer data.

APIs are essential to the Bazaarvoice platform. During its early days the company didn’t use APIs, relying instead on direct communication links to connect its customers to what consumers were saying about them. “That approach just didn’t scale,” says White. “Without reliable APIs, it would be almost impossible for us to be in business today.”

Eight years ago, Bazaarvoice switched to APIs. From about 2013 to 2017, the company relied upon the same API management SaaS solutions provider. But the company was growing. The call volume that its APIs generated was expanding at a rapid pace, too—especially during the busy year-end shopping season. For example, in early October 2016, Bazaarvoice APIs generated nearly 9 billion calls, compared to about 12 billion calls in early December 2016.

Unfortunately, along with the pace of API calls, the costs associated with Bazaarvoice’s existing API solutions provider were also escalating—increasing 74% from early 2016 to early 2017. To keep rising expenses from stifling its own growth, and to continue offering its reliable, high-performing SaaS solution, the company’s IT team decided it was to time to find a different API solutions provider.

In April 2017, Bazaarvoice migrated to the Apigee API platform because of its feature set and, in particular, its competitive pricing. By switching to Apigee, Bazaarvoice reduced its API spend by 34%, White says.

A ticking clock

Migrating from its previous API provider to Apigee involved importing 66,000 API keys—an arduous task. Apigee engineers and business leaders worked directly with their Bazaarvoice counterparts to help ensure a successful transition. “Everyone at Apigee was very responsive to our needs,” White says. “If a problem came up, the Apigee team owned it and worked through it to give us a great experience.”

During the migration, there was a clock ticking in the background. Bazaarvoice wanted to shift 100% of its API calls to Apigee before the contract with its existing API provider came up for renewal. “I wasn’t sure we could make the deadline,” says White. “But we did, and I give a big credit to the Apigee technical team. They provided 24-hour support to our team. And once we went live, our platform was handling 15 billion API calls a month with no outages.”

Following the migration, Apigee support continues to “knock it out of the park,” he added. “Apigee is a great partner to have.”

Controlling destiny

The Bazaarvoice IT team didn’t specifically choose Apigee because of the ability to write code on the platform—but they quickly came to appreciate the feature.

“Our previous API provider was like a black box to us,” says White. “They had written some custom code for us that we depended upon. But we didn’t own that code. And if we needed changes, we had to pay them to do it for us.”

“Apigee allows us to write our own code that runs on the platform and looks at all of the API calls,” White continues. “We can put the code into a virtual control system. We can update it whenever we want to add a feature. Because of how important APIs are to our business, the ability to write code on Apigee lets us control our own destiny. It’s the Apigee number one benefit, in my opinion.” This also accelerates the time it takes Bazaarvoice to bring new features to market.

“Apigee gives us the flexibility to do things we wouldn’t have even tried before,” says White. “We can test new things easily, without getting locked into a service agreement with an external party. Before, it might have taken months to develop new product functionalities. Now it takes days.”

In addition, writing code on the Apigee platform enables the IT team to quickly address any problems that may arise. “If someone notices a problem, we can write the code to fix it right away,” White says.

“Because Apigee lets us iterate and fix problems quickly, our innovation has gone to the next level,” White added. “Before, if you had an idea, you’d wonder if you really wanted to invest $30,000 and three months in it. Probably not. Now, with Apigee, the investment is maybe one day and zero dollars.”

Experimentation pays off for Bazaarvoice and its customers. For example, during the 2017 holiday season, Bazaarvoice was able to give all its customers the capacity to handle twice the number of API calls.

“With our previous API solutions provider, it would have been such a long process to make that happen, it wouldn’t have been worth it,” says White. “But it was really easy to write the code in Apigee. Plus, we made our customers happy and kept them running smoothly during the peak holiday season—with little effort on our part.”

Personalization and monetization

Apigee has played a key role in enabling Bazaarvoice to develop new products, too. In March 2018, Bazaarvoice released a new personalization data product for its customers, built on top of an Apigee-powered API. The new product enables Bazaarvoice retail customers to recommend relevant products to their online shoppers. The products are personalized to the shoppers’ interests, based on their past behavior and what they’re shopping for.

Apigee is also serving as a strategic business advisor, helping Bazaarvoice determine the best way to price its offerings as its API call volumes continue to increase.

“We’re working with Apigee to build an industry-leading model for monetizing our APIs,” says White. “Apigee is the ideal advisor in this regard. We’re handling such large volume, the volume is continuing to grow, and Apigee enables us to power it.”

Editor’s note: To launch a new mobile payment platform, Mercari needed a database solution strong on scalability, availability, and performance. Here’s how Cloud Spanner delivered those results. 

E-commerce companies need to connect customers to their services securely, reliably, with zero downtime. When Mercari, Inc. launched a new mobile payment platform, we chose Cloud Spanner as part of our data portfolio, which provided us with easy scalability to handle millions of new users, a fully managed service that minimized overhead costs, and deep integration with other Google Cloud services. 

Mercari, Inc., Japan’s largest C2C marketplace, launched its app in 2013, which allows 18.2million monthly users to easily and securely buy new and used items. Mercari expanded into the United States and in 2014 and launched Merpay, a mobile payment service that can be used through Mercari in Japan in 2017. With more than 85 million users, Merpay is now accepted at 1.8 million merchants and e-commerce sites in Japan, supporting payments via the DOCOMO ID contactless system and QR code.

Prioritizing availability and scalability

When we started building Merpay, we were looking for a new database. In the past, Mercari had used MySQL with bare metal hardware. Because of the amount of data, we required additional expertise to manage and maintain the hardware, software and MySQL implementation. Having built much of the microservices architecture for our Mercari app using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), it was natural to look at Google Cloud’s managed services when deciding upon our new database infrastructure for Merpay. 

For the database, we were focusing especially on requirements around availability, scalability, and performance. To do a single payment transaction, there were multiple steps each with writes, requiring high-write-throughput and low-latency from the database. Needing a solution that would support reliable payment processing 24/7/365, we chose Spanner, which offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes. 

We worked closely with Google Cloud’s Premium Support, Technical Account Management (TAM), and Strategic Cloud Engineer and Cloud Consultant teams to implement Spanner, including separating the payment processing— originally one of the functions in Mercari—as a microservice.

A nod to easier nodes and better scale

After launch, the number of Merpay users reached 2 million in only a few months. We had 45 Spanner nodes at the time of launch of Merpay and about 50 nodes four months later. Because we’d optimized the application side during those four months, we didn’t have to add many nodes to keep up with the growing traffic. 

Whenever we needed to scale up the serving and storage resources in our instances, Spanner made it easy to increase nodes as needed in the Cloud Console. To optimize costs, it’s easy to add nodes during a marketing campaign and remove them afterward. Even if the traffic count is different from expected, we can change the number of nodes immediately. That’s one incredible convenience of Cloud Spanner.

Building powerful pipelines

Our data pipelines are used for KPI analytics, fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer support use cases. Because Cloud Spanner integrates so easily with other Google Cloud data services, the data in Spanner is easily accessible for analytics. From the Spanner database for each microservice, we create both batch and streaming data pipelines using Pub/Sub and Dataflow, as well as Apache Flink, and load the data into BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. We’re able to quickly aggregate the data required for data platforms such as BigQuery and Cloud Storage. The original data is stored in Spanner and managed by microservices, but analysis through BigQuery is centrally managed by the Data Platform team. This team determines the confidentiality level of data and centrally manages BigQuery permissions using Terraform. By centrally managing data access permissions on the data platform rather than on individual microservices, we’re able to set appropriate security for individual users.

Our full data portfolio also includes Looker, which we use for product analysis, accounting analysis, test performance visualization, operation monitoring, development efficiency analysis, and HR analysis. We also use Dataproc, Cloud Composer, Data Catalog, and Data Studio. The Dataflow template created for the pipeline is also published as OSS. 

With Spanner and other Google Cloud services, our Merpay platform is flexible, secure, scalable and highly available. As Spanner eliminates overhead, we can devote engineering resources to developing new tools and solutions for our customers. We’re looking ahead at providing cryptocurrency service, for example, and are now working on a project to migrate Mercari’s monolithic system that is still on premises entirely over to Google Cloud.

Read more about Mercari and Merpay. Or check out our recent blog: three reasons to consider Cloud Spanner for your next project.

In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

The combination of a vital need for IT experts among businesses and a digital skills gap is making lifelong learning increasingly critical. Beyond professional development, learning new skills offers additional rewards from building peer connections to boosting your creativity. That’s why in 2020 Krishna Deepak Nallamilli and I launched KIMO.ai to reimagine how people approach learning, especially in developing markets. Our team is building the artificial intelligence needed to generate individual learning paths through a wide range of quality digital learning content.

Google Cloud and its Startup Program have been instrumental in connecting our team with the tools, people, processes, and best practices to grow our business. 

Existing learning platforms lack engagement

Outside of traditional education settings, massive open online learning courses (MOOCs)—often modeled after university courses—can provide a flexible and affordable way to upskill or reskill. But the vast majority of people who participate in MOOC programs fail to complete courses. Based on our research, the challenge with existing learning platforms is a lack of engagement, primarily caused by limited direction on which skills to learn, whether AI, fintech, blockchain, or other in-demand disciplines.   

We’ve also received feedback that many corporate learning management systems–developed as online training systems to upskill employees–tend to be poorly designed and time-consuming to use. 

Overall, a significant challenge with most existing learning platforms is that they’re generic. For example, suppose you’re interested in learning about AI. In that case, you need AI-related coursework that applies to your industry and the job you want because AI in medicine is vastly different from AI in financial services. Today’s online learning options typically take a one-size-fits-all approach and fail to capture the nuances of what learners really need to get ahead. 

Building a future-proof learning platform 

The commitment to highly personalized, accessible learning inspired KIMO.ai, a platform that we believe is the future of education. Depending on your goals, current skills, location, and other factors, our AI-based platform will identify which coursework (and where to find those classes) to build the skills you need. The more personalized, relevant learning recommendations even take into account people’s preferences for podcasts, MOOCs, books, articles, videos, courses, publications, and more.  

In a mix of cooperation and competition we call “coopetition,” KIMO.ai will regularly recommend courses from other established online learning systems if, based on our automated assessment, it’s the best option for a learner. There’s also the option to access free content only. 

Google cultural alignment fosters trust

Our platform started with one developer exploring NLP models and Google APIs. As we’ve grown our team and launched our beta to 110,000 users in developing markets, we discovered there is a lot of interest in our platform, and we believe we can make a significant impact. In feedback forums, we also learned that we need to focus our efforts on the mobile experience to improve engagement since 99% of the beta testers use mobile devices. 

Beyond our team’s high level of trust in Google Cloud solutions, our team also appreciates the cultural alignment with Google. We value Google’s developer-centric approach and rely on tools like Dataflow for batch data processing and Cloud TPU to reliably run machine learning models with AI services on Google Cloud. We also build all of our deployments on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which makes it easy to manage all our containerized workloads 

On the front end, Google App Engine makes it easy to deploy apps and experiment, and it integrates seamlessly with Firebase for authentication and more. BigQuery is our serverless data warehouse that efficiently scales to support the millions of articles, videos, and other learning resources we need to analyze to provide the targeted coursework recommendations our learners require.

As we grow our business having a network of trusted advisors is also extremely valuable. By working closely with DoIT International, the 2020 Google Cloud Global Reseller Partner of the Year, our team has access to their cloud, Kubernetes, and machine learning expertise. DoIT has already helped us quickly resolve IT issues and create analytics dashboards that give us insights to continually enhance our services. 

Building for a growing industry

The dynamic edtech market is growing rapidly and estimated to become an $11B industry by 2025. We’re proud to be part of the next wave of personalized education that has the potential to empower people in developing markets and beyond to grow their skills with coursework tailored to their exact needs and how they like to learn. This year, we will deliver our platform to at least 400,000 more people. We’re excited to see how they use it and where it takes them. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application 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.

Kubernetes made a splash when it brought containerized app management to the world a few years back. Now, many of us are using it in production to deploy and manage apps at scale. Along the way, we’ve gathered tips and best practices on using Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to your best advantage. Here are some of the most popular posts on our site about deploying and using Kubernetes. 

1. Use Kubernetes Namespaces for easier resource management. Simple tasks get more complicated as you build services on Kubernetes. Using Namespaces, a sort of virtual cluster, can help with organization, security, and performance. This post shares tips on which Namespaces to use (and not to use), how to set them up, view them, and create resources within a Namespace. You’ll also see how to manage Namespaces easily and let them communicate.
2. Use readiness and liveness probes for health checks. Managing large, distributed systems can be complicated, especially when something goes wrong. Kubernetes health checks are an easy way to make sure app instances are working. Creating custom health checks lets you tailor them to your environment. This blog post walks you through how and when to use readiness and liveness probes.
3. Keep control of your deployment with requests and limits. There’s a lot to love about the scalability of Kubernetes. However, you do still have to keep an eye on resources to make sure containers have enough to actually run. It’s easy for teams to spin up more replicas than they need or make a configuration change that affects CPU and memory. Learn more in this post about using requests and limits to stay firmly in charge of your Kubernetes resources.  
4. Discover services running outside the cluster. There are probably services living outside your Kubernetes cluster that you’ll want to access regularly. And there are a few different ways to connect to these services, like external service endpoints or ConfigMaps. Those have some downsides, though, so in this blog post you’ll learn how best to use the built-in service discovery mechanisms for external services, just like you do for internal services.
5. Decide whether to run databases on Kubernetes. Speaking of external services: there are a lot of considerations when you’re thinking about running databases on Kubernetes. It can make life easier to use the same tools for databases and apps, and get the same benefits of repeatability and rapid spin-up. This post explains which databases are best run on Kubernetes, and how to get started when you decide to deploy.
6. Understand Kubernetes termination practices. All good things have to come to an end, even Kubernetes containers. The key to Kubernetes terminations, though, is that your application can handle them gracefully. This post walks through the steps of Kubernetes terminations and what you need to know to avoid any excessive downtime.

For even more on using GKE, check out our latest Containers and Kubernetes blog posts.