Editor’s note: In February 2021, Google Cloud and TELUS announced a 10-year strategic alliance to drive innovation of new services and solutions across data analytics, machine learning, and go-to-market strategies that support digital transformation within key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, and connected home. By December 2021, TELUS had completed a pilot for a use case that leveraged Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning solutions and Telco Edge Anthos to increase safety in the workplace and save lives in manufacturing facilities. The use case leverages Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) to move the processing and management of traffic from a centralized cloud to the edge of TELUS’ 5G network, making it possible to deploy applications and process content closer to its customers, and thus yielding several benefits including better performance, security, and customization. Today, we invite Samer Geissah, Head of Technology Strategy and Architecture at TELUS, to share how the company is delivering on its promise to use this technology to drive meaningful change, starting with workers’ well-being.

Whenever a new technology buzzword comes along I think: what problems does this solve, and for whom is this going to make a real difference? That’s because at TELUS, we see innovation as a means to act on our social purpose to drive meaningful change, from modernizing healthcare and making our food supply more sustainable, to reducing our environmental footprint and connecting Canadians in need. Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a buzzword that offers an opportunity to do just this. That’s why we want to leverage cloud capabilities and optimize our network’s edge computing potential, tapping into our award-winning high-speed 5G connectivity to help solve some of industry’s most complex challenges.

The reason why this presents such a great opportunity is that companies across industries still rely on maintenance-heavy on-premises systems to manage core computing tasks. But, with cloud capabilities delivered at the edge of our 5G network, we open a new world of possibilities for them. For example, manufacturers who currently rely on IoT-enabled equipment in their facilities can deliver new experiences by running advanced AI-based visual inspections directly from 5G-enabled devices–all without the need for local processing power or extra on-site space. In fact, it’s this example that inspired our new use case, where our Connected Worker Safety solution can be applied across a range of business verticals to help improve safety, prevent injury, and save lives, demonstrating how the perfect combination of skilled people and digital technology can make the world a safer place.

Empowering intelligent decision making at the edge

Be it a farm, manufacturing facility, hospital, or a factory floor, workers should be able to work in environments where their health and safety are held as the highest priority. But how can employers ensure that their remote, frontline, and in-office employees are safe and healthy at all times? We’ve found the answer by combining Google Cloud AI/ML capabilities and Anthos as a platform for delivering workloads, with our network’s infrastructure.

Together with Google Cloud, we have been leveraging solutions with the power of MEC and 5G to develop a workers’ safety application in our Edmonton Data Center that enables on-premise video analytics cameras to screen manufacturing facilities and ensure compliance with safety requirements to operate heavy-duty machinery. The CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras we used are cost-effective and easier to deploy than RTLS (real time location services) solutions that detect worker proximity and avoid collisions. This is a positive, proactive step to steadily improve workplace safety. For example, if a worker’s hand is close to a drill, that drill press will not bore holes in any surface until the video analytics camera detects that the worker’s hand has been removed from the safety zone area.

A few milliseconds could make all the difference when you are operating heavy equipment without guards in place. So, to power the solution’s predetermined actions with immediate response times, we worked with Accenture and hosted the application on an Anthos bare metal Google Cloud environment running on our TELUS multi-edge access computing.

Because all the conditions in our model are programmable, this solution can be replicated at scale across a variety of practical scenarios other than factory floors. The actions in response to the analysis are also programmable, which means companies can use this technology to look at workers’ conditions and decide the best course of action to educate, assist, and protect them. All this is done through a single pane of glass ecosystem, making it easy to customize this solution to meet various business needs.

Meanwhile, leveraging our existing global networks to process data and compute cycles at the edge eliminates the need to transport data to a central location for real-time computation. This means that we can offer this solution to partners while optimizing latency and lowering costs.

Powering blink-of-an-eye communication with Anthos

To put the importance of lowering speed into perspective, consider that the average latency of blinking your eye is about 300 milliseconds. From a safety point of view, preventative processes need to be much faster than that. For this use case, our machine learning models running on edge are currently processing data at a tenth of the time it takes for you to blink your eyes, and we’re aiming to lower that latency further to help build even safer systems.

Our plan is to deploy Anthos clusters on bare metal to our customers across Canada to take advantage of our existing enterprise infrastructure, making it possible for us to run our solution closer to partners and eventually enable just one millisecond of latency.

At that point, we’ll be able to power new use cases that require near real-time feedback, leaving absolutely no room for error. This could include remote surgery, platooning of fleets on autonomous vehicles, and many other cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) solutions that require high-speed communication for platform operators to manage remote edge fleets in far-away places.

Improving workers’ safety while enabling new sources of revenue

Although edge computing and 5G have been around for a while, we believe that use cases like this are only just starting to demonstrate the incredible speed of change and high potential that these models provide. The next step for us is to develop our workers’ safety solution and get it to market, making TELUS an early adopter of new 5G solutions at the edge that can help our business and industry partners make workplaces safer.

It’s a great win to be able to combine efforts with Google Cloud and reduce latency in a context where timing can impact and save lives, and I’m confident that workers’ safety is just the beginning of a series of industry challenges that we’ll address together.

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

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

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

Google Cloud is recognized by independent experts for its leadership

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

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

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

We made it easier to migrate enterprise applications

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

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

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

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

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

New cost and performance options

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

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

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

Distributed cloud brings us closer to you

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

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

Data protection and security that never sleeps

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

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

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

We made it easier to build and manage applications

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

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

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

We continue to be the most sustainable cloud for you

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

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

A big thank you to our customers

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

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

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

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

Soldiers can now use their CAC cards to log into the service’s newly established Google Workspace account. With it, soldiers who don’t need the full spectrum of information-sharing provided by Army365 can nevertheless find comrades, schedule meetings and coordinate other activities.

“All new entrants to the Army will be provisioned automatically with a Google Workspace account with a new email address … when they receive their CAC card,” Raj Iyer, the service’s chief information officer, said in a social-media post.

“Soldiers will retain their Google account till they fully transition to their first unit after completion of basic training and AIT [advanced infantry training], at which point their commanders will determine if they need an Army365 account.”

The directive applies to all active-duty, reserve, and National Guard soldiers.

AI, deep learning, and image recognition is transforming the shopping experience. These technologies enable consumers to use product images or screenshots rather than text to search for similar products. This improves the customer experience and enables retailers with online and offline outlets to provide a genuine omnichannel experience.

The lack of complexity and the ease of use of BigQuery has enabled ViSenze to reduce its data infrastructure and management costs by 30%–50%, and scale up without incurring downtime.

—Renjie Yao, Data Platform Lead, ViSenze

Visual commerce provider ViSenze is helping some of the world’s leading retailers improve conversion rates through image-based search.

The business’s products also enable media companies to use the platform to turn images and videos into engagement opportunities—driving new and incremental revenues.

Created through NExT—a research center established by the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University of China—ViSenze now operates in the United States, United Kingdom, India, China, and Singapore. The business is backed by Japan-based internet and ecommerce company Rakuten and cross-border investment specialist WI Harper Group.

Growth in SMB and Mobiles

Renjie Yao, Data Platform Lead at ViSenze, sees opportunities for growth in the small-to-medium business sector, where companies do not have the resources to build similar technologies, and with mobile device OEMs to integrate ViSenze natively on smartphones.

Phone owners can activate a “shopping lens” on camera and gallery apps to capture an image of a product. They then receive matching results from more than 800 partner merchants and retailers and can then click through to product pages on partner apps or mobile websites. Alternatively, they may use a photo to compare products sold on different sites or shop matching styles.

“Our research found Google Cloud provided a complete, integrated ecosystem rather than a disparate collection of tools and components, and so was ideal for our needs.”

—Renjie Yao, Data Platform Lead, ViSenze

The ViSenze API analyzes the contents of a selected or clicked image and sends the information back to the organization’s visual commerce platform. The platform feeds back similar results based on that information.

The ViSenze offering also extends to image analysis for the tagging of product attributes—such as a white turtleneck cardigan with full sleeves—to provide an improved search experience.

Data Vital to ViSenze

Capturing and analyzing large volumes of data is integral to ViSenze. “We have to understand how consumers interact with our customers’ ecommerce websites and apps,” says Yao. “For example, we need to know who has looked at a particular pair of jeans on a website and whether that visit led to a conversion. We can then tell that customer whether they need to make more stock available.”

ViSenze also relies on data to provide high-quality training for its image recognition models and its domain-specific models for online retail.

Protect Customer Data

Data is vital to ViSenze—but customer privacy is most important. “All the data we collect is transparent to our customers, meaning they can decide what they do not want us to collect. In addition, all personal data processing complies with privacy protection regulations in each region, such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe.”

A Quick Move to the Cloud

ViSenze started operations using servers, storage, networking, and associated systems in an on-premises data center operated by NExT.

However, to support rapid growth, the business decided to move its workloads to the cloud. ViSenze opted for a multi-cloud architecture, using in part a Google Cloud data infrastructure.

“Our research found Google Cloud provided a complete, integrated ecosystem rather than a disparate collection of tools and components, and so was ideal for our needs,” says Yao. “We could connect different components with the click of a mouse.” Further, the business found it could easily configure rules and pipelines to route data logs to relevant Google Cloud services.

The review found Google Cloud’s extensive managed services would also remove administration and maintenance tasks from ViSenze’s in-house technology team—freeing team members to focus on more valuable tasks.

In addition, Google Cloud provided the security features—including custom hardware running hardened operating systems and file systems and encryption of data at rest and in transit—needed to protect sensitive information. Finally, the location of Google Cloud regions in several countries would enable the business to meet regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.

A Three-Month Implementation

ViSenze opted to move to Google Cloud in mid-2017 and completed a three-month implementation using internal resources. “The process was very smooth and intuitive, and we had no problems building our entire data platform within Google Cloud,” says Yao.

The business now uses an architecture comprising Google Kubernetes Engine to manage and orchestrate Docker containers running in Google Cloud Platform; BigQuery to provide an analytics data warehouse, with Google Data Studio providing customizable visualization and reports; Stackdriver to monitor and manage virtual machine instances and services inside Google Cloud; Cloud SQL to manage its relational databases for real-time analytics; Compute Engine to provide compute resources; Cloud Storage to store files and objects; Cloud Pub/Sub to provide real-time messaging between applications; and Cloud Functions to build event-driven applications.

After collecting the request logs of users in virtual machine instances and Docker containers, ViSenze distributes them in three directions. “We export raw logs into Cloud Pub/Sub for indexing inside an Elasticsearch search engine, and to a BigQuery data warehouse for further analytics,” explains Yao. “We also use Cloud Functions-created applications to obtain the logs from Cloud Pub/Sub to perform some real-time calculations.”

“We are currently using Airflow workflow management on Compute Engine as our hosted ETL platform, but are likely to move to Cloud Composer in future.”

500 Million Records Per Day

With Google Cloud providing its data infrastructure, ViSenze is well positioned to meet internal and customer demands for more granular insights. The business is now processing 500 million records per day through BigQuery and saves up to one year’s aggregated data—excluding any personal data—in the data warehouse for analysis.

The nature of ViSenze’s business means most reports are generated for data processed on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis. “BigQuery is extremely stable and performance optimized, regardless of the volume of data it processes,” says Yao. “Across BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services, we’ve recorded 99.99% availability over the past year.”

The lack of complexity and the ease of use of BigQuery has enabled ViSenze to reduce its data infrastructure and management costs by 30%–50%, and scale up without incurring downtime.

“With BigQuery, we have saved the equivalent of two full-time engineers and now need only half of one person’s time to maintain our whole data platform,” says Yao.

“In addition, BigQuery integrates closely with Data Studio, enabling non-technical people in our product and business teams to create dynamic, detailed analysis dashboards. We now use Data Studio to create nearly 50 separate reports.”

The business has now grown to offer access to more than 1 billion users and a listing of more than 400 million purchasable products.

Next Steps

ViSenze is now researching the potential of the Cloud AutoML suite of machine learning products to improve the training of its models and run a fully managed NoSQL database through Cloud Datastore.

“A NoSQL database service is the only missing piece of our architecture for now, and using Cloud Datastore would enable us to focus almost exclusively on our business,” says Yao. “With Google Cloud Platform, we are ideally positioned to continue providing support to our business team and help them continue expanding into new markets.

“In addition, we can help retailers and consumers to unlock the potential of the web and apps to transform the purchasing experience.”