Official Google Cloud Blog: Google Cloud Platform

Charles Schwab uses Chromebooks to launch innovative, secure investment advisory service

Monday, August 1, 2016

Posted by Ed Obuchowski, Senior VP, Advisor Technology Solutions

Editor's note: Today we hear from Ed Obuchowski, Senior VP of Advisor Technology Solutions at Charles Schwab, one of the largest public brokerage and banking companies in the U.S. Learn how Charles Schwab launched Schwab Intelligent Portfolios in 250 branches nationwide using Google Chromebooks. If you’d like to learn more about how Chrome devices can be used as kiosks, register here for our August 17th Hangout on Air. To find out how Chromebooks can be used as shared devices, register for our August 18th segment here.

At Charles Schwab, we believe in the power of investing to transform people’s lives. Last year, we launched Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, an online investment advisory service that uses sophisticated computer algorithms to help clients invest smarter.

It was a huge opportunity for us to innovate and offer our clients more options when it comes to investing.

In order to launch successfully, we needed an intuitive interface that not only educated potential clients about our product but also made it easy to sign up. We tested several laptops and tablets that weren’t the right fit, before I reached out to Google. That was on a Friday and the following Monday, Google engineers came into our Phoenix engineering facility. By lunchtime, we landed on a solution that was quick to deploy, very easy to manage and use, and offered the high level of security that we demanded: Chromebooks.

With help from Insight, a Google reseller, we rolled out 1,000 Chromebooks in 250 Charles Schwab branches in less than two months. Everything worked right out of the box — our IT team didn’t have to install any software or manually customize settings directly on the devices. Instead, they used Chrome device management to put each device in public session mode, so multiple clients could use the same Chrome device securely, without signing in.

Our IT staff can implement specific settings, such as session length, which saves time on device management. Today, our IT team spends fewer than 10 hours each week managing 1,700 devices in our branches across the country.

Opening a Schwab Intelligent Portfolios account on a Chromebook is easy. When a client walks into one of our branches to learn more about automated investing, an associate hands the client a Chromebook. Within seconds, the client is guided to a Charles Schwab webpage, where he or she can learn about the product, complete a questionnaire and open an account. The whole process is electronic, so there’s no paperwork — minimizing errors and time spent on administration.

Our clients trust us with their sensitive financial data and their money. Security has to be our biggest priority. Chromebooks’ rigorous security settings ensure our clients’ data is safe. Chromebooks manage software updates automatically, so devices are always running the latest and most secure version.

Our IT staff limits session length and all data is wiped after a client finishes. IT can also block certain websites and limit Chromebooks to the private Schwab network, so data isn’t traversing public networks. If a device is stolen, there's no risk of data loss and the device is rendered virtually useless.

Our partnership with Google has helped us deliver on our promise to provide best in class client experiences with ongoing innovation. We’re also looking into installing Chromeboxes in kiosk mode in our branch lobbies, so clients can easily explore all of our other product offerings. Tens of thousands of clients have opened Intelligent Portfolios accounts using Chromebooks’ secure, client-friendly devices, and we've exceeded our targets nearly every month since the devices were deployed.

Here's more on how Charles Schwab's clients use Chromebooks to sign up for Schwab Intelligent Portfolios.

To find out more on how Google helps keep your data and devices safe, view the Atmosphere: Rethinking Security in the Cloud digital event on demand here.

Announcing Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Posted by Bram Bout, Director, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

While university students are on their summer holidays, internships or jobs, their professors are already hard at work planning for fall courses. These course maps will be at the center of student learning, research and academic growth. Google was founded on the basis of the work that Larry and Sergey did as computer science students at Stanford, and we understand the critical role that teachers play in fostering and inspiring the innovation we see today and will see in the years to come. That’s why we’re excited to offer Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science.

Starting today, university faculty in the United States who teach courses in computer science or related subjects can apply for free credits for their students to use across the full suite of Google Cloud Platform tools, like App Engine and the Cloud Machine Learning platform. These credits can be used any time during the 2016-17 academic year and give students access to the same tools and infrastructure used by Google engineers.

Students like Duke University undergrad Brittany Wenger are already taking advantage of cloud computing. After watching several women in her family suffer from breast cancer, Brittany used her knowledge of artificial intelligence to create Cloud4Cancer, an artificial neural network built on top of Google App Engine. By analyzing uploaded scans of benign and malignant breast cancer tumors, Cloud4Cancer has learned to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue. It’s providing health care professionals with a powerful diagnostic tool in the fight against cancer.

Google Cloud Platform offers a range of tools and services that are unique among cloud providers. The tool that Brittany used — Google App Engine — lets you simply build and run an application without having to configure custom infrastructure. Our Machine Learning platform allows you to build models for any type of data, at any size, and TensorFlow provides access to an open-source public software library (tinker with that extensive data here). Students will also be able to get their hands on one of Cloud Platform’s most popular new innovations: the Cloud Vision API, which allows you to incorporate Google’s state-of-the-art image recognition capabilities into the most basic web or mobile app.

We look forward to seeing the creative ways that computer science students will use their Google Cloud Platform Education Grants, and will share stories along the way on this blog.

Computer science faculty in the United States can apply here for Education Grants. Students and others interested in Cloud Platform for Higher Education, should complete this form to register and stay up to date with the latest from Cloud Platform. For more information on Cloud Platform and its uses for higher education, visit our Google Cloud Platform for Higher Education site.

Online Travel Agent (OTA) Travix takes off with Google Apps for Work

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Posted by Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations, Travix, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations at Travix, a global online travel technology company that sells low fare flight tickets to 2.5 million passengers from 28 countries every year. Founded in 2011, Travix has rapidly built up a network of 500 staff in seven offices worldwide. Read why they chose Google Apps as the IT infrastructure behind their rapid expansion.

When Travix started out in 2011, it was through the merger of three companies. We gained strength from that diversity, but we also inherited three corporate IT systems. So the first thing the CEO asked me to do when I joined was to find one system we could use across the whole company. He recommended Microsoft Office 365, but implementing it was more demanding than anyone had expected. Months into the process, I went back to him with a realistic projection of the time and resources necessary to finish the rollout, and a recommendation that we put the project on hold. The hunt began for alternatives. That’s where Google Apps came in.

Google Apps is perfectly suited for an expanding global business. We have offices in Amsterdam, Oosterhout, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, California and London, and in all of these places, Office 365 required infrastructure modifications before implementation. By contrast, Google Apps was ready to go right out of the box.

Our corporate IT systems need to be quick, reliable and safe, with a minimum of costs and management overhead. Google Apps costs less to implement, less to maintain and allows greater contractual flexibility than Office 365. Because Google Apps is also entirely cloud based, we don’t need to install servers, as recommended in the hybrid server-cloud Office 365 solution. In fact, Google Apps allowed the decommissioning of 10 existing servers, each of which is priced at $3,000.

Rolling out Google Apps took just six weeks. g-company led training with one-on-one sessions for executives, small workshops for staff and even presentations over Hangouts for our Bangalore team. But key to our rapid deployment were the “ambassadors” – staff prepared to support their colleagues when Google Apps went live. After setting up our systems engineers on Google Apps, I sent out a Form for people to register as ambassadors and the response was overwhelming: 104 people signed up for 50 positions. This was a clear sign for us that our people were willing to embrace this change and make this transition work.

At Travix, we already worked with other Google products in particular fields, like Google Analytics and Google Adwords in marketing and Google BigQuery and kubernetes in engineering. Now we have Google Apps for everyone.

Staff here have become very enthusiastic about Google Apps, as they see how the tools fit into their working lives. Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts let staff stay on top of their work anytime, from anywhere. Rather than book meeting rooms through a separate app, now everything is on Calendar, saving time and hassle. Drive has been organically and rapidly adopted across the organisation, and Forms has been a huge success that we didn’t even plan for. Instead of starting a gigantic email thread or using a free survey tool found on the internet, we now use the simple Forms interface to get swift feedback, with answers fed directly into Sheets for analysis.

Hangouts in particular has changed the way we communicate, whether through the efficiency of instant messaging or by working more closely with colleagues abroad. Hangouts on Air allows staff in other offices to participate in our CEO’s presentations in Amsterdam, and because the stream is recorded, engineers in Bangalore and California can watch it too, despite the time difference. Collaboration between team members no longer requires a kind of “email ping pong” and stressful version control. We can just open Hangouts and Drive and go through a document together, whether an engineering design in Docs, a marketing product plan on Slides, or details of a tender on Sheets.

A growing global technology company demands an IT solution that works in any location, on any device. On top of that, it has to be cost-effective, easy to maintain and ready to use in short time. It’s my job to provide that for my colleagues. With Google Apps, that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Google I/O: What’s new for enterprise developers

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Posted by Diane Greene, SVP, Google

Applications have long been the lifeblood of the enterprise. This has never been more true than in today’s market. And Google has never been more committed to the enterprise. We’re excited to expose our APIs to enterprise developers who can now incorporate advanced technologies such as image recognition, speech recognition, location and maps, email and calendaring into their applications.

Google I/O is a great opportunity to share what excites us about the massive digital transformation happening at companies around the globe. We’re thrilled about the speed of innovation with all of our enterprise products, particularly Google Cloud Platform, Google Apps, Maps, Android and Chromebooks. We’re laser focused on creating what developers need to build successfully in the cloud.

At Google, we continue to push new innovations that enable developers to turn great ideas into world class applications. We can also help you get your apps in the hands of your customers through marketplaces like Google Play, Chrome Web Store, Google Apps Marketplace and Cloud Launcher, which serve billions of Android and Chrome users and millions of businesses.

Today’s announcements at I/O further build out our developer toolkit, with new features to help developers build what’s next for the enterprise.

New APIs for Sheets & Slides: With the new Sheets API, we're giving developers a new level of access to some of the most popular features in Sheets. Create new spreadsheets, populate them with data and formulas, insert charts and pivot tables, and pull results right into your apps. Developers can use Sheets in a powerful workflow to push data from their app into Sheets, allowing users to collaborate on that data, before the updated data is pulled back into the original app. The Slides API enables developers to push data from other applications into Slides in order to create custom, polished presentations quickly.
API Partner Ecosystem: A number of partners, including Salesforce, SAP Anywhere, Conga, Prosperworks, Anaplan, Sage, Trello, and Asana are already connecting their services through these new APIs, and we look forward to seeing even more developers follow suit.
Enhancements to the Classroom API: We’re giving developers programmatic access to our most powerful features within Google Classroom. The Classroom API lets school reporting systems sync coursework and grades from Classroom and quickly connect teachers and students to their learning content.

Whether you’re using Google Cloud Platform, integrating with our Machine Learning APIs or building on top of our Google Apps suite, we’re committed to delivering the tools and technologies that help businesses improve productivity, securely connect information across platforms and power new workflows. Earlier this month we announced a BigQuery integration with Google Drive that allows customers to run queries, gather insights and then share that data with teams in a familiar and easy to understand template, no matter where they are. We also recently added two new security certifications, ISO27017 for cloud security and ISO27018 for privacy. And customers like Land O Lakes are taking advantage of our cloud and APIs to revolutionize their fields — in this case, modern farming.

Ever since I began my career in technology, I’ve been working to advance the way the enterprise runs. I worked on some of the first relational databases for Sybase and Tandem and then, at VMware, helped to create an entirely new industry centered around virtualization. Fast forward to today, and I can say that I’ve never been more excited about the potential for the cloud to transform businesses. There was a period in time where the energy was around consumer applications, but we can now see that people are realizing just how much innovation can be done in the enterprise, and it’s enticing more and more developers. While we’re excited about the innovations that we’re bringing to market, we’re even more excited about how you will take advantage of these new advancements. As the momentum continues in the enterprise, we can’t wait to see what you build next.

Introducing Style Detection for Google Cloud Vision API

Friday, April 1, 2016

Posted by Miles Ward, Global Head of Solutions, Google Cloud Platform

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.)

At Google Cloud Platform, we’re thrilled by the developer community’s enthusiastic response to the beta release of Cloud Vision API and our broader Cloud Machine Learning product family unveiled last week at GCP NEXT.

Cloud Vision API is a tool that enables developers to understand the contents of an image, from identifying prominent natural or man-made landmarks to detecting faces and emotion. Right now, Vision API can even recognize clothing in an image and label dominant colors, patterns and garment types.

Today, we’re taking another step forward. Why only evaluate individual components of an outfit when we could evaluate the full synthesis — the real impact of what you wear in today’s culture?

We’re proud to announce Style Detection, the newest Cloud Vision AP feature. Using millions of hours of deep learning, convolutional neural networks and petabytes of source data, Vision API can now not just identify clothing, but evaluate the nuances of style to a relative degree of uncertainty.

Style Detection aims to help people improve their style — and lives — by navigating the complex and fickle landscape of fashion. Does a brown belt go with black shoes? Pleats or no pleats? “To tuck or not to tuck?” is now no longer a question. With Style Detection, we’re able to mine our nearly bottomless combined data sets of selfies, fashion periodicals and the unstructured ramblings of design bloggers into a coherent and actionable tool for picking tomorrow’s trousers.

We’re already seeing incredible results. Across our training corpus, we were able to detect the majority of personal style choices and glean with 52-97% accuracy not just what people were wearing, but what those clothes might say about them. The possibilities are endless — and it could mean the end of spandex forever!

Learn more about Style Detection and the Cloud Vision API here. We’re offering it to a small group of developers in alpha today (obviously, there are still details to iron out).

GRAS helps build sustainable and ethical supply chains using Google Maps APIs and Google Cloud Platform

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Posted by Dr. Norbert Schmitz, Managing Director of Meo Carbon Solutions

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of “Mapping a better world” blog posts highlighting ways in which organizations are using location data to affect positive local and global change. Google Maps APIs continues to create opportunities and tools to support our community.

Today we hear from Dr. Norbert Schmitz, managing director of Meo Carbon Solutions. Read how Meo Carbon Solutions and Google for Work Premier Partner Wabion used Google Maps APIs and Google Cloud Platform to develop Global Risk Assessment Services (GRAS). The tool provides reliable information about the ecological and social risks of expanding agriculture into natural habitats.

In the European Union, companies that sell biofuels must get certifications to show that producing their fuel — often made from agricultural crops — does not cause deforestation, the loss of biodiversity or the loss of carbon stocks. We established GRAS to provide a single tool to gather and visualize this data required to support a credible certification.

Through GRAS, we’ve made this information accessible not only to governments and NGOs, but also to businesses, financial institutions and individuals. For example, a U.S. company buying soybean oil from Brazil can use GRAS to verify the ecological and social risk exposure of the mills and the farmers supplying the mills.

We decided the most effective way to present this complex set of information was to build a web app that would overlay data from multiple sources on top of a map. Using this tool, auditors can compare before-and-after maps of a certain area, and based on changes to the habitat, either grant or deny certifications.

To build GRAS, we partnered with IT consultant Wabion, a Google for Work Premier Partner. After testing several map solutions, we chose Google Maps because of its high performance, ability to easily integrate data from multiple sources, flexible APIs, solid support and large user community.

The GRAS website combines mapping information with data from dozens of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other global databases. It uses the Google Maps JavaScript API to display the base maps for the site. The API also visualizes layers and more than 100 types of data — including agriculture, deforestation and social welfare — on top of the maps.

Users can upload and visualize their own data sets. The Google Maps Geocoding API verifies map locations, and the Google Maps Places API autocomplete makes it easy for site users to choose locations that they want to learn about.

A GRAS visualization of biodiversity risk in Brazil

GRAS is powered by the Google Cloud Platform — specifically, Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine. Combining these services with the Google Maps APIs lets us handle geodata in a 10-terabyte database, which hosts more than 100 layers, many of them extremely large.

We’ve recently expanded GRAS beyond our original mission to provide insights for other industries by expanding the data layered on top of maps. We’ve included new information on biodiversity, land-use changes, and available carbon stock. We’ve also been able to incorporate numerous measurements of social health — ranging from the Global Slavery Index to the Global Hunger Index and the UNICEF index of access to drinking water and sanitation.

Through GRAS, we’ve made this information accessible not only to governments and NGOs, but also to businesses, financial institutions and individuals. For example, a U.S. company buying soybean oil from Brazil can use GRAS to verify the ecological and social risk exposure of the mills and the farmers supplying the mills.

Far exceeding our initial vision, the GRAS website combines transparency with the power of technology to help users in wide-ranging industries, —from food, to chemicals and energy — operate environmentally and socially sound supply chains.

Sports Authority handles 2,000 transactions per second with Google Cloud Platform

Friday, February 19, 2016

Posted by Jon Byrum, Product Marketing Manager, Google Cloud Platform

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.)

Athletic gear, much like all apparel categories, is quickly shifting to an online sales business. Sports Authority, seeing the benefits that cloud could offer around agility and speed, turned to Google Cloud Platform to help it respond to its customers faster.

In 2014, Sports Authority’s technical team was asked to build a solution that would expose all in-store product inventory to its ecommerce site, sportsauthority.com, allowing customers to see local store availability of products as they were shopping online. That’s nearly half a million products to choose from in over 460 stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

This use case posed a major challenge for the company. Its in-store inventory data was “locked” deep inside a mainframe. Exposing millions of products to thousands of customers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week would not be possible using this system.

The requirements for a new solution included finding the customer’s location, searching the 90 million record inventory system and returning product availability in just the handful of stores nearest in location to that particular customer. On top of that, the API would need to serve at least 50 customers per second, while returning results in less than 200 milliseconds.

Choosing the right cloud provider

At the time this project began, Sports Authority had already been a Google Apps for Work (Gmail, Google Sites, Docs) customer since 2011. However, it had never built any custom applications on Google Cloud Platform.

After a period of due diligence checking out competing cloud provider options, Sports Authority decided that Google App Engine and Google Cloud Datastore had the right combination of attributes — elastic scaling, resiliency and simplicity of deployment — to support this new solution.

Through the combined efforts of a dedicated project team, business partners and three or four talented developers, it was able to build a comprehensive solution on Cloud Platform in about five months. It consisted of multiple modules: 1) batch processes, using Informatica to push millions of product changes from its IBM mainframe to Google Cloud Storage each night, 2) load processes — python code running on App Engine, which spawn task queue jobs to load Cloud Datastore, and 3) a series of SOAP and REST APIs to expose the search functionality to its ecommerce website.

Sports Authority used tools including SOAPUI and LOADUI to simulate thousands of virtual users to measure the scalability of SOAP and REST APIs. It found that as the number of transactions grew past 2,000 per second, App Engine and Cloud Datastore continued to scale seamlessly, easily meeting its target response times.

The company implemented the inventory locator solution just in time for the 2014 holiday season. It performed admirably during that peak selling period and continues to do so today.

This screenshot shows what customers see when they shop for products on the website — a list of local stores, showing the availability of any given product in each store

When a customer finds a product she's interested in buying, the website requests inventory availability from Sports Authority’s cloud API, which provides a list of stores and product availability to the customer, as exhibited in the running shoe example above.

In-store kiosk

As Sports Authority became comfortable building solutions on Cloud Platform, it opened its eyes to other possibilities for creating new solutions to better serve its customers.

For example, it recently developed an in-store kiosk, which allows customers to search for products that may not be available in that particular store. It also lets them enroll in the loyalty program and purchase gift cards. This kiosk is implemented on a Google Chromebox, connected to a web application running on App Engine.

This image shows the in-store kiosk that customers use to locate products available in other stores.

Internal store portal

Additionally, it built a store portal and task management system, which facilitates communication between the corporate office and its stores. This helps the store team members plan and execute their work more efficiently, allowing them to serve customers better when needs arise. This solution utilizes App Engine, Cloud Datastore and Google Custom Search, and was built with the help of a local Google partner, Tempus Nova.

This screenshot shows the internal store portal that employees use to monitor daily tasks.

Learning how to build software in any new environment such as Cloud Platform takes time, dedication and a willingness to learn. Once up to speed, the productivity and power of Google Cloud Platform allowed the Sports Authority team to work like a software company and build quickly while wielding great power.

Bringing Unlimited Storage to all government customers, looking back and looking ahead

Friday, January 29, 2016

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google for Work

I don’t know about you, but it seems like 2016 has started with a bang!

I have an exciting announcement for my first post of the year — now all U.S. government agencies can choose Google Apps for Work and store unlimited content with the assurance that its security is assessed against the FedRAMP standards. Over the holidays, we received a FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) Authorization to Operate for Google Apps for Work* and Google App Engine. And because this authorization — along with its ongoing compliance requirements — covers our common infrastructure, it benefits all existing Google Apps for Work and App Engine customers as well.

With 2016 off to a busy start, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on 2015. It was a big year for Google for Work.

We launched new features, powered by machine learning, that do more of the heavy lifting so you can work better and faster. For Sheets, we introduced Explore, which provides instant data analytics and visualization with the click of a button. We added Smart Reply to Inbox, which helps you respond to messages by generating short contextual responses to your emails, based on your typical responses. And we open-sourced TensorFlow, our fast and scalable machine learning system, to accelerate advances within the wider community.

Along with the roll out of Marshmallow to the Android for Work program, we held a virtual conference called Android for Work Live so users all over the world could watch and participate. On Maps, we launched Predict Travel Time — one of the most powerful features from our consumer Google Maps experience — so businesses and developers can make their location-based applications even more relevant for their users.

We’re continuing to build out and improve Google Cloud Platform at breakneck speed, with nearly 300 combined products and features launched in 2015. Nearline gives you the benefits of cold storage and the pricing of offline backups, but with high availability for your data. Bigtable gives you access to the same database service that powers many of Google’s core products, like Search and Maps. And Custom Machine Types give you the flexibility to create the virtual machine shape that works for you, so you get just the right amount of memory and processing power for your workloads.

We also reached a new milestone — there are now more than 2 million paying businesses using Google Apps for Work, including new customers like Morrisons, Catholic Health Initiatives and Thames Water. Organizations like Broad Institute, HTC, Atomic Fiction and Nomanini that want powerful data analytics and developer platforms, began using and partnering with Google Cloud Platform for everything from tackling genomic data to building innovative mobile payment apps.

Looking ahead, our goal remains the same: empower billions of people to work the way they choose and build what’s next. We’re building simple and secure tools that make it easier for you to focus on the things that matter. Technology can help by assisting with tasks, suggesting how to maximize your time and even proactively surfacing the information you need. It’s going to be an exciting year. Have a look at our full year wrap up and best wishes for a happy and productive 2016!

*Google Apps for Work, Google Apps for Work Unlimited, Google Apps for Education and Google Apps for Nonprofits. Google's dedicated Government edition is also FedRAMP-authorized.

Google for Work security: Announcing Data Loss Prevention to wrap up 2015

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Posted by Suzanne Frey, Director, Security, Trust, and Privacy, Google Apps

Every company has data that it must keep secure — whether that data is about confidential innovations, strategic plans or sensitive HR issues — keeping all of your data safe from inadvertent or purposeful leaks needs to be simple, quick and reliable. Google for Work already helps admins manage information security with tools such as encryption, sharing controls, mobile device management and two-factor authentication. However, sometimes user actions compromise the best of all of these controls; for example, a user might hit “Reply all” when meaning to send a private message with sensitive content.

Starting today, if you’re a Google Apps Unlimited customer, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Gmail will add another layer of protection to prevent sensitive information from being revealed to those who shouldn’t have it.

How Gmail DLP works

Organizations may have a policy that the Sales department shouldn’t share customer credit card information with vendors. And to keep information safe, admins can easily set up a DLP policy by selecting “Credit Card Numbers” from a library of predefined content detectors. Gmail DLP will automatically check all outgoing emails from the Sales department and take action based on what the admin has specified: either quarantine the email for review, tell users to modify the information or block the email from being sent and notify the sender. These checks don’t just apply to email text, but also to content inside common attachment types ― such as documents, presentations and spreadsheets. And admins can also create custom rules with keywords and regular expressions.

Check out the DLP whitepaper for more information including the full list of predefined content creators, and learn how to get started. Gmail DLP is the first step in a long-term investment to bring rule-based security across Google Apps. We’re working on bringing DLP to Google Drive early next year, along with other rule based security systems.

As we round out the year, let’s take a look at what we did in 2015 to enhance the security, privacy and control you have over your information.

To verify the good work we do on privacy, we were one of the first cloud providers to invite an independent auditor to show that our privacy practices for Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Education comply with the latest ISO/IEC 27018:2014 privacy standards. These confirm for example, that we don’t use customer data for advertising.
To make security easier for all, we've expanded our security toolset:

We introduced Security Keys to make two-step verification more convenient and provide better protection against phishing. For admins, we released Google Apps identity services, which allows secure single sign on access with SAML and OIDC support and we delivered device (MDM) and app (MAM) Mobile Management across Google Apps.
We launched Postmaster tools to help Gmail users better handle large volumes of mail and report spam.
For Google Cloud developers, the Cloud Security Scanner allows you to easily scan your application for common vulnerabilities (such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and mixed content).
For those who want the power and flexibility of public cloud computing and want to bring their own encryption keys, we announced Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys for Google Cloud Platform.
To give more transparency on how email security, even beyond Gmail, is changing over the years we published the Safer Email report.

We introduced new sharing features, alerts and audit events to Google Drive for Google Apps Unlimited customers. For example, administrators can now create custom alerts and disable the downloading, printing or copying of files with Information Rights Management (IRM). New sharing settings give employees better control within their organization unit and now admins can let them reset their own passwords.
Google Groups audit settings allow better tracking of Groups memberships. For all, the launch of google.com/privacy gives better control over personal data and Android for Work makes it easier to keep personal and work data separate on employee devices.

Companies are moving to the Cloud for all kinds of reasons, but Security and Trust remain critical and predominant differentiators between providers. That’s why millions of businesses trust Google to do the daily heavy lifting in security ─ preventing, testing, monitoring, upgrading and patching, while working towards the future. Because Google was born in the cloud, we’ve built security from the ground up across our entire technology stack, from the data centers to the servers to the services and features we provide across all of your devices. No other Cloud provider can claim this degree of security investment at every single layer.

While 2015 was a great year, there’s a lot more in store for 2016. To learn more about how our technology is evolving, please join us at the Enigma conference in San Francisco on January 25th to discuss electronic crime, security and privacy ideas that matter.

Celect brings science to the art of retail merchandising

Friday, October 16, 2015

Posted by Devavrat Shah, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Celect

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Blog.)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blog comes from Devavrat Shah, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Celect, which helps retailers understand buying patterns and customer choices.

Retailers spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out what people will buy and when, online or offline. Many retailers see this as an art, but at Celect, we want to add science to this process. The answer lies in what we call the “Choice Engine,” which gathers data on what customers buy and don’t buy – instead of just simply finding out how they rate products they like. Think of the shopping process this way: If someone browses black shirts and red shirts online, but puts a blue shirt in the shopping cart, they’re giving you comparative information. Celect can take these choices and suggest which products a retailer should stock more or less of – as well as predict when price becomes a factor in a shopper’s purchase decision.

My cofounder Vivek Farias and I, both professors at MIT, decided to put our brains together and see if we could bring our technology to the commercial market. We knew our technology was great, so we bootstrapped a team together – two professors, two engineers, and one person on the ground doing business development. Our biggest challenge was scaling our technology even though we had an extremely small development team. We didn’t want to run a system when we didn’t yet have clients.

Fortunately for Celect, we met the criteria for Google Cloud Platform for Startups, giving us $100,000 in credit for Google Cloud Platform products and easy access to engineers and architects to help us make the most of our infrastructure. We quickly found out how good Google’s documentation is, which matters when you’re a startup that needs to move quickly. We get to tap into the expertise of people who’ve spent 10 years building cloud infrastructure, and they know it very well. The web user interface of Google Cloud Storage is very intuitive to navigate, and gives us an overall view of the system and the resources in use.

We run our workloads on Google Compute Engine, which operates easily with our commodity Linux machines – another way we save money as a startup. Google Cloud Platform also gives us peace of mind about security. Retailers trust us with highly proprietary information, and they’re very sensitive to data breaches. When they hear we rely on Google, retailers know we’re adhering to strong security standards.

Since we’re going after large retailers for our product, we need the scalability to store massive datasets. We can create new data stores in Google Cloud Platform so that every client’s data is siloed from the others. It’s the perfect on-demand infrastructure for a company like ours that needs to run lean for the first couple of years.

At this stage in our growth, we want to make very efficient use of every dollar we spend. The past year has been very successful for us, with some great retailer brands signed on and a threefold growth in employees. Google Cloud Platform will grow with us, while helping us develop our products better and faster.

- Posted by Devavrat Shah, Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Celect

One year in, and just getting started

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google for Work

What’s in a name? Last September, when we changed our name from Google Enterprise to Google for Work, it wasn’t just about what we call ourselves – it was about what we stand for. We want to build great products that help you with every aspect of your life – including work (where many waking hours are spent).

Enterprise is old business. We believe in a new way of working with collaboration at the core. A world where we work how we choose. Where getting stuff done in the office doesn’t feel like traveling back in time. Where our work tools are just as good or even better than the ones we have in our personal lives.

We bring the best of Google to work. The same cloud computing infrastructure that we use to run our search engine; powerful apps and services to help you get work done – fast; simple, secure platforms to access everything, wherever you are.

While we have much more in store, it’s been a busy year and we’ve hit some great milestones over the last twelve months:

More than one million paying organizations are actively using Google Drive, including companies like The New York Times, Uber, Fossil, Wedding Wire and BBVA.

Google Apps for Work is proving to be the next generation tool of choice: according to a Better Cloud study, Millennials (aged 18-34) are 55% more likely to use Google Apps than alternatives. It’s cost effective, too: Forrester Research’s Total Economic Impact calculator shows that companies using Google Apps see a 304 percent return on investment.

We’ve introduced groundbreaking new services with Google Cloud Platform, such as Nearline and Cloud Bigtable for storage and Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system. In total, we’ve added over 30 products to our stack, and our online community has nearly doubled.

Chromebooks are now the best-selling device in the US for K-12 education, according to a report from IDC.

More than 10,000 companies are testing, trialling and using Android for Work following its launch in February. In July, we added carriers such as AT&T and Verizon to our partner program and introduced a new class of devices for regulated industries, like the Blackphone by Silent Circle and Samsung's KNOX devices.

And the best is yet to come. Cloud computing will continue to get more powerful, and we’re only at the beginning of what machine learning can do to help businesses and people contextualize data.

Imagine an even smarter digital assistant that can surface the information you need at just the right time and help you manage your schedule for stress-free productivity. Virtual reality products, such as Expeditions, are going to help us learn and work in exciting new ways. And finally, more and more of the objects around us will connect to the internet, enabling more efficient information transfer and actionable data for businesses than ever. These advances will affect all aspects of our lives, including work, and the possibilities are great. We’ll keep our focus forward, so that wherever we’re going, we’re always embarking on what’s next.

Honoring ex-military entrepreneurs this Armed Forces Day

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Posted by Kevin Mathers, Country Sales Director, Google UK and former Army Captain

I was fourteen when I knew I wanted to join the Army. I was a cadet at school, in the cold and wet Lake District hills. I revelled in the fun of confronting and overcoming seemingly impossible challenges and hardships with my mates. I loved being part of something; a team, a mission. To me, the Army was something to be part of. Something to believe in.

I served for five years with the Highland Fusiliers, a British Army infantry regiment, after university. What I cherish most from my time in the military is how my character developed from repeatedly having to achieve goals, against the odds, with some of the best teams I could imagine. I remember leading five young Glaswegian soldiers across the glaciers of the Karakoram mountains in Pakistan, and watching as their courage and resolve grew with every icy step. Then, later, I saw them become leaders of teams on operations. It was soldiers like those that taught me leadership is about serving a team, not running a team.

This is just one of many lessons that ex-servicemen and women learn from the military that make them great entrepreneurs. In addition to recognizing the power of a team, they’re taught to plan and act with imperfect information and limited resources. They prepare for every scenario, but know how to react quickly and logically to sudden obstacles. And they learn to do it all while under extreme pressure and often in dire circumstances — skills that become priceless qualities for entrepreneurs in fast-moving business environments.

Now, thanks to development in cloud technology and web-based tools, it’s easier than ever for ex-military personnel to pursue entrepreneurship. They don’t need a physical office to bring a team together; with video conferencing and collaborative tools, they can work with colleagues from all over the world as if they’re in a room together. Having a website means no longer needing an expensive storefront or being limited to customers within driving distance, and online advertising makes it possible to find the clients who are looking for exactly what you offer. Starting a business now costs a fraction of what it used to, with even more tools available to get your idea off the ground.

So, in honour of Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom, we’re celebrating those leaders in service who became leaders in British business. We’re highlighting people like Andy McNab, the best-selling author and entrepreneur who joined the military at 16 with the literacy of an 11-year old. Or Tom Bodkin, who spent six years in the Parachute Regiment before starting a fast-growing company that leads treks to remote places around the world. And to encourage ex-servicemen and women to pursue their passions as entrepreneurs, we’re offering discounts on Google Apps, Google AdWords and Google Cloud Platform, and providing business training from our Digital Garage in Leeds.

To all those who have served and continue to serve in so many ways, thank you for your dedication and courage. With greatest respect and gratitude, I salute you and your families this Armed Forces Day.

Band Aid 30 on Google Cloud Platform: There’s more than one way to skin a Web server

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Posted by Miles Ward, Global Head of Solutions, Google Cloud Platform

Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.

As the most recent and deadly Ebola outbreak spread in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the global philanthropic community sought new and innovative ways to raise money for much needed awareness and relief. Band Aid 30 was imagined as a modern echo of the original Band Aid’s successful campaign to address hunger in Africa. A global team immediately set out to organize a live performance that would feature dozens of the world’s top music artists.

Sounds a bit ambitious, right? In this case, as with many ventures that make a true impact, the team behind the scenes was a lot smaller than you’d think. The number of developers responsible for deploying the website for this fast-paced, globally critical project: two. Mukesh Randev and Jonathan Horne, web developers from a cutting edge media agency in the UK called Adtrak, took the job on with great urgency. A couple of nice chaps in Nottingham, trying to change the world. Well, ok, mostly trying to keep the website online.

The project came together in just shy of 14 days, so things were a bit frenetic. The logos changed 17 times. Layout and top billing were in constant flux. The front page had UK and US donation links… or maybe just UK? Looming in the back of Jonathan’s mind was the fact that when this site goes live, and several dozen artists with an aggregate 100+ million twitter followers all invite the world to donate, the traffic would be coming fast and heavy.

They were using Google Cloud Platform, which was a bit new to them, and they were really eager to set up automatic scaling so that they’d be able to handle the load. They were also using Google DNS to direct traffic to a Google Compute Engine instance hosting Wordpress and using a local instance of MySQL as the database.

As I explained to Mukesh and Jonathan the standard best practices required to operate a dynamic website like this correctly (e.g., use a load balancer, use replica pools, use autoscaler, and move MySQL to CloudSQL with MemCacheD, and configure WordPress for performance), an idea struck:

Miles: “Hey, what dynamic stuff are you running through WordPress?”

Mukesh: “Well, really nothing. All payment processing is offloaded, comments are using disqus, but that’s really just for layout. And so the PR/media team can make updates on the day of the event.”

Because 100% of the site was static, rather than creating all of the above services, we simply copied the Band Aid 30 website to Google Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage is integrated into the Google front end, a powerful distributed edge routing and caching system that provides incredible performance for serving static content. Just imagine how much content is being served through this system for YouTube, Google Play, Picasa... it’s staggering!

Copying the site might sound complex, but let me assure you, it’s not. In fact, it’s exactly three short lines of code at your command line prompt:

//go get my website, make sure you go to an empty folder first

wget --convert-links -q --mirror -p --html-extension --base=./ -k -P ./ http://ipaddressforyourstagingserver



//put that website in the cloud

gsutil cp -R * gs://www.yourrockingwebsite.com



//let everyone read it

gsutil -m acl set -R -a public-read gs://www.yourrockingwebsite.com

That’s it! This solution had simplicity written all over it.

Simplicity also meant cost savings. The dynamic setup – which is obviously more functional – allows lots of simultaneous site editors, data-driven features and richer logging, but is also substantially more expensive to operate. We think all of that would’ve looked something like this, and cost in excess of $10,000 USD per month.

Now, compare that to what we actually built.

It only cost $9.17 (yes, you read that right) to run this production website on launch day, without a single performance hiccup or any risk of operational crisis. It just worked.

That’s a 99.92% discount from our original approach. Assuming all other costs of Band Aid 30 are zero (clearly they aren’t), this would represent a 40,621,592.14% ROI based on their smash success of raising over £2.5 million GBP. Not too shabby ;)

We’re really excited about the positive impact in Ebola victim’s lives that Band Aid 30 is making, the outstanding execution under pressure that Mukesh, Jonathan and the whole Adtrak team delivered (in less than 14 days) and our opportunity to help in this little way.

Introducing Google Actual Cloud Platform

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Posted by Greg Demichillie, Director of Product Management

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.)

At Google Cloud Platform, we strive to deliver innovative cloud computing technology to developers at low costs with massive scale. Currently, our cloud offerings are powered by best-in-class data centers, virtualization software and container-based applications, but as we consider the future of cloud computing, we realize there’s a major opportunity ahead that would allow us to deliver an unprecedented improvement in the power, efficiency and reliability of our infrastructure. We can elevate cloud computing like never before.

We’re answering the question that’s been in front of us the whole time: why isn’t cloud computing built in actual clouds? Well, as of today, it is. We’re excited to announce Google Actual Cloud Platform: all of our incredible services and products running in actual clouds in the troposphere.

Starting on April 1, Google Actual Cloud Platform brings with it a number of exciting new features:

New compute zone: We’ve added a new compute zone, troposphere-1a, to make it easier than ever to provide your app with non-earth-bound availability. Now, you no longer have to make a choice between high availability and high altitude.

New machine types: Alongside our current machine types, we’ve added a new category of “physical” devices: actual-cloud machine types. Choose from cumulus-16gb, cirrus-32gb and stratocumuliform-64g (created specifically for data intensive workloads).

Stormboost: Drawing on charges from electrical fields during thunderstorms, we’re able to supercharge read/write performance on all persistent disks and offer 50% higher IOPS.

CloudDrops: A new, game-changing content distribution system. CloudDrops can provide blazingly fast content delivery to all of your users using—you guessed it—rain drops.

Weather Dashboards in the Developer’s Console: With new weather-dependent performance features, you need a way to monitor the atmospheric conditions of your servers. Now, you can monitor humidity/request, watch your app’s altitude and see a 7-day forecast right next to the rest of your stats.

Bare-metal container support: Applications deployed on Actual Cloud Platform can run in containers too. The lightweight shared kernel model of containers makes them ideal for non-terrestrial deployments.

From all of us on the Google Cloud Platform team, here’s to clear skies ahead.

Avaya chooses Google Cloud Platform for new cloud-based contact center solution

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Posted by Brian Goldfarb, Head of Cloud Platform Marketing

Today at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Avaya announced their new OnAvaya™ cloud-based contact center solution, built exclusively on Google Cloud Platform. Avaya provides solutions that help companies increase their engagement within a contact center across multiple channels and devices. Their new product – Customer Engagement OnAvaya™ Powered by Google Cloud Platform – provides a low-cost solution that allows customer service agents to work from anywhere, right in the browser. Aiming to meet the specific demands of a communications platform, Avaya chose Google Cloud Platform for its reliability, performance and scalability – and our simple pricing structure. OnAvaya™ runs on Google Compute Engine and utilizes Google's advanced networking capabilities to provide Unified Communications services running in the public cloud. The Chrome device based agent endpoints communicate using WebRTC with their cloud infrastructure.

“Google is one of the world leaders in cloud environments,” says Tony Pereira, director of business development at Avaya. “They have built an impressive architecture with security features that they are constantly evolving to make the most of cloud efficiencies.”

OnAvaya™ takes advantage of the unique capabilities of Chrome devices. You simply provision a Chromebook and headset and your customer service agents can work from home or wherever there's an Internet connection and have full Avaya contact center functionality. In the event of a snowstorm or network interruption, you can shift your support operations to any site that has Wi-Fi. Since employees no longer need a physical phone, you'll save costs on additional hardware.

With Customer Engagement OnAvaya™ Powered by Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to support growth in their business and seasonal spikes without huge capital investments. And since we manage the technology on our end, implementation time for OnAvaya™ customers should drop from months to weeks – or even days.

The solution will be available to certified Avaya business partners as well as Google for Work service partners starting in the spring of 2015. Learn more about the OnAvaya™ solution on their blog.

We’re thrilled to welcome Avaya to the Cloud Platform family!

5 Reasons CIOs can feel secure with their information in Google’s Cloud

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps for Work

Many organizations are in the dark about the security of their data, especially with the rise of shadow IT and numerous recent breaches. It’s no wonder IT execs are concerned about how their data is protected and who has access to their confidential information.

Every day I meet CIOs who ask me how Google’s cloud can offer the level of security they need, and many IT execs likely have the same nagging worries. To ease those worries — and since today is Safer Internet Day — I’d like to highlight five ways in which Google’s cloud keeps your information safe:

1. Secure physical infrastructure
There are many layers of security baked into our data center security measures and infrastructure. A very small percentage of Googlers are allowed in our data centers, and even fewer are allowed on the floor where the servers are located. And as they near the core of the data center, they encounter more sophisticated security measures, like biometric scanners and under floor laser beams.

2. Control over the entire technology stack
From the servers and routers we build ourselves, to the submarine fiber that connects our data centers, to the mobile management of our software interface, our team has control and visibility over the entire chain of technologies. This enables us to detect weaknesses faster and respond to threats that may emerge swiftly.

3. Investment in active security research beyond Google
More than 500 security engineers work to protect our systems, while dedicated teams look for malware and vulnerabilities beyond our own infrastructure, in other operating systems and all over the web. For this, we know there is power in numbers, which is why we engage the broader security research community with our Vulnerability Reward Program. In the last year, we paid 1.5 million dollars to security researchers and hackers from every corner of the world to attack our systems and share the vulnerabilities they identified.

4. Locations chosen for speed and reliability
When picking the location of our data centers, we have many priorities that keep speed and reliability top of mind. Among these factors, the location must:

Be distributed geographically for better user experience and greater resiliency
Have reliable, fast Internet connectivity and stable energy sources
Be in politically stable areas with legal systems that maintain laws protecting cloud users from liability for content in the systems
Abide by rule-of-law that protects our right and the rights of users as it relates to human rights and challenging third-party requests

With all of our data centers adhering to these location priorities, we can surpass the capabilities of on-premise data centers by creating an infrastructure built for speed, reliability, and protection of users’ data

5. There's no downtime
Information is distributed across our servers and data centers worldwide, so if a single server or even an entire data center fails, your information will still be accessible. Our team is committed to reliability, and the way we built our data model for applications and networks allows us to “replace the engines as the plane is flying,” so we can complete our maintenance while providing an uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime.

Our team has gone to great lengths to build one of the most secure cloud infrastructures in the world. While Safer Internet Day may only happen once a year, we take the trust and security of our customers information very seriously year-round (which we like to share in writing, too). Whether it’s creating easy-to-use tools to help organizations manage their information or keeping customer information safe from prying eyes, we’re constantly investing to ensure that Google earns and keeps your trust.

VMware to make Google Cloud Platform available to its customers

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Posted by Murali Sitaram, Managing Director, Global Partner Strategy & Alliances, Google for Work

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Many businesses around the world rely on VMware datacenter virtualization solutions to virtualize their infrastructure and optimize the agility and efficiency of their data centers. Today we’re excited to announce that we are teaming up with VMware to make select Google Cloud Platform services available to VMware customers via vCloud Air, VMware’s hybrid cloud platform. We know how valuable flexibility is to a business when determining its total infrastructure solution, and with today’s announcement, enterprise businesses leveraging VMware’s datacenter virtualization solutions gain the flexibility to easily integrate Google Cloud Platform.

Businesses can now use Google Cloud Platform tools and services – including Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage – to increase scale, productivity, and functionality. VMware customers will benefit from the security, scalability, and price performance of Google’s public cloud, built on the same infrastructure that allows Google to return billions of search results in milliseconds, serve 6 billion hours of YouTube video per month and provide storage for 425 million Gmail users.

With Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud DNS directly available via VMware vCloud Air, VMware customers will benefit from a single point of purchase and support for both vCloud Air and Google Cloud Platform:

vCloud Air customers will have access to Google Cloud Platform under their existing service contract and existing network interconnect with vCloud Air, and will simply pay for the Google Cloud Platform services they consume.
Google Cloud Platform services will be available under the VMware vCloud Air terms of service, and will be fully supported by VMware’s Global Support and Services (GSS) team.
Certain Google Cloud Platform services are also fully covered by VMware’s Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for US customers who require HIPAA-compliant cloud service.

Google Cloud Platform services will be available to VMware customers beginning later this year, so we’ll have more information very soon. In the near future, VMware is also exploring extended support for Google Cloud Platform as part of its vRealize Cloud Management Suite, a management tool for hybrid clouds.

Today’s announcement bolsters our joint value proposition to customers and builds on our strong, existing relationship around Chromebooks and VMware View and also around the recently announced Kubernetes open-source project. We look forward to welcoming VMware customers to Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud Platform Live: Introducing Container Engine, Cloud Networking and much more

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Posted by Brian Stevens, VP of Product Management

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Today, tens of thousands of developers from around the world are joining us at Google Cloud Platform Live — either in person in San Francisco, at our watch parties in New York, Austin, and London, or on the livestream. One of the things we are discussing is that the cloud of today is not yet where developers need it to be. The promise of cloud computing is only partly realized; too many of the headaches of on-premise development and deployment remain. We want to do better. Today, we get one step closer with some important updates to Cloud Platform:

Simple, Flexible Compute Options Development in the cloud today is by and large a fragmented experience. You need to decide up front whether you want to work with virtual machines — and therefore build everything yourself, either from scratch or by wiring together open source components — or to adopt a managed platform, and give up the ability to control the underlying infrastructure. At Google, we think about compute in the cloud differently: as a continuum which allows you to pick and choose the level of abstraction that is right for your application, or even for a component of your application. Today, we’re happy to announce two important steps towards that vision.

Google Container Engine: run Docker containers in compute clusters, powered by Kubernetes

Google Container Engine lets you move from managing application components running on individual virtual machines to launching portable Docker containers that are scheduled into a managed compute cluster for you. Create and wire together container-based services, and gain common capabilities like logging, monitoring and health management with no additional effort. Based on the open source Kubernetes project and running on Google Compute Engine VMs, Container Engine is an optimized and efficient way to build your container-based applications. Because it uses the open source project, it also offers a high level of workload mobility, making it easy to move applications between development machines, on-premise systems, and public cloud providers. Container-based applications can run anywhere, but the combination of fast booting, efficient VM hosts and seamless virtualized network integration make Google Cloud Platform the best place to run them.

Managed VMs in App Engine: PaaS - Evolved

App Engine was born of our vision to enable customers to focus on their applications rather than the plumbing. Earlier this year, we gave you a sneak peek at the next step in the evolution of App Engine — Managed VMs — which will give you all the benefits of App Engine in a flexible virtual machine environment. Today, Managed VMs goes beta and adds auto-scaling support, Cloud SDK integration and support for runtimes built on Docker containers. App Engine provisions and configures all of the ancillary services that are required to build production applications — network routing, load balancing, auto scaling, monitoring and logging — enabling you to focus on application code. Users can run any language or library and customize or replace the entire runtime stack (want to run Node.js on App Engine? Now you can). Furthermore, you have access to the broader array of machine types that Compute Engine offers.

Google Cloud Interconnect: better network connectivity to support global architectures A flexible, high performance and secure network is the backbone of any Internet-scale application or enterprise IT architecture. Today, we’re making it easier for you to get the benefits of Google’s worldwide fiber network by introducing three new connectivity options:

Direct peering gives you a fast network pipe directly to Google in any of over 70 points of presence in 33 countries around the world
Carrier Interconnect enables you to connect to Google with our carrier partners including Equinix, IX Reach, Level 3, TATA Communications, Telx, Verizon, and Zayo
Next month, we will introduce VPN-based connectivity

We’ll follow up with a deeper look at Networking on Wednesday.

Firebase: it’s easier to build mobile and web real-time applications

Two weeks ago, we announced that Firebase joined Google. Today, we are demonstrating a hint of what makes their platform so powerful. Users of today’s mobile apps are used to real-time flow of communication such as chat, presence, commenting and location. However, current developer tools make it cumbersome to manage the relationship between multiple devices, and the underlying database and storage layer in real time. Google Firebase makes this easier, which is why it powers over 60,000 applications. We’ll follow up with a deeper look at their technology on Thursday.

Google Cloud Debugger: ending printf-style debugging

At Google I/O, we gave you a sneak peek at how Cloud Debugger makes it easier to troubleshoot applications in production. Today, this service is publicly available in beta. With Cloud Debugger there’s no more hunting through logs to guess at what is going on with your services. Now you can simply pick a line of code, set a watchpoint and the debugger will return locals and a full stack trace from the next request that executes that line on any replica of your service. There is zero setup time, no complex configurations and no performance impacts noticeable to your users.

Google Compute Engine Autoscaler

Today we are launching Compute Engine Autoscaler. It uses the same technology that Google uses to seamlessly handle huge spikes in load and gives developers the ability to dynamically resize a VM fleet in response to utilization and based on a wide array of signals, from QPS of a HTTP Load Balancer, to VM CPU utilization, or custom metrics from the Cloud Monitoring service.

Cloud Platform Free Trial

New customers can now sign up for a free trial at http://cloud.google.com and receive $300 in credits that you can spend on all Cloud Platform products and services. There are no ongoing commitments — we will never charge your credit card until you upgrade your account. With $300 you can run two n1-standard-2 VMs 24x7 for 60 days, store over 11TB of data, or process over 60TB of data with BigQuery. Learn more about the free trial and start building something for free.

A growing partner ecosystem

Our Partner Lounge at the SF event features Tableau, Red Hat, DataStax, MongoDB, SaltStack, Fastly and Bitnami. Bitnami announced its Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform featuring almost 100 cloud images, enabling our users to deploy common open source applications and development environments on our infrastructure in one-click. Fastly announced a new offering called Cloud Accelerator, a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that improves content delivery and performance at the edge.

Rapid adoption

Over the past months, thousands of new companies have moved to Cloud Platform and adopted it as their development platform of choice. Kevin Baillie took the stage to talk about how Atomic Fiction is able to use thousands of Compute Engine cores to produce high-quality visual effects for Hollywood studios. We also spoke about Wix, one of the most popular consumer website builders, whose media services are built entirely on Cloud Platform. We’re happy to support the launch of their media services platform today. Finally, Office Depot moved its entire printing service from a hosted storage solution to one powered by Cloud Platform — helping them reduce cost, develop with greater agility and power their in-store and online printing service for over 2000 locations.

New price reductions: continued leadership in price-performance

As always, we have an enduring commitment to passing along the savings we receive from Moore’s Law to our users. That is why today we’re announcing price reductions on Network egress (47%), BigQuery storage (23%), Persistent Disk Snapshots (79%), Persistent Disk SSD (48%), and Cloud SQL (25%). These are in addition to the 10% reduction on Google Compute Engine that we announced at the beginning of October and reflect our commitment to make sure you benefit from increased efficiency and falling hardware prices.

A personal note

I want to end on a personal note. I joined Google just two months ago, and during this time I’ve been floored by what our teams are doing to create the world’s best cloud. We are committed to not just evolving technology for technology’s sake but to staying focused on the user and delivering real value. From what I’ve seen at Google I don’t think the combination of world class technology, innovation and user-focus exists anywhere else in the world today. Today’s announcements are representative of that, and we have so much more in store.

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