Official Google Cloud Blog: cloud platform

Synergyse Training for Google Apps

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Posted by Majid Manzarpour, Founder & CTO, Synergyse

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Majid Manzarpour, Founder and CTO of Synergyse, a company that provides training solutions for Google Apps. See what other customers that have Gone Google have to say. And learn more about Synergyse on our Cloud Platform Blog.

Synergyse is on a mission to teach the world how to use Google Apps. We built Synergyse Training for Google Apps, a fully interactive, measurable and scalable training solution that has been deployed throughout organizations and educational institutions globally.

There are new features introduced to Google Apps on a regular basis, and we take extra care to keep our customers educated whenever any product updates happen. Our solution provides in-application training that delivers lessons with audio and visual guides in your existing Google Apps account, allowing you to remain in your applications, learning how to use them simultaneously.

We aimed to build a solution that could deliver the same level of scalability, security and reliability that more than 5 million businesses have known to expect from Google Apps. In order to make sure our training software could run seamlessly, we chose Google Cloud Platform to support our backend.

We run on Google App Engine, and can automatically scale up to accommodate organizations of any size, anywhere in the world. Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL handle all of our data needs and provide cost-effective integration with App Engine. We can rely on the 99.95% uptime delivered by App Engine to ensure our customers have training available when they need it. When we deliver automatic training updates for new applications and features to our clients, they can trust us to provide the same level of security that they find with Google Apps. The Google Cloud Platform is powered by the same Google data centers that power Google Apps; it takes care of our backend infrastructure and enables us to focus on our product.

We chose to develop our solution as a Chrome Extension because we can deeply integrate with Google Apps through the browser, as well as provide IT administrators with rapid software deployment options. This allows us to layer our interactive training on top of real Google Apps and provide automatic software updates. With the Chrome Management console, the extension can be deployed to an entire fleet of Chrome browsers and Chromebooks with a few simple clicks.

When we went live with our first enterprise client, we were both impressed with how effortlessly our software deployed to the entire organization and scaled up to support them. By choosing Google Cloud Platform and Chrome, we can focus on providing scalability, security and reliability to our clients who have chosen to run their organizations on Google Apps.

Ushering in the next generation of computing at Google I/O

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Posted by Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog and Google Developers Blog)

Watch the live stream of the Cloud track kickoff now

Over the last fourteen years we have been developing some of the best infrastructure in the world to power Google’s global-scale services. With Google Cloud Platform, our goal is to open that infrastructure and make it available to any business or developer anywhere. Today, we are introducing improvements to the platform and making Google Compute Engine available for anyone to use.

Google Compute Engine - now available for everyone

Google Compute Engine provides a fast, consistently high-performance environment for running virtual machines. Later today, you’ll be able to go online to cloud.google.com and start using Compute Engine.

In addition, we’re introducing new Compute Engine features:

Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use
Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads
Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers that enable you to build applications spanning your local network and Google’s cloud
Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard

We’ve also completed ISO 27001:2005 international security certification for Compute Engine, Google App Engine, and Google Cloud Storage.

Google App Engine adds the PHP runtime

App Engine 1.8.0 is now available and includes a Limited Preview of the PHP runtime - your top requested feature. We’re bringing one of the most popular web programming languages to App Engine so that you can run open source apps like Wordpress. It also offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage.

We’ve also heard that we need to make building modularized applications on App Engine easier. We are introducing the ability to partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.

Introducing Google Cloud Datastore

Google Cloud Datastore is a fully managed and schemaless solution for storing non-relational data. Based on the popular App Engine High Replication Datastore, Cloud Datastore is a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability while still providing powerful capabilities such as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.

Over the last year we have continued our focus on feature enhancement and developer experience across App Engine, Compute Engine, Google BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL. We also introduced Google Cloud Endpoints and Google Cloud Console.

With these improvements, we have seen increased usage with over 3 million applications and over 300,000 unique developers using Cloud Platform in a given month. Our developers inspire us everyday, and we can’t wait to see what you build next.

Google Compute Engine - Now Available to Gold Support Customers

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Posted by Navneet Joneja, Product Manager

Google Compute Engine gives developers everywhere access to Google's computing infrastructure. Now you can sign up online for Google Compute Engine with the purchase of Gold Support; you no longer need an invitation or a conversation with sales to get access. We’re also further reducing prices for all instance types by an average of 4%.

Starting at $400/month, Gold support gives you a direct relationship with our experienced support engineers to help you get started or troubleshoot issues across the Google Cloud Platform products.

Since announcing Compute Engine, we’ve expanded geographic coverage, added new instance types, released many new features, and made improvements behind the scenes. Sebastian Stadil of Scalr wrote, in a recent review:

“Google Compute Engine is not just fast. It’s Google fast. In fact, it’s a class of fast that enables new service architectures entirely."

We’re inspired by the awesome projects being created every day with Google Cloud Platform and can’t wait to see what you create next. If you’re ready to try Compute Engine today, sign up today.

Google Cloud Platform introduces new support packages

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Posted by Brett McCully, Google Cloud Platform Team

Support is as important as product features when choosing a platform for your applications. And let’s face it, sometimes we all need a bit of help. No matter which Google Cloud Platform services you are using—App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, etc.—or what time of day, you should be able to get the answers you need. While you can go to Stack Overflow or Google Groups, we realize some of you may need 24x7 coverage, phone support or direct access to a Technical Account Manager team.

To meet your support requirements, we’re introducing a comprehensive collection of support packages for services on Google Cloud Platform, so you can decide what level best fits your needs:

Bronze: All customers get access to online documentation, community forums, and billing support. (Free)
Silver: In addition to Bronze, you can email our support team for questions related to product functionality, best practices, and service errors. ($150/month)
Gold: In addition to Silver, you'll receive 24x7 phone support and consultation on application development, best practices or architecture for your specific use case. (Starts at $400/month)
Platinum: The most comprehensive and personalized support. In addition to Gold, you’ll get direct access to a Technical Account Manager team. (Contact Sales for more information)

A year in review: work the way you live

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google Enterprisefundamental shiftWork securely...require their employees2-step verificationGoogle Apps VaultModel Contract ClausesISO 27001 certification… anytime, anywhere...offline editingdocumentsspreadsheetsiPhone, iPadAndroidGoogle Maps CoordinateGoogle Play Private ChannelChromebooksChromeboxes1-to-1 programsfor office workersin a call centerbest business gadgets

...with simple tools...Google Driveinsert filesshare workYou and up to 14 colleaguescalendar entryemail inboxopen a Google Doccall or email usGoogle Search Appliance 7.0visualize your data...supported by partners and Google infrastructureenergy-efficientCompute EngineBigQueryEuropean datacenter supportlower pricesPartner ProgramGoogle Enterprise Partner Search6,000 Google Apps Resellers* * *retailmediamanufacturingtransportationeducationgovernmentgoing Googlewine business with your two best friendsbuild a bear-proof coolerkeeping citizens safe

Cloud computing enabling entrepreneurship in Africa

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Posted by Zafir Khan, Google App Engine Team(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)Nomanini

Vuyile prints a voucher from his LulaGoogle App EngineGoogle App Engine blog

Google Cloud Storage - more value for performance

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager

(Cross-posted to Google Developers Blog)

Earlier this week, we announced a collection of improvements across Google Cloud Platform including 36 new Compute Engine instances, Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage, Object Versioning, and European datacenter support. We also announced that we are reducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20%.

We are committed to delivering the best value in the marketplace to businesses and developers looking to operate in the cloud. That’s why today we are reducing the price of Google Cloud Storage by an additional 10%, resulting in a total price reduction of over 30%. This price reduction applies to all Cloud Storage regions and the new DRA Storage.

Find out more about the new Cloud Storage pricing and sign up now to get started.

Google Cloud Platform: new features, lower prices, extending European datacenters

Monday, November 26, 2012

Posted by Jessie Jiang, Product Management Director(Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.)introducedno-cost trialLower storage prices and new Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) Storagereducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20%Durable Reduced AvailabilityObject VersioningMore European Datacenter supportEuropean Datacenter support36 New Compute Engine instance types and overall reduced pricesintroduced36 additional instance typesreducing the price of our original 4 standard instances

High Memory Instance - High performance instances tailored for applications that demand large amounts of memory.

High CPU Instance - Reduced cost option when applications don’t require as much memory.

Diskless Configurations - Lower cost options for applications that do not require ephemeral disk and can exclusively utilize persistent disk.

Persistent Disk SnapshottingCloud Storage pricingCompute Engine instancesSign up now

Get started at no cost with a faster, larger Cloud SQL database

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on Google Developers Blog)

You want your applications to be fast, even with millions of users. Anytime your user tries to retrieve information from the app or update settings, it should happen instantly. For the best performance, you need faster, larger databases - especially if you have a growing user base to serve.

Google App Engine is designed to scale. And now Google Cloud SQL—a MySQL database that lives in Google’s cloud—has new features to meet the demand for faster access to more data. With today’s updates, you can now work with bigger, faster MySQL databases in the cloud:

More Storage: We’re increasing the available storage on Cloud SQL to 100GB – ten times more than what used to be available.
Faster Reads: We’re increasing the maximum size of instances to 16GB RAM, a 4 times increase in the amount of data you can cache.
Faster Writes: We’re adding functionality for optional asynchronous replication, which gives the write performance of a non-replicated database, but the availability of a replicated one.
EU datacenter availability: Now you can choose to store your data and run your Cloud SQL database instance in either our US or EU data centers.
Integration with Google Apps Script: We’re making it quick and easy for businesses using Google Apps to use Cloud SQL. Publish and share data with Google Sheets, add data to Google Sites pages or create simple Google Forms without worrying about hosting or configuring servers.

Introducing a new trial offer
Many of you have requested a trial offer to test out Cloud SQL. Today, we’re introducing a 6- month trial offer at no charge, effective until June 1, 2013. This will include one Cloud SQL instance with 0.5 GB of storage. Sign up now and get started on Cloud SQL at no cost.

Streak powers their business on Google Cloud Platform

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Posted by Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak, a startup alum of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator. Streak is a CRM tool built into Gmail. Aleem shares why Streak chose Google Cloud Platform to run their business.

Everyone relies on email to get work done – yet most people use separate applications from their email to help them with various business processes. Streak fixes this problem by letting you do sales, hiring, fundraising, bug tracking, product development, deal flow, project management and almost any other business process right inside Gmail. We decided to build Streak on Google Cloud Platform to operate at scale, to understand our users and improve the application over time, and to rapidly grow our business.

We chose to build Streak with Google App Engine for many reasons: it can handle tons of load; it requires no maintenance; and it guarantees 99.95% uptime. Streak’s user base grew 30% week over week for 4 consecutive months after launch. Being able to handle the load and data requirements at our scale would have required us to hire a full team of backend engineers just to keep the application running. Instead, the Streak backend on App Engine is built and maintained by a single engineer.

All of our data is stored in the App Engine Datastore, but we also mirror our data using Google Cloud Storage. As a result, Cloud Storage is a conduit to route this data to other Google cloud services, such as BigQuery and the Prediction API.

Last, we use Google BigQuery to better understand our users. It allows us to analyze large amounts of data from our usage logs and query it to answer complex questions such as:

How much does the average request cost broken down by type? How many users are running an old version of Streak? Are there currently any abnormal error rates in our application? On average, if a user is working in a 3 person team, how many deals do they have assigned to them?

We bundle the insights gained from BigQuery and use it to power our dashboards with key business metrics.

One of many Streak dashboards powered by BigQuery showing current usage statistics

When we first launched our business, we had gigabytes worth of data. Now, we anticipate growing to terabytes of data in just a few months. We couldn’t have scaled this easily without Google Cloud Platform. To learn more, check out our case study and our post on the App Engine blog for a detailed technical explaination.

Google BigQuery updates: Faster, easier and more data formats

Monday, October 1, 2012

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager

We know you have a lot of data to work with within your organization, which can present big challenges. Your data can be large in volume and complex in structure. For example, large-scale web applications have millions of users, documents and events to manage. As a result, many engineering teams choose highly scalable NoSQL databases over relational databases. Though this approach is effective in storing and retrieving data, it poses challenges for interactive data analysis.

Today’s release of Google BigQuery tackles these hurdles with several new features:

Support for JSON: JSON is used to power most modern websites, is a native format for many NoSQL databases hosting large scale web applications, and is used as the primary data format in many REST APIs. With this update, it’s now possible to import data formatted in JSON directly to BigQuery without the hassle of writing extra code to convert the data format.
Nested and Repeated Fields: If you’re using App Engine Datastore or other NoSQL databases, it’s likely you’re taking advantage of nested and repeated data in your data model. For example, a customer data entity might have multiple accounts, each storing a list of invoices. Now, instead of having to flatten that data, you can keep your data in a hierarchical format when you import to BigQuery.
Additional improvements:

Increased import quotas from 1000 jobs per day to 1000 jobs per table per day, and boosted the file size limit from 4GB to 100GB
Faster data exports from BigQuery to Google Cloud Storage, by enabling large tables to be exported as multiple files in parallel
Permanently save common queries in the BigQuery interface

To learn more about how Google BigQuery can help you gain insights from your data in the cloud, click here to sign up.

Google BigQuery new features let you do more with your data

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager, Google BigQueryLast monthBigQueryBatch Queriesbatch queriesinteractive queriesBigQuery Connector for ExcelGoogle Apps Script®BigQuery Connector for ExcelhereMicrosoft and Excel are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Neural Network for Breast Cancer Data Built on Google App Engine

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Posted by Brittany Wenger, Winner of Google Science Fair 2012(Cross-posted from Google App Engine Blog)Editors note: Today’s guest blog post comes from 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, the winner of this year’s Google Science Fair. Brittany built an application on Google App Engine called the Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer. This artificial neural network can detect complex patterns in data, learning how to classify malignant or cancerous cells it hasn’t seen before. Learn more about her project. dataMachine Learning RepositorySDK’s Greeting Serviceleave-one-out testing

Introducing the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program: Helping businesses move to the cloud

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Posted by Eric Morse, Head of Sales and Business Development, Google Cloud PlatformGoogle Cloud Platform Orangescape TechnologiesService Partners

Business apps: Ci&T, a global systems integrator, built a new quotation app on Google App Engine to help SulAmerica, one of the largest insurance providers in Brazil, provide better policy quotations to millions of their customers.

Mobile apps: Agosto built a smartphone app running on Google App Engine to help the Minneapolis Loppet Foundation register thousands of participants in a Nordic ski event.

Social apps: PA Consulting built a crowd-sourced app on Google App Engine and Google Maps for MetOffice to provide richer, up-to-date local weather forecasts around the world.

Technology Partners

Google Compute Engine: Compute Engine technology partners offer a rich set of management services that help you configure and manage applications running on Google’s infrastructure.

Google BigQuery: BigQuery technology partners enable you to import data from a wide range of existing on-premise and cloud data sources into BigQuery, as well as build rich, visually interactive dashboards on top of BigQuery.

Google Cloud Storage: Cloud Storage technology partners have integrated Google Cloud Storage directly into their offerings to provide you with active archiving, backup and recovery, and primary storage solutions.

partner

Google Compute Engine: Computing without limits

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Posted by Craig McLuckie, Product Manager, Google Compute Engine(Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.)Google Compute Engine

Scale. At Google we tackle huge computing tasks all the time, like indexing the web, or handling billions of search queries a day. Using Google's data centers, Google Compute Engine reduces the time to scale up for tasks that require large amounts of computing power. You can launch enormous compute clusters - tens of thousands of cores or more.

Performance. Many of you have learned to live with erratic performance in the cloud. We have built our systems to offer strong and consistent performance even at massive scale. For example, we have sophisticated network connections that ensure consistency. Even in a shared cloud you don’t see interruptions; you can tune your app and rely on it not degrading.

Value. Computing in the cloud is getting even more appealing from a cost perspective. The economy of scale and efficiency of our data centers allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers. You can see pricing details here.

Compute. Launch Linux VMs on-demand. 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual core VMs are available with 3.75GB RAM per virtual core.

Storage. Store data on local disk, on our new persistent block device, or on our Internet-scale object store, Google Cloud Storage.

Network. Connect your VMs together using our high-performance network technology to form powerful compute clusters and manage connectivity to the Internet with configurable firewalls.

Tooling. Configure and control your VMs via a scriptable command line tool or web UI. Or you can create your own dynamic management system using our API.

RightScalePuppet LabsOpsCodeNumerateCliqrMapRheresign up here

Use Google BigQuery for your visual interactive dashboards

Monday, June 18, 2012

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek and Momchil Filev, Google BigQuery Team(Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.)Last month we announced the public launch of Google BigQuery, which enables developers and businesses to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any hardware or software investments.Since then, we’ve added new features to Google BigQuery every week. For example, our most recent release includes support for running up to 20 concurrent queries, depending on the volume of data. This enables developers to build visually interactive dashboards on Google BigQuery.Today, we’re highlighting two data visualization providers, QlikView and Bime, who are using Google BigQuery’s latest features to build dashboards with snappier and richer experiences.QlikView

QlikView, one of the leaders in the Business Intelligence market, has developed a dashboard that visualizes the birth-record data for all babies born to mothers of different ages and races. With the help of BigQuery, QlikView can crunch millions of rows of data in seconds to answer questions like, “What's the average age of a mother in New York vs. in Texas?"Bime

Bime, a cloud-based Business Intelligence provider based in France, is another early adopter of Google BigQuery. They’ve built a slick UI on top of the Google BigQuery platform that allows users to slice and dice 432 million rows of business data. For example, you can adjust a few simple parameters to see the sales distribution across products or regions on a map.This is just a snapshot of how developers can use Google BigQuery to build interactive visual dashboards using a browser and without the hassle of managing SQL. Sign up and share your BigQuery use cases via our developer feedback form or on the Google Enterprise Google+ page.

Google BigQuery Service: Big data analytics at Google speed

Monday, November 14, 2011

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine Blog and the Google Code Blog.)Google BigQuery ServiceGoogle I/O last year

We’ve added a graphical user interface for analysts and developers to rapidly explore massive data through a web application.

We’ve made big improvements for customers accessing the service programmatically through the API. The new REST API lets you run multiple jobs in the background and manage tables and permissions with more granularity.

Whether you use the BigQuery web application or API, you can now write even more powerful queries with JOIN statements. This lets you run queries across multiple data tables, linked by data that tables have in common.

It’s also now easy to manage, secure, and share access to your data tables in BigQuery, and export query results to the desktop or to Google Cloud Storage.

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