Tag Archives: Announcements

Our Los Angeles cloud region is open for business

By Kirill Tropin, Product Manager

Hey, LA — the day has arrived! The Los Angeles Google Cloud Platform region is officially open for business. You can now store data and build highly available, performant applications in Southern California.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said it best: “Los Angeles is a global hub for fashion, music, entertainment, aerospace, and more—and technology is essential to strengthening our status as a center of invention and creativity. We are excited that Google Cloud has chosen Los Angeles to provide infrastructure and technology solutions to our businesses and entrepreneurs.”

The LA cloud region, us-west2, is our seventeenth overall and our fifth in the United States.

Hosting applications in the new region can significantly improve latency for end users in Southern California, and by up to 80% across Northern California and the Southwest, compared to hosting them in the previously closest region, Oregon. You can visit www.gcping.com to see how fast the LA region is for you.

Services


The LA region has everything you need to build the next great application:

Of note, the LA region debuted with one of our newest products: Cloud FilestoreBETA, our managed file storage service for applications that require a filesystem interface and a shared filesystem for data.

The region also has three zones, allowing you to distribute apps and storage across multiple zones to protect against service disruptions. You can also access our multi-regional services (such as BigQuery) in the United States and all the other GCP services via our Google Network, and combine any of the services you deploy in LA with other GCP services around the world. Please visit our Service Specific Terms for detailed information on our data storage capabilities.

Google Cloud Network

Google Cloud’s global networking infrastructure is the largest cloud network as measured by number of points of presence. This private network provides a high-bandwidth, highly reliable, low-latency link to each region across the world. With it, you can reach the LA region as easily as any region. In addition, the global Google Cloud Load Balancing makes it easy to deploy truly global applications.

Also, if you’d like to connect to the Los Angeles region privately, we offer Dedicated Interconnect at two locations: Equinix LA1 and CoreSite LA1.

LA region celebration

We celebrated the launch of the LA cloud region the best way we know how: with our customers. At the celebration, we announced new services to help content creators take advantage of the cloud: Filestore, Transfer Appliance and of course, the new region itself, in the heart of media and entertainment country. The region’s proximity to content creators is critical for cloud-based visual effects and animation workloads. With proximity comes low latency, which lets you treat the cloud as if it were part of your on-premises infrastructure—or even migrate your entire studio to the cloud.
Paul-Henri Ferrand, President of Global Customer Operations, officially announces the opening of our Los Angeles cloud region.


What customers are saying


“Google Cloud makes the City of Los Angeles run more smoothly and efficiently to better serve Angelenos city-wide. We are very excited to have a cloud region of our own that enables businesses, big or small, to leverage the latest cloud technology and foster innovation.”
- Ted Ross, General Manager and Chief Information Officer for City of LA Information Technology Agency, City of LA

“Using Google Cloud for visual effects rendering enables our team to be fast, flexible and to work on multiple large projects simultaneously without fear of resource starvation. Cloud is at the heart of our IT strategy and Google provides us with the rendering power to create Oscar-winning graphics in post-production work.”
- Steve MacPherson, Chief Technology Officer, Framestore

“A lot of our short form projects pop up unexpectedly, so having extra capacity in region can help us quickly capitalize on these opportunities. The extra speed the LA region gives us will help us free up our artists to do more creative work. We’re also expanding internationally, and hiring more artists abroad, and we’ve found that Google Cloud has the best combination of global reach, high performance and cost to help us achieve our ambitions.”
- Tom Taylor, Head of Engineering, The Mill

What SoCal partners are saying


Our partners are available to help design and support your deployment, migration and maintenance needs.

“Cloud and data are the new equalizers, transforming the way organizations are built, work and create value. Our premier partnership with Google Cloud Platform enables us to help our clients digitally transform through efforts like app modernization, data analytics, ML and AI. Google’s new LA cloud region will enhance the deliverability of these solutions and help us better service the LA and Orange County markets - a destination where Neudesic has chosen to place its corporate home.”
- Tim Marshall, CTO and Co-Founder, Neudesic

“Enterprises everywhere are on a journey to harness the power of cloud to accelerate business objectives, implement disruptive features, and drive down costs. The Taos and Google Cloud partnership helps companies innovate and scale, and we are excited for the new Google Cloud LA region. The data center will bring a whole new level of uptime and service to our Southern California team and clients.”
- Hamilton Yu, President and COO, Taos

“As a launch partner for Google Cloud and multi-year recipient of Google’s Partner of the Year award, we are thrilled to have Google’s new cloud region in Los Angeles, our home base and where we have a strong customer footprint. SADA Systems has a track record of delivering industry expertise and innovative technical services to customers nationwide. We are excited to leverage the scale and power of Google Cloud along with SADA’s expertise for our clients in the Los Angeles area to continue their cloud transformation journey.”
- Tony Safoian, CEO & President, SADA Systems

Getting started


For additional details on the LA region, please visit our LA region page where you’ll get access to free resources, whitepapers, the "Cloud On-Air" on-demand video series and more. Our locations page provides updates on the availability of additional services and regions. Contact us to request early access to new regions and help us prioritize where we build next.

Introducing new Apigee capabilities to deliver business impact with APIs

By Ed Anuff, Director of Product and Strategy, Apigee

Whether it's delivering new experiences through mobile apps, building a platform to power a partner ecosystem, or modernizing IT systems, virtually every modern business uses APIs (application programming interfaces).

Google Cloud’s Apigee API platform helps enterprises adapt by giving them control and visibility into the APIs that connect applications and data across the enterprise and across clouds. It enables organizations to deliver connected experiences, create operational efficiencies, and unlock the power of their data.

As enterprise API programs gain traction, organizations are looking to ensure that they can seamlessly connect data and applications, across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, with secure, manageable and monetizable APIs. They also need to empower developers to quickly build and deliver API products and applications that give customers, partners, and employees secure, seamless experiences.

We are making several announcements today to help enterprises do just that. Thanks to a new partnership with Informatica, a leading integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) provider, we’re making it easier to connect and orchestrate data services and applications, across cloud and on-premise environments, using Informatica Integration Cloud for Apigee. We’ve also made it easier for API developers to access Google Cloud services via the Apigee Edge platform.

Discover and invoke business integration processes with Apigee

We believe that for an enterprise to accelerate digital transformation, it needs API developers to focus on business-impacting programs rather than low-level tasks such as coding, rebuilding point-to-point integrations, and managing secrets and keys.

From the Apigee Edge user interface, developers can now use policies to discover and invoke business integration processes that are defined in Informatica’s Integration Cloud.

Using this feature, an API developer can add a callout policy inside an API proxy that invokes the required Informatica business integration process. This is especially useful when the business integration process needs to be invoked before the request gets routed to the configured backend target.

To use this feature, API developers:
  • Log in to Apigee Edge user interface with their credentials
  • Create a new API proxy, configure backend target, add policies
  • Add a callout policy to select the appropriate business integration process
  • Save and deploy the API proxy

Access Google Cloud services from the Apigee Edge user interface

API developers want to easily access and connect with Google Cloud services like Cloud Firestore, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Spanner. In each case, there are a few steps to perform to deal with security, data formats, request/response transformation, and even wire protocols for those systems.

Apigee Edge includes a new feature that simplifies interacting with these services and enables connectivity to them through a first-class policy interface that an API developer can simply pick from the policy palette and use. Once configured, these can be reused across all API proxies.

We’re working to expand this feature to cover more Google Cloud services. Simultaneously, we’re working with Informatica to include connections to other software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and legacy services like hosted databases.

Publish business integration processes as managed APIs

Integration architects, working to connect data and applications across the enterprise, play an important role in packaging and publishing business integration processes as great API products. Working with Informatica, we’ve made this possible within Informatica’s Integration Cloud.

Integration architects that use Informatica's Integration Cloud for Apigee can now author composite services using business integration processes to orchestrate data services and applications, and directly publish them as managed APIs to Apigee Edge. This pattern is useful when the final destination of the API call is an Informatica business integration process.

To use this feature, integration architects need to execute the following steps:
  • Log in to their Informatica Integration Cloud user interface
  • Create a new business integration process or modify an existing one
  • Create a new service of type (“Apigee”), select options (policies) presented on the wizard, and publish the process as an API proxy
  • Apply additional policies to the generated API proxy by logging in to the Apigee Edge user interface.
API documentation can be generated and published on a developer portal, and the API endpoint can be shared with app developers and partners. APIs are an increasingly central part of organizations’ digital strategy. By working with Informatica, we hope to make APIs even more powerful and pervasive. Click here for more on our partnership with Informatica.

Five can’t-miss application development sessions at Google Cloud Next ‘18

Google Cloud Next ‘18 will be a developer’s paradise, with bootcamps, hands-on labs, and yes, breakout sessions—more than 60 dedicated to app dev in some form or another. And that’s before we get to the Spotlight sessions explaining new product launches! We polled developer advocates and product managers from across Google Cloud, and here are their picks for the sessions you can’t afford to miss.

1. From Zero to Production: Build a Production-Ready Deployment Pipeline for Your Next App

Scott Feinberg, Customer Engineer, Google Cloud

Want to start deploying to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) but aren't sure how to start? In this session, you'll take an app with multiple process types, containerize it, and build a deployment pipeline with Container Builder to test and deploy your code to a Kubernetes Engine cluster.

Register for the session here.

2. Enterprise-Grade Mobile Apps with Firebase

Michael McDonald, Product Manager and Jonathan Shriver-Blake, Product Manager, Google Firebase

 Firebase helps mobile development teams build better apps, improve app quality, and grow their business. But before you can use it in your enterprise, you’ll have to answer a number of questions: Will it scale in production? Is it reliable, and can your team monitor it? How do you control who has access to production data? What will the lawyers say? And how about compliance and GDPR? This session will show you the answers to these questions and pave the way to use Firebase in your enterprise.

Click here to reserve your spot.

3. Migrating to Cloud Spanner

Niel Markwick, Solutions Architect and Sami Zuhuruddin, Staff Solutions Architect, Google Cloud

 When migrating an existing database to Cloud Spanner, an essential step is importing the existing data. This session describes the steps required to migrate the data and any pitfalls that need to be dealt with during the process. We'll cover what it looks like to transition to Cloud Spanner, including schema migration, data movement, cutover, and application changes. To make it real, we'll be looking at migrating from two popular systems: one NoSQL and the other SQL.

Find more details about the session here.

4. Serverless Compute on Google Cloud: What's New

Myles Borins, Developer Advocate and Jason Polites, Product Manager, Google

 Join us to learn what’s new in serverless compute on GCP. We will share the latest developments in App Engine and Cloud Functions and show you how you can benefit from new feature releases. You will also get a sneak peek and preview of what’s coming next.

Secure your spot today.

5. Accelerating Your Kubernetes Development with Kubernetes Applications

Konrad Delong, Senior Software Engineer; David Eustis, Senior Staff Software Engineer; and Kenneth Owens, Software Engineer, Google

 Kubernetes applications provide a new, powerful abstraction for you to compose and re-use application building blocks from a variety of sources. In this talk, we’ll show you how to accelerate your development process by taking advantage of Kubernetes applications. We’ll walk you through creating these applications and deploying third-party, commercial Kubernetes applications from the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Click here to register for this session.

And if you haven’t already registered for Next, don’t delay! Everyone who attends will receive $500 in GCP credits. Imagine the possibilities!

Introducing Endpoint Verification: visibility into the desktops accessing your enterprise applications

By Dan Montgomery, Engineering Program Manager and Gustavo Sacomoto, Software Engineer

While corporate devices are the key to employee productivity, they can also be the weak link when it comes to application and data security. Today we are introducing Endpoint Verification, giving admins an overview of the security posture of their laptop and desktop devices. Having that inventory of what computers employees are using provides valuable information which the enterprise can use to maintain security. Available to all Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Cloud Identity, G Suite Business, and G Suite Enterprise customers, Endpoint Verification consists of a Chrome extension and native app and is available for ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows devices.
Endpoint Verification is available as a Chrome extension

With the proliferation of multiple platforms and bring your own device (BYOD) in the enterprise, administrators find full MDM solutions to be difficult to deploy and maintain. Endpoint Verification offers a lightweight, easy-to-deploy solution to desktop device reporting for GCP, Cloud Identity and G Suite customers.

With Endpoint Verification, enterprises get two key value adds immediately. First, you can now build an inventory of devices within the enterprise that access corporate data. And second, with Endpoint Verification, admins have access to device information including: screen lock, disk encryption, and OS version.

For information on how to deploy Endpoint Verification, please visit the help center. For organizations that would like to try this out, a free trial of Cloud Identity is available here.

Last month today: GCP in June

In June, we had a lot to discuss about getting the most out of the cloud for your business, from speeding up web traffic to running fully managed apps easily. Here’s a quick look at some of the highlights from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) news this month.

What caught your attention this month

Some of the most-read stories this month reflected new technology developments or integrations that will be useful for developers and engineers.
  • You can now deploy your Node.js app to the Google App Engine standard environment—and based on readership, many of you are excited about this. Node.js works easily on App Engine, without any language, module or API restrictions. You’ll get very quick deployment times, and a fully managed experience once you’ve deployed those apps, just as in other apps on the fully managed App Engine.
  • QUIC is a transport protocol, optimized for HTTPS, that makes web traffic run faster. The protocol itself isn’t new, but last month we announced QUIC support for our HTTPS load balancers. Network performance is a huge part of a successful public cloud operation, so this new support could make a big impact on web page load times for your cloud services. Enabling QUIC means your connections can be established faster, which is especially useful for latency-prone connections, and clients who don’t yet support QUIC will seamlessly continue to use HTTPS.
  • If you’re a Kubernetes fan, you may have already explored the new kubemci command-line interface (CLI). It lets you configure ingress for multi-cluster Kubernetes Engine environments, using Cloud Load Balancer. It’s also the first step in a long-term solution that will consist of a multi-cluster ingress system controlled via kubectl CLI or Kubernetes API calls.

Hot topics

You can now run your GCP workloads in Finland to improve availability and reduce your latency in the Nordics, and we announced that the Los Angeles region will open next month.

We also added some new storage tools to your arsenal. We’re adding Cloud Filestore as a GCP storage option so you can run enterprise applications that need a file system interface and shared file system for data. It’s fully managed and offers high performance for applications that need low latency and high throughput. For those of you supporting and running creative industry applications on GCP infrastructure, Cloud Filestore works great for render farms, website hosting and content management systems.

In addition, the Transfer Appliance became generally available in June, allowing a type of cloud data migration that will work well if you’ve got more than 20TB of data to upload to GCP, or that would take more than a week to upload. In early use, Transfer Appliance customers have gotten quick starts on analytics projects by moving test data to GCP, along with moving backup data and some or all of a data center to GCP.

And in the “Cloud powers some very cool projects” category, take a look at how the new Dragon Ball Legends game creator built the backend on GCP. Bandai Namco Entertainment knew that players of the latest addition to their Dragon Ball Z franchise would want to play against one another in real-time, with players around the globe. They turned to GCP for the scalability, global reach and real-time analytics they needed to make that possible.

Behind the compute curtain

This news of sole-tenant nodes for Google Compute Engine will come in handy for those of you at companies that need dedicated cloud servers. With this option, it’s possible to launch new VM instances as usual, but on server capacity dedicated to you. This choice is nice for industries with strict compliance and regulatory rules around data, and for getting higher utilization from VM instances along with instance placement, done either manually or by Compute Engine.

Building applications on GCP involves some upfront choices for app developers: Which compute offering will you pick, and what language will you use? Whether you’re a fan of containers or VMs, containers, App Engine or Cloud Functions, you’ll find in this post some excellent concrete examples the time and effort involved in building a “Hello, World” app in each of GCP’s four compute platforms.

That’s a wrap for June. This month brings the Next ‘18 conference, July 24-26. Join us and thousands of other IT practitioners in San Francisco to learn all you need to know about building a modern cloud infrastructure. Till then, build away!

Kubernetes 1.11: a look from inside Google

By Craig Box, Cloud Native Advocacy Lead, Google

Congratulations to everyone involved in the recent Kubernetes 1.11 release. Now that the core has been stabilized, we here at Google have been focusing our upstream work on increasing Kubernetes’ plugability, i.e., moving more pieces out into other repositories. As the project has matured, adding a plugin no longer means "sending Tim Hockin a pull request," but instead means creating proper, well-defined interfaces with names like CNI, CRI and CSI. In fact, this maturity and extendability has been one of the things that helps us make Google Kubernetes Engine an enterprise-ready platform. Back in March, we gave you a look at what was new in Kubernetes 1.10. Now, with the release of 1.11, let’s take a look at the core Kubernetes work that Google is driving, as well as some of the innovation we've built on Kubernetes’ foundations in the last three months.

New features in 1.11

Priority and preemption
Pod priority and preemption is one of the main features of our internal scheduling system that lets us achieve high resource utilization in our data centers. We wrote about that key use case when we introduced it in Alpha in Kubernetes 1.9, and since then, we’ve added improved scheduling performance and better support for critical system pods. Now, we're pleased to move it to Beta in this release, meaning it’s enabled by default in Kubernetes Engine clusters that run 1.11. This is a feature that many users who run larger clusters have been waiting for!

Changes to CRDs
Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) are one of the most popular extension mechanisms for Kubernetes, and new features in 1.11 make them even more powerful. CRDs are used for a broad array of Kubernetes extensions, for example to enable the use of Spark or Functions natively through the Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes objects have a schema version (e.g. v1beta1 or v1), but we only ever store one version in the etcd database. When you query an object at a particular version, a server-side conversion is done to convert the object to match the schema of the version you request.

Previously, CRD authors had to delete and recreate resources to move them between different versions. In 1.11, you can now define multiple versions for your own resources. The next step will be to enable server-side conversion for CRD, to allow for schema changes like renaming fields, without breaking existing clients.

Cloud Provider plugins
Google continues to invest in the long-term sustainability and multi-cloud portability of core Kubernetes. The Cloud Provider interface allows infrastructure providers to deliver a "batteries-included" experience for user workloads on their platform, powering common services like dynamic provisioning and management of storage and external load balancing for Services.

This code is currently compiled into Kubernetes core binaries. Google is leading a long running effort to extract this functionality into provider-specific repositories, in order to reduce the scope of the Kubernetes core. This will also allow providers to deliver enhancements and fixes to users more quickly than Kubernetes’ three-month release cadence. As a part of this effort, we’re excited to announce the creation of SIG-Cloud Provider to provide technical oversight and governance for this effort.

New features not in 1.11

That's not a headline you normally see, right?

One thing that is not in 1.11 — not even a bit of it — is Server-side Apply, a feature which moves the logic for kubectl apply from the client to server, making the expected behavior clearer, and allowing more clients to take advantage of server-side processing without shelling out to kubectl.

Normally, a feature like this would be committed to the project as it was built. But if a release is due, and the feature isn't ready, a large amount of effort would be required to go towards reverting it. Instead, Google has been leading the effort to introduce feature branches in Kubernetes, which let us work on long-running features in parallel to the main codebase. This lets us avoid last-minute scrambles to adjust for surprises, and is an example of how we are working to ensure the stability of the Kubernetes project.

Work on server-side apply is happening in the open in its feature branch, and we look forward to welcoming it into Kubernetes when it's ready — and not a moment before.

Kubernetes ecosystem work
Our work with Kubernetes doesn't stop at releasing core binaries every three months. Some of the work we are most excited about is in the form of extensions we've released since the last Kubernetes release:

Kustomize
We've thought a lot about how to declaratively manage application configuration. A common pattern that we saw was the use of templating solutions such as Helm (based on Google Cloud's Deployment Manager), which requires a user to learn a different configuration language than what the API server returns when you query it. A templating approach also means that if you download a YAML example, you have to turn it into a template before you can use it in your environment.

With kustomize, we're introducing a new approach to application definition. Kustomize allows you to apply overlays to existing YAML configurations, so you can customize a forked repository with your local changes, or define different configs for 'staging' and 'production' with different configs and replica counts.

Kustomize is well suited for a GitOps-style workflow, where there's a common base configuration that is tweaked in various directions with overlays to create different variants. The base and overlays can be managed by separate teams in different repositories.

Application API
Applications are made up of many services and resources, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts. After they are created, there is no well-defined way of identifying all the parts that relate to an application to Kubernetes. We want cluster users to be able to think in terms of their applications, and allow tools and UIs to define, update and display an application-centric view of your cluster.

The new Application API provides a way to aggregate Kubernetes components (e.g. Services, Deployments, StatefulSets, Ingresses, CRDs), and manage them as a group.

We have had contributions from friends at Samsung, Bitnami, Heptio, Red Hat and more, and we are looking for more contributions and feedback to ensure that the project adds value across the community.

The Application API is currently in Alpha. We hope to promote it to Beta in the next few weeks, and you'll hear more about it from us then.

Looking forward to Kubernetes Engine

If you'd like to get access to Kubernetes 1.11 on Kubernetes Engine ahead of general availability, please complete this form.

And if you liked reading this post, you'll love the Kubernetes Podcast from Google, which I co-host with Adam Glick. Every Tuesday we take a look at the week’s news and talk with Googlers or members of the wider Kubernetes community. So far we've spoken about product launches, processes and community, and this week we talk to the Kubernetes 1.11 release leads. Subscribe now!

New GitHub repo: Using Firebase to add cloud-based features to games built on Unity

By Dane Zeke Liergaard

A while back, a group of us Google Cloud Platform Developer Programs Engineers teamed up with gaming fans in Firebase Engineering to work on an interesting project. We all love games, gamers, and game developers, and we wanted to support those developers with solutions that accomplish common tasks so they can focus more on what they do best: making great games.

The result was Firebase Unity Solutions. It’s an open-source github repository with sample projects and scripts. These projects utilize Firebase tools and services to help you add cloud-based features to your games being built on Unity.

Each feature will include all the required scripts, a demo scene, any custom editors to help you better understand and use the provided assets, and a tutorial to use as a step-by-step guide for incorporating the feature into your game.

The only requirements are a Unity project with the .NET 2.0 API level enabled, and a project created with the Firebase Console.

Introducing Firebase Leaderboard


Our debut project is the Firebase_Leaderboard, a set of scripts that utilize Firebase Realtime Database to create and manage a cross-platform high score leaderboard. With the LeaderboardController MonoBehaviour, you can retrieve any number of unique users’ top scores from any time frame. Want the top 5 scores from the last 24 hours? Done. How about the top 100 from last week? You got it.

Once a connection to Firebase is established, scores are retrieved automatically, including any new scores that come in while the controller is enabled.

If any of those parameters are modified (the number of scores to retrieve, or the start or end date), the scores are automatically refreshed. The content is always up-to-date!

private void Start() {
    this.leaderboard = FindObjectOfType();
    leaderboard.FirebaseInitialized += OnInitialized;
    leaderboard.TopScoresUpdated += UpdateScoreDisplay;
    leaderboard.UserScoreUpdated += UpdateUserScoreDisplay;
    leaderboard.ScoreAdded += ScoreAdded;

    MessageText.text = "Connecting to Leaderboard...";
}
With the same component, you can add new scores for current users as well, meaning a single script handles both read and write operations on the top score data.

public void AddScore(string userId, int score) {
    leaderboard.AddScore(userId, score);
}
For step-by-step instructions on incorporating this cross-platform leaderboard into your Unity game using Firebase Realtime Database, follow the instructions here. Or check out the Demo Scene to see a version of the leaderboard in action!

We want to hear from you

We have ideas for what features to add to this repository moving forward, but we want to hear from you, too! What game feature would you love to see implemented in Unity using Firebase tools? What cloud-based functionality would you like to be able to drop directly into your game? And how can we improve the Leaderboard, or other solutions as they are added? You can comment below, create feature requests and file bugs on the github repo, or join the discussion in this Google Group.

Let’s make great games together!

Why we believe in an open cloud

By Melody Meckfessel and Eric Brewer, Vice Presidents, Google Cloud, and Miles Ward, Director of Solution Architecture, Google Cloud

Open clouds matter more now than ever. While most companies today use a single public cloud provider in addition to their on-premises environment, research shows that most companies will likely adopt multiple public and private clouds in the coming years. In fact, according to a 2018 Rightscale study, 81-percent of enterprises with 1,000 or more employees have a multi-cloud strategy, and if you consider SaaS, most organizations are doing multi-cloud already.

Open clouds let customers freely choose which combination of services and providers will best meet their needs over time. Open clouds let customers orchestrate their infrastructure effectively across hybrid-cloud environments.

We believe in three principles for an open cloud:
  1. Open is about the power to pick up an app and move it—to and from on-premises, our cloud, or another cloud—at any time.
  2. Open-source software permits a richness of thought and continuous feedback loop with users.
  3. Open APIs preserve everyone’s ability to build on each other’s work.

1. Open is about the power to pick up an app and move it

An open cloud is grounded in a belief that being tied to a particular cloud shouldn’t get in the way of achieving your goals. An open cloud embraces the idea that the power to deliver your apps to different clouds while using a common development and operations approach will help you meet whatever your priority is at any given time—whether that’s making the most of skills shared widely across your teams or rapidly accelerating innovation. Open source is an enabler of open clouds because open source in the cloud preserves your control over where you deploy your IT investments. For example, customers are using Kubernetes to manage containers and TensorFlow to build machine learning models on-premises and on multiple clouds.

2. Open-source software permits a richness of thought and continuous feedback loop with users

Through the continuous feedback loop with users, open source software (OSS) results in better software, faster, and requires substantial time and investment on the part of the people and companies leading open source projects. Here are examples of Google’s commitment to OSS and the varying levels of work required:
  • OSS such as Android, has an open code base and development is the sole responsibility of one organization.
  • OSS with community-driven changes such as TensorFlow, involves coordination between many companies and individuals.
  • OSS with community-driven strategy, for example collaboration with the Linux Foundation and Kubernetes community, involves collaborative, decision-making and accepting consensus over control.
Open source is so important to Google that we call it out twice in our corporate philosophies, and we encourage employees, and in fact all developers, to engage with open source.

Using BigQuery to analyze GHarchive.org data, we found that in 2017, over 5,500 Googlers submitted code to nearly 26,000 repositories, created over 215,000 pull requests, and engaged with countless communities through almost 450,000 comments. A comparative analysis of Google’s contribution to open source provides a useful relative position of the leading companies in open source based on normalized data.

Googlers are active contributors to popular projects you may have heard of including Linux, LLVM, Samba, and Git.

Google regularly open-sources internal projects

Top Google-initiated projects include:

3. Open APIs preserve everyone’s ability to build on each other’s work

Open APIs preserve everyone’s ability to build on each other’s work, improving software iteratively and collaboratively. Open APIs empower companies and individual developers to change service providers at will. Peer-reviewed research shows that open APIs drive faster innovation across the industry and in any given ecosystem. Open APIs depend on the right to reuse established APIs by creating independent-yet-compatible implementations. Google is committed to supporting open APIs via our membership in the Open API Initiative, involvement in the Open API specification, support of gRPC, via Cloud Bigtable compatibility with the HBase API, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery compatibility with SQL:2011 (with extensions), and Cloud Storage compatibility with shared APIs.

Build an open cloud with us

If you believe in an open cloud like we do, we’d love your participation. You can help by contributing to and using open source libraries, and asking your infrastructure and cloud vendors what they’re doing to keep workloads free from lock-in. We believe open ecosystems grow the fastest and are more resilient and adaptable in the face of change. Like you, we’re in it for the long-term.



It’s worth noting that not all Google’s products will be open in every way at every stage of their life cycle. Openness is less of an absolute and more of a mindset when conducting business in general. You can, however, expect Google Cloud to continue investing in openness across our products over time, to contribute to open source projects, and to open source some of our internal projects.

If you believe open clouds are an important part of making this multi-cloud world a place in which everyone can thrive, we encourage you to check out our new open cloud website where we offer more detailed definitions and examples of the terms, concepts, and ideas we’ve discussed here: cloud.google.com/opencloud.

Announcing MongoDB Atlas free tier on GCP

By Kent Smith, Cloud Customer Engineer; Kavitha Gopalakrishnan, Technology Partnerships

Earlier this year, in response to strong customer demand, we announced that we were expanding region support for MongoDB Atlas. The MongoDB NoSQL database is hugely popular, and the MongoDB Atlas cloud version makes it easy to manage on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We heard great feedback from users, so we’re further lowering the barrier to get started on MongoDB Atlas and GCP.

We’re pleased to announce that as of today, MongoDB will offer a free tier of MongoDB Atlas on GCP in three supported regions, strategically located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific in recognition of our wide user install base.

The free tier will allow developers a no-cost sandbox environment for MongoDB Atlas on GCP. You can test any potential MongoDB workloads on the free tier and decide to upgrade to a larger paid Atlas cluster once you have confidence in our cloud products and performance.

As of today, these specific regions are supported by the Atlas free tier:
  1. Iowa (us-central1)
  2. Belgium (europe-west1)
  3. Singapore (asia-southeast1)
To get started, you’ll just need to log in to your MongoDB console, select “Build a New Cluster,” pick “Google Cloud Platform,” and look for the “Free Tier Available” message. The free tier utilizes MongoDB’s M0 instances. An M0 cluster is a sandbox MongoDB environment for prototyping and early development with 512MB of storage space. It also comes with strong enterprise features such as always-on authentication, end-to-end encryption and high availability, as well as monitoring. Happy experimenting!

Related content:

New Cloud Filestore service brings GCP users high-performance file storage

By Tad Hunt, Product Manager; Chris Talbott, Product Marketing

As we celebrate the upcoming Los Angeles region for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in one of the creative centers of the world, we’re really excited about helping you bring your creative visions to life. At Google, we want to empower artist collaboration and creation with high-performance cloud technology. We know folks need to create, read and write large files with low latency. We also know that film studios and production shops are always looking to render movies and create CGI images faster and more efficiently. So alongside our LA region launch, we’re pleased to enable these creative projects by bringing file storage capabilities to GCP for the first time with Cloud Filestore.

Cloud Filestorebeta is managed file storage for applications that require a file system interface and a shared file system. It gives users a simple, integrated, native experience for standing up fully managed network-attached storage (NAS) with their Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine instances.

We’re pleased to add Cloud Filestore to the GCP storage portfolio because it enables native platform support for a broad range of enterprise applications that depend on a shared file system.


Cloud Filestore will be available as a storage option in the GCP console
We're especially excited about the high performance that Cloud Filestore offers to applications that require high throughput, low latency and high IOPS. Applications such as content management systems, website hosting, render farms and virtual workstations for artists typically require low-latency file operations, high-performance random I/O, and high throughput and performance for metadata-intensive operations. We’ve heard from some of our early users that they’ve saved time serving up websites with Cloud Filestore, cut down on hardware needs and sped up the compute-intensive process of rendering a movie.

Putting Cloud Filestore into practice

For organizations with lots of rich unstructured content, Cloud Filestore is a good place to keep it. For example, graphic design, video and image editing, and other media workflows use files as an input and files as the output. Filestore also helps creators access shared storage to manipulate and produce these types of large files. If you’re a web developer creating websites and blogs that serve file content to your audience, you’ll find it easy to integrate Cloud Filestore with web software like Wordpress. That’s what Jellyfish did.

Jellyfish is a boutique marketing agency focused on delivering high-performance marketing services to their global clients. A major part of that service is delivering a modern and flexible digital web presence.

“Wordpress hosts 30% of the world’s websites, so delivering a highly available and high performance Wordpress solution for our clients is critical to our business. Cloud Filestore enabled us to simply and natively integrate Wordpress on Kubernetes Engine , and take advantage of the flexibility that will provide our team.”
- Ashley Maloney, Lead DevOps Engineer at Jellyfish Online Marketing
Cloud Filestore also provides the reliability and consistency that latency-sensitive workloads need. One example is fuzzing, the process of running millions of permutations to identify security vulnerabilities in code. At Google, ClusterFuzz is the distributed fuzzing infrastructure behind Chrome and OSS-Fuzz that’s built for fuzzing at scale. The ClusterFuzz team needed a shared storage platform to store the millions of files that are used as input for fuzzing mutations.
“We focus on simplicity that helps us scale. Having grown from a hundred VMs to tens of thousands of VMs, we appreciate technology that is efficient, reliable, requires little to no configuration and scales seamlessly without management. It took one premium Filestore instance to support a workload that previously required 16 powerful servers. That frees us to focus on making Chrome and OSS safer and more reliable.”
- Abhishek Arya, Information Security Engineer, Google Chrome
Write once and read many is another type of workload where consistency and reliability are critical. At ever.ai, they’re training an advanced facial recognition platform on 12 billion photos and videos for tens of millions of users in 95 countries. The team constantly needs to share large amounts of data between many servers that will be written once but read a bunch. They faced a challenge in writing this data to a non-POSIX object storage, reading from which required custom code or to download the data. So they turned to Cloud Filestore.
“Cloud Filestore was easy to provision and mount, and reliable for the kind of workload we have. Having a POSIX file system that we can mount and use directly helps us speed-read our files, especially on new machines. We can also use the normal I/O features of any language and don’t have to use a specific SDK to use an object store."
- Charlie Rice, Chief Technology Officer, ever.ai
Cloud Filestore is also particularly helpful with rendering requirements. Rendering is the process by which media production companies create computer-generated images by running specialized imaging software to create one or more frames of a movie. We’ve just announced our newest GCP region in Los Angeles, where we expect there are more than a few of you visual effects artists and designers who can use Cloud Filestore. Let’s take a closer look at an example rendering workflow so you can see how Cloud Filestore can read and write data for this specialized purpose without tying up on-site hardware.

Using Cloud Filestore for rendering

When you render a movie, the rendering job typically runs across fleets ("render farms") of compute machines, all of which mount a shared file system. Chances are you’re doing this with on-premises machines and on-premises files, but with Cloud Filestore you now have a cloud option.

To get started, create a Cloud Filestore instance, and seed it with the 3D models and raw footage for the render. Set up your Compute Engine instance templates to mount the Cloud Filestore instance. Once that's set, spin up your render farm with however many nodes you need, and kick off your rendering job. The render nodes all concurrently read the same source data set from the Network File System (NFS) share, perform the rendering computations and write the output artifacts back to the share. Finally, your reassembly process reads the artifacts from Cloud Filestore and assembles it and writes into the final form.

Cloud Filestore Price and Performance

We offer two price-for-performance tiers. The high-performance Premium tier is $0.30 per GB per month, and the midrange performance Standard tier is $0.20 per GB per month in us-east1, us-central1, and us-west1 (Other regions vary). To keep your bill simple and predictable, we charge for provisioned capacity. You can resize on demand without downtime to a max of 64TB*. We do not charge per-operation fees. Networking is free in the same zone, and cross zone standard egress networking charges apply.

Cloud Filestore Premium instance throughput is designed to provide up to 700 MB/s and 30,000 IOPS for reads, regardless of the Cloud Filestore instance capacity. Standard instances are lower priced and performance scales with capacity, hitting peak performance at 10TB and above. A simple performance model makes it easier to predict costs and optimize configurations. High performance means your applications run faster. As you can see in the image below, the Cloud Filestore Premium tier outperforms the design goal with the specified benchmarks, based on performance testing we completed in-house.

Trying Cloud Filestore for yourself

Cloud Filestore will release into beta next month. To sign up to be notified about the beta release, complete this request form. Visit our Filestore page to learn more.

In addition to our new Cloud Filestore offering, we partner with many file storage providers to meet all of your file needs. We recently announced NetApp Cloud Volumes for GCP and you can find other partner solutions in our launcher.

If you’re interested in learning more about file storage from Google, check out this session at Next 2018 next month. For more information, and to register, visit the Next ‘18 website.