Tag Archives: Google Cloud Platform

Kubernetes wins OSCON Most Impact Award

By Paris Pittman, Kubernetes Community Manager, Google

Today at the Open Source Awards at OSCON 2018, Kubernetes won the inaugural Most Impact Award, which recognizes a project that has had a ‘significant impact on how software is being written and applications are built’ in the past year. Thank you O’Reilly OSCON for the recognition, and more importantly, thank you to the vast Kubernetes community that has driven the project to where it is today.

When we released Kubernetes just four years ago, we never quite imagined how successful the project would be. We designed Kubernetes from a decade of experience running production workloads at Google, but we didn’t know whether the outside world would adopt it. However we believed that if we remained open to new ideas and new voices, the community would provide feedback and contributions to move the project forward to meet the needs of users everywhere.

This openness led to Kubernetes’ rapid adoption—and it’s also one of the core pillars of Google Cloud: our belief in an open cloud, so that you can pick-up and move your app wherever you want. Whether it’s Tensorflow, an open source library for machine learning, Asylo, a framework for confidential computing, or Istio, an open platform to connect microservices, openness remains a core value here at Google Cloud.

To everyone who has helped make Kubernetes the success it is today, many thanks again.

If you haven’t tried Kubernetes, it’s easy to get started with using Google Kubernetes Engine. If you’re interested to learn more about Kubernetes and the ecosystem it spawned, then subscribe to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google to hear weekly insights from leaders in the community.

VMware and Google Cloud: building the hybrid cloud together with vRealize Orchestrator

By Shan Kulandaivel, Product Manager, Google Compute Engine

Many of our customers with hybrid cloud environments rely on VMware software on-premises. They want to simplify provisioning and enable end-user self service. At the same time, they also want to make sure they’re complying with IT policies and following IT best practices. As a result, many use VMware vRealize Automation, a platform for automated self-service provisioning and lifecycle management of IT infrastructure, and are looking for ways to leverage it in the cloud.

Today, we’re announcing the preview of our plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator and support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources in vRealize Automation. With these resources, you can now deploy and manage GCPresources from within your vRealize Automation environment.

The GCP plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator provides a consistent management and governance experience across on-premises and GCP-based IT environments. For example, you can use Google-provided blueprints or build your own blueprints for Google Compute Engine resources and publish to the vRealize service catalog. This means you can select and launch resources in a predictable manner that is similar to how you launch VMs in your on-premises VMware environment, using a tool you’re already familiar with.

This preview release allows you to:
  • Create vRealize Automation “blueprints” for Compute Engine VM Instances
  • Request and self-provision resources in GCP using vRA’s catalog feature
  • Gain visibility and reclaim resources in GCP to reduce operational costs
  • Enforce access and resource quota policies for resources in GCP
  • Initiate Day 2 operations (start, stop, delete, etc.) on Compute Engine VM Instances, Instance Groups and Disks
The GCP plug-in for vRealize makes it easy for you to unlock new hybrid scenarios. For example:

  1. Reach new regions to address global business needs. (Hello Finland, Mumbai and Singapore.)
  2. Define large-scale applications using vRA and deploy to Compute Engine to leverage GCP’s worldwide load balancing and automatic scaling.
  3. Save money by deploying VMs as Compute Engine Preemptible VM Instances and using Custom Machine Types to tailor the VM configuration to application needs.
  4. Accelerate the time it takes to train a machine learning model by using Compute Engine with NVIDIA® Tesla® P100 GPUs.
  5. Replicate your on premises-based applications to the cloud and scale up or down as your business dictates.
While this preview offers support for Compute Engine Virtual Machines in vRealize Automation, we’re working together with VMware to add support for additional GCP products such as Cloud TPUs—we’ll share more on that in the coming months. You can also find more information about this announcement by reading VMware’s blog.

In the meantime, to join the preview program, please submit a request using the preview intake form.

SRE fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs

By Jay Judkowitz, Senior Product Manager and Mark Carter, Group Product Manager

Next week at Google Cloud Next ‘18, you’ll be hearing about new ways to think about and ensure the availability of your applications. A big part of that is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does day in and day out here at Google. Our SRE principles have as their end goal to improve services and in turn the user experience, and next week we’ll be discussing some new ways you can incorporate SRE principles into your operations.

In fact, a recent Forrester report on infrastructure transformation offers details on how you can apply these SRE principles at your company—more easily than you might think. They found that enterprises can apply most SRE principles either directly or with minor modification.

To learn more about applying SRE in your business, we invite you to join Ben Treynor, head of Google SRE, who will be sharing some exciting announcements and walking through real-life SRE scenarios at his Next ‘18 Spotlight session. Register now as seats are limited.

The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. We use several essential measurements—SLO, SLA and SLI—in SRE planning and practice.

Defining the terms of site reliability engineering

These measurements aren’t just useful abstractions. Without them, you cannot know if your system is reliable, available or even useful. If they don’t tie explicitly back to your business objectives, then you don’t have data on whether the choices you make are helping or hurting your business.

As a refresher, here’s a look at the key measurements of SRE, as discussed by AJ Ross, Adrian Hilton and Dave Rensin of our Customer Reliability Engineering team, in the January 2017 blog post, SLOs, SLIs, SLAs, oh my - CRE life lessons.


1. Service-Level Objective (SLO)

SRE begins with the idea that a prerequisite to success is availability. A system that is unavailable cannot perform its function and will fail by default. Availability, in SRE terms, defines whether a system is able to fulfill its intended function at a point in time. In addition to being used as a reporting tool, the historical availability measurement can also describe the probability that your system will perform as expected in the future.

When we set out to define the terms of SRE, we wanted to set a precise numerical target for system availability. We term this target the Service-Level Objective (SLO) of our system. Any discussion we have in the future about whether the system is running sufficiently reliably and what design or architectural changes we should make to it must be framed in terms of our system continuing to meet this SLO.

Keep in mind that the more reliable the service, the more it costs to operate. Define the lowest level of reliability that you can get away with for each service, and state that as your SLO. Every service should have an SLO—without it, your team and your stakeholders cannot make principled judgments about whether your service needs to be made more reliable (increasing cost and slowing development) or less reliable (allowing greater velocity of development). Excessive availability can become a problem because now it’s the expectation. Don’t make your system overly reliable if you don’t intend to commit to it to being that reliable.

Within Google, we implement periodic downtime in some services to prevent a service from being overly available. You might also try experimenting with planned-downtime exercises with front-end servers occasionally, as we did with one of our internal systems. We found that these exercises can uncover services that are using those servers inappropriately. With that information, you can then move workloads to somewhere more suitable and keep servers at the right availability level.

2. Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

At Google, we distinguish between an SLO and a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). An SLA normally involves a promise to someone using your service that its availability should meet a certain level over a certain period, and if it fails to do so then some kind of penalty will be paid. This might be a partial refund of the service subscription fee paid by customers for that period, or additional subscription time added for free. The concept is that going out of SLA is going to hurt the service team, so they will push hard to stay within SLA. If you’re charging your customers money, you will probably need an SLA.

Because of this, and because of the principle that availability shouldn’t be much better than the SLO, the SLA is normally a looser objective than the SLO. This might be expressed in availability numbers: for instance, an availability SLA of 99.9% over one month, with an internal availability SLO of 99.95%. Alternatively, the SLA might only specify a subset of the metrics that make up the SLO.

If you have an SLA that is different from your SLO, as it almost always is, it’s important for your monitoring to measure SLA compliance explicitly. You want to be able to view your system’s availability over the SLA calendar period, and easily see if it appears to be in danger of going out of SLA. You will also need a precise measurement of compliance, usually from logs analysis. Since we have an extra set of obligations (in the form of our SLA) to paying customers, we need to measure queries received from them separately from other queries. That’s another benefit of establishing an SLA—it’s an unambiguous way to prioritize traffic.

When you define your SLA, you need to be extra-careful about which queries you count as legitimate. For example, if a customer goes over quota because they released a buggy version of their mobile client, you may consider excluding all “out of quota” response codes from your SLA accounting.

3. Service-Level Indicator (SLI)

We also have a direct measurement of SLO conformance: the frequency of successful probes of our system. This is a Service-Level Indicator (SLI). When we evaluate whether our system has been running within SLO for the past week, we look at the SLI to get the service availability percentage. If it goes below the specified SLO, we have a problem and may need to make the system more available in some way, such as running a second instance of the service in a different city and load-balancing between the two. If you want to know how reliable your service is, you must be able to measure the rates of successful and unsuccessful queries; these will form the basis of your SLIs.

Since the original post was published, we’ve made some updates to Stackdriver that let you incorporate SLIs even more easily into your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) workflows. You can now combine your in-house SLIs with the SLIs of the GCP services that you use, all in the same Stackdriver monitoring dashboard. At Next ‘18, the Spotlight session with Ben Treynor and Snapchat will illustrate how Snap uses its dashboard to get insight into what matters to its customers and map it directly to what information it gets from GCP, for an in-depth view of customer experience.
Automatic dashboards in Stackdriver for GCP services enable you to group several ways: per service, per method and per response code any of the 50th, 95th and 99th percentile charts. You can also see latency charts on log scale to quickly find outliers.  

If you’re building a system from scratch, make sure that SLIs and SLOs are part of your system requirements. If you already have a production system but don’t have them clearly defined, then that’s your highest priority work. If you’re coming to Next ‘18, we look forward to seeing you there.

See related content:


Bringing GPU-accelerated analytics to GCP Marketplace with MapD

By Venkat Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Product, MapD


 Editor’s note: Today, we hear from our partner MapD, whose data analytics platform uses GPUs to accelerate queries and visualizations. Read on to learn how MapD and Google Cloud are working together.

MapD and public cloud are a great fit. Combining cloud-based GPU infrastructure with MapD’s performance, interactivity and operational ease of use is a big win for our customers, allowing data scientists and analysts to visually explore billion-row datasets with fluidity and minimal hassle.

Our Community and Enterprise Edition images are available on AWS, MapD docker containers are available on NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC), as well as our own MapD Cloud. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the availability of MapD on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, helping us bring interactivity at scale to the widest possible audience. With services like Cloud DataFlow, Cloud BigTable and Cloud AI, GCP has emerged as a great platform for data-intensive workloads. Combining MapD and these services let us define scalable, high-performance visual analytics workflows for a variety of use cases.

On GCP, you’ll find both our Community and Enterprise editions for K80, Pascal and Volta GPU instances in the GCP Marketplace. Google’s flexible approach to attaching GPU dies to standard CPU-based instance types means you can dial up or down the necessary GPU capacity for your instances depending on the size of your datasets and your compute needs.

We’re confident that MapD’s availability on GCP marketplace will further accelerate the adoption of GPUs as a key part of enterprise analytics workloads, in addition to their obvious applicability to AI, graphics and general purpose computing. Click here to try out MapD on GCP.

Now shipping: ultramem machine types with up to 4TB of RAM

By Hanan Youssef, Product Manager

Today we are announcing the general availability of Google Compute Engine “ultramem” memory-optimized machine types. You can provision ultramem VMs with up to 160 vCPUs and nearly 4TB of memory--the most vCPUs you can provision on-demand in any public cloud. These ultramem machine types are great for running memory-intensive production workloads such as SAP HANA, while leveraging the performance and flexibility of Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The ultramem machine types offer the most resources per VM of any Compute Engine machine type, while supporting Compute Engine’s innovative differentiators, including:

SAP-certified for OLAP and OLTP workloads

Since we announced our partnership with SAP in early 2017, we’ve rapidly expanded our support for SAP HANA with new memory-intensive Compute Engine machine types. We’ve also worked closely with SAP to test and certify these machine types to bring you validated solutions for your mission-critical workloads. Our supported VM sizes for SAP HANA now meet the broad range of Google Cloud Platform’s customers’ demands. Over the last year, the size of our certified instances grew by more than 10X for both scale-up and scale-out deployments. With up to 4TB of memory and 160 vCPUs, ultramem machine types are the largest SAP-certified instances on GCP for your OLAP and OLTP workloads.
Maximum memory per node and per cluster for SAP HANA on GCP, over time



We also offer other capabilities to manage your HANA environment on GCP including automated deployments, and Stackdriver monitoring. Click here for a closer look at the SAP HANA ecosystem on GCP.

Up to 70% discount for commited use

We are also excited to share that GCP now offers deeper committed use discounts of up to 70% for memory-optimized machine types, helping you improve your total cost of ownership (TCO) for sustained, predictable usage. This allows you to control costs through a variety of usage models: on-demand usage to start testing machine types, committed use discounts when you are ready for production deployments, and sustained use discounts for mature, predictable usage. For more details on committed use discounts for these machine types check our docs, or use the pricing calculator to assess your savings on GCP.

GCP customers have been doing exciting things with ultramem VMs

GCP customers have been using ultramem VMs for a variety of memory-intensive workloads including in-memory databases, HPC applications, and analytical workloads.

Colgate has been collaborating with SAP and Google Cloud as an early user of ultramem VMs for S/4 HANA.

"As part of our partnership with SAP and Google Cloud, we have been an early tester of Google Cloud's 4TB instances for SAP solution workloads. The machines have performed well, and the results have been positive. We are excited to continue our collaboration with SAP and Google Cloud to jointly create market changing innovations based upon SAP Cloud Platform running on GCP.”
- Javier Llinas, IT Director, Colgate

Getting started

These ultramem machine types are available in us-central1, us-east1, and europe-west1, with more global regions planned soon. Stay up-to-date on additional regions by visiting our available regions and zones page.

It’s easy to configure and provision n1-ultramem machine types programmatically, as well as via the console. To learn more about running your SAP HANA in-memory database on GCP with ultramem machine types, visit our SAP page, and go to the GCP Console to get started.

Improving our account management policies to better support customers

By Ben Treynor Sloss, VP 24x7

Recently, a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customer blogged about an incident in June, in which a project they were running on Google Cloud Platform was suspended. We really appreciated the candid feedback, in which our customer noted several aspects of our account management process which needed to be improved. We also appreciated our customer’s followup and recognition of the Google Cloud support team, “who have reached out and assured us these incidents will not repeat.”

Here’s what we are doing to be as good as our word, and provide a more careful, accurate, thoughtful and empathetic account management experience for our GCP customers. These changes are intended to provide peace of mind and a predictable, positive experience for our GCP customers, while continuing to permit appropriate suspension and removal actions for the inevitable bad actors and fraud which are a part of operating a public cloud service.

No Automatic Fraud-Based Account Suspensions for Established Customers with Offline Payment. Established GCP customers complying with our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP, TOS and local laws), with an offline billing contract, invoice billing, or an active relationship with our sales team, are not subject to fraud-based automatic account suspension.



Delayed Suspension for Established Online Customers. Online customers with established payment history, operating in compliance with our TOS, AUP and local laws, will receive advance notification and a 5 day cure period in the event that fraud or account compromise activity is detected in their projects.

Other Customers. For all other customers, we will institute a second human review for flagged fraud accounts prior to suspending an account. We’re also modifying who has authority to suspend an account, as well as refreshing our training for the teams that review flagged accounts and determine response actions; re-evaluating the signals, sources, and the tools we use to assess potential fraudulent activity; and increasing the number of options we can use to help new customers quickly and safely grow their usage while building an account history with Google.

In addition to the above, for all customers we are making the following improvements:

24X7 Chat Support. We are rolling out 24X7 chat support for customers that receive account notices, so that customers can always reach us easily. We expect this to be fully rolled out for all customers by September.

Correcting Notices About our 30 Day Policy. Our customer noted, with appropriate concern, that their suspension email stated “we will delete your account in 3 days.” This language was simply incorrect -- our fraud suspension policy provides 30 days before removal. We have corrected the communication language, and we are conducting a full review of our communication verbiage and systems and ensuring that our messages are accurate and clear.

Updating Our Project Suspension Guidelines. We will review and update our project suspension guidelines to clarify our practices and describe what you should expect from Google.

Improving Customer Contact Points. We will encourage customers to provide us with a verifiable phone number, email, and other contact channels, both at sign-up and at later points in time, so that we can quickly contact you if we detect suspicious activity on your account.

Creating Customer Pre-Verification. We will provide ways for customers to pre-verify their accounts with us if they desire, either at sign-up or at a later point in time.

These suspensions are our responsibility.There are also steps that customers can take to help us protect their accounts including:
  1. Make sure to monitor emails sent to your payments and billing contacts so you don’t miss important alerts.
  2. Provide a valid phone number where we can reach you in the event of suspicious activity on your account.
  3. Provide one or more billing admins to your account.
  4. Provide a secondary payment method in case there are problems charging your primary method.
  5. Contact our sales team to see if you qualify for invoice billing instead of relying on credit cards.
We’re making immediate changes to ensure our policies will improve our customer’s experience. Our work here is never done and we will continue to update and optimize based on your feedback.

We sincerely apologize to all our customers who’ve been concerned or had to go through a service reinstatement. Please keep the feedback coming, we’ll work to continue to earn your trust every day.

Introducing commercial Kubernetes applications in GCP Marketplace

By Anil Dhawan, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Building, deploying and managing applications with Kubernetes comes with its own set of unique challenges. Today, we are excited to be the first major cloud provider to offer production-ready commercial Kubernetes apps right from our marketplace, bringing you simplified deployment, billing, and third-party licensing.

Now you can find the solution you need in Google Cloud Platform Marketplace (formerly Cloud Launcher) and deploy quickly on Kubernetes clusters running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes Engine, on-prem, or even other public clouds.

Enterprise-ready containerized applications - We are on a mission to make containers accessible to everyone, especially the enterprise. When we released Kubernetes as open source, one of the first challenges that the industry tackled was management. Our hosted Kubernetes Engine takes care of cluster orchestration and management, but getting apps running on a Kubernetes cluster can still be a manual, time-consuming process. With GCP Marketplace, you can now easily find prepackaged apps and deploy them onto the cluster of your choice.

Simplified deployments - Kubernetes apps are configured to get up and running fast. Enjoy click-to-deploy to Kubernetes Engine, or deploy them to other Kubernetes clusters off-GCP. Now, deploying from Kubernetes Engine is even easier, with a Marketplace window directly in the Kubernetes Engine console.

Production-ready security and reliability - All Kubernetes apps listed on GCP Marketplace are tested and vetted by Google, including vulnerability scanning and partner agreements for maintenance and support. Additionally, we work with open-source Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to create standards for Kubernetes apps, bringing the knowledge of the open-source community to your enterprise.

Supporting hybrid environments - One of the great things about containers is their portability across environments. While Kubernetes Engine makes it easy to click-to-deploy these apps, you can also deploy them in your other Kubernetes clusters—even if they’re on-premises. This lets you use the cloud for development and then move your workloads to your production environment, wherever it may be.

Commercial Kubernetes applications available now

Our commercial Kubernetes apps, developed by third-party partners, support usage-based billing on many parameters (API calls, number of hosts, storage per month), simplifying license usage and giving you more consumption options. Further, the usage charges for your apps are consolidated and billed through GCP, no matter where they are deployed (not including any non-GCP resources they need to run on).


“Cloud deployment and manageability are core to Aerospike's strategy. GCP Marketplace makes it simpler for our customers to buy, deploy and manage Aerospike through Kubernetes Engine with one-click deployment. This provides a seamless experience for customers by allowing them to procure both Aerospike solutions and Kubernetes Engine on a single, unified Google bill and providing them with the flexibility to pay as they go.”
- Bharath Yadla, VP-Product Strategy, EcoSystems, Aerospike

"As an organization focused on supporting enterprises with security for their container-based applications, we are delighted that we can now offer our solutions as commercial Kubernetes application more simply to customers through the GCP Marketplace commercial Kubernetes application option. GCP Marketplace helps us reach GCP customers, and the one-click deployment of our applications to Google Kubernetes Engine makes it easier for enterprises to use our solution. We are also excited about GCP’s commitment to enterprise agility by allowing our solution to be deployed on-premises, letting us reach enterprises where they are today."
- Upesh Patel, VP Business Development, Aqua Security

“Couchbase is excited to see GCP Marketplace continue the legacy of GCP by bringing new technologies to market. We've seen GCP Marketplace as a key part of our strategy in reaching customers, and the new commercial Kubernetes application option differentiates us as innovators for both prospects and customers."
-Matt McDonough, VP of Business Development, Couchbase

"With the support for commercial Kubernetes applications, GCP Marketplace allows us to reach a wider range of customers looking to deploy our graph database both to Google Kubernetes Engine and hybrid environments. We're excited to announce our new offering on GCP Marketplace as a testament to both Neo4j and Google's innovation in integrations to Kubernetes."
- David Allen, Partner Solution Architect, Neo4j

Popular open-source Kubernetes apps available now

In addition to our new commercial offerings, GCP Marketplace already features popular open-source projects that are ready to deploy into Kubernetes. These apps are packaged and maintained by Google Cloud and implement best practices for running on Kubernetes Engine and GCP. Each app includes clustered images and documented upgrade steps, so it’s ready to run in production.

One-stop shopping on GCP Marketplace

As you may have noticed, Google Cloud Launcher has been renamed to GCP Marketplace, a more intuitive name for the place to discover the latest partner and open source solutions. Like Kubernetes apps, we test and vet all solutions available through the GCP Marketplace, which include virtual machines, managed services, data sets, APIs, SaaS, and more. In most instances, we also recommend Marketplace solutions for your projects.
With GCP Marketplace, you can verify that a solution will work for your environment with free trials from select partners. You can also combine those free trials with our $300 sign-up credit. Once you’re up and running, GCP Marketplace supports existing relationships between you and your partners with private pricing. Private pricing is currently available for managed services, and support for more solution types will be rolling out in the coming months.

Get started today

We’re excited to bring support for Kubernetes apps to you and our partners, featuring the extensibility of Kubernetes, commercial solutions, usage-based pricing, and discoverability on the newly revamped GCP Marketplace.
If you are a partner and want to learn more about selling your solution on GCP Marketplace, please visit our sign-up page.

Top storage and database sessions to check out at Next 2018

Whatever your particular area of cloud interest, there will be a lot to learn at Google Cloud Next ‘18 (July 24-26 in San Francisco). When it comes to cloud storage and databases, you’ll find useful sessions that can help you better understand your options as you’re building the cloud infrastructure that will work best for your organization.

Here, we’ve chosen five not-to-miss sessions, where you’ll learn tips on migrating data to the cloud, understand types of cloud storage workloads and get a closer look at which database is best for storing and analyzing your company’s data. Wherever you are in your cloud journey, there’s likely a session you can use.

Top cloud storage sessions


First up, our top picks for those of you delving into cloud storage.

From Blobs to Tables, Where to Store Your Data
Speakers: Dave Nettleton, Robert Saxby
What’s the best way to store all the data you’re creating and moving to the cloud? The answer depends on the industry, apps and users you’re supporting. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers many options for storing your data. The choices range from Cloud Storage (multi-regional, regional, nearline, coldline) through Persistent Disk to various database services (Cloud Datastore, Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner) and data warehousing (BigQuery). In this session, you’ll learn about the products along with common application patterns that use data storage.

 Why attend: With much to consider and many options available, this session is a great opportunity to examine which storage option fits your workloads.

Caching Made Easy, with Cloud Memorystore and Redis
Speaker: Gopal Ashok
In-memory database Redis has plenty of developer fans: It’s high-performance and highly available, making it an excellent choice for caching operations. Cloud Memorystore now includes a managed Redis service. In this session, you’ll hear about its new features. You’ll also learn how you can easily migrate applications using Redis to Cloud Memorystore with minimal changes.
Why attend: Are you building an application that needs sub-millisecond response? GCP provides fully managed service for the popular Redis in-memory datastore.

Google Cloud Storage - Best Practices for Storage Classes, Reliability, Performance and Scalability
Speakers: Geoff Noer, Michael Yu
Learn about common Google Cloud Storage workloads, such as content storage and serving, analytics/ML and data protection. Understand how to choose the best storage class, depending on what kind of data you have and what kind of workload you're supporting. You’ll also learn more about Multi-Regional, Regional, Nearline and Coldline storage.
Why attend: You’ll learn about ways to optimize Cloud Storage to the unique requirements of different storage use cases.

Top database sessions


Here are our top picks for database sessions to explore at Next ‘18.

Optimizing Applications, Schemas, and Query Design on Cloud Spanner
Speaker: Robert Kubis
Cloud Spanner was designed specifically for cloud infrastructure and scales easily to allow for efficient cloud growth. In this session, you’ll learn Cloud Spanner best practices, strategies for optimizing applications and workloads, and ways to improve performance and scalability. Through live demos, you’ll see real-time speed-ups of transactions, queries and overall performance. Additionally, this talk explores techniques for monitoring Cloud Spanner to identify performance bottlenecks. Come learn how to cut costs and maximize performance with Cloud Spanner.
Why attend: Cloud Spanner is a powerful product, but many users do not maximize its benefits. You’ll get an inside look at this session at getting the best performance and efficiency results out of this type of cloud database.

Optimizing performance on Cloud SQL for MySQL
Speakers: Stanley Feng, Theodore Tso, Brett Hesterberg
Database performance tuning can be challenging and time-consuming. In this session, you’ll get a look at the performance tuning our team has conducted in the last year to considerably improve Cloud SQL for MySQL. We’ll also highlight useful changes to the Linux kernel, EXT4 filesystem and Google's Persistent Disk storage layer to improve write performance. You'll come away knowing more about MySQL performance tuning, an underused EXT4 feature called “bigalloc” and how to let Cloud SQL handle mundane, yet necessary, tasks so you can focus on developing your next great app.
Why attend: When GCP provides fully managed services for databases, we put lots of innovations under the hood, so that your database runs in the most optimal way. Come and learn about Google’s secret sauce that lets you optimize Cloud SQL performance.

Check out the full list of Next sessions, and join your peers at the show by registering here.

Cloud Spanner adds import/export functionality to ease data movement

By Deepti Srivastava, Product Manager, Cloud Spanner

We launched Cloud Spanner to general availability last year, and many of you shared in our excitement: You explored it, started proof-of-concept trials, and deployed apps. Perhaps most importantly, you gave us feedback along the way. We heard you, and we got to work. Today, we’re happy to announce we’ve launched one of your most commonly requested features: importing and exporting data.

Import/export using Avro

You asked for easier ways to move data. You’ve got it. You can now import and export data easily in the Cloud Spanner Console:
  • Export any Cloud Spanner database into a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket.
  • Import files from a GCS bucket into a new Cloud Spanner database.
These database exports and imports use Apache Avro files, transferred with our recently released Apache Beam-based Cloud Dataflow connector.

Adding imports and exports opens up even more possibilities for your Cloud Spanner data, including:
  • Disaster recovery: Export your database at any time and store it in a GCS location of your choice as a backup, which can be imported into a new Cloud Spanner database to restore data.
  • Testing: Export a database and then import it into Cloud Spanner as a dev/test database to use for integration tests or other experiments.
  • Moving databases: Export a database and import it back into Cloud Spanner in a new/different instance with the console’s simple, push-button functionality.
  • Ingest for analytics: Use database exports to ingest your operational data to other services such as BigQuery, for analytics. BigQuery can automatically ingest data in Avro format from a GCS bucket, which means it will become easier for you to run analytics on your operational data.
Ready to try it out? See our documentation on how to import and export data. Learn more about Cloud Spanner here, and get started with a free trial. For technical support and sales, please contact us.

We're excited to see the ways that Cloud Spanner—making application development more efficient, simplifying database administration and management, and providing the benefits of both relational and scale-out, non-relational databases—will continue to help you ship better apps, faster.

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.