Tag Archives: google cloud

Cloud Covered: What was new in June on Google Cloud

June was full of news about new products, technologies and information from Google Cloud to help people connect, build and explore. Here’s a recap of June’s most popular posts on the Google Cloud blog. 

New subsea cable will connect the US and South America

Last month we announced that Google is building a new, open subsea cable that will run from the East Coast of the United States to points in South America that include Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Named after Maria Firmina dos Reis, Brazil’s first novelist, the resilient Firmina cable will be the longest of its kind in the world that can run entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable. As one of 16 subsea cables Google has invested in around the world, Firmina will improve access for South American users to Google products likeSearch, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services. 

A powerful family of virtual machines say hello

In June we also announced a new virtual machine (VM) family type coming to Google Cloud, our Tau VMs. VMs are just like an actual computer, complete with an entire operating system, that is run in a separate window on a host computer or a remote server in a data center. They make it easier and faster for developers to build and run software in the cloud. Tau VMs will offer enterprises market-leading performance improvements and cost savings for their software applications. Learn more about Tau VMs’ performance versus competitors and read testimonials from companies like Snap and Twitter who’ve already benefited from this new offering. 

A new dataset lets you do more with top Google Search terms

Trends in the top Google Search terms can tell people and businesses a lot about what’s on consumers’ minds. To expand access to this data and make it easier for enterprises to analyze these trends, we announced preview availability of a new public dataset for Google Trends. This will bring Google-owned Search data into Google Cloud Datasets for convenient analysis through favorite business tools like BigQuery, Google Cloud’s multicloud data warehouse. The dataset will allow you to gauge interest in specific topics or search terms across Google Search, from around the United States, down to the city level. This new public dataset is just the beginning of our process to make Google's first-party data more accessible to businesses and enhance their data analysis projects.

Google gets one step closer to 24/7 carbon-free data centers

One of last month’s top announcements focused on Google data centers and sustainability. In 2020, we announced an ambitious sustainability goal to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Last month, in the spirit of transparency, we released our updated carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%) for all Google data centers in 2020, as well as overall progress on our 2030 goal. The blog post details how we achieved 67% 24/7 carbon-free energy across all our data centers, up from 61% in 2019. This means that of all the energy used by Google data centers last year, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis. You can check out an animation that explores events that helped us achieve these numbers. Decarbonizing the world’s power grids quickly will help prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Google is committed to clearing a path for others and encouraging collective action to achieve this goal. Let’s move, together, toward a carbon-free future.

Cloud Covered: What was new in June on Google Cloud

June was full of news about new products, technologies and information from Google Cloud to help people connect, build and explore. Here’s a recap of June’s most popular posts on the Google Cloud blog. 

New subsea cable will connect the US and South America

Last month we announced that Google is building a new, open subsea cable that will run from the East Coast of the United States to points in South America that include Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Named after Maria Firmina dos Reis, Brazil’s first novelist, the resilient Firmina cable will be the longest of its kind in the world that can run entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable. As one of 16 subsea cables Google has invested in around the world, Firmina will improve access for South American users to Google products likeSearch, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services. 

A powerful family of virtual machines say hello

In June we also announced a new virtual machine (VM) family type coming to Google Cloud, our Tau VMs. VMs are just like an actual computer, complete with an entire operating system, that is run in a separate window on a host computer or a remote server in a data center. They make it easier and faster for developers to build and run software in the cloud. Tau VMs will offer enterprises market-leading performance improvements and cost savings for their software applications. Learn more about Tau VMs’ performance versus competitors and read testimonials from companies like Snap and Twitter who’ve already benefited from this new offering. 

A new dataset lets you do more with top Google Search terms

Trends in the top Google Search terms can tell people and businesses a lot about what’s on consumers’ minds. To expand access to this data and make it easier for enterprises to analyze these trends, we announced preview availability of a new public dataset for Google Trends. This will bring Google-owned Search data into Google Cloud Datasets for convenient analysis through favorite business tools like BigQuery, Google Cloud’s multicloud data warehouse. The dataset will allow you to gauge interest in specific topics or search terms across Google Search, from around the United States, down to the city level. This new public dataset is just the beginning of our process to make Google's first-party data more accessible to businesses and enhance their data analysis projects.

Google gets one step closer to 24/7 carbon-free data centers

One of last month’s top announcements focused on Google data centers and sustainability. In 2020, we announced an ambitious sustainability goal to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Last month, in the spirit of transparency, we released our updated carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%) for all Google data centers in 2020, as well as overall progress on our 2030 goal. The blog post details how we achieved 67% 24/7 carbon-free energy across all our data centers, up from 61% in 2019. This means that of all the energy used by Google data centers last year, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis. You can check out an animation that explores events that helped us achieve these numbers. Decarbonizing the world’s power grids quickly will help prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Google is committed to clearing a path for others and encouraging collective action to achieve this goal. Let’s move, together, toward a carbon-free future.

Migrating from App Engine webapp2 to Flask

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
graphic showing movement with arrows,. settings, lines, and more

Migrating web framework

The Google Cloud team recently introduced a series of codelabs (free, self-paced, hands-on tutorials) and corresponding videos designed to help users on one of our serverless compute platforms modernize their apps, with an initial focus on our earliest users running their apps on Google App Engine. We kick off this content by showing users how to migrate from App Engine's webapp2 web framework to Flask, a popular framework in the Python community.

While users have always been able to use other frameworks with App Engine, webapp2 comes bundled with App Engine, making it the default choice for many developers. One new requirement in App Engine's next generation platform (which launched in 2018) is that web frameworks must do their own routing, which unfortunately, means that webapp2 is no longer supported, so here we are. The good news is that as a result, modern App Engine is more flexible, lets users to develop in a more idiomatic fashion, and makes their apps more portable.

For example, while webapp2 apps can run on App Engine, Flask apps can run on App Engine, your servers, your data centers, or even on other clouds! Furthermore, Flask has more users, more published resources, and is better supported. If Flask isn't right for you, you can select from other WSGI-compliant frameworks such as Django, Pyramid, and others.

Video and codelab content

In this "Module 1" episode of Serverless Migration Station (part of the Serverless Expeditions series) Google engineer Martin Omander and I explore this migration and walk developers through it step-by-step.

In the previous video, we introduced developers to the baseline Python 2 App Engine NDB webapp2 sample app that we're taking through each of the migrations. In the video above, users see that the majority of the changes are in the main application handler, MainHandler:

The diffs between the webapp2 and Flask versions of the sample app

The "diffs" between the webapp2 and Flask versions of the sample app

Upon (re)deploying the app, users should see no visible changes to the output from the original version:

VisitMe application sample output

VisitMe application sample output

Next steps

Today's video picks up from where we left off: the Python 2 baseline app in its Module 0 repo folder. We call this the "START". By the time the migration has completed, the resulting source code, called "FINISH", can be found in the Module 1 repo folder. If you mess up partway through, you can rewind back to the START, or compare your solution with ours, FINISH. We also hope to one day provide a Python 3 version as well as cover other legacy runtimes like Java 8, PHP 5, and Go 1.11 and earlier, so stay tuned!

All of the migration learning modules, corresponding videos (when published), codelab tutorials, START and FINISH code, etc., can all be found in the migration repo. The next video (Module 2) will cover migrating from App Engine's ndb library for Datastore to Cloud NDB. We hope you find all these resources helpful in your quest to modernize your serverless apps!

A new Android smartphone and 5G partnership with Jio

Editor’s note: Today, we announced the next steps in our partnership with Jio Platforms, including a new, affordable Jio smartphone built with an optimized version of Android OS and a new 5G collaboration powered by Google Cloud. The following is adapted from remarks delivered by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, at Reliance Industries’ Annual General Meeting today.


Thank you to everyone at Reliance Industries for all you do for India — from investing in infrastructure and technology to creating jobs and expanding opportunity to supporting communities in need, especially in this difficult moment for the country.


It’s been devastating to see the country hit so hard by COVID-19. Yet it’s heartening to see how Reliance has stepped up to contribute to the national response and get support to the communities that need it most. On behalf of all of us at Google: We hope you are taking care and we are wishing for better days ahead.


For Google, the past year has brought renewed purpose and greater urgency to our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. At a time when so many aspects of our lives and work are moving online, it’s even more important to make technology accessible and helpful for everyone. 


This goal is at the heart of our partnership with Reliance Jio. I was proud to help launch this partnership last year. It was the first and biggest equity investment from the ₹75,000 crore ($10 billion) Google for India Digitization Fund.


Our vision was to bring affordable access to information for Indians in their own language, to build new products and services for India’s unique needs, and to empower businesses with technology.


I’m excited that today, we can announce the next steps in this vision, starting with a new, affordable Jio smartphone, created with Google. Our teams have optimized a version of our Android OS especially for this device. It will offer language and translation features, a great camera, and support for the latest Android updates.


It is built for India and it will open up new possibilities for millions of new users who will experience the internet for the very first time. And we can’t wait to show you the device later this year.


I’m also proud to announce that we are taking our collaboration further with a new 5G partnership between Google Cloud and Jio.


It will help more than a billion Indians connect to a faster and better internet, support businesses in their digital transformation, and help Jio build new services in sectors like health, education and more — laying a foundation for the next phase of India’s digitization.  

As part of this collaboration, Reliance will also shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud’s infrastructure. They will be able take advantage of Google’s AI and machine learning, e-commerce, and demand forecasting offerings. Harnessing the reliability and performance of Google Cloud will enable these businesses to scale up as needed to respond to customer demand. 

Empowering businesses as they embark on their digital transformation is a key part of our mission in India, and I’m excited for the innovations this partnership will help unleash. We are proud to play a part in India’s next wave of technological innovation. 


Helping to connect 1.3 billion Indians to the opportunities the internet creates is meaningful to all of us at Google — and certainly to me personally. I know that with greater access to smartphones and improved connectivity, there’s no limit to what India’s people can do. 


We look forward to getting technology into the hands of more people and to exploring what more we can achieve together in the years ahead. 

Related Article

Bringing internet access to millions more Indians with Jio

We signed an agreement to invest $4.5 billion in Jio Platforms Ltd—the first investment from the Google For India Digitization Fund.

Read Article

Source: Android


Introducing "Serverless Migration Station" Learning Modules

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
graphic showing movement with arrows,. settings, lines, and more

Helping users modernize their serverless apps

Earlier this year, the Google Cloud team introduced a series of codelabs (free, online, self-paced, hands-on tutorials) designed for technical practitioners modernizing their serverless applications. Today, we're excited to announce companion videos, forming a set of "learning modules" made up of these videos and their corresponding codelab tutorials. Modernizing your applications allows you to access continuing product innovation and experience a more open Google Cloud. The initial content is designed with App Engine developers in mind, our earliest users, to help you take advantage of the latest features in Google Cloud. Here are some of the key migrations and why they benefit you:

  • Migrate to Cloud NDB: App Engine's legacy ndb library used to access Datastore is tied to Python 2 (which has been sunset by its community). Cloud NDB gives developers the same NDB-style Datastore access but is Python 2-3 compatible and allows Datastore to be used outside of App Engine.
  • Migrate to Cloud Run: There has been a continuing shift towards containerization, an app modernization process making apps more portable and deployments more easily reproducible. If you appreciate App Engine's easy deployment and autoscaling capabilities, you can get the same by containerizing your App Engine apps for Cloud Run.
  • Migrate to Cloud Tasks: while the legacy App Engine taskqueue service is still available, new features and continuing innovation are going into Cloud Tasks, its standalone equivalent letting users create and execute App Engine and non-App Engine tasks.


The "Serverless Migration Station" videos are part of the long-running Serverless Expeditions series you may already be familiar with. In each video, Google engineer Martin Omander and I explore a variety of different modernization techniques. Viewers will be given an overview of the task at hand, a deeper-dive screencast takes a closer look at the code or configuration files, and most importantly, illustrates to developers the migration steps necessary to transform the same sample app across each migration.

Sample app

The baseline sample app is a simple Python 2 App Engine NDB and webapp2 application. It registers every web page visit (saving visiting IP address and browser/client type) and displays the most recent queries. The entire application is shown below, featuring Visit as the data Kind, the store_visit() and fetch_visits() functions, and the main application handler, MainHandler. 


import os
import webapp2
from google.appengine.ext import ndb
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
 
class Visit(ndb.Model):
    'Visit entity registers visitor IP address & timestamp'
    visitor   = ndb.StringProperty()
    timestamp = ndb.DateTimeProperty(auto_now_add=True)
 
def store_visit(remote_addr, user_agent):
    'create new Visit entity in Datastore'
    Visit(visitor='{}: {}'.format(remote_addr, user_agent)).put()
 
def fetch_visits(limit):
    'get most recent visits'
    return (v.to_dict() for v in Visit.query().order(
            -Visit.timestamp).fetch(limit))
 
class MainHandler(webapp2.RequestHandler):
    'main application (GET) handler'
    def get(self):
        store_visit(self.request.remote_addr, self.request.user_agent)
        visits = fetch_visits(10)
        tmpl = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'index.html')
        self.response.out.write(template.render(tmpl, {'visits': visits}))
 
app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([
    ('/', MainHandler),
], debug=True)

Baseline sample application code

Upon deploying this application to App Engine, users will get output similar to the following:

image of a website with text saying VisitMe example

VisitMe application sample output

This application is the subject of today's launch video, and the main.py file above along with other application and configuration files can be found in the Module 0 repo folder.

Next steps

Each migration learning module covers one modernization technique. A video outlines the migration while the codelab leads developers through it. Developers will always get a starting codebase ("START") and learn how to do a specific migration, resulting in a completed codebase ("FINISH"). Developers can hit the reset button (back to START) if something goes wrong or compare their solutions to ours (FINISH). The hands-on experience helps users build muscle-memory for when they're ready to do their own migrations.

All of the migration learning modules, corresponding Serverless Migration Station videos (when published), codelab tutorials, START and FINISH code, etc., can all be found in the migration repo. While there's an initial focus on Python 2 and App Engine, you'll also find content for Python 3 users as well as non-App Engine users. We're looking into similar content for other legacy languages as well so stay tuned. We hope you find all these resources helpful in your quest to modernize your serverless apps!

Google Meet is more secure, easy to use and engaging

Over the past year, video conferencing became essential for teaching, learning and staying connected. Whether you’re still teaching remotely, in a hybrid setting or have returned to in-person instruction, Meet provides an easy, reliable and secure way for your school community to connect. Today, we're announcing new features to Meet to continue supporting the evolving needs of school communities. 

Secure by design

Meetings initiated from Google Classroom will soon be safer and more secure by design, with these updates coming in the next few months: 

  • Every teacher and co-teacher in a Classroom class will be meeting hosts in Meet by default, so multiple teachers can share the load of managing a class.
  • Once a teacher is present, students who are on the Classroom roster will be automatically admitted to the meeting. Students will be placed into a “waiting room” and won't be able to see or communicate with other participants until a teacher is present.
  • Anyone who’s not on the Classroom roster will have to “ask to join” and only the teacher(s) can allow them into the meeting.

All meetings, including those started from Meet or Calendar, will get the following additional security updates in the coming months: 

  • When a host ends breakout rooms, participants will get a warning and then will be forced back into the main meeting.
  • Hosts can match the breakout room safety settings with the safety settings from the main meeting.
  • To quickly prevent distractions, hosts will be able to turn off everyone’s video at once with “video lock.” 
  • For hosts using tablets and mobile phones, we’re adding important meeting safety controls, like the ability to end meetings for everyone on the call and mute everyone at once. 
Google Meet and Google Classroom integration

Improved integration makes meetings started from Classroom safer and more secure by default  

In Meet, participants are forced back into the main meeting when breakout rooms end

When hosts end breakout rooms, participants will be forced back into the main meeting

To give admins more control, starting this month we’re adding settings to the Admin console so school leaders can set policies for who can join their school’s video calls and whether people from their school can join video calls from other schools. This helps admins create the right boundaries for different aged students, facilitate external speakers and more. Note that this update doesn't change your default experience — your experience will only change if your admin changes the current setting. Admins will also soon have a new setting to control whether Quick access is enabled by default, and another setting to control whether people can use the chat in meetings. 

And in the coming weeks, admins with Education Standard and Education Plus can end any meeting in their organization directly from the investigation tool, and Quick access will be automatically turned off so nobody can rejoin the meeting without the host present.

An admin ending meetings in their organization directly from the investigation tool

Admins can end any meeting in their organization directly from the investigation tool

Easier to use

To make it easier for you to connect with your students while presenting, we recently rolled out a refreshed Meet experience that allows you to see your presentation content and students at the same time. You can unpin your presentation or minimize your self feed to see more of your students on the call, and names are always visible so you can see who’s who. You can also use different layout options to customize what you want to focus on.

New Google Meet user experience showing how to unpin your presentation

The refreshed user interface makes it easier to engage with your students while presenting

We also recently announced that meetings not initiated from Classroom will soon start supporting multiple hosts, making it easier for you to partner with other people helping manage a class. You’ll be able to choose co-hosts in meetings, and all meeting hosts will have access to safety controls. Multiple hosts will be rolling out in the coming months.

Adding a co-teacher as a co-host in Google Meet

Add co-hosts to share the load of managing class 

More engaging and inclusive for all types of learners

We recently launched an improved hand-raise icon and sound so students can participate with even more confidence, and teachers can more easily see and hear who raised their hands. People who raise their hands show up in the grid and there is a persistent notification so you can see how many people raised their hands and in what order. And once a student with a raised hand is done talking, their hand automatically lowers.

Improved hand-raising experience with a new icon and sound

An improved hand-raising experience makes it easier for students to engage with confidence

Meet now supports closed captions in five languages so people can more easily follow along and stay engaged. And in the coming months, you’ll be able to pin multiple tiles to customize what you want to focus on. For example, students can easily pin a sign language interpreter and the teacher so they can see both at the same time.

Pinning multiple participants in Google Meet

Pin multiple tiles to customize what you want to focus on

For educators with the Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus, we’re introducing features that take engagement and inclusivity to the next level. Later this year, Meet will offer live translated captions. With live translations enabled, you can listen to someone speaking one language and see real-time captions in another language. We expect this will be especially helpful in multilingual classrooms or when meeting with parents who speak a different language.

Live translated captions from English to Spanish

Make classes and conversations more accessible with live translated captions 

In the coming months, you’ll be able to use closed captions during livestreams. You’ll also soon be able to host public livestreams streamed right to YouTube so anyone outside of your institution can attend, ideal for school board meetings, school events and more. Public live streaming will be rolling out in beta later this year and will be widely available for customers with the Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus in early 2022. 

Creating a public livestream in Google Meet

Host school board meetings, events and more with public livestreams on YouTube

Using Meet beyond distance learning

We’ve been inspired to see how educators are using Meet to improve the student learning experience, professional development and engage their whole school community. As the needs of school communities change, Meet will keep adapting to help people teach, learn and stay connected — whether they’re remote or in person.

Collaboration and security in Google Workspace for Education

Google Workspace for Education, previously known as G Suite for Education, offers simple and flexible tools so your school community can better collaborate, manage classes and create safe learning environments. Our latest updates include improved collaboration across our products and security improvements for all Google Workspace for Education customers.

The next evolution of collaboration

Last month we announced smart canvas, a new experience that enhances collaboration in the tools that you use every day — like Docs, Sheets and Slides—by making them even more interactive and intelligent. 

One new feature of this experience is smart chips, which allows you to pull in helpful information from other Google Workspace products while working in a document. For example, if you’re a student working on a group project, you can quickly embed files from Drive or tag other students in your group right into your document by typing the ‘@’ sign. Once people are tagged, just hover over their name to quickly chat, email or set up a meeting. 

Adding smart chips to a Google Doc

Smart chips allow you to pull in helpful information from other Google Workspace products while working in a document

We also recently added interactive checklists to Docs to help you stay on track. Checklists are similar to bulleted lists, except you can mark items once they are complete. In the coming months, we’re introducing table templates in Docs to help you collaborate faster and more effectively. For example, topic-voting templates let you easily gather feedback directly in docs.

Adding a checklist to a Google Doc

Stay on track with interactive checklists in Docs

Last year we introduced grammar suggestions in Docs to help provide tips and catch tricky grammatical errors. For Education Plus customers, we’re rolling out the next phase of writing tips in Docs and adding assisted analysis in Sheets later this year. In Docs, this includes warnings about offensive language and stylistic suggestions. Admins can easily turn this off if they prefer. In Sheets, assisted analysis provides formula suggestions that make it easier for everyone to derive insights from data. These suggestions can help guide students and reinforce concepts that improve their writing and analysis skills.  

Google Docs suggesting more inclusive language

Docs will provide warnings about offensive language and stylistic suggestions

Our products will also work together better so teachers can focus on what they do best. You can now easily present content to Google Meet directly from Docs, Sheet, and Slides with the click of a button. You can quickly present and see both participants and your content in the Meet tab. Later this year we’ll take this a step further and allow Education Plus customers to embed live Meet video calls in Docs, Sheets and Slides, making it even easier to see each other while collaborating.

Embedding a live Google Meet call in a Google Doc

Embed live Meet video calls in Docs, Sheets and Slides

We’re also making our tools easier to use so you can get valuable time back. In Forms, we’re simplifying settings in the coming months so you can quickly and easily set up Forms the way you want. For example, you’ll see a new ‘Settings’ tab at the top of Forms with key settings that are easy-to-find, like the option to make a Form a Quiz, and ways to control default settings that apply to all your new Forms and Quizzes. We’re also launching more than 20 new fonts so you can add fun and personal touches.

Exploring the new settings navigation in Forms

Quickly and easily set up Forms the way you want with simplifying settings 

Earlier this year we announced that Forms would start automatically saving your draft responses for 30 days or until your submission was complete. This feature is starting to roll out next month and will be available to everyone this summer.

Improving security for everyone using Google Workspace for Education

Providing your school community with a safe digital learning environment is a commitment and responsibility we take very seriously. We’re strengthening the security of all Google Workspace for Education customers with Drive security improvements and additional advanced security for Education Plus and Education Standard customers. 

Every Google Workspace for Education customer already benefits from the built-in protections in Google Drive that help block phishing and malware content from external users and organizations. In the coming weeks, we’re adding enhanced protections to Drive that allow all Google Workspace for Education admins to turn on this kind of protection within their organizations' internal Drive to further defend against insider threats and accidental sharing of malware.

Additionally, new Drive trust rules will give admins more advanced controls around how files can be shared within and outside of their organization. For example, an admin can allow a subset of faculty to share documents with anyone in their district, but only allow students to share files with people in their specific school. Drive trust rules are rolling out in beta for Education Standard and Education Plus customers in the coming months.

Illustrating how to use Drive trust rules to control how files are shared in your organization

Drive trust rules will give admins more advanced controls around how files can be shared within and outside of their organization

Admins will soon have access to Drive labels, allowing them to classify files stored in Google Drive to make sure they’re handled correctly. Drive labels integrate with Google Workspace’s data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities so admins can set rules at the appropriate sensitivity level. Even if teachers or staff forget to classify content on their own, files can be automatically classified based on administrator-defined DLP rules. This can help admins be more proactive about protecting some of your communities’ most sensitive data, like personally identifiable information or proprietary research. Drive Labels will be planned to also work with Google Vault, allowing admins to set retention policies for a given sensitivity level. Drive labels are now available in beta for Education Standard and Education Plus customers.

Altogether, these improvements are going to change the way we get things done, making it easier and safer to collaborate with anyone, from anywhere. By using these tools at school and at home, your students will build important collaboration skills to be better prepared for the workplace of the future.


Cloud Covered: What was new in May on Google Cloud

May flowered with new products, technologies and learning resources from Google Cloud. Here’s a recap of May’s most popular posts on the Google Cloud blog. 

A new platform makes machine learning easier

At Google I/O, our annual conference for developers, we announced the general availability of Vertex AI, Google’s unified machine learning platform that allows companies to speed up the building, deployment and management of their artificial intelligence (AI) models. Because it requires far less coding to build custom models, Vertex AI can be used by data analysts and data scientists with varying levels of expertise. For example, a division of L'Oreal uses Vertex AI to create tools that let people “try on” beauty products online.

New data products come in threes

At our Data Cloud Summit, we introduced a number of new solutions to help organizations gain value from their data in support of their data cloud strategies. These include Dataplex, which allows organizations to centrally manage,  monitor and govern data across a variety of systems; Datastream, which allows companies to replicate data in real-time across heterogeneous databases, storage systems and applications reliably and with minimal latency; and Analytics Hub, which provides a way to access and share data and analytics models across organizational boundaries. 

A first-of-its-kind technology powers carbon-free energy

We announced a new technology that will help us reach our goal of operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Fervo is a next-generation geothermal project that will soon add carbon-free energy to the electric grid that powers our data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada. Using fiber-optic cables inside wells, Fervo will gather information on flow, temperature and performance of the geothermal resource. Fervo will bring our data centers in Nevada closer to round-the-clock clean energy, and demonstrate how clean energy sources such as next-generation geothermal could eventually help replace carbon-emitting power sources around the world.

A video series teaches Anthos basics

Anthos is a managed application platform that extends Google Cloud services and engineering practices to development environments so you can modernize apps faster and establish operational consistency across them. To help you get started, we introduced the Anthos 101 video learning series, a great starting point for understanding the basics of Anthos and how to use it. Even better, you can watch the whole series of 11 episodes in less than an hour.

FAQs that clear up the clouds

Speaking of 101s, we also created a popular one with frequently asked questions about cloud computing. Do you want to learn the basics of containers, virtual machines, Kubernetes, data warehouses and more? The blog gives a quick rundown of common cloud computing terms and products. It’s just one guide available in our learning resources to help you understand cloud computing and start working with cloud-based tools and products. 

That’s a wrap for May. Stay tuned to the Google Cloud blog for all things cloud.

Introducing the Open Source Insights Project

Open Source Insights

Google has been working on software supply-chain security for many years, and transitive dependencies remain one of the most complex and least understood aspects. While we will be integrating this data into our Cloud and internal products in a variety of ways, we believe there is an immediate value in helping developers understand and visualize dependencies. Today, we are excited to share an exploratory visualization site: Open Source Insights, which provides an interactive view of the dependencies of open source projects.

Software development practices have evolved significantly over the last few years. Collaborative development with distributed feature development, consumption of open source and third-party packages, and publicly maintained software libraries have become commonplace, partly as a result of the widespread use of open source software. The advantages of open source are so clear that people and companies that would once have rejected OSS are now adopting it as a critical element of their environment.

But there are challenges brought by OSS too. The pace of change is electric, and it can be hard to keep up. The software packages that a large project depends on might update too frequently to keep a clear picture of what is happening. And those packages, in turn, can change their dependencies to provide new features or fix bugs. Security problems and other issues can arise unexpectedly in your project as a result, and the scale of the problem can make it all difficult to manage. Even a modest OSS project might depend on hundreds of packages.

There are tools to help, of course: vulnerability scanners and dependency audits that can help identify when a package is exposed to a vulnerability. But it can still be difficult to visualize the big picture, to understand what you depend on, and what that implies.

Open Source Insights provides a visualization of a project’s dependencies and their properties. Our exploratory website can be used to get an overview of how a particular software package is put together. Among other features, it provides interactive tools to visualize and analyze full, transitive dependency graphs. It also has a comparison tool to highlight how different versions of a package might affect your dependencies, perhaps by changing their own dependencies, adding licensing requirements, or fixing security problems.

Dependency graph for express 4.17.1

Open Source Insights shows you all this information about a package without asking you to install the package first. You can see instantly what installing a package—or an updated version—might mean for your project, how popular it is, find links to source code and other information, and then decide whether it should be installed. Insights also helps you see the importance of your project by showing the projects that depend on it: its dependents. Even a small project is important if a large number of other projects depend on it, either directly or through transitive dependencies.

Open Source Insights continuously scans millions of projects in the open source software ecosystem, gathering information about packages, including licensing, ownership, security issues, and other metadata such as download counts, popularity signals, and OpenSSF Scorecards. It then constructs a full dependency graph—transitively tracking dependencies, dependencies' dependencies, and so on—and incorporates the metadata, then publishes it so you can see how it all might affect your software. And the information it provides is continually updated.
Filtered dependency graph showing how eslint 7.27.0 depends on chalk 2.4.2 and 4.1.1

Filtered dependency graph showing how eslint 7.27.0 depends on chalk 2.4.2 and 4.1.1

This information can help visualize how software is put together, whether an update is worth doing, or how to fix a problem.

Today, Open Source Insights supports npm, Maven, Go modules, and Cargo. While we work on adding additional packaging systems, we want to hear from you: How could this data fit into your development workflow? What would make it more useful? You can reach the team at deps.dev to share your thoughts; we’ll be collecting feedback for the upcoming months and look forward to hearing your ideas on how best to improve supply-chain security.

Visit our website at deps.dev to try it out.

From the Google Cloud team: What this means for GCP’s open cloud

For users of open source software, this may be the first time you’re seeing dependency and vulnerability information in an organized and accessible way. If you’re using a managed service based on open source, it’s important to remember that you may not be affected by all vulnerabilities listed. Your provider may have taken steps to harden the products you use, and when a new vulnerability is disclosed, your provider may take responsibility for patching this on your behalf.

Google Cloud follows both these steps to help users get the benefits of open cloud while prioritizing security. Multiple layers of hardening create defense-in-depth, which helps protect services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run and Cloud Functions from a container escape vulnerability. For components that are the user’s responsibility, we’re constantly rolling out new services—like GKE Autopilot—that automate these responsibilities.

We’re committed to protecting our customers, both through our patch rewards program and the recently launched cyber insurance partnership, the Risk Protection Program, which moves from shared responsibility to shared fate. We look forward to bringing our customers new information on their open source dependencies.

By Andrew Gerrand, Michael Goddard, Rob Pike and Nicky Ringland of the Open Source Insights Team

Helping Mulberry bag more customers during COVID-19

Something struck solutions architect Neill Randall in the first week he joined the iconic British fashion brand Mulberry. The company had access to an impressive amount of data, but it wasn’t being fully exploited.

Renowned for its leather craftsmanship, Mulberry’s made-to-last accessories are sold across 25 countries via 120 stores and its digital network. The brand’s diverse physical and online touch points meant it was producing data through many different channels. And yet it didn’t have a central solution to bring all this information together. It was against this backdrop that the company turned to Google for a solution.

“All the data at Mulberry was coming in at different times, from different silos, in different formats, into different systems, making it impossible to gain end-to-end visibility,” Neill explains. “To create a global view of our stock, products and customers, we needed to bring all that information together. Google Cloud made that possible.”

With a centralised data solution on Google Cloud, Mulberry was able to connect the dots between data that was previously scattered across different systems. This extra capability would be useful at the best of times, but it proved to be even more lucrative when the brand had to shut its doors during the UK’s lockdown in March 2020. 

Transforming its closed bricks-and-mortar stores into warehouses for online sales, Mulberry was able to add all products still out on the shop floors to the company’s digital channels.

The benefits quickly made their way to customers, who now had an even larger selection of products to choose from when shopping online. Better still, with an improved view of each order status, issues were easier to resolve and customers received their favourite Mulberry items faster than expected.

Full stock visibility coupled with fewer order issues and faster shipping led to a 25% boost in sales. Some of Mulberry’s stores even got back to their normal sales levels, despite COVID-19.

That wasn’t the only benefit the brand enjoyed thanks to our partnership. With more than 2.7 million customers and 5,000 products, Mulberry gains valuable insights from each purchase. Now, having established a centralised data view, Mulberry could take the customer relationship to the next level by using this data to tailor marketing campaigns and offer hyper-personalised product recommendations. 

As a result, the company saw an increased click-through rate by 37%, which led to an 110% increase in return on ad spend in general.

For Niell and the team, simplicity was high on the shopping list. “We managed to get up and running within days, and began to see the benefits quickly,” he recalls. “We are basically self-taught, which is a testament to how easy to use Google Cloud is.”

With the tools to make its products even more fashionable to customers, we’re excited to see what Mulberry does next.