Google Cloud Platform Blog
Product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Cloud Platform
In case you missed it in October: Welcome Firebase, local SSD opens for beta, lower prices and the final countdown to Google Cloud Platform Live
Friday, October 31, 2014
We want to make creating and scaling apps online easier than ever, so simplification was the name of the game for Google Cloud Platform in October. In case you missed it, here’s the scoop from the last month.
Welcome Firebase!
We welcomed Firebase to the Cloud Platform family in October in our efforts to provide developers the best experience to build as easily as possible. We’ll be demonstrating the new features at
Google Cloud Platform Live
next week, but in the meantime, read our
welcome note and future plans
.
Local SSD goes beta
Following our
announcement in June at Google I/O
, we’re taking the next step in local SSD for
Google Compute Engine
and bringing it to open beta. The local SSD feature has five key characteristics including: high performance and low latency, competitive pricing, no planned downtime, configuration flexibility, and encryption. Check out our
extended blog post
and
product documentation
to learn more.
The price is right, and simple
We started October with across-the-board price cuts on Compute Engine at
Atmosphere Live
. Following Moore’s Law, we cut prices by about 10% for
all instance types
. And because no one wants to spend time managing their billing information when they could be building the app of the future, we
simplified the process
of paying for Google Cloud Platform.
More Google Cloud Platform Live details
It’s just 4 days until Google Cloud Platform Live on November 4th. Though we’re sold out for seats in San Francisco and our watch-event in New York City, join in on the livestream and conversation on
Google+
,
Twitter
and elsewhere using
#GCPLive
.
From the department of semantics
We’re speeding our release process by aligning our phases with industry standard definitions that match how our developers manage their own projects. From now on, there will be no more “trusted tester,” “limited preview” and “preview” phases, just Alpha and Beta. For more details on the phases and our reasoning, read
our blog post about it.
On the road again
October saw the completion of an epic Roadshow series, covering 35 cities worldwide and reaching nearly 4,500 developers from around the globe. Read our
recap
and relive the
talks
.
Great new customers
From Tel Aviv to Tokyo, we’re trying to enable developers around the world to deploy and scale in a flash. mCASH, a payment provider in Norway,
uses App Engine
to handle the manic growth of mobile transactions. Channel 2 News in Israel
migrated its mobile app
to Cloud Platform to cope with unexpected peaks in traffic. And Japan’s Medical Network Systems
powers their remote-diagnosis system
with Cloud Platform.
Stay tuned for next month’s announcements. Meantime, the Google Cloud Platform team wishes you all a Happy Halloween (timelapse-style)!
-- Posted by Charlene Lee, Product Marketing Manager
Join Google Cloud Platform Live on livestream
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Google Cloud Platform Live
is less than one week away, and we now have sold out our venue in San Francisco and our watch event in New York City.
We still want you to be able to join us for the fun and news - including our keynote and breakout session- so we have a livestream set up so you can pick the sessions you want to join and will be live-tweeting the entire event. Make sure to catch us on
Twitter
and
Google+
using
#GCPLive
to hear updates as they’re announced and to talk to us directly.
Plan ahead to see what to tune in for:
Can’t wait to see you all in San Francisco, New York City, or on social media.
--Posted by Charlene Lee, Product Marketing Manager
Announcing Beta For Local SSD
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
At
Google I/O in June
, we announced a trusted tester program for the local SSD product for
Google Compute Engine
. Today, we’re taking the next step and bringing local SSD to open beta. Now all Compute Engine customers will have a cost effective way to serve massive amounts of IO, making the platform an ideal place to run:
Large databases backing internet-scale applications
Intensive data processing applications
The local SSD feature lets customers attach from 1 to 4 x 375 GB SSD partitions to any full core VM and have dedicated use of those partitions. It provides higher IO than Persistent Disk but does not have any redundancy. This is ideal for highly demanding applications that provide their own replication such as many modern databases and Hadoop, as well as for scratch space for intense computational applications.
The local SSD feature has five key characteristics:
High performance and low latency
Performance scales linearly from 1 to 4 partitions. The full 4 partitions can execute up to 680,000 random 4K read IOPS and 360,000 random 4K write IOPS. This is 8x more write IOPS/GB and 15x more read IOPS/GB than SSD Persistent Disk.
Competitive pricing
At $0.218/GB/month, local SSD is very competitively priced. For those used to buying local SSD attached to VMs, this comes to $0.0003/GB/hour.
No planned downtime
Local SSD data will not be lost when Google does datacenter maintenance, even without replication or redundancy. We will use our live migration technology to move your VMs along with their local SSD to a new machine in advance of any planned maintenance, so your applications are not disrupted and your data is not lost.
Configuration flexibility
There are no special instance types needed to use local SSD. You can attach 1 to 4 local SSD partitions to any full core VM. You can scale up and down CPU/memory and CPU as you need and are not locked into predefined ratios.
Encryption
Local SSD is always encrypted for your protection.
There is
product documentation available
so you can learn more about local SSD. We love hearing from you, so let us know how things are working either through our
technical support
, the
Google Compute Engine Discussion mailing list
or the
Google Compute Engine Stack Overflow forum
. Happy computing!
-Posted by Jay Judkowitz, Senior Product Manager
Recap of the 2014 Google Cloud Platform Roadshows
Thursday, October 23, 2014
We just wrapped up the
Google Cloud Platform Roadshows
, a series of developer events in 35 cities worldwide, where we reached nearly 4,500 developers spanning the globe, from Texas to Tel Aviv to Tokyo.
Now that the series is finished, we wanted to thank everyone for coming and share with you the slides and
all our talks recorded live
from our New York City event:
Keynote
|
Video
Blurring the IaasS/PaaS divide
|
Video
From Data to Meaning
|
Video
Containerizing the Cloud with Kubernetes and Docker
|
Video
How to Design, Build and Run a Cloud App
|
Video
Cloud Power Your Android Apps
The Roadshow team sends huge thanks to everyone who attended and looks forward to seeing you next year. We'd love to hear from you in the meantime:
Join the official
Google Cloud Platform G+ community
and
stream
Participate in your local
Google Developer Group
and get together with other developers for events like code sprints and hackathons
Talk to us on Twitter
@googlecloud
Get started now
-Posted by Tom Van Waardhuizen, Program Manager
Welcome Firebase to the Google Cloud Platform Team
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Today we extend a warm welcome to
Firebase
, who is joining the
Google Cloud Platform
team. Firebase makes it very easy for developers to build mobile and web apps that store and sync data in realtime.
Mobile is one of the fastest-growing categories of app development, but it’s also still too hard for most developers. With Firebase, developers are able to easily sync data across web and mobile apps without having to manage connections or write complex sync logic. Firebase makes it easy to build applications that work offline and has full-featured libraries for all major web and mobile platforms, including Android and iOS.
By combining Firebase with Google Cloud Platform, we’ll be able to build the best end-to-end platform for mobile application development. If you’re already a Firebase developer, you’ll start seeing improvements right away and if you’re a Google Cloud Platform customer, you’ll find it even easier to create great mobile and web apps. The entire Firebase team is joining Google and, under the leadership of Firebase co-founders James Tamplin and Andrew Lee, will be working hard to bring you great new features. Not only will the products you already love continue to get better, but you’ll also gain access to the full power of Google Cloud Platform.
At
Google Cloud Platform Live
on November 4, we’ll be demonstrating new Firebase features and integrations with Cloud Platform. You can join us there in person or you can register to stream online for free.
If you are looking for more info check out the
Firebase blog
. We can’t wait to see what applications you build!
-Posted by Greg DeMichillie, Director of Product Management
Radiology in the Cloud
Monday, October 20, 2014
Cross-posted on the Google for Work
blog
.
Japan faces a critical shortage of radiologists. Although major hospitals are well equipped to conduct scans, the scarcity of experts to read them and give patients their diagnoses means that people, especially those in rural areas, often have to wait a long time to discover their results. This can have tragic consequences for people with serious conditions.
To address this shortage and help people get accurate diagnoses faster, Medical Network Systems Inc. (MNES) in Hiroshima started running a
remote diagnosis service
in 2000. Rather than waiting for patients to come to hospitals, we bring the radiology equipment to them. This teleradiology service has helped combat the challenge of getting scanning technology to people in remote areas; however, we are still short on specialists that can read the scans, and we wanted to find ways to give access to patients in areas without specialists.
Last year, our team started using
Google Cloud Platform
to power our remote-diagnosis systems. Patients used to be given a hard copy of their scan to take to a doctor or specialist. Moving the process to the cloud speeds everything up. All of our buses are equipped with CT scanning machines, so our technicians upload images and scans right from the bus. Specialists can then log into the system from wherever they’re working and see the scans and diagnose the patient remotely.
Reading scans is a very specialized process. Radiologists must examine lots of images and scans in a very particular sequence, and it’s important that this process isn’t laggy or slow. One of the benefits of using Google’s services is that they can handle massive volumes of information.
Google App Engine
processes the images and data in the right sequence and enables us to cross reference patient inputs with existing radiographic and pathological information.
Instead of waiting for a few days or a week for a diagnosis, which was the usual turnaround for our teleradiology service, patients get their results within a few hours. And it’s not just our patients benefiting from remote diagnosis; enabling our radiologists to work from anywhere has meant that many of our female specialists are able to stay in the workforce — diagnosing scans while working from home and taking care of their kids. With so few radiologists in Japan, this flexibility helps us keep skilled technicians in the workforce.
We’re optimistic about the potential for cloud-based technology to enrich our understanding of pathological issues and believe it signals a new chapter for the healthcare industry by removing geographical barriers between patients and doctors.
- Posted by Dr. Naoyuki Kitamura, CEO, Japan’s Medical Network Systems Inc.
Simpler billing on Google Cloud Platform
Friday, October 17, 2014
We know that developers don’t want to spend time managing their billing information so we’ve added a couple of useful features to make managing your billing easier and less time consuming.
First, you’re now able to
consolidate multiple projects
and pay for them under a single billing account. This means you no longer have to manage and maintain billing information in multiple places. It also lets you quickly and easily set up new projects without having to re-enter your billing details.
Consolidate multiple projects into a single billing account
Second, we know that sometimes you want another person (e.g. your accountant) to have access to your billing information but don’t want to grant them ownership permissions on your projects. You can now
invite additional billing administrators
from the Developers Console who can view and manage your billing details but are not automatically project owners.
Add additional billing administrators
With these two changes, you can spend time less on billing and more time doing the work you care about.
-Posted by Dan Stokeley, Product Manager
Channel 2 News mobile app in Israel streams breaking news with Google Cloud Platform
Monday, October 13, 2014
Israel is a country in which life is rarely dull. Many Israelis read or listen to the news several times a day, often from leading broadcaster Channel 2 News. Channel 2 has responded with the development of a mobile app, to which it continuously streams its news broadcasts. In November 2012, events in Israel led to a peak in app usage. This led to availability issues, which persisted despite servers being added during the crisis.
To cope with such unexpected peaks in traffic, Channel 2 News decided to migrate the infrastructure for its mobile app to Google Cloud Platform. To find out more about the process and the results of the migration, read the case study
here
.
-Posted by Ori Weinroth, Product Marketing Manager
Looking forward to Google Cloud Platform Live on November 4
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
At the first Google Cloud Platform Live, developers told us that they were inspired to be surrounded by hundreds of their peers using Cloud Platform technology to turn their ideas into reality. They had the opportunity to meet Googlers who designed and built the products they use and hear, firsthand, about our vision for cloud computing. On November 4, Brian Stevens, who recently joined as Vice President of Product Management for Cloud Platform, and I will outline our next steps for Cloud at the second
Google Cloud Platform Live
.
We’ll share how
Docker and Kubernetes
can complement VMs as well as how our
flexible PaaS solution
provides workload portability and ease of use. We will give a sneak peek at the future of our mobile services, making it easier than ever for you to build a Cloud-backed mobile app. We’ll also be talking about how you can get useful insights from ever growing data.
For those who get to join us in person, we will have a Partner Sandbox, featuring
MongoDB
,
Datastax
,
Fastly
,
RedHat
,
SaltStack
,
Tableau
and
Bitnami
where you can see first hand the work they are doing with Google. And, just announced, an after-party to celebrate the day’s events.
Finally, we just released a new list of speakers, including the engineers, product managers, and developer advocates who build the products you know and love. You can see the full list of speakers at
cloud.google.com/LIVE
- and come back to see updates between now and the event.
Click here to register.
See you on November 4!
- Posted by Greg Demichillie, Director
mCASH handles growing volume of Norway’s mobile payments with Google App Engine
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
mCASH, a payment provider located in Norway, relies on Google App Engine to build a resilient payment system for users that can handle the incredible rate of growth of mobile transactions.
As more consumers switch from cards to mobile, mCASH anticipates large-scale volume to their virtual bank, where a customer can send and receive money instantly, pay bills, view transactions, and even obtain instant credit.
“With App Engine, we can go from ten transactions a second to thousands a second without a hiccup. Expanding across borders into new markets becomes vastly more tractable. It scales beautifully,” notes founder and CEO Daniel Döderlein.
To learn more about their use of Google Cloud Platform and subsequent results for their business, read the case study
here
.
-Posted by Ori Weinroth, Product Marketing Manager
New Release Phases for Google Cloud Platform
Friday, October 3, 2014
In an effort to add transparency, speed and simplicity to our release process, Google Cloud Platform will align our own release definitions and process with how our developers manage their projects. We are eliminating the confusing (and Google-specific) “trusted tester,” “limited preview” and “preview” phases and replacing them with simple Alpha and Beta releases. These align more closely with standard software practices for pre-release products.
Going forward, all products will be pre-released in Alpha format for testing by a select group of customers, and after passing this phase, will be released to Beta testing. Beta products are available publicly to all customers but will not have SLAs and full support until cleared to General Availability. Timing for each phase varies by product and will be announced accordingly.
Some more precise definitions:
Alpha
Alpha is a limited availability test for releases before they are cleared for widespread use. By alpha, all significant design issues are resolved and we are simply verifying functionality. For Alpha, customers need to apply for access, agree to applicable terms and get their projects whitelisted. Alpha releases don’t have to be feature complete, no SLAs are provided and there are no technical support obligations, but they will be far enough along that customers can actually use them in test environments or for limited-use tests -- just like they would in normal production cases.
Beta
You will mostly only hear about products when they’re released in Beta stage. This means you can now use it openly without access controls. However, beta products will not have an SLA or technical support obligations. Charges may be waived in some cases. Products will be complete from a feature perspective, but may have some open outstanding issues. Beta releases are suitable for limited production use cases, though customers should be aware that this is pre-release software and full, SLA-bound use is not encouraged until General Availability (GA).
Along with the introduction of Alpha and Beta, we are renaming the “Trusted Tester” program, which is designed to give a small group of customers tight integration to our design process during early stages of development, the “Early Access Program" (or EAP). Most products won’t go through this phase, but for certain programs where complexity and breadth of design are significant, we will continue to seek tight integration and feedback from a select group of customers.
These new program names roll out immediately -- we look forward to your participation and your help in making Google Cloud Platform better with each new release!
--Posted by Tom Kershaw, Product Management Director
Switch.co dials in with Google Cloud Platform
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Today’s guest bloggers are Brian Peterson and John Rector, co-founders of
Switch Communications
, a San Francisco-based voice communications startup. Learn more about how they use Google Apps for Work
here
.
At Switch Communications, we fundamentally believe that technology should empower people to work faster. That was the driving principle behind Switch.co, a cloud-based business phone system we launched yesterday enables you to make and take calls from anywhere, on any device, so you can be as productive on your smart phone at the local coffee shop as you are on your desk phone at the office. With Switch.co, calls ring on all connected devices, so you don’t miss any calls, and it’s easy to switch seamlessly between each of those devices without having to hang up and call back.
Of course, we apply the same principle of speed to our company, too: technology should help our employees be more efficient, flexible and agile. That’s why we built Switch.co on
Google Cloud Platform
— because we believe startup founders should spend time on products, not on backend architecture.
John Rector and Brian Peterson, co-founders of Switch Communications
Selecting the cloud service for your underlying architecture is a key decision for any startup. We evaluated a number of platforms, but quickly determined that Google’s Cloud Platform was by far the best fit. We knew we were dealing with a complex system with our telephony infrastructure, and given the viral nature of our initial conferencing product,
UberConference
, we also knew we needed solid scalability and flexibility. Google Cloud Platform ticked off all the right boxes.
Google App Engine
made rapid development of Switch.co possible. In fact, we built Switch.co on App Engine in under a year, which would have been unheard of just a few years ago given Switch.co’s sophisticated infrastructure. Since all of the core routing and smart business logic takes place in App Engine, we’ve eliminated the need to perform administrative tasks or carry pagers around to deal with maintenance issues.
In addition to App Engine, we’re heavy users of
Cloud Datastore
, which makes it easy to upload all of our data into a simple, searchable database. For example, we’re able to provide search functionality across a user’s entire history of messages in real-time by just typing in a few letters. This setup required just one engineer and was completed in about a month -- a MySQL database couldn’t have enabled a similar result.
Beyond building on Google Cloud Platform, we utilize the set of rich Google Apps APIs to integrate Switch.co with
Google Apps for Work
. When you call someone from Switch.co, you get useful context by seeing recent
Gmail
messages, shared
Google Docs,
and upcoming
Calendar
invites. You can even launch a
Hangout
directly from a conversation.
With Google Cloud Platform, we can prioritize building dynamic features instead of bailing out water repairing databases and networks. It helps us focus on what we really care about: improving the product to create a great experience for our users and, like Google, making work easier.
-Contributed by Brian Peterson and John Rector, co-founders of Switch Communications
Announcing across-the-board price cuts on Compute Engine
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Today at
Atmosphere Live,
I spoke about how Google is helping developers realize the promise of cloud computing by providing on-demand access to world-class technology at an affordable price.
We believe that compute — the core of any cloud workload — should be simple and fast to provision, scale without effort, and be priced in accordance with Moore’s Law.
In March of this year
we set a new standard for economics in the public cloud when we brought the price of core infrastructure, including compute & storage, in line with where it should be.
And, as predicted by Moore’s Law, we can now lower prices again. Effective immediately, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine by approximately 10% for all instance types in every region. These cuts are a result of increased efficiency in our data centers as well as falling hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers.
Old and new prices for all our Compute Engine instance types
Using Compute Engine doesn’t just lower costs; it makes developers more productive, agile and efficient. Many development teams spend about 80% of time on what we call “fix and fiddle,” such as managing systems, fixing bugs and just keeping the lights on. Only 20% of time is spent how it should be — building new products or systems that will be platforms for growth.
With Compute Engine and the rest of Cloud Platform, it doesn’t have to be this way. A small company like
Snapchat
can reach a global audience with just a few people on their development and operations team.
Workiva
, which processes financial reports for 60% of the Fortune 500, can focus on solving the needs of their users rather than managing infrastructure. And, this past World Cup, Coca Cola and Cloud Platform partner CI&T
built and ran the Happiness Flag campaign
in just a few weeks with the help of Google Compute Engine. The campaign solicited over three million contributions from fans in more than 200 countries.
We've made a lot of progress in the past year and look forward to what's coming next. Tune in to
Google Cloud Platform Live
on November 4th to learn more about where we’re headed.
-Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure
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