<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"><channel><title>Telecommunications</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/</link><description>Telecommunications</description><atom:link href="https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/topics/telecommunications/rss/" rel="self"></atom:link><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:00:00 -0000</lastBuildDate><image><url>https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/telecommunications/static/blog/images/google.a51985becaa6.png</url><title>Telecommunications</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/</link></image><item><title>Google and Automation Anywhere reimagine customer experience by giving virtual agents a boost</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/call-center-ai-and-rpa-automation-boost-customer-experience/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the advent of the pandemic, contact center traffic has increased &lt;a href="https://www.gep.com/blog/mind/impact-of-covid-19-on-contact-centers-and-measures-taken#:~:text=Overall%2C%20contact%20centers%20witnessed%20an,early%20stages%20of%20the%20pandemic.&amp;amp;text=The%20sudden%20increase%20in%20call,to%20closer%20to%2010%2B%20minutes" target="_blank"&gt;by as much as 300%&lt;/a&gt;, taxing center capabilities. To help handle the surge, and keep up with heightened customer demands, many customer experience providers have deployed automation in the form of virtual agents that serve as the first—and, sometimes the last—line of customer support. How effective these virtual agents are in delivering timely, complete customer service depends in large part on the contact center’s infrastructure and the power of the automation solution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Customer support providers can now start to reimagine customer experience with Conversational AI and take advantage of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/bots-are-here-use-rpa-and-ai-automate-digital-tasks"&gt;the Google Cloud-Automation Anywhere partnership&lt;/a&gt; to modernize their operations. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bringing together the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/contact-center"&gt;Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution&lt;/a&gt; and the Automation Anywhere &lt;a href="https://www.automationanywhere.com/products/automation-360" target="_blank"&gt;cloud-native Automation 360 platform&lt;/a&gt;, the partnership helps contact centers remain competitive by improving their performance metrics and customer satisfaction to exceed the continuously growing expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Information here, there, anywhere—with limited access&lt;/h3&gt;Over the years, many contact centers have accumulated a multitude of systems, often creating a disconnected infrastructure. As a result, both human and virtual agents alike are challenged to keep up with growing customers' expectations for timely, accurate, and complete service. Without up-to-date software and infrastructure, human agents have to perform a “swivel-chair” maneuver, logging in to the different systems, sifting through records, copying the needed information, and deciding what the next action should be. This approach is not conducive to achieving lower average handle times (or AHT), reduced processing errors, or increased customer satisfaction.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In such a siloed environment, virtual agents may not connect to all the relevant data systems and applications. That also limits what they can do to support human agents. Typically, a virtual agent can handle basic customer requests, such as providing banking customers with their account balances. For more complex requests, such as applying for a line of credit, a virtual agent still must transfer customers to human agents, and the swivel-chair maneuver begins. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Enter the RPA-assisted AI-powered virtual agent&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The combination of Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 RPA platform can help contact centers get the maximum benefit from utilizing virtual agents, enriching customer engagements. Further, by integrating automation, opening up APIs, and creating new processes for virtual agents, customer experience teams can help streamline operations by enabling users to quickly access the information they require. This helps minimize the need for the “swivel-chair” maneuver.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Automation 360 makes it possible for the CCAI virtual agents to access all systems and applications in both legacy and modern infrastructure, helping resolve every case quickly and easily. Not only can the virtual agents respond faster with answers, but they can complete more complex end-to-end requests. With RPA, customers are reporting &lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMV8mvZhf1w" target="_blank"&gt;66% improved efficiency&lt;/a&gt; of contact center operations while exceeding their AHT reduction goals. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zwBRPPavMc" target="_blank"&gt;This video&lt;/a&gt; illustrates how such automation can dramatically reduce the processing time of a customer service request, and you can &lt;a href="https://www.automationanywhere.com/solutions/contact-center" target="_blank"&gt;read more about the details of contact center automation&lt;/a&gt;, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, a comprehensive development platform, the Google Cloud &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow?skip_cache=true"&gt;CCAI Dialogflow&lt;/a&gt;, powers virtual agents—chatbots and voicebots—with Conversational AI to deliver lifelike customer experiences anytime a customer reaches out to a brand. CCAI Agent Assist helps human agents with turn-by-turn guidance, ready-to-deliver answers, and ready-to-send responses. CCAI Insights identifies key metrics such as call drivers and customer sentiment for workflow optimization. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Living up to their potential&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience provider and long-time partner of both Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, has been leveraging virtual agents to enhance the employee and customer experience.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We are very proud of the enormous value that we can provide our clients through combining our expertise in customer experience and digital transformation alongside the innovative solutions of our technology partners,” Jim Radzicki, CTO of TELUS International, explains. “For instance, through leveraging Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s RPA integration, we are able to expand the capabilities of virtual agents to process a wider variety of customer requests while allowing our team members to focus on the most critical conversations and creating a meaningful connection with every customer.” &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With CCAI and Automation 360, virtual agents can help contact centers deliver 24/7, comprehensive, accurate service, all of which helps eliminate wait times—even with heavy traffic. And this is just the start. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With deeper integration planned between Automation 360 and CCAI, RPA can augment CCAI Agent Assist’s abilities to help human agents by bringing untapped case-sensitive information to their fingertips. Furthermore, Automation 360 Bot Insight can complement CCAI Insights’ as well as TELUS International’s Intelligent Insights, a tool-agnostic platform to monitor and manage RPA solutions and bots, with backend data access metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, we’ll continue developing our contact center solution to extend automation capabilities for better customer service and greater customer satisfaction. Instead of constantly swiveling, agents can once again be at the center of the call center action, taking their work—and the experience of their customers—to the next level.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/ai-machine-learning/google-cloud-contact-center-ai-2021-highlights/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/CCAI_wrap_21_v1.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Reaching more customers with Contact Center AI: 2021 Wrap-up&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Explore Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) and its momentum in 2021&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/call-center-ai-and-rpa-automation-boost-customer-experience/</guid><category>Telecommunications</category><category>AI &amp; Machine Learning</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/google_contact_center_ai.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Google and Automation Anywhere reimagine customer experience by giving virtual agents a boost</title><description>Transform your call center customer experience by combining the power of conversational AI and RPA process automation.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/google_contact_center_ai.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/call-center-ai-and-rpa-automation-boost-customer-experience/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Aziz Khan</name><title>Sr. Director, Product, Automation Anywhere</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Shantanu Misra</name><title>Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Deploying and operating cloud-based 5G networks</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/how-csps-can-use-cloud-networks-to-deliver-5g/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Communication services providers (CSPs) are experiencing a period of disruption. Overall revenue growth is decelerating and is projected to remain below 1 percent per year, following a trend that started even before the pandemic.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; At the same time, driven by the pandemic, data consumption in 2020 increased by 30 percent relative to 2019, with some operators even reporting increases of 60 percent.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The combination of pressure on revenues with rising data traffic costs is forcing operators to innovate in three fundamental ways. First, operators are looking to establish new sources of revenue. Second, increased network utilization must be met with a reduction in network cost. And third, there is an opportunity to gain new customers by improving the customer experience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, 5G offers a path forward across each of these three areas. Concepts such as network slicing and private networks allow CSPs to offer differentiated network services to public sector and enterprise customers. The disaggregation of hardware and software allows new vendors with unique strengths to enter the market and to enable CSPs to build, deploy, and operate networks in fundamentally new ways. And the ability to place workloads at the edge permits CSPs to offer compelling experiences to consumers and businesses alike. In this blog, we will discuss how CSPs can create a solid foundation for their cloud networks. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Understanding telecommunications networks&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, it is useful to consider the way telecommunications networks were traditionally built. Initially, networks were built using physical network functions (PNFs) — appliances that used a tight combination of hardware and software to perform a specific function. PNFs offered the benefit of being purpose-built for a specific application, but they were inflexible and difficult to upgrade. As an example, deploying new features frequently required replacing the entire PNF, i.e., deploying a new hardware appliance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first step in improving deployment agility came with the concept of virtualized network functions (VNFs), software workloads designed to operate on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Rather than utilizing an integrated hardware and software appliance, VNFs disaggregated the hardware from the software. As such, it became possible to procure the hardware from one vendor and the software from another. It also became possible to separate the hardware and software upgrade cycles. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, while VNFs offered advantages over PNFs, VNFs were still an intermediate step. First, they typically needed to be run within a virtual machine (VM), and as such required a hypervisor to interface between the host operating system (OS) and the guest OS inside the VM. The hypervisor consumed CPU cycles and added inefficiency. Second, the VNF itself was frequently designed as a monolithic function. This meant that while it was possible to upgrade the VNF separately from the hardware, such an upgrade, even for a feature that affected only a portion of the VNF, required deployment of the entire large VNF. This created risk and operational complexity, which in turn meant that upgrades were delayed just as they were with PNFs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Creating the foundation for cloud networks&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The trick to establishing your cloud based network resides in the challenge of moving from VNFs to containerized network functions (CNFs) — network functions organized as containers as a collection of small programs, each of which can be independently operated. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The concept of containers is not new. In fact, Google has been using containerized workloads for over 15 years. Kubernetes, which Google developed and open-sourced, is the world’s most popular container orchestration system, and is based on Borg, Google’s internal container management system.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; There are lots of benefits to using containers, but fundamentally, it frees developers from worrying about resource scheduling, interprocess communication, security, self-healing, load balancing, and many other tedious (but important!) tasks. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider just a couple examples of benefits that containerization brings to network functions. First, when upgrading the network function to implement new features, you no longer need to re-deploy the entire network function. Instead, you only need to re-deploy the containers that are affected by the upgrade. This improves developer velocity and reduces the risk of the upgrade because, rather than infrequent upgrades that each introduce substantial changes, you can now have frequent upgrades that each deploy small changes. Small changes are less risky because they are easier to understand and to roll back in case of anomaly. Incidentally, this also improves your security posture because it reduces the time between when a security vulnerability is discovered and when a patch is deployed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of security, another example of the benefits that containerization brings to network functions is an automatic zero-trust security posture. In Kubernetes, the communication among microservices can be handled by a service mesh, which manages mundane aspects of inter-services communication such as retries in case of failure and providing observability into communication. It can also manage other essential aspects such as security. For example, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos/service-mesh"&gt;Anthos Service Mesh&lt;/a&gt;, which is a fully-managed implementation of the open-source &lt;a href="https://istio.io/" target="_blank"&gt;Istio service mesh&lt;/a&gt; (also co-developed by Google), includes the ability to authenticate and encrypt all communications using mutual TLS (mTLS) and to deploy fine-grained access control for each individual microservice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Automation and orchestration for cloud networks&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;CNFs bring tremendous benefits, but they also bring challenges. In place of a relatively small number of network appliances, we now have a large number of containers, each of which requires configuration, management, and maintenance. In the past, many of these processes were accomplished using manual techniques, but this is impossible to accomplish economically and reliably at the scale required by CNFs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, there are cloud-native approaches to solving these challenges. First, consider the problem of autonomously deploying and maintaining CNFs. The ideal way is to use the concept of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/understanding-configuration-as-data-in-kubernetes"&gt;Configuration as Data&lt;/a&gt;. Unlike imperative techniques such as Infrastructure as Code, which provide a detailed description of a sequence of steps that need to be executed to achieve an objective, Configuration as Data is a declarative method whereby the user specifies the desired end state (i.e., the actual desired configuration) and relies on automated controllers to continuously drive the infrastructure to achieve that state. Kubernetes includes such automated controllers, and the great news is that this method can be used not just for infrastructure but also for the applications residing on top of it, including CNFs. This cloud-native technique frees you from the toil and associated risk of writing detailed configuration procedures, so you can focus on the business logic of your applications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As another example, consider the problem of understanding your network performance, including anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and resolution. The cloud-native approach starts with creating a data platform where both infrastructure and CNF monitoring data can be ingested, regularized, processed, and stored. You can then correlate data sets against each other to detect anomalies, and with AI/ML techniques, you can even anticipate anomalies before they happen. AI/ML is likewise indispensable in gaining an understanding of why the anomaly is happening, i.e. performing root cause analysis, and automated closed-loop controllers can be developed to correct the problem, ideally before it even happens.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Architecting for the edge&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The transition from VNFs to CNFs is a critical piece in addressing the challenge that CSPs face today, but it alone is not enough. CNFs need infrastructure to run on, and not all infrastructure is created equal. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider a typical 5G network. There are some functions, such as those associated with an access network, that need to be deployed at the edge. These functions require low latency, high throughput, or even a combination of the two. In 5G networks, examples of such functions include the radio unit (RU), distributed unit (DU), centralized unit (CU), and the user plane function (UPF). The first three are components of the radio access network (RAN), while the last is a component of the 5G core. At the same time, there are some other control plane functions such as the session management function (SMF) or the authentication and mobility management function (AMF) that do not have such tight latency and high throughput requirements and can thus be placed in a more centralized data center. Furthermore, consider an AI/ML use case where a particular model (perhaps for radio traffic steering) needs to run at the network edge because of its latency requirements. While the model itself needs to run at the edge, model training (i.e., generating the model coefficients) is frequently a compute-intensive exercise that is latency-insensitive and is thus more optimal to run in a public cloud region.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of these use cases have one thing in common: they call for a hybrid deployment environment. Some applications must be deployed at the edge as close to the user as possible. Others can be deployed in a more centralized environment. Still others can be deployed in a public cloud region to take advantage of the large amount of compute and economies of scale available therein. Wouldn’t it be convenient — if not transformational — if you could use a single environment for deploying at the edge, in a private datacenter, and in public cloud, with a consistent set of security, lifecycle management, policy, and orchestration resources across all such locations? This is indeed what &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud"&gt;Google Distributed Cloud&lt;/a&gt;, enabled by &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos"&gt;Anthos&lt;/a&gt;, brings to the table.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With Google Distributed Cloud, you can architect a 5G network deployment such as the one shown below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/cloud_networks_to_deliver_5g.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="cloud networks to deliver 5g.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/cloud_networks_to_deliver_5g.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Business benefits of cloud networks&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beyond the technical benefits, consider the business benefits of such an architecture. First, by following the best practices of hardware and software disaggregation, it permits the CSP to procure the infrastructure and the network functions from different vendors, spurring competition among vendors. Second, each workload is placed in precisely the right location, enabling efficient utilization of hardware resources and offering compelling low-latency, high-throughput services to users. Third, because the architecture utilizes a common hybrid platform (Anthos), it makes it easy to move workloads across infrastructure locations. Fourth, the separation of workloads into microservices accelerates time-to-market when developing new features or applications, such as those enabling enterprise use cases. And finally, the container management platform supports the simultaneous deployment of both network functions and edge applications on the same infrastructure, allowing the operator to deploy new experiences such as AR/VR directly on bare metal as close to the user as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;The next generation cloud network is now&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot more we could say, but perhaps the most important takeaway is that this architecture is not a future dream. It exists today, and Google is working with leading CSPs and network vendor partners to deploy it, helping them realize the promise of 5G to deliver new revenues, reduce operating costs, and enable new customer experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn more, watch the video series on the &lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBgogxgQVM9s-95F-lv322LGRZ6g-kSwx" target="_blank"&gt;cloudification of CSP networks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Discover what’s happening at the edge:&lt;/b&gt; &lt;a href="https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/csp-innovate-at-the-edge-enterprise?utm_source=cgc-site&amp;amp;utm_medium=et&amp;amp;utm_campaign=FY21-Q4-northam-NA1252-onlineevent-er-tmeg_omdia_edge_study_telco&amp;amp;utm_content=telco-cgc-site&amp;amp;utm_term=-" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;How CSPs Can Innovate at the Edge&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;b&gt;.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1.&lt;b&gt; &lt;/b&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/323006/worldwide-telecom-services-spending-growth-forecast/" target="_blank"&gt;Statista, Forecast growth worldwide telecom services spending from 2019 to 2024&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;2 &lt;a href="https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/tmt/media/outlook/segment-findings.html?WT.mc_id=CT1-PL52-DM2-TR2-LS4-ND30-TTA9-CN_GEMO-2021-segments-two" target="_blank"&gt;PricewaterhouseCoopers, Global entertainment and media outlook 2021-2025&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;3. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;a href="https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kubernetes/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;i&gt;Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/telecommunications/how-telco-and-csps-can-do-cloud-native-right/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Expert advice from operators and network provider partners on how to do cloud-native right.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Jan 2022 17:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/how-csps-can-use-cloud-networks-to-deliver-5g/</guid><category>Containers &amp; Kubernetes</category><category>Anthos</category><category>Telecommunications</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Deploying and operating cloud-based 5G networks</title><description>Cloud services and networks can help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) deliver next-generation 5G networks to their customers quickly.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/how-csps-can-use-cloud-networks-to-deliver-5g/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Gabriele DiPiazza</name><title>Director of Outbound Product Management, Telco</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Max Kamenetsky</name><title>Group Product Manager</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>TELUS accelerates modernization with data science</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/telus-accelerates-modernization-with-data-science/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;Editor’s note&lt;/b&gt;: TELUS, a Canadian communications and information technology company, has transformed their approach to data science with Google Cloud services. Here’s how they’ve broken down data silos, accelerated data engineering tasks, and democratized data access.  &lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a dynamic, world-leading communications and information technology company, &lt;a href="https://www.telus.com/en/" target="_blank"&gt;TELUS&lt;/a&gt; is always at the forefront of innovation. We have made significant progress with our digitization journey over the last few years, modernizing our systems and networks to create new and improved growth opportunities. However, in that process, we have inevitably accumulated vast amounts of important data across various systems resulting in data access challenges for our teams.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our vision was to unite siloed data, democratize it across our organization, and enable our data science team to effectively extract meaningful, high quality insights to help with important business decisions. Partnering with Google Cloud, we’ve approached our cloud transformation in a way that allows us to unlock the true potential of data to create valuable insights and deliver exceptional customer experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;From siloed data assets to a single source of truth&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;We began this transformation by cleaning up and starting the migration of our siloed data assets to Google Cloud, aggregating all our data points into a common data layer built with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery"&gt;BigQuery&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/dataflow"&gt;Dataflow&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/composer"&gt;Cloud Composer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigtable"&gt;Cloud Bigtable&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage"&gt;Cloud Storage&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Data governance has been crucial through this to ensure we have a single reliable source of truth for our data. We created a TELUS Metadata Repository to document information about our data assets (provenance, business description, privacy and security classification) in order to improve our team efficiency and streamline productivity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Democratized data unlocks new use cases &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our partnership with Google Cloud has also helped us to democratize data across the organization, allowing each business unit to share their data with each other and collaborate more effectively. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At TELUS, our data spans beyond just the telecom industry across multiple business units such as  healthcare, security, and agriculture. By bringing all those different datasets together, we’re seeing new use cases that help us improve the lives of Canadians. As an example, our &lt;a href="https://www.telus.com/en/about/privacy/data-for-good" target="_blank"&gt;Data for Good program&lt;/a&gt; was instrumental in helping track the spread of the COVID-19 virus during the global pandemic. By providing governments, health authorities, and academic researchers a platform to access strongly de-identified and aggregated network mobility data free of charge, the program assisted in initiatives to flatten the curve of COVID-19, reduce its health and economic impacts, and contribute to studies that could prevent or mitigate future phases of COVID-19 or other pandemics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Unifying the data and AI lifecycle&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our data science team has made tremendous strides with Google Cloud services to  reduce machine learning (ML) model development and deployment time. We have been testing very sophisticated compute instances on Google Cloud, and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai"&gt;Vertex AI&lt;/a&gt;, to accelerate our journey by unifying the data and AI lifecycles - from data exploration, aggregation and cleaning to model building, training, testing and finally deploying ML models in production.  In addition to the acceleration of ML model development and experimentation, with Vertex AI our data scientists will also be able to implement Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) to efficiently build and manage ML projects throughout the development lifecycle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Accelerating innovation&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moving to the cloud has not only accelerated our model development, it has also allowed us to innovate faster. We transitioned from a waterfall to an agile mindset early on, but we needed an even faster framework to trial many ideas in just a few hours. We’re trying to empower the team to rapidly test their ideas, accelerate their iterations, and minimize the impact of their failures. This has enabled us to determine within just a few days—as opposed to months—if a project will be successful or not and therefore, minimize wasted time. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Privacy and security remain at the forefront&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;As we grow our data science practice and use these tools more widely throughout our organization, keeping our data secure remains a top priority. We’ve established the &lt;a href="https://www.telus.com/en/about/privacy/trust-model" target="_blank"&gt;TELUS Trust Model&lt;/a&gt; to reflect our commitment to protecting our customers’ personal information. To build trust with our stakeholders, we always use this data with respect and make sure that security and privacy is built into every step of our projects. Using Google Cloud allows us to retain complete control over our data and ensure that any information we use for analysis is always de-identified, so it can't be attributed to any single subscriber. While Google Cloud provides Data Loss Prevention (DLP) service, it does so in a way that doesn’t slow down our time to retrieve insights. In addition, we leverage Google Cloud locations in Montreal and Toronto to help support data sovereignty requirements and ensure that our customer information never leaves Canada.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Data champions shape the TELUS culture&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since we’ve transitioned to Google Could, TELUS has also undergone a significant cultural shift. We’re driving TELUS to become a next-generation, insights-driven organization that creates valuable analytics to maximize business outcomes and deliver superior experiences to our customers. Moving forward, we are excited to continue leveraging our insights, AI skills and technology to create meaningful human and social outcomes and help build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Learn more about TELUS’ Data for Good initiatives and overall data cloud use cases &lt;a href="https://youtu.be/nKWOa5SweCc" target="_blank"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/telecommunications/google-cloud-joins-o-ran-alliance/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Google joins the O-RAN ALLIANCE to advance telecommunication networks&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Google Cloud joins O-RAN ALLIANCE to drive transformative change in telecommunications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2022 17:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/telus-accelerates-modernization-with-data-science/</guid><category>Customers</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Data Analytics</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/GCP_AIML_Data_Analytics.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>TELUS accelerates modernization with data science</title><description>TELUS, a Canadian communications and information technology company, has transformed their approach to data science with Google Cloud services. Here’s how they’ve broken down data silos, accelerated data engineering tasks, and democratized data access.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/GCP_AIML_Data_Analytics.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/telus-accelerates-modernization-with-data-science/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Alexandre Guilbault</name><title>Director Artificial Intelligence &amp; Advanced Analytics, TELUS</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/how-telco-and-csps-can-do-cloud-native-right/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;As communication service providers (CSPs) continue to focus on capitalizing on the promise of 5G, I’ve been having more conversations with operators and network equipment providers on why and how it may make sense to adopt cloud-native approaches. More specifically, we often discuss best practices around accelerating the time to value of 5G and simplifying the deployment and management of networks as well as the applications deployed on top of them. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, &lt;a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-10-18-gartner-identifies-the-top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2022" target="_blank"&gt;cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives, which is up from less than 40% in 2021.&lt;/a&gt; Both Ankur Jain, Head of Engineering for Google Cloud for Telecommunications, and I recently sat down with telecommunications industry experts, including Jitin Bhandari, CTO of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia and Dr. Lester Thomas, Head of New Technologies and Innovation at Vodafone, to discuss how CSPs can best take advantage of cloud-native. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are on the path to “cloudify” your networks for 5G and beyond, here’s your chance to learn from some folks who have done it and are doing it now. We summarize five key takeaways from my conversations with these experts. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Do: Leverage cloud-native approaches to simplify networks&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;5G promises value creation for CSPs and enterprises, but first we must think about simplifying those networks. As Jitin Bhandari from Nokia puts it in his conversation with Google's Ankur Jain, “Over the last two decades…we’ve built layers of complexity in our telco networks. You see these waves of 2G, 3G, and now we’re building 5G - they are still reminiscent of fixed networks.” Moving to a cloud-native approach could help CSPs break that cycle and simplify telecommunications networks; how the networks are constructed and how they are operated. The good news is that leading with a cloud-native approach is how Google has always built our services and networks, and is a key reason operators and partners like Nokia are collaborating with us to drive value in the 5G era.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-qL2ruKqok_k-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=qL2ruKqok_k"&gt;&lt;img alt="Why should communication service providers (CSPs) consider cloud-native and why now? Ankur Jain, Head of Engineering for Telecommunications, Edge and Container Networking at Google Cloud and Jitin Bhandari, CTO of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia discuss how embracing cloud-native approaches can help CSPs reduce complexity, break the costly upgrade patterns in telco, and fast track value creation in the 5G era." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/qL2ruKqok_k/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-qL2ruKqok_k-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="qL2ruKqok_k" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=qL2ruKqok_k" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Don’t: Just take legacy operational processes with you to the cloud&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely a world of difference between migrating to the cloud and adopting a cloud-native approach. According to Dr. Thomas from Vodafone, “When you think about migrating existing systems and applications to the cloud, the tendency is to take your operational processes with [you]. You can almost question what real business benefit does that give you?” On the other hand, moving to a cloud service, consumption-based model and leveraging cloud-native solutions like Kubernetes, microservices, and open APIs forces one to rethink how applications are built and decouples one from the legacy operations that, in the past, hindered speed of innovation. Another takeaway from Dr. Thomas is that “our cloud-native approach is typically coupled with agile delivery methods, DevOps so you can take reliability engineering as the way in which you operate and [be] much more focused on data and open APIs.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-mQBzytmSrxg-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=mQBzytmSrxg"&gt;&lt;img alt="There is a difference between migrating to cloud and adopting a cloud-native approach. Jitin Bhandari, CTO of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, discusses this very difference with Dr. Lester Thomas, Head of New Technologies and Innovations at Vodafone. Watch this video to get an operator’s point of view on cloud-native and learn the key principles that can end up being real business enablers." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/mQBzytmSrxg/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-mQBzytmSrxg-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="mQBzytmSrxg" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=mQBzytmSrxg" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Do: Recognize that operators will continue to own and control their networks&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I chat with our CSP customers on whether the cloud and Google Cloud specifically is carrier-grade and telco-ready, the topic of security, privacy, and control often comes up. First, I think it’s important to make it clear that operators will continue to control, own and manage their networks as well as the data running on those networks. You can think of Google Cloud as supplying the enabling technologies. Second, protecting the trust and security of Google Cloud is a key priority for us. As such, we publish and adhere to a set of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/security/transparency"&gt;trust principles&lt;/a&gt; that govern our approach to security. In addition, by working with Google Cloud, CSPs can take advantage of the same &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/security/infrastructure"&gt;secure-by-design infrastructure&lt;/a&gt; and investments that Google makes to ensure the nine applications and services we offer, each supporting over 1 billion users around the world, run quickly, reliably and securely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-8oUgQpyUSxI-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=8oUgQpyUSxI"&gt;&lt;img alt="Jitin Bhandari, CTO of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia and Max Kamenetsky, Group Product Manager for Telecom at Google Cloud discuss why the move to cloud native in telecom needs to happen now. They dive into the industry’s transition from VNFs to CNFs and the key considerations you need to make when running network functions on the public cloud, including managed infrastructure as a path forward." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/8oUgQpyUSxI/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-8oUgQpyUSxI-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="8oUgQpyUSxI" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=8oUgQpyUSxI" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Do: Build scale and simplicity into your data platform to unlock a whole world of use cases&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;While we are on the subject of control, Dr. Thomas also shared some key insights from an operator’s point of view on building scale and simplicity into one’s data platform. “Getting the data governance right is a critical part,” said Dr. Thomas. “We have all these different use cases that we use the data to drive business insights and value. The underlying data for it is in a common database. So as we do each use case, we will bring in new data into our data ocean, but they’ll be standardized and normalized.” In addition to data consolidation and normalization, it is essential to set standards for data quality, ownership, lifecycle management, interoperability and exchange. With that established, you can really focus on delivering that business value with 5G, IoT, and even network optimization use cases, most of which are data and analytics driven. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, Dr. Thomas talked about using data and automation to help detect network anomalies, and that’s only the beginning. “The anomaly detection use case that we’ve done so far is about analyzing the root cause of what’s going on in the network. We see that as the very first part of an autonomous network.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-Fk2EaXXjeag-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fk2EaXXjeag"&gt;&lt;img alt="Dr. Lester Thomas, Head of New Technologies and Innovations at Vodafone, shares how leveraging cloud, data analytics, and automation is helping to drive network operational efficiencies." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/Fk2EaXXjeag/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-Fk2EaXXjeag-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="Fk2EaXXjeag" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fk2EaXXjeag" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Don’t: Fall into the habit of architecting separate infrastructure for virtualized and containerized workloads&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Though many software vendors are well on the way to migrating to cloud-native containerized workloads, virtualized workloads still exist and will continue to exist for some time. At the same time, the status quo of deploying separate infrastructure for virtualized and containerized workloads creates unnecessary complexity, limits scale, creates unmanageable silos, and is, quite frankly, unsustainable. The solution is to have a single set of managed infrastructure with Kubernetes running on top and the ability to seamlessly place and orchestrate CNFs, VNFs and even edge applications. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud"&gt;Google Distributed Cloud&lt;/a&gt;was built with the necessary capabilities to enable this CNF and VM coexistence so that infrastructure silos can become a thing of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-jmTU-5RDWSs-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=jmTU-5RDWSs"&gt;&lt;img alt="Jitin Bhandari, CTO of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia and Max Kamenetsky, Group Product Manager for Telecom at Google Cloud discuss the design and architectural elements needed for high-performance and cloud-native telecom workloads." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/jmTU-5RDWSs/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-jmTU-5RDWSs-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="jmTU-5RDWSs" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=jmTU-5RDWSs" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are learning a lot from our friends in the telecommunications industry as more operators consider taking a more modern approach to building, operating, and maintaining future generations of networks and services. At Google Cloud, we understand that these are tasks not to be done alone nor in siloes. They will be done in partnership across the ecosystem, where we bring our strength in cloud-native, data, and AI/ML solutions combined with the telecommunications-specific expertise and technologies provided by our partners. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Catch all the conversations with our experts in our &lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBgogxgQVM9s-95F-lv322LGRZ6g-kSwx" target="_blank"&gt;Cloudification of Telecom Networks&lt;/a&gt; video series.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-distributed-cloud-edge-and-hosted/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud-01_xyGPYQS.max-500x500.png')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Google Distributed Cloud runs Anthos on dedicated hardware at the edge or hosted in your data center, enabling a new class of low-latency...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jan 2022 17:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/how-telco-and-csps-can-do-cloud-native-right/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Partners</category><category>Application Modernization</category><category>Anthos</category><category>Telecommunications</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native</title><description>Expert advice from operators and network provider partners on how to do cloud-native right.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/how-telco-and-csps-can-do-cloud-native-right/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Max Kamenetsky</name><title>Outbound Group Product Manager, Telecommunications</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Google delivers 5G network slicing capabilities for enterprises</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/5g-network-slicing-with-google-android-enterprise-and-cloud/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Building on the recent releases of the &lt;a href="https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2021/10/android-12-is-live-in-aosp.html" target="_blank"&gt;Android 12 operating system&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-distributed-cloud-edge-and-hosted"&gt;Google Distributed Cloud&lt;/a&gt;, Google is paving the way for communication service providers (CSPs) as well as enterprises to deliver enterprise applications and services over 5G network slices, for enhanced application security, reliability, and performance. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;5G network slicing enables virtual mobile networks to be created dynamically with varying properties utilizing shared underlying physical resources. 5G slicing is one of the key areas of innovations that will let CSPs earn a return on their investments in 5G, by offering a secure and dynamic network platform to enterprises. For enterprises, meanwhile, the true value of network slicing will be realized when the ecosystems for devices, network, edge cloud, and applications work together seamlessly and automatically. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the depth of our technology focused on 5G network slicing, enterprises can boost application performance through a dedicated network channel that’s optimized for higher bandwidth, lower latency, higher reliability, and increased security and isolation. For example, financial institutions can deliver critical and sensitive data to employees’ mobile devices, while enterprises of all types can use network slices to deploy secure WFH connectivity for their employees.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Android’s support for 5G enterprise network slicing routes application traffic on managed devices on CSPs’ 5G networks. For devices provisioned with a work profile, data from work apps will be routed over an enterprise network slice. CSPs looking for more in-depth information on Android’s 5G network slicing implementation can visit the &lt;a href="https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/5g-slicing" target="_blank"&gt;Android SAC site&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;5G slicing is just one of the exciting developments in the mobile sphere. In addition, edge computing is critical to the 5G slicing ecosystem allowing application functionality to be processed at the edge while managed in a centralized cloud, further enhancing performance, resilience and operational continuity. CSPs must consider three core attributes to ensure enterprises get value from 5G slicing: 1) Enterprise tools and device integration, 2) turn-key network and cloud automation, and 3) compelling use cases. This is where choosing the right partner becomes critical, and Google is working across the ecosystem to ensure these attributes are seamlessly implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The support of 5G network slicing capabilities for enterprises was validated in partnership with both Ericsson and Nokia through a successful integration of 5G radio access networks (RAN) and 5G core network solutions with test units of the recently released Pixel 6 smartphone running the Android 12 operating system. Additionally, &lt;a href="https://www.fetnet.net/content/corp/tw/LatestNews/LatestNews_Contents.html?uuid=d441750c-8e95-4611-a30d-2b65a6ffda2b&amp;amp;lang=tw" target="_blank"&gt;Far EasTone (FET)&lt;/a&gt;, Android, and &lt;a href="https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2/2021/11/20211102-fareastone-and-ericsson-mark-a-breakthrough-in-5g-network-slicing" target="_blank"&gt;Ericsson&lt;/a&gt; collaborated on an end-to-end demonstration of 5G Network Slicing with 5G URSP. This demonstration showcased URSP capability on the Google Pixel 6 to direct work apps traffic over the enterprise slice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To unlock the value of 5G slicing, CSPs must consider how they want to participate across the wider 5G ecosystem, which is rapidly extending beyond mere connectivity. With Pixel devices, Android OS, Google Distributed Cloud, and applications, in partnership with CSPs, Google is creating optimal value for both 5G providers and enterprises.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Nov 2021 13:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/5g-network-slicing-with-google-android-enterprise-and-cloud/</guid><category>Android Enterprise</category><category>Partners</category><category>Hybrid &amp; Multicloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Google delivers 5G network slicing capabilities for enterprises</title><description>With support for 5G network slicing in Android Enterprise, CSPs and enterprises alike can use the cloud to optimize 5G for their users.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/5g-network-slicing-with-google-android-enterprise-and-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Ankur Jain</name><title>Distinguished Engineer, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Sat K</name><title>Engineering Director, Android</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Leveraging APIs to create value for telco ecosystems: STC's digital transformation</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/api-management/using-apis-to-create-value-for-telco-ecosystems/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;Editor's note&lt;/b&gt;: Today we hear from Haitham AlFaraj, Senior Vice President of Technology and Operations, Yazeed Alfaris, Vice President of Application, and Faisal  Alhatlani, Applications Planning &amp;amp; Control GM from STC, which does business as “STC.” Since 1998, STC has been a telecommunications leader in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region. Learn how STC uses APIs as part of its digital transformation strategy to expand business and connect with partners and customers more effectively&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The world is changing for telecommunications operators. We live in a digital age when people, information, and services are more connected than ever, and people expect virtually any service on demand, at their fingertips. STC is already a telecommunications leader in the Middle East, but to remain on top in a competitive field, we must continue to grow and provide valuable experiences for our customers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We adopted a four-pillar strategy to prepare our company for the future, supporting the Saudi 2030 Vision. Our “&lt;a href="https://www.stc.com.sa/wps/wcm/connect/english/stc/aboutSTC/Strategy" target="_blank"&gt;DARE&lt;/a&gt;” strategy is built around the core goals to digitize STC, accelerate core asset performance, reinvent customer experiences at world-class standards, and expand scale and scope. We strive to become the digital platform for youth and entrepreneurs and build a vibrant ecosystem to modernize many daily activities in Saudi Arabia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Digital transformation is at the heart of each of these pillars. When looking at all of the ways that we want to grow, change, and evolve digitally, we recognized that APIs are essential to our transformation. By adopting APIs at every level of our business, we can make our digital services more secure and accessible to consumers (inside and outside of our organization), connect with our partner ecosystem more effectively, and quickly deliver new customer services. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Embracing APIs across the company&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;To realize the full potential of APIs, we started pushing an API-first strategy, even for internal groups. Rather than creating numerous potentially redundant single-use features and point-to-point integrations, we instructed teams to create APIs as products that can be reused by internal teams, partners, and other STC group subsidiaries. We’ve already deployed over 100 API products across various use cases, and we’re continuing to double down on expanding.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because of the growing API program’s  requirements for security, runtime governance, and a seamless onboarding experience of our API products, we needed a robust, scalable, and flexible API management solution. Selecting such a critical component of our digital architecture was not easy. We went through a comprehensive evaluation process, inspecting multiple solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the end, we chose Google Cloud’s &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/apigee/"&gt;Apigee API Management Platform&lt;/a&gt;. We appreciate not only that Apigee has strong security and functionality, but also that the platform is very easy to use. The strong support and thought leadership that we have received from Apigee since implementation has helped us feel even more confident that we made the right choice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apigee has helped us drive our API program towards success by enabling us to take on innovative digital transformation initiatives, such as participating in the TM FORUM Open API, which aims to enable service providers to improve their IT and operational agility and customer centricity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The success of our API program can also be seen in our API traffic volume, which has increased by over 300% from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, driven by usage from our subsidiaries. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Prioritizing developer success &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Developers are key to the success of our API-first mindset, as developers are the ones who consume our APIs and bring new services to STC customers. To ensure that developers are successfully utilizing our APIs, we believe building a seamless, self-service onboarding experience via a centralized developer portal is crucial. An API developer portal not only offers a 360-degree view of digital assets and the value they provide but also helps accelerate adoption of APIs and simplify their discovery &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;STC has set foot in this direction by creating a unified API developer portal that leverages Apigee. The Apigee Developer Portal is very straightforward, with fast and simple onboarding. Developers can read about APIs, test them, and easily subscribe to them, all in a single location. With self-service experiences in place, we can encourage more members of the developer community to explore our APIs, no matter whether they work with a major corporation or as an independent app creator. This will lead to more diverse services and greater value for our customers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have already launched our developer portal with several dozen internal developers onboarded. We have released internal APIs that power key initiatives, and we have also released some APIs to our partner ecosystem. We expect the number of developers and APIs to increase dramatically when we launch it publicly. With Apigee, we have confidence that our system will continue to scale and provide all of our users with excellent experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-RNavw0jToTo-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=RNavw0jToTo"&gt;&lt;img alt="Learn how Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform helps stc to accelerate development and work with partners more easily." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/RNavw0jToTo/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-RNavw0jToTo-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="RNavw0jToTo" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=RNavw0jToTo" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Delivering new customer services&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the first APIs that we released for our partners is the Direct-Carrier Billing (DCB) API, which enables STC customers to pay for partner services via their STC bill. Instead of creating unique integrations for each partner, partners can now connect using our DCB API. This has allowed us to onboard new partners such as Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon in record time. Customers have reacted very positively to these new services, with subscriptions rising steadily.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We also used Apigee to manage creation and delivery of the APIs needed to launch STC Pay, a secure digital wallet solution from STC Group. Before implementing Apigee, it might have taken us close to a year to create the foundation to run this offering, but by implementing API-first strategies and powerful API management capabilities, we launched STC Pay in just three months. This shows how APIs can help us reach new lines of business and grow the reach of STC.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Exploring the digital future&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re currently working with business units to understand how we can use APIs to monetize STC assets and create new revenue streams. We also plan to start opening up API management to subsidiaries across STC Group, such as STC Kuwait and STC Bahrain. This will open the doors to more collaboration and sharing through APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We see our current API management program naturally evolving into a federated API platform that serves multiple business segments. As API adoption increases within the organization, we anticipate increased focus on public APIs and connectivity with mobile / standalone apps, as opposed to server-to-server communications. These initiatives will make API security more important than ever.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At STC, we believe that a continued focus on digital transformation will have a positive impact on the growth of our company. API management will continue to play an important role in our transformation by helping us use APIs to create value for our company, our partners, and our customers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-Jgqawt8WRkM-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jgqawt8WRkM"&gt;&lt;img alt="Learn how Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform helps stc to accelerate development and work with partners more easily." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/Jgqawt8WRkM/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-Jgqawt8WRkM-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="Jgqawt8WRkM" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jgqawt8WRkM" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about how APIs and Apigee API management are used by many other companies like STC, read the &lt;a href="https://pages.apigee.com/api-economy-telco-register.html" target="_blank"&gt;Telecom State of the API Economy 2021 report&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/api-management/accelerating-app-innovation-with-api-management/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/Fueling_App_Innovation.gif')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Staying ahead with API-powered Application Innovation&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Watch Google Cloud’s Application Innovation webinar series.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Oct 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/api-management/using-apis-to-create-value-for-telco-ecosystems/</guid><category>Business Application Platform</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>API Management</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/api_02VCF0D.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Leveraging APIs to create value for telco ecosystems: STC's digital transformation</title><description>How Saudi Arabian telecommunications leader STC is digitally transforming with APIs.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/api_02VCF0D.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/api-management/using-apis-to-create-value-for-telco-ecosystems/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Haitham AlFaraj</name><title>Senior Vice President of Tech &amp; Ops, STC</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Yazeed Alfaris</name><title>Vice President of Application, STC</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-distributed-cloud-edge-and-hosted/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now more than ever, organizations are looking to accelerate their cloud adoption. They want easier development, faster innovation, and efficient scale, all while simultaneously reducing their technology risk. However, some of their workloads cannot move to the public cloud entirely or right away, due to factors such as industry or region-specific compliance and data sovereignty needs, low latency or local data-processing requirements, or because they need to run close to other services.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To ensure these workloads can still take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, today at &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next" target="_blank"&gt;Google Cloud Next ’21&lt;/a&gt; we are announcing &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud"&gt;Google Distributed Cloud&lt;/a&gt;, a portfolio of solutions consisting of hardware and software that extend our infrastructure to the edge and into your data centers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your organization’s needs, you can run Google Distributed Cloud across multiple locations, including:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Google’s network edge&lt;/b&gt; - Allowing customers to leverage over 140+ Google network edge locations around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Operator edge&lt;/b&gt; - Enabling customers to take advantage of an operator’s edge network and benefit from 5G/LTE services offered by our leading communication service provider (CSP) partners. The operator edge is optimized to support low-latency use cases, running edge applications with stringent latency and bandwidth requirements. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Customer edge&lt;/b&gt; - Supporting customer-owned edge or remote locations such as retail stores, factory floors, or branch offices, which require localized compute and processing directly in the edge locations. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Customer data centers&lt;/b&gt; - Supporting customer-owned data centers and colocation facilities to address strict data security and privacy requirements, and to modernize on-premises deployments while meeting regulatory compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/google_distributed_cloud.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="google distributed cloud.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/google_distributed_cloud.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Distributed Cloud is built on &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos"&gt;Anthos&lt;/a&gt;, an open-source-based platform that unifies the management of infrastructure and applications across on-premises, edge, and in multiple public clouds, all while offering consistent operation at scale. Google Distributed Cloud taps into our planet-scale infrastructure that delivers the highest levels of performance, availability, and security, while Anthos running on Google-managed hardware at the customer or edge location provides a services platform on which to run applications securely and remotely. Using Google Distributed Cloud, customers can migrate or modernize applications and process data locally with Google Cloud services, including databases, machine learning, data analytics and container management. Customers can also leverage third-party services from leading vendors in their own dedicated environment. At launch, a diverse portfolio of partners, including &lt;a href="https://www.cisco.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Cisco&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.dell.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Dell&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html" target="_blank"&gt;HPE&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://www.netapp.com/" target="_blank"&gt;NetApp&lt;/a&gt;, will support the service.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our first products under this portfolio include &lt;b&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Edge&lt;/b&gt; and &lt;b&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Hosted&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Edge &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Available in preview today, &lt;b&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Edge&lt;/b&gt; is a fully managed product that brings Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services closer to where your data is being generated and consumed. Google Distributed Cloud Edge empowers you to run 5G Core and radio access network (RAN) functions at the edge, alongside enterprise applications, to support mission-critical use cases such as computer vision and Google AI edge inferencing. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Edge is ideal for running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads, modernizing on-premises environments, and deploying private 5G/LTE solutions across a variety of industries. With Google Distributed Cloud Edge, retailers can provision applications at a Google network location, which allows in-store teams to focus on customers rather than sorting out IT. Manufacturers can save time and money by using video for visual inspections on factory floors, and CSPs can offer high-speed bandwidth with private 5G and localized compute to their customers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Edge builds on our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/telecommunications"&gt;telecommunication solutions&lt;/a&gt; and empowers CSPs to run workloads on Intel and NVIDIA technologies to deliver new 5G and edge use cases. Google Distributed Cloud Edge also allows ISV and network functions partners, application developers, and data scientists to deliver innovation and scale quickly and efficiently.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“CSPs are looking for faster ways to deploy cloud-native network architecture that can bring flexibility and agility to their edge solutions” said Dan Rodriguez, VP &amp;amp; GM Network Platforms Group at Intel, “Google Distributed Cloud Edge will help accelerate the delivery of 5G Telco Cloud and services at the edge leveraging Intel® Smart Edge Open, Intel’s FlexRAN® reference software, and Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We are excited to partner with Google Cloud on Google Distributed Cloud Edge,” said Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President of Telecom at NVIDIA. “This builds on our continued partnership to deliver GPU-accelerated computing and networking solutions that help the telecommunications industry and enterprises harness data and &lt;a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring21-s31931/" target="_blank"&gt;AI-on-5G or AI at the edge&lt;/a&gt; to unlock new business opportunities.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We are also committed to delivering cloud capabilities to our partners’ 5G networks and beyond. &lt;b&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Edge&lt;/b&gt; furthers our previously announced global, strategic partnerships with both &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/ericsson-and-google-cloud-talk-5g-and-the-cloud"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Ericsson&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;and &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/partners/detail/?id=nokia&amp;amp;_ga=2.74167570.1877982600.1632167394-560837777.1603140996" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Nokia&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to bring new solutions built on a cloud-native 5G core and develop the network edge as a business services platform for enterprises.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“This announcement builds on our on-going partnership with Google Cloud to develop Nokia &lt;a href="https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2021-01-14-Google-Cloud,-Nokia-Partner-to-Accelerate-Cloud-Native-5G-Readiness-for-Communications-Providers" target="_blank"&gt;cloud-native 5G core&lt;/a&gt; and Nokia &lt;a href="https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2021-03-15-Nokia-and-Google-Cloud-Partner-to-Develop-New,-Cloud-Based-5G-Radio-Solutions" target="_blank"&gt;radio solutions&lt;/a&gt; for Google’s edge computing platform. By extending this relationship into Google Distributed Cloud Edge, we will increase customer choice and flexibility, ultimately helping our global customer base with multiple cloud-based solutions to deliver 5G services on the network edge,” said Nishant Batra, Nokia Chief Strategy and Technology Officer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to network modernization, we are focused on building an edge ecosystem to help CSPs move beyond connectivity services and monetize the edge. Together, 5G and edge provide a powerful combination to help enterprises continue to digitize their business while leveraging third-party services from our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/expanding-partner-solutions-at-the-network-edge"&gt;trusted partner ecosystem&lt;/a&gt; in their dedicated environment. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The announcement of Google Distributed Cloud supports Ericsson’s vision of the network becoming a platform of innovation, enabling companies across the ecosystem to deliver the applications of the future the way they need to, unlocking the full potential of 5G and edge,” said Rishi Bhaskar, Vice President and Head of Hyperscale Cloud Providers for Ericsson North America.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Hosted&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Designed to run sensitive workloads, &lt;b&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Hosted&lt;/b&gt; builds on the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/how-google-cloud-is-addressing-data-sovereignty-in-europe-2020"&gt;digital sovereignty vision&lt;/a&gt; we outlined last year, and supports public-sector customers and commercial entities that have strict data residency, security or privacy requirements. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Distributed Cloud Hosted provides you with a safe and secure way to modernize an on-premises deployment, regardless of whether you do it yourself or choose to host through a designated, trusted partner. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted does not require connectivity to Google Cloud at any time to manage infrastructure, services, APIs, or tooling, and uses a local control plane provided by Anthos for operations. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted will be available in preview in the first half of 2022. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To address the needs of customers and governments across Europe, we are also developing trusted partner offerings as part of our ‘&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/helping-build-the-digital-future-on-europes-terms"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Cloud. On Europe’s Terms&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’ initiative. These partners will provide governments and enterprises the highest levels of digital sovereignty, without compromising on functionality or pace of innovation. Each of these partnerships leverage different technologies. Last week, we announced a "Trusted Cloud" partnership with &lt;a href="https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2021-10-06-Thales-and-Google-Cloud-Announce-Strategic-Partnership-to-Jointly-Develop-a-Trusted-Cloud-Offering-in-France" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Thales&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. On Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, two of our initial partnerships are with &lt;b&gt;T-Systems&lt;/b&gt; in Germany and &lt;b&gt;OVHcloud&lt;/b&gt; in France. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.t-systems.com/de/en/newsroom/news/t-systems-and-google-cloud-partner-to-deliver-sovereign-cloud-for-germany-450474" target="_blank"&gt;T-Systems&lt;/a&gt; is building a sovereign cloud offering in partnership with Google Cloud for private and public-sector organizations based in Germany, which will become available in mid-2022. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“T-Systems and Google Cloud share a common goal of developing cloud-based solutions for European governments and enterprises that meet their digital sovereignty, sustainability and economic objectives,” said Frank Strecker, Senior Vice President Global Cloud Computing &amp;amp; Big Data and Edge, T-Systems. “Together we will offer a sovereign cloud solution for customers in Germany that gives them peace of mind to meet their rapidly evolving data, operational, and software sovereignty requirements.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’ve also announced a strategic partnership with &lt;a href="https://corporate.ovhcloud.com/en/newsroom/news/ovhcloud-and-google-cloud-announce-strategic-partnership-co-build-trusted-cloud-solution-europe/" target="_blank"&gt;OVHcloud&lt;/a&gt; to accelerate French and European organizations’ ability to digitally transform and reimagine their businesses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We have seen how Google Cloud listens to their customers, partners and policymakers in Europe and heard the need for even greater control and autonomy,” said Sylvain Rouri, CSO at OVHcloud. “Together, we are building a sovereign cloud services portfolio that provides clients with full control over their data, software and operations whilst leveraging the full power of Google Cloud and meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;A cloud infrastructure built for your evolving needs&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to building a true distributed cloud, our work on core Google Cloud infrastructure (compute, network, and storage capabilities) continues unabated. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This year, Google Cloud expanded its global infrastructure by opening four new regions in &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-region-in-warsaw-poland-is-now-open"&gt;Warsaw&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-region-in-delhi-ncr-is-now-open"&gt;Delhi&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/the-google-cloud-region-in-melbourne-is-now-open"&gt;Melbourne&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-toronto-region-now-open"&gt;Toronto&lt;/a&gt;. We now have 28 regions around the world, making us the largest and lowest latency network among hyperscale cloud providers. We also announced future availability in Berlin-Brandenburg; Columbus, OH; Israel; Madrid; Milan; Paris; Santiago; Saudi Arabia; and Turin. Combined with over 140 network-edge locations worldwide, these Google Cloud regions deliver the services, capacity, and performance you need to ensure a terrific experience for your users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We also continued to advance our network by investing in subsea cables that improve access to Google services. With the addition of Firmina, which will connect the East Coast of the United States to three locations in South America, we now have investments in 19 subsea cables. All of this allows us to provide transformative infrastructure to businesses that build on Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/google_cloud_subsea_cables.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="google cloud subsea cables.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/google_cloud_subsea_cables.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Service-centric networking &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;As our global network increases in reach, we’re building out &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/expanding-google-cloud-network-infrastructure-and-services"&gt;service-centric networking&lt;/a&gt; capabilities to simplify everything from connectivity to observability. For organizations with interconnects, VPNs, and SD-WANs, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity-center#section-1"&gt;Networking Connectivity Center&lt;/a&gt; provides a centralized management model, with monitoring and visualization through our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-intelligence-center"&gt;Network Intelligence Center&lt;/a&gt;. And, with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/private-service-connect"&gt;Private Service Connect,&lt;/a&gt; partners and customers such as Bloomberg, MongoDB, and Elastic are now able to easily connect services without having to configure the underlying network. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Enterprises with workloads both on-premises and in the cloud can leverage &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/hybrid"&gt;hybrid load balancing&lt;/a&gt; to securely optimize application delivery. To help you detect and prevent malicious bot attacks, we recently integrated &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise/docs/usecase"&gt;reCAPTCHA Enterprise with Cloud Amor&lt;/a&gt;. Together with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/intrusion-detection-system"&gt;Cloud IDS&lt;/a&gt;, the Google network edge is fortified with best-in-class security. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Industry-leading compute&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons people choose Google Cloud is for access to the latest high-performance compute services. For example, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute"&gt;Compute Engine&lt;/a&gt; can be configured with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/tau-vm"&gt;Tau VMs&lt;/a&gt;, which are optimized for scale-out workloads. Tau VMs offer 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose virtual machines from any of the leading public cloud vendors. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, we are also excited to announce our new Compute Engine &lt;a href="http://cloud.google.com/spot-vms"&gt;Spot VMs&lt;/a&gt; in Preview. Spot VMs offer customers better guaranteed minimum savings and more pricing predictability than spot instances from any other leading cloud provider. With fewer restrictions on excess compute capacity, Spot VMs are the future of preemptible instances for Google Cloud. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/tau-vm"&gt;Tau VMs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/spot-vms"&gt;Spot VMs&lt;/a&gt; are supported with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Reliable and secure storage &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the last year, we’ve been focused on making our storage easier to use, more performant, and the best choice for enterprises. We recently announced &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/google-cloud-expands-storage-portfolio-with-latest-launches"&gt;extensions to our popular Cloud Storage offering&lt;/a&gt;, and introduced two new services: &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/google-cloud-announces-filestore-enterprise-for-business-critical-apps"&gt;Filestore Enterprise&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/google-cloud-launches-backups-for-gke"&gt;Backup for GKE&lt;/a&gt;. Together, these new capabilities make it easier for you to protect your data out-of-the box across a wide variety of applications and use cases. For a deeper dive into these storage announcements, watch our &lt;a href="https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/whats-new-with-google-cloud-storage" target="_blank"&gt;on-demand webinar&lt;/a&gt;, listen to our developer &lt;a href="https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/episode-277-storage-launches-with-brian-schwarz-and-sean-derrington/" target="_blank"&gt;podcast&lt;/a&gt;, and be sure to attend our &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/catalog#infrastructure" target="_blank"&gt;storage-focused sessions at NEXT '21.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Delivering a flexible cloud strategy&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our goal is to make your journey to the cloud easy. With transformative capabilities to help you innovate faster and save money, we follow an open approach to give you the greatest flexibility and choice as your organization evolves. Join us at the “Driving Transformation with Google Distributed Cloud” &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/catalog?session=SPTL101&amp;amp;utm_source=copylink&amp;amp;utm_medium=social#application-modernization" target="_blank"&gt;spotlight session&lt;/a&gt; and watch the &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/catalog?demo=LD101&amp;amp;utm_source=copylink&amp;amp;utm_medium=social#application-modernization" target="_blank"&gt;interactive live demo&lt;/a&gt; of Google’s latest investments in application modernization and infrastructure in a distributed cloud environment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-distributed-cloud-edge-and-hosted/</guid><category>Anthos</category><category>Compute</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Next</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Hybrid &amp; Multicloud</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/CloudNext21_6.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud</title><description>Google Distributed Cloud runs Anthos on dedicated hardware at the edge or hosted in your data center, enabling a new class of low-latency and/or regulated workloads.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/CloudNext21_6.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-distributed-cloud-edge-and-hosted/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Sachin Gupta</name><title>Vice President and GM, Google Cloud Infrastructure</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Announcing Apricot: a new subsea cable connecting Singapore to Japan</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-apricot-subsea-cable-brings-more-connectivity-to-asia/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did you know that 98% of international internet traffic is ferried around the world by subsea cables? As the ways that we work, play and connect become increasingly digital, reliable connectivity is more important than ever before. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, we are announcing Apricot, a new subsea cable that will connect Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia. It is expected to be ready for service in 2024.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Earlier this year, we also announced the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/introducing-the-echo-subsea-cable"&gt;Echo&lt;/a&gt; subsea cable, which will connect the U.S., Singapore, Guam and Indonesia. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems that will offer benefits with multiple paths in and out of Asia, including unique routes through southern Asia, ensuring a significantly higher degree of resilience for Google Cloud and digital services. Together they’ll provide businesses and startups in Asia with lower latency, more bandwidth, and increased resilience in their connectivity between Southeast Asia, North Asia and the United States. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Network investments like these have had a measurable impact on regional economic activity. For example, Analysys Mason conducted a &lt;a href="https://www.analysysmason.com/consulting-redirect/reports/impact-of-google-network-APAC-2020/" target="_blank"&gt;study&lt;/a&gt; of Google’s APAC network infrastructure between 2010 and 2019, and found that network investments led to an extra $430 billion (USD) in aggregate GDP and 1.1 million additional jobs for the APAC region.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;img alt="Number of additional jobs supported through the increase in GDP attributable to Google’s network infrastructure investments.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Number_of_additional_jobs_supported_throug.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;Number of additional jobs supported through the increase in GDP attributable to Google’s network infrastructure investments [Source: &lt;a href="https://www.analysysmason.com/contentassets/b8e0ea70205243c6ad4084a6d81a8aa8/impact-of-googles-network-investments-in-apac---september.pdf"&gt;Analysys Mason, 2020&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apricot joins Google’s global network of subsea cables, including Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like JGA, INDIGO and Havfrue. In total, we have investments in 18 subsea cables, alongside our 27 cloud regions and 82 zones around the world. Learn more about Google Cloud’s &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations"&gt;network and infrastructure&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/infrastructure/learn-about-googles-subsea-cables/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/infrastructure_QIVuEgz.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;All about cables: A guide to posts on our infrastructure under the sea&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;All our posts on Google’s global subsea cable system in one handy location.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:30:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-apricot-subsea-cable-brings-more-connectivity-to-asia/</guid><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/infrastructure_QIVuEgz.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Announcing Apricot: a new subsea cable connecting Singapore to Japan</title><description>The new Apricot subsea cable will connect Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia by 2024.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/infrastructure_QIVuEgz.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-apricot-subsea-cable-brings-more-connectivity-to-asia/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Bikash Koley</name><title>VP and Head of Google Global Networking and Head of Technology and Strategy, Google Cloud for Telecommunications</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>At Ericsson and Google Cloud, imagining the future of edge and 5G</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/ericsson-and-google-cloud-talk-5g-and-the-cloud/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;Editor’s note&lt;/b&gt;: 5G is much more than a network—it’s a platform for innovation with the ability to provide immediate global scale and enable use cases that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. But to achieve this, industry players must come together to drive this growing ecosystem. Today, Erik Ekudden, CTO of Ericsson, and Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google Cloud, share their insights into the potential of edge and 5G.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Experts consider &lt;a href="https://www.crn.com/news/networking/5-predictions-on-the-future-of-5g-from-ces-2021" target="_blank"&gt;2021 to be the year that serves as the inflection point between network readiness and 5G availability&lt;/a&gt;. However, communications service providers (CSPs) are still faced with the task of modernizing their networks, systems, and infrastructure to maximize the potential of 5G for themselves and for the enterprise customers they serve. As you weigh whether to tackle this challenge, let’s first examine what’s different about 5G and how CSPs can best leverage 5G and the edge together as an even stronger platform for innovation than just 5G alone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;With 5G, applications and mobile networks are no longer isolated&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let’s first address what 5G brings to the table. Faster speeds and lower latency are expected of course, and throughout the evolution from 2G to 3G to 4G, there’s been a step function in performance improvements with each of these. However, with every generation, applications and networks have been like ships passing in the night. Networks have been unaware of what the applications have been doing and applications have been guessing what the network was capable of. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s different this time around is that there is some real innovation happening with the development and rollout of 5G itself. The network is on a path to become more accessible via APIs so that applications can call on and consume what they need from the networks in a more programmable way. This sets us up for more open architectures and ecosystems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;5G leverages a more open architecture &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;One key difference with 5G as compared to prior generations is that it’s the most open and flexible network architecture the CSP industry has seen. This is thanks to its service-based approach and the decoupling of hardware and software components. CSPs are now running core network elements in the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and even multi-cloud, which was unthinkable even five years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/unified_cloud_native_plat.0581036010780619.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="unified cloud native platforrm.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/unified_cloud_native_plat.0581036010780619.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;Click to enlarge&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;The flexibility of this more open architecture allows us to push the cloud to the edge while still being able to manage it from a single pane of glass. This is a huge leap forward from traditional networks, which have been domain-specific, managed in silos, and with slow service creation and delivery. Now, hyperscale cloud vendors and network equipment providers are offering solutions that help CSPs break down these silos to enable more flexible, automated networks with improved orchestration, visibility, and control across multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud-provider environments. In addition, the separation of hardware and software provides a much more flexible and cost-effective way to upgrade from one network generation to the next.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To provide solutions that are relevant to enterprises, CSPs must offer capabilities beyond connectivity. Enterprise service orchestration, including exposure of network assets and network slicing, are foundational capabilities to provide value to the application ecosystem and be in control of the network and the delivered services.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Combining 5G and edge to help industries reimagine user experiences&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;This convergence of compute, storage and networking at the edge coming together for the first time will enable CSPs and enterprises to offer their customers completely reimagined user experiences. Consider, for example, how the automotive industry might enhance how customers shop for a car. As part of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/google-cloud-streams-augmented-reality"&gt;Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ Virtual Showroom at the recent CES 2021 event,&lt;/a&gt; consumers were able to experience the innovative new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with their phones, and then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of them—virtually placed on their own driveway or in any open space. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;By rendering the model in Google Cloud, then streaming it to mobile devices, visitors could also see what the car looked like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior in incredible detail. That is the true digitization of an industry segment and highlights the device-to-network-to-edge-to-cloud application relationship and how it can impact the user experience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;A programmable network unlocks more application use cases&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The programmability of the 5G network will truly enable application developers to utilize all the benefits of the underlying network. Programmability supports ease of use and enables CSPs, integrated software vendors (ISVs) and the ecosystem to have the right network-level APIs exposed so that applications can be optimized based on the network behavior and vice versa. Imagine, for instance, automatically pushing applications from a cloud region to the edge based on network latency and performance metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, 5G’s programmability is also about having the right tools available for developers to build and integrate applications on the network with zero-touch onboarding and validation. With this, we’ve come to the point where the network is now a “platform” for application innovation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;5G and edge will be all about the ecosystem&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;One thing is for certain: the shift to 5G will place tremendous focus on the ecosystem, and it needs to be an ecosystem that includes CSPs, public cloud providers, application developers and technology providers, all coming together to optimize the user experiences across industry applications. For instance, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2021/0629/ericsson-google-cloud-5g"&gt;Google Cloud and Ericsson recently announced our partnership to deliver 5G and edge cloud solutions for CSPs and enterprise&lt;/a&gt;.  In addition, Google Cloud is also teaming up with popular ISVs to deliver more than &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telecom-puts-google-cloud-partners-apps-at-the-edge"&gt;200 edge applications&lt;/a&gt; from 30-plus partners, all running on our cloud.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With collaboration across ISVs, cloud providers and network equipment providers, we are enabling the rapid delivery and deployment of new vertical services and applications, leveraging capabilities like &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos"&gt;Anthos&lt;/a&gt;, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as well as multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud provider service orchestration and global edge networks such as those provided by Google and telecom service providers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As members of the technology ecosystem, we talk about compute, storage and networking, but when it comes down to it, it’s about optimally placing these resources—whether in the cloud, at the provider core, at the edge or anywhere in between—to maximize the end-user experience. The openness and programmability of 5G lends itself to collaboration like never before. We predict that in 2022 and beyond, it will be all about the ecosystem coming together to leverage 5G and the edge to build innovations that we can’t yet imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn more, watch the full &lt;a href="https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/experience-centers/d-15/edge" target="_blank"&gt;Ericsson 5G Things CTO Focus fireside chat&lt;/a&gt;, where we discuss these topics and more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/networking/google-cloud-streams-augmented-reality/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/ARJeepHeroImage.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Streaming augmented reality with Google Cloud&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Accelerated by 5G, Google Cloud lets our customers stream mixed reality experiences to any device.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/ericsson-and-google-cloud-talk-5g-and-the-cloud/</guid><category>Networking</category><category>Anthos</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>At Ericsson and Google Cloud, imagining the future of edge and 5G</title><description>Google Cloud’s Bikash Koley and Ericsson’s Erik Ekudden discuss how the cloud and 5G can enable the next generation of interactive applications.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/ericsson-and-google-cloud-talk-5g-and-the-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Bikash Koley</name><title>VP and Head of Google Global Networking and Head of Technology and Strategy, Google Cloud for Telecommunications</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Erik Ekudden</name><title>SVP and Chief Technology Officer at Ericsson</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Google joins the O-RAN ALLIANCE to advance telecommunication networks</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/google-cloud-joins-o-ran-alliance/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;At Google, we believe that co-innovation with customers, partners, and technology vendors as part of a broader ecosystem is critical to accelerating industry digital transformation. From our contribution to open standards, to our commitment to open source and our continued focus and expansion of Google’s vibrant partner network, we are committed to drive transformative change in telecommunications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since announcing our comprehensive &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0305/google-cloud-telco-strategy"&gt;strategy for the telecommunications industry&lt;/a&gt; in 2020, we’ve been working closely with customers, partners, and industry bodies globally to help transform the industry together. Today, we’re excited to take another step forward and are proud to announce that we are joining the &lt;a href="https://www.o-ran.org/" target="_blank"&gt;O-RAN ALLIANCE,&lt;/a&gt; which is a world-wide community of mobile network operators, vendors, and research and academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Accelerating cloud-native network readiness&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to the evolution of mobile networks, Radio Access Network (RAN) is the most significant building block to reduce total cost of ownership, scale, and overall complexity. As a result, operators worldwide are now on the journey to apply principles of disaggregation, cloud, and software centricity to transform radio access. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We believe that industry-wide open reference architectures and interfaces for RAN are key to driving innovation across communication service provider (CSP) mobile networks—with the O-RAN ALLIANCE driving significant advances in the RAN layer and already gaining traction with a number of large CSPs who have become early adopters of the standard. O-RAN specifications will also create conditions for enhanced network security and enable a more competitive and vibrant RAN supplier ecosystem with faster innovation to improve user experience and unlock new CSP operating models. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Partnering with industry leaders&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;As its newest member, we’re excited to work alongside fellow ALLIANCE members, bringing the broad knowledge and expertise across Google to jointly drive and accelerate the realization of O-RAN initiatives:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;History of software innovation&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br/&gt;From programming languages like Go, to the Android mobile operating system that provides the foundation of billions of mobile devices across the world, to Kubernetes, which has become the default choice for container orchestration across the industry, Google has a long history of software innovation, and we’re eager to further solidify O-RAN’s journey to achieving truly open cloud software centricity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Hybrid and multicloud solutions to enable choice&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br/&gt;As 5G brings cloud, software, and network together, CSPs globally are embracing public cloud and multicloud for both IT and network transformation. Google Cloud’s solutions empower CSP developer ecosystems to seamlessly build and scale new applications across any environment, with Anthos providing a complete, open, hybrid, and modular solution that enables flexible deployment models across a wide range of RAN use cases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Network leadership&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;Over the past decade, we’ve seen the network evolve through the emergence of programmability, open APIs, declarative intents and data models, and early software definition of network functions. Over the coming years, we believe this journey will accelerate with the shift to cloud-native networking across the board, bringing in end-to-end multi-domain automation and rich analytics. We’re bringing Google’s experience in building our own scaled global network to drive greater innovation and accelerate O-RAN initiatives in this space.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Network AI &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;Over the next decade, companies will undergo massive transformation towards an autonomous and self-healing network. This digital transformation will require architecting, designing, and deploying intelligence across a distributed cloud network that is fundamentally powered by AI and closed loop automation. Our vision is to work with the O-RAN ALLIANCE to enable cloud-native intelligent networks that are secure, self-driving, and self-healing—bringing Google's wealth of software experience and global leadership in the areas of machine learning, massive data processing, and geospatial analytics to efficiently design, manage, and operate RAN intelligent controllers and network orchestrators, as well as create common data platforms for end-to-end network optimization powered by predictive machine learning solutions.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re excited by the journey that lies ahead and look forward to partnering with ALLIANCE members to help drive the O-RAN ambitions from vision into reality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Jun 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/google-cloud-joins-o-ran-alliance/</guid><category>Hybrid &amp; Multicloud</category><category>Networking</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Google joins the O-RAN ALLIANCE to advance telecommunication networks</title><description>Google Cloud joins O-RAN ALLIANCE to drive transformative change in telecommunications.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telco.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/google-cloud-joins-o-ran-alliance/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Amol Phadke</name><title>Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Ankur Jain</name><title>Distinguished Engineer, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Expanding partner solutions at the network edge</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/expanding-partner-solutions-at-the-network-edge/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;High-speed connectivity to the network edge is growing. As it does, organizations with presences at the edge have opportunities to apply digital technologies and cloud capabilities that can streamline business processes, create exciting new experiences for consumers, uncover insights from data at the edge, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Late last year, we announced a new initiative &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telecom-puts-google-cloud-partners-apps-at-the-edge"&gt;to bring partner solutions to the network edge&lt;/a&gt;. We were delighted with the response—at launch, more than 30 partners joined to deliver more than 200 solutions to the edge on Google Cloud. Today, our partners are supporting customers in industries like retail, media and entertainment, and manufacturing with solutions to manage data from connected machines on shop floors, deliver new digital retail experiences for shoppers, manage fleets of connected vehicles, and support many other use cases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, we’re delighted to expand this initiative, adding support for solutions from more than 20 additional partners. These solutions span use cases like video analytics and smart surveillance, edge data storage infrastructure, artificial intelligence, as well as network management and control.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;By bringing these solutions to Google Cloud, our partners are enabling the rapid delivery and deployment of new services and capabilities at the edge, which can leverage Google Cloud services and capabilities including Anthos, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and data analytics. Anthos will act as a consistent platform to deliver these solutions to the network edge, leveraging Google’s edge network as well as high-speed 5G connectivity from leading CSPs that are working with us to build this unique ecosystem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Partners joining our edge and ISV ecosystem today include:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://airhopcomm-web.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;AirHop Communications&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will provide its real-time, AI and ML-driven 4G/5G RAN automation and optimization solutions on Google Cloud, helping communications service providers deliver greater spectral efficiency and improved end-user experiences, while helping to reduce costs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.arrikto.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Arrikto&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will deliver its MLOps platform on Google Cloud, helping teams bring models to market more quickly, and deploy ML to the network edge with Anthos and Kubeflow.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.bitbrew.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;BitBrew&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a Danlaw company, will deliver its Cognitive Edge Compute and 5G Connectivity solutions on Google Cloud, simplifying the connectivity and management of edge devices with Data, OTA (Over The Air) &amp;amp; Analytics services for mobility and smart city initiatives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://carto.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;CARTO&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will bring its cloud-native geospatial platform to the edge on Google Cloud, enabling communications service providers to accelerate spatial analysis and application development by leveraging data at the network edge, Google BigQuery, and CARTO’s Spatial Extension.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.casa-systems.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Casa Systems&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is bringing its cloud-native 5G Core with ultra-low latency and multi-gigabit edge computing services to Google Cloud, helping communications service providers reduce end-to-end transport costs and converging mobile and fixed broadband user experiences at the service edge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.ciena.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Ciena&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will deliver its Adaptive Network and network automation software on Google Cloud, providing secure, high-speed, and elastic connectivity between customers and Google’s edge network.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.foghorn.io/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;FogHorn&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is bringing its Lightning™ Edge Platform and Solutions to Google Cloud, with native integrations providing edge-to-cloud AI and ML services, model retraining and auto publishing to FogHorn edge nodes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.f5.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;F5&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will deliver its BIG-IP, NGINX, Shape, and Volterra solutions on Google Cloud, extending secure application delivery, insights, and scale for any edge environment.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://highway9networks.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Highway9 Networks, Inc.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will deliver its 5G-ready edge cloud solutions for enterprises on Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.keysight.com/us/en/solutions/5g.html" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Keysight&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will provide its Edge-to-Core test solutions for O-RAN and 5G Core to help customers quickly validate new, cloud-native technologies and will deliver its comprehensive systems analysis capabilities to ensure end-to-end performance and operational efficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://kognition.ai/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Kognition AI&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a provider of enterprise cyber-physical threat detection systems, will deliver its patented AI software on Google Cloud, helping customers improve operations, increase security, and lower costs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.leverege.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Leverege&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will deliver its low-cost, massive-scale enterprise IoT solutions for asset tracking, remote monitoring, workflow optimization, and process automation on Google Cloud, with edge use cases across multiple industries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.netapp.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;NetApp&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will help customers manage and access data at the edge by delivering its edge storage infrastructure on Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://nxn.ae/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;NXN&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will offer its smart digital services integration and delivery platform, as well as its Command and Insights platform on Google Cloud, providing seamless access to its smart city control platform at the edge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://phenixrts.com/en-us/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Phenix Real Time Solutions&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will bring its real-time streaming platform to Google Cloud, enabling customers to deliver broadcast quality content with sub-second latency at a global scale.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://prosimo.io/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Prosimo.io&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will bring its cloud-native Application eXperience Infrastructure to the edge on Google Cloud, helping enable secure and optimized access to applications for users, and simplifying operations and application delivery for businesses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://quantiphi.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Quantiphi Inc.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will deploy its intelligent video analytics and low-latency edge AI solutions on Google Cloud, enabling smart surveillance, improved customer experience, and intelligent operations for 5G service providers and enterprises.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.section.io/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Section&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an Edge as a Service provider, will apply its capabilities in infrastructure provisioning, workload orchestration, scaling, monitoring, and traffic routing to Google Cloud, helping customers accelerate their edge strategies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt; &lt;a href="https://www.sigmoid.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Sigmoid&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;will deliver its open-source, real-time analytics and custom-AI solutions for enterprise customers on Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.vapor.io/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Vapor IO&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will bring its edge-to-edge automation, intelligent colocation, networking, and interconnection services to customers via Google Cloud, helping enable seamless, high-performance delivery of applications to the network edge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.voltdb.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;VoltDB&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is bringing its 5G- and IoT-optimized data platform to Google Cloud, empowering companies to deliver game-changing applications that unlock new revenue streams or prevent revenue loss through single-digit millisecond contextual decisioning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://zededa.com/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;ZEDEDA&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; will provide its zero-trust, cloud-based orchestration solution for distributed edge computing to help Google Cloud customers securely scale deployments of any edge application including AI/ML on choice of hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about running ISV applications at the edge with Google Cloud, please &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/contact?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=blog"&gt;reach out&lt;/a&gt; to your Google Cloud partner or representative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2021 13:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/expanding-partner-solutions-at-the-network-edge/</guid><category>Partners</category><category>Hybrid &amp; Multicloud</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Anthos</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/anthos_hvslCE9.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Expanding partner solutions at the network edge</title><description>Google Cloud’s Anthos for Telecom initiative plus the availability of 5G lets our partners run their apps on Anthos, at the edge.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/anthos_hvslCE9.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/expanding-partner-solutions-at-the-network-edge/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Amol Phadke</name><title>Managing Director, Telecom Industry Solutions at Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, we’re announcing Firmina, an open subsea cable being built by Google that will run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay. Firmina will be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable—a resilience boost at a time when reliable connectivity is more important than ever. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As people and businesses have come to depend on digital services for many aspects of their lives, Firmina will improve access to Google services for users in South America. With 12 fiber pairs, the cable will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America, giving users fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;img alt="Firmina subsea cable.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Firmina_subsea_cable.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Single-end power source capability is important for reliability, a key priority for Google’s network. With submarine cables, data travels as pulses of light inside the cable’s optical fibers. That light signal is amplified every 100 km with a high-voltage electrical current supplied at landing stations in each country. While shorter cable systems can enjoy the higher availability of power feeding from a single end, longer cables with large fiber-pair counts make this harder to do. Firmina breaks this barrier—connecting North to South America, the cable will be the longest ever to feature single-end power feeding capability. Achieving this record-breaking, highly-resilient design is accomplished by supplying the cable with a voltage 20% higher than with previous systems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Celebrating the world’s visionaries&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;We sought to honor a luminary who worked to advance human understanding and social justice. The cable is named after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825 - 1917), a Brazilian abolitionist and author whose 1859 novel, Úrsula, depicted life for Afro-Brazilians under slavery. A mixed-race woman and intellectual, Firmina is considered Brazil’s first novelist. With this cable, we’re thrilled to draw attention to her pioneering work and spirit. You can learn more about Firmina in this &lt;a href="https://www.google.com/doodles/maria-firmina-dos-reis-194th-birthday" target="_blank"&gt;Google Doodle&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Including Firmina, we now have investments in 16 subsea cables, such as Dunant, Equiano and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Echo, JGA, INDIGO, and Havfrue. We’re continuing our work of building out a &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#network"&gt;robust global network&lt;/a&gt; and infrastructure, which includes &lt;a href="https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/" target="_blank"&gt;Google data centers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#regions"&gt;Google Cloud regions&lt;/a&gt; around the world. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Learn more about our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure"&gt;infrastructure&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/infrastructure/googles-dunant-subsea-cable-is-now-ready-for-service/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/world_map1.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;The Dunant submarine cable system, crossing the Atlantic Ocean between Virginia Beach in the U.S. and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Jun 2021 13:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Firmina.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable</title><description>The new Firmina subsea cable will run from the eastern U.S. to Argentina, and will be the world’s longest cable cable powered by a single power source.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Firmina.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Bikash Koley</name><title>VP and Head of Google Global Networking and Head of Technology and Strategy, Google Cloud for Telecommunications</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Partnering with NSF to advance networking innovation</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/google-partnering-with-nsf-to-innovate-networking/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), joining other industry partners and federal agencies, as part of a combined &lt;a href="https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/042721.jsp" target="_blank"&gt;$40 million investment in academic research for Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation (NextG) Systems, or RINGS&lt;/a&gt;. In addition to funding, Google will offer expertise, research collaborations, infrastructure, and in-kind support for researchers and students as they advance knowledge and progress in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;NextG systems are future versions of today’s cellular, Wi-Fi, and satellite networks. By leveraging low-latency edge-cloud networking and network function virtualization, NextG systems have the potential to greatly expand capacity, bandwidth, and functionality—further enabling billions of people to connect with each other and millions of businesses to create brand-new use cases. These faster and higher-capacity systems will enable enhanced data streaming, communications, AI/ML-based analytics, and pervasive automation. This has the potential to support societal priorities such as education, transportation, public health and safety, defense, and critical infrastructure. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of course, any NextG system must be architected to offer end-to-end security, stability, and resiliency. A zero-trust and defense-in-depth approach will be central to the evolution of the NextG architecture. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At Google, we have a long history of fundamental &lt;a href="https://research.google/pubs/?area=networking" target="_blank"&gt;research in networking&lt;/a&gt;. This experience has helped us build a &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/understanding-google-cloud-network-edge-points"&gt;global and edge network&lt;/a&gt; infrastructure that is cloud-native, fully automated, software-defined, and extensively virtualized. We directly interconnect with all major internet service providers (ISPs) and telecom carriers, and we deliver traffic to users with very low latency. We’re also now working on a fully managed, open, and secure modern edge cloud platform—with capabilities such as zero-touch, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/endpoint-verification/docs/overview"&gt;verifiability&lt;/a&gt;, closed-loop automation, and more. This globally distributed edge-cloud platform is optimized for the most performant networking applications, such as radio-access networks, packer processing, and security. And our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/security/beyondprod"&gt;BeyondProd&lt;/a&gt; security framework offers a path towards modernizing the next generation of communication networks via cloud-native security models. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;U.S. institutions of higher education, individually and in collaboration, are welcome to apply for RINGS funding. Research projects will engage a diverse set of experts, educate the next generation of innovators and promote workforce development, while broadening participation of historically marginalized groups and institutions across the country. We’re eager to work closely with institutions selected through the RINGS program, to build a diverse and inclusive workforce in this research space. All research outcomes will be published to advance knowledge and progress in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re proud to &lt;a href="https://blog.google/technology/ai/partnering-nsf-human-ai-collaboration/" target="_blank"&gt;continue our strong partnership with NSF&lt;/a&gt; in promoting innovation and technology leadership. We look forward to advancing new solutions in networking systems together with the academic community. As we said last week, &lt;a href="https://blog.google/perspectives/kent-walker/seizing-moment-framework-american-innovation/" target="_blank"&gt;we now have a historic opportunity&lt;/a&gt; to seize the moment and cultivate a national strategy around innovation in science and technology. Our support of RINGS is just one small, but important step in that direction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/google-partnering-with-nsf-to-innovate-networking/</guid><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Systems</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Networking</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/networking_nedNYmJ.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Partnering with NSF to advance networking innovation</title><description>Google is partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation to support academic research for Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation (NextG) Systems, or RINGS.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/networking_nedNYmJ.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/google-partnering-with-nsf-to-innovate-networking/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Bikash Koley</name><title>VP and Head of Google Global Networking and Head of Technology and Strategy, Google Cloud for Telecommunications</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Shailesh Shukla</name><title>Vice President and General Manager, Networking, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Leaf Space: Enabling next-gen satellites on Google Cloud</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/startups/leaf-space-enabling-next-gen-satellites-on-google-cloud/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a revolution happening in the space industry. Spurred on by low rocket launch costs, component miniaturization, and digitalization, more than 15,000 satellites will launch over the next decade&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;—more than have been launched throughout the prior six decades—studying the Earth’s weather and environment, helping people and things communicate in remote locations, monitoring critical infrastructure, backhauling cellular traffic, and performing other important tasks. And if all goes as planned, Leaf Space’s “Ground Station as a Service” which runs on Google Cloud will be there to help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of these new satellites will be launched into low Earth orbit (LEO). Unlike traditional broadcast TV satellites, which operate in a geostationary (GEO) orbit approximately 36,000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, LEO satellites are much closer to Earth, typically at an altitude of 500 to 2,000 kilometers. For communications missions, this reduces the latency, or the amount of time that it takes a signal to travel from the ground to the satellite and back, and increases the capacity density, or the number of bits per square kilometer that the satellite can deliver. For Earth observation satellites, this increases the resolution of images or other observations that the satellite is making. LEO satellites are also cheaper and faster to manufacture and launch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a downside to using LEO. Unlike GEO satellites which appear to be fixed in the sky, LEO satellites move relative to the Earth’s surface. As a result, for a specific LEO satellite, there is no single ground antenna that will always have that satellite within its field of view. Uninterrupted connectivity between the ground and the satellite requires multiple antennas that are distributed around the world. The number of antennas can be reduced if interruptions to space-to-ground communications are allowed, but even in that scenario, several sites are desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This creates a problem for new satellite operators. Launching even one satellite requires a worldwide network of antennas, and most of the time, those antennas will be idle when the satellite is not overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Ground Station as a Service&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Enter companies like Leaf Space. Since it was founded in 2014, Leaf Space’s mission has been to simplify access to space with global infrastructure composed of antennas, processing equipment, and software that it offers as a service to satellite operators. A satellite operator can lease time on Leaf Space’s ground network, and when a satellite is within its field of view, use Leaf Space’s antennas and other equipment to communicate between the satellite and ground. And because an antenna can be shared among many satellites and even satellite operators via a reservation system (much like a conference room that’s reserved by different teams over the course of the day), this lowers operating costs by creating a more efficient utilization of resources. This model is known as Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS). Today, Leaf Space operates a network of eight such GSaaS stations across Europe and New Zealand with plans to expand around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Leaf Space software operating on Google Cloud&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Network Cloud Engine (NCE) is the brain of Leaf Space’s GSaaS solution. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;NCE manages multiple satellite missions by ingesting relevant mission constraints, automatically optimizing a schedule of contacts between the satellites and the antennas, orchestrating the activity of the network by automatically configuring signal processing equipment at the ground stations, and enabling control and visibility for satellite mission control center operations teams.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;NCE orchestrates the entire ground station network operation, while edge resources are utilized to handle baseband processing (the process needed to extract bits and bytes from an RF signal). You can see the flow of data from a satellite to its mission control center (and vice versa) in the diagram below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Network_Cloud_Engine.1000064920000973.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="Network Cloud Engine.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Network_Cloud_Engine.1000064920000973.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;NCE runs entirely on Google Cloud. A member of Google Cloud’s startup program, Leaf Space chose Google Cloud for the wealth and maturity of its services, its worldwide regions, and its high-speed network backbone. NCE uses Google Cloud services for network connectivity, data transfer, processing, and software control and orchestration. These products enabled Leaf Space’s engineering team to save several months of development time relative to implementing these services from scratch, start commercial operations and continuously roll-out upgrades and new features on a weekly basis. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Key solution design decisions and performance metrics&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In designing NCE, Leaf Space took advantage of Google Cloud services in order to establish a secure, reliable, scalable, easy to maintain and efficient system by virtualizing major components of a typical ground station network backbone and avoiding any human-in-the-loop process. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;NCE is composed of several components. The main ones, such as scheduling, ground station control, data transfer, routing, and APIs are built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Additional specific tasks are handled through Cloud Functions, Cloud Load Balancer and Compute Engine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Building the NCE on Google Cloud has enabled Leaf Space to achieve the following objectives:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leverage automated continuous deployment via Cloud Build and source repositories&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Utilize a multi-server distributed system with liveness probes to ensure zero downtime&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Load-balance traffic with fast autoscaling for high loads &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoid wasting compute resources for low-load services&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eliminate operating system maintenance tasks, allowing more focus on development&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Google Cloud services, Leaf Space also reduced time-to-market of new features from weeks to days, leveraging all the automated tools for code management: any time a new tag is pushed, the code is validated, a docker container is built and set in production on GKE. A key advantage of this approach is that the team can deploy new capabilities with zero downtime, a significant advantage for a system that must run at high SLAs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Leaf Space solution utilizes Cloud Function and Kubernetes Engines, Google products that are tightly integrated with other services such as Pub/Sub and Cloud Storage. It decreases time to process logs, creating alerts to monitor the GSaaS network and providing visual analysis of the data received from the satellites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The solution is inherently scalable, making it easy for Leaf Space to add new ground stations or new customers to the production environment and to handle surges in demand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/A_single_NCE_ground_stati.1000064720000986.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="A single NCE ground station and user running on Google Cloud.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/A_single_NCE_ground_stati.1000064720000986.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;A single NCE ground station and user running on Google Cloud.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;User experience with using cloud-powered GSaaS&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With Google Cloud services such GKE, Scheduler, Redis Cloud Memory Store, Pub/Sub and CloudSQL, Leaf Space was able to create a GSaaS solution that customers report is easy and straightforward to use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/User_experience_with_usin.1000062920000510.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="User experience with using cloud-powered GSaaS.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/User_experience_with_usin.1000062920000510.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;To access the system, a user simply provides their spacecraft details, such as orbital parameters, launch date, and baseband configuration. NCE then creates a user account and configures the GSaaS network, including accounting for any applicable regulatory requirements, such as the user’s spectrum license. The mission constraints that the automatic scheduling service needs are set through the API, and NCE then creates an optimized schedule for communications between the satellite and the antenna network. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When it comes time to establish a link between the satellite and the ground, NCE spins up the edge baseband processing chain and enables the data routing between the active ground station and the user interface. Any packets that are received, demodulated, and decoded are directly forwarded in real-time  to the user or the satellite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-cc2Bu7Bd-bc-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=cc2Bu7Bd-bc"&gt;&lt;img alt="Here is the video of the demo that shows an antenna moving and data flowing." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/cc2Bu7Bd-bc/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-cc2Bu7Bd-bc-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="cc2Bu7Bd-bc" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=cc2Bu7Bd-bc" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What happens to the downlinked data?&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once the data reaches the user, customers can perform further processing and extract useful information from it, for example performing weather monitoring from GPS occultation sensors, ship detection from a SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) acquisition or deforestation trend analysis from optical images. All these analyses can be done directly in the cloud environment by the user using Google Cloud Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning services. The ultimate end-product can then be easily stored and distributed to end customers. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In short, Google Cloud provides an efficient way for Leaf Space to provide GSaaS services to the space ecosystem and further open the doors for development of the space economy. Having the entire processing chain in the cloud from the acquisition phase (through the GSaaS) to data analytics and distribution significantly lowers the delivery latencies and allows efficient distribution of the data. Together, Leaf Space and Google Cloud look forward to enabling the next generation of LEO satellites.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our startup page to &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/startup?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;amp;utm_campaign=FY21-Q1-global-demandgen-website-cs-startup_program_mc&amp;amp;utm_content=whm_blog_post_referral"&gt;learn more&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href="https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/startup/dl-cd.html?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;amp;utm_campaign=FY21-Q1-global-demandgen-website-cs-startup_program_mc&amp;amp;utm_content=whm_blog_post_referral" target="_blank"&gt;apply&lt;/a&gt; for our Startup Program, and &lt;a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfowlgaSsVDQojZ1JDDhRMfZ5TAFY6do4UPZXqkuToX63K2dQ/viewform" target="_blank"&gt;sign up for our monthly startup newsletter&lt;/a&gt; to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;i&gt;A big thank you to Jai Dialani, Leaf Space Sr. Business Developer and the entire Leaf Space team, for creating this solution and your contributions to this blog post.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;i&gt;1. Euroconsult study; &lt;a href="https://www.euroconsult-ec.com/research/WS319_free_extract_2019.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;https://www.euroconsult-ec.com/research/WS319_free_extract_2019.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/data-analytics/glidefinder-how-we-built-a-platform-on-google-cloud-that-can-monitor-wildfires/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Glidefind.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;GlideFinder: How we built a platform on Google Cloud that can monitor wildfires&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Dmitry Kryuk, founder and CTO of GlideFinder, shares how they built a platform that can locate wildfires, alert subscribers, and provide ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/startups/leaf-space-enabling-next-gen-satellites-on-google-cloud/</guid><category>Customers</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Startups</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/gcp_satellites.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Leaf Space: Enabling next-gen satellites on Google Cloud</title><description>A new generation of low Earth orbit satellites is coming online with the help of Leaf Space’s Ground Station as a Service running on Google Cloud.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/gcp_satellites.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/startups/leaf-space-enabling-next-gen-satellites-on-google-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Giovanni Pandolfi Bortoletto</name><title>Chief Strategy Officer at Leaf Space</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Vadim Astakhov</name><title>Analytics Specialist, Cloud Customer Engineer</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Four ways CSPs can harness data, automation, and AI to create business value</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/new-study-from-analysys-mason-on-telecom-provider-technology/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Telecommunications companies sit on a veritable goldmine of data they can use to drive new business opportunities, improve customer experiences, and increase efficiencies. There’s so much data, in fact, that a significant challenge lies in ingesting, processing, refining, and using that data efficiently enough to inform decision-making as quickly as possible—often in near real-time.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to a &lt;a href="https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/tackling-telco-challenges/dl-cd.html?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;amp;utm_campaign=FY21-Q1-global-jointpartner-website-other-analysys_mason_telco_whitepaper&amp;amp;utm_content=whitepaper" target="_blank"&gt;new study by Analysys Mason&lt;/a&gt;, telecommunications data volumes are growing worldwide at 20% CAGR, and network data traffic is expected to reach 13 zettabytes by 2025. To stay relevant as the industry evolves, communications service providers (CSPs) need to manage and monetize their data more effectively to:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deliver new user experiences and B2B2X services, with the “X” being customers and entities in previously untapped industries, and unlock new revenue streams.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transform operations by harnessing data, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) to drive new efficiencies, improved network performance, and decreased CAPEX/OPEX across the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here are four key data management and analytics challenges CSPs face, and how cloud solutions can help. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;1. Reimagining the user experience means CSPs need to solve for near-real-time data analytics challenges.&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider being able to suggest offers to customers at the right place and time, based on their interactions. Or imagine being able to maximize revenue generation by dynamically adjusting offers to macro and micro groups based upon trends you discover during a campaign. These types of programs, which reduce churn and increase up-sell/cross-sell, are made possible when you can correlate your data across systems and get actionable insights at near real-time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, when it comes to effective decision-making in near real-time, lightning-speed is critical. Low latency is required for use cases like delivering location-based offers while customers are still on-site, or detecting fraud fast enough during a transaction to minimize losses. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud vendors can offer the speed and scale to tackle streaming data required for near-real-time data processing. At Google, we understand these requirements because they are core to our business, and we’ve developed the technologies to do so at scale. Google Cloud’s &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery"&gt;BigQuery&lt;/a&gt;, for example, is a serverless and highly scalable cloud data warehouse that supports &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/streaming-data-into-bigquery"&gt;streaming ingestion&lt;/a&gt; and super-fast queries at petabyte scale. Google infrastructure technologies like &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/new-blog-series-bigquery-explained-overview"&gt;Dremel, Colossus, Jupiter and Borg&lt;/a&gt; that underpin BigQuery were developed to address Google’s global data scalability challenges. And Google Cloud’s full &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/stream-analytics"&gt;stream analytics&lt;/a&gt; solution is built upon Pub/Sub and Dataflow, and supports the ingestion, processing, and analysis of fluctuating volumes of data for near real-time business insights. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, CSPs can also take advantage of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos"&gt;Google Cloud Anthos&lt;/a&gt;, which offers the ability to place workloads closer to the customer, whether within an operator’s own data center, across clouds, or even at the edge, enabling the speed required for latency sensitive use cases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What’s more, according to Justin van der Lande, principal analyst at Analysys Mason, “real-time use cases require an action to take place based on changes in streaming data, which predicts or signifies a fresh action.” They also require constant model validation and optimization. Therefore, using ML tools like TensorFlow in the cloud can help improve models and prevent them from degrading. Cloud-based services also let CSP developers build, deploy and train ML models through APIs or a management platform, so models can be deployed quickly with the appropriate validation, testing, and governance. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/automl"&gt;Google Cloud AutoML&lt;/a&gt;enables users with limited ML expertise to train high-quality models specific to their business needs. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2. Driving CSP operational efficiencies requires streamlining fragmented and complex sets of tools.&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over time, many CSPs have built up highly fragmented and complex sets of software tools, platforms, and integrations for data management and analysis. A legacy of M&amp;amp;A activity over years means different departments or operating companies may have their own tools, which adds to the complexity of procuring and maintaining them—and can also impact an operator’s ability to make changes and roll out new functionalities quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud providers offer CSPs access to advanced data and analytics tools with rich capabilities that are continuously updated. Google Cloud, for instance, offers &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/looker"&gt;Looker&lt;/a&gt;, which enables organizations to connect, analyze, and visualize data across Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, or on-premises databases, and is ideal for streaming applications. In addition, hyperscale cloud vendors work with a wide ecosystem of technology partners, enabling operators to adopt more standardised data tools that support a wider variety of use cases and are more open to new requirements. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0305/google-cloud-amdocs-partnership"&gt;Google Cloud partnered with Amdocs&lt;/a&gt;, helping CSPs consolidate, organize, and manage data more effectively in the cloud to lower costs, improve customer experiences, and drive new business opportunities. Amdocs DataONE extracts, transforms, and organizes data using a telco-specific and TM Forum-compliant Amdocs Logical Data Model. The solution runs on &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sql"&gt;Google Cloud SQL&lt;/a&gt;, a fully managed and scalable relational database solution that allows you to more efficiently organize and improve the accessibility, availability, and visibility of your operational and analytical data. The Amdocs data solution can also integrate with BigQuery to take advantage of built-in ML. Finally, &lt;a href="https://www.amdocs.com/blog/amdocs-voices/why-every-cloud-modernization-must-start-well-planned-data-migration" target="_blank"&gt;Amdocs Cloud Services&lt;/a&gt;offers a practice to help CSPs migrate, manage and organize their data so they can extract the strategic insights needed to maximize business value.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-video"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module article-video "&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;a class="h-c-video h-c-video--marquee" data-glue-modal-disabled-on-mobile="true" data-glue-modal-trigger="uni-modal-LFhtg_RqsIU-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=LFhtg_RqsIU"&gt;&lt;img alt="Telcos are using cloud and AI to keep up with the changing needs of customers. AI and Cloud can help reduce complexity and costs, enable smart decision making in real time, and help maximize value per customer. Gil Rosen, President and GM of Amdocs is sharing how Amdocs is driving data innovation through the partnership with Google Cloud and enabling the Telco industry." src="//img.youtube.com/vi/LFhtg_RqsIU/maxresdefault.jpg"/&gt;&lt;svg class="h-c-video__play h-c-icon h-c-icon--color-white" role="img"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-youtube-icon"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-modal--video" data-glue-modal="uni-modal-LFhtg_RqsIU-" data-glue-modal-close-label="Close Dialog"&gt;&lt;a class="glue-yt-video" data-glue-yt-video-autoplay="true" data-glue-yt-video-height="99%" data-glue-yt-video-vid="LFhtg_RqsIU" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=LFhtg_RqsIU" ng-cloak=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;3. Leveraging cloud and automation can help CSPs reduce cost and overhead as data volumes continue to rise.&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the most powerful motivations for CSPs to adopt a cloud-based data infrastructure may be the prospect of lowering operational and capital costs. Analysys Mason predicts that IT and software capital spending for CSPs will approach $45 billion by 2025, and IT operational expenses will be more than double that amount. These costs are set to rise, as operators support new digital services and growing data volumes. With cloud services, you pay for the capacity you use, not the servers you own. This not only saves on infrastructure-related capital costs, but it also takes advantage of the efficiencies cloud computing achieves through scale and means that all maintenance and updates are built into a predictable monthly bill.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, CSPs experience demand peaks and valleys daily and annually to accommodate busy internet traffic hours and high-audience events, like the Super Bowl. However, building infrastructure to accommodate these peaks wastes resources and reduces your return on capital. Customer demand may also fluctuate beyond these expected cycles, and large workloads like big data queries or ad hoc analytics and reports also make it difficult to predict your capacity needs. Cloud computing offers fast scaling up and down—even autoscaling—that isn’t always easy to do with on-premises systems. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;4. Increasing customer lifetime value requires high quality and complete data for timely decision-making.&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, CSPs need to utilize data and analytics to better understand how to engage with customers and deliver greater, more personalized services in order to increase overall customer lifetime value. This requires the ability to analyze and act on a complete set of quality data quick enough to inform sound decision-making. For example, without high quality and timely data on your most valued customers, you may not be able to spot customers who are about to churn or conversely, you may offer discounts to customers who were not about to churn in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to van der Lande, there are five main attributes required of a good data set: data quality, governance, speed, completeness, and shareability (see Chart 1). Put another way, your data is only as good as how fast you can capture/transform/load it from a myriad of back-end systems, front-end systems, and networks, how complete it is, and how easily you can share a 360o view with the right decision-makers. It is also important to consider how well that data is governed. Considerations such as data lineage, data source, categorization of PII data, and regulatory requirements are very important as you look to build trust in the data quality and ultimately the insights. What’s more, as data volumes grow, the more difficult it is to ensure its quality, governance, and completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--medium h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--4 h-c-grid__col--offset-4 "&gt;&lt;img alt="_main CSP challenges.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/_main_CSP_challenges.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;The main CSP challenges related to data (Source: Analysys Mason)&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Operators can create a single operational data store in the cloud and use ML-driven preparation tools to improve data quality and completeness. Cloud vendors can also provide enterprise-grade security tools with the ability to manage access rights, as well as automated administration to ensure proper governance. The cloud supports near real-time, end-to-end streaming pipelines for big data analytics that would otherwise quickly strain in-house systems. In addition, solutions like &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0714/bigqueryomni"&gt;Google Cloud's BigQuery Omni powered by Anthos&lt;/a&gt; give CSPs a consistent data analysis and infrastructure management experience, regardless of their deployment environment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/telecommunications"&gt;telecommunications industry&lt;/a&gt; has a unique opportunity to mine the massive amount of data its systems generate to improve customer experiences, operate more efficiently, create innovative new products, and uncover use cases to generate new revenue opportunities faster. But as long as CSPs rely on rigid on-premises infrastructure, they’re unlikely to capitalize on this valuable resource. In a world where near real-time decision-making is more critical than ever, the cloud can help provide the agility, scale, and flexibility necessary to process and analyze this growing volume of data to remain not just relevant, but competitive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/tackling-telco-challenges/dl-cd.html?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;amp;utm_campaign=FY21-Q1-global-jointpartner-website-other-analysys_mason_telco_whitepaper&amp;amp;utm_content=whitepaper" target="_blank"&gt;Download the complete Analysys Mason whitepaper&lt;/a&gt;, co-sponsored with &lt;a href="https://www.amdocs.com/amdocs-next/data-intelligence" target="_blank"&gt;Amdocs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/wireless-network/5g-technology-overview.html" target="_blank"&gt;Intel&lt;/a&gt;, to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/partners/speeding-up-cloud-native-5g-networks-with-intel-and-google-cloud/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Blog_Networking02_1.max-500x500.jpg')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Partnering with Intel to accelerate cloud-native 5G&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;See how Google Cloud and Intel are partnering to make it easier for telco companies to help customers use 5G networks and deliver edge ap...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/new-study-from-analysys-mason-on-telecom-provider-technology/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Data Analytics</category><category>Telecommunications</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telecom.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Four ways CSPs can harness data, automation, and AI to create business value</title><description>Check out new research from Analysys Mason on how communication service providers (CSPs) can take advantage of data analytics, automation, and AI.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/telecom.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/telecommunications/new-study-from-analysys-mason-on-telecom-provider-technology/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Don Tirsell</name><title>Head of Strategic Partnerships, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Vivek Gupta</name><title>Director, Network AI and Telecom Partnerships, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>TELUS International migrates key customer experience app to Google Cloud</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/cloud-migration/telus-international-migrates-key-app-to-google-cloud/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;As more services and applications go online, ensuring a frictionless customer experience is vital to building brand loyalty, capturing more sales, and optimizing profits. But if your underlying technology isn’t reliable, it’s easy to lose customers to the competition. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href="https://www.telusinternational.com/" target="_blank"&gt;TELUS International&lt;/a&gt;, a leading digital customer experience innovator, ensuring the reliability of its online tools and services is crucial to its team’s mission to design, build, and deliver high-tech, high-touch customer experiences for some of the world’s most respected brands. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;TELUS International bundles&lt;a href="https://www.verint.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Verint&lt;/a&gt;, a Google Cloud Partner and workforce-management application, with its Cloud Contact Center platform to help North American call centers optimize customer service activities on the phone and online. TELUS International also uses Verint’s solution internally for its business process outsourcing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;So, as part of its own digital transformation journey, TELUS International migrated &lt;a href="https://www.verint.com/engagement/our-offerings/solutions/workforce-engagement/" target="_blank"&gt;Verint&lt;/a&gt;—a workforce-optimization-management application—from its legacy on-premises data center to Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This move will help its global service centers optimize customer service activities for improved performance, by leveraging automation and AI-based analytics and insights to achieve better business outcomes..  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Currently, TELUS International has approximately 30,000 users on the Verint platform, so ensuring that it’s running on a reliable cloud platform like Google Cloud is vital.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Fast, painless migration&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Martin Viljoen, VP of Information Technology at TELUS International, says the Verint migration from on-premise to Google Cloud was fast and seamless. “It took us about a week to stand up the infrastructure, which could have taken up to a year or more on-premises,” he says, given the traditional back and forth with hardware vendors to beef up the data center and solve problems along the way. “We didn’t have to worry about hardware availability on the fly. If you miss something, you just click and add it. You don't have to write up a purchase order and wait for six weeks for delivery,” with much more time needed to get the new hardware operational. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In all, Viljoen says it took only 4–6 weeks to go from system design to production. “Everything we needed was readily available,” he says. “And at the end of the day, it was very successful.” &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Simple, quick provisioning&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every migration has its challenges, but TELUS International found this project’s ‘bumps in the road’ much easier to navigate in Google Cloud. For example, Viljoen says the company started with a load balancer which was inexpensive but didn’t provide all the functionality needed. “We just went down the menu and selected the F5 load balancer,” which the company is currently using on-premises. “It was a very simple, very quick provisioning process and it proved why we are in the cloud. You can just pick any service if or when needed.” He says doing the same thing with an off-the-shelf load balancer and running into the same issue would have delayed the project for months. . &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Getting F5 configured for the cloud was also easy. The company simply replicated its on-premises configuration in Google Cloud. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;One-click backup&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Backing up into Google Cloud is also simple for TELUS International. “All you do is right-click,” says Viljoen. “On-premises, I would have to order oodles of bandwidth or buy a massive storage array. We're also backing up our on-premises data center into Google Cloud because it's so easy to do. It's a no-brainer.” &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Exceptional performance&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;With Verint Workforce Engagement and the Google Cloud Platform, TELUS has a world-class customer engagement platform to empower the remote and globally distributed workforce to support exceptional customer experiences, while gaining real-time insight into business operations for adjustment as needed to meet today’s ever-changing demands both within contact centers and throughout the enterprise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;TELUS International’s clients are benefiting from improved performance on Google Cloud. “On a server, antivirus software is running and it eats up half of your resources.” He says customers with resource-intensive jobs have reported dramatic improvements in speed, getting reports in minutes instead of hours. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a result of all these gains, TELUS International’s plan is to migrate more of Verint to Google Cloud, including key components of the application’s workforce management solution as well as its call and screen recording feature. Having this data in Google Cloud will make it more accessible and open up new possibilities for data analytics and integration with other services, such as the company’s telephony platform, which is also on Google Cloud. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Viljoen says, “We're still at the low-hanging-fruit stage with Google Cloud, and we're going to get deeper into it in the platform. The next step is to integrate other services that either our company or our clients are mandating. We’re a growing and evolving global organization. Having incremental tools and  services in the cloud has made all aspects of our business a lot easier, including our integrations. Once things are in the cloud, it's just a lot simpler to enable our business.” &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At Google Cloud, we’re here to help you craft the right migration for you and your business just like we did with TELUS International. Get started by &lt;a href="https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/tco-assessment-19/form.html" target="_blank"&gt;signing up for a free migration cost assessment&lt;/a&gt;, or visit our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/migration-center"&gt;data center migration solutions&lt;/a&gt; page to learn more. Let’s get migrating!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/remote-work/telus-runs-vdi-on-google-cloud-during-covid-closures/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_GCP.max-500x500.png')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;How TELUS International got employees back to work with virtual desktops&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;How TELUS deployed VDI to let agents work from home during COVID-19 pandemic&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/cloud-migration/telus-international-migrates-key-app-to-google-cloud/</guid><category>Customers</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Cloud Migration</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Blog_CloudMigration_C.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>TELUS International migrates key customer experience app to Google Cloud</title><description>For TELUS International, the process of migrating a key app to Google Cloud was surprisingly easy, and delivered much needed performance.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Blog_CloudMigration_C.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/cloud-migration/telus-international-migrates-key-app-to-google-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>James Lambe</name><title>Managing Director, Google Cloud Canada</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Partnering with Intel to accelerate cloud-native 5G</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/partners/speeding-up-cloud-native-5g-networks-with-intel-and-google-cloud/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Communications service providers are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies to harness the potential of 5G not only as a connectivity solution, but also as a business services platform for delivering applications to the network edge. We announced &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-cloud-unveils-strategy-telecommunications-industry"&gt;our telecommunications industry strategy&lt;/a&gt; last year to help Communication Service Providers address the growing demands of enterprise customers to take advantage of cloud capabilities with 5G connectivity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We believe that by partnering across the telecommunications stack—with application providers, carriers and communications service providers, hardware providers, and global telecoms—we can decrease the cost and time-to-market needed for the telecommunications industry to shift to cloud-native 5G, and open new lines of business for communications service providers as they deliver cloud-native 5G for enterprises.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As we continue to grow cloud-native services for the telecommunications industry, we’re excited to announce a collaboration with Intel to develop reference architectures and integrated solutions for communications service providers to accelerate their deployment of 5G and edge network solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The next wave of network transformation is fueled by 5G and is driving a rapid transition to cloud-native technologies,” said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Network Platforms Group. “As communications service providers build out their 5G network infrastructure, our efforts with Google Cloud and the broader ecosystem will help them deliver agile, scalable solutions for emerging 5G and edge use cases.” &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under this partnership, we’ll work closely with Intel in three main areas: accelerating the ability of communications service providers to deploy their Virtualized RAN (vRAN) and Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) solutions by providing next-generation infrastructure and hardware, launching new lab environments to help communications service providers innovate on cloud-native 5G, and making it easier for them to deliver business applications to the network edge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;5G vRAN on Google Cloud’s Anthos with Intel cloud-native platforms and solutions&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the industry’s transition to 5G and growth in edge services, Google Cloud and Intel will also collaborate on vRAN solutions. vRAN can bring significant benefits for operators, including improved network performance and spectral efficiency, cost efficiencies, and flexible deployment models. At the same time, these solutions present communications service providers with stringent network, timing, and processing demands. The ability to deploy, manage, and upgrade network functions is critical to enable 5G vRAN deployments at scale.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To help communications service providers streamline the rollout of vRAN, and therefore 5G, we will leverage Google Cloud’s global infrastructure and capabilities alongside solutions from Intel, including:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intel’s &lt;a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/videos/an-overview-of-flexran-sw-wireless-access-solutions.html" target="_blank"&gt;FlexRAN reference software&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intel’s cloud-native Open Network Edge Service Software (OpenNESS) deployment model, and best practices applicable to Anthos;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and hardware infrastructure based on Intel Xeon processors;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New reference architecture and solutions to accelerate 5G vRAN with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos"&gt;Anthos, an application platform&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Network Functions Validation Lab&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Google Cloud will jointly launch a Network Functions Validation lab and collaborate with Intel to support vendors in testing, optimizing, and validating their core network functions running on Google Cloud’s Anthos for Telecom platform. This lab environment will expand to help customers conceive, plan, and validate their 5G and edge application strategies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Delivering ISV applications to the network edge&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the rollout of 5G networks, communications service providers have an opportunity to transform the network edge into an enterprise services platform, opening up new lines of business by delivering enterprise applications to the edge. For example, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telecom-puts-google-cloud-partners-apps-at-the-edge"&gt;we recently announced&lt;/a&gt; an initiative to deliver 200+ partner applications to the edge via Google Cloud’s network and 5G.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to network functions, to make it even easier for communications service providers to deliver applications to the edge, we will collaborate with Intel to develop edge solutions with Intel compute-optimized technology. We’ll also work closely with Intel to create blueprints and solutions to accelerate edge transformation in key industries, such as manufacturing or retail.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about our telecommunications industry offerings and our partnership with Intel, reach out to your &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/contact?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=blog"&gt;Google Cloud partner or representative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telecom-puts-google-cloud-partners-apps-at-the-edge/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Anthos.max-500x500.png')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;Bringing partner applications to the edge with Google Cloud&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Google Cloud’s Anthos for Telecom initiative plus the availability of 5G lets our partners run their apps on Anthos, at the edge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2021 14:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/partners/speeding-up-cloud-native-5g-networks-with-intel-and-google-cloud/</guid><category>Networking</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Partners</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/networking.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Partnering with Intel to accelerate cloud-native 5G</title><description>See how Google Cloud and Intel are partnering to make it easier for telco companies to help customers use 5G networks and deliver edge applications.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/networking.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/partners/speeding-up-cloud-native-5g-networks-with-intel-and-google-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Shailesh Shukla</name><title>Vice President and General Manager, Networking, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>What’s in a name? Understanding the Google Cloud network “edge”</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/understanding-google-cloud-network-edge-points/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google is &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-a-leader-in-gartner-cips-mq"&gt;dedicated to building infrastructure&lt;/a&gt; that lets you modernize and run your workloads, and connect with more users, no matter where they are in the world. Part of this infrastructure is our extensive global &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/#network"&gt;network&lt;/a&gt;, which provides best-in-class connectivity to Google Cloud customers, and our &lt;a href="https://peering.google.com/#/" target="_blank"&gt;edge network&lt;/a&gt;, which lets you connect with ISPs and end customers. &lt;/p&gt;When it comes to choosing how you connect to Google Cloud, we provide a variety of flexible options that optimize performance and cost. But when it comes to the Google network edge, what constitutes an edge point? Depending on your requirements and connectivity preferences, your organization may view different demarcation points in our network as the “edge,” each of which performs traffic handoffs in their own way. For example, a telco customer might consider the edge to be where Google Global Caches (GGC) are located, rather than an edge point of presence (POP) where peering occurs. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this blog post, we describe the various network points of presence within our edge, how they connect to Google Cloud, and how traffic handoffs occur. Armed with this information, you can make a more informed decision about how best to connect to Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/cloud_network_diagram.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="cloud network diagram.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/cloud_network_diagram.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;Click to enlarge&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;GCP regions and zones&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to think about when considering your edge options is where your workloads run in Google Cloud. Google Cloud hosts compute resources in multiple locations worldwide, which comprise different &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones"&gt;regions and zones&lt;/a&gt;. A region includes data centers in a specific geographical location where you can host your resources. Regions have three or more zones. For example, the us-west1 region denotes a region on the west coast of the United States that has three zones: us-west1-a, us-west1-b, and us-west1-c.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_regions_and_zones.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="gcp regions and zones.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_regions_and_zones.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;Click to enlarge&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Edge POPs&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/edge-locations"&gt;edge POPs&lt;/a&gt; are where we &lt;a href="https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure" target="_blank"&gt;connect Google's network to the Internet via peering&lt;/a&gt;. We're present on over &lt;a href="https://www.peeringdb.com/net/433" target="_blank"&gt;180 internet exchanges and at over 160 interconnection facilities&lt;/a&gt; around the world. Google operates a large, global meshed network that connects our edge POPs to our data centers. By operating an extensive global network of interconnection points, we can bring Google traffic closer to our peers, thereby reducing their costs, latency, and providing end users with a better experience. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google directly interconnects with all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the vast majority of traffic from Google's network to our customers is transmitted via direct interconnections with the client's ISP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Cloud CDN&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/cdn"&gt;Cloud CDN&lt;/a&gt; (Content Delivery Network) uses Google's globally distributed edge POPs to cache Cloud content close to end users. Cloud CDN relies on infrastructure at edge POPs that Google uses to cache content associated with its own web properties that serve billions of users. This approach brings Cloud content closer to customers and end users, and connects individual POPs into as many networks as possible. This reduces latency and ensures that we have capacity for large traffic spikes (for example, for streaming media events or holiday sales).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/cloud_cdn_locations.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="cloud cdn locations.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/cloud_cdn_locations.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;Click to enlarge&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Cloud Interconnect POPs&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/interconnect/concepts/dedicated-overview"&gt;Dedicated Interconnect&lt;/a&gt; provides direct physical connections between your on-premises network and Google's network. Dedicated Interconnect enables you to efficiently transfer large amounts of data between networks. For Dedicated Interconnect, your network must physically meet Google's network in a supported colocation facility, also known as an Interconnect connection location. This facility is where a vendor, the colocation facility provider, provisions a circuit between your network and a Google point of presence. You may also use &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/interconnect/concepts/partner-overview"&gt;Partner Interconnect&lt;/a&gt; to connect to Google through a supported service provider. Today, you can provision an Interconnect to Google Cloud in these &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/interconnect/concepts/choosing-colocation-facilities"&gt;95+ locations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Edge nodes, or Google Global Cache&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our edge nodes represent the tier of Google's infrastructure closest to Google’s users, operating from over &lt;a href="https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure" target="_blank"&gt;1,300 cities in more than 200 countries and territories&lt;/a&gt;. With our edge nodes, network operators and ISPs host Google-supplied caches inside their network. Static content that's popular with the host's user base (such as YouTube and Google Play) is temporarily cached on these edge nodes, thus allowing users to retrieve this content from much closer to their location. This creates a better experience for users and reduces the host’s overall network capacity requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Region extensions&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;For certain specialized workloads, such as &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bare-metal"&gt;Bare Metal Solution&lt;/a&gt;, Google hosts servers in colocation facilities close to GCP regions to provide low latency (typically &amp;lt;2ms) connectivity to workloads running on Google Cloud. These facilities are referred to as region extensions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;To the edge and back&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;An edge is in the eye of the beholder. Despite this already vast investment in infrastructure, network, and partnership, we believe that the journey towards the edge has just begun. As Google Cloud expands in reach and capabilities, the landscape of applications is evolving again, with traits such as critical reliability, ultra low latency, embedded AI, as well as tight integration and interoperability with 5G networks and beyond. We are looking forward to driving the future evolution of network edge as well as edge cloud capabilities. Stay tuned as we continue to roll out new edge sites, capabilities, and services.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We hope this post clarifies Google’s network edge offerings, and how they help connect your applications running in Google Cloud to your end users. For more about Google Cloud’s networking capabilities, check out these &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/docs/tutorials#networking"&gt;Google Cloud networking tutorials and solutions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2021 17:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/understanding-google-cloud-network-edge-points/</guid><category>Hybrid &amp; Multicloud</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Networking</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_tKCxgFO.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>What’s in a name? Understanding the Google Cloud network “edge”</title><description>The network edge is in the eye of the beholder. Learn about Google Cloud’s various network edge points and how traffic handoffs occur for each one.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_tKCxgFO.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/understanding-google-cloud-network-edge-points/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Shweta Jain</name><title>Product Manager, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Why Verizon Media picked BigQuery for scale, performance and cost</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/benchmarking-cloud-data-warehouse-bigquery-to-scale-fast/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;As the owner of Analytics, Monetization and Growth Platforms at Yahoo, one of the core &lt;a href="https://www.verizonmedia.com/our-brands" target="_blank"&gt;brands&lt;/a&gt; of Verizon Media, I'm entrusted to make sure that any solution we select is fully tested across real-world scenarios. Today, we just completed a massive migration of Hadoop and enterprise data warehouse (EDW) workloads to &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery"&gt;Google Cloud’s BigQuery&lt;/a&gt; and&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/looker"&gt;Looker&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this blog we’ll walk through the technical and financial considerations that led us to our current architecture. Choosing a data platform is more complicated than just testing it against standard benchmarks. While benchmarks are helpful to get started, there is nothing like testing your data platform against real world scenarios. We’ll discuss the comparison that we did between BigQuery and what we’ll call the Alternate Cloud (AC), where each platform performed best, and why we chose BigQuery and Looker.  We hope that this can help you move past standard industry benchmarks and help you make the right decision for your business. Let’s get into the details.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What is a MAW and how big is it?&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yahoo’s MAW (Media Analytics Warehouse) is the massive data warehouse which houses all the clickstream data from &lt;a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Yahoo Finance&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Yahoo Sports&lt;/a&gt;, Yahoo.com, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and various other popular sites on the web that are now part of Verizon Media. In one month in Q4 2020, running on BigQuery, we measured the following stats for active users, number of queries, and bytes scanned, ingested, and stored.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;img alt="MAW usage of BQ.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/MAW_usage_of_BQ.0361026107230502.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Who uses the MAW data and what do they use it for?&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yahoo executives, analysts, data scientists, and engineers all work with this data warehouse. Business users create and distribute &lt;a href="https://looker.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Looker dashboards&lt;/a&gt;, analysts write SQL queries, scientists perform predictive analytics and the data engineers manage the ETL pipelines. The fundamental questions to be answered and communicated generally include: How are Yahoo’s users engaging with the various products? Which products are working best for users? And how could we improve the products for better user experience?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Media Analytics Warehouse and analytics tools built on top of it are used across different organizations in the company. Our editorial staff keeps an eye on article and video performance in real time, our business partnership team uses it to track live video shows from our partners, our product managers and statisticians use it for A/B testing and experimentation analytics to evaluate and improve product features, and our architects and site reliability engineers use it to track long-term trends on user latency metrics across native apps, web, and video. Use cases supported by this platform span across almost all business areas in the company. In particular, we use analytics to discover rends in access patterns and in which partners are providing the most popular content, helping us assess our next investments. Since end-user experience is always critical to a media platform’s success, we continually track our latency, engagement, and churn metrics across all of our sites.  Lastly, we assess which cohorts of users want which content by doing extensive analyses on clickstream user segmentation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this all sounds similar to questions that you ask of your data, read on. We’ll now get into the architecture of products and technologies that are allowing us to serve our users and deliver these analytics at scale.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Identifying the problem with our old infrastructure&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rolling the clock back a few years, we encountered a big problem: We had too much data to process to meet our users’ expectations for reliability and timeliness. Our systems were fragmented and the interactions were complex. This led to difficulty in maintaining reliability and it made it hard to track down issues during outages. That leads to frustrated users, increasingly frequent escalations, and the occasional irate leader.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Managing massive-scale Hadoop clusters has always been Yahoo’s forte. So that was not an issue for us. Our massive-scale data pipelines process petabytes of data every day and they worked just fine. This expertise and scale, however, were insufficient for our colleagues’ interactive analytics needs. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Deciding solution requirements for analytics needs&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;We sorted out the requirements of all our constituent users for a successful cloud solution. Each of these various usage patterns resulted in a disciplined tradeoff study and led to  four critical performance requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Performance Requirements&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Loading data requirement: Load all previous day’s data by next day at 9am. At forecasted volumes, this requires a capacity of more than 200TB/day.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Interactive query performance: 1 to 30 seconds for common queries&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Daily use dashboards: Refresh in less than 30 seconds&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Multi-week data: Access and query in less than one minute.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;The most critical criteria was that we would make these decisions based on user experience in a live environment, and not based on an isolated benchmark run by our engineers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the performance requirements, we had several system requirements that spanned the multiple stages that a modern data warehouse must accommodate: simplest architecture, scale, performance, reliability, interactive visualization, and cost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;System Requirements&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Simplicity and architectural integrations&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ANSI SQL compliant&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No-op/serverless—ability to add storage and compute without getting into cycles of determining the right server type, procuring, installing, launching, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Independent scaling of storage and compute&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Reliability&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reliability and availability: 99.9% monthly uptime&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Scale&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Storage capacity: hundreds of PB&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Query capacity: exabyte per month&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Concurrency: 100+ queries with graceful degradation and interactive response&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Streaming ingestion to support 100s of TB/day&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Visualization and interactivity&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mature integration with BI tools&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Materialized views and query rewrite&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Cost-efficient at scale&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Proof of concept: strategy, tactics, results&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;Strategically, we needed to prove to ourselves that our solution could meet the requirements described above at production scale. That meant that we needed to use production data and even production workflows in our testing. To focus our efforts on our most critical use cases and user groups, we focused on supporting dashboarding use cases with the proof-of-concept (POC) infrastructure. This allowed us to have multiple data warehouse (DW) backends, the old and the new, and we could dial up traffic between them as needed. Effectively, this became our method of doing a staged rollout of the POC architecture to production, as we could scale up traffic on the CDW and then do a cut over from legacy to the new system in real time, without needing to inform the users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Tactics: Selecting the contenders and scaling the data&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our initial approach to analytics on an external cloud was to move a three petabyte subset of data. The dataset we selected to move to the cloud also represented one complete business process, because we wanted to transparently switch a subset of our users to the new platform and we did not want to struggle with and manage multiple systems. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;After an initial round of exclusions based on the system requirements, we narrowed the field to two cloud data warehouses. We conducted our performance testing in this POC on BigQuery and “Alternate Cloud.” To scale the POC, we started by moving one fact table from MAW (note: we used a different dataset to test ingest performance, see below). Following that, we moved all the MAW summary data into both clouds. Then we would move three months of MAW data into the most successful cloud data warehouse, enabling all daily usage dashboards to be run on the new system. That scope of data allowed us to calculate all of the success criteria at the required scale of both data and users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Performance testing results&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Round 1: Ingest performance.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The requirement is that the cloud load all the daily data in time to meet the data load service-level agreement (SLA) of “by 9 am the next day”—where day was local day for a specific time zone. Both the clouds were able to meet this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Bulk ingest performance: Tie&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Round 2: Query performance&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To get an apples-to-apples comparison, we followed best practices for BigQuery and AC to measure optimal performance for each platform. The charts below show the query response time for a test set of thousands of queries on each platform.  This corpus of queries represents several different workloads on the MAW. BigQuery outperforms AC particularly strongly in very short and very complex queries.  Half (47%) of the queries tested in BigQuery finished in less than 10 sec compared to only 20% on AC.  Even more starkly, only 5% of the thousands of queries tested took more than 2 minutes to run on BigQuery whereas almost half (43%) of the queries tested on AC took 2 minutes or more to complete.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Query_Performance_Test_Results_1.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="Query Performance Test Results.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Query_Performance_Test_Results_1.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;Click to enlarge&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Query performance: BigQuery&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Round 3: Concurrency&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our results corroborated &lt;a href="https://www.atscale.com/blog/tech-talk-bi-performance-benchmarks-with-bigquery-from-google/" target="_blank"&gt;this study from AtScale&lt;/a&gt;: BigQuery’s performance was consistently outstanding even as the number of concurrent queries expanded.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;img alt="concurrency benchmark.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/concurrency_benchmark.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Concurrency at scale: BigQuery&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Round 4: Total cost of ownership&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Though we can’t discuss our specific economics in this section, we can point to third-party studies and describe some of the other aspects of TCO that were impactful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We found the results in &lt;a href="https://www.esg-global.com/evaluating-cost-savings-across-cloud-data-warehouses" target="_blank"&gt;this paper from ESG&lt;/a&gt; to be both relevant and accurate to our scenarios. The paper reports that for comparable workloads, BigQuery’s TCO is 26% to 34% less than competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;img alt="est 3-year cloud bases data warehouse cost.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/est_3-year_cloud_bases_data_warehouse_cost.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other factors we considered included:  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Capacity and Provisioning Efficiency&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Scale&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;With 100PB of storage and 1EB+ of query over those bytes each month, AC’s 1PB limit for a unified DW was a significant barrier.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Separation of Storage and Compute&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;Also with AC, you cannot buy additional compute without buying additional storage, which would lead to significant and very expensive overprovisioning of compute.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Operational and Maintenance Costs&lt;/h2&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Serverless&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;With AC, we needed a daily standup to look at ways of tuning queries (a bad use of the team’s time). We had to be upfront about which columns would be used by users (a guessing game) and alter physical schema and table layout accordingly. We also had a weekly “at least once” ritual of re-organizing the data for better query performance. This required reading the entire data set and sorting it again for optimal storage layout and query performance. We also had to think ahead of time (at least by a couple of months) about what kind of additional nodes were required based on projections around capacity utilization. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We estimated this tied up significant time for engineers on the team and translated into a cost equivalent to 20+ person hours per week. The architectural complexity on the alternate cloud - because of its inability to handle this workload in a true serverless environment - resulted in our team writing additional code to manage and automate data distribution and aggregation/optimization of data load and querying. This required us to dedicate effort equivalent to two full time engineers to design, code and manage tooling around alternate cloud limitations. During a time of material expansion, this cost would go up further. We included that personnel cost in our TCO. With BigQuery, the administration and capacity planning has been much easier, taking almost no time. Infact, we barely even talk within the team before sending additional data over to Bigquery. With BigQuery we spend zero/little time doing maintenance or performance tuning activities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Productivity Improvements&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;One of the advantages of using Google BigQuery as the database, was that we could now simplify our data model and also unify our semantic layer by leveraging a then new BI tool - Looker. We timed how long it took our analysts to create a new dashboard using BigQuery with Looker and compared it to a similar development on AC with a legacy BI tool. The time for an analyst to create a dashboard went from one to four hours to just 10 minutes - a 90+% productivity improvement across the board. The single biggest reason for this improvement was a much simpler data model to work with and the fact that all the datasets could now be together in a single database. With hundreds of dashboards and analysis conducted every month, saving about one hour per dashboard returns thousands of person-hours in productivity to the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The way BigQuery handles peak workloads also drove a huge improvement in user experience and productivity versus the AC. As users logged-in and started firing their queries on the AC, they would get stuck because of the workload. Instead of a graceful degradation in query performance, we saw a massive queueing up of workloads. That created a frustrating cycle of back-and-forth between users, who were waiting for their queries to finish, and the engineers, who would be scrambling to identify and kill expensive queries, to allow for other queries to complete.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;TCO Summary&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;In these dimensions—finances, capacity, ease of maintenance and productivity improvements— BigQuery was the clear winner with a lower total cost of ownership than the alternative cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Lower TCO: BigQuery&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Round 5: The intangibles&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;At this point in our testing, the technical outcomes were pointing solidly to BigQuery. We had very positive experiences working with the Google account, product and engineering teams as well. Google was transparent, honest and humble in their interactions with Yahoo. In addition, the data analytics product team at Google Cloud conducts monthly meetings of a customer council that have been exceedingly valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another reason why we saw this kind of success with our prototyping project, and eventual migration, was the Google team with whom we engaged. The account team, backed by some brilliant support engineers stayed on top of issues and resolved them expertly.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Support and Overall Customer Experience&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;POC Summary&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;We designed the POC to replicate our production workloads, data volumes, and usage loads. Our success criteria for the POC were the same SLAs that we have for prod. Our strategy of mirroring a subset of our production with the POC paid off well. We fully tested the capabilities of the data warehouses; and consequently we have very high confidence  that the chosen tech, products, and support team will meet our SLAs at our current load and future scale.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the POC scale and design are sufficiently representative of our prod workloads that other teams within Verizon can use our results to inform their own choices. We’ve seen other teams in Verizon move to BigQuery, at least partly informed by our efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a roundup of the overall proof-of-concept trial that helped us pick BigQuery as the winner:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-image_full_width"&gt;&lt;div class="article-module h-c-page"&gt;&lt;div class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;figure class="article-image--large h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-3 "&gt;&lt;img alt="proof of concept.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/proof_of_concept.max-1000x1000.jpg"/&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;With these results, we concluded that we would move more of our production work to BigQuery by expanding the number of dashboards that hit the BigQuery backend as opposed to Alternate Cloud. The experience of that rollout was very positive, as BigQuery continued to scale in storage, compute, concurrence, ingest and reliability as we added more and more users, traffic, and data. I’ll explore our experience fully using BigQuery in production in the second blog post of this series.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/benchmarking-cloud-data-warehouse-bigquery-to-scale-fast/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>BigQuery</category><category>Customers</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Data Analytics</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_Data_Analytics_1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Why Verizon Media picked BigQuery for scale, performance and cost</title><description>See the proof of concept (POC) numbers that Verizon’s Yahoo got when testing and verifying the improved performance, cost, and scale of BigQuery for their data warehouse.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_Data_Analytics_1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/benchmarking-cloud-data-warehouse-bigquery-to-scale-fast/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Nikhil Mishra</name><title>Sr. Director of Engineering, Verizon Media</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/googles-dunant-subsea-cable-is-now-ready-for-service/</link><description>&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;/head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re thrilled to say &lt;i&gt;bonjour&lt;/i&gt; to the Dunant submarine cable system, which has been deployed and tested and is now ready for service. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean between Virginia Beach in the U.S. and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast, the system expands Google’s global network to add dedicated capacity, diversity, and resilience, while enabling interconnection to other network infrastructure in the region. It’s named in honor of Swiss businessman and social activist Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross and first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The historic landing was made possible in partnership with &lt;a href="https://www.subcom.com/" target="_blank"&gt;SubCom&lt;/a&gt;, a global partner for undersea data transport, which engineered, manufactured and installed the Dunant system on schedule despite the ongoing global pandemic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Delivering record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the Atlantic&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;As we shared when &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/a-quick-hop-across-the-pond-supercharging-the-dunant-subsea-cable-with-sdm-technology"&gt;we originally announced the Dunant cable&lt;/a&gt;, Dunant is the first long-haul subsea cable to feature a 12 fiber pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) design, and will deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the ocean—enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second. Increased cable capacity is delivered in a cost-effective manner with additional fiber pairs (twelve, rather than six or eight in past generations of subsea cables) and power-optimized repeater designs. While previous subsea cable technologies relied on a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify each fiber pair, the SDM technology used in Dunant allows pump lasers and associated optical components to be shared among multiple fiber pairs. This ‘pump sharing’ technology enables more fibers within the cable while also providing higher system availability. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Transforming businesses in the cloud worldwide&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The power and capacity of our infrastructure plays an important role in Google’s mission to make the world’s information more accessible and useful, and in Google Cloud’s role in transforming businesses in the cloud worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This means organizations can:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Run their apps where they need them with open, hybrid, and multi-cloud solutions&lt;/b&gt; so their developers can build and innovate faster, in any environment, without being forced into a single vendor solution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Get smarter and make better decisions with the leading data platform&lt;/b&gt; with machine learning and advanced analytics capabilities that helps them maximize the insights they derive from their data.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Run on the cleanest cloud in the industry&lt;/b&gt;, on tools and technologies that will foster a carbon-free future for everyone and enable them to reduce their carbon footprint. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Operate confidently with advanced security&lt;/b&gt; &lt;b&gt;tools&lt;/b&gt; that protect their data, applications, and infrastructure—as well as that of their customers—from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Transform how their people connect and collaborate&lt;/b&gt;, with all the digital tools they need to do their best work, whether at home, at work, or in the classroom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Save money, increase efficiency, and optimize spend&lt;/b&gt;—from &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/anthos/forrester-tei-report"&gt;reducing time spent on platform management&lt;/a&gt; with Anthos to &lt;a href="https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/esg-economic-validation-google-nov-2020-final.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;saving up to 32%&lt;/a&gt; migrating your applications to Google versus running them on-prem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Get customized industry solutions that tackle their toughest challenges&lt;/b&gt;—retail, CPG, financial services, manufacturing, media, entertainment and telco, gaming, public sector, and healthcare and life sciences, you name it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Looking ahead&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;This work is part of our ongoing efforts to build a superior cloud network for our customers, with well-provisioned direct paths between our cloud and our customers. The Google Cloud network consists of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/#network-tab"&gt;fiber optic links and subsea cables&lt;/a&gt;—which will soon include the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-googles-grace-hopper-subsea-cable-system"&gt;Grace Hopper subsea cable&lt;/a&gt;—between &lt;a href="http://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure" target="_blank"&gt;100+ points of presence&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure" target="_blank"&gt;thousands of edge node locations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/locations"&gt;100+ Cloud CDN  locations&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/docs/concepts/colocation-facilities"&gt;91 dedicated interconnect locations&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://cloud.google.com/about/locations"&gt;24 GCP regions&lt;/a&gt;, with additional regions announced in places like Chile, Spain, Italy France and Poland. All of this means better reliability, speed and security performance as compared with the nondeterministic performance of the public internet, or other cloud networks. And while we haven’t hastened the speed of light, we’re still very much hard at work at bringing you a better and faster cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Learn more about our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure"&gt;infrastructure and data centers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="block-related_article_tout"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout h-c-page"&gt;&lt;section class="h-c-grid"&gt;&lt;a class="uni-related-article-tout__wrapper h-c-grid__col h-c-grid__col--8 h-c-grid__col-m--6 h-c-grid__col-l--6 h-c-grid__col--offset-2 h-c-grid__col-m--offset-3 h-c-grid__col-l--offset-3 uni-click-tracker" data-analytics='{ "event": "page interaction", "category": "article lead", "action": "related article - inline", "label": "article: {slug}" }' href="https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/infrastructure/a-quick-hop-across-the-pond-supercharging-the-dunant-subsea-cable-with-sdm-technology/"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__inner-wrapper"&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__eyebrow h-c-eyebrow"&gt;Related Article&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__image" style="background-image: url('https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_GCP.max-500x500.png')"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="uni-related-article-tout__content"&gt;&lt;h4 class="uni-related-article-tout__header h-has-bottom-margin"&gt;A quick hop across the pond: Supercharging the Dunant subsea cable with SDM technology&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;In 1858, Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic telegram to U.S. President James Buchanan, sending a message in Morse Code at a rate...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class="cta module-cta h-c-copy uni-related-article-tout__cta muted"&gt;&lt;span class="nowrap"&gt;Read Article&lt;svg class="icon h-c-icon" role="presentation"&gt;&lt;use xlink:href="#mi-arrow-forward" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"&gt;&lt;/use&gt;&lt;/svg&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/section&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Feb 2021 08:01:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/googles-dunant-subsea-cable-is-now-ready-for-service/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Telecommunications</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/world_map1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service</title><description>The Dunant submarine cable system, crossing the Atlantic Ocean between Virginia Beach in the U.S. and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast, has been deployed and tested and is now ready for service.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/world_map1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/googles-dunant-subsea-cable-is-now-ready-for-service/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Chris Ciauri</name><title>President, EMEA, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item></channel></rss>