<?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>Infrastructure</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/</link><description>Infrastructure</description><atom:link href="https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/infrastructure/rss/" rel="self"></atom:link><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:00:00 -0000</lastBuildDate><image><url>https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/products/infrastructure/static/blog/images/google.a51985becaa6.png</url><title>Infrastructure</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/</link></image><item><title>Announcing new tools to measure—and reduce—your environmental impact</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/new-tools-to-measure-and-reduce-your-environmental-impact/</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 Cloud is proud to support our customers with the cleanest cloud in the industry. For the past four years, we’ve matched 100% of our electricity use with renewable energy purchases, and we were the first company of our size to commit going even further by running on &lt;a href="https://sustainability.google/commitments/" target="_blank"&gt;carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030&lt;/a&gt;.  As we work to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy, we help you take immediate action to decarbonize your digital applications and infrastructure. We're also working with our customers across every industry to develop new solutions for the unique climate change challenges that organizations face. Today, we’re excited to expand our portfolio of carbon-free solutions and announce new partnerships that will help every company build a more sustainable future. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, we’re launching &lt;a href="http://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Carbon Footprint&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a new product that provides customers with the gross carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage. &lt;a href="https://console.cloud.google.com/carbon"&gt;Now available&lt;/a&gt; to every GCP user for free in the Cloud Console, this tool helps you measure, track and report on the &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;gross&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; carbon emissions associated with the electricity of your cloud usage. Of course, the &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;net&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; operational emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage is &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-achieves-four-consecutive-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy"&gt;still zero&lt;/a&gt;. With growing requirements for Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, companies are looking for ways to show their employees, boards and customers their progress against climate targets. Using Carbon Footprint, you have access to the gross energy related emissions data you need for internal carbon inventories and external carbon disclosures, with one click. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Built in collaboration with customers like &lt;a href="https://atos.net/en" target="_blank"&gt;Atos&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.etsy.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Etsy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.hsbc.com/" target="_blank"&gt;HSBC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.loreal.com/en/" target="_blank"&gt;L’Oréal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.salesforce.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Salesforce&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.thoughtworks.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Thoughtworks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/?lang=en" target="_blank"&gt;Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, our Carbon Footprint reporting introduces a new standard of transparency to support you in meeting your climate goals. You can monitor your gross cloud emissions over time, by project, by product and by region, giving IT teams and developers metrics that can help them reduce their carbon footprint. Our detailed calculation methodology is &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint/docs/methodology?skip_cache=true"&gt;published&lt;/a&gt; so that auditors and reporting teams can verify that their cloud emissions data meets &lt;a href="https://ghgprotocol.org/" target="_blank"&gt;GHG Protocol&lt;/a&gt; guidance.&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="google cloud carbon footprint.gif" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/google_cloud_carbon_footprint.gif"/&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;&lt;i&gt;“The power of knowledge combined with the power of technology innovation plays a vital role in proactively responding to the climate crisis we are facing. With Google Carbon Footprint reporting, Atos feeds emissions data in our Decarbonization Data Platform, demonstrating potential emissions reductions from the Google Cloud Platform to our customers. This reporting opens up new levels of emissions transparency, trajectory planning, and data insight to support our customers in meeting, and potentially accelerating towards, their climate goals."&lt;/i&gt;—Nourdine Bihmane, Head of Decarbonization Business Line, &lt;a href="https://atos.net/en/solutions/decarbonization" target="_blank"&gt;Atos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“The capability to measure and to understand the environmental footprint of our Public Cloud usages is among the key axes of our sustainable tech roadmap. With Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we are now able to directly follow the impact of our sustainable infrastructure approach and architecture principles. Beauty Tech is a strategic ambition for L’Oréal: the ambition to invent the beauty of the future while becoming the company of the future… Sustainable tech is an imperative and a very important step towards this ambition of creating responsible beauty for our consumers, and sustainable-by-design tech services for our employees. We all have a role to play! By joining forces, we can have a positive impact.”&lt;/i&gt;—Hervé DUMAS, Sustainability IT Director, L’Oreal&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;While digital infrastructure emissions are just one part of your environmental footprint, accurately accounting for IT carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against the carbon reduction targets required to avert the worst consequences of climate change. To help you account for emissions beyond our cloud and across your organization, we’re excited to partner with &lt;a href="https://www.salesforce.com/products/sustainability-cloud/overview/" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Salesforce Sustainability Cloud&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, integrating our Google Cloud Platform emissions data into their carbon accounting platform. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“As we face unprecedented climate challenges, companies across the globe need to embed sustainability into the core of their business in order to meet growing customer and stakeholder expectations, and reduce their environmental impact. Together, Google Cloud and Salesforce Sustainability Cloud can help our joint customers accelerate their path to Net Zero, leveraging data-driven insights and visualizations to track and reduce their carbon emissions to drive sustainable change."&lt;/i&gt;—Ari Alexander, GM of Salesforce Sustainability Cloud. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;From information to action&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the gross energy-related emissions footprint of data associated with your Google Cloud usage now available, we’re committed to providing tools to not only measure your carbon footprint, but help you reduce it. We recently launched &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/pick-the-google-cloud-region-with-the-lowest-co2"&gt;low-carbon region icons&lt;/a&gt; to help you choose cleaner regions to locate your Google Cloud resources. New users who see the icons are over 50% more likely to choose clean regions over others, ensuring their applications emit less carbon over time. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For current Google Cloud users, we’re pleased to announce that &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/active-assist"&gt;Active Assist&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender"&gt;Recommender&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt; will include a new &lt;b&gt;sustainability&lt;/b&gt; impact category, extending its original core pillars of cost, performance, security, and manageability. Starting with the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-launches-unattended-project-recommender"&gt;Unattended Project Recommender&lt;/a&gt;, you’ll soon be able to estimate the gross carbon emissions you’ll save by removing your idle resources. Unattended Project Recommender uses machine learning to identify, with a high degree of confidence, projects that are likely abandoned based on API and networking activity, billing, usage of cloud services, and other signals, and provides actionable recommendations on how to remediate those abandoned projects. By deleting these projects, not only can you reduce costs and mitigate security risks, but you can also reduce your carbon emissions. In August, Active Assist analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across our platform, and over 600,000 gross kgCo2e was associated with projects that it recommended for cleanup or reclamation. If customers deleted these projects they would significantly reduce future gross carbon emissions. Check out &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/what-to-expect-from-active-assist-at-google-cloud-next21"&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about Active Assist.&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="co2 est.gif" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/co2_est.gif"/&gt;&lt;figcaption class="article-image__caption "&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;i&gt;As we roll-out this feature, users will see a recommendation card in the Carbon Footprint dashboard to reduce emissions. They can investigate the associated projects and choose to delete them to reduce emissions&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;Solutions for climate resilience &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of our customers face difficult questions about how their business impacts the natural environment today, and how it will be affected by climate change in the future. Answering these questions requires rich datasets about the planet, better analytics tools and smarter models to predict potential outcomes. For over a decade &lt;a href="https://earthengine.google.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Google Earth Engine&lt;/a&gt; has supported scientists and developers with hyperscale computing power and the world’s largest catalog of satellite image data. Today, we are delighted to announce the &lt;a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfC3GlMqj5yaDF4lejrde3sNNfoZVUJQlZ9SMmFYnYYZej4WQ/viewform?resourcekey=0-RDa_Kq6jp6H3QxGrwrYc7g" target="_blank"&gt;preview&lt;/a&gt; of Earth Engine as part of Google Cloud Platform. Now, you can access Earth Engine and combine it with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery. By extending Earth Engine’s powerful platform to enterprises through Google Cloud, we are bringing the &lt;a href="https://blog.google/products/earth/earth-engine-preview-google-cloud" target="_blank"&gt;best of Google together&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the past year we’ve worked with a number of organizations to use Earth Engine technology with tools like BigQuery and the Cloud AI Platform to develop new solutions for responsible commodity sourcing, sustainable land management and carbon emissions reduction. Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, thus  helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. This new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability.&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="Earth Engine.gif" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/Earth_Engine.gif"/&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;As we work with our customers to accelerate their sustainability initiatives, earth observation data is proving critical to effectively plan for the long-term impacts of climate change. To extend our geospatial and sustainability use cases we’re also expanding our partnerships with &lt;a href="https://carto.com/" target="_blank"&gt;CARTO&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://climateengine.com/enterprise-solution/" target="_blank"&gt;Climate Engine&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.geotab.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Geotab&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://ngis.com.au/" target="_blank"&gt;NGIS&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://www.planet.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Planet&lt;/a&gt;to bring their data and core applications to Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;These partners will each make their existing platforms and datasets available globally on Google Cloud, giving you low-latency and reliable access to critical data and applications that will inform your sustainability initiatives. By integrating water availability, agricultural data, weather risks, and extensive daily satellite imagery into Earth Engine and BigQuery, you can achieve more ambitious goals for the sustainability of your business and our planet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Committing to help you meet your climate goals&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;With each of these tools, we’re working to reduce the barriers you face in adopting more sustainable technology practices. We understand that building more sustainable applications and infrastructure is not easy. You face competing priorities, technical challenges, and the perception that climate action is costly. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, we are making a sustainability pledge to you: teams across Google Cloud are committing to eliminating the barriers you face in building a more sustainable digital future for your organization, and will help you take action &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/b&gt; to realize your climate goals. We’ll do this in a number of ways: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;ol&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In digital transformation projects and workshops, sustainability teams will always have a seat at the planning table, so we can work together on using cloud technology to build a more sustainable future. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re putting low-carbon signals natively into our products to help developers choose more sustainable options early in their application development. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’ll ensure carbon impact is measured consistently with other key performance indicators. Leveraging the &lt;a href="http://whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TechnicalSupportDocument_SocialCostofCarbonMethaneNitrousOxide.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;social cost of carbon&lt;/a&gt;, the ROI models and value assessments you conduct with Google Cloud will project your emissions impact too. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’ll be transparent about our carbon impact, by &lt;a href="https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/3degrees_cloud_services_review_statement_final.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;publishing third-party reviewed&lt;/a&gt; reports and methodologies, so you can trust the data for your own reports and disclosures. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’ll continue to work with the industry on best practices, including educational resources like &lt;a href="https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/sustainable-it-masterclass/register-interest.html" target="_blank"&gt;Sustainable IT - Decoded&lt;/a&gt;, a new masterclass created in partnership with &lt;a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/corporate-responsibility.html" target="_blank"&gt;Intel&lt;/a&gt;, that shares the expertise of sustainability thought leaders. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the next decade we need to work together to avert the worst consequences of climate change. We’ve made tremendous progress in building technology that helps everyone do more for the planet, and we’re excited to see what you do with it. Visit this page to learn more about &lt;a href="http://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts&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/sustainability/it-leaders-are-choosing-sustainable-future/"&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/gcp_sustainability.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;IT leaders are choosing a sustainable future&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;A recent Google-commissioned study by IDG highlights the importance of sustainable solutions when selecting a cloud provider.&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, 12 Oct 2021 12:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/new-tools-to-measure-and-reduce-your-environmental-impact/</guid><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Next</category><category>Sustainability</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/sustainability_KV5zDL9.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Announcing new tools to measure—and reduce—your environmental impact</title><description>Now you can evaluate and reduce the carbon footprint of your cloud workloads, and evaluate your environmental impact with Earth Engine.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/sustainability_KV5zDL9.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/new-tools-to-measure-and-reduce-your-environmental-impact/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Chris Talbott</name><title>Cloud Sustainability</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Joel Conkling</name><title>Product Manager, Google Earth Engine</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>What to expect from Active Assist at Google Cloud Next’21</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/what-to-expect-from-active-assist-at-google-cloud-next21/</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 Cloud &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/active-assist"&gt;Active Assist&lt;/a&gt; is a portfolio of tools that use data, intelligence, and machine learning designed to reduce cloud complexity and administrative toil, making it simple to optimize your cloud's security, performance, and cost. Under the Active Assist Portfolio, we have tools like &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/policy-intelligence-tools?hl=en"&gt;Policy Intelligence&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-intelligence-center?hl=en"&gt;Network Intelligence Center&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/autoscaler/predictive-autoscaling"&gt;Predictive Autoscaler&lt;/a&gt;, and a collection of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender?hl=en"&gt;Recommendations&lt;/a&gt; for various Google Cloud services. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this blog, we’ll touch on the following topics:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;New Active Assist tools and use cases&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How Active Assist has simplified Google Cloud for customers since Next’20&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where to learn more about Active Assist at Next’21&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Top Active Assist features launched since Next’20&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Throughout 2021, Active Assist customers saw major reductions in time required to manage their Google Cloud deployments as well as meaningful reductions to their monthly cloud costs. After closely listening to your feedback, we have launched a set of new features and capabilities to help you to reduce your cost, elevate your security postures, optimize your workload performance and minimize your operational complexity by providing automated solutions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Below are a few examples of what we have heard from our customers with Active Assist:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2020-07-09-Groupe-Renault-and-Google-Cloud-Partner-to-Accelerate-Industry-4-0" target="_blank"&gt;Groupe Renault&lt;/a&gt;is a French-based automotive manufacturer, who teamed up with Google Cloud to accelerate the digitization of its production facilities and supply chain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“Not only did these [Cloud SQL] recommendations help us reduce waste, but they also saved us significant effort in the writing and maintaining of custom scripts.”&lt;/i&gt; —&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/reduce-cloud-sql-costs-with-optimizations-by-active-assist"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Renault&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/customers/veolia-group"&gt;Veolia&lt;/a&gt; is one of the world’s largest water, waste and energy management companies and collaborates with Google Cloud to empower its employees to solve business problems faster with technological solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“This feature [Unattended Project Recommender] allows us to reduce our costs and security debt on assets that are no longer in use, and is also fully in line with Veolia's philosophy of limiting its carbon footprint.”&lt;/i&gt; —&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-launches-unattended-project-recommender"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Veolia&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Below are a sample of the new features we’ve released so far throughout 2021:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Committed Use Discount recommender (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender/docs/committed-use-discount-recommender"&gt;optimize your resource costs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Compute Engine (GCE) Predictive Autoscaler (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/introducing-compute-engine-predictive-autoscaling"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/autoscaler"&gt;ML-powered automation&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unattended Project recommender (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-launches-unattended-project-recommender"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender/docs/unattended-project-recommender"&gt;reclaim or remove unattended projects&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Firewall Insights (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/eliminate-firewall-misconfigurations-with-firewall-insights"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-intelligence-center/docs/firewall-insights/concepts/overview#ML"&gt;optimize your firewall rules&lt;/a&gt; with increased accuracy with ML)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Account Security recommender (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/helping-users-keep-their-organization-secure-with-phones-built-in-security-key"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender/docs/account-security-recommender"&gt;up your security game&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;IAM Lateral Movement Insights (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/recommender-overview#lateral-movement-insights"&gt;understand insider attack risk&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud SQL Out-of-disk recommender (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/using-ood-recommender"&gt;monitor your SQL disk availability&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud SQL cost optimization (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/reduce-cloud-sql-costs-with-optimizations-by-active-assist"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, detect &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/recommender-sql-idle"&gt;idle&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/recommender-sql-overprovisioned"&gt;over-provisioned&lt;/a&gt; instances)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud Asset Insights (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/improve-visibility-with-four-cloud-asset-inventory-features"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/asset-inventory/docs/using-asset-insights"&gt;detect risks in your asset configs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud Run Service Security recommender (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/improving-the-security-of-your-cloud-run-environment"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/recommender"&gt;identify the least-privileged service account to run Cloud Run&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition, we released the following tools to make it easier for you to consume and leverage all your recommendations:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;BigQuery export for recommendations and insights (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/optimizing-your-google-cloud-spend-bigquery-and-looker"&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/recommender/docs/bq-export/export-recommendations-to-bq"&gt;access all your recommendations faster&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud Architectures Center references:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Patterns for using Active Assist at scale (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/architecture/patterns-for-using-active-assist-at-scale"&gt;"how to" guide&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using serverless pipelines with Active Assist (&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/architecture/using-serverless-pipelines-with-active-assist"&gt;"how to" guide&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What to expect in Google Next’21 for Active Assist &lt;/h3&gt;With &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next" target="_blank"&gt;Google Next’21&lt;/a&gt; around the corner, we want to take this opportunity to share what’s in store for Active Assist during the event.  Several sessions will feature Active Assist and our portfolio solutions, you can &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/register" target="_blank"&gt;register&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/playlists?playlist=G-9c33b8df941a388b&amp;amp;utm_source=copylink&amp;amp;utm_medium=social#mine" target="_blank"&gt;signup&lt;/a&gt; for those sessions to get the latest updates on the set of intelligent services Google Cloud offers as part of the Active Assist solution portfolio.&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="image2.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/image2_JUCBaWd.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;The best part is that, this year, the entire conference is free. So what are you waiting for? Here they are:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?session=SEC202" target="_blank"&gt;SEC202&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=02E4DA706EF3A7AD" target="_blank"&gt;Vandhana Ramadurai&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=AC209EB9214E996D" target="_blank"&gt;Nicole Liang&lt;/a&gt;): Policy Intelligence&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Policy Intelligence, as part of Active Assist solution portfolio, provides IAM recommendations and insights that help customers reduce security vulnerability, elevate their security postures and improve operational efficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?session=INF204" target="_blank"&gt;INF204&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=9E178EA6CF728D2B" target="_blank"&gt;Dan Sheppard&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=9F6EBCF495E60AF1" target="_blank"&gt;Sergey Maximov&lt;/a&gt;): Dramatically simplify Day 2 Ops with GCP infrastructure&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Several Active Assist VM recommenders and predictive autoscaler are featured in this talk to help customers drastically improve their operational efficiency while balancing their cost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?session=INF201" target="_blank"&gt;INF201&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=3A32D76ADD456A1B" target="_blank"&gt;Jess Killips&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=D146D4D0873E2017" target="_blank"&gt;Yasmin Mowafy&lt;/a&gt;): Best practices for cost optimization on Google Compute Engine&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Active Assist cost optimization recommendations were featured in this talk to help our customers to accomplish more with less and make their cost management experience on Google Cloud a breeze.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?session=INF105" target="_blank"&gt;INF105&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=8A07BE0C0ED5148B" target="_blank"&gt;Wendy Cartee&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=10E1DCFE7F6D02F3" target="_blank"&gt;Shailesh Shukla&lt;/a&gt;): What’s New and What’s Next in Cloud Networking &amp;amp; &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?session=SEC211" target="_blank"&gt;SEC211&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=E640FB3A70CE3204" target="_blank"&gt;Peter Blum&lt;/a&gt;&amp;amp; &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next?speaker=E9261EBE676B6B0F" target="_blank"&gt;Emil Kiner&lt;/a&gt;): Innovations in DDoS, WAF, Firewall &amp;amp; Network Threat Detection&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Newly released Firewall Insights powered by Active Assist will be featured in this session on how customers can leverage these automated and intelligent services to optimize their firewall rules and improve their security postures.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the way, &lt;a href="https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/playlists?playlist=G-9c33b8df941a388b&amp;amp;utm_source=copylink&amp;amp;utm_medium=social#mine" target="_blank"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a pre-made playlist for all Active Assist related sessions at Google Cloud Next’21 for your ease of tracking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What’s next?&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’d love to hear your feedback about our latest Active Assist features, recommenders, your Recommendation Hub experiences, or those Next’21 sessions. Please reach out to &lt;a href="mailto:active-assist-feedback@google.com"&gt;active-assist-feedback@google.com&lt;/a&gt; and we’d be delighted to speak with you about your experiences and suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Want to learn more about Active Assist and all our portfolio products and solutions? Check out our solutions &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/active-assist"&gt;home page here&lt;/a&gt;. You can also follow us at our Twitter handle &lt;a href="https://twitter.com/cheng__wei" target="_blank"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks for reading and “see” you virtually at Next ’21!&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/identity-security/google-cloud-launches-unattended-project-recommender/"&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 Unattended Project Recommender: discover, reclaim, or deprecate abandoned projects under your organization&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Save money and improve security by automating the discovery, management and reclamation of old projects with Unattended Project Recommender.&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, 06 Oct 2021 15:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/what-to-expect-from-active-assist-at-google-cloud-next21/</guid><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Next</category><category>Cost Management</category><category>Management Tools</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/CloudNext21.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>What to expect from Active Assist at Google Cloud Next’21</title><description>Learn what’s the latest with Google ML-Powered intelligence service #ActiveAssist and how to learn more about it at Next’21</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/CloudNext21.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/what-to-expect-from-active-assist-at-google-cloud-next21/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Cheng Wei</name><title>Product Manager for Active Assist</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Dima Melnyk</name><title>Product Manager</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>The new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-toronto-region-now-open/</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;For over a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications or the public sector, a rapidly growing number of organizations located or operating in Canada are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and deliver awesome experiences to their users, all on the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;cleanest cloud in the industry&lt;/a&gt;. To support this growing customer base, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you’d expect, we’re thrilled about this news, but we aren’t the only ones that have been looking forward to this launch. We asked some of our customers operating in Canada for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;"Our alliance with Google is truly distinctive in the Canadian market as we are working together to co-innovate and create new services for key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, security, and the connected home. The new cloud region in Toronto marks another key milestone that will propel TELUS’ digital leadership by further leveraging the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of Google Cloud to support improved customer experience and build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities."—Hesham Fahmy, Chief Development Officer, TELUS &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We’re simplifying, modernizing and digitizing Scotiabank to enhance the customer experience for our 25 million customers across the globe. By leveraging powerful cloud-based services including Google Cloud, we’re able to put the most advanced software engineering, data analytics and machine learning tools in the hands of our talented employees. We welcome Google Cloud's investment in Toronto and look forward to the opportunities the Toronto Cloud Region will present to our Technology team.”&lt;br/&gt;—Michael Zerbs, Group Head Technology &amp;amp; Operations, Scotiabank &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical  contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions. At &lt;a href="https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/home" target="_blank"&gt;Natural Resources Canada&lt;/a&gt;, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.”&lt;br/&gt;—Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“At Accenture, we bring together technology and human ingenuity to create and respond to change. We’re thrilled to join forces with Google Cloud and their newest region in Toronto with an important mutual goal: to accelerate cloud innovation in Canada. Our clients already know us for our deep industry intelligence, cloud-first expertise and market-renowned delivery. We’re now combining that with Google’s human-centric design to bring even more opportunities to our clients across all industries.”&lt;br/&gt;—Jeffrey Russell, President of Accenture in Canada. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We are thrilled to see Google’s commitment to Canada. We look forward to helping our joint customers transform their operations, leveraging Google Cloud’s latest data center in Toronto. At Deloitte, we believe cloud is THE opportunity to reimagine everything."&lt;br/&gt;—Terry Stuart, Deloitte Chief Digital Officer, Canada. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”&lt;br/&gt;—Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Toronto joins 27 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/gcp-arrives-in-canada-with-launch-of-montreal-region"&gt;Montreal&lt;/a&gt; region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.&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_toronto.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="gcp toronto.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_toronto.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;The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/products"&gt;Google Cloud Platform products&lt;/a&gt;, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re working to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily—wherever you might be in the country. The past year has proved how important easy access to digital infrastructure, technical education, training and support are to helping businesses respond to the pandemic. We’re particularly proud of the teams who faced the unique challenges of building a cloud region during this time to help our customers and community accelerate their digital transformation.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions. We’re currently hosting &lt;a href="https://canada.googleblog.com/2021/06/meet-inaugural-google-cloud-accelerator.html" target="_blank"&gt;our first ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada&lt;/a&gt; to bring the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’ve recently received Protected B accreditation with &lt;a href="https://cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/cloud-service-provider-information-technology-security-assessment-process-itsm50100" target="_blank"&gt;Canadian Centre for Cyber Security&lt;/a&gt;, which is crucial for healthcare, education, and regulated industries adopting cloud services. We’re also pleased to announce the preview of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/assured-workloads"&gt;Assured Workloads&lt;/a&gt; for Canada—a capability which allows you to secure and configure sensitive workloads in accordance with your specific regulatory or policy requirements. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For help migrating to Google Cloud, please contact our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/partners/directory/#?q=canada#search"&gt;local partners&lt;/a&gt;. For additional details on Google Cloud regions, please visit our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/"&gt;locations page&lt;/a&gt;, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions. You can always &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/contact"&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; to help you get started or &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/gcp/getting-started"&gt;access our many educational resources&lt;/a&gt;. We’re excited to see what you build next with Google Cloud.&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/gcp/gcp-arrives-in-canada-with-launch-of-montreal-region/"&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;GCP arrives in Canada with launch of Montréal region&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;La version française est ici: La plateforme infonuagique de Google (Google Cloud) fait son entrée au Canada avec son lancement à Montréal&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, 14 Sep 2021 13:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-toronto-region-now-open/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Artboagcp_toronto_1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>The new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open</title><description>Google Cloud now has two regions in Canada: one in Montreal, and another in Toronto, providing customers with enhanced choice and data sovereignty.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Artboagcp_toronto_1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-toronto-region-now-open/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Jim Lambe</name><title>Managing Director, Canada, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Improve gRPC service availability and efficiency with Traffic Director</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/new-service-mesh-features-with-proxyless-grpc-services-and-traffic-director/</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;Traffic Director is Google Cloud’s fully managed traffic control plane for service mesh and helps you manage traffic flows &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs/proxyless-overview"&gt;between gRPC-based services&lt;/a&gt;. For example, you can split traffic between multiple versions of your services for canary or blue/green deployments. You can manage this centrally (for example, by issuing API calls to Traffic Director) without having to re-deploy your applications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the most recent &lt;a href="https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/grpc_xds_features.md" target="_blank"&gt;release of gRPC&lt;/a&gt;, we are bringing new traffic management capabilities to &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs/proxyless-overview"&gt;proxyless gRPC services that use Traffic Director&lt;/a&gt;: retries and session affinity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Retry&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Retries help you improve your service availability by enabling your gRPC applications to retry outbound requests according to a policy. This can be helpful if instances or endpoints (that host your server application(s)) are slow or flaky.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When your client gRPC application sends a request, the request gets resolved to a particular backend service based on request characteristics (for example, the hostname). You can use Traffic Director to set a retry policy for that backend service. The client will check the policy before sending a request to that backend service. The policy defines how your proxyless gRPC client application(s) can retry requests:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;according to retry conditions (for example, when encountering response codes such as `unavailable`, `resource-exhausted`, and/or others)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;x number of times where x is configurable (for example, retry up to 3 times)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&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/Proxyless_gRPC_Traffic_Di.0975056213311125.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="Proxyless gRPC Traffic Director Diagrams used in UG-01.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Proxyless_gRPC_Traffic_Di.0975056213311125.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;Session Affinity&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Session affinity is critical to enabling particular use cases and can also help you improve application performance and efficiency. It works by attempting to send requests to the same backend service instance or endpoint based on the request characteristics (HTTP headers).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, session affinity allows you to route requests from a particular user to the same shopping cart instance during a session so that the cart can return the items that are in the user's cart. Additionally, because the instance can store those items in memory, it doesn't need to repeatedly read and write entries from a database (which can introduce latency).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can use Traffic Director to enable header-based session affinity for a backend service. When your gRPC application sends a request, it will attempt to route all RPCs with a given request header to the same endpoint. The application just needs to use the same header on all RPCs in a given session.&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/session_affinity.0495029108810442.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="session affinity.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/session_affinity.0495029108810442.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;If you've been thinking about adopting a service mesh, improving performance, or increasing the reliability of your system, proxyless gRPC and Traffic Director can help you do that. Once you have proxyless gRPC applications set up with Traffic Director, you can enable the above features on all your applications via API calls, as opposed to having to code each application independently. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For more information about using gRPC with Traffic Director and these new features, see the following links:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs/proxyless-overview"&gt;Traffic Director with proxyless gRPC services overview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/traffic-director/docs/proxyless-configure-advanced-traffic-management"&gt;Advanced traffic management overview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&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/grpc-gains-advanced-traffic-management-features/"&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;Proxyless gRPC adds support for advanced traffic management features&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Introducing new traffic management features in gRPC to improve the reliability of your microservices.&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, 31 Aug 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/new-service-mesh-features-with-proxyless-grpc-services-and-traffic-director/</guid><category>Networking</category><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Service Mesh</category><category>Application Development</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_App_Dev_4.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Improve gRPC service availability and efficiency with Traffic Director</title><description>Make your proxyless gRPC services with Traffic Director more reliable and efficient with the new capabilities: Retry and Session Affinity.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_App_Dev_4.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/new-service-mesh-features-with-proxyless-grpc-services-and-traffic-director/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Mark D. Roth</name><title>Engineering Lead, gRPC</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Penn Zhang</name><title>Software Engineer, gRPC</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Google invests 1 billion euros in Germany's digital future</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-invests-1-billion-euros-in-germanys-digital-future/</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;In September 2001, the first-ever German Google employee switched on their computer in Hamburg. Since then, we’ve grown to more than 2,500 employees in four offices across Germany. Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich have long been our home, and we continue to invest in the growth of the local economy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, 20 years after the start of “Google Germany”, we are pleased to present one of our most important investment programs to date in this country. With the expansion of our Cloud Region in Frankfurt in a new Google-owned Hanau facility, a new Google Cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg, and a broad investment plan in renewable energy, our commitment is clear: Google is investing in Germany's potential and supporting the transition to a digital and sustainable economy. Between now (2021) and 2030, this investment in digital infrastructure and clean energy will total approximately 1 billion euros.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Expanding our Frankfurt cloud region to support growing demand from German businesses and organizations&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Hanau, only 20 kilometers from the DE-CIX Internet hub in Frankfurt, Google is proud to be nearing completion of an additional cloud facility that will be fully operational in 2022. This expansion of our existing Frankfurt Google Cloud region will serve the growing demand for Google Cloud services in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The 4-story building is ​​10,000 square meters and was sustainably constructed with energy efficient infrastructure and adherence to our &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/circular-google-sustainable-world/" target="_blank"&gt;circular economy model&lt;/a&gt; for waste. The symbolic handover of the keys from developer NDC-Garbe, together with local government officials, took place on site yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;A new cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the Hanau expansion of our Google Cloud region in Frankfurt, we are pleased to announce that a new Google Cloud region will be located in Berlin-Brandenburg, further extending our ability to meet growing demand for cloud services in the country. When open, this will be our second Google Cloud region in Germany, providing enterprise customers with faster access to secure infrastructure, smart analytics tools and an open platform. Designed and dedicated to providing enterprise services and products for Google Cloud customers of all sizes and industries in Germany, the Berlin-Brandenburg region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions and join the existing network of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#regions"&gt;27 Google Cloud regions&lt;/a&gt; connected via our high-performance network. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;One of the cleanest clouds in the industry becomes even cleaner&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since 2017, Google has matched 100% of our global, annual electricity use with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-achieves-four-consecutive-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy"&gt;renewable energy&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-third-decade-climate-action-realizing-carbon-free-future/" target="_blank"&gt;Last year&lt;/a&gt;, we set out to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere and at all times by 2030, enabling us to offer cloud customers one of the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;cleanest clouds in the industry&lt;/a&gt;, while &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/supporting-greener-future-europe/" target="_blank"&gt;helping Europe achieve its ambitious climate goals&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Today, we’re excited to announce that ENGIE Deutschland has been selected as Google's carbon-free energy supplier in Germany. Under the terms of the agreement, ENGIE will assemble and develop, on Google’s behalf, a 140 megawatt (MW) carbon-free energy portfolio in Germany that has the ability to flex and grow with us as our needs change. This includes a new 39MW solar Photovoltaic system, and 22 wind parks in five federal states that will see their lives extended so they continue to produce electricity instead of being dismantled. This portfolio will ensure that the energy delivered to Google’s German facilities will be nearly 80% carbon-free by 2022 when&lt;a href="https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/24x7-carbon-free-energy-methodologies-metrics.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;measured on an hourly basis&lt;/a&gt;. This is a first but important step on Google's journey to reach our goal of full electricity decarbonization by 2030. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is the first energy supply of its kind in Europe, with a focus on sourcing carbon-free energy for every hour of Google’s operations. Not only will this new agreement draw the roadmap for the industry and more 24/7 carbon-free energy contracts in Europe, but it provides our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability/region-carbon"&gt;cloud customers with two more region&lt;/a&gt;s where they can lower their carbon footprint. And importantly, by working with our energy suppliers to transform how clean energy is delivered to customers, Google is supporting the broader decarbonization of the German electricity grid.&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="ENGIE Visualization.gif" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/ENGIE_Visualization.gif"/&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;What customers and partners are saying&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;As companies continue to grapple with changing customer demands, technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions in Germany and around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg and the expansion of our Google Cloud region in Hanau will help our customers — such as &lt;a href="https://www.bmg.com/" target="_blank"&gt;BMG&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://www.deliveryhero.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Delivery Hero&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://www.db.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Deutsche Bank&lt;/a&gt; — adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We are very pleased about the symbolic handover of the keys to the building here in Hanau to Google Cloud,” said &lt;b&gt;Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky&lt;/b&gt;. “With Google, we have a strong partner at our side who is supporting us in setting up Hanau's economic future, both digitally and sustainably. The data center facility of Google Cloud embodies this transformation: We bring the cloud to us in Hanau and thus support the digital transformation of companies and public authorities. Not only in our city and Hesse, but throughout Germany and Europe. The new building meets high sustainability standards and the clean energy initiative presented today by Google is in line with our aspirations for sustainable digitalization.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Sustainability is a central pillar of Deutsche Bank’s strategy and we have made strong public commitments to be part of the solution,” said &lt;b&gt;Bernd Leukert, Chief Technology, Data and Innovation Officer and Member of the Management Board at Deutsche Bank&lt;/b&gt;. “We welcome the new Google Cloud region in Germany, which will enable us to deliver additional resilience and performance for our German client base.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Ralf Bernhard, Senior Originator Renewables, ENGIE&lt;/b&gt;, said: “ENGIE is excited to collaborate with Google based on a first-of-a-kind agreement which will support the company with its sustainability goals and ambitious carbon-free energy target. Thanks to our expertise in energy and risk management, we can seamlessly integrate renewable energy from existing plants and develop new assets to design a tailor made product that meets Google’s needs and plans to go even greener.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;20 years since Google first touched down in Germany, our commitment to helping Germany continue to lead in technical innovation is stronger than ever. We are excited to continue working with our partners in Hesse, Berlin and Brandenburg and across Germany to advance infrastructure and clean energy projects, help accelerate digital transformation, and secure a sustainable future for German and European companies and organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Aug 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-invests-1-billion-euros-in-germanys-digital-future/</guid><category>Customers</category><category>Partners</category><category>Infrastructure Modernization</category><category>Sustainability</category><category>Google Cloud in Europe</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_1.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Google invests 1 billion euros in Germany's digital future</title><description>Google is supporting Germany's transition to a digital and sustainable economy, investing 1 billion euros in digital infrastructure and clean energy.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Google_Cloud_1.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-invests-1-billion-euros-in-germanys-digital-future/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Daniel Holz</name><title>VP, EMEA North, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Philipp Justus</name><title>VP, Google Central Europe</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>How retailers can boost agility and resilience in Google Cloud</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/retailers-use-vmware-as-a-service-increase-agility/</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;COVID-19 drastically changed the way consumers purchased goods and services, but these changes merely accelerated trends that were well underway. While many retailers were caught off guard with the suddenness of the transition, most are stepping up their cloud transformation initiatives in response to changes in consumer behavior and expectations — changes that are likely to be permanent. These retailers realize they need to migrate on-premises workloads to the cloud to achieve the speed and responsiveness required to better promote their products, expand customer support, predict demand levels, and meet ever-rising customer expectations. The trick will be to do so as quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible while minimizing disruption.  By leveraging solutions such as Google Cloud VMware Engine, retailers can move their on-premises applications to the cloud, where they can achieve the scale, intelligence, and speed required to stay relevant and competitive. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Gaining the cloud advantage&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a recent survey from MIT&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, 75% of retail IT leaders said the pandemic had accelerated their digital transformation projects to improve business processes, increase operational efficiency, and enhance customer experience. Cloud computing is at the heart of digital transformation. It gives retailers the scale, analytical power, and agility they need to respond to the increasing pace of change. By migrating IT resources to the cloud, retailers can develop and deploy innovative mobile apps, virtualize costly services such as call centers, automate business processes, and analyze massive volumes of data to improve the speed and accuracy of demand forecasts. Running applications in the cloud enables business managers and IT departments to replicate the functions of their on-premises system without changes, so that employees, customers, and partners can access those systems from anywhere and at any time. Operating in the cloud also allows retailers to avoid many of the limitations of legacy systems that may have been holding them back. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;These are just some of the capabilities that retailers gain when they migrate their applications and data to the cloud: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Build new revenue streams&lt;/b&gt; with omnichannel shopping that runs on the speed and reliability of cloud infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Leverage artificial intelligence and data analytics&lt;/b&gt; available in the cloud. Use Google Cloud’s BigQuery to run AI-powered forecasting models to predict demand and plan sales, orders, and other activities with greater precision. Deploy Recommendations AI, to deliver highly personalized product recommendations to your customers at scale.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Improve operational efficiency&lt;/b&gt; with a highly scalable and elastic environment that lets you pay for the compute and storage you need instead of making major investments in physical infrastructure up front.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Improve customer experience&lt;/b&gt; by analyzing behavior and other data to offer customers what they want, when they want it; build personalized mobile and web applications and provide real-time information to customer service and floor staff so they can address customer concerns quickly and effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Reduce costs&lt;/b&gt; by deploying AI-powered agents to help customers solve straightforward issues on their own and automate mundane back-office processes to let your team focus on more value-add work. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Safeguard customer data&lt;/b&gt; with Google Cloud’s multi-layer, secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Improve control&lt;/b&gt; with integrated cloud management tools that enable IT staff to oversee the whole stack — across on-premises systems and cloud in a single location.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Easy lift and shift with Google Cloud VMware Engine&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Retailers do not need to deploy entirely new applications to take advantage of Google Cloud. Rather, they can move their back-office applications and other business systems into the cloud as-is, without the need to rewrite a line of code. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Cloud VMware Engine enables businesses to migrate or extend their on-premises workloads and applications seamlessly to the cloud. This means that IT managers can move their existing applications into the cloud in just a few minutes without having to rebuild them. From there, retailers can run their existing applications — including point-of-sale (POS) systems, virtual desktops, and other devices — just as they did when those applications were installed in the store or office. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Cloud VMware Engine creates a software-defined infrastructure that natively runs VMware workloads without any changes to current tools. That infrastructure includes computing power, storage, network connections, and security services that are dedicated to the individual customer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Cloud infrastructure for new retail realities&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;COVID-19 was a wakeup call for many retailers who realized they needed to energize their transformation initiatives in response to permanent shifts in consumer behavior and expectations. Essential to this transformation is getting to the cloud as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible, without creating costly disruptions or downtime. Google Cloud VMware Engine lets retailers do exactly that with a straightforward lift-and-shift process that takes just a few minutes. Once in the cloud, retailers can take advantage of the many capabilities Google Cloud offers, including sophisticated data analytics, improved customer experience, enterprise-grade security, and reduced cost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read our &lt;a href="https://services.google.com/fh/gumdrop/preview/misc/retail_and_google_cloud_vmware_engine.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;retail white paper&lt;/a&gt; to learn more about how easy it is to migrate your retail IT systems to the cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine&lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. MIT Technology Review Insights’ survey on COVID-19 and its impact on technology, in association with VMware; N=100 Retail Senior Technology and Business leaders Worldwide.&lt;/sup&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/cloud-migration/updates-to-google-cloud-vmware-engine/"&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_7fdTm09.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;New in Google Cloud VMware Engine: autoscaling, Mumbai expansion, etc.&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;A review of the latest updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine.&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, 20 Aug 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/retailers-use-vmware-as-a-service-increase-agility/</guid><category>Cloud Migration</category><category>Infrastructure Modernization</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/retail.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>How retailers can boost agility and resilience in Google Cloud</title><description>Learn how retailers can migrate their on-premises applications to the cloud, to stay relevant and competitive.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/retail.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/retailers-use-vmware-as-a-service-increase-agility/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Ken Drachnik</name><title>Product Marketing</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>Announcing the Blue and Raman subsea cable systems</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-blue-and-raman-subsea-cable-systems/</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 that we are collaborating with &lt;a href="https://www.tisparkle.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Sparkle&lt;/a&gt; and others to build and operate two submarine cable systems linking the Middle East with southern Europe and Asia: the Blue Submarine Cable System connecting Italy, France, Greece, and Israel; and the Raman Submarine Cable System connecting Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman and India. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Developing additional network capacity and routes is critical to Google users and customers around the globe, who depend on robust connectivity to power their online lives, and communicate with friends, family and business partners. Google users and Google Cloud customers will benefit from increased capacity and decreased latency to regions in the area. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Each equipped with 16 fiber optic pairs, the Blue and Raman Submarine Cable Systems are expected to be ready for service in 2024. In time, consortium members hope to make additional landings and connect the two systems through terrestrial network assets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like with other infrastructure projects, building a subsea cable is an opportunity to pay tribute to a regional luminary who has advanced human understanding. The Raman cable is named for &lt;a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._Raman" target="_blank"&gt;Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman&lt;/a&gt;, an Indian physicist who won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics—the first Asian to receive that honor in science. C.V. Raman’s work centered on light scattering, which finds that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes wavelength and amplitude. This so-called Raman effect is a foundational principle in the field of optics that enables any underwater network cable. A trip across the Mediterranean also prompted him to ask why the sea is blue, when water itself is clear? Thanks to C.V. Raman, we now know that the sea isn’t simply reflecting the sky, but because the water itself causes blue light to scatter.      &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With Blue and Raman, we now have 18 investments in subsea cables around the world, including Google-funded cables like Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Echo, JGA, INDIGO and Havfrue. You can learn more about Google Cloud’s network and infrastructure &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations"&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/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable/"&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/Firmina.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;Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;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...&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, 29 Jul 2021 13:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-blue-and-raman-subsea-cable-systems/</guid><category>Inside Google Cloud</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 the Blue and Raman subsea cable systems</title><description>The Blue and Raman subsea cable systems will link the Middle East with southern Europe and Asia.</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/announcing-the-blue-and-raman-subsea-cable-systems/</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>The new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/the-google-cloud-region-in-melbourne-is-now-open/</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 opened our Sydney cloud region in 2017 and, since then, we have continued to invest and expand across Australia and New Zealand to support the digital future of organizations of all sizes. In Australia, &lt;a href="https://alphabeta.com/our-research/the-value-of-google-cloud-to-australia/" target="_blank"&gt;Google Cloud supports&lt;/a&gt; almost A$3.2 billion in annual gross benefits to businesses and consumers. This includes A$686 million to businesses using Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, another A$698 million to Google Cloud partners, and A$1.8 billion to consumers.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For customers in Australia, New Zealand and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open. Designed to help businesses build highly available applications for their customers, the Melbourne region is our second Google Cloud region in Australia and 11th to open in Asia Pacific. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’re celebrating the occasion with a digital event where federal minister for the Digital Economy, Jane Hume, and customers Australia Post, Trade Me, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, The Australian Football League and Macquarie Bank will share their perspectives. &lt;a href="https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/aunz-melbourne-region-launch?utm_source=cloud_sfdc&amp;amp;utm_medium=email&amp;amp;utm_campaign=FY21-Q3-apac-APAC957-operational-er-ANZMelbourneRegionLaunch_EM_salesFSR&amp;amp;utm_content=sales_fsr" target="_blank"&gt;Come join us&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;A global network of regions&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. With this our second region in Australia, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all the while maintaining data sovereignty in-country.&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="google cloud melbourne.gif" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/google_cloud_melbourne.gif"/&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 this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We also continue to invest in expanding connectivity across the Australia and New Zealand region by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Auckland.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Collectively, this will deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across Australia and New Zealand - which is especially important for those in regulated industries such as Financial Services and the Public Sector.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What customers and partners are saying&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and greater economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Melbourne will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We moved to Google Cloud to improve the stability and resilience of our infrastructure and become more cloud-native as part of a digital transformation program that keeps the customer at the heart of our business. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in ANZ and the opportunities the Google Cloud Melbourne region presents to improve Trade Me’s agility and performance. - Paolo Ragone, Chief Technology Officer, &lt;a href="https://www.trademe.co.nz/" target="_blank"&gt;Trade Me     &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We initially turned to Google Cloud to help us process parcels faster and gain deeper insights into our business and its processes. The relationship has continued to deliver benefits to our customers and our organization and we welcome Google Cloud’s opening of the Melbourne region as presenting even more opportunities for businesses to innovate and generate efficiencies.” - Munro Farmer, Chief Information Officer,&lt;a href="https://auspost.com.au/mypost/track/" target="_blank"&gt;Australia Post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We are well progressed with our multi-year strategy to grow and transform our organization to be Australia’s bank of choice. Google Cloud’s advanced data capabilities and renowned culture of innovation are strongly aligned to this strategy and will allow us to become even more innovative and agile in responding to our customers’ ever-changing needs. We were quick to run our workloads out of the Melbourne cloud region and we believe Google Cloud’s expanded investment in local infrastructure will further assist us on our business transformation journey.” - Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer, &lt;a href="https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/" target="_blank"&gt;Bendigo and Adelaide Bank&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“We have a clear vision when it comes to innovating to deliver world-class service to our customers, and our partnership with Google Cloud is core to that strategy. The company’s continued investments in local infrastructure and technology present new opportunities for us as we advance our transformation journey in this digital-first era.” - Chris Smith, Vice President, Digital Service, &lt;a href="https://www.optus.com.au/" target="_blank"&gt;Optus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our global ecosystem of channel partners has expanded by more than 400% in the last two years, and we look forward to continuing our close relationships with partners  in Australia and New Zealand as we help customers modernize, innovate, scale and grow.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Australian companies are increasingly realising the benefits of their cloud investments and are now looking to transform their organisations at scale. We are excited about the potential and new value that the Google Melbourne Cloud region will bring to our clients as we continue to work together on delivering intelligent and innovative solutions to Australian organisations.” - Tara Brady, CEO of &lt;a href="https://www.accenture.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Accenture&lt;/a&gt; Australia and New Zealand&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Google Cloud has always been there for its customers for the long haul and the opening of the new Melbourne Cloud region is great news. This increased resilience and scale will empower companies of all sizes to be bold in accelerating their digital transformation plans.” - Tony Nicol,  CEO of &lt;a href="https://www.servian.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Servian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;"We’re excited about the launch of the Melbourne Cloud region. It will cater to the needs of industries we work closely with including healthcare and financial services, and will further enhance how we jointly deliver on the compliance, privacy and security requirements of companies as they advance their digital transformation." - Simon Poulton, CEO of &lt;a href="https://kasna.com.au/" target="_blank"&gt;Kasna&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The opening of the new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is fantastic news as it now enables DXC customers access to enhanced services for their mission critical application and data solutions across two regions within Australia.  As our customers modernise their application estate, many are seeking dual region cloud services, and DXC is excited to partner with Google Cloud to deliver these services to customers in Australia and New Zealand.” - Tim Fraser, Google Practice Lead ANZ at &lt;a href="https://www.dxc.com/us/en" target="_blank"&gt;DXC Technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Helping customers build their transformation clouds&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Melbourne offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change.  Click here to learn more about all our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/"&gt;Google Cloud locations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. AlphaBeta, The Economic Impact of Google Cloud to Australia, July 2021&lt;/sup&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/topics/google-cloud-next/register-now-for-google-cloud-next21/"&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/CloudNext21.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;Registration is open for Google Cloud Next: October 12–14&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Register now for Google Cloud Next on October 12–14, 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>Wed, 28 Jul 2021 20:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/the-google-cloud-region-in-melbourne-is-now-open/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/google_cloud_melbourne_region.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>The new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open</title><description>The new Google Cloud region in Melbourne adds a second region to Australia, supporting economic growth in the region.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/google_cloud_melbourne_region.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/the-google-cloud-region-in-melbourne-is-now-open/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Sachin Gupta</name><title>GM and VP of Product for IaaS</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Alister Dias</name><title>Vice President, Australia &amp; New Zealand</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>The new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR is now open</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-region-in-delhi-ncr-is-now-open/</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;In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent &lt;a href="https://india.googleblog.com/2021/06/broadening-our-covid-19-support-in-india.html" target="_blank"&gt;support to Indians in need&lt;/a&gt;. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What customers and partners are saying&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.inmobi.com/" target="_blank"&gt;InMobi&lt;/a&gt; scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “&lt;a href="https://www.glance.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Glance&lt;/a&gt;, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://groww.in/" target="_blank"&gt;Groww&lt;/a&gt; now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.hdfcbank.com/" target="_blank"&gt;HDFC Bank&lt;/a&gt; is positioned for the future. "At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud," says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.drreddys.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Dr. Reddy’s Lab&lt;/a&gt; built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President &amp;amp; CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said &lt;b&gt;Piyush N. Singh, Lead - India market unit &amp;amp; lead - Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture.&lt;/b&gt; “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;A global network of regions&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.&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/dehli_cloud_region.0903047417140949.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="dehli cloud region.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/dehli_cloud_region.0903047417140949.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;With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Supporting India’s recovery with training and education&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Through the &lt;a href="https://india.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%20for%20India%20Digitization%20Fund" target="_blank"&gt;India Digitization Fund&lt;/a&gt;, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our &lt;a href="https://grow.google/intl/en_in/smallbusinesses/#?modal_active=none&amp;amp;smb--quick-easy-actions_activeEl=smb--keep-your-customers-informed" target="_blank"&gt;Grow with Google&lt;/a&gt; efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Helping customers build their transformation clouds&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/"&gt;Google Cloud locations&lt;/a&gt; page, and be sure to watch the region launch event &lt;a href="https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/india-region-launch" 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/products/gcp/gcp-arrives-in-india-with-launch-of-mumbai-region/"&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;GCP arrives in India with launch of Mumbai region&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;The first Google Cloud Platform region in India is now open for you to build applications and store your data.&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, 15 Jul 2021 06:30:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-region-in-delhi-ncr-is-now-open/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/dehli_google_cloud.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>The new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR is now open</title><description>The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR is now open for business, ready to host your workloads.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/dehli_google_cloud.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-cloud-region-in-delhi-ncr-is-now-open/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Bikram SIngh Bedi</name><title>Managing Director, Google Cloud India</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>A year of carbon-free energy at our data centers</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-releases-carbon-free-energy-percentage-for-2020/</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;Last year, we announced our most ambitious sustainability goal yet: to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-third-decade-climate-action-realizing-carbon-free-future/" target="_blank"&gt;by 2030&lt;/a&gt;. We’ve set this goal to ensure that Google Cloud continues to be &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;the cleanest cloud in the industry&lt;/a&gt;, and to show that full-scale decarbonization of electricity use is possible. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since setting our target, we’ve made tremendous progress in how we &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/t-eacs-offer-new-approach-to-certifying-clean-energy"&gt;track&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://aescorp2020cr.q4web.com/press-releases/news-details/2021/AES-Announces-First-of-Its-Kind-Agreement-to-Supply-247-Carbon-Free-Energy-for-Google-Data-Centers-in-Virginia/default.aspx" target="_blank"&gt;buy&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/data-centers-energy-efficient/" target="_blank"&gt;use&lt;/a&gt; electricity; advocate for &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/working-with-governments-on-climate-goals"&gt;clean energy policies&lt;/a&gt;; and support the development of &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-fervo-geothermal-project-creates-carbon-free-energy"&gt;new technologies&lt;/a&gt; to help us reach this goal. And we’ve done it all while maintaining a commitment to &lt;a href="https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/24x7-carbon-free-energy-methodologies-metrics.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;transparency&lt;/a&gt; that we hope will make it easier for other organizations wishing to fully decarbonize their operations as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of transparency, today we’re releasing the &lt;a href="https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/carbon-free-energy-data-centers.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;2020 carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%)&lt;/a&gt; for all Google data centers, as well as overall progress on the road to our 2030 goal: In 2020, Google achieved 67% round-the-clock carbon free energy across all its data centers, up from 61% in 2019. In other words, of all the electricity consumed by Google data centers in 2020, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Though we saw a significant jump in global CFE% in 2020, we expect the numbers to vary from year to year. Ultimately, CFE% is dependent on the amount of new clean energy that comes online in a given year; we may even occasionally see short-term drops in the numbers. What’s most important is that we continue to maintain a long-term trajectory toward our 2030 goal. With meaningful progress in clean energy policy, technologies, and transactional models, we believe 24/7 carbon-free energy is achievable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tracking these numbers also allows us to give Google Cloud customers greater control in their own sustainability efforts. Earlier this year we announced &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-cloud-region-picker-helps-you-make-the-green-choice"&gt;Google Cloud Region Picker&lt;/a&gt;, a system that helps our customers assess factors like cost, speed, and CFE% as they choose where to run their applications. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To outline some of the events that have helped us get to 67% CFE%, we’ve developed an animation that shows every hour of electricity use in 2020, at all our Google data centers around the world. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Visualizing clean energy: every hour, every day, everywhere&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Imagining what every hour in a year looks like is hard enough (there are 8,760 of them, in case you’re wondering). With 23 data centers and 25 cloud regions around the world, we’re aiming to source clean energy for over 200,000 operational hours each year.&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-f9ecEokcFlk-" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9ecEokcFlk"&gt;&lt;img alt="Data visualization for Google's global carbon-free electricity use for 2020" src="//img.youtube.com/vi/f9ecEokcFlk/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-f9ecEokcFlk-" 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="f9ecEokcFlk" data-glue-yt-video-width="100%" href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9ecEokcFlk" 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;The “A year in carbon-free energy” animation points out significant projects that came online in 2020 to bring our data centers closer to operating entirely on round-the-clock carbon-free energy. It also reflects an unparalleled level of transparency about our carbon-free energy data, showing hour-by-hour where we need to develop new clean energy projects, advocate for policy changes, and in some cases, look to new technologies that can help &lt;a href="https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;fill in the gaps&lt;/a&gt; left by variable renewable resources. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the animation, you’ll notice sites with a lot of green at midday (e.g. in Chile or the U.S. Southeast) – a sign that solar is making a big contribution. Other data centers, such as our facilities in the U.S. Midwest, rely more heavily on wind power and are subject to seasonal fluctuations in wind speed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Preventing the worst impacts of climate change will require decarbonizing the world’s electric grids, as fast as possible. Google is &lt;a href="https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/247-carbon-free-energy.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;committed&lt;/a&gt; to doing as much as possible to clear a path for others and drive collective action to achieve this goal. We’re thrilled to be in good company as we move, together, toward a carbon-free future.&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/google-fervo-geothermal-project-creates-carbon-free-energy/"&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/sustainability_1mI5Bxf.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;With new geothermal project, it’s full steam ahead for 24/7 carbon-free energy&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Google and Fervo are developing a next-generation geothermal power project, which will provide an “always-on” carbon-free resource for ou...&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 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-releases-carbon-free-energy-percentage-for-2020/</guid><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Sustainability</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/2020CFE-Cloud-blog-hero-FINAL-6-28-21.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>A year of carbon-free energy at our data centers</title><description>Google's new data visualization shows every hour of carbon-free energy in 2020 for all its data centers.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/2020CFE-Cloud-blog-hero-FINAL-6-28-21.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-releases-carbon-free-energy-percentage-for-2020/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Maud Texier</name><title>Carbon Free Energy Lead, Data Center</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Nordeus brings its A-game with Google Cloud CDN</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/nordeus-migrates-from-on-prem-to-google-cloud-cdn/</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;Nordeus’ flagship football team-management simulation, Top Eleven, reached the top of the mobile game charts nearly a decade ago, and it’s been there ever since.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nordeus clearly knows a thing or two about creating exceptional game experiences that keep players coming back. And with a recently completed cloud migration that includes &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/cdn"&gt;Google Cloud CDN&lt;/a&gt;, the Nordeus infrastructure team created a simpler, smarter, and more cost-effective way to sustain its success.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to Strahinja Kustudić, head of infrastructure and data engineering at Nordeus, there are now more than 240 million registered players around the world that play Top Eleven on a very regular basis, and millions more are now playing two other game titles on the company's active roster. Nordeus itself has emerged as one of Europe's fastest-growing game developers, with new game titles currently in the works and more than 180 employees working at the company in Belgrade, Serbia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Leaving behind an unscalable, unsustainable on-prem system&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until 2019, the company delivered all of its gaming content using self-managed, on-premises systems. Their infrastructure included a UK-based data center with more than 400 dedicated servers running a virtual machine-based private cloud production environment, along with a sizable production Hadoop cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keeping everything on-prem gave the Nordeus infrastructure team control and visibility. But for their small and overstretched team, a status quo approach was no longer sustainable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;"For a long time, the infrastructure team was just me and one other person," Kustudić said. "We were doing some extreme over-provisioning, which is something you have to do when you're running dedicated servers. But we were paying a lot for nothing, and it didn't make any sense." At the same time, he added, the team's challenges with scaling its compute capacity separately from storage meant that a much-needed Hadoop upgrade was unlikely to occur.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;A legacy CDN with little room for growth&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The company's content delivery network (CDN) comprised another piece of its infrastructure puzzle. Previously, Nordeus relied on a single CDN provider that delivered acceptable performance, Kustudić said, but the process for adding new domains or other management tasks was complex and inefficient.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;"You had to contact [the CDN provider], talk with them, send them a certificate, and then they had to set it up," Kustudić stated. "It's not that easy."&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Nordeus on-prem storage cluster was another potential barrier to growth. While it performed as expected, the server's high-maintenance, custom storage and file system requirements combined to create yet another source of complexity and inefficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to Kustudić, Nordeus wasn't eager to take on the potential complexities of a cloud migration project. But moving to the cloud made sense not just from a cost perspective, but from a scalability perspective, too; supporting current and future growth had become unsustainable with on-prem infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;"It wasn't just about the cost," Kustudić explained. "We needed a platform that would be much easier to scale, administer, and monitor. We needed a platform that would be flexible and that would allow us to develop faster, move faster, and be a lot more agile.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Going all-in with a cloud migration strategy&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In April 2019, Nordeus started its Google Cloud migration project. Over the next six months, and with support from Google Cloud engineers from the outset, Nordeus moved its entire on-prem technology stack into Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;After taking some initial steps to strengthen the performance of its network, the Nordeus team learned to take advantage of tools like Terraform, which was new to them, and Ansible, which they already had been using to manage their on-prem environment for years. Both contributed to greater efficiency and scalability in their game development, test and launch processes. By January 2020, Nordeus was ready to migrate its final piece of infrastructure: its CDN.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kustudić and his team were impressed by the simplicity of the Google Cloud CDN setup process. "We couldn't imagine a CDN would be that easy to set up," Kustudić said. "We don't want to think about CDN — and that was a big problem with our on-prem system. Over the past year, since we did the migration, it's not something we ever think about. . . . we know it works and can scale indefinitely."&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;A CDN strategy designed to scale&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to Kustudić, Nordeus achieved both scalability and simplicity while revamping its entire approach to using a CDN. Whenever Nordeus launches a new game, the infrastructure team and any necessary dev teams are able to use a simple Terraform script to launch a CDN environment on demand which includes a Google Cloud Platform project, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing"&gt;Cloud Load Balancer,&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage"&gt;Google Cloud Storage&lt;/a&gt; bucket, and Cloud CDN instances. Using this code-based approach allows Nordeus to easily set up multiple test environments to efficiently test games during the development cycle, launch new games quickly, and scale game infrastructure efficiently based on user demands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cloud Storage also played an important part in solving the company's CDN challenges. Gone are the custom storage requirements and the inefficiency of storing vast numbers of small files within their filesystem. Instead, CDN origin storage became a non-issue with GCS. "The simplicity of CDN and Cloud Storage was mind-blowing," Kustudić said. "We don't have to worry about scaling at all — it just works." Yet another advantage of using GCS instead of a home-grown on-prem storage cluster is that the infrastructure team doesn’t have to worry about user errors and backing up files anymore — GCS built-in versioning takes care of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Freeing up the infrastructure team to focus on enabling growth&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;In terms of bottom-line impact, Kustudić pointed out that Google Cloud CDN delivered clear improvements in latency — especially in Europe, where latency has dropped by 15-20 percent. And while Kustudić pointed out that Nordeus didn't go into its Google Cloud migration to lower costs, that's exactly what happened. Its monthly CDN operating costs have declined by about 50%.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For Nordeus, saving money with Google Cloud CDN is less important than simply being able to focus on more important things like enabling growth, empowering dev teams to support a faster cadence of releases, and keeping the company on its fast track to global gaming prominence. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;"It's insane how good this is, and how easy it is to set up," Kustudić said. "We got a faster and more flexible platform, with more features than we ever could have had with a private cloud." Those are important capabilities for any business, but for a fast-growing company working to stay on top of a hotly competitive industry, they can make a critical difference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Learn More About Cloud CDN&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;To learn more about Cloud CDN, visit the Google Cloud CDN &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/cdn"&gt;solution page&lt;/a&gt; which includes features, documentation, customer stories and more. To get started with Cloud CDN, take a look at our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/how-to"&gt;how-to guides&lt;/a&gt; and review our best practices &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/best-practices"&gt;here&lt;/a&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/networking/cloud-cdn-and-load-balancing-support-http3/"&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/gcp_networking.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;HTTP/3 gets your content there QUIC, with Cloud CDN and Load Balancing&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Cloud CDN and Load Balancing customers can now serve clients HTTP/3, for better performance for streaming video, image serving and API sc...&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 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/nordeus-migrates-from-on-prem-to-google-cloud-cdn/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure Modernization</category><category>Cloud Migration</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gaming.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Nordeus brings its A-game with Google Cloud CDN</title><description>How one of Europe's fastest-growing game developers surmounted challenges with scale by migrating to the cloud.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gaming.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/nordeus-migrates-from-on-prem-to-google-cloud-cdn/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Yannick Guillerm</name><title>Solutions Manager Infrastructure Modernization</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Shubhika Taneja</name><title>Product Marketing Manager, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>2 ways to migrate your SAP HANA database to Google Cloud</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/sap-google-cloud/ways-to-migrate-sap-hana-databases-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;Many of the world’s leading companies run on SAP—and deploying it on Google Cloud extends the benefits of SAP even further. Migrating your current SAP S/4HANA deployment to Google Cloud—whether it resides on your company’s on-premises servers or another cloud service—provides your organization with a flexible virtualized architecture that lets you scale your environment to match your workloads, so you pay only for the compute and storage capacity you need at any given moment. Google Cloud includes built-in features, such as Compute Engine live migration and automatic restart, that minimize downtime for infrastructure maintenance. And it allows you to integrate your SAP data with multiple data sources and process it using Google Cloud technology such as BigQuery to drive data analytics.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;SAP server-side architecture consists of two layers: the SAP HANA database, and the Netweaver application layer. In this blog post, we’ll look at the options and steps for moving the database layer to Google Cloud as a lift and shift or rehost, a straightforward approach that entails moving your current SAP environment unchanged onto Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Deploying an SAP HANA system on Google Cloud&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google Cloud offers SAP-certified virtual machines (VMs) optimized for SAP products, including SAP HANA and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, as well as dedicated servers for SAP HANA for environments greater than 12TB. (For a complete list of VM and hardware options, visit the&lt;a href="https://www.sap.com/dmc/exp/2014-09-02-hana-hardware/enEN/#/solutions?filters=iaas;ve:29" target="_blank"&gt;Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Before proceeding with a rehost migration to Google Cloud, your current (source) environment and Google Cloud (target) environments should meet these specifications:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Prerequisites&lt;/b&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The configuration of the Google Cloud environment (i.e., VM  resources, SSD storage capacity) should be identical to that of the source environment. If the underlying hardware is different, however, you must use Option 2 for your migration, detailed below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both environments should be running the same operating system (SUSE or RHEL Linux).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The HANA version, instance number, and system ID (SID) should be identical.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Schema names must remain the same.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Establishing the network connection between the on-premises environment and Google Cloud will be required in this phase to support rehost of the SAP application.you can use Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect. Learn more about &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/interconnect/concepts/dedicated-overview"&gt;Dedicated Interconnect&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/vpn/concepts/overview"&gt;Cloud VPN&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Note&lt;/b&gt;: Depending on your internet connection and bandwidth requirements, we recommend using a Dedicated Interconnect over Cloud VPN for production environments. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We offer a number of automated processes to accelerate your cloud journey. To deploy the SAP HANA system on Google Cloud, you can use the&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap/docs/sap-hana-deployment-guide"&gt;Google Cloud Deployment manager&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href="https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/sap-deployment-automation/blob/master/terraform/modules/nw/README.md" target="_blank"&gt;Terraform and Ansible scripts available on GitHub&lt;/a&gt; with configuration file templates to define your installation. For more details, see the&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap/docs/sap-hana-planning-guide"&gt;Google Cloud SAP HANA Planning Guide&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Note&lt;/b&gt;: To deploy SAP HANA on Google Cloud machine types that are certified by SAP for production, please review the&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap/docs/certifications-sap-hana"&gt;Certification for SAP HANA on Google Cloud&lt;/a&gt; page. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Moving an SAP HANA Database to Google Cloud&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are two different options you can use to rehost your SAP HANA database to Google Cloud, and each has pros and cons that you should consider when deciding on your approach.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Option 1: Asynchronous replication&lt;/b&gt; uses SAP’s built-in replication tool to provide continuous data replication from the source system (also known as the primary system) to the destination or secondary system—in this case residing on Google Cloud. It’s best for mission-critical applications for which minimum downtime is a high priority, and for large databases. In addition, the high level of automation means that the process requires less manual intervention. Here’s where you can learn more on &lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.03/en-US/86267e1ed56940bb8e4a45557cee0e43.html" target="_blank"&gt;HANA Asynchronous Replication&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Option 2: Backup and restore&lt;/b&gt; relies on SAP’s backup utility to create an image of the database that is then transferred to Google Cloud, where it is restored in the new environment. Downtime for this method varies by database size, so large databases may require more downtime via this method vs. asynchronous replication. It also involves more manual tasks. However, it requires fewer resources to perform, making it an attractive option for less urgent use cases. Here’s where you can learn more on &lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.03/en-US/c4663eabbb571014923a90c70cec566c.html" target="_blank"&gt;SAP HANA database Backup and restore&lt;/a&gt;.&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/Migration_options_Pros_an.1000063420000891.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="Migration options Pros and cons.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Migration_options_Pros_an.1000063420000891.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;How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Asynchronous Replication&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/1_Asynchronous_Replication.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="1 Asynchronous Replication.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/1_Asynchronous_Replication.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;ol&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create and configure &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/network-connectivity/docs/interconnect/how-to/dedicated/provisioning-overview"&gt;Dedicated Interconnect&lt;/a&gt; or Cloud VPN between the current environment and Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Set up SAP HANA asynchronous replication. You can configure system replication using SAP HANA Cockpit, SAP HANA Studio, or hdbnsutil. See &lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.03/en-US/c7ecfd46d4124d42b868bad468175c30.html" target="_blank"&gt;Setting Up SAP HANA System Replication&lt;/a&gt; in the SAP HANA Administration Guide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to use the same instance number and HANA SID in the template as the primary instance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Configure the Google Cloud instance as the secondary node for using &lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/viewer/6b94445c94ae495c83a19646e7c3fd56/2.0.02/en-US/fe5fc53706a34048bf4a3a93a5d7c866.html" target="_blank"&gt;HANA Asynchronous replication&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perform data validation once full data replication is completed to the SAP HANA database in Google Cloud. To learn more: &lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/doc/c81e9406d08046c0a118c8bef71f6bdc/2.0.04/en-US/SAP_HANA_System_Replication_Guide_en.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;HANA System Replication overview&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perform an SAP HANA takeover on your standby database. This switches your active system from the current primary system onto the secondary system on Google Cloud. Once the takeover command runs, the system on Google Cloud becomes the new primary system.To learn more: &lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/doc/c81e9406d08046c0a118c8bef71f6bdc/2.0.04/en-US/SAP_HANA_System_Replication_Guide_en.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;HANA Takeover&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;p&gt;How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Backup and Restore&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/2_Backup_and_Restore.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="2 Backup and Restore.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/2_Backup_and_Restore.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;ol&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a full backup of your SAP HANA database in your current environment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a new storage bucket in your Google Cloud environment. Visit&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/creating-buckets"&gt;Creating Storage Buckets&lt;/a&gt; in the Google Cloud Storage documentation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Download and install gsutil onto the source environment and run it to upload the HANA backup to the Google Cloud storage bucket. To install gsutil utility on any computer or server, visit &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil_install"&gt;Install gsutil&lt;/a&gt; in the Google Cloud Storage documentation.&lt;br/&gt;Note: You can run parallel multi thread/multi processing in gsutil to copy large files more quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recover the HANA database on Google Cloud using SAP’s RECOVER DATABASE statement. See&lt;a href="https://help.sap.com/viewer/7c78579ce9b14a669c1f3295b0d8ca16/Cloud/en-US/c4205f73bb571014ba46d209981bc1f5.html" target="_blank"&gt;RECOVER DATABASE Statement (Backup and Recovery)&lt;/a&gt; in the SAP HANA SQL Reference Guide for SAP HANA Platform.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Note&lt;/b&gt;: BackInt agent is an integrated SAP interface tool used for HANA database on Google Cloud.Backint agent for SAP HANA can be used to store and retrieve backups directly from Google Cloud Storage. It is supported and certified by SAP on Google Cloud. To learn more:  &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap/docs/sap-hana-backint-overview#:~:text=The%20Backint%20agent%20stores%20your,regional%2C%20or%20multi%2Dregional."&gt;SAP HANA Backint Agent on Google Cloud. &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In summary, we recommend using Asynchronous Replication (Option 1) for mission-critical applications that require the lowest downtime window. For all other applications, we recommend Backup and Restore (Option 2), as this approach requires fewer resources. It’s also a great way to implement the backup and restore functionality on Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A rehost migration is the most straightforward path to getting your SAP on HANA system up and running on Google Cloud. And the sooner you migrate, the sooner you can take advantage of the many benefits Google Cloud brings to your SAP solution. For more information on the different migration options please review: &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap-on-google-cloud-migration-strategies"&gt;SAP on Google Cloud: Migration strategies&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap"&gt;Learn more&lt;/a&gt; about deploying SAP on Google Cloud. Technical resources can be found &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap/docs/overview-of-sap-on-google-cloud"&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/products/sap-google-cloud/9-ways-to-back-up-your-sap-systems-in-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_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;9 ways to back up your SAP systems in Google Cloud&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Backup and storage design should be part of any business continuity plan. This post explains Google Cloud’s multiple cloud-based backup s...&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, 15 Jun 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/sap-google-cloud/ways-to-migrate-sap-hana-databases-to-google-cloud/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Partners</category><category>Cloud Migration</category><category>SAP on Google Cloud</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/sap.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>2 ways to migrate your SAP HANA database to Google Cloud</title><description>Learn two methods for moving your current SAP environment unchanged onto Google Cloud as a lift and shift or rehost.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/sap.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/sap-google-cloud/ways-to-migrate-sap-hana-databases-to-google-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Ajay Asthana</name><title>SAP Cloud Consultant, Google Cloud Professional Services</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>All about cables: A guide to posts on our infrastructure under the sea</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/learn-about-googles-subsea-cables/</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;From data centers and cloud regions to subsea cables, Google is committed to connecting the world. Our investments in infrastructure aim to further improve our network—one of the world’s largest—which helps improve global connectivity, supporting  users and Google Cloud customers. Our subsea cables play a starring role in this work, linking up &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#regions"&gt;cloud infrastructure&lt;/a&gt; that includes more than 100 &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/edge-locations"&gt;network edge locations&lt;/a&gt; and over 7,500 &lt;a href="https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure" target="_blank"&gt;edge caching nodes&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, readers of this blog seem to find what happens under the sea just as fascinating as what’s going on in the cloud. Posts on our cables are consistently among our most popular, which is why we brought them together for you here so you can take a deeper dive (pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a list our most popular posts on our underwater infrastructure:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2021&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable"&gt;Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/introducing-the-echo-subsea-cable"&gt;This bears repeating: Introducing the Echo subsea cable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/googles-dunant-subsea-cable-is-now-ready-for-service"&gt;The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2020&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-googles-grace-hopper-subsea-cable-system"&gt;Announcing the Grace Hopper subsea cable, linking the U.S., U.K. and Spain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2019&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/introducing-equiano-a-subsea-cable-from-portugal-to-south-africa"&gt;Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&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;A quick hop across the pond: Supercharging the Dunant subsea cable with SDM technology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/curie-subsea-cable-set-to-transmit-to-chile-with-a-pit-stop-to-panama"&gt;Curie subsea cable set to transmit to Chile, with a pit stop to Panama&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2018&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/expanding-our-cloud-network-faster-more-reliable-experience-between-australia-and-southeast-asia"&gt;Expanding our cloud network for a faster, more reliable experience between Australia and Southeast Asia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/delivering-increased-connectivity-our-first-private-trans-atlantic-subsea-cable"&gt;Delivering increased connectivity with our first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2017&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-invests-indigo-undersea-cable-improve-cloud-infrastructure-southeast-asia"&gt;Google invests in INDIGO undersea cable to improve cloud infrastructure in Southeast Asia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;2016&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/new-undersea-cable-expands-capacity-for-google-apac-customers-and-users"&gt;New undersea cable expands capacity for Google APAC customers and users&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-customers-run-at-the-speed-of-light-with-new-faster-undersea-pipe"&gt;Google Cloud customers run at the speed of light with new FASTER undersea pipe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/journey-bottom-internet"&gt;A journey to the bottom of the internet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers can make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services. To learn more, you can &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#network"&gt;view our network on a map&lt;/a&gt;, or read more &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations"&gt;about our network&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/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable/"&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/Firmina.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;Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;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...&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, 11 Jun 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/learn-about-googles-subsea-cables/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/world_map1_54SFPZM.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>All about cables: A guide to posts on our infrastructure under the sea</title><description>All our posts on Google’s global subsea cable system in one handy location.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/world_map1_54SFPZM.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/learn-about-googles-subsea-cables/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>The Google Cloud content marketing team </name><title></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>With new geothermal project, it’s full steam ahead for 24/7 carbon-free energy</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-fervo-geothermal-project-creates-carbon-free-energy/</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;When Google announced our plan to go beyond purchasing renewable power for 100% of our energy usage and operate on &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-third-decade-climate-action-realizing-carbon-free-future/" target="_blank"&gt;24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030&lt;/a&gt;, we noted that achieving this goal will require &lt;a href="https://aescorp2020cr.q4web.com/press-releases/news-details/2021/AES-Announces-First-of-Its-Kind-Agreement-to-Supply-247-Carbon-Free-Energy-for-Google-Data-Centers-in-Virginia/default.aspx" target="_blank"&gt;new transaction structures&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://grist.org/energy/can-the-federal-government-run-on-24-7-clean-energy-biden-wants-to-try/" target="_blank"&gt;advancements in clean energy policy&lt;/a&gt;, and innovative new technologies. Today, we’re pleased to announce that one of these new technologies—a first-of-its-kind, next-generation geothermal project—will soon begin adding carbon-free energy to the electric grid that serves our data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada, including our Cloud region in Las Vegas.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google and clean-energy startup Fervo have just signed the world’s first corporate agreement to develop a next-generation geothermal power project, which will provide an “always-on” carbon-free resource that can reduce our hourly reliance on fossil fuels. In 2022, Fervo will begin adding “firm” geothermal energy to the state’s electric grid system, where Google’s commitments already include one of the &lt;a href="https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-inks-huge-ci-deal-in-nevada-with-a-prominent-place-for-storage" target="_blank"&gt;world’s largest&lt;/a&gt; corporate solar-plus-storage power purchase agreements. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, this collaboration also sets the stage for next-generation geothermal to play a role as a &lt;a href="https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;firm and flexible&lt;/a&gt; carbon-free energy source that can increasingly replace carbon-emitting fossil fuels—especially when aided by policies that expand and improve electricity markets; &lt;a href="https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/crapo-whitehouse-release-energy-innovation-tax-credit-proposal" target="_blank"&gt;incentivize deployment&lt;/a&gt; of innovative technologies; and increase investments in clean energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&amp;amp;D). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Next-generation geothermal technology&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Traditional geothermal already provides carbon-free baseload energy to a number of power grids. But because of cost and location constraints, it accounts for a very small percentage of global clean energy production. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;That’s one reason this new approach is so exciting; by using advanced drilling, fiber-optic sensing, and analytics techniques, next-generation geothermal can unlock an entirely new class of resource. And the US Department of Energy has found that with advancements in policy, technology, and procurement, geothermal energy could provide up to &lt;a href="https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/06/f63/GeoVision-full-report-opt.pdf" target="_blank"&gt;120 GW&lt;/a&gt; of firm, flexible generation capacity in the US by 2050. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As part of our agreement, Google is partnering with Fervo to develop AI and machine learning that could boost the productivity of next-generation geothermal and make it more effective at responding to demand, while also filling in the gaps left by variable renewable energy sources. Although this project is still in the early stages, it shows promise.&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/original_images/gcp_sustainability_Gaux6Wf.gif" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="gcp sustainability.gif" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/gcp_sustainability_Gaux6Wf.gif"/&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;Using fiber-optic cables inside wells, Fervo can gather real-time data on flow, temperature, and performance of the geothermal resource. This data allows Fervo to identify precisely where the best resources exist, making it possible to control flow at various depths. Coupled with the AI and machine learning development outlined above, these capabilities can increase productivity and unlock flexible geothermal power in a range of new places. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This won’t be the first time that Google is applying software solutions to clean energy applications: we’ve just announced an update to our &lt;a href="https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/carbon-aware-computing-location" target="_blank"&gt;carbon-intelligent computing program&lt;/a&gt; that helps us reduce emissions associated with running applications at Google data centers. And other forms of AI and machine learning are currently being used to &lt;a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/26/18241632/google-deepmind-wind-farm-ai-machine-learning-green-energy-efficiency" target="_blank"&gt;increase the value of wind energy&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Already this year, Google has taken significant strides toward sourcing 24/7 carbon-free energy for all our data centers, office campuses, and Cloud regions. On Earth Day, our CEO Sundar Pichai announced that for the first time, five of our global data center sites operated &lt;a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/new-progress-toward-our-247-carbon-free-energy-goal" target="_blank"&gt;near or at 90% carbon-free energy&lt;/a&gt; in 2020. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only does this Fervo project bring our data centers in Nevada closer to round-the-clock clean energy, but it also acts as a proof-of-concept to show how firm clean energy sources such as next-generation geothermal could eventually help replace carbon-emitting power sources around the world.&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/public-sector/working-with-governments-on-climate-goals/"&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/sustainability_6eOFFx2.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;How we’re working with governments on climate goals&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Google’s Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt shares how technology companies and governments can work together to address climate change.&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, 18 May 2021 19:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-fervo-geothermal-project-creates-carbon-free-energy/</guid><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Sustainability</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/sustainability_1mI5Bxf.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>With new geothermal project, it’s full steam ahead for 24/7 carbon-free energy</title><description>Google and Fervo are developing a next-generation geothermal power project, which will provide an “always-on” carbon-free resource for our data centers.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/sustainability_1mI5Bxf.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/google-fervo-geothermal-project-creates-carbon-free-energy/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Michael Terrell</name><title>Director of Energy</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Google Cloud and Seagate: Transforming hard-disk drive maintenance with predictive ML</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/seagate-and-google-predict-hard-disk-drive-failures-with-ml/</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;Data centers may be in the midst of a flash revolution, but managing hard disk drives (HDDs) is still paramount. According to IDC, stored data will increase &lt;a href="https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS46303920" target="_blank"&gt;17.8%&lt;/a&gt; by 2024 with HDD as the main storage technology. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At Google Cloud, we know first-hand how critical it is to manage HDDs in operations and preemptively identify potential failures. We are responsible for running some of the largest data centers in the world—any misses in identifying these failures at the right time can potentially cause serious outages across our many products and services. In the past, when a disk was flagged for a problem, the main option was to repair the problem on site using software. But this procedure was expensive and time-consuming. It required draining the data from the drive, isolating the drive, running diagnostics, and then re-introducing it to traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;That’s why we teamed up with Seagate, our HDD original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner for Google’s data centers, to find a way to predict frequent HDD problems. Together, we developed a machine learning (ML) system, built on top of Google Cloud, to forecast the probability of a recurring failing disk—a disk that fails or has experienced three or more problems in 30 days.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let’s take a peek. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Managing disks by the millions is hard work&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are millions of disks deployed in operation that generate terabytes (TBs) of raw telemetry data. This includes billions of rows of hourly SMART(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data and host metadata, such as repair logs, Online Vendor Diagnostics (OVD) or Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) logs, and manufacturing data about each disk drive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;That’s hundreds of parameters and factors that must be tracked and monitored across every single HDD. When you consider the number of drives in an enterprise data center today, it’s practically impossible to monitor all these devices based on human power alone. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To help solve this issue, we created a machine learning system to predict HDD health in our data centers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Reducing risk and costs with a predictive maintenance system&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our Google Cloud AI Services team (Professional Services), along with Accenture, helped Seagate build a proof of concept based on the two most common drive types. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ML system was built on the following Google Cloud products and services:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs" target="_blank"&gt;Terraform&lt;/a&gt; helped us configure our infrastructure and manage resources on Google Cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google internal technologies enabled us to migrate data files to Google Cloud. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery"&gt;BigQuery and&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/dataflow"&gt;Dataflow&lt;/a&gt; allowed us to build highly scalable data pipelines to ingest, load, transform, and store TB of data, including raw HDD health data, features (used for training and prediction), labels, prediction results, and metadata. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We built, trained, and deployed our time-series forecasting ML model using:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform-notebooks"&gt;AI Platform Notebooks&lt;/a&gt; for experimentation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/automl-tables"&gt;AutoML Tables&lt;/a&gt; for ML model experimentation and development&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Custom Transformer-based Tensorflow model trained on &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform"&gt;Cloud AI Platform&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;UI views in Data Studio and BigQuery made it easy to share results for executives, managers, and analysts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/composer"&gt;Composer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/functions/"&gt;Cloud Functions&lt;/a&gt;, and our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/products/operations"&gt;Cloud operations suite&lt;/a&gt; provided end-to-end automation and monitoring.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the past, when we flagged a disk problem, the main fix was to repair the disk on site using software. But this procedure was expensive and time-consuming. It required draining the data from the drive, isolating the drive, running diagnostics, and then re-introducing it to traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;"End-to-end automated MLOps using Google Cloud products from data ingestion to model training, validation and deployment added significant value to the project."&lt;/i&gt; according to Vamsi Paladugu, Director of Data and Analytics at Seagate. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vamsi also added, &lt;i&gt;"Automated implementation of infrastructure as code using Terraform and DevOps processes, aligning with Seagate security policies and flawless execution of the design and setup of the infrastructure is commendable."&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, when an HDD is flagged for repair, the model takes any data about that disk before repair (i.e. SMART data and OVD logs) and uses it to predict the probability of recurring failures.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Data is critical—build a strong data pipeline &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Making device data useful through infrastructure and advanced analytics tools is a critical component of any predictive maintenance strategy. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every disk has to continuously measure hundreds of different performance and health characteristics that can be used to monitor and predict its future health. To be successful, we needed to build a data pipeline that was both scalable and reliable for both batch and streaming data processes for a variety of different data sources, including:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;SMART system indicators from storage devices to detect and anticipate imminent hardware failures.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Host data, such as notifications about failures, collected from a host system made up of multiple drives. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;HDD logs (OVD and FARM data) and disk repair logs. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Manufacturing data for each drive, such as model type and batch number. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;b&gt;Important note&lt;/b&gt;: We do not share user data at any time during this process. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;With so much raw data, we needed to extract the right features to ensure the accuracy and performance of our ML models. AutoML Tables made this process easy with automatic feature engineering. All we had to do was use our data pipeline to convert the raw data into AutoML input format. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;BigQuery made it easy to execute simple transformations, such as pivoting rows to columns, joining normalized tables, and defining labels, for petabytes of data in just a few seconds. From there, the data was imported directly into AutoML Tables for training and serving our ML models.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Choosing the right approach — two models put to the test&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once we had our pipeline, it was time to build our model. We pursued two approaches to build our time-series forecasting model: an &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/automl-tables"&gt;AutoML Tables&lt;/a&gt; classifier and a custom &lt;a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762" target="_blank"&gt;deep Transformer-based&lt;/a&gt; model.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The AutoML model extracted different aggregates of time-series features, such as the minimum, maximum, and average read error rates. These were then concatenated with features that were not time-series, such as drive model type. We used a time-based split to create our training, validation, and testing subsets. AutoML Tables makes it easy to import the data, generate statistics, train different models, tune hyperparameter configurations, and deliver model performance metrics. It also offers an API to easily perform and batch online predictions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, we created a custom Transformer-based model from scratch using Tensorflow. The Transformer model didn’t require feature engineering or creating feature aggregates. Instead, raw time series data was fed directly into the model and positional encoding was used to track the relative order. Features that were not time-series were fed into a deep neural network (DNN). Outputs from both the model and the DNN were then concatenated and a sigmoid layer was used to predict the label. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;So, which model worked better? &lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The AutoML model generated better results, outperforming the custom transformer model or statistical model system. After we deployed the model, we stored our forecasts in our database and compared the predictions with actual drive repair logs after 30 days. Our AutoML model achieved a precision of 98% with a recall of 35% compared to precision of 70-80% and recall of 20-25% from custom ML model). We were also able to explain the mode by identifying the top reasons behind the recurring failures and enabling ground teams to take proactive actions to reduce failures in operations before they happened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Our top takeaway: MLOps is the key to successful production&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The final ingredient to ensure you can deploy robust, repeatable machine learning pipelines is MLOps. Google Cloud offers multiple options to help you implement MLOps, using automation to support an end-to-end lifecycle that can add significant value to your projects. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For this project, we used Terraform to define and provision our infrastructure and GitLab for source control versioning and CI/CD pipeline implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our repository contains two branches for development and production, which corresponds to an environment in Google Cloud. Here is our high-level system design of the model pipeline for training and serving:&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/repository.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="repository.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/repository.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;We used Cloud Composer, our fully managed workflow orchestration service, to orchestrate all the data, training, and serving pipelines we mentioned above. After an ML engineer has evaluated the performance-trained model, they can trigger an activation pipeline that promotes the model to production by simply appending an entry in a metadata table.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;"Google's MLOps environment allowed us to create a seamless soup-to-nuts experience, from data ingestion all the way to easy to monitor executive dashboards."&lt;/i&gt; said Elias Glavinas, Seagate’s Director of Quality Data Analytics, Tools &amp;amp; Automation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elias also noted, &lt;i&gt;"AutoML Tables, specifically, proved to be a substantial time and resource saver on the data science side, offering auto feature engineering and hyperparameter tuning, with model prediction results that matched or exceeded our data scientists' manual efforts. Add to that the capability for easy and automated model retraining and deployment, and this turned out to be a very successful project.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;What’s coming next&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;The business case for using an ML-based system to predict HDD failure is only getting stronger. When engineers have a larger window to identify failing disks, not only can they reduce costs but they can also prevent problems before they impact end users. We already have plans to expand the system to support all Seagate drives—and we can’t wait to see how this will benefit our OEMs and our customers! &lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Acknowledgements&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;sup&gt;We’d like to give thanks to Anuradha Bajpai, Kingsley Madikaegbu, and Prathap Parvathareddy for implementing the GCP infrastructure and building critical data ingestion segments. We’d like to give special thanks to Chris Donaghue, Karl Smayling, Kaushal Upadhyaya, Michael McElarney, Priya Bajaj, Radha Ramachandran, Rahul Parashar, Sheldon Logan, Timothy Ma and Tony Oliveri for their support and guidance throughout the project. We are grateful to Seagate team (Ed Yasutake, Alan Tsang, John Sosa-Trustham, Kathryn Plath and Michael Renella) and our partner team from Accenture (Aaron Little, Divya Monisha, Karol Stuart, Olufemi Adebiyi, Patrizio Guagliardo, Sneha Soni, Suresh Vadali, Venkatesh Rao and Vivian Li) who partnered with us in delivering this successful project.&lt;/sup&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/ai-machine-learning/key-requirements-for-an-mlops-foundation/"&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_AI.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;Key requirements for an MLOps foundation&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;MLOps aims to unify ML system development with ML system operations and these Google Cloud tools help.&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, 07 May 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/seagate-and-google-predict-hard-disk-drive-failures-with-ml/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Partners</category><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Systems</category><category>AI &amp; Machine Learning</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/AI_Deploy_nlfl0lU.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Google Cloud and Seagate: Transforming hard-disk drive maintenance with predictive ML</title><description>Seagate and Google work on ML that forecasts the probability of problems with hard disk drives.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/AI_Deploy_nlfl0lU.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/seagate-and-google-predict-hard-disk-drive-failures-with-ml/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Nitin Aggarwal</name><title>Sr. Technical Program Manager, Google</title><department></department><company></company></author><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Rostam Dinyari</name><title>AI Engineer</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Google Cloud announces new region to support growing customer base in Israel</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-google-cloud-region-in-israel/</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 has long looked to Israel for globally impactful technologies including popular Search features, Waze, &lt;a href="https://blog.google/technology/ai/duplex-helpful-updates/" target="_blank"&gt;Duplex&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://blog.google/products/android/live-caption/" target="_blank"&gt;Live Caption&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://blog.google/technology/ai/flood-forecasts-india-bangladesh/" target="_blank"&gt;flood forecasting&lt;/a&gt;. At our &lt;a href="https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/decode15#" target="_blank"&gt;Decode with Google 15RAEL&lt;/a&gt; event last week, we celebrated &lt;a href="https://youtu.be/Y_U1s1xoYoA" target="_blank"&gt;15 years&lt;/a&gt; of Google innovation in Israel and our longstanding support of the country’s vibrant startup ecosystem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the years, we’ve expanded our enterprise investments in the country, too. In addition to our over a decade long investment in the space, Google has acquired Israeli-based companies like &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-announces-intent-to-acquire-alooma-to-simplify-cloud-migration"&gt;Alooma&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/expanding-our-enterprise-file-storage-offerings-to-simplify-the-management-and-scaling-of-data"&gt;Elastifile&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-cloud-announces-intent-to-acquire-velostrata"&gt;Velostrata&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-past-present-and-future-of-custom-compute-at-google"&gt;Uri Frank&lt;/a&gt; joined Google Cloud last month to lead our server chip design team from our offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As we continue to meet growing demand for cloud services in Israel, we’re excited to announce that a new Google Cloud region is coming to Israel to make it easier for customers to serve their own users faster, more reliably and securely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our global network of Google Cloud regions are the foundation of the cloud infrastructure we’re building to support our customers. With &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/about/locations"&gt;cloud’s 25 regions and 76 zones&lt;/a&gt; around the world, we deliver high-performance, low-latency services and products for Google Cloud’s enterprise and &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/assured-workloads"&gt;public sector&lt;/a&gt; customers. With each new Google Cloud region, customers get access to &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure"&gt;secure infrastructure&lt;/a&gt;, smarter &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/smart-analytics"&gt;analytics tools&lt;/a&gt;, an &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud"&gt;open platform&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;cleanest cloud in the industry&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Having a region in Israel will help accelerate innovation for customers of all sizes, including PayBox, a digital wallet application owned by Discount Bank, one of Israel’s largest banks. “When we acquired PayBox, our goal was to improve the security and the user experience for its products, but we also wanted to keep the startup’s agility and innovation. Google Cloud has enabled us to do just that,” said Sarit Beck-Barkai, Managing Director of PayBox at &lt;a href="https://www.discountbank.co.il/DB/en" target="_blank"&gt;Discount Bank&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“We are very excited that leading vendors like Google are investing and launching a local cloud region in Israel. This will make a significant change in the technology landscape of the public-sector, enterprise and SMB markets in Israel. Matrix is proud to be a major part of the transition to the cloud,”&lt;/i&gt; said Moti Gutman, CEO at &lt;a href="https://www.matrix-globalservices.com/" target="_blank"&gt;Matrix&lt;/a&gt;, technology services company and Google Cloud partner. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;"In the last year, Panorays more than tripled its customer base and scaled its infrastructure, practically at the click of a button. Google Cloud made it easy for us to scale without worrying about DevOps, which meant that our engineers could focus on developing new and better features for our customers. The new region launching in Israel will allow us to serve our local customer base even better, as we'll be able to experience higher availability and deploy resources in specific regions, thus reducing latency."&lt;/i&gt; said Demi Ben-Ari, Co-founder and CTO, &lt;a href="https://www.panorays.com" target="_blank"&gt;Panorays&lt;/a&gt;, a third-party security platform and Google Cloud customer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;"This new cloud region will provide even better access and growth potential for our mutual customers with tech hubs in the region. We are serving hyper growth companies who need Google Cloud’s services and will benefit greatly from this regional presence,"&lt;/i&gt; said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO of &lt;a href="https://www.doit-intl.com/" target="_blank"&gt;DoiT International&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When it launches, the Israel region will deliver a comprehensive portfolio of Google Cloud products to private and public sector organizations locally. We look forward to welcoming you to the Israel region, and we’re excited to support your growing business on our platform. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Learn more about our global cloud infrastructure, including new and upcoming regions, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure"&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/systems/the-past-present-and-future-of-custom-compute-at-google/"&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/compute.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 past, present and future of custom compute at Google&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;To meet users’ performance needs at low power, we’re doubling down on custom chips that use System on a Chip (SoC) designs.&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, 28 Apr 2021 05:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-google-cloud-region-in-israel/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_israel_region.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Google Cloud announces new region to support growing customer base in Israel</title><description>The new Google Cloud region in Israel will bring low-latency for users in the area, as well as a full complement of Google Cloud services.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/gcp_israel_region.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-google-cloud-region-in-israel/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Boaz Maoz</name><title>Country Director, Israel, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Earth Week in the cloud</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/earth-week-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;Although &lt;a href="https://www.earthday.org/" target="_blank"&gt;Earth Day was April 22&lt;/a&gt;, at Google Cloud &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;we take sustainability seriously&lt;/a&gt; so we celebrated Earth Day all week long. We didn’t want you to miss a thing, so we’re recapping all our news from Earth Week in one handy location.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that’s right for you&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to sustainability, we get more done when we move together. That’s why Google Cloud partners with nonprofits, research organizations, governments, and businesses to build technology and tools to accelerate meaningful change. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To help our customers do this, &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/sharing-carbon-free-energy-percentage-for-google-cloud-regions"&gt;last month&lt;/a&gt; we shared the average hourly &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability/region-carbon"&gt;Carbon Free Energy Percentage (CFE%)&lt;/a&gt; for the majority of our Google Cloud regions. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-cloud-region-picker-helps-you-make-the-green-choice"&gt;On Monday&lt;/a&gt;, we shared a new tool leveraging this data—&lt;a href="https://gcp-region-picker.web.app/" target="_blank"&gt;a Google Cloud region picker&lt;/a&gt;—that helps customers assess key inputs like price, latency to their end users and carbon footprint, as they choose which Google Cloud region to run on. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-cloud-region-picker-helps-you-make-the-green-choice"&gt;Read more&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/sustainability/google-cloud-region-picker-helps-you-make-the-green-choice/"&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/gcp_sustainability_region_picker.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;Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that’s right for you&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;New Google Cloud region picker makes it easy for you to take advantage of our greenest data centers.&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;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Four consecutive years of 100% renewable energy—and what’s next&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Tuesday, we announced that in 2020 Google again matched 100 percent of its global electricity use with &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-achieves-four-consecutive-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy"&gt;purchases of renewable energy&lt;/a&gt;. We were the first company of our size to achieve this milestone back in 2017, and we’ve repeated the accomplishment in every year since. All told, we’ve signed agreements to buy power from more than 50 renewable energy projects, with a combined capacity of 5.5 gigawatts—about the same as a million solar rooftops. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-achieves-four-consecutive-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy"&gt;Read more&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/sustainability/google-achieves-four-consecutive-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy/"&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/gcp_sustainability.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;Four consecutive years of 100% renewable energy—and what’s next&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;For the fourth consecutive year, Google has matched 100% of its global electricity use with renewable energy—but that’s just the beginning.&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;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Solving for more sustainable and resilient value chains&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Global supply chains are also subject to environmental risks. In 2020, over 8,000 suppliers &lt;a href="https://6fefcbb86e61af1b2fc4-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/005/554/original/CDP_SC_Report_2020.pdf?1614160765" target="_blank"&gt;disclosing through CDP,&lt;/a&gt; a global disclosure system for environmental impacts, reported that US$1.26 trillion of revenue is likely to be at risk over the next five years due to climate change, deforestation, and water insecurity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Thursday, we shared how we’re working to help organizations digitally transform their &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains"&gt;supply chains with sustainability&lt;/a&gt; in mind. With better insights from data, they can automate processes more intelligently. With smarter ML models, they can optimize systems and routing. With an open platform, they can integrate partner solutions. And they can connect their workforce in real time to collaborate up and down the value chain. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains"&gt;Read more&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/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains/"&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/gcp_sustainable_supply_chain_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;Solving for more sustainable and resilient value chains&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Improved visibility and insights—and the flexibility to adopt new business models—are key to building more sustainable supply chains.&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;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Contributing to a sustainable future with Chrome OS and partners&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google’s sustainability initiatives extend all the way from our data centers to our endpoints. That’s why Chrome OS also provides sustainable computing software and hardware through our ecosystem of partners and customers committed to driving systemic change. On Friday, we shared how Chrome OS was born in the cloud and introduced a &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partners"&gt;modern, more sustainable way of computing&lt;/a&gt;. Many partners and customers have adopted Chrome OS with specific sustainability goals in mind, and we’re sharing their stories to inspire others. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partnershttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partners"&gt;Read more&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/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partners/"&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/EarthDayBanner-2800x1200-2.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;Contributing to a sustainable future with Chrome OS and partners&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;How Chrome OS and partners are contributing to a sustainable future&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;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Every day is Earth Day&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although today marks the close of Earth Week, our passion for sustainability never waivers. As we continue to operate the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;cleanest cloud in the industry&lt;/a&gt;, we’re working with a growing group of cloud customers focused on reducing the carbon impact of their operations. Learn more at &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;https://cloud.google.com/sustainability&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/sustainability/sharing-carbon-free-energy-percentage-for-google-cloud-regions/"&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_sustainability_v2.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;How carbon-free is your cloud? New data lets you know&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;A Google Cloud region’s Carbon-Free Energy percentage (CFE%) lets you choose where best to run your workloads to meet your sustainability...&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;div class="block-paragraph"&gt;&lt;div class="rich-text"&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Further reading&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-cloud-region-picker-helps-you-make-the-green-choice"&gt;Faster, cheaper, greener? Pick the Google Cloud region that’s right for you&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/google-achieves-four-consecutive-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy"&gt;Four consecutive years of 100% renewable energy—and what’s next&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains"&gt;Solving for more sustainable and resilient value chains&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/chrome-enterprise/contributing-to-a-sustainable-future-with-chrome-os-and-partners"&gt;Contributing to a sustainable future with Chrome OS and partners&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/working-with-governments-on-climate-goals"&gt;How we’re working with governments on climate goals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/sharing-carbon-free-energy-percentage-for-google-cloud-regions"&gt;How carbon-free is your cloud? New data lets you know&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/t-eacs-offer-new-approach-to-certifying-clean-energy"&gt;A timely new approach to certifying clean energy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;</description><pubDate>Sat, 24 Apr 2021 12:44:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/earth-week-google-cloud/</guid><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Inside Google Cloud</category><category>Chrome Enterprise</category><category>Sustainability</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/earth.max-600x600.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Earth Week in the cloud</title><description>All the sustainability news from Google Cloud for Earth Day 2021</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/earth.max-600x600.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/earth-week-google-cloud/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>The Google Cloud content marketing team </name><title></title><department></department><company></company></author></item><item><title>Solving for more sustainable and resilient value chains</title><link>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains/</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;The past year highlighted the fragility of global supply chains and logistics networks and the need to adapt to rapidly changing business models and customer preferences. The importance of flexible, resilient and sustainable customer value chains is critical as organizations recalibrate to a post-pandemic world. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Global supply chains are also subject to environmental risks. In 2020, over 8,000 suppliers disclosing through &lt;a href="https://www.cdp.net/en" target="_blank"&gt;CDP&lt;/a&gt;, a global disclosure system for environmental impacts, reported that US$1.26 trillion of revenue is likely to be at risk over the next five years due to climate change, deforestation, and water insecurity&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Organizations are also likely to be challenged with reputational and regulatory risks across their value chain. For instance, emissions from supply chains are on average 11.4x higher than emissions from a company’s direct operations&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. In many sectors, supply chains are responsible for over 80% of total greenhouse gas emissions. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a strong argument for accelerating efforts to tackle these emissions, as suppliers reported combined savings of US$33.7 billion in 2020 by actively cutting emissions.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Challenges in creating a sustainable customer value chain &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Organizations struggle with achieving sustainable value chain goals largely due to three factors: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Limited visibility across the end-to-end value chain to drive transparency and accelerate adoption of sustainable best practices&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lack of flexibility to adapt to new business models as highlighted during the pandemic and the rapid shift to e-commerce &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Limited insight into an organization’s operational decisions and their impact in reducing carbon emissions, preventing data-driven decision making.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;h3&gt;How Google Cloud can help&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our mission at Google Cloud is to accelerate your organization’s ability to digitally transform your business. That includes supply chains. With better insights from data you can automate processes more intelligently. With smarter ML models you can optimize systems and routing. With an open platform you can integrate partner solutions. And you can connect your workforce in real time to collaborate up and down the value chain. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Leveraging these technologies, we’re partnering with our customers to tackle the unique sustainability challenges they face to help transform their supply chains.&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/the_challenges.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="the challenges.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/the_challenges.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;&lt;b&gt;Greater visibility into supply chain impacts with&lt;/b&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.eni.com/en-IT/home.html" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;ENI&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: By creating an &lt;a href="https://openes.io/portal/homepage" target="_blank"&gt;open digital platform&lt;/a&gt; for companies to measure their own sustainability performance, Google Cloud and ENI, together with Boston Consulting Group, are helping companies gain an awareness of their strengths and areas for improvement across industrial supply chains. &lt;b&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Enabling sustainable sourcing at&lt;/b&gt;&lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0922/unilever-to-reimagine-future-of-sustainable-sourcing"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Unilever&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: By combining the power of cloud computing with satellite imagery and AI, Google Cloud and Unilever are building a more holistic view of the forests, water cycles, and biodiversity that intersect Unilever’s supply chain—raising sustainable sourcing standards for suppliers and bringing Unilever closer to its goal of ending deforestation and regenerating nature.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Reducing emissions from last-mile logistics and fleet operations at&lt;/b&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ1Lqxfs1yw&amp;amp;t=2458s" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;b&gt;UPS&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: UPS leverages Google Cloud smart analytics platform to reduce fuel consumption by 10 million gallons a year, reducing carbon emissions and saving up to $400 million a year.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Reducing manufacturing waste and improving production quality at LG and GlobalFoundries:&lt;/b&gt; &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/ai-and-machine-learning-improve-manufacturing-visual-inspection-process"&gt;LG&lt;/a&gt; improved defect detection accuracy by 6% and reduced the time to design and train ML models from days to hours using Google Cloud Vision AI. The Vision AI solution was able to reduce waste and increase customer satisfaction and quality at GlobalFoundries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Reducing packaging at Lush&lt;/b&gt;: &lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn4_ilZkk-s&amp;amp;feature=youtu.be" target="_blank"&gt;Lush&lt;/a&gt; was able to nearly eliminate plastic packaging by using Google AI to develop an app that leverages AI and augmented reality to recognize products and overlay product information.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In solutions engineering our goal is to take these unique experiences and scale them to help organizations reduce emissions and meet their sustainability goals. To facilitate collaboration along this journey we are creating a program to work with our customers and assess where cloud technology can impact their value chains in an environmentally positive way.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;h3&gt;Steps for creating more sustainable value chains &lt;/h3&gt;&lt;p&gt;We’ve developed innovative models to tackle challenges from reducing IT costs to data center transformations to IT infrastructure emissions. We’re excited to apply it to our customers’ sustainability priorities and pain points across the supply chain. We will partner closely to build proof of concepts (PoCs) to tackle new opportunities that help customers achieve their sustainability goals.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;We’ll start with benchmarks. We measure where customers are relative to industry benchmarks, to better help them achieve their target goals.&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Next, we’ll assess sustainability and supply chain processes against a maturity curve. This creates a gap analysis to identify areas for improvement.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;We’ll prioritize the areas of focus using factors such as cost reduction, productivity improvement, revenue impact, and environmental and financial risks.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;We’ll map the &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/solutions/supply-chain-logistics"&gt;Google Cloud solutions&lt;/a&gt; against your areas of focus identifying where cloud technology can potentially reduce environmental impact and operational costs, and where it can enhance security, compliance, and flexibility. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;With a short list of opportunities, we’ll partner closely with your teams to build PoCs and test the impact of our solutions and ability to scale across your end-to-end value chain.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&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/Steps_for_creating_more_s.0771025314920491.max-2800x2800.jpg" rel="external" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="Steps for creating more sustainable value chains.jpg" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/Steps_for_creating_more_s.0771025314920491.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;This is just the beginning of our journey to help address the most challenging problems across the supply chain and partner with our customers to help them achieve sustainability goals. You can learn more about our &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/sustainability"&gt;sustainability efforts&lt;/a&gt; and how we’re integrating circular economy principles into our own supply chain to make it more sustainable. &lt;a href="https://cloud.google.com/contact"&gt;Contact us&lt;/a&gt; to tell us what you’re solving for and get started. A Google Cloud expert will help you find the best engagement for you. We look forward to helping you achieve your sustainable value chain goals.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;hr/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;i&gt;1. &lt;a href="https://6fefcbb86e61af1b2fc4-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/005/554/original/CDP_SC_Report_2020.pdf?1614160765" target="_blank"&gt;CDP Global Supply Chain Report 2020&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;2. &lt;a href="https://6fefcbb86e61af1b2fc4-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/005/554/original/CDP_SC_Report_2020.pdf?1614160765" target="_blank"&gt;CDP Global Supply Chain Report 2020&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;3. &lt;a href="https://6fefcbb86e61af1b2fc4-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/005/554/original/CDP_SC_Report_2020.pdf?1614160765" target="_blank"&gt;CDP Global Supply Chain Report 2020&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/sup&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/manufacturing/cloud-can-transform-supply-chain-and-logistics-tools-and-processes/"&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/Retail.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;Run a transformed supply chain—see how at Google’s Digital Supply Chain summit&lt;/h4&gt;&lt;p class="uni-related-article-tout__body"&gt;Check out how to build modern digital supply chain and logistics platforms and check out Google’s Supply Chain Summit.&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, 21 Apr 2021 16:00:00 -0000</pubDate><guid>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains/</guid><category>Infrastructure</category><category>Supply Chain &amp; Logistics</category><category>Google Cloud</category><category>Sustainability</category><media:content url="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/gcp_sustainable_supply_chain_1.jpg" width="540" height="540"></media:content><og xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"><type>article</type><title>Solving for more sustainable and resilient value chains</title><description>Improved visibility and insights—and the flexibility to adopt new business models—are key to building more sustainable supply chains.</description><image>https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/gcp_sustainable_supply_chain_1.jpg</image><site_name>Google</site_name><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/how-google-cloud-is-helping-build-more-sustainable-supply-chains/</url></og><author xmlns:author="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><name>Hamidou Dia</name><title>VP, Solutions Engineering, Google Cloud</title><department></department><company></company></author></item></channel></rss>