Google Compute Engine and App Engine give Evite freedom to expand services anytime

Posted by Dan Mesh, Vice President of Technology, Evite

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blog comes from Dan Mesh, Vice President of Technology at Evite, the pioneer in online invitations and social planning. Evite has over 30 million registered users and sends more than 250 million party invitations annually.

In the past year, we’ve introduced a couple of exciting new products at Evite: our Postmark service offers premium online invitations and announcements for milestone events like weddings and births, and Evite Ink lets our users design custom paper invitations that we print and mail for a small fee. We couldn’t have launched these products without Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, which gave us the infrastructure needed to scale our services to high demands and analyze large volumes of data they generate.

Evite has been around since 1998, but behind this well-known online brand is a small and lean team. Migrating to the cloud has allowed us to focus our time, energy and financial resources on development of new products and services, free from worries of server management, capacity planning and hardware costs.

We chose Google Cloud Platform because the combination of App Engine and Compute Engine truly delivers on the cloud’s promise of scalable and elastic computing. App Engine’s autoscaling means that as long as our applications are developed in line with the platform API’s and architecture guidelines, scalability comes for free. This is a huge benefit since we no longer worry about scaling our services to meet heavy demands and are also free from the difficulties and risks inherent in capacity planning.

Most online businesses have very consistent daily, weekly and seasonal traffic patterns, and in Evite’s case, these patterns are even more pronounced. In the past, we used to provision resources to meet peak demand allowing for a healthy margin of error and future growth. Naturally, this resulted in a lot of wasted capital and engineering resources. Now that most of our systems are running on Google Cloud Platform, we see significant savings as application servers expand and shrink elastically in accordance with our web traffic.

For example, in the past Evite was hesitant to roll out major application releases in Q4, typically the busiest time of the year for us. During this time, we reach our peak traffic, and operational focus was on making sure nothing went wrong. Any significant releases represented unwanted risk. Cloud Platform greatly simplifies the release process and provides built-in traffic splitting. This has made it possible for Evite product teams to test new features and release products more frequently and with reduced risks, even during the busiest times of year.

As we add new products and services, Compute Engine plays a key role in our application infrastructure. We use it to closely monitor and analyze the performance of our products and services. All application data and log files generated by applications running on App Engine flow through a cluster of Compute Engine instances running extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, which feed this data into the data warehouse. There we analyze the collected data to detect errors and usage patterns helping us improve the design of our products and maintain performance levels.

Compute Engine gets high marks for interoperability with App Engine and other cloud vendors. We use AWS Redshift as our data warehouse so interoperability is very important. Equally impressive are predictable, high I/O performance and fast instance startup times. For our data processing workloads these two metrics are critical to success.

With App Engine powering all of our customer-facing services and Compute Engine helping us monitor and understand application performance, Evite is in great shape to create and release new products. We look forward to many new releases in 2014 knowing we can count on Cloud Platform to make these launches trouble-free.

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Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available with expanded OS support, transparent maintenance, and lower prices

Posted by Ari Balogh, Vice President, Google

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog and Google Developers Blog)

Google Cloud Platform gives developers the flexibility to architect applications with both managed and unmanaged services that run on Google’s infrastructure. We’ve been working to improve the developer experience across our services to meet the standards our own engineers would expect here at Google.

Today, Google Compute Engine is Generally Available (GA), offering virtual machines that are performant, scalable, reliable, and offer industry-leading security features like encryption of data at rest. Compute Engine is available with 24/7 support and a 99.95% monthly SLA for your mission-critical workloads. We are also introducing several new features and lower prices for persistent disks and popular compute instances.

Expanded operating system support
During Preview, Compute Engine supported two of the most popular Linux distributions, Debian and Centos, customized with a Google-built kernel. This gave developers a familiar environment to build on, but some software that required specific kernels or loadable modules (e.g. some file systems) were not supported. Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution (including SELinux and CoreOS) as well as any kernel or software you like, including Docker, FOG, xfs and aufs. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD.

Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart
At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.

New 16-core instances
Developers have asked for instances with even greater computational power and memory for applications that range from silicon simulation to running high-scale NoSQL databases. To serve their needs, we’re launching three new instance types in Limited Preview with up to 16 cores and 104 gigabytes of RAM. They are available in the familiar standard, high-memory and high-CPU shapes.

Faster, cheaper Persistent Disks
Building highly scalable and reliable applications starts with using the right storage. Our Persistent Disk service offers you strong, consistent performance along with much higher durability than local disks. Today we’re lowering the price of Persistent Disk by 60% per Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges so that you get a predictable, low price for your block storage device. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability. You can read more about the improvements to Persistent Disk in our previous blog post.

10% Lower Prices for Standard Instances
We’re also lowering prices on our most popular standard Compute Engine instances by 10% in all regions.

Customers and partners using Compute Engine
In the past few months, customers like Snapchat, Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite and Wix have built complex systems on Compute Engine and partners like SaltStack, Wowza, Rightscale, Qubole, Red Hat, SUSE, and Scalr have joined our Cloud Platform Partner Program, with new integrations with Compute Engine.

“We find that Compute Engine scales quickly, allowing us to easily meet the flow of new sequencing requests… Compute Engine has helped us scale with our demands and has been a key component to helping our physicians diagnose and cure genetic diseases in Brazil and around the world.”
- David Schlesinger, CEO of Mendelics

"Google Cloud Platform provides the most consistent performance we’ve ever seen. Every VM, every disk, performs exactly as we expect it to and gave us the ability to build fast, low-latency applications."
- Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr

We’re looking forward to this next step for Google Cloud Platform as we continue to help developers and businesses everywhere benefit from Google’s technical and operational expertise. Below is a short video that explains today’s launch in more detail.

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Google App Engine helps MAG Interactive handle explosive growth of word game, Ruzzle

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Hasselberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of mobile game development company, MAG Interactive, based in Stockholm, Sweden. MAG Interactive produces some of the most popular games in the world, including Ruzzle, which has more than 45 million players in 142 different countries.

When we launched our word game Ruzzle in 2012, we had no idea it would become an international sensation almost overnight. We initially promoted the game only to our family and friends, but within two weeks of our launch, Ruzzle was the No.1 game on the Swedish App Store.

I believe if we hadn’t used Google App Engine to build the backend of Ruzzle, we wouldn’t have been able to scale fast enough with our own servers, which would have killed the app in the marketplace. There were about a million downloads of Ruzzle per month in the Nordic region, Holland, Spain and Italy through 2012. As we refined the game’s social integration through channels like Facebook and Twitter, we grew rapidly in Italy and the United States. In 2013, Ruzzle became the No. 1 game download on Google Play and the App Store in Italy, Sweden, the United States and many other countries.

Things were especially crazy at the end of last year. We were seeing about 700,000 new players each day from December 2012 through January 2013. We added 20 million users in a single month! It was incredible to see App Engine scale – and just keep on working – as we grew from about 5 million players to 25 million players in just a few weeks.

Our decision to use App Engine as the platform for Ruzzle and our new game, QuizCross, was strategic. Some of us at MAG Interactive helped develop the server platform for one of the most popular music download services in the Nordic region, so we knew about the challenges of having to scale quickly. While we didn’t anticipate Ruzzle’s popularity, we did recognize even before creating the game that we could face scaling problems if we were successful. So we decided from day one to use a cloud solution.

We looked at Amazon’s platform but preferred Google’s approach to cloud solutions. Google’s scalability was an important factor in our decision, but we also appreciated the company’s transparent pricing. The more efficient we became with App Engine, the less we paid.

The Google Cloud Platform team has been great to work with, as well. They are very supportive and appreciate our feedback. The technical support experts at Google are amazing, too – very hands-on. They know the platform extremely well and can help us work through any challenge.

We’re also using Google BigQuery for business intelligence. We track millions of events in the game every day so we know what users are doing – or not doing – and how we should improve the experience. We really like that we can throw enormous amounts of data at BigQuery, and it still performs. It only takes a few seconds to get results, and there are no scaling issues. It’s also easy to use. We have just one data analyst doing all the work with BigQuery but could probably use more people. If there are a few brilliant data mining experts out there who can imagine a future in Stockholm, please give us a call!

One thing we’ve learned from our BigQuery analysis is that the more users play Ruzzle, the more they improve their skills. New players typically find about 18 words in the two-minute time frame they’re given. After they play 100 games, they can find about 50 words, on average. I think that tracking player improvement is what keeps people playing and has helped to make Ruzzle so popular.

BigQuery offers our company a lot of insight into the use of our games and how we can improve them. We’re looking forward to expanding our relationship with Google as App Engine and Cloud Platform evolves.

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How to get to the cloud: 5 easy steps

Posted by Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

Earlier this month, I delivered a keynote at Gartner’s annual symposium and published a blog post about the rapidly evolving landscape of business technology. The rise of cloud computing and ubiquitous, powerful mobile devices means that organizations can reduce their IT bills significantly while boosting employees’ productivity and collaboration. Moving to the cloud is no longer a questionable proposition — it’s inevitable.

This led some of the organizations I work with to ask: “That all makes sense, but how do we actually get started?”

Good question. Here are five concrete steps you can take to get started:

1. Start by setting up a Google Apps account for your organization. This will allow you to move your standard productivity and communications work to the cloud: you’ll use Gmail for your email (with your own domain, like joe@joescoffeeshop.com); Google Calendar for your calendars; Google Drive to store files; Google Docs to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations; and Hangouts to send instant messages and hold video calls. This will free your staff from spending time maintaining servers and installing upgrades. Google Apps is free to schools and non-profits, and costs $50/person per year for businesses and government agencies.
2. Move your other standard business applications to cloud-based equivalents. Popular apps include Workday (HR), Salesforce (CRM), Zendesk (customer service), Netsuite (Financials), and Wix or Weebly (websites). More companies are creating and launching cloud-based business applications every day — check out the Chrome Web Store for more.
3. Move your custom applications to a cloud infrastructure. Many organizations have built their own custom applications or need to be able to do very specialized programming. Most people use Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Choose between the first two.
4. Standardize on a modern browser, ideally Chrome. Chrome is built for speed, simplicity and security — and of course it’s free. To make sure that you're protected from the latest threats, Chrome automatically updates whenever a new version of the browser is available. You can also use Chrome on all the major desktop and mobile platforms, including Android and iOS, and sync your tabs and bookmarks between different devices. Chrome for Business includes a cloud-based management console, which lets you customize policies and preferences for your employees easily from the web, including which apps and extensions they receive, across their devices.
5. For hardware, you can now move to a flexible, “bring your own device” policy. Without servers, the only real hardware you need are computers and phones — and a true cloud architecture works well with any operating system: Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, Android, iOS. People can choose the device that suits them, and you can then reimburse their purchases and/or their own personal cell phone and internet bills. If you do decide to supply your staff with computers, consider Chromebooks: they boot up in seconds, have built-in virus protection and are dead simple to deploy and manage.

*    *    *

Lots of companies have already moved to the cloud successfully, from local coffee shops to major corporations with 200,000 employees. For small and mid-size companies, the transition can be made in a matter of days or weeks. For larger companies, who often have custom legacy systems built over many years, the migration may take a few months. In these cases, consider working with experts that specialize in helping companies move to the cloud using all the tools I’ve mentioned.

The world is moving to the cloud. Now’s the time for you to move, too.

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Hangout On Air: Tapping Into Big Data to Discover Future Retail Strategies

Posted by Meghdutt Brahmachari, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

When it’s raining out, do people’s shopping habits change? Those are the kind of questions the team at Interactions Marketing, working with Tableau Software, think about when analyzing massive data sets on behalf of retailers. In a highly competitive market, retailers need the edge they can gain from business data – and with the analysis they can generate using Google BigQuery. By analyzing these data sets, you can find what Interactions Marketing calls “unexpected insights,” which help businesses make predictions that can improve sales. For example, they look at how external factors like the weather will affect retail sales.

Find out more about the value of Big Data and unexpected insights for retailers – and how Google BigQuery supports these analytics projects – in our Hangout On Air on Thursday, September 26, at 9 a.m. PT. Giovanni DeMeo, Vice President of Global Marketing and Analytics for Interactions Marketing; Paul Lilford, Global Director for Technology Partners at Tableau Software; and Daniel Powers, Director of Sales for Google Cloud Platform will explain how retailers can understand their businesses better and boost success:

• How can unexpected insights help retailers attract and keep customers?
• What are the pressures on retailers to glean insights from their data?
• How does cloud storage make Big Data analysis possible?
• How can you make it easier to visualize and understand your data?

If you missed our previous Hangout On Air with Speedway Motors, the world’s largest manufacturer of specialty hot-rodding and racing products, you can catch up on the recording here.

RSVP for the Interactions Marketing/Tableau Software Hangout On Air, and participate in the Q&A by posting your questions on Google+ or Twitter using the hashtag #GoneGoogle.

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Khan Academy builds scalable education site on Google Cloud Platform

Posted by Ben Kamens, Lead Developer at Khan Academy

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is from Ben Kamens, Lead Developer at Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that provides a free education available for anyone. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Khan Academy has an audacious mission: to provide a free world class education to anyone anywhere. With less than fifty full-time employees at the company, our small team has to take special care to work on whatever’s most critical. So we’re building a culture that relentlessly focuses on shipping code that improves students’ lives. Our team of developers relies on three simple principles that guide all the work we do:

1. Shipping beats perfection.
2. Be open. Share your work.
3. Anybody can fix anything.
 

Google Cloud Platform provides a flexible and reliable environment to put these principles into practice. With Google App Engine in particular, we get a big, enormous, whopper of a benefit — consistent Datastore performance no matter how big the product gets. Even if we have a query that returns 10 items from a set of 10,000, we can relax. We know that as our company grows over time, we’ll get the exact same speed when pulling 10 items from a set of 10,000,000,000. 

Lots of people ask, “How will you know if Khan Academy is really successful?” My answer is always the same: we of course care about data, analytics, and metrics that demonstrate provable, real learning. But in the back of my mind I’m most persuaded by the personal stories that people send us literally every day. Those stories of real lives being changed for the better are the reason why we believe a free educational resource like Khan Academy simply must exist.

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Google Cloud Platform Powers Minyanville’s Buzz and Banter

Posted by Philip Talamas, CIO of Minyanville Media, Inc

(Cross-posted on the Cloud Platform blog)

Editor's note: Today’s post is from Philip Talamas, CIO of Minyanville Media, Inc., a New York based financial media company. In this post, Philip looks at the benefits his company received from switching from a major public cloud provider to Google Cloud Platform.

At Minyanville Media, our goal is to create branded business content that informs, entertains, and educates all generations about the worlds of business and finance. We designed our premium Buzz & Banter app app to serve this need. The Buzz ran on a competing cloud platform that presented increasing technical challenges as we expanded our customer base and feature set. We wanted a higher performing platform offering a more flexible and deeper feature set; we wanted to be certain we were serving our longtime clients as best as we could.

We consulted our strategic technology partner MediaAgility, and the company advised us to move to Google Cloud Platform. There were two obvious benefits to switching to Google Cloud Platform from our old provider: better reliability and automatic demand-based scaling of the application.

Every day, thousands of investors access our system globally, everywhere from Syracuse to Switzerland. They turn to us for reliable market intelligence and investing ideas. Today's economic uncertainty, coupled with high frequency trading, keeps us on our toes. When a central bank unexpectedly cuts interest rates or a hacked tweet sends markets into a tailspin, seconds matter. We are timely, or we are out of business. It’s as simple as that. Additionally, we serve two major online brokerage firms, which have very high standards for performance and reliability.

Hence, we decided to move Buzz and Banter to the Google Cloud Platform. The improvement and increase in operational speed was drastic. New Buzz, running on Google App Engine, updates content instantaneously -- even before our content management system refreshes to confirm publication. The icing on the cake is that our operating costs are significantly lower than what they were under our old provider.

It’s rare that everyone wins in a technology transition, but that’s exactly what’s been accomplished in our move to Google App Engine. With a better customer experience, lower operating costs, and fewer technological headaches, we only wish that we’d made the switch sooner.

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