A recently announced multi-year deal between HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud partners the two in an intricate dance across a tightrope, balancing the enormous benefits instant data can provide in treating patients against the enormous risks the sharing of that data poses to patient privacy.

HCA Healthcare operates in about 2,000 locations in 21 states. HCA Florida is one of the largest private health systems in the state and treats approximately five million patients each year in its 50 hospitals and 31 surgery centers.

Under the agreement with Google, HCA Healthcare will consolidate and store data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices with Google. HCA Healthcare and Google engineers will develop algorithms to improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions.

“While protecting patient privacy and the security of data, HCA Healthcare uses information from our 32 million annual encounters to identify opportunities to improve clinical care and support its 93,000 nurses and 47,000 active and affiliated physicians. HCA Healthcare has … developed algorithm-informed decision support tools for caregivers and identified clinical practices that reduce infections and improve perinatal care. The partnership with Google Cloud is expected to enhance efforts by HCA Healthcare to continue to improve and develop new advanced decision support to promote quality, safety, and efficiency,” said HCA Healthcare officials in its announcement of the deal.

“Next-generation care demands data science-informed decision support so we can more sharply focus on safe, efficient and effective patient care,” said Sam Hazen, chief executive officer of HCA Healthcare. “We view partnerships with leading organizations, like Google Cloud, that share our passion for innovation and continual improvement as foundational to our efforts.”

The new data platform will provide HCA physicians, nurses, and non-clinical staff with workflow tools, analysis, and alerts that will improve the monitoring of patients and guide treatments.

Google Cloud Healthcare and Life Sciences Manager Chris Sakalosky told the Wall Street Journal in an article about the partnership with HCA Healthcare, “We want to push the boundaries of what the clinician can do in real-time with data.”

The partnership will also focus on improving data and insights for nonclinical areas within the health system, such as supply chain, human resources and physical plant operations.

“The cloud can be an accelerant for innovation in health, particularly in driving data interoperability, which is critical in streamlining operations and providing better quality of care to improve patient outcomes,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “We are honored to partner with HCA Healthcare on this unique opportunity to be at the forefront of advancing care through the power of real-time data availability to support clinical and operational workflows.”

But with the exciting benefits of deploying such information technology comes the huge responsibility to protect the privacy of those patients.

HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud emphasized the importance of privacy and security as guiding principles throughout their partnership. According to the news release, access and use of patient data will be addressed through Google Cloud’s infrastructure alongside HCA’s security controls and processes.

Patient records would be stripped of identifying information before being shared with Google’s data scientists, and the health system will have control of access to the data, HCA Healthcare CMO Jonathan Perlin, MD, told the Journal.

According to HCA Healthcare, under the partnership, HCA Healthcare will use Google Cloud’s healthcare data offerings, including the Google Cloud Healthcare application programming interface and BigQuery, a database that supports healthcare data sharing standards Health Level Seven (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) as well as HIPAA compliance.

HL7 refers to a set of international standards for transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications used by various healthcare providers. The HL7 standards are produced by Health Level Seven International, an international standards organization, and are adopted by other standards issuing bodies such as American National Standards Institute and International Organization for Standardization.

Going even further, Google addressed the partnership and privacy concerns with CNBC in an email saying, “This is deal between HCA and Google Cloud follows Google Cloud’s Enterprise Privacy Commitments. We do not process customer data to create ads profiles or improve Google Ads products. We do not sell customer data or service data to third parties.”

But, all that being said, there are concerns that privacy laws have not kept up with the technology.

Arthur Kaplan, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told CNBC’s Shepard Smith he was concerned that, despite Google’s comments to the contrary, companies like Google, which do a lot of commercial advertising, could correlate the information coming out of the healthcare system and potentially sell it.

“Maybe they don’t have your name, but they sure enough can figure out what sub-group, sub-population might do best by getting advertised to you.”

But healthcare experts, like Mary Mayhew, President and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association, believe hospitals can walk that tightrope.

“For many years, hospitals have been focused on leveraging the latest health information technology to benefit patient care that is focused on real time, comprehensive clinical data. As technology and software has advanced, physicians are better able to identify early risks associated with diabetes, heart conditions and other health concerns that allow for treatment plans that are preventative to reduce the progression of these disease. And, while digital information and analytics are enhancing patent treatment and hospital efficiency, protecting our patient data remains the top priority of hospital systems.”

Google Cloud has announced the launch of Datashare for financial services, a new solution designed to empower the entire capital markets ecosystem including market data publishers like exchanges and other providers, and data consumers, like investment banks, asset managers, and hedge funds, to share market data more securely and easily.

“Data publishers and data consumers are in need of processing large volumes of data from disparate sources quickly, and need access to it all in one place at the touch of their fingertips. According to our research, over two-thirds of end users of market data across the globe believe it is critical for market data providers to have improved accessibility via the cloud,” said David Easthope, senior analyst, Coalition Greenwich.

Datashare is built on Google Cloud analytics services like BigQuery and will leverage Analytics Hub. The new solution addresses both market data publisher and data consumer needs by organizing third-party data and making it more accessible and useful. With Datashare, data publishers can onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud securely while data consumers can access that data in tools like BigQuery.

Features of Datashare include:

Batch data delivery: Datashare provides a batch data delivery mechanism for reference, historical tick, and alternative market data sources via BigQuery cloud-based delivery, reducing the administrative burden on data consumers to extract insights.
Real-time data streaming: By using this event-based data delivery channel for rapidly changing instrument prices, tick data, orders, news and others via Pub/Sub, data consumers can reliably process individual messages or rewind to a point in time to replay a prior market scenario and test model changes.
Data monetization: Market data publishers can onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud, and make them available via Google Cloud Marketplace, providing new sales channels and expanding their customer reach.
To bring Datashare to life for the industry and connect more sources to potential customers, Google Cloud is working with multiple data publishers. Datashare publishers currently signed onto the solution include OneTick and Accern.

“As the global data landscape continues to evolve, market data publishers need to consider cloud-based models to keep up with the demands of their customers who expect easy, flexible and cost-efficient ways to consume market data. Stakeholders in the ecosystem, including consumers, corporate and investment banks, asset managers, and hedge funds, are increasingly asking data publishers for data delivery via the cloud. Datashare solves this problem by making market data accessible and beneficial to both publishers and consumers,” said Christin Brown, global Financial Services industry technical solutions leader, Google Cloud.

Next-generation database developer MongoDB and Google Cloud are extending the strategic alliance they launched two years ago with a new partnership deal under which the MongoDB Atlas cloud database will be integrated with a slew of Google Cloud services.

The move is expected to provide systems integrators, ISVs and other solution provider partners of the two companies with new opportunities in cloud application development and cloud data migration.

Google Cloud and MongoDB have undertaken the joint engineering task of integrating MongoDB Atlas with a number of Google applications and services that run on the Google Cloud Platform including BigQuery data warehouse, Pub/Sub publish and subscribe messaging, Dataflow data processing, Dataproc managed Hadoop and Spark, TensorFlow machine learning, Cloud Run serverless computing, Cloud Functions serverless execution, App Engine platform-as-a-service, and the Google Kubernetes Engine container environment.

The new pre-built integrations and reference architectures being developed by MongoDB and Google Cloud will make it easier for an ISV partner or an in-house developer to build applications that tie into both MongoDB Atlas and all those Google Cloud services, said Alan Chhabra, MongoDB senior vice president of worldwide partners.

“A developer, who is the person who uses MongoDB the most, potentially can now get a full-stack architecture to develop applications centered around MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud services,” said Chhabra in an interview with CRN.

The joint development initiative “really solidifies the amount of pre-built integration work between the two companies’ platforms,” said Chhabra.

In February 2020 Google bought Cornerstone Technology and its tools for migrating mainframe workloads to the cloud. Those mainframe modernization tools now support MongoDB Atlas, the companies said Thursday, making it easier to convert legacy Cobol code on mainframes into Java-based applications that can run on MongoDB.

Those capabilities will assist global and regional systems integration partners that MongoDB and Google Cloud work with for projects to modernize legacy mainframe applications and move them to Google Cloud, said Chhabra.

Shortly after taking the job of Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian said the company would work more closely with developers of open-source software. In 2019 MongoDB took Google Cloud up on that promise, striking a go-to-market partnership through which MongoDB Atlas was offered through the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace.

And in 2020 MongoDB Atlas became a fully managed service directly integrated with the Google Console, providing integrated billing and support for the companies’ joint customers.

This week Chhabra said that in the last year MongoDB and Google Cloud have seen a 300 percent year-over-year increase in joint customer wins, particularly in such vertical industries as financial services and retail.

Altogether the database vendor has some 22,600 customers.

MongoDB runs on all three of the hyper-scale cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. (AWS offers Amazon DocumentDB, its own database software that some observers see as competing with MongoDB.)

In 2019 MongoDB allied with Alibaba to bring its cloud database service to China.

“We are delighted to expand our partnership with MongoDB to deliver Atlas at global scale on Google Cloud and help businesses leverage data in their digital transformations,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president, global ecosystem at Google Cloud, in a statement. “This announcement builds on our shared commitment to helping businesses build a foundation for data-driven transformation. We are excited to build on significant customer successes with MongoDB on Google Cloud.”

Sunnyvale and San Francisco, Calif., February 17, 2021 – Today, Google Cloud and Databricks announced a new partnership to deliver Databricks at global scale on Google Cloud. Under the partnership, organizations can now use Databricks to create a lakehouse capable of data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics on Google Cloud’s global, scalable, and elastic network. Databricks on Google Cloud will deeply integrate with Google BigQuery’s open platform and will leverage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), enabling customers to deploy Databricks in a fully containerized cloud environment for the first time. With this integrated solution, organizations can unlock AI-driven insights, enable intelligent decision-making, and ultimately accelerate their digital transformations through data-driven applications.

“Businesses with a strong foundation of data and analytics are well-positioned to grow and thrive in the next decade,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud. “We’re delighted to deliver Databricks’ lakehouse for AI and ML-driven analytics on Google Cloud. By combining Databricks’ capabilities in data engineering and analytics with Google Cloud’s global, secure network—and our expertise in analytics and delivering containerized applications—we can help companies transform their businesses through the power of data.”

“This is a pivotal milestone that underscores our commitment to enable customer flexibility and choice with a seamless experience across cloud platforms,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks. “We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud and deliver on our shared vision of a simplified, open, and unified data platform that supports all analytics and AI use-cases that will empower our customers to innovate even faster.”

“For Condé Nast, finding valuable insights from massive amounts of data is essential for creating world class content experiences that delight our global customers. Databricks on Google Cloud provides a lakehouse for our data engineers, data scientists and analysts to consolidate, collaborate, analyze, and use all of our global data to experiment and innovate quickly. We’re excited to see leaders like Google Cloud and Databricks come together to streamline and simplify getting value from data,” said Nana Essuman, Director of Data Engineering at Condé Nast.

Deploying Databricks rapidly and securely at global scale

Global businesses need the ability to quickly deploy applications at any scale, and the elasticity to scale them up or down depending on their needs. Delivering Databricks on Google Cloud enables customers to rapidly provision Databricks on Google Cloud’s global network, with advanced security and data protection controls required for highly-regulated industries, and with the flexibility to quickly adjust usage based on the needs of the business.

Additionally, customers will soon be able to deploy Databricks from the Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling simplified procurement and user provisioning, Single Sign-On, and unified billing.

Advancing analytics with Databricks, BigQuery, and Google Cloud AI Platform

Databricks on Google Cloud is tightly integrated with Google BigQuery, giving customers the freedom of choice and access to their choice of data analytics services. With this integration, businesses can extend their existing Databricks lakehouse capabilities, now running on Google Cloud, and can cross-leverage Google BigQuery for analytics, ultimately simplifying their data investments, increasing usage, and creating new, data-driven business models and opportunities.

Unique integrations between Databricks and Google Cloud include:

Tight integration of Databricks with Google Cloud’s analytics solutions, giving customers the ability to easily extend AI-driven insights across data lakes, data warehouses, and multiple business intelligence tools.
Pre-built connectors to seamlessly and quickly integrate Databricks with BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Looker and Pub/Sub.
Fast and scalable model training with AI Platform using the data workflows created in Databricks, and simplified deployment of models built in Databricks using AI Platform Prediction.
Delivering containerized Databricks deployments for the first time

Databricks on Google Cloud represents the first container-based deployments of Databricks, on any cloud.

Increasingly, Kubernetes and containers are the de facto orchestration system for enterprise workloads and applications running in the cloud. Databricks on Google Cloud is built on GKE, Google Cloud’s secure, managed Kubernetes service, to support containerized deployments of Databricks in the cloud. By adopting GKE as an operating environment, Databricks is able to leverage managed services for security, network policy, and compute and as a result, provide customers with increasing business value through Databricks analytics, AI, and ML capabilities. Additionally, with GKE, Databricks increases its agility and the ability to accelerate the release of new features, quickly, at scale, and at lower cost.

Supporting open source innovation and partner collaboration

Databricks and Google Cloud share a commitment to open innovation and open source software. Under this new partnership, the two companies will continue to support the open source community, encourage open innovation and collaboration, making it easier for joint customers to build on open-source technologies.

Additionally, members of our joint ecosystem of partners have committed to ensure seamless integrations with Databricks on Google Cloud, including Accenture, Cognizant, Collibra, Confluent, Deloitte, Fishtown Analytics, Fivetran, Immuta, Informatica, Infoworks, Insight, MongoDB, Privacera, Qlik, SADA, SoftServe, Slalom, Tableau, TCS and Trifacta among others.

On April 6, join Databricks CEO, Ali Ghodsi, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian as they share more about the partnership and vision of an open, unified data analytics platform during a discussion hosted by TechCrunch; visit the event page for more information.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud provides organizations with leading infrastructure, platform capabilities and industry solutions. We deliver enterprise-grade cloud solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology to help companies operate more efficiently and adapt to changing needs, giving customers a foundation for the future. Customers in more than 150 countries turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to solve their most critical business problems.

Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. Thousands of organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Nationwide, and H&M — rely on Databricks’ open and unified platform for data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics. Databricks is venture-backed and headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Google Cloud has appointed Ruma Balasubramanian as managing director of Southeast Asia, replacing Tim Synan who has relocated to Italy with the technology giant.

Effective immediately, Singapore-based Balasubramanian is tasked with driving the vendor’s go-to-market strategy across customer and partner segments, in addition to delivering operational execution and building on growing enterprise momentum within the region.

Balasubramanian joins Google Cloud from Cisco, having spent more than eight years in a number of regional management roles, most recently as vice president and chief transformation officer across Asia Pacific and Japan. Prior to Cisco, Balasubramanian was vice president and general manager of then Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Services division, following more than a decade at EDS Corporation.

Balasubramanian replaces Synan who has transitioned to another role as part of Google Cloud’s Global Strategic Initiatives team, based in Milan, Italy.

“Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, and industry-based artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions are critical enablers for economic recovery and growth in Southeast Asia,” Balasubramanian said. “As enterprises of all sizes look to digitise, modernise and innovate, I’m thrilled to embark on this journey with Google Cloud to accelerate cloud adoption for our customers.”

Balasubramanian’s appointment comes amid strong momentum for Google Cloud in Southeast Asia, with the vendor counting Bank BRI, Gojek, NTUC Fairprice Co-Operative and REA Group as key customers, in addition to Reliance Health Services, Tiki Group, True Digital and Tokopedia among others.

The move also comes six months after Google Cloud officially launched a new region in Jakarta, in a landmark move designed to help businesses overcome traditional barriers to cloud adoption in Indonesia.

The newly unveiled GCP region – first communicated to the market in October 2018 – comes with the vendor’s standard set of services, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL, alongside Cloud Storage, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable and BigQuery.

Representing the first GCP region in Indonesia – and ninth in Asia Pacific – the launch comes with three cloud zones from the start, enabling high availability workloads across the country. Collectively, Google Cloud now offers 24 regions and 73 zones across 17 countries worldwide.

Google Cloud is to launch VMware Engine in its Sydney cloud region in a move that will ease customer’s migration of VMware-based applications into the cloud.

The engine provides a hyper-converged architecture that allows organisations to run and scale their infrastructure, while managing workloads traditionally kept on-premise.

It enables self-service provisioning of VMware private clouds with integrated connectivity to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Operations, Cloud Storage, Kubernetes and Cloud AI.

According to Google Cloud, the engine allows migration without any major changes to application policies, tools or processes.

“With today’s announcement, businesses in the region can deploy Google Cloud VMware Engine closer to their operations and unlock new growth opportunities,” Google Cloud said in a statement.

Google Cloud VMware Engine’s worldwide presence also allows multinational customers to benefit from the service’s unique networking capabilities, such as its global routing service to allow VMware workloads to securely communicate across regions.”

Google Cloud first launched a deep integration with VMware in November 2019 with the acquisition of CloudSimple, a VMware vSphere private cloud infrastructure provider.

The move now sees VMware run on all three of the major cloud infrastructure providers, as well as Alibaba and IBM.

It also signaled VMware’s desire to set itself up as a key player in any enterprise hybrid IT strategy, while Google Cloud continues to look to prove itself as a viable rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Last week, VMware also launched a point-of-presence (PoP) in a Sydney data centre for its Carbon Black offering approximately five months later than intended.

The virtualisaion giant had intended to launch the data centre presence in the city during the first half of 2020 to support its VMware Carbon Black Cloud Platform.

From today, organisations can run the Google Cloud VMware Engine from Google’s Sydney cloud region.

The Engine is an integrated first-party offering and fully owned and operated service that enables enterprises to migrate or extend their VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without any major changes to application policies, tools or processes.

This allows customers to keep what they like about their on-prem application environment and tap into next-generation hardware and application services with minimal effort.

“VMware technologies form the cornerstone of many customers’ enterprise IT environments and we’re focused on giving customers a simple way to be able to run what they want, where they want and how they want. As part of our ongoing commitment to enterprise customers, this is a significant step forward, building on the support we have already added for the likes of SAP, Oracle and Windows over the last year,” says Google Cloud Australia and New Zealand vice president Mark Innes.

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides a hyper-converged architecture so organisations can run and scale their infrastructure to power enterprise workloads that they would traditionally have needed to manage on-premise.

Enterprises can also modernise existing IT investments and leverage on-demand self-service provisioning of VMware private clouds with integrated connectivity to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Operations, Cloud Storage, Kubernetes, and Cloud AI.

Businesses in the A/NZ region can deploy Google Cloud VMware Engine closer to their operations and unlock new growth opportunities.

The Engine’s worldwide presence allows multinational customers to benefit from the service’s networking capabilities, such as a global routing service to allow VMware workloads to securely communicate across regions.

Partner ecosystem

This availability builds on VMware Cloud Foundation joining Google Cloud in July 2019 and the acquisition of CloudSimple in November 2019.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is also VMware Cloud Verified, the highest level of validation for VMware-based cloud services.

“VMware’s partnership with Google Cloud is about accelerating our customers’ digital transformation journey, so we’re pleased Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Sydney region. Local customers can now maintain the familiarity of their VMware tools and training and protect their investments as they execute on their cloud strategies. We look forward to helping our mutual customers bring new services to market rapidly and operate them seamlessly and more securely across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments,” says VMware vice president and Australia and New Zealand managing director Brad Anderson.

Google Cloud has launched the new serverless Database Migration Service (DMS) as part of its vision to meet the modern needs in a way that’s easier, faster, more predictable, and more reliable. The tech giant has further revealed that enterprises across all industries are answering the call to move their business infrastructure, and with that their databases, to the cloud.

Asserting that the database migrations can be a challenge for enterprises, Andi Gutmans, General Manager and Vice President of Engineering, Databases, said, “That’s why we give our customers a uniquely easy, secure, and reliable experience with DMS. We worked with dozens of customers around the world, including Samsung Electronics, Adwerx, Affle, Cirruseo (Accenture), Guichê Virtual, and Ryde, to successfully migrate their production databases with minimal downtime using DMS. So, what is it exactly that makes DMS different?”

DMS provides a fast and seamless migration to Cloud SQL, the fully managed database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. By migrating to Cloud SQL, one not only benefit from its enterprise-grade availability, security, and stability, but you also get unique integrations with the rest of Google Cloud, including Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery. “We needed to create live dashboards built on top of BigQuery that pulled data from both on-premises and cloud sources. Google Cloud’s Database Migration Service made this easy for us,” says Sofiane Kihal, Engineer, Cirruseo (Accenture). “Using its continuous replication, we were able to migrate data to Cloud SQL and then query directly using federation from BigQuery. Additionally, using Cloud SQL as a managed service for MySQL has allowed us to reduce the time we spend on operations by over 75 percent.”

According to Google Cloud, “DMS provides high-fidelity, minimal downtime migrations for MySQL and PostgreSQL workloads. We designed it to be truly cloud-native—built by and for the cloud. DMS utilizes log shipping to replicate data at super-low latencies from the source database to the destination. It streams the initial snapshot of data, then catches up and continuously replicates new data as it arrives in the source.”

Stating that the source and destination are continuously up to date because they rely on the databases’ own native replication capabilities, Gutmans said, “This replication technique maximizes the fidelity of data transferred with very low latency. That means you can decide when you’re ready to promote your database, then just point your application to Cloud SQL as the primary database, with minimal downtime.”

Google Cloud is debuting its new serverless Database Migration Service (DMS) that will support migrations of MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases to Cloud SQL — its fully managed relational database service and one of its fastest-growing offerings – with minimal downtime.

Andi Gutmans, general manager and vice president of engineering for databases at Google Cloud, describes DMS as the “simple, easy, fast track to the cloud.”

“You can think about the Database Migration Service as being a super simple serverless way — meaning customers don‘t have to manage any servers — to basically replicate databases from their on-premises environments into Cloud SQL,” Gutmans told CRN. “They can also use it to replicate from other clouds or from self-managed databases on the Google Cloud.”

Google Cloud’s DMS has an edge over other commonly used solutions that move production databases to the cloud and often are more costly and error-prone, according to Gutmans (pictured above). Those solutions force customers to read through lots of documentation and are complex to set up from a networking standpoint, he said. They also can’t guarantee data fidelity and don’t take advantage of native database replication capabilities, which can introduce incompatibilities between the source and destination.

“We’ve decided to deliver a no-documentation-needed experience,” he said. “There’s a very easy, intuitive UI (user interface) to take customers through the steps and makes it very easy by even also generating scripts so they can run and kind of set everything up for them. It really is kind of a wizard — that kind of a click, click, click, super easy — a lot easier than what customers typically need to go through.”

And Google Cloud decided to depend on native database-replication capabilities, so it also maximizes compatibility, Gutmans said.

“In some other solutions, the replication is done outside of the database,” he said. “There‘s lots of little nuances of things that don’t work quite the way customers anticipate. Because we basically took the really simple, easy approach of just depending on the databases’ capabilities, we basically avoid a lot of those incompatible nuances.”

DMS for MySQL databases is now in public preview and being offered to customers at no extra charge for native like-to-like migrations. DMS for PostgreSQL is in private preview for limited customers, and DMS for SQL Server is “coming soon,” according to Google Cloud, which did not provide a timeline.

With DMS, Google Cloud wanted to help customers with the first step of what it considers to be a three-step journey – migration, modernization and transformation — that customers make from their on-premises environments to the cloud, according to Gutmans, who joined Google Cloud in May after four-plus years at Amazon Web Services, most recently as vice president of analytics.

The initial migration stage involves the lifting and shifting of workloads and applications as-is into the cloud to gain agility and initial benefits from turning capital expenditures to operating expenses.

“We have customers who have a tight timeline, they have to shut off their data center, and they just want to move all the workload into the cloud,” Gutmans said. “We have additional scenarios where customers are running already on the cloud, but they‘re self-managing these databases, and they want to get the full benefit of using fully managed services.”

Gutmans pointed to research by Gartner, a Stamford, Conn.-based research and advisory firm, that predicts 75 percent of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform by 2022.

“Customers are accelerating their digital transformation and looking at reinventing their business and, obviously, things like the (coronavirus) pandemic are only accelerating that as they need to touch and do their business mostly in a digital manner,” Gutmans said. “Given that most applications are data-driven applications, databases are just at that core of making sure that customers can really innovate and transform.”

The challenge that customers face when they try to migrate lots of databases at scale is it starts to get quite complex, according to Gutmans.

“They have to make sure that the source and destination databases can see each other from a networking perspective,” he said. “The connection needs to be secure from on premises into the cloud. And then customers, of course, want to minimize downtime, so the replication of databases from on premises to the cloud has to be online. And then the switchover — moving from the production database being on premise to the cloud — hopefully has minimal downtime.”

Once their databases are in Cloud SQL, Google Cloud’s DMS customers can take advantage of its integrations with Google Kubernetes Engine, its managed environment for deploying, managing and scaling containerized applications, and its serverless BigQuery multi-cloud data warehouse for analytics.

Google Cloud’s early customers that have been using DMS include Accenture-owned Cirruseo, Samsung Electronics, Adwerx, Affle, Guichê Virtual and Ryde Technologies.

“In our private preview, we saw that the majority of customers were actually migrating databases from other clouds onto GCP (Google Cloud Platform),” Gutmans said.

Cirruseo has been using DMS to continuously replicate MySQL databases to the cloud.

“They’re actually querying that Cloud SQL database from BigQuery, which is our analytics system,” Gutmans said. “And they‘re using the BigQuery federated query capability, where you can query data both in BigQuery and in Cloud SQL at the same time. So not only are they getting this online replication from on premises to the cloud, but they went a step further and got this benefit of being able to analyze both their analytical data and their operational data at the same time. They have estimated that this is reducing the time that they’re actually spending on the toil to make this work by (more than) 75 percent.”

Singapore-based Ryde offers a real-time carpooling application.

“Our ride-sharing app users are always active,” Ryde chief technology officer Nitin Dolli said in a statement. “When we made the decision to move to Google Cloud, we needed a way to migrate our production databases from Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) to Cloud SQL. Database Migration Service made this simple, and we were able to complete the migration in less than a day, with minimal disruption to our users. Now that we’re fully migrated to Cloud SQL, we no longer need to worry about scaling, maintenance or other operations as we continue to grow. We can just focus on building robust applications.”

Google Cloud partners HCL Technologies, an India-based systems integrator, and DoiT International, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based cloud consulting company, also participated in the private preview for DMS.

“Partners are very often at the center of customers‘ digital transformation journeys and moving into the cloud, and so they’re very interested in actually using this capability to help their customers transition in an easier way and in a more cost-effective way,” Gutmans said. “Of course, it also reduces some of the overhead on our partners, so they can really focus on the higher-value services that they need to deliver.”

DoiT has been using DMS since its release in alpha, according to Mike Royle, staff cloud architect for the 2019 Google Cloud Reseller Partner of the Year for North America.

“The top benefit is this will provide a zero-downtime migration path to Cloud SQL, which doesn’t exist at the moment for all of those flavors of Cloud SQL,” Royle said. “That is a very big deal.”

Customers with very large databases, especially with PostgreSQL databases, could see downtime of four to six hours while migrating with other solutions, according to Royle.

“Some customers can‘t handle that, so they haven’t been able to migrate,” he said. “This really changes the game and makes it possible for more customers to migrate that couldn’t before.”

DMS is the “last step in providing a world-class set of migration services that the other clouds don‘t have,” Royle said.

“When you couple this with the data migration service that actually moves data from S3 to Cloud Storage, and you have the BigQuery migration services, and you have…(Migrate for Compute Engine), in theory that allows you to migrate like for like to Google Cloud in a fully automated fashion all of your services, which makes that migration path much easier,” he said.

As businesses look to rebuild their technology infrastructure, many are adopting Kubernetes platforms, a move that has implications for marketing and marketing operation teams.
Amy Gesenhues on January 29, 2020 at 8:56 am
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Chicory, a data platform that enables shoppable recipes, needed to rebuild its technology infrastructure. Because the company relies heavily on being able to access and utilize data in near real-time — analyzing millions of interactions on a daily basis with recipes, ingredients and food brands — it needed a solution that was fast, easy to deploy and could scale across all of its departments.

“We needed to create a solution that could process billions of data points close to real-time and that was easier to maintain for our team,” said Chicory’s Director of Engineering Asaf Klibansky, “We were dealing with issues that were mostly related to our infrastructure. It was clear that containerization would be a great solution to our problems as it is faster and lighter to deploy, scales easily and generally provides a smoother experience with few issues.”

The company had already implemented a Kubernetes containerization system for other smaller services, and at the time, was in the market for a new data warehouse. Knowing the benefits a Kubernetes platform would offer, Chicory began the process of moving its entire technology infrastructure to a Kubernetes system, migrating various microservices one-by-one.

You may be wondering why Chicory’s decision to adopt a Kubernetes platform is relevant to marketers. As a marketing or marketing operations professional, there’s a good chance the solutions you implement and manage are connected to your company’s broader technology infrastructure. As technology stacks become increasingly more difficult to manage and scale, many IT and engineering teams are turning to Kubernetes platforms. And while your department may not be the primary driver to implement a Kubernetes system, your data and marketing operations teams could potentially benefit from one.

What is Kubernetes?

Let’s begin with the basics. Kubernetes — also known as K8 — is an open-source container system for managing and scaling business applications. The open-source orchestration software allows technology teams to deploy and manage the microservices that make up a business’ technology stack. It allows for portability and scalability when deploying applications across on-premise or cloud environments. It takes less time to manage, decreases downtime, reduces IT costs and improves “time to market” speed.

The Microsoft Azure blog defines its Kubernetes solution as a way to help technology teams, “Orchestrate a cluster of virtual machines and schedule containers to run on those virtual machines based on their available compute resources and the resource requirements of each container.” (If this all sounds Greek to you, there’s a reason: the name Kubernetes has Greek origins, meaning helmsman or pilot.)

Google was the first company to open-source its Kubernetes initiative in 2014, and gave the platform its name.

A number of technology companies provide Kubernetes: Google, Microsoft Azure, SAP, Dell and others. The Linux Foundation, an initiative focused on open source software development, is the organization behind the resource site Kubernetes.io, which includes a list of certified solution providers. There are courses and a Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam for professionals who oversee Kubernetes platforms.

What are the implications for marketers?

A Kubernetes system can benefit marketing departments in a number of ways, from how a company manages its customer data to its ability to access actionable analytics and leverage marketing technology solutions.

“Our services are easier and faster to deploy, as well as scale,” said Chicory’s Klibansky, “Our codebase can be more easily maintained and we can provide more insights to our customers and clients in real-time, which is crucial in the martech sphere.”

Since migrating to the Kubernetes platform, Klibansky says his company has improved several aspects of its analytics stack and data reporting capabilities.

“We now offer our users more robust reports, such as visualizing our user interaction with recipes containing the ingredient ‘Fresh Basil’ across the country,” said Klibansky, “This has a huge effect on the business and the quality of service that we provide to our clients.”

Who implements and manages the Kubernetes platform?

Because Kubernetes applies to a company’s entire technology stack across multiple business units, the primary stakeholders driving such a project are usually outside of marketing. When Chicory moved to a Kubernetes platform, the initiative required cross-departmental coordination.

“Serving as a conduit between our account management and marketing teams, our co-founder Joey Petracca, actually stepped in on the project as the lead product manager,” said Klibansky, “The migration was so impactful to the core of our business that we needed a high-level stakeholder who could synthesize all of the teams’ needs and communicate that back to our engineering team.”

While marketing may not lead the Kubernetes charge, it should be involved. One of the biggest challenges Chicory faced with rebuilding its tech infrastructure on the Kubernetes platform involved a new business intelligence tool it was implementing — a solution that directly impacted the company’s data analytics capabilities.

“The reports had to match the previous reporting, which were slightly different in shape due to the new BI tool requirements,” said Klibansky, “We had to make modifications over and over again. We also had to rewrite our data pipelines using a new framework, Dataflow, which took some getting used to.”

In the end, Chicory’s choice to implement Kubernetes to rearchitect its tech ecosystem delivered stability and flexibility, which Klibansky said was paramount for managing the volume of data contained in Chicory’s systems.

Should my company consider Kubernetes?

This isn’t necessarily a question for the marketing team to answer, but because marketing is often the team managing and analyzing various data sets, marketers may be more likely to notice instances where Kubernetes could benefit the entire organization.

Is your company’s technology stack outdated and difficult to manage? Does it take longer than necessary to update systems? How scalable is your company’s technology? Is there a mix of technology — both on-premise software applications and cloud solutions? These are all questions that point to the benefits of adopting a Kubernetes platform.

“The move to use containerization along with Kubernetes, BigQuery and Dataflow had a major effect on the time that we now spend deploying and debugging our solutions,” said Klibansky, “It also affects the speed at which we can introduce changes and reduce the number of issues that we have to address on a daily basis. The data is available to us almost immediately and we are able to provide more robust solutions that involve real-time data as well as richer reporting for our clients.”