[MUSIC PLAYING]
PENNY AVRIL: Hi, I'm Penny Avril,
and I lead product for Google Cloud's database business.
Especially now, many of us are no stranger
to unpredictability.
You may be struggling to keep the lights on
or being pushed in new ways to best serve your customers.
Let's take the New York Department of Labor,
for example.
In barely three months, they've seen three years' worth
of claims come in.
And their website, which usually sees
350,000 sign-ons in a week, saw 6 million sign-ons.
They needed to not only be able to react quickly
to this surge from their customers
but also provide a better experience, especially
given how critical their services are.
Working with Google Cloud, they are now
able to scale and support their customers
in a way their mainframe wouldn't
have been able to handle.
Leveraging Cloud Firestore enabled
them to handle over 100,000 sign-ons in just the first 24
hours and provide more familiar communications
to their customers throughout their experience.
The ability to tackle the unpredictable
is critical to your success.
As the volume, variety, and velocity of data grows,
managing your data reliably and securely at scale is key.
At its core, Google is a data company,
and much of the innovation you experience
is built out of our need to solve
some of the most difficult challenges
in managing vast volumes of data--
planetary scale with consistency, reliability
and redundancy at reasonable costs, and a speedy user
experience no matter where your users are in the world.
Today, we will take you through that journey
from easily moving your databases
to the cloud to modernizing applications
to handle the unexpected and to providing simplicity
for your developers, all while sharing new developments
along the way.
For most of you, this journey begins
with how you can free your teams from self-managing thousands
of on-prem applications and traditional databases
and unlock the speed to build and launch quickly.
A good place to start is with infrastructure
that supports specialized workloads like Oracle
databases.
We offer a bare-metal solution which helps you quickly
and cost effectively move these workloads
to within milliseconds latency of Google Cloud.
This bare-metal solution is built
on an Oracle-certified platform to meet the performance,
availability, and trust needed for the most
mission-critical applications.
For other proprietary databases, Cloud SQL for SQL Server
offers familiarity and compatibility.
Released to general availability early this year
and with a quickly growing customer base,
the service supports multiple editions of SQL Server
and works with popular clients such as SQL Server Management
Studio and PowerShell.
This fully managed service leverages Cloud SQL's
capabilities to provide scalability, performance,
and high availability built in.
But for your journey to the cloud,
this is often only the first step in your transformation.
Your use cases and your database environment
will continue to evolve, which is
why I am excited to announce we have launched committed use
discounts which provide financial governance
without manual overhead.
Committed use discounts are transferable
across SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, and machine sizes,
so you can maximize your utilization
even as your resourcing needs change.
These releases make migrations and compatibility easier
for common databases like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL,
and Postgres.
But when you're building for the unexpected,
Google Cloud native databases offer
unique benefits such as industry-leading five
nines SLA, online scale, and global replication
without any operational complexity.
So to modernize your relational workloads,
we developed Cloud Spanner which offers
a unique pairing of a relational database
with nonrelational availability and scale,
and we have continued to extend the reach of Spanner.
In the last year, we made our industry
leading Spanner SLA of five nines available to all Spanner
multiregion instances, even those starting at one node.
We also introduced a plethora of features for Spanner
this year, including adding additional multiregion
configs and user-managed backup and recovery.
Developer productivity was improved
with JDBC driver and Hibernate ORM
support, additional introspection capabilities,
and now a local emulator.
We continue to enhance our SQL feature
set with foreign keys, WITH clause support,
and query optimizer versioning.
Spanner's combination of relational semantics
and horizontal scale was elusive for so long
that many assumed it was unreachable for application
development, but it solved some of the most critical challenges
for our customers.
This week, you will hear from Uber on their use of Spanner
for dealing with their unpredictable marketplace
demands.
We also saw Spanner shine at ShareChat,
one of the largest social-media platforms in India.
ShareChat supports over 140 million monthly active users,
and while scale was paramount, they
needed to increase their team's operational efficiency
and ability to develop new applications quickly.
Let's hear from Venkatesh Ramaswamy, Vice President
of Engineering at ShareChat, about why they ultimately
rearchitected on Spanner and Google Cloud.
Hi, Venkatesh.
Thanks for joining us at Next on Air.
We know migrating and architecting
can be a major undertaking.
Can you share your motivation to take this on?
VENKATESH RAMASWAMY: Firstly, thank you
for the wonderful introduction, Penny.
It's great to be here.
Our primary reason to move out of AWS
was because we encountered various limitations of scale
with DynamoDB that required us to fundamentally rethink
our existing table and schema definitions.
So when we look at the effort for this rearchitecture,
it was huge in terms of development time.
The other big reason was cost, which was becoming
untenable given our scale.
So we wanted a solution that would support us
while we continue to grow and tackle
as yet unknown use cases.
We also wanted to partner with a technology-first company
and not a sales-driven one.
So we went through a very thorough evaluation process
internally and then decided to migrate off
Dynamo DB, leveraging both Spanner and Bigtable.
PENNY AVRIL: That's great to hear.
How has your experience been with Google Cloud
during this transition?
VENKATESH RAMASWAMY: Google Cloud
has been a great partner for us due to the breadth
of experience with technology, the cost sustainability,
and just the technical support.
We were already running our machine learning and AI
workloads on Google Cloud to begin with,
and that gave us the confidence to look at Spanner and Bigtable
to support the rest of our data infrastructure.
It was clear even early on that the entire process was
approached more as a partnership,
and that gave us the immediate trust that they'd listen
and understand what we need.
The PSO team felt like an extension of our own,
and we had a great working relationship.
In fact, we were in touch with the Spanner team
directly, so we were very confident
that we had the right kind of support structure
in place for us to succeed as a business.
Now as we progressed with our migration,
we made a conscious decision to tackle the migration first
and then focus on the optimizations.
During this time, the folks at Google Cloud
worked with us to ensure that we had the right cost flexibility
and that it wasn't a concern to begin with.
Now that we are fully migrated over,
we have been seeing some amazing savings.
PENNY AVRIL: Congratulations on completing that migration.
Could you share a sense of the scale of that migration
and what sort of results you had seen?
VENKATESH RAMASWAMY: The entire process
took about six months of time, and we
had more than 80 terabytes of data to move over.
That included about 200-plus tables.
Now, post-migration, our overall costs
have reduced by almost 30% to 40%,
and that is just the first few months,
and we are just getting started here.
Recently, we have had our traffic grow to almost 500%
over the span of just a few days,
and we scaled horizontally with zero lines of code change.
We also launched a short-video app called
Moj in a week's time, and we were
able to move it to another region in an extremely
seamless manner.
Now in the midst of all this, Spanner
handled all that extra load that was thrown at it,
and the Google team was right alongside us for the ride.
The fact that we were able to do it without needing any help
is a testament to the robustness of the Google system,
and I don't think there's a better
compliment than that, Penny.
PENNY AVRIL: Thank you, Venkatesh, for joining us today
and for sharing why ShareChat chose Google Cloud.
VENKATESH RAMASWAMY: Thanks, Penny,
and wonderful to be here again.
PENNY AVRIL: It's wonderful to hear how ShareChat is handling
their growing scale at 30% less cost
while making it faster for their team to tackle
new strategic use cases.
With Spanner, we were the first to architect
a relational system that brought together
massive scale, strong consistency, five
nines of availability, and the ease of just being
able to build, and we saw there continue
to be a gap in the nonrelational world.
These developers not only wanted ease
to build yet rescale insurance and the reliability
from the relational world.
For mobile and web developers looking for a document
database, Cloud Firestore became generally available just
over 18 months ago.
To date, over 2 million Firestore databases
have been created.
A recent study from SlashData found
that Firestore had the most satisfied developers compared
to any other cloud on the database market.
So why did these developers love Firestore?
The Firebase integration, serverless architecture,
and free tier are appealing.
However, if we look under the covers,
we have uniquely offered a globally consistent NoSQL
document database with five nines availability
by building Firestore on an optimally tuned deployment
of Spanner infrastructure.
The end result?
Firestore developers can quickly build
reliable, real-time applications at scale.
In addition for Firestore, today I'm
pleased to announce we're introducing tools
to give you better visibility into usage and performance
with Key Visualizer.
Additionally, we've invested in a richer query language
and added a new SDK for game developers for even easier
application development.
Continuing in the nonrelational world,
we are expanding the enterprise capabilities of Cloud Bigtable
while also making it easier to get started in production.
I'm happy to announce that managed backups are now
generally available for Bigtable.
This provides protection against operator error
and application-corruption scenarios
without the management overhead, so you
can stay up and running no matter what happens.
We've also added table-level identity management,
audit logs for admin activity, and expanded our support of SLA
for single-node production instances,
so you can get started at any scale.
We believe this focus on developing, not operating,
needs to extend to all of your most common databases,
including MySQL and Postgres.
Now we are elevating the easy-to-use Cloud SQL
to better meet the needs of the enterprise.
In addition to the financial control of committed use
discounts, in the last year, Cloud SQL
added support for core security controls,
more control over maintenance, and introduced
cross-region replicas.
The popularity of Cloud SQL can be seen this week
from the talk by McKesson.
And over the past year, we've seen Cloud SQL's popularity
continue to grow.
It is now one of Google Cloud's fastest-growing top services.
What excites me about this momentum
is that it's not happening in isolation.
The deep integrations across the entirety of Google Cloud's
offerings make your next-generation architectures
truly powerful.
These native integrations ensure you always
get the best of Google Cloud no matter
what you were developing.
We've seen GKE users deploying more than 500,000
proxy instances to securely connect
to Cloud SQL and BigQuery users querying 22 petabytes of data
in Cloud SQL in just one month, bridging
the gap between analytic and operational data.
We continue to advance our databases
to meet your needs no matter where you are on your journey,
whether you're just getting started,
designing for the unpredictable, or enabling your teams to build
faster than ever.
This week, you'll not only be able to hear
from ShareChat, [INAUDIBLE],, Khan Academy, McKesson,
New York Times, and Uber, but also from our product experts
on every Google Cloud database service.
Thank you all for watching, and enjoy the week.