From Infrastructure to Innovation

How Google Cloud enables you to shift your focus from maintaining infrastructure to driving business outcomes faster

Tech companies and startups tell us they prefer Google Cloud because our industry-leading app development and smart analytics services help them get things done faster and easier. Google Cloud reduces and eliminates the need for infrastructure maintenance, custom tooling and operations. This frees up engineering to focus on roadmap priorities that drive business outcomes like competitive advantage, growth and increased profitability. Yes, you really can focus on innovation and let Google Cloud take care of the rest. Let’s explore how.

“Google Cloud removes a lot of the operational complexity from our ecosystem. That frees up time. We can iterate quicker on key needs, like data insights and machine learning. Having infrastructure managed for us, with the lower-value details taken away, streamlines our ability to concentrate on what’s important to our users and give them the experiences they know and love about Spotify.” Tyson Singer, VP of Technology and Platform, Spotify

Streamlining application delivery gets you to market faster

Speed is the new currency of business. That’s why tech companies and startups are choosing Google Cloud’s state-of-the-art containers and microservices: to get from code to production in record time. By running on Google Cloud, fin-tech startup Current improved time to market for app development by 400% while eliminating downtime for users of its debit card app. Idwall improved developer productivity by 30% and Rakuten Viki freed up engineers from managing infrastructure to focus on scaling the business to serve rapidly growing user demand. Let’s take a closer look at how you can speed up your application delivery.

Get speed and flexibility from containers

Containers give you more flexibility and speed than virtual machines, and Google Cloud takes the hard part - maintenance and operations - out of the equation.

How many tools are you using today to manage and patch your VMs? How do you upgrade your applications? And what’s your VM utilization like? Maybe what you have right now isn’t efficient. For example: things are breaking (outages, scalability issues, etc) due to weaknesses in your VM architecture, or costs are spiraling out of control, or your infrastructure isn’t set up to support everything your business wants to do, like: 

• Refactoring/re-architecting an MVP into a scalable solution 

• Expanding into additional cloud providers to meet regulatory or customer expectations

• Expanding geographically to reduce latency and provide better experiences to a global customer base 

• Improving your end-to-end security posture 

Or maybe you want to improve the existing customer experience (eg. service availability) or launch a differentiated experience that will take your company to the next level, but the project is taking longer than you’d like. 

Legacy or technical debt can slow you down. But a modern architecture consisting of managed services and containers gives you access to proven patterns for running reliable and secure infrastructure. This helps speed up your time to market and increase your productivity without sacrificing stability and security - with the added benefit of helping you attract the best technical talent to work on innovation.

Use Kubernetes to reduce infrastructure management
While most tech companies and startups run in the cloud, many have yet to realize all the benefits of doing so. If you’re in the cloud today, but not on Kubernetes, you’re probably leveraging proprietary solutions while building and maintaining your own supplemental custom tooling. You’re also leaving a lot on the table in terms of efficiency, running your own workloads on underutilized VMs and potentially locking yourself in. 

But you should also be worried about locking yourself out. You’re missing out on the innovation of the Kubernetes community and surrounding ecosystem that’s setting current industry standards and best practices. 

It comes down to where you want your engineers to spend their time -- maintaining infrastructure and building and maintaining custom tooling or ticking off your priority list to drive your business forward. What you have today might be working, but your roadmap probably includes things like repaying technical debt and filling in platform gaps: 

• End-to-end encryption

• Observability (logs, metrics, auto-logging)

• Policy management and enforcement

• High availability and automatic fell-over

• Cost reduction