Posted by Bram Bout, Director, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)
While university students are on their summer holidays, internships or jobs, their professors are already hard at work planning for fall courses. These course maps will be at the center of student learning, research and academic growth. Google was founded on the basis of the work that Larry and Sergey did as computer science students at Stanford, and we understand the critical role that teachers play in fostering and inspiring the innovation we see today and will see in the years to come. That’s why we’re excited to offer Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science.

Starting today, university faculty in the United States who teach courses in computer science or related subjects can apply for free credits for their students to use across the full suite of Google Cloud Platform tools, like App Engine and the Cloud Machine Learning platform. These credits can be used any time during the 2016-17 academic year and give students access to the same tools and infrastructure used by Google engineers.
Students like Duke University undergrad Brittany Wenger are already taking advantage of cloud computing. After watching several women in her family suffer from breast cancer, Brittany used her knowledge of artificial intelligence to create Cloud4Cancer, an artificial neural network built on top of Google App Engine. By analyzing uploaded scans of benign and malignant breast cancer tumors, Cloud4Cancer has learned to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue. It’s providing health care professionals with a powerful diagnostic tool in the fight against cancer.

Google Cloud Platform offers a range of tools and services that are unique among cloud providers. The tool that Brittany used — Google App Engine — lets you simply build and run an application without having to configure custom infrastructure. Our Machine Learning platform allows you to build models for any type of data, at any size, and TensorFlow provides access to an open-source public software library (tinker with that extensive data here). Students will also be able to get their hands on one of Cloud Platform’s most popular new innovations: the Cloud Vision API, which allows you to incorporate Google’s state-of-the-art image recognition capabilities into the most basic web or mobile app.

We look forward to seeing the creative ways that computer science students will use their Google Cloud Platform Education Grants, and will share stories along the way on this blog.

Computer science faculty in the United States can apply here for Education Grants. Students and others interested in Cloud Platform for Higher Education, should complete this form to register and stay up to date with the latest from Cloud Platform. For more information on Cloud Platform and its uses for higher education, visit our Google Cloud Platform for Higher Education site.

Posted by Dr. Norbert Schmitz, Managing Director of Meo Carbon Solutions

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of “Mapping a better world” blog posts highlighting ways in which organizations are using location data to affect positive local and global change. Google Maps APIs continues to create opportunities and tools to support our community.

Today we hear from Dr. Norbert Schmitz, managing director of Meo Carbon Solutions. Read how Meo Carbon Solutions and Google for Work Premier Partner Wabion used Google Maps APIs and Google Cloud Platform to develop Global Risk Assessment Services (GRAS). The tool provides reliable information about the ecological and social risks of expanding agriculture into natural habitats.


In the European Union, companies that sell biofuels must get certifications to show that producing their fuel — often made from agricultural crops — does not cause deforestation, the loss of biodiversity or the loss of carbon stocks. We established GRAS to provide a single tool to gather and visualize this data required to support a credible certification.

Through GRAS, we’ve made this information accessible not only to governments and NGOs, but also to businesses, financial institutions and individuals. For example, a U.S. company buying soybean oil from Brazil can use GRAS to verify the ecological and social risk exposure of the mills and the farmers supplying the mills.

We decided the most effective way to present this complex set of information was to build a web app that would overlay data from multiple sources on top of a map. Using this tool, auditors can compare before-and-after maps of a certain area, and based on changes to the habitat, either grant or deny certifications.

To build GRAS, we partnered with IT consultant Wabion, a Google for Work Premier Partner. After testing several map solutions, we chose Google Maps because of its high performance, ability to easily integrate data from multiple sources, flexible APIs, solid support and large user community.


The GRAS website combines mapping information with data from dozens of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other global databases. It uses the Google Maps JavaScript API to display the base maps for the site. The API also visualizes layers and more than 100 types of data — including agriculture, deforestation and social welfare — on top of the maps.

Users can upload and visualize their own data sets. The Google Maps Geocoding API verifies map locations, and the Google Maps Places API autocomplete makes it easy for site users to choose locations that they want to learn about.

A GRAS visualization of biodiversity risk in Brazil

GRAS is powered by the Google Cloud Platform — specifically, Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine. Combining these services with the Google Maps APIs lets us handle geodata in a 10-terabyte database, which hosts more than 100 layers, many of them extremely large.

We’ve recently expanded GRAS beyond our original mission to provide insights for other industries by expanding the data layered on top of maps. We’ve included new information on biodiversity, land-use changes, and available carbon stock. We’ve also been able to incorporate numerous measurements of social health — ranging from the Global Slavery Index to the Global Hunger Index and the UNICEF index of access to drinking water and sanitation.

Through GRAS, we’ve made this information accessible not only to governments and NGOs, but also to businesses, financial institutions and individuals. For example, a U.S. company buying soybean oil from Brazil can use GRAS to verify the ecological and social risk exposure of the mills and the farmers supplying the mills.

Far exceeding our initial vision, the GRAS website combines transparency with the power of technology to help users in wide-ranging industries, —from food, to chemicals and energy — operate environmentally and socially sound supply chains.

Posted by Jon Byrum, Product Marketing Manager, Google Cloud Platform

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.)

Athletic gear, much like all apparel categories, is quickly shifting to an online sales business. Sports Authority, seeing the benefits that cloud could offer around agility and speed, turned to Google Cloud Platform to help it respond to its customers faster.

In 2014, Sports Authority’s technical team was asked to build a solution that would expose all in-store product inventory to its ecommerce site, sportsauthority.com, allowing customers to see local store availability of products as they were shopping online. That’s nearly half a million products to choose from in over 460 stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

This use case posed a major challenge for the company. Its in-store inventory data was “locked” deep inside a mainframe. Exposing millions of products to thousands of customers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week would not be possible using this system.

The requirements for a new solution included finding the customer’s location, searching the 90 million record inventory system and returning product availability in just the handful of stores nearest in location to that particular customer. On top of that, the API would need to serve at least 50 customers per second, while returning results in less than 200 milliseconds.

Choosing the right cloud provider

At the time this project began, Sports Authority had already been a Google Apps for Work (Gmail, Google Sites, Docs) customer since 2011. However, it had never built any custom applications on Google Cloud Platform.

After a period of due diligence checking out competing cloud provider options, Sports Authority decided that Google App Engine and Google Cloud Datastore had the right combination of attributes — elastic scaling, resiliency and simplicity of deployment — to support this new solution.

Through the combined efforts of a dedicated project team, business partners and three or four talented developers, it was able to build a comprehensive solution on Cloud Platform in about five months. It consisted of multiple modules: 1) batch processes, using Informatica to push millions of product changes from its IBM mainframe to Google Cloud Storage each night, 2) load processes — python code running on App Engine, which spawn task queue jobs to load Cloud Datastore, and 3) a series of SOAP and REST APIs to expose the search functionality to its ecommerce website.

Sports Authority used tools including SOAPUI and LOADUI to simulate thousands of virtual users to measure the scalability of SOAP and REST APIs. It found that as the number of transactions grew past 2,000 per second, App Engine and Cloud Datastore continued to scale seamlessly, easily meeting its target response times.

The company implemented the inventory locator solution just in time for the 2014 holiday season. It performed admirably during that peak selling period and continues to do so today.

This screenshot shows what customers see when they shop for products on the website — a list of local stores, showing the availability of any given product in each store

When a customer finds a product she's interested in buying, the website requests inventory availability from Sports Authority’s cloud API, which provides a list of stores and product availability to the customer, as exhibited in the running shoe example above.

In-store kiosk

As Sports Authority became comfortable building solutions on Cloud Platform, it opened its eyes to other possibilities for creating new solutions to better serve its customers.

For example, it recently developed an in-store kiosk, which allows customers to search for products that may not be available in that particular store. It also lets them enroll in the loyalty program and purchase gift cards. This kiosk is implemented on a Google Chromebox, connected to a web application running on App Engine.

This image shows the in-store kiosk that customers use to locate products available in other stores.

Internal store portal

Additionally, it built a store portal and task management system, which facilitates communication between the corporate office and its stores. This helps the store team members plan and execute their work more efficiently, allowing them to serve customers better when needs arise. This solution utilizes App Engine, Cloud Datastore and Google Custom Search, and was built with the help of a local Google partner, Tempus Nova.

This screenshot shows the internal store portal that employees use to monitor daily tasks.

Learning how to build software in any new environment such as Cloud Platform takes time, dedication and a willingness to learn. Once up to speed, the productivity and power of Google Cloud Platform allowed the Sports Authority team to work like a software company and build quickly while wielding great power.

Posted by Dr. Naoyuki Kitamura, CEO, Japan’s Medical Network Systems Inc.

Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog

Japan faces a critical shortage of radiologists. Although major hospitals are well equipped to conduct scans, the scarcity of experts to read them and give patients their diagnoses means that people, especially those in rural areas, often have to wait a long time to discover their results. This can have tragic consequences for people with serious conditions.

To address this shortage and help people get accurate diagnoses faster, Medical Network Systems Inc. (MNES) in Hiroshima started running a remote diagnosis service in 2000. Rather than waiting for patients to come to hospitals, we bring the radiology equipment to them. This teleradiology service has helped combat the challenge of getting scanning technology to people in remote areas; however, we are still short on specialists that can read the scans, and we wanted to find ways to give access to patients in areas without specialists.

Last year, our team started using Google Cloud Platform to power our remote-diagnosis systems. Patients used to be given a hard copy of their scan to take to a doctor or specialist. Moving the process to the cloud speeds everything up. All of our buses are equipped with CT scanning machines, so our technicians upload images and scans right from the bus. Specialists can then log into the system from wherever they’re working and see the scans and diagnose the patient remotely.

Reading scans is a very specialized process. Radiologists must examine lots of images and scans in a very particular sequence, and it’s important that this process isn’t laggy or slow. One of the benefits of using Google’s services is that they can handle massive volumes of information. Google App Engine processes the images and data in the right sequence and enables us to cross reference patient inputs with existing radiographic and pathological information.

Instead of waiting for a few days or a week for a diagnosis, which was the usual turnaround for our teleradiology service, patients get their results within a few hours. And it’s not just our patients benefiting from remote diagnosis; enabling our radiologists to work from anywhere has meant that many of our female specialists are able to stay in the workforce — diagnosing scans while working from home and taking care of their kids. With so few radiologists in Japan, this flexibility helps us keep skilled technicians in the workforce.

We’re optimistic about the potential for cloud-based technology to enrich our understanding of pathological issues and believe it signals a new chapter for the healthcare industry by removing geographical barriers between patients and doctors.

Posted by Brian Peterson and John Rector, co-founders, Switch Communications

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

Today’s guest bloggers are Brian Peterson and John Rector, co-founders of Switch Communications, a San Francisco-based voice communications startup.
When companies first started using business phones, work was a place you went; today, work is a thing you do, whether you’re at your desk or in transit. Yet the business phone hasn’t evolved to work the way that you do. With today’s mobile worker in mind, we created Switch.co, a business phone system built in the cloud, from the ground up. With Switch.co, you can receive calls on any device, whether it’s your desktop through the Chrome app, on mobile with the Android or iOS apps, or even your old desk phone (if you really, really want to). You can even switch seamlessly between devices, so if you start a call on your cell in your car, you can transfer it to your desk when you get into the office without having to hang up then dial back in.

On top of that, Switch.co is designed specifically for Google Apps for Work users: given its rich set of APIs, Google Apps is deeply integrated into the app, allowing users to view recent Gmail messages, see upcoming Calendar events, and access recently shared Docs while in the context of a conversation. You can even launch a Hangout directly from a call. We know Google Apps admins expect setup and management to be easy, so we’ve ensured you can get started with Switch.co over your lunch break.

We built Switch.co for Google Apps users because we’re such heavy Google users ourselves: Switch.co runs on Google App Engine and our team relies on Google Apps internally to keep business running smoothly and efficiently. Because many of our employees work remotely, it’s vital that we can access information at any time and on any device, then collaborate in real-time, no matter where we are. With single sign-on, we can access all the Google products we need with just one log-in; with Google Drive, we can store and share all of our files in one place; and with Google Sheets and Google Docs, we can work together on projects without worrying about out of date attachments.

Drive is particularly powerful in enabling our design and engineering teams to easily share and centralize the many assets required to take a idea from a concept to launch. We deal with a ton of huge files – hi-res graphics, professional grade videos, Adobe Illustrator files — and the ability to store and share them from Drive makes working together so much more seamless. Not only are these files too big for email, but they’d also otherwise splinter into countless versions distributed throughout our employees’ individual hard drives. Plus, the files are backed up by Google so we know they won’t get lost, and they’re centralized in one system, so we don’t have to worry about sensitive data leaving our company’s domain. And given that Google got its start as a search company, being able to search by document name or the copy within a file makes finding what you need easy and fast.

We rely on Google Sheets for our highly collaborative projects, like launch planning. Our entire calendar for the development and promotion of Switch.co, for example, was created and constantly updated in a Google spreadsheet. That way, our marketing and PR teams can access the latest version of the go-to-market plan whenever they need it.

We couldn’t have launched Switch.co without the power of Google Apps for Work enabling us to collaborate and work with the flexibility that a fast-paced startup needs. Google Apps for Work does for Switch Communications what Switch.co does for callers everywhere — it enables you to be agile, connected, and always on the go.

Posted by Daniel Viveiros, CI&T’s Head of Technology

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Today's guest post is from Daniel Viveiros, Head of Technology at CI&T, a Google Cloud Platform Partner of the Year LATAM 2013. In this post, Daniel describes how CI&T in partnership with Coca-Cola built the ‘Happiness Flag’ for the Coca-Cola 2014 FIFA World Cup™ campaign in Brazil. To learn more about the Happiness flag visit this website.


As part of the ‘The World’s Cup’ campaign, Coca-Cola wanted to do something that would visually illustrate soccer’s global reach. Coca-Cola invited fans around the world to share their photos to create the Happiness Flag -- the world’s largest mosaic flag crafted from thousands of crowdsourced images submitted by people in more than 200 countries. The flag, 3,015 square meters in size, was unveiled during the opening ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™.
A project of this scale calls for high performing and reliable technology, so when we started working with Coca-Cola to build the infrastructure for the Happiness Flag campaign, we knew we had to use Google Cloud Platform. By using Google Cloud Platform, we turned a big, innovative idea into reality on a global scale.

To create the Happiness Flag, we leveraged the whole Google Cloud Platform stack as shown below:
Google App Engine enabled us to handle the computing workload, capable of handling millions of images via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and email, to the searches for images and view requests. The architecture was scalable to meet this kind of transaction demand and the fluctuations in traffic. We stored all the images in Google Cloud Storage, where integrated edge caching support and image services made it an ideal choice for serving the images. Meanwhile, Google Compute Engine gave us the capability for long-running processes, such as the Twitter integration and advanced image transformations. We were able to show how powerful the creation of hybrid environments can be, using both Platform-as-a-Service (Google App Engine) and raw virtual machines (Google Compute Engine) in the cloud.

We used other out-of-the-box Google Cloud Platform technologies like Memcache, Datastore and Task Queues to ensure outstanding levels of performance and scalability. We know that many fans will be viewing the Happiness Flag on their mobile devices, so we needed a platform that would offer different capacities of computational power. The system provides amazing user experience with high performance and low latency, regardless of the device and its location. Using Google Cloud Platform, the campaign runs smoothly 24/7 and includes redundancy, failover techniques, backups and state-of-the-art monitoring. Plus, it’s affordable.

After the physical flag was unveiled before the opening match, the digital mosaic was made available with a Google map-like zoom in and out with eleven levels of detail. Anyone who submitted an image can now search for themselves on the virtual flag and the search results will show up as pins in the mosaic, like locations found in a Google map. By clicking on the pin, their photos open up in an overlay and they are taken to the maximum level of zoom in to see the "neighborhood" around their image in the flag. After the match, a link to the Happiness Flag site was sent to each participant as a souvenir.

Our goal was to help Coca-Cola create a project that would celebrate the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ by enabling fans from all over the world to express their creativity in a show of unity and art. What better way to open the games than by displaying the Happiness Flag, which is a symbol of the spirit of the game and its fans.

Posted by Jeff Trom, CTO, WebFilings

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is from Jeff Trom, CTO at Webfilings, a Software-as-a-Service provider that develops cloud-based solutions for business reporting.

At Webfilings, we’re reinventing complex business reporting. Wdesk, our flagship product, is an enterprise solution that is transforming how companies manage and report complex business data. It’s a collective workspace for teams to come together to build documents and reports without having to go to IT for assistance. Using Wdesk, financial teams have quickly become accustomed to how the cloud has simplified collaboration, provided global accessibility and eliminated the replication of data and documents.

What started as an idea to automate SEC reporting has now grown to a robust offering that supports more than 60% of the Fortune 500 in just 4 years since launch. We’ve been able to build a great company and culture where rapid innovation and best-in-class customer service are key.

We rely on Google Cloud Platform to make a formerly onerous process seem easy. Cloud Platform replicates our terabytes of data across multiple datacenters seamlessly and allows our developers to focus on innovation, not infrastructure. We deploy updates daily and leverage Google App Engine’s ability to simultaneously serve traffic from multiple versions to test new features with a few customers before releasing them to everyone. This helps ensure that our customers have the best experience possible each time they log in to Wdesk. Check out the video below to learn more about how we’re using Cloud Platform.

In our product space, the data-in-motion architecture we’ve chosen is what sets us apart. It requires:

1. Dynamically scalable application servers to handle variable traffic patterns
2. Replicated storage that’s scalable and provides reliable performance under load
3. Enterprise-grade reliability to ensure 24 x 7 access for our customers

We love learning about how our customers innovate with Wdesk inside their own companies, and are constantly impressed by the solutions they produce. The possibilities seem endless.

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.

(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.

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.

Posted by Joshua Lowcock, Head of Commercial Platforms and Products for News Limited

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Joshua Lowcock, Head of Commercial Platforms and Products for News Limited, an Australian media company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

News Limited is one of Australia’s largest media companies, spanning newspapers, magazines, online, and subscription TV. We publish over 140 online and printed newspapers in major Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as in suburban areas.

Classified advertising is a key revenue stream across all our markets, but traditionally booking and billing classifieds had been a manual and time-consuming process. We wanted to implement a solution that would allow customers to serve themselves by placing ads online.

Google App Engine has enabled customers to do just that. We chose Google App Engine as the application because it is easy to build, easy to maintain and simple to scale as the user base and data storage grows. Functionalities within the Google App Engine environment, such as Google BigQuery, have also been useful. We can do an in-depth analysis of our ads and item pricing, as well as provide an internal reporting tool, all using BigQuery.

The end result is a self-service, production booking and billing system - www.traderoo.com.au - which we have developed on Google App Engine. It’s proving to be a real winner for both our business and our customers. It’s fundamentally changed the way customers engage with our company, creating a more usable experience and superb responsiveness. It’s easy to use, and gives more control over ad content, as well as the ability to publish ads online immediately. Online ads are free, while print ads are optional and require a small fee, but complement online ads by extending the advertiser’s reach.

When customers book ads using the Traderoo website, they get automatic email notification from the platform that tells them how their advertisement is performing. Traderoo is optimised for PC, laptop, smartphone and tablet, so the browser and ad placement remain consistent, no matter what device our customers are using.

The real advantage for us is that our classified business has achieved faster time to market, lower costs and less overheads in the form of call centre time and manual data entry. The site has been a huge success, and we look forward to continuing to use Google App Engine as we develop Traderoo further.

Posted by Brett McCully, Google Cloud Platform Team

Support is as important as product features when choosing a platform for your applications. And let’s face it, sometimes we all need a bit of help. No matter which Google Cloud Platform services you are using—App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, etc.—or what time of day, you should be able to get the answers you need. While you can go to Stack Overflow or Google Groups, we realize some of you may need 24x7 coverage, phone support or direct access to a Technical Account Manager team.

To meet your support requirements, we’re introducing a comprehensive collection of support packages for services on Google Cloud Platform, so you can decide what level best fits your needs:

• Bronze: All customers get access to online documentation, community forums, and billing support. (Free) 
• Silver: In addition to Bronze, you can email our support team for questions related to product functionality, best practices, and service errors. ($150/month) 
• Gold: In addition to Silver, you'll receive 24x7 phone support and consultation on application development, best practices or architecture for your specific use case. (Starts at $400/month) 
• Platinum: The most comprehensive and personalized support. In addition to Gold, you’ll get direct access to a Technical Account Manager team. (Contact Sales for more information)

Sign up or click here to find out more information about the new Google Cloud Platform support options.

When we first launched our business, we had gigabytes worth of data. Now, we anticipate growing to terabytes of data in just a few months. We couldn’t have scaled this easily without Google Cloud Platform. To learn more, check out our case study and our post on the App Engine blog for a detailed technical explaination.