Cloud Platform at Google I/O - new Big Data, Mobile and Monitoring products
    
    
    
    
     By Greg
      DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform team
      By Greg
      DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform team
      
      Today at 
Google I/O, we are
      introducing new services that help developers build and optimize data pipelines, create mobile
      applications, and debug, trace, and monitor their cloud applications in production.
      
      
Introducing Google Cloud Dataflow
      A decade ago, Google invented MapReduce to process massive datasets using distributed
      computing. Since then, more devices and information require more capable analytics pipelines —
      though they are difficult to create and maintain.
      
      Today at Google I/O, we are demonstrating Google Cloud Dataflow for the first time. Cloud
      Dataflow is a fully managed service for creating data pipelines that ingest, transform and
      analyze data in both batch and streaming modes. Cloud Dataflow is a successor to MapReduce,
      and is based on our internal technologies like 
Flume and 
MillWheel.
      
      Cloud Dataflow makes it easy for you to get actionable insights from your data while lowering
      operational costs without the hassles of deploying, maintaining or scaling infrastructure. You
      can use Cloud Dataflow for use cases like ETL, batch data processing and streaming analytics,
      and it will automatically optimize, deploy and manage the code and resources required.
      
      
Debug, trace and monitor your application in production 
      We are also introducing several new Cloud Platform tools that let developers understand,
      diagnose and improve systems in production.
      
      Google Cloud Monitoring is designed to help you find and fix unusual behavior across your
      application stack. Based on technology from our recent acquisition of Stackdriver, Cloud
      Monitoring provides rich metrics, dashboards and alerting for Cloud Platform, as well as more
      than a dozen popular open source apps, including Apache, Nginx, MongoDB, MySQL, Tomcat, IIS,
      Redis, Elasticsearch and more. For example, you can use Cloud Monitoring to identify and
      troubleshoot cases where users are experiencing increased error rates connecting from an App
      Engine module or slow query times from a Cassandra database with minimal configuration.
      
      We know that it can be difficult to isolate the root cause of performance bottlenecks. Cloud
      Trace helps you visualize and understand time spent by your application for request
      processing. In addition, you can compare performance between various releases of your
      application using latency distributions.
      
      Finally, we’re introducing Cloud Debugger, a new tool to help you debug your applications in
      production with effectively no performance overhead. Cloud Debugger gives you a full stack
      trace and snapshots of all local variables for any watchpoint that you set in your code while
      your application continues to run undisturbed in production. This brings modern debugging to
      cloud-based applications.
      
      
New features for mobile development
      With rapid autoscaling, caching and other mobile friendly capabilities, many apps like 
Snapchat
      or 
Rising
      Star have built and run on Cloud Platform. We’re adding new features that make
      building a mobile app using Cloud Platform even better.
      
      Today, we’re demonstrating a new version of Google Cloud Save, which gives you a simple API
      for saving, retrieving, and synchronizing user data to the cloud and across devices without
      needing to code up the backend. Data is stored in 
Google Cloud Datastore, making
      the data accessible from 
Google App
      Engine or 
Google
      Compute Engine using the existing 
Datastore API.
      Google Cloud Save is currently in private beta and will be available for general use soon.
      
      We’ve also added tooling to 
Android Studio, which simplifies the process of adding an App
      Engine backend to your mobile app. In particular, Android Studio now has three built-in App
      Engine backend module templates, including 
Java
      Servlet, 
Java
      Endpoints and an 
App
      Engine backend with Google Cloud Messaging. Since this functionality is powered by
      the open-source 
App Engine plug-in
      for Gradle, you can use the same build configuration for both your app and your
      backend across IDE, CLI and Continuous Integration environments.
      
      We’ll be doing more detailed follow-up posts about these announcements in the coming days, so
      stay tuned.
      
      
Greg
      DeMichillie has spent his entire career working on developer platforms for web,
      mobile, and the cloud. He started as a software engineer before making the jump to Product
      Management. When not coding, he's an avid photographer and gadget geek.
      
      Posted by Louis Gray,
      Googler
      
      Apache, Nginx, MongoDB, MySQL, Tomcat, IIS, Redis, Elasticsearch
      and Cassandra are trademarks of their respective owners.