BI for cloud data with Looker | Google Cloud Blog

As we welcome Looker’s team and their business intelligence (BI) and analytics technology to Google Cloud, we’re exploring all the platform can do. Looker helps to leverage the full potential of data you’re collecting or have access to. You can model the data, analyze it, create visualizations, embed real-time dashboards, build data applications, and share the right data with the people who need it in your organizations. In many ways, Looker is like an API for your data.

With the potential to gather so much data today, that part often seems easy. But putting that data to work for you can really bring value. Get started with Looker’s unique approach to BI with some of these common use cases, and consider how you might apply some of these in your own organization. Once you know what you’re looking for and have some concrete numbers, you can decide which data can help you make decisions and set business goals.

Check out these explainers to learn more about BI concepts and how you can work across business, IT, and operations teams to apply them appropriately.

** Building beautiful dashboards**. After all the work of getting data into BigQuery and applying analytics to it, dashboards are a great payoff. To build one that users will love, start by knowing what the reason for the dashboard is, and who the audience is within your organization. From there, get approval on the overall look of the dashboard, then start working on the actual creation. Ideally, your dashboard will be easy to scan and offer opportunities for users to drill down further if needed. You can also pay attention to details like flow and color to really entice users. Learn more.

**Measuring customer profitability. **Having a handle on customer profitability can help you understand whether customers are actually costing you money, rather than making you money. The measure of customer profitability is more complex than lifetime value or net margin of a transaction—it should include all touch points the customer has with your company. Those could include customer service interactions, fulfillment requirements, or overuse of services.

You can use a step-by-step process to determine customer profitability, including identifying customer channels, segmenting customer groups, and digging into your collected data to understand more about various costs related to customers. Once that process is in place, you can find that number as often as possible, then use the resulting information to adapt your business strategies and goals. Learn more.

#google cloud platform #data analytics #data analytic

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Multi-cloud Spending: 8 Tips To Lower Cost

A multi-cloud approach is nothing but leveraging two or more cloud platforms for meeting the various business requirements of an enterprise. The multi-cloud IT environment incorporates different clouds from multiple vendors and negates the dependence on a single public cloud service provider. Thus enterprises can choose specific services from multiple public clouds and reap the benefits of each.

Given its affordability and agility, most enterprises opt for a multi-cloud approach in cloud computing now. A 2018 survey on the public cloud services market points out that 81% of the respondents use services from two or more providers. Subsequently, the cloud computing services market has reported incredible growth in recent times. The worldwide public cloud services market is all set to reach $500 billion in the next four years, according to IDC.

By choosing multi-cloud solutions strategically, enterprises can optimize the benefits of cloud computing and aim for some key competitive advantages. They can avoid the lengthy and cumbersome processes involved in buying, installing and testing high-priced systems. The IaaS and PaaS solutions have become a windfall for the enterprise’s budget as it does not incur huge up-front capital expenditure.

However, cost optimization is still a challenge while facilitating a multi-cloud environment and a large number of enterprises end up overpaying with or without realizing it. The below-mentioned tips would help you ensure the money is spent wisely on cloud computing services.

• Deactivate underused or unattached resources

Most organizations tend to get wrong with simple things which turn out to be the root cause for needless spending and resource wastage. The first step to cost optimization in your cloud strategy is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for.

Enterprises often continue to pay for resources that have been purchased earlier but are no longer useful. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it on a regular basis brings you one step closer to cost optimization. If needed, you can deploy automated cloud management tools that are largely helpful in providing the analytics needed to optimize the cloud spending and cut costs on an ongoing basis.

• Figure out idle instances

Another key cost optimization strategy is to identify the idle computing instances and consolidate them into fewer instances. An idle computing instance may require a CPU utilization level of 1-5%, but you may be billed by the service provider for 100% for the same instance.

Every enterprise will have such non-production instances that constitute unnecessary storage space and lead to overpaying. Re-evaluating your resource allocations regularly and removing unnecessary storage may help you save money significantly. Resource allocation is not only a matter of CPU and memory but also it is linked to the storage, network, and various other factors.

• Deploy monitoring mechanisms

The key to efficient cost reduction in cloud computing technology lies in proactive monitoring. A comprehensive view of the cloud usage helps enterprises to monitor and minimize unnecessary spending. You can make use of various mechanisms for monitoring computing demand.

For instance, you can use a heatmap to understand the highs and lows in computing visually. This heat map indicates the start and stop times which in turn lead to reduced costs. You can also deploy automated tools that help organizations to schedule instances to start and stop. By following a heatmap, you can understand whether it is safe to shut down servers on holidays or weekends.

#cloud computing services #all #hybrid cloud #cloud #multi-cloud strategy #cloud spend #multi-cloud spending #multi cloud adoption #why multi cloud #multi cloud trends #multi cloud companies #multi cloud research #multi cloud market

Your Data Architecture: Simple Best Practices for Your Data Strategy

If you accumulate data on which you base your decision-making as an organization, you should probably think about your data architecture and possible best practices.

If you accumulate data on which you base your decision-making as an organization, you most probably need to think about your data architecture and consider possible best practices. Gaining a competitive edge, remaining customer-centric to the greatest extent possible, and streamlining processes to get on-the-button outcomes can all be traced back to an organization’s capacity to build a future-ready data architecture.

In what follows, we offer a short overview of the overarching capabilities of data architecture. These include user-centricity, elasticity, robustness, and the capacity to ensure the seamless flow of data at all times. Added to these are automation enablement, plus security and data governance considerations. These points from our checklist for what we perceive to be an anticipatory analytics ecosystem.

#big data #data science #big data analytics #data analysis #data architecture #data transformation #data platform #data strategy #cloud data platform #data acquisition

Overview of Google Cloud Essentials Quest

If you looking to learn about Google Cloud in depth or in general with or without any prior knowledge in cloud computing, then you should definitely check this quest out, Link.

Google Could Essentials is an introductory level Quest which is useful to learn about the basic fundamentals of Google Cloud. From writing Cloud Shell commands and deploying my first virtual machine, to running applications on Kubernetes Engine or with load balancing, Google Cloud Essentials is a prime introduction to the platform’s basic features.

Let’s see what was the Quest Outline:

1. A Tour of Qwiklabs and Google Cloud
2. Creating a Virtual Machine
3. Getting Started with Cloud Shell & gcloud
4. Kubernetes Engine: Qwik Start
5. Set Up Network and HTTP Load Balancers

A Tour of Qwiklabs and Google Cloud was the first hands-on lab which basically gives an overview about Google Cloud. There were few questions to answers that will check your understanding about the topic and the rest was about accessing Google cloud console, projects in cloud console, roles and permissions, Cloud Shell and so on.

**Creating a Virtual Machine **was the second lab to create virtual machine and also connect NGINX web server to it. Compute Engine lets one create virtual machine whose resources live in certain regions or zones. NGINX web server is used as load balancer. The job of a load balancer is to distribute workloads across multiple computing resources. Creating these two along with a question would mark the end of the second lab.

#google-cloud-essentials #google #google-cloud #google-cloud-platform #cloud-computing #cloud

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud for Data Warehouse

In today’s market reliable data is worth its weight in gold, and having a single source of truth for business-related queries is a must-have for organizations of all sizes. For decades companies have turned to data warehouses to consolidate operational and transactional information, but many existing data warehouses are no longer able to keep up with the data demands of the current business climate. They are hard to scale, inflexible, and simply incapable of handling the large volumes of data and increasingly complex queries.

These days organizations need a faster, more efficient, and modern data warehouse that is robust enough to handle large amounts of data and multiple users while simultaneously delivering real-time query results. And that is where hybrid cloud comes in. As increasing volumes of data are being generated and stored in the cloud, enterprises are rethinking their strategies for data warehousing and analytics. Hybrid cloud data warehouses allow you to utilize existing resources and architectures while streamlining your data and cloud goals.

#cloud #data analytics #business intelligence #hybrid cloud #data warehouse #data storage #data management solutions #master data management #data warehouse architecture #data warehouses

Google Cloud: Caching Cloud Storage content with Cloud CDN

In this Lab, we will configure Cloud Content Delivery Network (Cloud CDN) for a Cloud Storage bucket and verify caching of an image. Cloud CDN uses Google’s globally distributed edge points of presence to cache HTTP(S) load-balanced content close to our users. Caching content at the edges of Google’s network provides faster delivery of content to our users while reducing serving costs.

For an up-to-date list of Google’s Cloud CDN cache sites, see https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/locations.

Task 1. Create and populate a Cloud Storage bucket

Cloud CDN content can originate from different types of backends:

• Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instance groups
• Zonal network endpoint groups (NEGs)
• Internet network endpoint groups (NEGs), for endpoints that are outside of Google Cloud (also known as custom origins)
• Google Cloud Storage buckets

In this lab, we will configure a Cloud Storage bucket as the backend.

#google-cloud #google-cloud-platform #cloud #cloud storage #cloud cdn