Maximize your Cloud Spanner savings with new committed use discounts

Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database that offers near unlimited scale, strong consistency, and industry leading high availability of up to 99.999%. Spanner powers applications of all sizes in multiple industries including financial services, gaming, retail, and healthcare. Spanner provides great value and price-performance since it helps you save operational costs, provides multiple replicas of your data by default, and allows you to pay for only what you need. Multiple customers have built their mission critical-applications on Spanner and are committed to expand its usage to transform many more applications. We are excited to announce the launch of Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) to further reduce costs for customers committing to use Spanner. You can get up to 40% discount on Spanner compute capacity by purchasing committed use discounts. Spanner committed use discounts provide deeply discounted prices in exchange for your commitment to continuously use Spanner compute capacity (as measured in nodes or processing units) for a one or three year period. One-year commitment provides a 20% discount whereas a three-year commitment provides a 40% discount! Spanner committed use discounts are available now and are applicable for all Spanner instance configurations in all regions.Greater flexibility drives higher utilizationSpanner committed use discounts provide full flexibility in terms of how discounts are applied. Once you make a commitment to spend a certain amount on an hourly basis on Spanner from a billing account, you can get discounts on instances in different instance configurations, regions, and projects associated with that billing account. Both regional and multi-region instances can utilize the same spend commitment. This flexibility helps you achieve a high utilization rate of your commitment across regions and projects without manual intervention, saving you time and money. If for business reasons you need to migrate your application from single region to multi-region in future, you can do so with the same commitment while continuing to enjoy the discounts.Committed use discounts along with other launches such as PostgreSQL interface and granular instance sizing democratize access to Spanner and make it easier for you to power more of your workloads with Spanner.How to purchase committed use discountsYou can purchase a Cloud Spanner committed use discount in the Google Cloud Console billing page by selecting the Commitments tab and then selecting PURCHASE at the top as shown below. Read the purchasing spend-based commitments section in Google Cloud’s documentation for more details.Once you click on PURCHASE, choose the billing account, commitment period and hourly commitment amount, in terms of equivalent on-demand spend.This amount represents the equivalent of on-demand costs that you would have incurred without the committed use discount.After you purchase a Spanner committed use discount, it automatically applies to aggregated spending on compute capacity (as measured in nodes or processing units) in all regions, instance configurations, and projects. We have provided this flexibility so that you need not make separate commitments for each region and instead have higher savings by automatically applying the discount in all regions.Spanner committed use discounts don’t apply to storage, backup, and network pricing. When you purchase a Spanner committed use discount, you pay the same commitment fee for the entire commitment period. You still receive the same discount percentage on applicable usage in the event of a price change. The commitment fee is billed monthly.When is committed use discounts right for you? Spanner committed use discounts are ideal when your spending on Spanner compute capacity has a predictable portion that you can commit to for a one or three year period. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you have a couple of Spanner instances in different regions and you have provisioned a total of 125 nodes. Let’s say you are consistently spending an average of $100/hour on this computer capacity. Let’s further assert that you feel confident this usage rate will not decline over the next year.This sort of steady usage represents an excellent opportunity to buy a Spanner committed use discount—in this case, a one-year commitment to spend $100/hour on Spanner nodes, in exchange for a 20% discount to that commitment. Let’s look at how such a purchase would apply to three different per-hour billing scenarios.In the first hour, you spend $100 on Spanner nodes. This matches your commitment exactly, with no overage. With the commitment’s 20 percent discount applied, this hour would cost you $80, saving you $20.Let’s say you scaled up Spanner nodes in the next hour, spending $110. You still enjoy a 20% discount for the $100 that your commitment covers. The remaining $10 gets billed at an on-demand rate.  Your bill for this hour would come to $80 plus the $10 of usage beyond the coverage of the commitment, for $90. Compared to the full $110 for the second hour, that still nets a $20 savings, just as in the previous hour.In the third hour, you scale down Spanner nodes, spending only $85. Your bill for this hour would still be $80 based on a $100/hour commitment with the 20% discount applied. As you can see, this commitment has saved you $45 over a three-hour span—even though one of those hours had a spending below the $100/hour commitment. Given that a typical month contains around 730 hours, a well-chosen committed use discount can add up to significant monthly savings for you. Let us see how. For example, considering $100 per hour On-demand spend on Spanner:Monthly expenditure based on On-demand rate = $100 per hour * 730 hours = $73,000Monthly expenditure based on 1 year commitment =  ($100 per hour * (1-20%)) * 730 hours  = $58,400 per monthTotal savings per month = $73,000 – $58,400 = $14,600Total savings in 1 year = $14,600 per month * 12 months =  $175,200You can save even more by making a 3 year commitment:Monthly spend based on 3 year commitment =  ($100 per hour * (1-40%)) * 730 hours  = $43,800 per monthTotal savings per month = $73,000 – $43,800 = $29,200Total savings in 3 years = $29,200 per month * 36 months =  $1,051,200These examples show how committed use discounts can help you achieve significant savings on Spanner usage. Now you can use committed use discounts to expand your Spanner usage to power more applications with Spanner’s consistency, availability and scalability guarantees. Learn moreCheck out our documentation for more details on Spanner committed use discounts. For Spanner pricing information, take a look at our pricing page.To get started with Spanner, create an instanceor try it out with a Spanner Qwiklab.Related ArticleVimeo builds a fully responsive video platform on Google CloudThe video platform Vimeo leverages managed database services from Google Cloud to serve up billions of views around the world each day.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Partners driving Retail and Commerce Innovation

With strains on the supply chain and other pandemic-driven economic challenges intensifying, retailers this year face some of their biggest mandates to date: Increasing operational efficiency, delivering a seamless online and in-store experience, and staying one step ahead of rapidly changing customer preferences while offering exceptional customer service. This is why Google’s internal media teams continuously monitor and analyze the retail market and innovate with their services partners. Their goal is to help business leaders maximize business outcomes in this new landscape.All of these challenges require business leaders to precisely balance investments in pricing, promotion, product assortment, technology, and in-store experiences. The good news is these same leaders know intuitively that cloud technology can help. And with the help of a trusted partner who has the necessary technical knowledge and business experience, they can put the right plan in place to move forward and win.Let me show you how some of our Google Cloud partners and customers are solving real-world retail and commence business challenges.Air Asia accelerating forecasting, budgeting and increasing agility Faster budgeting and forecasting enabled Air Asia’s BIG Rewards’ leadership team to transition the business from survival mode during the pandemic, to more long-term program stability looking forward. BIG Rewards partnered with Searce to innovate and quickly implement a solution with improved speed and accuracy that democratizes data to better serve the business and empower all users to create relevant reports for decision-making. With Connected Sheets, BIG Rewards employees can analyze and report on large volumes of data through a familiar Sheets interface, accelerating decision-making and enabling the business to become more agile and relevant to a fast-changing market.“With the Google Cloud and Google Workspace solution, we expect to reduce the time to complete budgets from up to three months to just two to three weeks and lower the time to undertake quarterly forecasts from one month to one to two weeks.”—Sereen Teoh, Chief Financial Officer, BIG RewardsWell-designed experiments delivering measurable ROI for American Eagle OutfittersAmerican Eagle Outfitters conducts store experiments on their key initiatives before scale-up by leveraging Google Cloud data, machine learning capabilities and Accenture’s retail data science expertise to remain quick and agile. From concept to production and deployment in four months, American Eagle Outfitters saved millions of dollars in savings through store testing and a cost-effective platform, and provided the ability to understand performance of in-store tests at a granular level across multiple metrics. Their centralized data store for transactions, inventory, and web data is used for multiple solutions without compromising on performance, and leads to accelerated solution development.  “BigQuery gave us the scalability and processing power to analyze massive datasets that were previously too hard to manage in our old systems.”—Jimmy Hunkele, Director of Data Analytics, American Eagle OutfittersUniting top retail brand, Unify, onto one collaboration platformWith the help of Devoteam, Unify successfully brought the companies behind France’s top digital media brands together onto one communications platform in just two months. Despite the COVID-19 lockdown, the migration helped improve the speed of collaboration by reducing the dependence on email using Google Meet and Google Sheets. By installing a single communications solution for multiple companies, the team reaps the rewards of a shared CRM system to illuminate new synergies and enable remote change management using face-to-face interaction. The migration transforms working norms by enabling remote collaboration between brands with tools that create harmony and support customer experiences.“Google Workspace is more intuitive than other solutions and simplifies large account migrations with automated processes. The question was never ‘Which system should we use?’ but always ‘How can we bring everyone to Google Workspace?”—Charles Misson, Manager of Corporate IT, UnifyCultivating a vision at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.To best manage all the eCommerce environments associated with its family of brands and ensure outstanding customer service, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. has been working with MongoDB and Google Cloud to revolutionize its DevOps culture. As organizations modernize IT, MongoDB encourages DevOps professionals to place more importance on understanding customers, driving business values, and taking a people-first approach to work. By encouraging experimentation and innovation, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., opens up new possibilities for software and infrastructure together. As a result, their DevOps team is able to act independently and bolster performance as demand fluctuates due to turbulent external factors across the retail marketplace.“From agility in scaling and improved resource management to seamless global clusters and premium monitoring, MongoDB and Google Cloud reduce complexity and allow our teams to stay lean and focused on innovation rather than infrastructure.”—Chief Technology Officer, Abi SachdevaPartner specializations create unique opportunities for retailersThese four examples show that Google Cloud, along with its services partners, helps retailers achieve their digital transformation goals with intelligent, data-driven solutions that are extended by our ecosystem of partners. One of the beauties of working with a partner is the instant access to expertise and experience necessary to align challenges with solutions and aspirations with reality. We continue to add thousands of people across Google Cloud to ensure our partners and customers receive all the support needed to thrive and win. Looking for a solution focused partner in your region who has achieved Expertise and/or Specialization in your industry? Search our Global Partner Directory. Not yet a Google Cloud partner? Visit Partner Advantage and learn how to become one today!Learn more about how Google Cloud is transforming retail and e-commerce to meet changing customer expectations at the NRF 2022 archives.Related ArticleLeading with Google Cloud & Partners to modernize infrastructure in manufacturingLearn how Google Cloud Partner Advantage partners help customers solve real-world business challenges in manufacturing.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Join Microsoft Azure at NVIDIA GTC developer conference 2022

The convergence of HPC+AI has opened new pathways for companies and developers worldwide to develop innovative, transformative applications. While this presents a plethora of new business opportunities in fields like academic research, climate modeling, and energy sustainability, they also push the boundaries of compute, data, and process capabilities of the underlying infrastructure so they can perform the way they were intended.

Microsoft Azure is committed to providing those capabilities through a continual improvement cycle that incorporates the newest and fastest processors into the cloud. This spring, NVIDIA GTC will illustrate that commitment in detail, showcasing NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities powering resources on Azure that highlight our ongoing commitment to HPC+AI computing across the spectrum of edge, on-premises, and the cloud, while extending data security and privacy capabilities to meet customer and business data needs.

Register for NVIDIA GTC, running March 21 through 24, 2022.

Get a chance to win an NVIDIA Jetson Nano

Two of our sessions give you the chance to win a SWAG box, complete with an HPC t-shirt and Jetson Nano developer kit. Attend these sessions and don’t forget to look for the special link to enter!

Supercomputer Performance, Meet Cloud Versatility.
Nidhi Chappell, Head of Product, Azure HPC/AI Microsoft; John Montgomery, Corporate Vice President Program Management, Azure AI- Microsoft,
Tuesday, March 22, 2022, 11:00 AM PDT.

The Azure HPC+AI platform enables a new era of innovative applications and services that leverage the versatility of the cloud with the power of supercomputing performance. The convergence of HPC and AI is a revolution, bringing dramatic acceleration to every kind of simulation, and advancing fields across science and industry. Whether you need to scale to over 80,000 cores for your message passing interface (MPI)-based workloads, or you are looking for AI supercomputing capabilities, Azure can support your needs with all of the versatility of the cloud. In this session, we will provide an overview of the Azure HPC+AI platform reviewing recent accomplishments, and cover in detail how the Azure HPC+AI portfolio can support your accelerator workload needs ranging from AI inferencing to deep learning and more.

Unlocking New Possibilities for Privacy-Preserving Data Analytics with Azure Confidential Computing.
Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO and Technical Fellow, Microsoft; Ian Buck, Vice President and General Manager of Accelerated Computing, NVIDIA.

In this session, Microsoft Azure CTO and Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich and NVIDIA Data Center VP Ian Buck discuss how Microsoft and NVIDIA are partnering together to integrate the latest GPU technology with Azure confidential computing to help customers process large data workloads such as AI and machine learning, multi-party analytics, and 3D rendering while keeping data private and secure. Currently, there is no comparable offering in the marketplace, and Azure is driving first to market with this game-changing technology in our quest to be the most secure cloud.

Preserving privacy with confidential computing

Organizations across industries are going through a major AI-led disruption. For example, in healthcare, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and researchers are leveraging AI to accelerate research, refine diagnostics, and improve drug discovery and development. Yet, the democratization of AI is limited by concerns regarding share and use of personal data. For example, banks are often unable to collaborate on critical tasks such as fraud and money laundering detection.

Microsoft has pioneered several privacy-preserving technologies such as homomorphic encryption, confidential computing, and differential privacy to address these challenges.

Join us at NVIDIA GTC to learn more about how to unlock new possibilities for privacy-preserving data analytics with Azure confidential computing to help process large data workloads such as AI and machine learning, multi-party analytics, and 3D rendering, while keeping data private and secure. Learn about how confidential GPUs offer high efficiency and confidentiality and how customers and organizations across the world benefit from it.

For more information about the latest on Azure confidential computing: check out our website, technical documentation, and blogs.

Transforming AI and machine learning at the edge

According to IoT Signals, IoT and AI adoption isn’t slowing down with 90 percent of adopters stating that IoT is critical to their success and 79 percent of businesses indicating they were successfully adopting AI within their IoT solutions with top reasons including predictive maintenance at 67 percent and prescriptive maintenance at 65 percent. Additionally, 56 percent of organizations are combining AI and IoT to create a better user experience.

However, at the same time, 46 percent of businesses with AI strategies are struggling to get their projects past the proof-of-concept stage due to technical challenges and complexity. By shifting AI, analytics, and logic to edge devices, edge computing can help solve speed, latency, security, and reliability challenges within AI and IoT applications.

At NVIDIA GTC, learn more about how Nvidia and Microsoft are working together to Transform AI and machine learning at the Edge leveraging the power of the GPU at the edge combined with Azure AI and IoT services. Learn about accelerating AI and IoT solutions with Azure Percept, Azure Stack HCI, and other Azure IoT services.

For more information check out NVIDIA + Microsoft Accelerated Edge AI webpage.

NVIDIA DLI Training Powered by Azure

We’re proud to host NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) training at NVIDIA GTC again this year, with instructor-led workshops around accelerated computing, accelerated data science, and deep learning.  Hosted on Microsoft Azure, these sessions enable and empower you to leverage NVIDIA GPUs on the Microsoft Azure platform to solve the world’s most interesting and relevant problems. Register for a DLI workshop today.

Microsoft customers solve complex problems with Azure and NVIDIA GPUs

Sensyne Health aids National Health Service in the COVID-19 struggle with Microsoft HPC and AI technologies.

In the midst of COVID-19 the need for a way to get faster test results, Sensyne Health developed its MagnifEye solution, a mobile app that uses a device’s camera to capture the lateral flow test (LFT) stick image and read it in tenths of seconds with a stunning 99.6 percent accuracy rate.

Learn More

Learn more about Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC.
Register for NVIDIA GTC DLI workshops and training sponsored by Microsoft Azure.
Learn more about our joint Edge to Cloud story with NVIDIA.
Learn more about our recently launched Digital Certification program with Cap Gemini focusing on NIVIDA GPU-powered Azure virtual machines.
Altair ultraFluidX™ on Azure.
Barracuda Virtual Reactor on Azure.
Autodesk VRED on Azure.

Quelle: Azure

Amazon SES unterstützt jetzt AWS-CloudFormation-Vorlagen in mehreren neuen Regionen

Mit AWS-CloudFormation-Vorlagen können Sie jetzt in mehreren neuen Regionen Ihre eigenen Ressourcen für den Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) erstellen. Amazon SES ist ein skalierbarer, kosteneffektiver und flexibler cloudbasierter E-Mail-Service, der es digitalen Vermarktern und Anwendungsentwicklern ermöglicht, Marketing-, Benachrichtigungs- und Transaktions-E-Mails aus jeder Anwendung heraus zu senden. Weitere Informationen über Amazon SES finden Sie auf dieser Seite. SES kann über SDK, CLI, die Konsole und AWS-CloudFormation-Vorlagen genutzt werden
Quelle: aws.amazon.com

Amazon Braket fügt Unterstützung für OpenQASM 3.0 hinzu

Amazon Braket, der Quantencomputing-Service von AWS unterstützt jetzt OpenQASM 3.0 für gatebasierte Quantengeräte und Simulatoren. Mit dieser Einführung haben Kunden nun die Wahl, entweder mit Braket SDK Programme zu entwickeln und auszuführen wie bisher oder direkt entsprechende OpenQASM-3.0-Strings über Braket SDK und API bereitzustellen. Die Einführung und laufende Unterstützung von OpenQASM 3.0 durch Amazon Braket wird den Kunden die Migration von Quantenprogrammen zwischen verschiedenen Bereitstellungsumgebungen weiter erleichtern.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com