With the popularization of cloud services, service providers also need to be more innovative in the construction of infrastructure and technology to support the development and operation of transformative applications. At the same time, cloud services must be sufficiently stable and trustworthy to attract long-term investment from more organizations. Take the Google Cloud platform as an example. Its latest actions include bringing enterprise-level stable API support to customers.
Kripa Krishnan, Vice President of Technical Infrastructure at Google Cloud, and John Jester, Vice President of Customer Experience, pointed out in a recent blog post:
Google Cloud has always been committed to implementing a series of plans to enhance customers’ trust in the cloud platform. For example, the mission-critical services we launched provide top-level support and simplified release, and provide customers with corresponding consulting services to improve the predictability of the product roadmap.
Today, Google Cloud has further launched the Google Enterprise API and applied it to the Google Cloud, Google Workspace and Google Maps platforms (excluding consumer-level APIs).
Google Enterprise API is designed to improve stability. Under the guidance of the new policy, Google Cloud has also formulated research requirements on how and when to change it. We realize that many customers’ key business systems rely on Google Cloud’s enterprise APIs and have extremely high requirements for the stability of the application program interface. In this way, their system can work as expected without bringing unexpected development work.
These principles can be summarized as the following:
- Platform responsibility: As long as customers are actively using it, Google Cloud will not remove or make any functional changes in an incompatible way. If it is unavoidable, the platform party will make the migration as easy as possible, unless it encounters serious security, legal or intellectual property issues.
- Customer support: Customers will be notified of upcoming changes at least one year in advance, during which the relevant functions will continue to operate normally. Customers can access tools, documentation, and other materials to migrate to an updated version with equivalent functionality and performance. The platform will also actively cooperate with customers to help them reduce the extra workload to close to zero.
- Ensure strong governance: To ensure strict compliance with these principles, any changes introduced by Google Cloud to the API will be reviewed by a centralized committee composed of product and engineering directors, and follow a strict product life cycle assessment. Google Cloud will also take the decision to close any product very seriously in order to strike a balance between innovation and stability. In the past few months, we have been experimenting with these principles in order to significantly improve the customer experience through the reliability of enterprise products.
Interested friends can move to the Google Cloud official website to view the details of Google Enterprise API.
