As Google’s Cloud Next OnAir enters its final week, the California-based giant announced its new Business Application Platform. The new platform comes with API management, no-code development, automation, and data insight capabilities.
While digitalization was already on the priority list of many enterprises, the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated it. The companies in the process of gradual digitalization had to accelerate its pace, and others that were still planning it, had to further expedite digitalization. This urgency has presented its own set of challenges, and Google aims to address these with its Business Application Platform.
With the new platform, Google aims to do away with coding complexities and simplify data, services, and functionality consumption for enterprises with the help of APIs. Further, the platform also aims to empower employees with no coding experience to make full use of and build data-driven applications. Google is also aiming to simplify application integration and extension, and business process automation.
In order to achieve the aforementioned goals, Google announced three new features for Business Application Platform. Let’s discuss the new features.
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API Gateway
This feature is available in beta as of now. API Gateway rids developers from the hassles of writing code for various endpoints or infrastructure configuration and scaling concerns for their APIs built on Compute Engine, GKE, App Engine, and serverless backends.
This fully managed service aids developers adopt serverless workloads to ensure better sharing of APIs with enterprise teams or even publicly on the internet. Some of the features of API Gateway are authentication, key validation, and rate-limiting. The service is built on Envoy edge and service proxy and comes with use-based or even tiered pricing plans.
Apigee Data Source for AppSheet
With this service, the Californian IT giant is trying to empower “citizen developers.” Google plans to support no-code development with the help of Apigee, a firm acquired by Google in 2016. AppSheet already supports various data sources such as G Suite, mySQL, and Salesforce, and Apigee is the latest addition to this collection.
The introduction of Apigee in data sources will bring even more data for “citizen developers.” In Google’s vision, leveraging Apigee APIs and no-code will mean that even the non-technical talent in enterprises can develop innovative apps. This will not only empower enterprises in digitalization, but also address the IT backlog plaguing companies far and wide.
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AppSheet Automation
This feature for Business Application Platform is still in the early access stage. AppSheet Automation aims to expedite enterprises’ automation processes by eliminating the need to write code for the same. Automation can not only help businesses ramp up the pace of tasks, but also help them with weeding out unavoidable manual errors.
The ease of governance in AppSheet Automation ensures that enterprises remain assured regarding the security of their data. The use cases for this involve tasks such as human-centric processes, application integration, and document-based processes. AppSheet Automation offers AI-driven functions that provide contextual suggestions based on natural language inputs. This helps in the development of rich apps and powerful automation as the entire process harnessed the power of no-code.
The new Business Application platform aims to ease digitalization for businesses. Amit Zavery, the general manager of platforms at Google, said that the platform’s objective is to “deliver a comprehensive, open and integrated application platform that empowers line-of-business users to create and extend applications, build and automate business workflows and connect and modernize legacy applications.” Lastly, other than these updates, Google has stated that it will add new features in the future that will leverage hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, artificial intelligence and machine learning, lifecycle management, security, and productivity and collaboration.
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