Pre-launch Checklist

Where to manage your Client ID in the Google Cloud Console

The Premium Plan Client ID management functionality is migrating from the Support Portal to the Cloud Console on the Maps' Credentials page, under the Service Accounts section.

The new Client ID area on the Credentials page

Note: The Google Maps Platform Premium Plan is no longer available for sign up or new customers.

Ensuring your team has access to the necessary resources

Use the Google Cloud Console

Why it's important: The Google Cloud Console gives you access to information such as usage reports, news feeds, and developer resources. More importantly, the Cloud Console allows you to file support cases with the Google Maps APIs Support team if you encounter any technical issues during development or launch.

Prior to launch, please enable Cloud Console access for all developers responsible for your application's maintenance. If you experience technical issues, access to the Cloud Console will allow members of your team to contact support and also let our support team to contact the proper stakeholders in your organization. For example, the support team may need to contact your organization if we detect abnormal traffic or behavior that could end up breaking your application. Ensuring that we can contact the appropriate developers could be the difference between having an unexpected outage and preventing an outage.

Subscribe to notification email groups

Why it's important: To ensure you stay up to date with developments and changes across the Maps APIs, we recommend subscribing to one or more of the following email groups:

Optimizing your application

Configure a firewall to allow access to the Google Maps Platform Services

Why it's important: Google Maps Platform services use a variety of domains, some of which do not belong to the *google.com domain. If you are behind a restrictive firewall, it is important to allow access to the domains used by each Maps API service. If your firewall doesn't allow access to these domains, API requests will fail, which can break your applications. See a complete list of domains used by the Maps APIs.

We do not recommend managing firewall restrictions by IP address, as the IPs associated with these domains are not static.

Note: Google Maps Platform services use port 80 (http) and 443 (https) for inbound and outbound traffic. These services also require GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and HEAD requests. Configure your firewall to allow traffic over these ports and to allow requests, depending on API and use case.

Authorize your SSL domains for use with the Maps JavaScript API

Why it's important: When using the Maps JavaScript API with an SSL domain, it's critical you have explicitly authorized your HTTPS domains to ensure your requests are not rejected. Note that authorizing http://yourdomain.com does not automatically enable its SSL equivalent, https://yourdomain.com. Check your list of authorized domains in the Cloud Console by scrolling down to the Client ID section. To troubleshoot errors related to using the client-side APIs with an SSL domain, check if any elements of your page are loaded over HTTP. View the guide to troubleshooting authorization.

Select the proper API version

Why it's important: Before developing your application, it's important to be aware which versions of the APIs are deprecated. Choosing to develop against the non-deprecated versions of the APIs will save you development time and cost down the road once deprecated versions become unavailable.

In particular, it's critical to understand the versioning scheme used by the Maps JavaScript API, so that you avoid accidentally using an improper version of the API in your environment.

For example, it may be suitable to use the experimental version of the API in your development or test environment, but we strongly discourage the use of the experimental version in a production environment. Our SLA only applies to stable versions of the API, so you should only use stable versions in your production environment.

See the guide to Maps JavaScript API versions.

Choose between client-side and server-side design

Why it's important: Choosing a client-side or server-side approach is an architectural decision and is absolutely critical to the stability and scalability of your application. By and large, a server-side approach should be used for pre- and post- processing of records offline (that is, outside of your application). Alternatively, a client-side approach should be used for the portions of your applications which interact with your users (that is, process user-submitted requests in real time).

Deploying a server-side approach where a client-side approach should be used instead is the leading cause for exceeding quotas and, hence, broken applications. We highly recommend consulting the geocoding strategies before designing or launching applications that rely on server-side calls.

Optimize quota usage

Why it's important: Understanding the way your application consumes quota, known as Maps APIs Credits, helps you to reduce the amount you pay. For example, if you're using the Maps JavaScript API, your application consumes Maps APIs Credits for each map load. See the guide to Premium Plan usage rates and limits.

Manage your web services quota usage

Before launching your service, it is critical that you understand the different quota related errors (for example, OVER_QUERY_LIMIT, User Rate Limit Exceeded), and set up the proper logic in your application to be able to respond to such errors when you exceed your quota. Please start by reading the usage limits FAQ. For information on the status codes returned by each API, consult the developer's guide for that API. For example, see the guide to Directions API status codes. Understanding and implementing these concepts will greatly reduce the chances of your application exceeding its allowed quota, being blocked by Google, and/or breaking.

Perform load testing on your app

Why it's important: Use load testing of your application to ensure it can handle high volumes of requests without exceeding your quotas for the Maps APIs.

Load testing against live Google services will lead to your application exceeding its allowed quota and being blocked by Google. Google Maps Platform can serve very high volumes. In 2012, Santa Tracker served 1,600,000 requests per second. Therefore, there is no need to do load testing against Google services. Instead, load testing your application should ensure that your application is able to cope with high volumes of requests without exceeding your quotas for the Maps APIs. Example: if your quota for the Geocoding API is 20 QPS (queries per second), load testing your application should ensure that your application can handle 600 QPS without sending more than 20 QPS to the Geocoding API.

To safely achieve this, load testing should be done against a mock (fake) API—a service that can absorb high amounts of requests and reply to them with valid responses, without involving the Google Maps Platform. Thus you can load test your application without risking being blocked by the Google Maps Platform.