Create a Google Cloud Storage source connection in the UI

Source connectors in Adobe Experience Platform provide the ability to ingest externally sourced data on a scheduled basis. This tutorial provides steps for creating a Google Cloud Storage (hereinafter referred to as “GCS”) source connector using the Platform user interface.

Getting started

This tutorial requires a working understanding of the following components of Adobe Experience Platform:

• Experience Data Model (XDM) System: The standardized framework by which Experience Platform organizes customer experience data.
  • Basics of schema composition: Learn about the basic building blocks of XDM schemas, including key principles and best practices in schema composition.
  • Schema Editor tutorial: Learn how to create custom schemas using the Schema Editor UI.
• Real-time Customer Profile: Provides a unified, real-time consumer profile based on aggregated data from multiple sources.

If you already have a valid GCS connection, you may skip the remainder of this document and proceed to the tutorial on configuring a dataflow.

Supported file formats

Experience Platform supports the following file formats to be ingested from external storages:

• Delimiter-separated values (DSV): Support for DSV formatted data files is currently limited to comma-separated values. The value of field headers within DSV formatted files must only consist of alphanumeric characters and underscores. Support for general DSV files will be provided in the future.
• JavaScript Object Notation (JSON): JSON formatted data files must be XDM compliant.
• Apache Parquet: Parquet formatted data files must be XDM compliant.

Gather required credentials

In order to access your GCS data on Platform, you must provide the following values:

For more information about these values, see the Google Cloud Storage HMAC keys guide. For steps on how to generate your own access key ID and secret access key, refer to the Google Cloud Storage overview.

Connect your Google Cloud Storage account

Once you have gathered your required credentials, you can follow the steps below to link your GCS account to Platform.

Log in to Adobe Experience Platform and then select Sources from the left navigation bar to access the Sources workspace. The Catalog screen displays a variety of sources for which you can create an account with.

You can select the appropriate category from the catalog on the left-hand side of your screen. Alternatively, you can find the specific source you wish to work with using the search option.

Under the Databases category, select Google Cloud Storage. If this is your first time using this connector, select Configure. Otherwise, select Add data to create a new GCS connector.

The Connect to Google Cloud Storage page appears. On this page, you can either use new credentials or existing credentials.

New account

If you are using new credentials, select New account. On the input form that appears, provide a name, an optional description, and your GCS credentials. When finished, select Connect and then allow some time for the new connection to establish.

Existing account

To connect an existing account, select the GCS account you want to connect with, then select Next to proceed.

Next steps

By following this tutorial, you have established a connection to your GCS account. You can now continue on to the next tutorial and configure a dataflow to bring data from your cloud storage into Platform.