Founded in 2006, PaGaLGuY started as a forum that enabled students, typically aged between 20 and 30 to discuss and seek advice on academic issues. By 2011, PaGaLGuY had increased its traffic to about 250,000 page views per month. The business is now one of India’s largest education networks and provides an app that users can download to their Android and iOS devices.

Over the past six years, PaGaLGuY has extended its service to include video advice from experts on education topics and grown the number of views of its pages to 1.5 million per day. As Head of Technology for the business, Sandeep Kalidindi has played a key role in ensuring PaGaLGuY is as engaging as possible to users. “Because the product is advertising based, the greater the user engagement, the greater the advertising revenue,” Kalidindi explains.

Google Cloud Platform Results

• Supported growth to 1.5 million page views per day and demand spikes that see requests increase from about 90 per second to about 1,200 per second
• Reduced API latency from about 1 second to about 40 milliseconds
• Reduced system administration time from three to four days per week to 30 minutes every two weeks

In 2015, PaGaLGuY’s senior management team decided to deliver an even more relevant experience for users of the education network. “The core thing we had to do was personalise the experience for each and every student that visited PaGaLGuY,” Kalidindi says. “So we had to capture each student’s data to customise what they see when they open the site.”

The business also found traffic to the network was straining its infrastructure. During demand peaks, created by exams involving as many as 5 million students, PaGaLGuY would be inaccessible for periods of 30 minutes to one hour. Furthermore, average API latency had climbed to an unacceptable 1 second, compromising performance.

PaGaLGuY needed to access extensive compute resources to undertake its planned change. Had the business relied on a physical technology architecture to undertake the transformation, it would have had to purchase capacity equivalent to 16 new servers. “There was no way with a small team we could grow to that extent in a short time,” Kalidindi says. “This was the right moment for us to explore cloud services.”

The business established two primary requirements the selected cloud service needed to meet. First, PaGaLGuY had to be able to scale the platform with costs rising only in proportion to the increase in resources consumed. Accordingly, the business would have to minimise the number of employees required to manage the cloud environment. Second, the platform had to give PaGaLGuY easy access to student data and the ability to undertake prompt, granular analysis.

PaGaLGuY reviewed available public cloud services and determined that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was the best fit for its business. “Google Cloud Platform was considerably more mature than the alternatives, with a high degree of automation and a suite of managed services,” Kalidindi says. PaGaLGuY management then discussed with Google how to optimise cost, performance and availability of its personalised education network on GCP.

With assistance from Google and business transformation specialists Searce, PaGaLGuY was able to deliver the platform into production on GCP in 10 months. “Searce was very proactive in ensuring the environment met our needs and allowing us to gain priority access to Google services in development,” Kalidindi says. “Their team was integral to the success of the migration.”

PaGaLGuY has been running in production in GCP for two years. The education network’s GCP architecture comprises a scalable back-end built on Google App Engine; a managed environment for its containerised applications in Google Kubernetes Engine; messaging-oriented middleware through Google Cloud Pub/Sub; a relational database in Google Cloud SQL; a managed data analytics warehouse running in Google BigQuery; stream and batch data processing through Google Cloud Dataflow; and object storage in Google Cloud Storage.

PaGaLGuY has leveraged GCP services to break down its platform application from a monolithic build to a series of microservices running in Google App Engine that enable independent deployment cycles, minimise test and quality assurance overheads and provide clearer monitoring and logging.

Running on GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to add new personalisation features and grow fourfold without having to add any new engineers or administrators to accommodate the increased traffic. The business has also used the platform to seamlessly collect and aggregate students’ data for analysis, reporting and delivering a more targeted user experience. Furthermore, PaGaLGuY has been able to provide its management team with direct access to Google BigQuery to scrutinise data rather than require them to wait at least a day to view reports created by the product or technology teams.

Support demand peaks of 1,200 requests per second

“Thanks to Google Cloud Platform, we can easily support demand peaks that see requests per second rise from an average 90 per second to about 1,200 per second for as long as 45 minutes,” Kalidindi says. Due to GCP’s scalability, PaGaLGuY can ensure its education network remains available and performance remains consistent during those periods.

Latency cut to 40 milliseconds

The business has also reduced average API latency from 1 second to about 40 milliseconds. Furthermore, using GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to automate most of its processes and reduce system administration requirements from three to four days a week across its team members to about half an hour per week.

The performance of GCP has transformed PaGaLGuY’s culture and processes. “Once our team was exposed to Google Cloud Platform and understood the superiority of the platform, our mindset changed from ‘let us do everything on our own’ to ‘let us do what we do best’ and delegate the remainder,” Kalidindi says. The quality of the service provided by GCP means PaGaLGuY effectively considers the cloud provider as part of its team. “We are always eager to see what new services are being launched and are extremely excited about what Google Cloud Platform can provide as part of its roadmap.” he concludes.

Despite a growing number of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Black and Latinx people remain highly underrepresented in tech. Although comprising 12.6% and 18% of the U.S. labor force respectively, Black professionals hold only 5% of tech positions, while Latinx professionals fill just 6% of tech roles.

Long-standing biases in hiring practices and non-inclusive work environments are the primary contributors to this lack of diversity. Even when underrepresented professionals are successfully recruited, invisible barriers to promotion and layoffs that disproportionally impact Black and Latinx employees make it extremely challenging for tech firms to retain top talent.

We founded Divercity to help employers build diverse workforces that are more inclusive and sustainable. With our comprehensive recruiting and retention platform, tech companies can accurately measure employee diversity and gender parity, seamlessly connect with underrepresented talent, and significantly reduce turnover.

As Divercity continues to grow, we’ll introduce new services and solutions that empower the tech world to build inclusive companies while improving compliance with state and federal equal opportunity laws. We also hope to expand the reach of Divercity to support DEI initiatives in non-tech industries and bolster recruiting underrepresented professionals in other countries as well.

Scaling Divercity with the help of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund

Shortly after founding Divercity, we participated in the 2021 Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator. The incredible support and guidance we received during and after the program highlighted the importance of long-term collaboration with reliable technology partners who actively champion diversity and inclusion.

That’s why we became part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. After completing the program, we used Google Cloud credits and Google for Startups Black Founders Fund funding to cost-effectively trial, deploy, and scale key Google Cloud solutions. In just months, we rolled out new inclusion tracking and recruiting tools on the highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud to expedite the sourcing and hiring of underrepresented talent in the tech industry.

With the support and mentorship of the Google for Startups Cloud Program and the Black Founders Fund, Divercity is well on its way to becoming one of the industry’s most trusted sites for DEI measurement, recruitment, and retention.

Delivering predictive diversity analyses with a 99% accuracy rate

We rely on the expansive Google Cloud ecosystem to power all the services offered on the Divercity platform. Specifically, we leverage Colab to write and execute the sophisticated TensorFlow machine learning (ML) models that deliver our predictive diversity analyses with a 99% accuracy rate.

We also use BigQuery to democratize insights and run analytics at scale with 27% lower three-year TCO than cloud data warehouse alternatives. BigQuery seamlessly integrates with Looker and Data Studio to display company diversity and recruitment data on interactive dashboards—and automatically populate reports with detailed demographic information.

We also accelerate the development, launch, and management of new Divercity tools with Firebase, while taking advantage of key features such as A/B testing and messaging campaigns to boost user engagement.

In the future, we plan to explore how Google Cloud AI and machine learning products such as Vertex AI and AutoML can further refine our diversity score analyses and applicant recruiting pipeline. We’ll also continue leveraging the many resources provided by the Google Black Founders Fund, including opportunities for technical project partnerships, early access to new Google Cloud products and tools, and collaboration with dedicated Google experts.

The Google for Startups Cloud Program and Google Black Founders Fund have been invaluable to our success. Since completing the Black Founders Accelerator program, we’ve been named a top 10 HR tech product by HR Tech Outlook, significantly increased our subscriber base, and received positive feedback from investors. We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we empower tech companies to build more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable workforces.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

There are just under 8 billion people on Earth, depending on the source. Here at Recruit, our work is to develop and maintain an email marketing system that sends personalized emails to tens of millions of customers of hundreds of web services, all with the goal of providing the best, most relevant customer experience.

When Recruit was founded in 1960, the company was focused on helping match graduates to jobs. Over the years, we’ve expanded to help providers that deal with almost every personal moment and event a person encounters in their life. From travel plans to real estate, restaurant choices to haircuts, we offer software and services to help providers deliver on virtually everything and connect to their end-customers.

Recruit depends on email as a key marketing vehicle to end-customers and to provide a communications channel to clients and advertisers across its services. To maximize the impact of these emails, we customize each email we send. To help power this business objective, we developed a proprietary system named “Soup” that we host on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Making use of Google Cloud Spanner, Soup is the connective tissue that manages the complex customization data needed for this system.

Of course, getting from idea to functioning product is easier said than done. We have massive datasets so requirements like high availability and serving data in real-time are particularly tricky. Add in a complex existing on-premises environment, some of which we had to maintain in our journey to the cloud creating a hybrid environment, and the project became even more challenging.

A Soup Primer

First, why the name “Soup”? The name of the app is actually “dashi-wake” in Japanese, from “dashi,” a type of soup. In theory, Soup is a fairly simple application: its API returns recommendation results based on the data we compute about a user via the user’s user ID. Soup ingests pre-computed recommendations and then serves those recommendations to the email generation engine and tracks metrics. While Soup doesn’t actually send the customer emails, it manages the entire volume of personalization and customization data for tens of millions of users. It also manages the computed metrics associated with these email sends such as opens, clicks, and other metadata.

Soup leverages other GCP services such as App Engine Flex (Node.js), BigQuery, Data Studio, and Stackdriver in addition to Cloud Spanner.

Soup Requirements

High availability

If the system is unavailable when a user decides to open an email they see a white screen with no content at all. Not only is that lost revenue for that particular email, it makes customers less likely to open future emails from us.

Low latency

Given a user ID, the system needs to search all its prediction data and generate the appropriate content—an HTML file, an image, multiple images, or other content—and deliver it, all very quickly.

Real-time log ingestion and fast JOINs

In today’s marketing environment, tracking user activity and being able to make dynamic recommendations based on it is a must-have. We live in an increasingly real-time world. In the past, it might have been OK to take a week or longer to adapt content based on customer behavior. Now? A delay of even a day can make the difference between a conversion and a lost opportunity.

The Problem

Pushing out billions of personalized emails to tens of millions of customers comes with some unique challenges. Our previous on-premises system was based on Apache HBase, the open-source NoSQL database, and Hive data warehouse software. This setup presented three major obstacles:

Cluster sizing

Email marketing is a bursty workload. You typically send a large batch of emails, which requires a lot of compute, and then there’s a quiet period. For our email workloads, we pre-compute a large set of recommendations and then serve those recommendations dynamically upon email open. On-premises, there wasn’t much flexibility and we had to resize clusters manually. We were plagued by errors whenever loads of email opens and the resulting requests to the system outpaced the traffic we could handle, because the cluster size of our HBase/Hive system couldn’t keep up.

Performance

The next issue was optimizing the schema model for performance. Soup has a couple of main functions: services write customer tracking data to it, and downstream “customers” read that data from it to create the personalized emails. On the write side, after the data is written to Soup, the writes need to be aggregated. We initially did this on-premises, which was quite difficult and time consuming because Hbase’s doesn’t offer aggregation queries, and because it was hard to scale in response to traffic bursts.

Transfer delays

Finally, every time we needed to generate a recommendation model for a personalized email blast, we needed to transfer the necessary data from HBase to Hive to create the model, then back to HBase. These complex data transfers were taking two-to-three days. Needless to say, this didn’t allow for the type of agility that we need to provide the best service to our customers.

Cloud Spanner allows us to store all our data in one place, and simply join the data tables and do aggregates; there’s no need for a time-intensive data transfer. Using this model, we believe we can cut the recommendation generation time from days to under a minute, bringing real-time back into the equation.

Why Cloud Spanner?

Compared to the previous application running on-premises, Cloud Spanner offers lower cost, lower operations requirements and higher availability. Most critically, we wanted to calculate metrics (KPIs) in real time without data transfer. Cloud Spanner allows us to do this by pumping SQL queries into a custom dashboard that monitors KPIs in real time.

Soup now runs on GCP, although the recommendations themselves are still generated in an on-premise Hadoop cluster. The computed recommendations are stored in Cloud Spanner for the reasons mentioned above. After moving to GCP and architecting for the cloud, we see an error rate of .005% per second vs. a previous rate of 4% per second, an improvement of 1/800. This means that for an email blast sent to all users in Japan, one user won’t be able to see one image in one email. Since these emails often contain 10 images or more, this error rate is acceptable.

Cloud Spanner also solved our scaling problem. In the future, Soup will have to support one million concurrent users in different geographical areas. Likewise, Soup has to perform 5,000 queries per second (QPS) at peak times on the read side, and will expand this requirement to 20,000 to 30,000 QPS in the near future. Cloud Spanner can handle all the different, complex transactions Soup has to run, while scaling horizontally with ease.

Takeaways

In migrating our database to Cloud Spanner, we learned many things that are worth taking note of, whether you have 10 or 10 million users.

Be prepared to scale

We took scaling into account from Day One, sketching out specific requirements for speed, high availability, and other metrics. Only by having these requirements specifically laid out were we able to choose—and build—a solution that could meet them. We knew we needed elastic scale.

With Cloud Spanner, we didn’t have to make any of the common trade-offs between the relational database structure we wanted, and the scalability and availability needed to keep up with the business requirements. Likewise, with a growing company, you don’t want to place any artificial limits on growth, and Cloud Spanner’s ability to scale to “arbitrarily large” database sizes eliminates this cap, as well as the need to rewrite or migrate in the future as our data needs grow.

Be realistic about downtime

For us, any downtime can result in literally thousands of lost opportunities. That meant that we had to demand virtually zero downtime from any solution, to avoid serving up errors to our users. This was an important realization. Google Cloud provides an SLA guarantee for Cloud Spanner. This solution is more available and resistant to outages than anything we would build on our own.

Don’t waste time on management overhead

When you’re worrying about millions of users and billions of emails, the last thing you have time to do is all the maintenance and administrative tasks required to keep a database system healthy and running. Of course, this is true for the smallest installations, as well. Nobody has a lot of extra time to do things that should be taken care of automatically.

Don’t be afraid of hybrid

We found that a hybrid architecture that leverages the cloud for fast data access but still using our existing on-premises investments for batch processing to be effective. In the future, we may move the entire workload to the cloud but data has gravity, and we currently have lots of data stored on-premises.

Aim for real-time

At this time, we can only move data in and out of Cloud Spanner in small volumes. This prevents us from making real-time changes to recommendations. Once Cloud Spanner supports batch and streaming connections, we’ll be able to enable an implementation to provide more real-time recommendations to deliver even more relevant results and outcomes.

Overall, we’re extremely happy with Cloud Spanner and GCP. Google Cloud has been a great partner in our move to the cloud, and the unique services provided enable us to offer the best service to our customers and stay competitive.

Demand for spoken audio content such as podcasts remains robust despite the proliferation of video services and other entertainment options for consumers. Shibin Li, Co-founder of Castbox, credits growth of the global podcast platform to the following: speed and availability, market-leading features, the proliferation of smart devices to deliver audio content, and activities — such as driving and working around the house — that make consuming video difficult.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Beijing, China, Castbox enables users to locate, access, and create spoken audio content. Available on iOS and Android, Castbox supports 50 million podcasts, on-demand radio programs, and audiobooks in 70 languages from 175 countries. The platform hosts about 2 million users per day and is the largest podcast platform on Android.

Castbox includes a range of features that build on its core service to provide a high-quality user experience. These features include curated podcast recommendations and in-audio search.

A combination of services

At its inception, Castbox relied on a combination of a multinational cloud services, as well as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, including the Google BigQuery analytics data warehouse and Cloud APIs to provide programmatic interfaces with Google Cloud services, and a range of services from the Google mobile development platform Firebase.

However, as Castbox matured and its user base expanded, the business increased its reliance on Google Cloud Platform and Firebase.

“We needed to access stable cloud services as we could not tolerate long periods of downtime that would compromise the user experience,” says Li. “Furthermore, we had to support up to 50,000 concurrent connections, and potentially more in future, without disruption.”

“Based on our analysis of the data in Google BigQuery, we can determine what type of content users are listening to, how long they like to listen to it, and when they like to listen to it. This allows us to recommend similar podcasts to each user based on the preferences he or she expressed, encouraging activity on and return visits to our platform.”

—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, Castbox

Competitive differentiation

Castbox also found machine learning-powered Google Cloud Platform APIs could help deliver features, such as in-audio search, that differentiate the podcast platform from its competitors. In addition, Firebase SDKs and Firebase A/B Testing would enable Castbox to create and analyze new applications, as well as make adjustments based on user feedback. Firebase Realtime Database would allow the business to support tens of thousands of concurrent user connections.

The diligence of the Google Cloud team in advising Li and her team about forthcoming products and services also swayed Castbox towards Google technologies. The business gained the opportunity with Google to join several programs that offered early access to Google innovations.

Signature in-audio search service

Castbox now uses Google Cloud Platform services in the Tokyo, Japan, and U.S. East regions. Cloud Speech-to-Text API plays a key role in delivering Castbox’s signature in-audio search service. This service enables users to search transcriptions of audio content on the platform for words or phrases. The search results incorporate the title of the podcast and the search term in context (for example, within the sentence or sentence excerpt in which it appears). Each use of the word or phrase is time-stamped so it can easily be found. The API enables Castbox developers to apply neural network algorithms to achieve audio-to-text conversion accuracy rates of greater than 96%, while search queries typically experience latency of just 50 milliseconds.

In addition, the latency of comparison data, converting audio to text, is only about 250 milliseconds, contributing to the processing of about 12 minutes worth of audio to text in just 10 minutes. “We can process about 20 hours of audio files in one day,” Li says. “This enables us to transcribe and index all the new episodes of a podcast in that period.”

50,000 concurrent connections

With Firebase Realtime Database, Castbox now supports up to 50,000 concurrent connections to its platform with an average latency per connection of just 10 milliseconds. “Firebase Realtime Database also allows us to continue operating in offline mode, which is extremely helpful if we experience any network disruptions,” Li explains. “When we come back online again, any data is simply synchronized with the database.”

Google BigQuery and the analytics capabilities of Firebase SDKs also enable Castbox to monitor and analyze user behaviors. “Based on our analysis of the data in Google BigQuery, we can determine what type of content users are listening to, how long they like to listen to it, and when they like to listen to it,” Li explains. “This allows us to recommend similar podcasts to each user based on the preferences he or she expressed, encouraging activity on and return visits to our platform.”

“Given our queries may span up to 40 days of data, we may be analyzing up to 1,200 GB at one time. We have no problem doing this with Google BigQuery.”

—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, Castbox

Castbox also uses its analyses of Google BigQuery data to amend banners and summaries on its platform to encourage users to listen to additional content. Furthermore, the service is prepared to make surprise recommendations of content to users based on the preferences and reactions of users with similar tastes.

“We analyze a pool of data growing at up to 30 GB per day,” Li explains. “Given our queries may span up to 40 days of data, we may be analyzing up to 1,200 GB at one time. We have no problem doing this with Google BigQuery.” These analyses also support Castbox’s decision to start creating original content, such as finance and economic news, for its platform.

Checking weekly changes

Castbox does not rely only on analyzing user data to deliver a high-quality experience. The business aggregates user feedback from emails and Google Play reviews to make weekly changes to its platform. It then uses Firebase A/B Testing to check whether these changes are met with a positive user response.

“We are extremely pleased with Google Cloud Platform and Firebase. We have been able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and provide an attractive option for users at a time when content and entertainment options are exploding. We have a great opportunity with Google to continue to improve the value of our offering to users and build engagement and loyalty.”

—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, Castbox

Castbox’s positive experiences with Google Cloud Platform are encouraging the business to grow its use of the product. “We are trying to move some more services to Google Cloud Platform because it is very stable and scalable,” Li says. The business is keen to explore the capabilities of Cloud Pub/Sub to provide low latency messaging between applications, Cloud Spanner to deliver a distributed relational database service, and Cloud Dataflow to transform and enrich data in stream and batch modes.

“We are extremely pleased with Google Cloud Platform and Firebase,” Li concludes. “We have been able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and provide an attractive option for users at a time when content and entertainment options are exploding. We have a great opportunity with Google to continue to improve the value of our offering to users and build engagement and loyalty.”

As the volume of data that people and businesses produce continues to grow exponentially, it goes without saying that data-driven approaches are critical for tech companies and startups across all industries. But our conversations with customers, as well as numerous industry commentaries, reiterate that managing data and extracting value from it remains difficult, especially with scale.

Numerous factors underpin the challenges, including access to and storage of data, inconsistent tools, new and evolving data sources and formats, compliance concerns, and security considerations. To help you identify and solve these challenges, we’ve created a new whitepaper, “The future of data will be unified, flexible, and accessible,” which explores many of the most common reasons our customers tell us they’re choosing Google Cloud to get the most out of their data.

For example, you might need to combine data in legacy systems with new technologies. Does this mean moving all your data to the cloud? Should it be in one cloud or distributed across several? How do you extract real value from all of this data without creating more silos?

You might also be limited to analyzing your data in batch instead of processing it in real-time, adding complexity to your architecture and necessitating expensive maintenance to combat latency. Or you might be struggling with unstructured data, with no scalable way to analyze and manage it. Again, the factors are numerous—but many of them accrue to inadequate access to data, often exacerbated by silos, and insufficient ability to process and understand it.

The modern tech stack should be a streaming stack that scales with your data, provides real-time analytics, incorporates and understands different types of data, and lets you use AI/ML to predictively derive insights and operationalize processes. These requirements mean that to effectively leverage your data assets:

• Data should be unified across your entire company, even across suppliers, partners, and platforms., eliminating organizational and technology silos.
• Unstructured data should be unlocked and leveraged in your analytics strategy.
• The technology stack should be unified and flexible enough to support use cases ranging from analysis of offline data to real-time streaming and application of ML without maintaining multiple bespoke tech stacks.
• The technology stack should be accessible on-demand, with support for different platforms, programming languages, tools, and open standards compatible with your employees’ existing skill sets.

With these requirements met, you’ll be equipped to maximize your data, whether that means discerning and adapting to changing customer expectations or understanding and optimizing how your data engineers and data scientists spend their time. In coming weeks, we’ll explore aspects of the whitepaper in additional blog posts—but if you’re ready to dive in now, and to steer your tech company or startup towards success by making your data better work for you, click here to download your copy, free of charge.