Editor’s note: Today’s guest post comes from Indian social media platform ShareChat. Here’s the story of how they improved performance, app development, and analytics for serving regional content to millions of users using Google Cloud. 

How do you create a social network when your country has 22 major official languages and countless active regional dialects? At ShareChat, we serve more than 160 million monthly active users who share and view videos, images, GIFs, songs, and more in 15 different Indian languages. We also launched a short video platform in 2020, Moj, which already supports over 80 million monthly active users. 

Connecting with people in the language they understand

As mobile data and smartphones have become more affordable in India, we noticed a large new segment of people, many in rural areas, being welcomed onto the internet. However, many of them didn’t speak English, and when it comes to accessing content and information—language plays a significant role. Instead of joining other social media sites where English reigned supreme, new internet users chose to join language or dialect-specific Whatsapp groups where they felt more comfortable instead.

So, we set out to build a platform where people can share their opinions, document their lives, and make new friends, all in their native language. ShareChat simplifies content and people discovery by using a personalized content newsfeed to deliver language-specific content to the right audience.

Given the high-intensity data and high volume of content and traffic, we rely heavily on IT infrastructure. On top of that, a large number of our users rely on 2G networks to post, like, view, or follow each other. Our platform needs to deliver great experiences to people who are spread out across the country and different networks without any reduction in performance.

The right cloud partner to support future growth

ShareChat was born in the cloud—we already knew how to scale systems to serve a large customer base with our existing cloud provider. But like many companies, we struggled with over-provisioning compute and storage to accommodate unpredictable traffic and avoid running out of storage. With demand rising for local language content and an increase in online interactions in response to the COVID-19 crisis, we realized that we would need a more efficient way to scale dynamically and allocate resources as needed.

Google Cloud was a natural choice for us. We wanted to partner with a technology-first company that would make it easy (and cost-effective) to manage a strong technology portfolio that would allow us to build whatever we wanted. Google is at the forefront of technology innovation and provided everything we needed to build, run, and manage our applications (including creating an efficient DevOps pipeline to fix and release new features quickly). 

We had a few issues in mind at the start of discussions with the Google Cloud team, but over time, as we got information and support from them, we realized that these were the partners we wanted in our corner when it came time to tackle our most challenging problems. In the end, we decided to take our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud.

To support millions of users, we deploy and scale using Google Kubernetes Engine. While we analyze our data using a combination of managed data cloud services, such as Pub/Sub for data pipelines, BigQuery for analytics, Cloud Spanner for real-time app serving workloads, and Cloud Bigtable for less-indexed databases. We also rely on Cloud CDN to help us distribute high-quality and reliable content delivery at low latency to our users. 

We now use just half the total core consumption of our legacy environment to run ShareChat’s existing workloads.

Google Cloud delivers better outcomes at every level 

By moving to Google Cloud, we saw major benefits in several key areas: 

Zero-downtime migration for users

At the time of migration, we had over 70 terabytes of data, consisting of 220 tables—some of which were up to 14 terabytes with nearly 50 billion rows. Due to our data’s interdependencies, moving services over one at a time wasn’t an option for us. 

Even though we were migrating such large volumes of data, we didn’t want to impact any of our customers. Latency spikes for out-of-sync data might affect message delivery. For instance, if a message or notification was delayed, we didn’t want to risk a bad user experience causing someone to abandon ShareChat. 

To prepare for the move, we ran a proof-of-concept cluster for over four months to test database performance in a real-world scenario for handling more than a million queries per second. Using an open-source API gateway, we replicated our legacy data environment into Google Cloud for performance testing and capacity analysis. As soon as we were confident Google Cloud could handle the same traffic as our previous cloud environment, we were ready to execute.

Using wrappers, we were able to migrate without having to change anything in our existing application code. The entire migration of 60 million users to Google Cloud took five hours—without any data loss or downtime. Today, ShareChat has grown to 160 million users, and Google Cloud continues to give us the support we need.

Scaling globally to meet unexpected demand

We rely on real-time data to drive everything on ShareChat by tracking everything that goes on in our app—from messages and new groups to content people like or who they follow. Our users create more than a million posts per day, so it’s critical that our systems can process massive amounts of data efficiently. 

We chose to migrate to Spanner for its global consistency and secondary index. Unlike our legacy NoSQL database, we could scale without having to rethink existing tables or schema definitions and keep our data systems in sync across multiple locations. It’s also cost-effective for us—moving over 120 tables with 17 indexes into Cloud Spanner reduced our costs by 30%.

Spanner also replicates data seamlessly in multiple locations in real time, enabling us to retrieve documents if one region fails. For instance, when our traffic unexpectedly grew by 500% over just a few days, we were able to scale horizontally with zero lines of code change. We were also launching our Moj video app simultaneously, and we were able to move it to another region without a single issue. 

Simplifying development and deployment

On average, we experience about 80,000 requests per second (RPS) –nearly 7 billion RPS per day. That means daily push notifications sent out to the entire user base about daily trending topics can often result in a spike of 130,000 RPS in just a few seconds. 

Instead of over-provisioning, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) enables us to pre-scale for traffic spikes around scheduled events, such as holidays like Diwali, when millions of Indians send each other greetings. 

Migrating to GKE has also enabled us to adopt more agile ways of work, such as automating deployment and saving time with writing scripts. Even though we were already using container-based solutions, they lacked transparency and coverage across the entire deployment funnel. 

Kubernetes features, such as sidecar proxy, allows us to attach peripheral tasks like logging into the application without requiring us to make code changes. Kubernetes upgrades are managed by default, so we don’t have to worry about maintenance and stay focused on more valuable work. Clusters and nodes automatically upgrade to run the latest version, minimizing security risks and ensuring we always have access to the latest features.

Low latency and real-time ML predictions

Even though many of our users may be accessing ShareChat outside of metropolitan areas, it doesn’t mean they’re more patient if the app loads slowly or their messages are delayed. We strive to deliver a high-performance experience, regardless of where our users are. 

We use Cloud CDN to cache data in five Google Cloud Point of Presence (PoP) locations at the edge in India, allowing us to bring content as close as possible to people and speeding up load time. Since moving to Cloud CDN, our cache hit ratio has improved from 90% to 98.5%—meaning our cache can handle 98.5% of content requests. 

As we expand globally, we’d like to use machine learning to reach new people with content in different languages. We want to build new algorithms to process real-time datasets in regional languages and accurately predict what people want to see. Google Cloud gives us an infrastructure optimized to handle compute-intensive workloads that will be useful to us both now—and in the future.  

The confidence to build the best platform

Our current system now performs better than before we migrated, but we are continuously building new features on top of it. Google’s data cloud has provided us with an elegant ecosystem of services that allows us to build whatever we want, more easily and faster than ever before. 

Perhaps the biggest advantage of partnering with Google Cloud has been the connection we have with the engineers at Google. If we’re working to solve a specific problem statement and find a specific solution in a library or a piece of code, we have the ability to immediately connect with the team responsible for it. 

As a result, we have experienced a massive boost in our confidence. We know that we can build a really good system because we not only have a good process in place to solve problems—we have the right support behind us.

From data centers and cloud regions to subsea cables, Google is committed to connecting the world. Our investments in infrastructure aim to further improve our network—one of the world’s largest—which helps improve global connectivity, supporting  users and Google Cloud customers. Our subsea cables play a starring role in this work, linking up cloud infrastructure that includes more than 100 network edge locations and over 7,500 edge caching nodes. 

As it turns out, readers of this blog seem to find what happens under the sea just as fascinating as what’s going on in the cloud. Posts on our cables are consistently among our most popular, which is why we brought them together for you here so you can take a deeper dive (pun intended).

Here’s a list our most popular posts on our underwater infrastructure:

2021

• Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable
• This bears repeating: Introducing the Echo subsea cable
• The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service

2020

• Announcing the Grace Hopper subsea cable, linking the U.S., U.K. and Spain

2019

• Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa
• A quick hop across the pond: Supercharging the Dunant subsea cable with SDM technology
• Curie subsea cable set to transmit to Chile, with a pit stop to Panama

2018

• Expanding our cloud network for a faster, more reliable experience between Australia and Southeast Asia
• Delivering increased connectivity with our first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable

2017

• Google invests in INDIGO undersea cable to improve cloud infrastructure in Southeast Asia

2016

• New undersea cable expands capacity for Google APAC customers and users
• Google Cloud customers run at the speed of light with new FASTER undersea pipe
• A journey to the bottom of the internet

Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers can make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services. To learn more, you can view our network on a map, or read more about our network.

As business leaders evaluate their hybrid work models, employee productivity is top of mind. They’re trying to understand how to balance organizational needs for productivity with employee needs for autonomy, flexibility, and work/life balance. In my role as Google’s Productivity Advisor, I help organizations and employees realize that being productive means working smartly and efficiently — not overworking. And one key to productivity is developing strong time management skills.

Recent research found that 82% of workers don’t have a proper time management system, however. Instead, they rely on making lists, referencing their inbox, or simply winging it. And the result is telling: 21% of people say “their work is never under control or only under control one day per week.”

Everyone works differently, and one of the best things about hybrid work is that it empowers people to work in their own way, at their own pace. However, if your employees are managing their time inefficiently over the long term, their risk of burnout increases — which can be bad news for employee wellbeing, morale and productivity.

In order for any hybrid work plan to be effective and your teams to be healthy, your employees need to build their time management muscle. You can help them do so with a three-step process:

1. Understand how your employees are currently managing their time
2. Encourage your employees to identify time management strengths and areas for improvement
3. Empower your employees to maximize their time management practices

Step 1: Understanding your employees’ work habits

Before you can help your employees manage their time more effectively, you first need to understand how they spend it. To start, identify habits that might be preventing your employees from establishing productive workflows. For example, some employees might be working too much outside of business hours or spending the majority of their working hours in meetings.

While observation may help you glean some of this information, it’s best to go straight to the source. To find out if your employees feel they’re managing their time efficiently, simply ask them! You can distribute an anonymous questionnaire using a survey tool, like Google Forms, with questions like:

• Are you having trouble getting all your work done?
• Do you feel like you have enough independent working time?
• Do alerts and notifications interrupt or enhance your workflow?
• Which productivity and collaboration tools do you find the most and the least useful?
• How do you communicate best with your coworkers when working on- and off-site?

One major hurdle to effective time management can be too many meetings. To learn if meeting fatigue is plaguing your teams, include a survey question asking employees if they feel like they devote too much time to meetings. Help them get specific by encouraging them to use a tool like Time Insights. With this feature, employees can see exactly how much time they spend in meetings and how much focus time they schedule each week to accurately answer your survey.

Fielding an anonymous questionnaire is a great way to start your time management audit. The learnings that emerge can help you identify patterns in your workplace and among your teams — but they won’t reveal how individual employees work. For that, you’ll need to reach out to them directly.

Step 2: Identifying individual strengths to harness and areas for improvement

Once you have a general idea of how your team works, you can dig deeper into your individual employees’ time management methods and working styles. With this information, you can then help them identify the practices that work — and don’t work — for them.

Suggest to your employees that they spend a week observing their productivity patterns and time management methods. You might encourage people to look at:

• Their level of energy at different times during the day and/or on different days of the week
• The different types of work, such as strategic or administrative, they like doing and when
• How much time they spend doing work versus communicating about work
• How they feel during and after group meetings
• The amount of time they spend in deep-focus versus time spent switching among different tasks

If your organization uses digital timesheets, your employees can consult built-in, automatic time-tracking insights to see where they’re spending their time. Otherwise, you can easily create a custom time-tracking app using a no-code solution like AppSheet to help your employees measure the time they devote to their various responsibilities.

Once everyone has completed their weeklong study, set up dedicated meetings to review your employees’ observations with them individually. Armed with this new understanding, you and your employees can clarify when and how each person does their best work, identify areas for improvement, and start adjusting accordingly.

Step 3: Empowering your employees to flex their time management muscle

Now that you have clarity on how your employees spend their time, you can work with them to develop personal time management practices. To set them up for success, look for opportunities that take advantage of their strengths and offset their challenges — no matter how they like to work.

It’s important to remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to using time productively. Some workers love to tackle the most difficult tasks first thing in the morning; others feel more energized at the end of their day. Some people think best in conversation while others prefer to be alone with their thoughts. To help your employees develop time management practices that fit their working style, they need to feel empowered to decide how they can use their time and tools productively.

When it comes to time management, calendars are your best friend, so encourage your employees to take advantage of simple features. Google Calendar lets everyone see availability; by glancing at a shared calendar, coworkers will know when to reach out to someone (and when not to). You can also prompt your employees to block off quiet time during windows when they feel most productive, and use tools like Focus time to protect the time they need for heads-down work.

Email and chat are important, but they can also become a distraction if not used intentionally. Most people open email first thing in the morning, leave it open all day, and check it often. Instead, when you and your employees need to focus, try closing the email tab or using Gmail features to snooze and star emails to stay on task. The same approach applies to chat: check it strategically and turn off notifications when you need deep focus.

Finally, be intentional about building and maintaining trust with your teams as they develop new time management skills. If you decide to use Google Meet for regular check-ins, partner with your employees to develop meeting agendas directly inside Calendar invites to ensure your shared time will be used efficiently.

Valuing impact over output

Hybrid work offers an opportunity for business leaders to rethink their perspective on employee time management and what it means to be productive. Remember, the goal of building effective time management skills isn’t always to become more efficient so one can take on additional work. Often times, taking a step back helps us simplify how we work in order to deepen our impact. When you empower your employees to create a personal time management system, I think you’ll find they will be happier and healthier, with more to contribute to your organization.

Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Naohiko Takemura, Head of Engineering, and Kosukex Oya, Engineer, both from Japanese customer experience platform PLAID. The company runs its platform in a multicloud environment through Anthos clusters on AWS and shares more on its experiences and best practices. 

At PLAID, our mission is to maximize the value of people through data, and we are developing a range of products that focus on improving customer experience. Our core product is a customer experience platform, KARTE, that can analyze the behavior and emotions of website visitors and application users, enabling businesses to deliver relevant communications in real time. We make KARTE available as a service to functions such as human resources and industries such as real estate and finance, and run the platform in a multicloud environment to achieve high-speed response and meet availability requirements. This is where Anthos comes in.

We introduced KARTE in 2015 and updated the system configuration in line with the addition of new functions and the need to increase scale. Our multicloud configuration is optimized through Anthos clusters on AWS, which give us access to the capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). 

KARTE runs in two groups of server instances in each cloud; one group runs the management screens used by clients, and the other provides content for visitors to our website. In Google Cloud, the management system runs in GKE and content is delivered through Compute Engine.

We initially developed and operated the core of our services on another provider and from 2016 began to transition to Google Cloud due to its strong data processing capabilities. The products that handled big data, such as Cloud Bigtable and BigQuery, were attractive because they could handle data in real time and were compatible with KARTE. Now most functions, including peripheral aspects, run in Google Cloud, because we thought if we built a system centered on these products, it would become efficient to build other parts on Google Cloud.

While we considered migrating everything to Google Cloud, we decided to leverage its strengths alongside those of our existing provider, AWS. We felt a multicloud approach could create more opportunities and deliver higher growth than a mono-cloud environment.  

We completed our move to a multicloud environment in 2017 and found that by building systems with almost the same content on two cloud services to leverage the strengths of each, we could reduce costs and improve performance and availability.

However, as KARTE grew, and the content of the service increased in complexity, we began to experience new problems. The increased load on the system due to an influx of in-house engineers from 2018 onwards impacted the scalability and development speeds of our  conventional monolithic architecture running in virtual machines. We opted for an approach based on microservices and containerization, excluding the components that enabled real-time analysis as these had been modernized since initially being deployed in 2016, and the management screens, as the infrastructure running these did not require crisp tuning. Our key priority was to improve the ability of our engineers to deliver quickly.

From 2019, we turned to promoting microservices that make full use of container technology. When deciding to move from a target built on virtual machines to containerization, we evaluated the ease of use of GKE and decided to build in Google Cloud. At the same time, the number of systems with strict service level obligations was increasing, so to ensure higher availability, we considered running these in a multi cloud environment. The announcement of Anthos clusters on AWS at Google Cloud Next ‘19 in San Francisco provided an answer.

We had been wondering how to achieve the equivalent smooth operation of GKE in our AWS environment, and welcomed the Anthos clusters on AWS announcement. We consulted with a Google Cloud customer engineer through an early access program and quickly gained an opportunity to work with this version of Anthos. This allowed us to provide feedback and requests for improvement, and this paved the way for us to implement the product to take advantage of its functionality and future enhancements. With Google Cloud, we have been able to continue to interact closely with the development team to understand and provide input into the product roadmap.

We are now realizing the benefits of multicloud, including faster development speeds and higher availability. For businesses in general, we recommend they take a thoughtful approach to multicloud—while for us, multicloud is a useful mechanism that enables us to provide large-scale data analysis in real time, other businesses should consider whether multicloud is right for them and if so, the role of a technology like Anthos. They should also start small before ramping up.  Moving forward, we are keen to see what other products Google Cloud is creating that can help drive our business to a higher level.

Do hamburgers really come from Hamburg? This may still be a matter of debate, but the popularity of American-style burger joints not just in Hamburg but all over Germany, is clear. Germany’s top two fast food companies are both burger chains. One of them is BURGER KING®, a global brand that welcomes more than 11 million customers worldwide every day. The company arrived in Germany in 1976, when its first restaurant opened in Berlin. It now operates more than 100 restaurants across Germany, with franchisees operating more than 600 restaurants of their own.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important. That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

Previously a subsidiary of the U.S. business, BURGER KING® Germany became an independent company in 2015. As a result, it needed to develop its own IT infrastructure, and the changeover needed to happen fast. “We had to put in place systems that would work for the entire network of franchisees and enable us to easily roll out campaigns,” explains Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager at BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH.

With the help of Google Cloud Premier partner Cloudwürdig, BURGER KING® Germany chose Google Cloud and G Suite as the right combination to suit its needs.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important,” says Oliver. “That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

Building a franchisee platform in just three months

When a business has multiple franchisees, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page, especially in the fast-paced fast food environment. “We have to collate data from all our franchisees and produce reports quickly in order to react to changes in customer behavior,” explains Oliver. “That means processing every transaction that takes place in our restaurants.” Following the restructure, BURGER KING® Germany also needed to build a secure invoicing system with data storage and optimize its communication channels.

“Using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

With support from Witter-IT, BURGER KING® Germany chose Cloudwürdig to build its BKD Connect internal platform on Google Cloud. Thanks to the ready-to-go tools on Google Cloud, it was able to put its invoicing system and data warehouse in place in just three months.

For the BURGER KING® Germany data warehouse, Cloudwürdig built an ETL pipeline that channels ticket data for every sale into BigQuery. “Data is gathered from the restaurants,” says Oliver, “and using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

As the ticket data for every transaction is stored in BigQuery, the marketing team can easily see exactly which products are selling well. That’s crucial for tweaking promotions as well as monitoring the supply chain to make sure enough produce is delivered to restaurants in response to changes in demand.

“Thanks to BigQuery, we have a speedy data pipeline that enables us to react on the same day to changes in the market and eliminate bottlenecks in production,” says Oliver.

Switching to G Suite to improve communication

To enable franchisees to sign in to its BKD Connect Platform, BURGER KING® Germany needed a secure authentication system. To solve that problem, it chose to provide franchisees with G Suite accounts. “It’s really easy to set up a new franchisee on the platform. I just create a new G Suite account and Drive folder for it, and it’s ready to go,” says Oliver. G Suite also helps the franchise network to run efficiently, as daily reports are automatically saved to Drive and shared to the appropriate regional network. “Thanks to that system, it’s much easier for any team at headquarters to access the information it needs,” Oliver explains.

BURGER KING® Germany also recently extended its use of G Suite across the whole company. “Following an evaluation of our previous email and productivity software, I made the decision to switch solely to G Suite,” says Oliver. BURGER KING® Germany employees now use Gmail, Calendar, and Drive for their day-to-day productivity needs. “We only just completed the migration, but already, everyone’s happy,” says Oliver. “It’s so easy to share a file using Drive or set up a meeting on Calendar.”

“We’re big fans of Hangouts Meet, and we have two rooms here at our Hanover headquarters equipped with Hangouts Meet hardware,” Oliver adds. “The speech quality is good, and it’s helpful to be able to see every participant, especially when you’re running a meeting with multiple franchisees.”

Optimizing infrastructure to power innovative campaigns

The BURGER KING® app, available for iOS and Android, helps the company to deliver a great customer experience. Through their MyBK accounts, guests can access coupons and special promotions. “We had a really interesting campaign for Easter: guests used the app to hunt for virtual Easter eggs,” explains Oliver. “We knew it was going to be big, and our previous back end wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic.”

To enable the marketing campaign to go ahead, BURGER KING® Germany moved the back end of the app, along with its website, to Google Cloud. For developing and running its web and app back ends, it now uses App Engine and virtual machines on Compute Engine, as well as Memorystore and Cloud Functions. For monitoring and logging, it uses Stackdriver, and Cloud CDN and Cloud DNS to easily handle its traffic.

“We ran the campaign without any performance issues, even though we were receiving several million hits a day,” says Oliver. Since migrating the back end to Google Cloud, the marketing team also launched the popular “Escape the Clown” campaign. “That campaign blew our minds!” says Oliver. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Google Cloud, because it required a lot of back end capacity.”

To develop the app infrastructure it needs, BURGER KING® Germany relies on Cloudwürdig. “Working with Cloudwürdig is great because the team has the same agile mindset as us,” says Oliver. “When we have a new idea, we just set up a meeting, and in a couple of days the new infrastructure is in place. For Escape the Clown, it only took a few weeks to get everything ready to launch.”

Leveraging integrated tools to grow the business

Using Google Cloud together with G Suite enables BURGER KING® Germany to run its franchise network efficiently, while keeping its IT team lean. “Google Cloud and G Suite are the perfect fit for the way of working at BURGER KING® Germany,” says Oliver. “Many of the company’s operatives are often on the road, visiting restaurants and franchisees. With these tools, they can work flexibly and react quickly to the situation on the ground.”

“In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants. With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

It also helps to keep infrastructure costs under control. “With Google Cloud, we only pay for what we use, which is really important for us,” Oliver explains. “It means we can scale up quickly if we see an opportunity to react to a trend in customer behavior and launch a new marketing campaign that resonates with the moment. When it’s finished, we can then scale down again, and that definitely saves us money.”

BURGER KING® is now working with Cloudwürdig to add more functionality to the BURGER KING® app using Google Kubernetes Engine. “We like to work with customers long-term to support their digital transformation. BURGER KING® Germany is a great example of how one project can develop into a great collaboration,” says Benny Woletz, Managing Director of Cloudwürdig.

BURGER KING® also plans to expand its presence in Germany and gain a greater market share by further tailoring both its marketing and the way it runs its restaurants to answer its guests’ needs. “In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants,” says Oliver. “With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”