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.

Today’s enterprise applications are often assembled across distributed environments. This includes the integration of services across multi-cloud, multi-SaaS and on-premises environments. While the approach has the advantage of enabling enterprises to choose the best service available to support their applications, it adds the complexity of delivering services across heterogeneous environments. To solve this, Cloud Load Balancing supports an open cloud strategy, which includes:

• Supporting universal traffic management policies across heterogeneous environment by leveraging open source and open standards
• Enabling a global front-end so applications can leverage a common set of policies and security postures
• Providing tools that give your users the highest possible performance and reliability

Universal traffic management with open source and open standards

Kubernetes is a great solution for managing containers across environments. We believe that traffic management policies should also be supported across environments. Cloud Load Balancing creates homogeneous traffic policies across highly distributed heterogeneous environments by supporting standard-based traffic management in a fully managed solution, and allowing open source Envoy Proxy sidecars to be used on-premises or in a multi-cloud environment, using the same traffic management as our fully managed Cloud Load Balancers.

As enterprises start modernizing services and refactor monolithic applications, they require solutions that can provide consistent traffic management across distributed systems at scale. But organizations want to invest their time and resources innovating and building new applications — not on the infrastructure and networking required to deploy and manage these services. Envoy is an open-source high-performance proxy that runs alongside the application to deliver common platform-agnostic networking capabilities, including:

• New load balancing algorithms, (e.g. round robin, ring hash, least conns)
• Weighted traffic splitting
• Fault injection
• Request mirroring
• Outlier detection
• Additional header transformation options
• Request retries
• Additional backend session affinity options
• Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)

Hybrid Load Balancing across multi-cloud and private clouds

Over the years Google has deployed Load Balancers across 173+ Edge Pop locations, delivering customer applications at massive-scale on Google infrastructure. And now Google Cloud has introduced Hybrid Load Balancing, extending our Load Balancing capabilities beyond Google’s network to on-premises private clouds and multi-cloud solutions. This allows our customers to migrate applications to the cloud iteratively, or build hybrid applications that are assembled from services that are running across heterogeneous environments.

Supporting modern application delivery with HTTP3/QUIC

Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed load balancing solution that balances user traffic (HTTP(s), HTTPS/2, HTTPS/3 with gRPC, TCP/SSL, UDP, and QUIC) to multiple backends to avoid congestion, reduce latency, increase security, and reduce costs. It is built on the same frontend-serving infrastructure that powers Google services, supporting millions of queries per second with consistent high performance and low latency.

To serve massive amounts of traffic, Google built the first scaled-out software-defined load balancing, Maglev, which has been serving global traffic since 2008. It has sustained the rapid global growth of Google services, and it also provides network load balancing functions for Google Cloud Platform customers. To accommodate ever-increasing traffic, Maglev is specifically optimized for packet processing performance with Linux Kernel Offload. Maglev is also equipped with consistent hashing and connection tracking features, to minimize the negative impact of unforeseen faults and failures on connection-oriented protocols.

Another key enabler to support this global-scale is that our Cloud Load Balancers are built on top of QUIC(RFC9000), a protocol developed from the original Google QUIC) (gQUIC). HTTP/3 is supported between the External HTTP(S) Load Balancer, Cloud CDN, and end clients. And once enabled, customers typically see dramatic improvements in performance and throughput.

Google Cloud already supports HTTP3 in Cloud Load Balancer. To use HTTP/3 for your applications, you can enable it on your external HTTPS Load Balancers via the Google Cloud Console or the gCloud SDK with a single click.

If your service is sensitive to latency, QUIC will make it faster because it establishes connections with reduced handshakes. When a web client uses TCP and TLS, it requires two to three round trips with a server to establish a secure connection before the browser can send a request. With QUIC, if a client has connected with a given server before, it can start sending data without any round trips, so your web pages will load faster.

QUIC has advantages over legacy TCP as follows.

Summary

Since 2008, Google has been an innovator in software-defined networking, supporting applications running at massive scale. Google Cloud Load Balancers support HTTP3 and QUIC as a next generation web transport protocol, which significantly improves customer traffic latency. Google Load Balancers also have incorporated the Envoy proxy as a foundational technology, providing our customers with advanced traffic management that’s compatible with the open source Envoy ecosystem. This allows our users to have the choice to combine Google’s fully-managed Cloud Load Balancers with open source Envoy Proxies, to enable consistent traffic management capabilities across a multi-cloud distributed environment. And with Hybrid Load Balancing, customers can leverage our 173+ world wide PoPs to seamlessly manage traffic across Google Cloud, on-premises and other cloud providers.

Google Cloud Load Balancers include all these capabilities natively. And when used together, they support globally-scaled applications that run seamlessly across the heterogeneous environments many enterprises deploy today.