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.”

Editor’s note: To launch a new mobile payment platform, Mercari needed a database solution strong on scalability, availability, and performance. Here’s how Cloud Spanner delivered those results. 

E-commerce companies need to connect customers to their services securely, reliably, with zero downtime. When Mercari, Inc. launched a new mobile payment platform, we chose Cloud Spanner as part of our data portfolio, which provided us with easy scalability to handle millions of new users, a fully managed service that minimized overhead costs, and deep integration with other Google Cloud services. 

Mercari, Inc., Japan’s largest C2C marketplace, launched its app in 2013, which allows 18.2million monthly users to easily and securely buy new and used items. Mercari expanded into the United States and in 2014 and launched Merpay, a mobile payment service that can be used through Mercari in Japan in 2017. With more than 85 million users, Merpay is now accepted at 1.8 million merchants and e-commerce sites in Japan, supporting payments via the DOCOMO ID contactless system and QR code.

Prioritizing availability and scalability

When we started building Merpay, we were looking for a new database. In the past, Mercari had used MySQL with bare metal hardware. Because of the amount of data, we required additional expertise to manage and maintain the hardware, software and MySQL implementation. Having built much of the microservices architecture for our Mercari app using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), it was natural to look at Google Cloud’s managed services when deciding upon our new database infrastructure for Merpay. 

For the database, we were focusing especially on requirements around availability, scalability, and performance. To do a single payment transaction, there were multiple steps each with writes, requiring high-write-throughput and low-latency from the database. Needing a solution that would support reliable payment processing 24/7/365, we chose Spanner, which offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes. 

We worked closely with Google Cloud’s Premium Support, Technical Account Management (TAM), and Strategic Cloud Engineer and Cloud Consultant teams to implement Spanner, including separating the payment processing— originally one of the functions in Mercari—as a microservice.

A nod to easier nodes and better scale

After launch, the number of Merpay users reached 2 million in only a few months. We had 45 Spanner nodes at the time of launch of Merpay and about 50 nodes four months later. Because we’d optimized the application side during those four months, we didn’t have to add many nodes to keep up with the growing traffic. 

Whenever we needed to scale up the serving and storage resources in our instances, Spanner made it easy to increase nodes as needed in the Cloud Console. To optimize costs, it’s easy to add nodes during a marketing campaign and remove them afterward. Even if the traffic count is different from expected, we can change the number of nodes immediately. That’s one incredible convenience of Cloud Spanner.

Building powerful pipelines

Our data pipelines are used for KPI analytics, fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer support use cases. Because Cloud Spanner integrates so easily with other Google Cloud data services, the data in Spanner is easily accessible for analytics. From the Spanner database for each microservice, we create both batch and streaming data pipelines using Pub/Sub and Dataflow, as well as Apache Flink, and load the data into BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. We’re able to quickly aggregate the data required for data platforms such as BigQuery and Cloud Storage. The original data is stored in Spanner and managed by microservices, but analysis through BigQuery is centrally managed by the Data Platform team. This team determines the confidentiality level of data and centrally manages BigQuery permissions using Terraform. By centrally managing data access permissions on the data platform rather than on individual microservices, we’re able to set appropriate security for individual users.

Our full data portfolio also includes Looker, which we use for product analysis, accounting analysis, test performance visualization, operation monitoring, development efficiency analysis, and HR analysis. We also use Dataproc, Cloud Composer, Data Catalog, and Data Studio. The Dataflow template created for the pipeline is also published as OSS. 

With Spanner and other Google Cloud services, our Merpay platform is flexible, secure, scalable and highly available. As Spanner eliminates overhead, we can devote engineering resources to developing new tools and solutions for our customers. We’re looking ahead at providing cryptocurrency service, for example, and are now working on a project to migrate Mercari’s monolithic system that is still on premises entirely over to Google Cloud.

Read more about Mercari and Merpay. Or check out our recent blog: three reasons to consider Cloud Spanner for your next project.

Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR) is a critical capability for enterprise applications.  It allows database administrators to recover from accidental data deletion by restoring their production databases to a time before the incident.  

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL launched support for PITR in July 2020, allowing you to recover from disasters like data corruption or accidental deletion by restoring your Cloud SQL instance to a previous time. We’re excited to announce an additional enhancement to PITR for Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL that makes enabling PITR an even easier decision: for instances with Point-in-Time Recovery newly-enabled, the write-ahead logs being stored for PITR operations (which are the transaction logs that are used to go back in time) will no longer consume disk storage space.  Instead, when you enable PITR for new instances, Cloud SQL will store transaction logs collected during the retention window in Google Cloud Storage, and retrieve them when you perform a restore.  Because transaction logs can grow rapidly when your database experiences a burst of activity, this move will help reduce the impact these bursts have on your provisioned disk storage.  These logs will be stored for up to seven days in the same Google Cloud region as your instance at no additional cost to you.  

PITR is enabled by default when you create a new Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance from the Google Cloud console, and transaction logs will no longer be stored on the instance for instances that have PITR newly enabled.  If you have already enabled PITR on your PostgreSQL instances, this enhancement will be rolled out to your instances at a later point.  If you want to take advantage of this change sooner, you can first disable and then re-enable PITR on your instance (which will reset your ability to perform a point-in-time restore to the time at which PITR was re-enabled).  On instances with this feature enabled, you’ll notice that consumed storage on your instance will reduce relative to the volume of write-ahead logs (WAL) generated by your instance.  The actual amount of storage your logs consume will vary by instance and by database activity – during busy times for your database, log size may shrink or grow.  However, these logs will now only be stored on your instance long enough to successfully replicate to any replicas of the instance and to ensure that they are safely written to Cloud Storage; afterwards, they will be removed from your instance.

We’re excited to continue to enhance Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to ensure that disaster recovery is easy to enable, cost effective, and seamless to use.  Learn more about this change in our documentation.