Since beginning its migration to GCP, Apester has seen its customer base triple in size. In 2017, the company delivered over 3.5 billion story experiences. At the same time, it has halved its infrastructure costs with the move to Kubernetes. Without virtual machines to maintain, Apester no longer has to provision idle servers that run up costs, just in case of heavy traffic. With Kubernetes Engine, autoscaling is made simple, replicable, and reliable. The time for deployment has been reduced from around four hours to just under a minute. Using the premium tier of the Google Cloud Network, Apester also managed to reduce its latency by half, thanks to its high performance and global load balancing.
Meanwhile, Apester’s data infrastructure, built around BigQuery, has been more than up to the task, handling millions of events per hour with ease. With its new solution, Apester now has a BI platform that delivers bespoke, powerful insight at scale and on the company’s own terms.
In addition to saving time and money, the shift to GCP has also changed the way Apester thinks about its processes. According to Or, the IT team has developed a service-based mindset that focuses on results and improving the overall Apester product line, rather than fussing over the minutiae of DevOps.
“Infrastructure is not our core business,” he says. “We want to focus on Apester’s needs and improving our application. When the deployment time gets cut from hours to seconds, it means we can focus on our own success.”
With the migration done, Apester continues to look for new ways to improve and evolve its products. The company is using Cloud Natural Language APIs to enhance the personalization of its service. Along with the data held in BigQuery, Apester’s work with the Cloud Natural Language modules provides the basis for an exploration into machine learning (ML). The company is heavily investing in its ML capabilities, and started using Tensorflow for its pipeline, enabling Apester to become even more responsive to its customers’ needs even as its audience expands.
“We are a fast growing company, with many challenges to focus on, with availability, scalability, and development efficiency among them,” says Moshe. “Moving to GCP solved those problems for us and helped keep us ahead of the competition.”