Tag Archives: Customers

Free online learning tool serves 200,000 requests per minute on Google Cloud Platform


Back in 2005, 15-year-old Andrew Sutherland created Quizlet to help study for his high school French class. He built a flashcard-like study tool that helped him learn the material in several different ways and started getting better grades on his tests and quizzes. His solution quickly grew and today has more than 100 million user-created study sets. Every day Quizlet helps more than one million students and teachers worldwide learn, from fourth graders studying history to adults learning a new language at night.
Stability and performance is a critical element of Quizlet’s infrastructure, which supports its website and the API for its mobile apps. Students and teachers create study sets on Quizlet and rely on it to store and serve their content. If Quizlet crashes, it’s like closing a textbook on a student mid-lesson, or the night before a test.

In January 2015 the company decided to switch to a new cloud provider and chose Google Cloud Platform. It had outgrown its legacy provider and knew it needed a platform that would scale as it continued to grow. Historically, Quizlet’s traffic increased at least 50 percent per year and with just six engineers, it had to choose its technology carefully. After testing the options the company picked Google Cloud because it believed we had fundamentally better core technology.

On August 1, 2015, after several months of preparation, Quizlet switched its infrastructure of 200 machines over to Google Compute Engine. The date was no accident — the company knew that it needed to be prepared for the back-to-school rush of traffic. It’s highly seasonal business means that from summer to fall its traffic increases by a factor of six. Compute Engine allowed Quizlet to smoothly scale as students returned to class.
Quizlet weekly unique visits since March 2008 in the U.S. (blue) and rest of world (grey).






Moving to Cloud Platform meant it was easy to use other Google Cloud technology too. Quizlet uses Google BigQuery to analyze both its production and event data. Queries over its multi-terabyte production data set are snappy, even as it streams several hundred million events into it every day.

The company also used Google Cloud Storage to help serve audio files generated from its text-to-speech feature, which allows users to hear their content in 18 different languages. Google’s peering agreement with Cloudflare, Quizlet’s CDN provider, meant that Quizlet saved significantly on bandwidth for these and other files.

Back to school never felt so smooth!

To learn more about Quizlet’s move to Cloud Platform, read their whitepaper, "What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP."

- Posted by Courtney Buchanan, Customer Marketing Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Sports Authority handles 2,000 transactions per second with Google Cloud Platform

Athletic gear, much like all apparel categories, is quickly shifting to an online sales business. Sports Authority, seeing the benefits that cloud could offer around agility and speed, turned to Google Cloud Platform to help it respond to its customers faster.

In 2014, Sports Authority’s technical team was asked to build a solution that would expose all in-store product inventory to its ecommerce site, sportsauthority.com, allowing customers to see local store availability of products as they were shopping online. That’s nearly half a million products to choose from in over 460 stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

This use case posed a major challenge for the company. Its in-store inventory data was “locked” deep inside a mainframe. Exposing millions of products to thousands of customers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week would not be possible using this system.

The requirements for a new solution included finding the customer’s location, searching the 90 million record inventory system and returning product availability in just the handful of stores nearest in location to that particular customer. On top of that, the API would need to serve at least 50 customers per second, while returning results in less than 200 milliseconds.

Choosing the right cloud provider

At the time this project began, Sports Authority had already been a Google Apps for Work (Gmail, Google Sites, Docs) customer since 2011. However, it had never built any custom applications on Google Cloud Platform.

After a period of due diligence checking out competing cloud provider options, Sports Authority decided that Google App Engine and Google Cloud Datastore had the right combination of attributes — elastic scaling, resiliency and simplicity of deployment — to support this new solution.

Through the combined efforts of a dedicated project team, business partners and three or four talented developers, it was able to build a comprehensive solution on Cloud Platform in about five months. It consisted of multiple modules: 1) batch processes, using Informatica to push millions of product changes from its IBM mainframe to Google Cloud Storage each night, 2) load processes — python code running on App Engine, which spawn task queue jobs to load Cloud Datastore, and 3) a series of SOAP and REST APIs to expose the search functionality to its ecommerce website.

Sports Authority used tools including SOAPUI and LOADUI to simulate thousands of virtual users to measure the scalability of SOAP and REST APIs. It found that as the number of transactions grew past 2,000 per second, App Engine and Cloud Datastore continued to scale seamlessly, easily meeting its target response times.

The company implemented the inventory locator solution just in time for the 2014 holiday season. It performed admirably during that peak selling period and continues to do so today.
This screenshot shows what customers see when they shop for products on the website — a list of local stores, showing the availability of any given product in each store



When a customer finds a product she's interested in buying, the website requests inventory availability from Sports Authority’s cloud API, which provides a list of stores and product availability to the customer, as exhibited in the running shoe example above.

In-store kiosk

As Sports Authority became comfortable building solutions on Cloud Platform, it opened its eyes to other possibilities for creating new solutions to better serve its customers.

For example, it recently developed an in-store kiosk, which allows customers to search for products that may not be available in that particular store. It also lets them enroll in the loyalty program and purchase gift cards. This kiosk is implemented on a Google Chromebox, connected to a web application running on App Engine.
This image shows the in-store kiosk that customers use to locate products available in other stores. 




Internal store portal

Additionally, it built a store portal and task management system, which facilitates communication between the corporate office and its stores. This helps the store team members plan and execute their work more efficiently, allowing them to serve customers better when needs arise. This solution utilizes App Engine, Cloud Datastore and Google Custom Search, and was built with the help of a local Google partner, Tempus Nova.
This screenshot shows the internal store portal that employees use to monitor daily tasks.




Learning how to build software in any new environment such as Cloud Platform takes time, dedication and a willingness to learn. Once up to speed, the productivity and power of Google Cloud Platform allowed the Sports Authority team to work like a software company and build quickly while wielding great power.

- Posted by Jon Byrum, Product Marketing Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Meeting the challenge of financial data transformation

Today’s guest post comes from Salvatore Sferrazza and Sebastian Just from FIS Global, an international provider of financial services and technology solutions. Salvatore and Sebastian tell us how Google Cloud Dataflow transforms fluctuating, large-scale financial services data so that it can be accurately captured and moved across systems.

Much software development in the capital markets (and enterprise systems in general) revolves around the transformation, enrichment and movement of data from one system to another. The unpredictable nature of financial market data volumes, often driven by volatility, exacerbates the pain of scaling and posting data when and where it’s needed for daily trade reconciliation, settlement and regulatory reporting. The implications of technology missteps within such crucial business processes range from missed business opportunities to undesired risk exposure to regulatory non-compliance. These activities must be relentlessly predictable, repeatable and measurable to yield maximum value to stakeholders.

While developers rely on the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) activities that are so crucial to processing data, they now face limits in terms of the speed and efficiency of ETL as the amount of transactions grows faster than they can process it. As shortened settlement durations and the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) loom on the horizon, financial services institutions need simple, fast and powerful approaches to quickly scale and ultimately mitigate time-sensitive risks and operational costs.

Traditionally, developers have considered the activities around ETL data an unglamorous yet necessary dimension of building software products for encapsulating functions that are core to every tier of computing. So when data-driven enterprises are tasked with harvesting insights from massive data sets, it’s quite likely that ETL, in one form or another, is lurking nearby. But in today’s world, data can come from anywhere and in any format, creating a series of labor, time and intellectual challenges. While there may be hundreds of ways to solve the problem, few provide the efficiency and effectiveness so needed in our “big data” world — until recently.

The Google Cloud Dataflow service and its associated software development kit (SDK) provides a series of powerful tools for a myriad of data transformation duties. Designed to perform data processing tasks of any size in a managed services environment, Google Cloud Dataflow simplifies the mechanics of large-scale transformation and supports both batch and stream processing using the same programming model. In our latest white paper, we introduce some of the main concepts behind building and running applications that use Dataflow, then get “hands on” with a job to transform and ingest options market symbol data before storing the transformations within a Google BigQuery data set.

In short, Google Cloud Dataflow allows you to focus on data processing tasks and not cluster management. Rather than asking you to guess the right cluster size, Dataflow automatically scales up or down horizontally as much as needed for your exact processing requirements. This includes scaling all the way down to zero when there is no work, so you’re never paying for an idle cluster. Dataflow also alleviates the pain of writing ETL jobs by standardizing the process of implementing application requirements. As a result, you’ll be able to focus on the data transformations you need to make rather than on the processing mechanics themselves. This not only provides greater flexibility, lower latency and enhanced control of ETL jobs; it offers built-in cost management and ties together other useful Google Cloud services. Beyond common ETL, Dataflow pipelines may also include inline computation ranging from simple counting to highly complex, multi-step analysis. In our experience with the service so far, it can potentially remove much of the work from engineers within financial institutions and regulatory organizations, while providing elasticity to the entire process and ensuring accuracy, scale, performance and cost efficiency.

As market volatility and reporting requirements drive the need for accuracy, low latency and risk reduction, transforming and interpreting market data in a big data world is imperative to trading efficiency and accessibility. Every second counts. With a more cost-effective, real-time and scalable method of processing an ever-increasing volume of data, financial institutions will be able to address specific requirements and volumes at hand while keeping up with the demands of a rapidly evolving global financial system. We hope our experience, as captured in the technical white paper, will prove useful to others in their quest for the more effective way to process data.

Please see this paper’s GitHub page for the complete and buildable project source code.

- Posted by Salvatore Sferrazza, Principal at FIS and Sebastian Just, Manager at FIS

S7 Airlines launches QPX to allow improved flight shopping across channels


S7 Airlines, one of Russia’s largest airlines and a oneworld alliance member, recently launched our QPX™ pricing and shopping technology. S7 now offers their customers a more accurate and efficient way of shopping for flights across multiple channels -- on www.s7.ru, within the call center and with their Android™ app.

This is part of a larger effort in which S7 deployed a new booking platform with a modern design. As part of this first release, S7 used QPX pricing and shopping technology to allow their customers to shop for flights across the S7 network and their partner networks.

Dmitriy Chuyko, S7 Airlines E-commerce Director said, “Using QPX pricing and shopping technology gives our customers a more accurate, robust and efficient way to shop for flights. The initial launch was really smooth and we’re looking forward to releasing some of the new features we’re working on, like reward shopping and the ability to support refunds and reissues.”

We’re excited to welcome S7 as a customer.

To learn more about QPX visit www.itasoftware.com.

Nicola Simionato, General Manager, Travel EMEA & APAC

Source: Google Travel


Finding good flight deals just got much easier in Europe

(Cross-posted on the UK Travel blog)

Travelers searching for a good flight deal in Europe may have needed to check multiple online sites to be sure they found the lowest airfare and best flight options. Now with the addition of Ryanair flight information in Google’s Flight Search, it is much easier to find the lowest fare -- at lightning speed.

We are delighted that Ryanair, which is Europe’s largest airline and the largest airline in the world in terms of flown international passengers and which is known for its low fares, has joined the Google Flight Search family.

Using Google’s Flight Search, travelers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain (as well as Canada and the USA) can quickly find, filter and compare flights, view prices in their local currency, save the results for later, or book directly with any of our booking partners.


Since we launched Flight Search in 2011, we've worked hard to add new features that make it fun, fast and easy to shop and book airfares
  • Best Flights and Tips - Quickly get the best answers with suggestions for alternate dates, airports, and trade-off between price and convenience 
  • Interactive Maps - users are able to explore possible destinations and view live ticket prices by surfing an interactive map 
  • Saved Flights - Results can be saved to track price changes, helping users make smart booking decisions 
Google Flight Search is fast, easy to use and interactive so business people, parents and star crossed lovers can quickly book their travel and get back to their work, parenting or pining. We want to give users as many flight options as possible, so introducing Ryanair is very exciting. We are working to expand our relationships with other airlines and travel partners to bring Flight Search to more countries in Europe and around the world.

Posted by David Robles Fosg, Partner Development, Travel

Source: Google Travel


China Southern Airlines signs up for QPX air shopping

China Southern Airlines, a SkyTeam member and the largest airline in Asia, signed a multi-year agreement to use our QPX™ pricing and shopping technology to improve the international airfare shopping experience for their online users.

With China becoming one of the world's fastest growing travel markets, China Southern Airlines is the first Chinese airline to take advantage of our technology to enhance the overall shopping experience for their customers. “QPX is the most advanced air ticket pricing and shopping engine in the market. QPX will help us innovate our online air ticket shopping and drive our online direct sales, which will allow us to slash distribution costs.“ said Mr. Jerry Hu, CIO of China Southern Airlines.


China Southern Airlines plans to use QPX for international revenue and reward redemption pricing and shopping, as well as ticket exchanges and refunds. The rollout will take place in phases, with the first release expected in Spring 2014. When launched, China Southern Airlines will provide a faster, more accurate and easier to use online air ticket shopping experience for their customers.

To learn more, visit www.itasoftware.com.

Posted by Kevin Wang, Strategic Partner Manager, Travel

Source: Google Travel


Virgin Atlantic sees success by improving user flight shopping experience

Over the past year Virgin Atlantic completely redesigned www.virigin-atlantic.com and expanded the way they use Google’s QPX™ pricing and shopping technology to simplify and improve the flight shopping process.

Their hard work has definitely paid off, as Virgin Atlantic has seen a significant increase in flight search conversions and the overall value of completed bookings since launch. Additionally, Virgin Atlantic was recently named the Lovie Award’s 2013 Web Futures Gold Winner for Best User Experience. 

David Bulman, Director of Information Technology, Virgin Atlantic, “One of the biggest benefits we realized since launching QPX is the dramatic increase in booking values. It’s easy for customers to quickly compare the different classes of service and realize the value they can get for different fare families. This means customers are frequently trading up and in fact, booking values on our flight search page have increased over 17% year-on-year. Working with Google and implementing QPX technology played a critical contribution to this success.”

We work with our travel partners, like Virgin Atlantic, to make the travel experience better for our users and help them innovate to accomplish their goals. You can check out the video and details about Virgin Atlantic's recent success. Way to go Virgin Atlantic!

Posted by Nicola Simionato, General Manager, Travel, EMEA & APAC

Source: Google Travel