In late 2013, Sony Music featured One Direction in what became the biggest livestream music event ever held on YouTube – “1D Day”. One of the many testaments to the power and reliability of Google Cloud Platform was this massive event, powered by a web application they built in just three weeks. Scalability and reliability were crucial. “We needed a platform that we could trust 100 percent not to crumble under repeated traffic spikes,” said James Bartram, business development director for Sony Music. Overall, the event saw 630,000 unique visitors in 10 hours, up to 12x spikes in traffic, and up to 9,000 queries per second (QPS). Even so, the error rate was nominal.
Google Cloud Platform is Google’s portfolio of cloud-based services that allows you to create anything from a simple website to the most complex applications. Named the 2014 North American Cloud Services Company of the Year by Frost & Sullivan, Google Cloud Platform has often been cited for visionary innovation, price/performance value, and customer-friendly pricing models.
Google Cloud Platform makes this possible with Google Compute Engine, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution, which serves as the foundation for everything from backend data processing to front-end applications serving to end-users. It allows you to easily develop powerful, custom applications. Below are three of the specific reasons why Google has become the platform of choice for websites and web applications:
1. Scalability – with a Low Error Rate
Confidence that your website or web application can scale quickly with consistent uptime to service your growing user base is key to your future success. Web traffic or application usage is often difficult to predict and can spike dramatically during certain news announcements, feature releases, promotions, etc…and at certain hours of the day. To address this challenge, Google built Google Cloud Platform with the ability to scale up to 7 billion requests per day and automatically scale down when traffic subsides. When you need to offload workloads on a virtual machine, Cloud Platform allows you to autoscale and load balance traffic across all Compute Engine virtual machines.
2. Pay for What You Use – Per Minute Billing without Reserved Instances
Depending on usage, Google Cloud Platform bills you in minute-level increments to ensure that you never pay for more than you use. Google also doesn’t require reserved instances for sustained use discounts, which allows for maximum billing flexibility. This exceptional agility brings costs down based on specific usage so that you never have to overpay.
3. Popular Languages and Frameworks
Google Cloud Platform speaks many languages, supporting all major programming languages such as Python, Java, PHP, and Go. It also allows you to use existing frameworks such as Django, Flask, Spring, and webapp2.
SADA is a Google Cloud Premier Partner focused on creating tools, methodologies, change management and business transformation strategies for the cloud. To learn more about building websites and web applications on Google Cloud Platform, contact us at [email protected] or visit our website to sign up for a free Google Cloud Platform assessment.
