Google Cloud Platform - the infrastructure that helped bring Pokémon GO to life for millions of players. If you'll remember anywhere near Pokemon Go launch date, you probably noticed that it broke. Always.
There's always suspicion that its instability was because the servers were falling over under the weight of the traffic, but there’s a confirmation from Google.
Before the launch of the game, Niantic and Google set an expected traffic target, and a “worst case” scenario, about five times higher than that target. In the end, traffic was 10 times higher than the worst case scenario, and 50 times higher than Niantic’s expectations. In fact, it was higher than Niantic’s expectations within 15 minutes of launching in Australia and New Zealand.
Google says it managed to “seamlessly” add extra capacity to enable Niantic “to stay well ahead of their record-setting growth”, which is a vaguely rose-tinted recollection of the actual launch, although the company’s director of customer reliability engineering, Luke Stone, does concede that “Not everything was smooth sailing at launch!”
The app hasn’t quite kept up with its enourmous launch success, with monthly active users falling by almost 20 million people over the month since August 12, according to market analysts Apptopia. But that still leaves 32.4 million playing it as of mid-September, and given the economics of free-to-play games – which tend to make the majority of their income from a tiny, highly-engaged core of players – the app is likely to still be pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a month. Source: The Guardian
Othe fun facts
- The Pokémon GO game world was brought to life using over a dozen services across Google Cloud.
- Pokémon GO was the largest Kubernetes deployment on Google Container Engine ever. Due to the scale of the cluster and accompanying throughput, a multitude of bugs were identified, fixed and merged into theopen source project.
- To support Pokémon GO’s massive player base, Google provisioned many tens of thousands of cores for Niantic’s Container Engine cluster.
- Google’s global network helped reduce the overall latency for Pokémon Trainers inhabiting the game’s shared world. Game traffic travels Google’s private fiber network through most of its transit, delivering reliable, low-latency experiences for players worldwide. Even under the sea!
Source: Google Cloud Platform
