Sharing platform strengthens services with Google Cloud Platform

Sharing platform GEEV aims to help reduce waste by encouraging people to exchange preloved items. With 350,000 unique monthly users, 1.2 million customer accounts and over 800,000 objects available, the French company has seen rapid growth since its 2016 launch.

In order to handle this growth, and after suffering several outages, GEEV looked to make its containerized infrastructure more robust and spend less time on maintenance by moving to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Supported by implementation partner Op-Rate, GEEV migrated its infrastructure to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Op-Rate conducted a staged migration over two weeks, which required zero downtime.

GEEV CTO Kevin Tran said that one of the key reasons for choosing GKE was autoscale: "I simply set up the minimum number of instances and the CPU threshold, and it handles everything else for me. Over the course of a day, our traffic might multiply by four or five times. Without the autoscale feature on Google Kubernetes Engine, it would be time consuming to handle and take up 25 percent of my time. I now spend only an hour or so per week on Kubernetes monitoring."

GEEV has been able to lighten its operational load with GCP, using Firebase for its mobile app and to host its web app, with Firebase Crashlytics enabling easy troubleshooting. Kevin says the company has also synchronized its hosted database with BigQuery, letting GEEV serve data straight into Google Data Studio.

Following its migration, GEEV no longer experienced downtime or outages, which also allowed the team to focus more on its code, leading to a better customer experience. Looking ahead, GEEV sought to utilise these benefits to expand to North America.

Kevin said: "With GCP, it's going to be easy to set up a more dispersed infrastructure and use multi-region clusters to handle our U.S. and Canadian traffic. That's really important, as we want to continue delivering the same excellent user experience as we grow."/p>