Car rental app turns to Google Cloud to continue expansion

French car rental app Virtuo has a user base of 150,000 active users and which is still growing. Since 2015, the company has expanded across 17 cities in four European countries, including London, Brussels and Madrid. As a result of this expansion, Virtuo needed to improve its development workflow efficiency and wanted to be able to develop new service. So, in August 2020, Virtuo migrated to Google Cloud.

Olivier Martin, CTO of Virtuo added: “Our turnover has tripled year-on-year since the company was founded. In 2019, we got to the point where we urgently needed to find solutions to manage the rapid expansion of our teams, fleet, and business.”

The Virtuo app has more than one million downloads and the company is now exploring new markets, such as B2B rentals.

Xavier Krantz, Site Reliability Engineer, Virtuo said: “It was a desire for more flexibility and freedom that made us turn to Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine. We wanted to be able to pick and choose the components of our platform according to their technical and cost advantages. We needed a high level of flexibility.”

Before Google Cloud, the tech teams had to constantly monitor their resources to ensure they were proportional to their activity levels. This was not only time-consuming but also expensive. With Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine, costs are directly related to activity and resources, rather than architecture, which makes them easier to monitor and control.

Thomas de Barochez, Virtuo Technical Lead and Architect said: “With Google Kubernetes Engine, we can tell immediately if we’ve allocated more resources than needed, which makes things much easier from a financial management point of view.”

“We had regular check-ins with the Google Cloud team where engineers provided support for our migration, as well as useful tips and ideas,” Thomas added. “The amount of documentation available for Google Cloud is also a plus point.”