Not everything was smooth sailing at launch! When issues emerged around the game’s stability, Niantic and Google engineers braved each problem in sequence, working quickly to create and deploy solutions. In response, Google CRE seamlessly provisioned extra capacity on behalf of Niantic to stay well ahead of their record-setting growth.
Pokémon GO’s popularity quickly surged player traffic to 50X the initial target, ten times the worst-case estimate. The graph opening this blog post tells the story: the teams targeted 1X player traffic, with a worst-case estimate of roughly 5X this target. Pokémon GO is a mobile application that uses many services across Google Cloud, but Cloud Datastore became a direct proxy for the game’s overall popularity given its role as the game’s primary database for capturing the Pokémon game world. Niantic and Google Cloud - spanning CRE, SRE, development, product, support and executive teams - braced for a flood of new Pokémon Trainers, as Pokémon GO would go on to shatter all prior estimates of player traffic. Niantic phoned in to Google CRE for reinforcements, in anticipation of the US launch planned the next day. This was the first indication to Niantic’s product and engineering teams that they had something truly special on their hands. Within 15 minutes of launching in Australia and New Zealand, player traffic surged well past Niantic’s expectations. Google CRE’s first customer was Niantic, and its first assignment the launch of Pokémon GO - a true test if there ever was one! Niantic and the Google Cloud teams put together this post to highlight some of the key components powering one of the most popular mobile games to date.Īt our Horizon event today, we’ll be introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), a new engagement model in which technical staff from Google integrates with customer teams, creating a shared responsibility for the reliability and success of critical cloud applications.
Our peers in the technical community have asked about the infrastructure that helped bring Pokémon GO to life for millions of players. Never have I taken part in anything close to the growth that Google Cloud customer Niantic experienced with the launch of Pokémon GO.Īs a teaser, I’ll start with a picture worth a thousand words: User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time. Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users.
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