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GenieConnect maximizes event attendee experience through Google Cloud Platform
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Today’s guest blog comes from Steve James, CTO of GenieConnect, a digital solutions provider for the events industry with products ranging from mobile apps to attendee Web portals and meetings management.
The nature of the events business is such that activity increases per platform according to the time. For example, visitors tend to use web resources for pre-planning prior to an event, whereas mobile app activity increases during the event. As a digital solutions provider for major events, like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we need to be able to support a large number of users in concentrated periods of time, even when connectivity is weak.
Google Cloud Platform gave us the infrastructure we needed to hit the ground running. We use almost every component of Cloud Platform, including
Google BigQuery
,
Google App Engine
,
Google Cloud Datastore
,
Google Cloud Storage
,
Google Compute Engine
and
Google Cloud SQL
. If we weren't running Cloud Platform, we would have had to spend significant resources and several months building out comparable tools before releasing our platform.
BigQuery forms the heart of our analytics piece and lets us run queries against multi-terabyte datasets in mere seconds, which is key during huge events with short windows of time. At Mobile World Congress, where we can get up to 75,000 people using our app every day, we’re collecting tens of millions of data points for our client. With BigQuery, our clients can use a simple GUI to make queries and get results right away. For example, we can find correlations between attendee activity and click-through data. This helps us immediately understand attendee behavior and preferences, and proactively prompt attendees to other parts of the event, instead of just reacting to what the user is doing in the app.
Cloud Platform lets us operate the way we like to: lean and cost effectively. We’re made up of small teams and engineers working on the platform at the same time.
App Engine’s Modules
allows us to partition our application into components based on different requirements for scale, service level, traffic, etc. This way, every team can tune the performance of their environment to their own needs and ultimately run more cost effectively. We can also integrate modules easily if we want to.
Autoscaling is also critical to our business. While some capacity planning is possible, there are challenges in anticipating attendance as well as provisioning resources to meet peak demand. Cloud Platform expands and shrinks our server resources automatically, letting us avoid the risk of not being able to handle user load during an event. Resiliency is also built-in to the cloud, which is critical for event organizers since attendees still need to be able to access information even if there is a server outage.
Cloud Platform has allowed us to bypass months in procuring and setting up new hardware, keeping track of user load and performance and managing our infrastructure. As an SME, we’re happy to let Google take on the responsibility of maintaining our infrastructure so we can focus on enhancing our platform.
-Contributed by Steve James, CTO, GenieConnect
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