Google reveals what it took to keep Pokémon Go up

There were a number of announcements related to Google cloud services, including consolidation and re-branding of the platform and rollout of a cloud region in Mumbai, aimed at providing services to customers in India. Among those announcements, Google also revealed the efforts that were needed to ensure trainers could keep playing Pokémon Go. The virality of the game was unprecedented. There are charts and figures by analytics companies and application trackers, explaining exactly how viral the game was here and here, but this one chart pretty much says it all. It is a comparison of what the infrastructure was prepared for, against what was thrown at it.

Google is introducing a new way Google Cloud integrates with customers. The Google Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) is a model of engagement where Google Engineers will directly co-ordinate with teams from customers to share responsibility in making sure that the end user gets a reliable service. The first customer for this new model was Niantic, and that should be enough to demonstrate the capabilities of Google Engineers.

Luke Stone, Director of CRE, said in a cloud platform blogpost, “I can say it was a rare pleasure to be part of such a memorable product launch that created joy for so many people around the world.”

There was a surge in traffic beyond Niantic’s expectations within the first fifteen minutes of the launch of the app in New Zealand. Applications are often launched first in New Zealand or Canada to test the waters, evaluate the reception, and even out any problems in the system that emerges from a public launch. Taking note of the insane amount of traffic, Niantic and Google geared up and got ready to brace the flood of traffic that they were expecting when Pokémon Go launched in the United States. Pokémon Go ended up shattering all estimates of player traffic.

There were problems as trainers poured at a rate that was more than fifty times the estimated worst case scenarios by Niantic. Google CRE provided the extra capacity as per the requirements. It was not a smooth rollout though, access to the game was patchy in the first few days after launch, and trainers were constantly demanding for better servers from Niantic, a demand that Google Engineers delivered. The challenges for Google did not stop at the US launch, up next was the launch in the home country of Pokémon, Japan.

The lessons from the US launch were implemented successfully at the Japan launch, where the number of new trainers signing up for the game more than tripled as compared to the US launch. The launch in Japan went smoothly however, and there were no issues. More than a dozen services from Google Cloud were used for Pokémon Go. Google provided Niantic tens of thousands of cores for their Google Container Engine cluster, which is powered by the Kubernetes project. The Kubernates open source project itself benefited because of the many bugs identified and fixed over the launch of Pokémon Go.