How does Pokémon Go scale to millions of requests?

Millions of people are playing Pokémon GO, but did you know it’s built on Google Cloud? In this episode of Architecting with Google Cloud, Priyanka Vergadia speaks with James Prompanya, the Technical Manager at Niantic Labs about Pokémon GO’s architecture and how it scales for a large number of players. Listen as they share how they use GKE and Spanner for scaling and how their data science team works with BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub for the data analytics!

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro,
0:42 - What is Pokémon GO and GO Fest?
2:08 - How does Pokémon GO scale to handle peak traffic?
4:00 - Why does the team use Spanner and GKE?
5:18 - Request flow and architecture
7:58 - Data processing workflow with Pub/Sub, Dataflow and BigQuery
10:50 - Scaling data processing for 10-20GB of data per day
11:26 - How do they monitor the health of systems
12:11 - What’s next - Game Servers
12:29 - Summary

#ArchitectingWithGoogleCloud

product: Cloud - General; fullname: Priyanka Vergadia;

[Xyd]

Really cool to understand why they changed from datastore to spanner.

[knghtRdr]

I was able to understand stuff on a high level, now I need to drill down to understand about each part. Learned a lot!

[natac]

As a Player and GCP user i found this really interesting 😁

[awerminator]

Very helpful information. It would be great to see more insights content like this.

[acloudpotato]

Last Question is very insightful, thank you for sharing this. Very interesting one

[Play_Streams]

I've learnt a lot from Priyanka's sessions. Great job!

[howardh]

At the end of the day everyone uses the similar architecture, the real design comes in data modelling and code performance. Infrastructure scales which is GCP is the best at it

[ano-xc]

And how much does it cost to use all these services from GCP? (in average)
That would be very interesting to know

[Kadavul-Murugan]

Just wondering have they used GKE cluster in a single region or multiple regions and backed by Global HTTPS LB.

[sirmcdonnell]

Ms. Vergadia I am such a fan of your work. 🤗

[ArtimusDragon]

Interesting but I wish they'd explain why the game lags so much for many and not others. Is it the game or is it their devices?

[JouganNeon]

Never did I think Google would upload this💀

[Eeveee]

Explains a little bit how 3rd party gotchas can get the run away xp from "failing to catch" a Pokemon for 25xp. consistent tick. Ey yo, Thanks for the wonderful game.

[TheOnlyEpsilonAlpha]

Oh holy crap, can someone forward this to ANY other MMO Dev Team how to do it right please?
Other MMOs rely on Static, non-consistent servers *facepalm*

[gaymer]

But of course niantic as an ex alphabet subsidiary use Google services. Big duh moment.

[adalgiziaantonia-gnmd]

Vou assistir primeiro aí eu faço comentários de avaliações