At Aerospike, our customers are at the forefront of innovation. The Aerospike database makes it possible for them to implement a wide range of hyperscale real time use cases. They’re scaling cybersecurity defenses, running social networks, increasing their shopping cart size through presenting extremely personalized offers for millions of customers in the moments that matter for making a purchase.
To serve our customers’ varied scale challenges, our relationship with Google Cloud Platform is critically important. Our customers have found that Google Cloud Platform is far ahead of the competition when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Its elasticity and scalability is second to none. And some of our customers, especially those in e-commerce, prefer not to use certain cloud providers for competitive reasons, and feel comfortable partnering with Google.
Below, I’ll describe how Aerospike and Google Cloud Platform helped just two of our many customers overcome their most important business and technology challenges.
Every Minute Matters: Elasticity in E-Commerce
Aerospike and Google Cloud Platform work with one of the world’s most innovative e-commerce companies whose global annual revenue is north of $5 billion and growing in excess of 40% every year. The company runs a special one-day sale, similar to Cyber Monday or Prime Day, that can generate three to eight times the typical amount of web traffic and over three times the typical revenue on any given day. This equates to well over $100 million in incremental revenue. Further, a large portion of the shoppers on that day are new to the site. Given the dramatically increased traffic, the amount of revenue generated from this 24-hour sale, and the need to impress new potential customers, every single minute of uptime matters to the company and to its shoppers.
Normally, this sales day would be a stressful management nightmare. The operations department could not simply purchase and set up three to eight times their day-to-day physical infrastructure for a single-day sales event. With a significantly higher browsing and purchasing volume expected, the company needed to ensure a seamless user experience – a fully functional site, responsive and free of errors and crashes under load.
Aerospike and Google Cloud Platform worked closely with the company during the planning and testing phases to prove the system’s readiness. Weeks in advance, the company spun up new Aerospike database clusters in several Google Cloud Platform regions, adding four extra data centers in addition to a central, bare metal cluster. Using the cross datacenter replication (XDR) enterprise feature of the Aerospike database, the bare metal and GCP clusters were kept in sync. The added database clusters enhanced the site with a higher load handling capacity, as well as lower latencies due to shorter geographical distances to online shoppers.
On the day of the event, Aerospike on Google Cloud Platform easily absorbed the increased load, empowering the company to delight its customers on one of its most important sales days of the year.
Exponential Growth in Data, Linear Growth in Servers: Cybersecurity at Scale
Another interesting use case is in the field of cybersecurity. One company working with Aerospike on the Google Cloud Platform logs an enormous amount of endpoint data. Their goal is to detect intruders through anomalous behavior and respond quickly and precisely to such breaches. Sophisticated attackers tend to “sit, observe and wait” to reduce the likelihood of being detected. Being able to reach back farther in time to detect and trace an intrusion necessitates the capability to store and access ever larger volumes of data. The challenge for the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) company was to scale storage, queries, scans, and key-value database operations from gigabytes to terabytes to petabytes, all without increasing latency, and while ensuring the same over 5 nines of uptime. The ability to sustain performance at hyperscale is a unique characteristic of the Aerospike database. Leveraging Aerospike’s speed at scale enabled the EDR application to perform through orders of magnitude of growth.
The company chose Aerospike as its object store and Elasticsearch for search, marrying two best of breed solutions for the highest possible performance. It chose Google Cloud Platform as its cloud infrastructure provider. As a result, it is able to tackle hyperscale cost-efficiently, without sacrificing performance.
The Road Ahead
We look forward to solving tough customer technology challenges with Google. Our customers expect nothing less – constant innovation to prepare for the next wave of computing, five-nine (99.999%) uptime and robust security, with extreme performance at scale. At Aerospike, our goal is to eliminate the friction that holds back companies from deriving remarkable value from vast amounts of data.
Through our Aerospike-Google Cloud partnership, we’re bringing customers the freedom of choice when it comes to building next generation applications in the cloud. The feedback from our customers has driven us to invest even more in our partnership with Google Cloud to provide a great product experience. You can find Aerospike Enterprise Edition and Aerospike Enterprise Edition for GKE on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Together with Google, we’re proud of the work we have accomplished, and we’re excited for what’s next.
