Since scalability and stability are paramount for BreezoMeter’s mission to improve the lives of billions, partnering with Google Cloud was a no-brainer. In this overview, we explain some of the early technology challenges we faced, how we use Google Cloud to facilitate our goal, and why sustainability is so important to us as a climate-aware company.
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Data Challenges We Overcame – How We Use Google Cloud Platform
BreezoMeter takes in a staggering amount of environmental data from an incredibly vast and diverse range of sources. In addition to that, our APIs handle millions upon millions of requests every hour from our range of big and small clients. Since air quality is very dynamic, we have to recalculate it every single hour, which we do, for 500 million geographical locations around the world.
Because our focus was on scalability and stability, we built our platform with App Engine supported by Compute Engine virtual machines and Cloud Storage buckets. We were early adopters of managed cloud services, and this thankfully allowed us to circumvent the higher costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure and enabled our developers to focus purely on building the best platform they could.
Maxing Out On Early Infrastructure
Over time, our infrastructure evolved while incorporating more automation with Cloud Functions and Cloud Run.
Eventually, however, we grew so big that, in order to scale without hiring DevOps specialists, we knew we needed to move to a serverless infrastructure.
Building Bigger & Better
We built the next phase of our infrastructure around microservices orchestrated with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). With this new architecture, we could scale up and down far quicker than before, thus minimizing the resources we waste and maximizing power.
We’re constantly having to schedule bigger and more loads, and we use thousands of CPUs every hour, and the numbers keep rising. Luckily, Google Kubernetes Engine lets us scale up in a cost-effective way.
We also moved our data platform to BigQuery, which allows us to load and analyze ten terabytes of data a day, something we couldn’t do before. In addition to scale, this move also supports us using new kinds of information, geographical data, for example, something absolutely crucial for our latest products.
Why We Chose Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud helped us adapt and overcome every obstacle we encountered, and we were able to grow our customer base and offer them bigger and better solutions.
And we’re still growing.
Scalability Made Possible With BigQuery
We now run billions of calculations every hour on Google Cloud, incorporating new types of environmental data. And we’re building new products to offer our customers better value, going from simply providing dry data to providing real-time actionable environmental insights that empower people to protect their wellbeing and health.
Moving BreezoMeter’s data platform to BigQuery changed the way we handle our data. Before the transition, we had to place captured data into Cloud Storage buckets soon after analysis in order to make way for new data. That made historical analysis very inconvenient and difficult.
But now, we can store data in BigQuery and analyze it at will. Using BigQuery as our data lake democratized our data, making it a whole lot easier to extract meaningful information than we could before. Anyone who knows how to write an SQL query can see the data and go to work on it.
Enabling Our Developers To Focus on the Core Issues
Of course, working at scale is very important to us, but another advantage of Google Cloud is that it also lets our developers work smarter. GCP’s managed services handle our infrastructure operations, and that lets developers concentrate on our core business challenges.
Without having to worry about infrastructure, our devs can maximize efficiency with innovations such as preemptible virtual machines to automatically shut down instances once their task is done, or use the latest, most powerful CPUs for faster calculations.
This level of control does more than help BreezoMeter to reduce operational costs, it also embodies the sustainable values we’re constantly striving to popularize.
Sustainability is Important to Us
As a company wholly focused on protecting people from environmental hazards like air pollution, the last thing we want is to somehow contribute to the very problem we’re advocating against.
With CO2 levels on the rise across the world, climate change is now more than ever a real threat to the entire global population, and we are nothing short of zealots for sustainable technology as one of the key solutions.
Working with Google Cloud lets us continue evolving and optimizing our processes and products without compromising on the sustainability aspect. We’re now heavily in the development of newer, better tools and are very happy to continue working with Google Cloud, not only because of the incredible efficiency it enables but because of the sustainability values we share.
BreezoMeter’s products require vast resources to run with thousands of machines in the cloud, so our standards of service are very high. They have to be. And sustainability is non-negotiable. The commitments we’ve seen recently from Google Cloud, such as operating carbon-free by 2030, reassure us that we’re working with the right partner.
