Google Enterprise Blog: Google Compute Engine and App Engine give Evite freedom to expand services anytime, plus 1 more |  |
| Google Compute Engine and App Engine give Evite freedom to expand services anytime Posted: 04 Dec 2013 12:00 PM PST (Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog) Editor's note: Today's guest blog comes from Dan Mesh, Vice President of Technology at Evite, the pioneer in online invitations and social planning. Evite has over 30 million registered users and sends more than 250 million party invitations annually. In the past year, we've introduced a couple of exciting new products at Evite: our Postmark service offers premium online invitations and announcements for milestone events like weddings and births, and Evite Ink lets our users design custom paper invitations that we print and mail for a small fee. We couldn't have launched these products without Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, which gave us the infrastructure needed to scale our services to high demands and analyze large volumes of data they generate. Evite has been around since 1998, but behind this well-known online brand is a small and lean team. Migrating to the cloud has allowed us to focus our time, energy and financial resources on development of new products and services, free from worries of server management, capacity planning and hardware costs.  Most online businesses have very consistent daily, weekly and seasonal traffic patterns, and in Evite's case, these patterns are even more pronounced. In the past, we used to provision resources to meet peak demand allowing for a healthy margin of error and future growth. Naturally, this resulted in a lot of wasted capital and engineering resources. Now that most of our systems are running on Google Cloud Platform, we see significant savings as application servers expand and shrink elastically in accordance with our web traffic. For example, in the past Evite was hesitant to roll out major application releases in Q4, typically the busiest time of the year for us. During this time, we reach our peak traffic, and operational focus was on making sure nothing went wrong. Any significant releases represented unwanted risk. Cloud Platform greatly simplifies the release process and provides built-in traffic splitting. This has made it possible for Evite product teams to test new features and release products more frequently and with reduced risks, even during the busiest times of year. As we add new products and services, Compute Engine plays a key role in our application infrastructure. We use it to closely monitor and analyze the performance of our products and services. All application data and log files generated by applications running on App Engine flow through a cluster of Compute Engine instances running extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, which feed this data into the data warehouse. There we analyze the collected data to detect errors and usage patterns helping us improve the design of our products and maintain performance levels. Compute Engine gets high marks for interoperability with App Engine and other cloud vendors. We use AWS Redshift as our data warehouse so interoperability is very important. Equally impressive are predictable, high I/O performance and fast instance startup times. For our data processing workloads these two metrics are critical to success. With App Engine powering all of our customer-facing services and Compute Engine helping us monitor and understand application performance, Evite is in great shape to create and release new products. We look forward to many new releases in 2014 knowing we can count on Cloud Platform to make these launches trouble-free.    |
| Google Apps Improves Efficiency for Redfin Agents and Engineers Posted: 04 Dec 2013 08:22 AM PST Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Eric Hollenbeck, Sr. Manager of IT & Business Services at Redfin, a technology-powered real estate company headquartered in Seattle, WA that serves 22 markets across the U.S. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say. Why did you choose Google Apps? We moved our entire company onto Google Apps five years ago to cut costs and align closely with the tools our customers and employees wanted to use. The benefits we're experiencing, however, go beyond that and have led to improved efficiency, increased mobility, and better collaboration across our company. We also knew that using Google Apps and other technologies would help us innovate and differentiate ourselves from other real estate companies. How is Google Apps increasing collaboration across Redfin? We have offices across the U.S., which could pose obstacles for a team-oriented work environment, but tools like Docs and Spreadsheets help keep our team collaborative. We use Docs to share any work that needs to be viewed or edited by multiple people or parties, like marketing lists or specs for new Redfin.com features. Our staff uses Docs to create and share planning documents and task checklists with 20 or more team members across multiple offices and time zones. The fact that we can all review and comment simultaneously has improved collaboration company-wide.  Our real estate agents are frequently out of the office helping clients buy or sell homes, so we really benefit from having remote access to all of our files through Google Drive. Our real estate agents work in teams, with a coordinator helping them throughout the escrow process. By using Google Drive, both team members can access and update the most current version of a contract, ensuring timely and accurate access to critical details about each real estate transaction. It's also a huge boost to efficiency knowing that anytime we open a document in Drive, it's the correct version and changes are saved automatically. This eliminates the need to sift through emails on our mobile device to try to find the most recent copy. Is there a particular tool that helps keep the team organized? Our intranet is powered by Google Sites. We store and share everything from company announcements and events to many internal resources like HR documents. The entire team knows that there's a single, centralized place to find all of the basic information they need. How is Google Apps helping Redfin achieve its goals? Our primary goal is to use technology to transform the way people buy and sell homes--making it easier and more enjoyable for our clients. Any tools that can help our teams collaborate more efficiently, thus serving our clients more effectively, is a win for Redfin and our customer. Google Apps is helping us deliver that result.   |
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