“With its profound knowledge in cloud technology, the CloudMile team understands our pain points very well and can therefore effectively help us overcome technical challenges.“

It's hard to miss the online social networking platform Dcard in Taiwan's cyberspace. With a penetration rate of more than 90 percent among people aged between 18 and 24 in the country, the platform is one of the top go-to sites for the younger generation in Taiwan to discuss heated topics and seek information or advice from others on a range of topics surrounding everyday life from outfits to relationships.

Dcard's founding team first launched the platform in 2011 as a networking service dedicated to college students. As the popularity of its forum grew, the startup expanded its business to include ecommerce, Intellectual Property content, and advertising services on its platform. Over the past few years, Dcard has also entered markets abroad for users in Hong Kong, Macau and Japan. As of November 2023, Dcard had 20 million monthly unique visitors and 8 million members in total.

"Our mission is to provide an online space where everyone can find something they're interested in. That's why we've been constantly adding engaging features to our platform," explains Taco, Engineering Manager at Dcard. "For example, many users on Dcard have expressed a desire for more diverse ways to convey their emotions. As a response, we have launched the original IP 'dtto friends' stickers. This enables everyone to respond to posts with relatable stickers, adding a new dimension to self-expression."

To ensure its platform continues to provide reliable services with its growing popularity, Dcard started to look for an IT infrastructure with higher scalability in 2016 to deploy its social networking platform in Taiwan. The team chose Google Cloud because it was the only public cloud provider that had a data center in Taiwan at the time, enabling dozens of milliseconds less latency for users in the country compared to other offerings.

"Our online forum was growing very fast in Taiwan, so we needed a highly scalable IT infrastructure to provide stable services," says Taco. "Google Cloud not only supports high scalability but also lower latency, which can help us ensure our service quality."

To provide engaging social networking services and support data-driven decision-making, Dcard needs to analyze terabytes of data every day. It employs Pub/Sub to transfer data from its platforms to its data warehouse in BigQuery and other databases for analytics. Taco notes that since Pub/Sub possesses great buffer capacity, the team is able to stream or batch insert all the data it needs. The fast query speed supported by BigQuery also enables Dcard to realize near real-time analytics. This means that it can identify and resolve issues more timely or even in advance.

"We're dedicated to providing engaging social networking services, so we need to know our users' preferences very well, which is why data analytics is crucial to our business," he adds. "With the powerful analytics capabilities of BigQuery, we're able to quickly find out what our users like or dislike through A/B testing, and effectively improve our services and operations based on near real-time insights."

Setting up its data warehouse in Google Cloud has also helped Dcard implement solid data governance. The team leverages the single sign-on authentication scheme in Google Cloud to control data access for better protection of sensitive data, and Cloud Data Loss Prevention to automatically identify data with high security risks.

Dcard has always been committed to enabling more interactions among users and creating strong bonds within the online community. The team is now adding small games to the forum allowing users to play against each other. Next, Dcard plans to leverage Vertex AI to develop features powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can further enhance user engagement. It will also integrate the large language model of Google with its data pipeline centered around BigQuery to provide automatically summarized product reviews in its ecommerce service, reinforce its recommendation system, and analyze its query records in BigQuery to optimize its data marts.

Taco says, "Our user base is rather young and vibrant, so we're constantly creating new features to cater to their needs. With its high-performance infrastructure and diverse cloud tools, Google Cloud has supported our rapid growth over the past years. We're confident that we'll be able to continue expanding and strengthening our online community using Google Cloud."