Google Cloud results
- Shortens software development cycles with microservices in GKE
- Helps save data storage costs through diverse storage classes of Cloud Storage
- Supports near real-time data analytics for quick service improvements and troubleshooting with BigQuery
- Enables the development of a content recommendation system serving 20 million monthly unique visitors within three months
- Ensures stable services despite exponential website traffic surges
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."
A highly scalable cloud infrastructure with flexible resources
The Dcard team moved its online forum to Google Cloud by leveraging microservices in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and virtual machines (VMs) in Compute Engine as servers, and Cloud Storage to back up data and store video content. With the timely technical support and comprehensive advice on product selection from the Google Cloud partner CloudMile, Dcard was able to quickly resolve issues and continue improving its operations when expanding its business.
"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. Although our team is already familiar with the Google Cloud tools, we still encounter setting errors from time to time, and that's when CloudMile's expertise and timely responses come in handy," says Taco.
One major advantage of using Google Cloud for the Dcard team is the diverse computing resources available. For its application services, Dcard relies on the microservice architecture supported by GKE to shorten development cycles and the autoscaling feature of GKE to ensure stable services despite exponential traffic growth when popular events like FIFA World Cup take place. For feature testing, it uses Cloud Functions and Cloud Run to simplify deployment and reduce costs. On top of that, being able to easily create isolated projects in Google Cloud has also helped the team at Dcard develop multiple new features at the same time without affecting existing services.
The high flexibility of resource use also applies to data storage. Since Cloud Storage provides various storage classes, Dcard can choose the most suitable storage plans based on the nature of its data and lower the overall costs. For example, it uses the archive storage class to store historical log data, which would only be used for auditing, and the coldline storage class to store backup data, which are occasionally retrieved for data analyses.
"The cloud infrastructure of Google Cloud not only delivers great performance, but also provides us with flexible resources to support our operations in the most cost-effective way possible," notes Taco. "We're therefore able to offer highly reliable services and develop more new features."
