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Google Cloud Platform > Case Studies > Bloomreach: Scaling for Peak Performance with Google Cloud
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Bloomreach: Scaling for Peak Performance with Google Cloud

Technology Category
  • Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Construction & Infrastructure
  • Retail
Applicable Functions
  • Product Research & Development
  • Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
  • Construction Management
  • Vehicle-to-Infrastructure
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • Testing & Certification
The Challenge

Bloomreach, a leading Commerce Experience Cloud, faced significant challenges as it grew rapidly since its launch in 2015. The company's growth began to strain its bare-metal IT infrastructure, affecting both development and stability. The company experienced server failures and poor connections with their data center provider, which threatened the reliability of their service. Furthermore, with the advent of GDPR regulations and a global client base, Bloomreach had to prepare for a more complex security environment. Their existing infrastructure was not capable of handling the upcoming challenges, and they needed a solution that could provide scalability, stability, and security.

About The Customer

Bloomreach is the world’s leading Commerce Experience Cloud, empowering brands to deliver personalized customer journeys. The company offers a suite of products that drive personalization and digital commerce growth, including AI-driven search and merchandising, a headless CMS, and a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) with marketing automation solutions. These solutions combine the power of unified customer and product data with the speed and scale of AI-optimization, enabling revenue-driving digital commerce experiences that convert on any channel and every journey. Bloomreach serves over 850 global brands including Albertsons, Bosch, Puma, FC Bayern München, and Marks & Spencer.

The Solution

After evaluating several cloud vendors, Bloomreach chose Google Cloud for its ease of use and global reach. The migration to Google Cloud allowed Bloomreach to meet its clients' different needs, including data storage in different regions for GDPR compliance. As the company migrated to Google Cloud, it redesigned its architecture around containers rather than just virtual machines, using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the backbone of the new infrastructure. For stateful services like databases, Bloomreach used virtual machines with Compute Engine. The company's AI platform used Cloud Storage for data sources, which were processed with Dataproc, and GKE was used to train and deploy prediction models. Over time, Bloomreach refined its infrastructure to make more effective use of Google Cloud products, using BigQuery for data analytics and Google Cloud operations suite for monitoring and logging.

Operational Impact

  • The migration to Google Cloud has significantly improved Bloomreach's operational efficiency. The company's IT team can now work in much faster, more efficient cycles, with deployments taking under 20 seconds, regardless of the number of new customers added. This has empowered developers to take on responsibility for new projects without having to wait for DevOps staff to set up new infrastructure. Furthermore, the company successfully handled the peak load during Black Friday 2018, delivering a reliably smooth service to its customers. As Bloomreach continues to grow, it is exploring Google Cloud's machine learning and AI tools to gain insights from its internal monitoring and convert them into even greater efficiencies.

Quantitative Benefit

  • Bloomreach's infrastructure scaled to handle more than double the normal load during Black Friday with minimal cost.

  • The development of new features and bug fixes was sped up, deploying in seconds rather than minutes.

  • Bloomreach processes around 7 billion events per client, a significant increase from the previous average of 500 million events monthly.

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