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Google Cloud Platform > Case Studies > Booksy: Leveraging IoT to Revolutionize Beauty and Health Service Booking
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Booksy: Leveraging IoT to Revolutionize Beauty and Health Service Booking

Technology Category
  • Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Cement
  • Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions
  • Product Research & Development
Use Cases
  • Construction Management
  • Infrastructure Inspection
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge

Booksy, a world-leading appointment management platform, was facing a significant challenge in scaling its infrastructure to match its rapidly growing user base. With its client base doubling every year, Booksy needed a scalable architecture to handle the increasing number of bookings. Initially, Booksy was built using on-premises servers, which led to a series of scaling issues. When extra capacity was required, the team had to wait several weeks before new servers were assembled and online. Maintaining the data centers was a lot of work and took their focus away from coding. Furthermore, they needed to do more coding to meet the demands of scaling up, such as refactoring code for larger architecture. The Booksy application ran on a monolithic architecture, making migration to a more scalable solution a complex task.

About The Customer

Booksy is a world-leading appointment management platform specializing in support for small traders in the health and beauty sector. With more than 10 million active users in 25 countries, Booksy is dedicated to making the lives of independent contractors easier by providing a SaaS solution that lets customers book online directly. The company processes more than 200,000 daily bookings and aims to penetrate the vast market of stylists who still use traditional methods to book appointments. With an eye on new markets and an impressive rate of growth, scaling is a key priority for the company.

The Solution

Booksy partnered with OChK, a highly specialized multi-cloud solutions provider, to migrate to Google Cloud. This move allowed Booksy to leverage scalable resources and decommission their previous infrastructure. They used Google Kubernetes Engine to orchestrate clusters, preparing them to meet surges in demand. The migration to Google Cloud also helped Booksy to handle their main bottleneck, PostgreSQL database, by hosting it on Compute Engine instances, making it easy to scale up. This gave them the time and confidence to look for more permanent solutions, such as moving the bookings part of their architecture to a NoSQL solution. To avoid holdups between their teams, Booksy developers now use Cloud Functions to create simple services independently, without relying on DevOps.

Operational Impact

  • The migration to Google Cloud has significantly improved Booksy's operational efficiency. The company is now able to quickly scale up its resources to meet peak demand periods, eliminating the need for extra servers and reducing the time spent on maintaining data centers. The use of Google Kubernetes Engine has prepared Booksy to meet surges in demand, even during exceptional events. The migration has also allowed Booksy to minimize latency for a seamless app experience, enhancing user satisfaction. With the upcoming Google Cloud region in Warsaw, Poland, Booksy is set to further improve its app responsiveness. The company is now fully migrated to a highly scalable architecture on Google Cloud, enabling it to reach out to millions of potential new users.

Quantitative Benefit

  • Unlocks global potential with scalable cloud infrastructure to meet consistent annual growth rates around 100%

  • Reduces bottlenecks in development with simple deployment on Cloud Functions

  • Enables 200,000+ bookings per day worldwide

Related Case Studies.

Case Study
IoT System for Tunnel Construction
The Zenitaka Corporation ('Zenitaka') has two major business areas: its architectural business focuses on structures such as government buildings, office buildings, and commercial facilities, while its civil engineering business is targeted at structures such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Within these areas, there presented two issues that have always persisted in regard to the construction of mountain tunnels. These issues are 'improving safety" and "reducing energy consumption". Mountain tunnels construction requires a massive amount of electricity. This is because there are many kinds of electrical equipment being used day and night, including construction machinery, construction lighting, and ventilating fan. Despite this, the amount of power consumption is generally not tightly managed. In many cases, the exact amount of power consumption is only ascertained when the bill from the power company becomes available. Sometimes, corporations install demand-monitoring equipment to help curb the maximum power demanded. However, even in these cases, the devices only allow the total volume of power consumption to be ascertained, or they may issue warnings to prevent the contracted volume of power from being exceeded. In order to tackle the issue of reducing power consumption, it was first necessary to obtain an accurate breakdown of how much power was being used in each particular area. In other words, we needed to be able to visualize the amount of power being consumed. Safety, was also not being managed very rigorously. Even now, tunnel construction sites often use a 'name label' system for managing entry into the work site. Specifically, red labels with white reverse sides that bear the workers' names on both sides are displayed at the tunnel work site entrance. The workers themselves then flip the name label to the appropriate side when entering or exiting from the work site to indicate whether or not they are working inside the tunnel at any given time. If a worker forgets to flip his or her name label when entering or exiting from the tunnel, management cannot be performed effectively. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, Zenitaka decided to build a system that could improve the safety of tunnel construction as well as reduce the amount of power consumed. In other words, this new system would facilitate a clear picture of which workers were working in each location at the mountain tunnel construction site, as well as which processes were being carried out at those respective locations at any given time. The system would maintain the safety of all workers while also carefully controlling the electrical equipment to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Having decided on the concept, our next concern was whether there existed any kind of robust hardware that would not break down at the construction work site, that could move freely in response to changes in the working environment, and that could accurately detect workers and vehicles using radio frequency identification (RFID). Given that this system would involve many components that were new to Zenitaka, we decided to enlist the cooperation of E.I.Sol Co., Ltd. ('E.I.Sol') as our joint development partner, as they had provided us with a highly practical proposal.
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