Case Study: Niantic achieves global-scale Pokémon GO launch success with Google Cloud Platform

Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud

Niantic partnered with Google Cloud Platform to power the launch of Pokémon GO, a mobile game that quickly faced explosive demand and major reliability challenges. Using Google Cloud services such as Cloud Datastore and Google Container Engine (GKE), Niantic needed infrastructure that could scale rapidly, support live changes, and keep the game stable for millions of players.

Google Cloud Platform’s Customer Reliability Engineering team worked closely with Niantic to provision extra capacity, stabilize the architecture, upgrade GKE, and replace the Network Load Balancer with the HTTP/S Load Balancer. The result was the ability to handle traffic that surged to 50X the initial target, and the Japan launch went live without incident, with new-user signups tripling compared with the US launch two weeks earlier.

Niantic

Luke Stone

Director of Customer Reliability Engineering