Case Study: Gigya achieves scalable, reliable social chat for live events with Google Cloud Platform

Gigya gives millions of users something to talk about with Google App Engine

Gigya, a SaaS provider that integrates social networking features for sites across media and entertainment, needed a hosting platform that could handle unpredictable, massive spikes in traffic for live social chat (from tens to hundreds of thousands of users in seconds). Their self-managed infrastructure required manual capacity additions, incurred costs for unused machines, and made it hard to guarantee uptime for customers.

Gigya migrated its social chat services to Google App Engine, using Java, the App Engine Eclipse plugin, Memcache and the management dashboard, and relying on App Engine’s SLA and pay-as-you-use pricing. The move delivered automatic scaling and improved operational visibility, letting Gigya support high-profile events (e.g., peaks of ~3,000 requests/sec and 120,000 concurrent users at E3), minimize downtime, reduce costs during low-traffic periods, and adopt better development and architecture practices.

Gigya

Raviv Pavel

Vice President of Research and Development