Case Study: Pulse achieves rapid scaling to 14 million users and faster mobile content delivery with Google Cloud Platform

News Reader App Delivers Content Quickly by Building a Mobile Back End on Google App Engine

Pulse, a Palo Alto startup, launched a popular news-reader app for iPad that quickly drew hundreds of thousands of downloads. As it expanded to iPhone, Android and other devices, Pulse needed a highly scalable, low-maintenance platform to deliver content quickly, roll out features fast, and handle massive, unpredictable traffic spikes.

Pulse built its back end on Google App Engine—going from zero to a working backend in a day—using auto-scaling, Datastore and Memcache to speed delivery and test new releases safely. The result: users grew from about 200,000 to over 14 million, the app earned Apple App Store recognition and was preloaded on Kindle Fire, and Pulse avoided hiring extra engineers or costly CDN services while maintaining fast, reliable service.

Pulse

Greg Bayer

Vice President of Platforms