Case Study: Planet achieves daily global Earth imaging and up to 60% lower data-processing costs with Google Cloud Platform

Planet Imaging a dynamic, ever-changing Earth

Planet operates the largest commercial fleet of Earth‑imaging satellites (190+), with a goal to image the planet’s entire landmass every 24 hours. Rapid growth — generating terabytes daily and petabytes of archive data — created a need for a global, cost‑effective, and highly scalable compute and storage platform to process and serve imagery in near real time.

As part of a multi‑cloud strategy Planet migrated its image processing and archive to Google Cloud Platform, using Cloud Storage, Compute Engine (preemptible VMs), Bigtable, BigQuery, VPC and load balancing, and moved about 7 PB in a three‑month migration. The result: Mission 1 achieved (fresh images every 24 hours), significant capacity gains (2.6x and up to sixfold increases cited), routine processing of terabytes per day, and up to 60% lower data‑processing costs.

Planet

Troy Toman

Director of Engineering