Case Study: Red Bull X‑Alps achieves scalable, mobile‑ready live tracking and doubles website retention with Google Cloud Platform

Red Bull X-Alps Live tracking the world’s most popular adventure race

Red Bull X‑Alps, a biennial alpine adventure race produced by Austria’s zooom productions, relies on live GPS tracking to engage a global audience. By 2017 the tracking feed had grown so dense — roughly 1 million GPS points per athlete — that mobile browsers were crashing, and with only three months to go the team needed a fast, sustainable replacement after their 3D mapping plugin was discontinued.

zooom and Google Cloud partner Wabion rebuilt the live‑tracking stack using Google’s IoT architecture: Cloud Pub/Sub for ingestion, Dataflow to handle late data, BigQuery for analysis, server‑side map rendering, and App Engine for autoscaling. Delivered in under three months, the solution doubled website retention, improved mobile performance, handled delayed athlete stats, and scaled from about 400 to over 250,000 daily sessions as the race began.

Red Bull X-Alps

Ulrich Grill

Founder and Owner