Case Study: SongPop scales to 60 million users and serves 17 TB/day with Google Cloud Platform (App Engine & Cloud Storage)

Scaling SongPop to 60 million users with App Engine and Google Cloud Storage

FreshPlanet’s SongPop is a social mobile game that grew explosively—from launch to a peak of 60 million users, top iOS game rankings, and spikes to >10k queries/second—while the company remained a tiny team of six engineers. The challenge was scaling a backend that could handle massive, sudden load, deliver audio assets quickly and reliably worldwide, and keep operational overhead low so engineers could focus on features.

FreshPlanet built on Google App Engine for autoscaling, used Memcache and Datastore optimizations (combining models and adding composite indexes), relied on Premier Support for incident help, and served media from Google Cloud Storage. The result: smooth scaling to millions of daily users, 17 TB/day of assets delivered globally, reduced latency and timeouts, and a backend maintained by a single full-time engineer.

Songpop