Case Study: Tencent Africa achieves dramatic latency reduction and cost savings with Google Cloud Platform

Tencent Africa Moving from messaging app to connectivity platform

Tencent Africa (formerly WeChat Africa) runs WeChat operations on the continent and launched services like WeChat Wallet, JOOX and VOOY as it expanded. Rapid user growth stretched its on-premises infrastructure: Official Accounts APIs risked missing response deadlines, pings to China averaged about 180 ms, and provisioning more servers was expensive and slow, so the company needed a more scalable, lower-latency platform.

Working with Google Cloud Platform and partner Siatik, Tencent migrated to Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, BigQuery and Cloud Storage and adopted G Suite. The move cut round-trip latency from ~180 ms to ~35 ms, reduced costs through per-minute billing and sustained-use discounts, and shrank server provisioning time from hours to minutes—enabling faster scaling and experiments with Kubernetes and machine learning.

Tencent

Christoff Albertyn

Head of Technology