Homegrown social media site, ShareChat, announced Monday the full transition of its technology to Google Cloud that supports more than 60 million active monthly users. The regional platform has made the shift to scale its market, boost productivity, cut costs and enhance the overall success of the app that houses active users in 15 Indian languages.
ShareChat following a host of Indian companies that, during the lockdown, changed or rebalanced their cloud provider mix to scale up to the massive increase in usage and reliance on such services. ShareChat’s IT network was divided between Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud according to the platform ‘s previous privacy policy claim.
Given the high-intensity data , high volume of content and traffic that the platform generates such as posts, likes, views and followers, ShareChat relies heavily on IT infrastructure. A significant proportion of their mobile-application’s subscribers come from cities that come in tier-2 and tier-3, with most of them heavily depending on 2 G networks. Therefore the it is most critical for such businesses to be able to minimize the impact of mobile bandwidth and providing all users with a great experience, the management said.
Cloud service companies have seen consistent increase in revenue in the first six months of 2020 with multinational technology firms such as Amazon.com, Microsoft Corp, and Google Inc. announcing solid growth in the demand for cloud computing as growing percentages of institutions turned to online connectivity for continued research.
As per the numbers shared by the companies for January-March, Amazon Web Services ( AWS) continues to lead with a global market share of 32 percent followed by Microsoft Azure (17 percent) and Google and Alibaba at around 6 percent each. India is currently a high-priority destination for these companies, with a growing number of established firms, startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) looking to embrace cloud and IT technologies in the face of the government’s drive for a stronger digital presence. The pandemic has only added to that urgency.
In April 2020, ShareChat decided to migrate to Google Cloud to successfully scale and achieve its customer service goals.
“We are happy to share that a couple of months down the line we have not only experienced 100% uptime but also we see the cost benefits of our choice much beyond our initial expectations. The scale at which ShareChat is, we wouldn’t have looked beyond the top three providers and Google was the perfect fit for us,” said Venkatesh Ramaswamy, vice president of engineering, ShareChat.
In the middle of the covid-19 crisis, the monumental eight-hour move from ShareChat ‘s predominant cloud network to Google Cloud forced the former to conduct a meticulous review for nearly three months, preparing and conducting a detailed operational and strategic approach to fulfill their market needs.
“60 million users, is among the largest that we have helped migrate in recent times. Because they had a very specific requirement about the timing and method of migration, our people across the professional services, India engineering and cloud teams, APAC and global teams were all on standby to handle any situation that arises,” said Karan Bajwa, managing director (MD), Google Cloud India.
International Journal of Research (IJR) 