Going for Goal with GKE

People who love sports have one thing in common, that is supporting their teams, whether it is a big or small league. Watching your preferred game no matter the location, it is essential and there should be any restriction such as a lack of TV or not reaching the stadium on time. This is where online live streaming comes in handy to bridge the gap. It allows fans to watch the game no matter the place or time.

And so MyCujoo was built by football fans, for football fans. In 2009, Pedro Presa, a huge fan of Portugal’s Boavista FC, was living abroad and had difficulty trying to watch his team, who at the time had slipped into a lower division so were no longer on TV. He searched for a website, app, or any kind of platform to watch his team play but he found nothing. So he and his brother, João, built their own.

MyCujoo streamed content from 120 countries to an immediately addressable community of more than 170 million players and 400 million fans. To support such an explosion in popularity, MyCujoo decided to update its technology infrastructure from a monolithic architecture, to a microservices-based model that could support live video streaming at scale. To do that, the company turned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We needed a new architecture to solve the problems of scaling up at speed, and to improve our speed of delivery,” says Patrick Plaatje, Director of Technology at MyCujoo. “We were looking for a microservices-oriented solution that we could deploy as easily and simply as possible. For us, the answer is Google Cloud Platform.”

MyCujoo decided to fundamentally redesign the way it handled its technology. Deciding early on that a microservices-oriented architecture would be more able to handle scaling at speed, the company chose to use Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration system developed by Google.

The decentralized nature of Kubernetes allowed MyCujoo to completely reorganize its teams, which was a key pillar of the redesign. Teams now centered around products, and cross-functional, with experts from each part of the product life cycle contributing. For the first time, each team can take an idea from inception to production, without waiting on anyone else for bug fixes, updates or maintenance.

MyCujoo ported more of its infrastructure over to GCP and saw its platform grow. For the first time, MyCujoo had the scalability, stability, and capability to host its own video streaming, instead of relying on a third party as it had done before. Combining its own expertise with the high performance global network offered by Google, MyCujoo also reduced the live stream video lag from 45 seconds to 15 seconds!

Get hands-on practice with the most popular container orchestration today with the Kubernetes in Google Cloud Quest. Also as the football season is reaching its climax, find out which team is going to lift the title in Paris with Predict Soccer Match Outcomes with BigQuery ML Quest and earn an exclusive digital badge issued by Google Cloud to get featured in our next Hall of Fame Video!

Use Code: 1q-goal-22 to receive 9 free credits on signing in and 11 more on completing the labs total worth $20!