The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
There are a lot of cool nuggets in Google's New Book: The Site Reliability Workbook. If you haven't put it on your reading list, here's a tantalizing excerpt from CHAPTER 11 Managing Load by Cooper Bethea, Gráinne Sheerin, Jennifer Mace, and Ruth King with Gary Luo and Gary O’Connor.
Niantic launched Pokémon GO in the summer of 2016. It was the first new Pokémon game in years, the first official Pokémon smartphone game, and Niantic’s first project in concert with a major entertainment company. The game was a runaway hit and more popular than anyone expected—that summer you’d regularly see players gathering to duel around landmarks that were Pokémon Gyms in the virtual world.
Pokémon GO’s success greatly exceeded the expectations of the Niantic engineering team. Prior to launch, they load-tested their software stack to process up to 5x their most optimistic traffic estimates. The actual launch requests per second (RPS) rate was nearly 50x that estimate—enough to present a scaling challenge for nearly any software stack. To further complicate the matter, the world of Pokémon GO is highly interactive and globally shared among its users. All players in a given area see the same view of the game world and interact with each other inside that world. This requires that the game produce and distribute near-real-time updates to a state shared by all participants.
Scaling the game to 50x more users required a truly impressive effort from the Niantic engineering team. In addition, many engineers across Google provided their assis‐ tance in scaling the service for a successful launch. Within two days of migrating to GCLB, the Pokemon GO app became the single largest GCLB service, easily on par with the other top 10 GCLB services.
As shown in Figure 11-5, when it launched, Pokémon GO used Google’s regional Network Load Balancer (NLB) to load-balance ingress traffic across a Kubernetes cluster. Each cluster contained pods of Nginx instances, which served as Layer 7 reverse proxies that terminated SSL, buffered HTTP requests, and performed routing and load balancing across pods of application server backends.
Figure 11-5. Pokémon GO (pre-GCLB) 
Return to Article