Let’s Talk GKE: What’s Ahead for Real Estate Webmasters?

Posted by Richard de Groot

Updated on November 6th, 2023

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Published in About REW

In the competitive world of cloud computing and infrastructure management, staying ahead of the curve means adopting the latest and most efficient tools. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been a popular option for many organizations, with Google Compute Engine (GCE) being the go-to for hosting virtual machines. However, as technology evolves, so does the need for more agile and scalable solutions. In this blog post, we'll dive into why businesses like Real Estate Webmasters have decided to move from GCE to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Google Kubernete Engine (GKE)'s infrastructure and flow of data.

From GCE to GKE

GCE is a Google Cloud service permitting users to create, modify, and manage virtual machines (VMs) in Google's data centers, giving control over VM configurations. On the other hand, GKE utilizes Kubernetes as an open-source platform to simplify the deployment and scaling of containerized apps. 

While GCE has proven reliable over the years, its scalability presents the main challenge that cannot be overlooked. As the amount of concurrent users goes up, GCE's average response rate significantly increases. In contrast, GKE is able to scale up to meet the demand, allowing it to handle more users before pages start slowing down.

GKE infrastructure includes Istio, an open-source platform for service mesh, which is instrumental in managing microservices applications. This helps development and operations teams manage and distribute cloud applications at a large scale, improving traffic routing, issues handling, and securing connections.

Additionally, bot traffic continues to increase every year. Last year, 47.5% of all internet traffic was bots, so we introduced Google's Cloud Armor to both our networks. Google faces the same challenges as we do but at a larger scale, and Cloud Armor successfully prevented the largest DDOS attack at 398 million requests per second. With this in place, your website is protected against DDOS attacks while blocking unhelpful bots.

A graph illustrating the rise in average response time as the number of users increases.

What’s Next?

With our switch from GCE to GKE, we are still continuing to look forward.  We are excited to introduce multi-tenant services, which will help us continue to improve client experience with higher uptimes, faster page loads, and optimizing costs. Some of those services include:

1. Storage as a service employs Google Cloud Storage, offering clients unlimited storage capacity, scalability, and public access to static assets without worrying about storage constraints.
2. Memcache as a service utilizes Facebook's McRouter, which enhances website performance by optimizing caching, offering shared cache options and client-specific data isolation, and ensuring a more responsive user experience.
3. Apache as a service allows us to accelerate development, and do other fun things like partial deployments to 5%, 50% or 100% of the traffic.
4. Database as a service fulfills all your database requirements. While we use MariaDB for all our database needs today, tomorrow we will be using the best option for your different types of data.

An illustration of how deployment will look like in GKE.

Conclusion

The transition to GKE brings scalability, increased operational efficiency, and the opportunity to implement innovative services, reflecting the benefits of adapting to the latest market and technological trends. 

Please note that clients using our latest Renaissance platform version, excluding those on the mobile app, already leverage GKE. Feel free to connect with me if you’re curious to learn more. I would love to chat!