Codeway: Putting AI at the fingertips of millions
About Codeway
Codeway is an app development company that creates innovative apps and games, making state-of-the-art technology, such as AI, accessible to millions.
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About Global IT
With 17 years of Google Cloud experience, Global IT helps businesses to excel in the cloud, offering close support from conception through implementation.
By leveraging Google Cloud solutions, Codeway manages to build and scale apps with an iterative "fail fast" development model, while optimizing GPU usage to reduce costs by 70%.
Google Cloud results
- Scales applications from zero to a million users in days by optimizing GPU usage on Google Cloud
- Enables continuous improvements to apps based on user patterns by analyzing 6TB of data per day with BigQuery
- Accelerates trial and launch of new apps with an iterative "fail fast" development model enabled by Google Cloud
- Helps to optimize GPU usage, reducing GPU cost for AI apps by 70%
70% reduction in GPU cost for AI apps
When technology evolves, people find ways to make it fun. The wheel got us racing, the computer made us gamers. Artificial intelligence is no different. AI tools are transforming the way we live and work, but they're also, quite literally, a game-changer when it comes to entertainment. Just ask Codeway.
Codeway is a tech company from Istanbul that creates chart-topping apps and games used by more than 115 million people around the world. Blending functionality and entertainment, the company's portfolio of games and apps explores both the useful and the playful side of AI and other technologies. "Wonder," for example, is an AI-powered app that turns words into digital artworks, while "Facedance" makes faces dance with a range of fun animations.
All of Codeway's apps have one thing in common: they make innovative new technologies accessible to everyone. "Technology advances constantly, and there's new research coming out all the time," says Uğur Arpaci, Lead DevOps Engineer, Codeway. "But transforming research into actual products requires a lot of creativity and engineering work. It also requires the right technology, and for us that's Google Cloud."
From insights to action with Google Cloud
Codeway was on Google Cloud from day one, and the company specifically selected it for its data capabilities and used it to create a powerful data analytics platform. Built as a foundation for the business to come, the data analytics platform would help Codeway to gain insights into user behavior, identify trends, and make informed decisions when it came to creating and improving the company's upcoming apps and games.
"We needed a data warehouse to build our data analytics platform, and BigQuery was the most easy-to-use solution on the market. It allows us to process and transform data on the fly, and because it's a managed service, we can focus most of our time on developing features. That's why Google Cloud was the best choice for us."
—Uğur Arpaci, Lead DevOps Engineer, Codeway"We needed a data warehouse to build our data analytics platform, and BigQuery was the most easy-to-use solution on the market," says Arpaci. "It allows us to process and transform data on the fly, and because it's a managed service, we can focus most of our time on developing features. That's why Google Cloud was the best choice for us."
Analyzing 6TB of data per day with BigQuery
Codeway's custom-built software development kit (SDK) enables the company to collect users' behaviors within apps to optimize and personalize the user experience. Event data is stored via Dataflow in BigQuery, and visualized in dashboards in Looker. "With our Google Cloud-powered data platform, we can follow and analyze user patterns, which enables us to constantly improve our applications and personalize our advertising campaigns," says Arpaci. "We're analyzing more than 6TB of user data each day, and everything scales without issue on Google Cloud."
BigQuery was just the start, and Codeway began rolling out new Google Cloud solutions bit by bit. The team's preferred compute hosting platform is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), where almost all of the company's custom-built APIs are maintained. Product teams deploy their AI models on GKE as well. The different solutions communicate with each other using Pub/Sub.
Codeway rolled these solutions out with close support from Global IT, a B2B technology partner specializing in Google Cloud and Google Workspace solutions. Global IT helped Codeway to optimize its use of Google Cloud technologies and offered support in financial and regulatory matters. "Global IT really acts like an extension of Codeway," says Arpaci. "Whether we have a general question or an urgent issue, Global IT is always our first port of call. They really drive our work with Google Cloud forward."
Optimizing GPU usage to reduce costs by 70%
Global IT also helps Codeway to optimize the cloud spend. Because AI model training and inference runtimes are GPU intensive workloads, one of Codeway's biggest cost sources are GPUs. With support from Global IT, the Codeway team was able to leverage Google Cloud features to significantly lower its GPU expenses.
"There are lots of ways to optimize our GPU usage on Google Cloud. For example, we're leveraging Spot instances for fault-tolerant workloads, and we're selectively deploying services on specific GPU types across different regions. All in all, we've been able to reduce the GPU costs for all our AI applications by around 70%."
—Uğur Arpaci, Lead DevOps Engineer, Codeway"There are lots of ways to optimize our GPU usage on Google Cloud," says Arpaci. "For example, we're leveraging Spot instances for fault-tolerant workloads, and we're selectively deploying services on specific GPU types across different regions. All in all, we've been able to reduce the GPU costs for all our AI applications by around 70%."
Failing fast, learning faster
Today, Codeway is using its Google Cloud setup to develop new applications quickly, while keeping costs down and not wasting unnecessary resources on manual tasks, such as infrastructure maintenance. With GKE, Arpaci and his team set up a CI/CD pipeline to speed up the development process. And by using Cloud Functions or Cloud Run to try out new ideas with smaller deployments, Codeway's developers can quickly identify projects with the most potential for success, and adapt the technology accordingly.
"Whenever we first launch a new product, we need to move fast and deploy frequently, often many times per day across different clusters," says Arpaci. "With our CI/CD approach on Google Cloud, we can test and iterate quickly, fail fast, and move forward with a small team of highly skilled professionals."
When an app does hit a nerve, the work continues: with A/B testing, Codeway works to further improve the user experience and develop new features that keep users engaged. By using custom queries on Looker, Codeway's developers can easily compare different versions of their app features to figure out what users like and dislike. For Codeway's AI Avatar Portrait Maker "Voi," for example, developers used A/B testing to introduce a new feature that allows couples to take their pictures together and create matching avatars with their loved ones.
Scaling to a million users in six days
Building a great app is one thing, scaling it is another. If an app proves popular but can't handle high traffic, if it's constantly crashing or lagging, users will quickly move on. By harnessing GPU power on Google Cloud and by leveraging different GPU accelerators across different regions, Codeway makes sure that its AI-based applications provide a seamless experience to their users, even as their user base grows to millions.
"We managed to scale Voi, our AI Avatar Portrait Maker, to a million users in just six days," says Arpaci. "With correct tooling and optimization on Google Cloud, we can easily duplicate and scale our workloads without issues."
Accelerating innovation with every app
At Codeway, speed and innovation go hand in hand. Turning technology into hit apps only works if you can do it quickly, and Google Cloud, along with the support from Global IT, enables the company to achieve just that. "As soon as we find a gap in the market, we want to launch an application within six weeks, and go from there," says Arpaci. "With Google Cloud, we can build, deploy, and scale applications quickly and cost-efficiently, and that's the basis of our success."
"As soon as we find a gap in the market, we want to launch an application within six weeks, and go from there. With Google Cloud, we can build, deploy, and scale applications quickly and cost-efficiently, and that's the basis of our success."
—Uğur Arpaci, Lead DevOps Engineer, CodewayTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Codeway
Codeway is an app development company that creates innovative apps and games, making state-of-the-art technology, such as AI, accessible to millions.
About Global IT
With 17 years of Google Cloud experience, Global IT helps businesses to excel in the cloud, offering close support from conception through implementation.