Estante Mágica expands its image processing capacity and creates new chapters in its history
About Estante Mágica
Estante Mágica seeks to foster transformation through education. Partnering with schools, the company motivates children to write and illustrate their own books in class and celebrate the achievement of having a book produced by themselves with an autograph signing evening. It has impacted 1.5 million students in Brazil and other countries.
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About IPNET
IPNET is a Google Cloud partner in Latin America that helps other businesses grow with agile products and team training, seeking to bring tech development for its customers.
Estante Mágica transformed its cloud journey with Google Cloud, which made it possible to size resources, expand, and assess app performance.
Google Cloud results
- Easy solution management
- Scalability
- Fast app development for the production environment
- Cost savings from 10% to 15% after migrating
Increased image processing capacity by 4x
Estante Mágica is a social business that transforms stories written by students into books and videogames. This encourages reading and writing, as well as new ways to stimulate children’s creativity and self-reliance by turning them into the heroes of their own stories. Through partnerships with more than 20,000 schools, 1.5 million students from eight countries have already written and illustrated their own books.
Currently, the company works with a full home office model and has professionals in nearly every Brazilian state and in a few countries in the Americas and Europe. With a team of around 170 employees and a seasonal team, Estante Mágica is a completely free initiative for schools.
In that context, the organization views the use of technology as essential for driving and valuing education to advance educational processes on several fronts.
In 2019, the company decided to manage its technology differently. After creating an in-house tech team and receiving an invitation to take part in Google for Startups Accelerator (GFSA), new doors opened for Estante Mágica.
"We had a machine-learning-oriented project, and I can say that our experience in Google for Startups was split into three phases. In the first, we had training on cloud products. The second featured engineers from around the world who helped us a lot with the machine-learning model we wished to deploy. The final phase covered training for leaders and for the startup as a whole, with insights about management and leadership models," explains Luiz Eduardo Pereira, Estante Mágica’s CTO.
A new chapter in the company’s history
Besides its participation in GFSA, which gave the company new opportunities, Estante Mágica’s migration to Google Cloud was supported by IPNET. Basically, the goal was finding out which Google solutions were best suited for the business, besides dealing with cost controls and environment sizing.
To do that, IPNET worked together with Google Cloud’s team to move a traditional virtual machine and storage infrastructure hosted in another server without disrupting Estante Mágica’s operations.
"Everything went as expected. Our archive of books written by children had over 1 million files and a data volume of 20 TB - which was quite something - and it was successfully sent to Google Cloud without any issues throughout the process."
—Paulo Manaças, Infrastructure Coordinator, Estante MágicaToday, the company has a multichannel digital platform for schools to apply and deploy every stage in the project to help the children draw and write.
The path between web/mobile interfaces and the app’s backend uses Cloud DNS to manage the domain, Cloud Load Balancing for load balancing, Google Cloud Armor to protect the system, and API Gateway for API management.
The architecture also has a data intercommunication layer to connect the CRM system and provide insights for decision-making instances. There is also an external service to send information to third-party systems (e-commerce, payment systems, invoicing, etc.).
The platform’s internal layers and external services also feature a series of Google Cloud products - Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Eventarc, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Firestore, and BigQuery - for various purposes.
"A major positive impact for us was accessing tools that were still in beta. Today we’re proud of having followed their development and having a platform running exclusively on Google Cloud."
—Paulo Manaças, Infrastructure Coordinator, Estante MágicaDevelopment as an enabler for expansion
As a result, some of Estante Mágica’s apps were created inside Google Cloud. The benefits include expense controls, easy solution management, and support from an environment providing security and scalability.
"Other advantages can be seen in the processing capacity for images created by students and sent by schools through Estante Mágica’s platform. In 2018, that capacity was 360,000 images every day. After migrating, it increased about four times."
—Luiz Eduardo Pereira, CTO, Estante MágicaThe book layout design process was also significantly accelerated. The time needed to gather every image and text and format a book went from 60 to four seconds.
The quick app development for the production environment and the integration with other solutions were also important benefits the company mentioned. Moreover, thanks to an improved monitoring of financial expenses, Estante Mágica achieved cost savings from 10% to 15% with the cloud.
In the future, the company wants to expand usability for cloud resources, leverage microservices components smartly, and invest more time in observability and scaling, without neglecting a crucial element: security requirements.
"These past two years have been really challenging for education because of the pandemic. We expect a recovery in 2022 and are very confident about Estante Mágica’s growth. With more products, you have more solutions for both schools and students. We aim to leverage all that to reach our goal of impacting 1 billion children and becoming a global platform," says the CTO.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Estante Mágica
Estante Mágica seeks to foster transformation through education. Partnering with schools, the company motivates children to write and illustrate their own books in class and celebrate the achievement of having a book produced by themselves with an autograph signing evening. It has impacted 1.5 million students in Brazil and other countries.
About IPNET
IPNET is a Google Cloud partner in Latin America that helps other businesses grow with agile products and team training, seeking to bring tech development for its customers.