Gorillas: Delivering a scalable, secure, and reliable on-demand grocery service fed by the cloud
About Gorillas
Gorillas is a grocery delivery company offering immediate access to essential needs. Founded in 2020, it has rapidly expanded from its native Berlin to offer services in 55 cities worldwide. It delivers groceries to millions of homes within minutes.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usOn-demand grocery delivery service Gorillas turned to Google Cloud when its existing infrastructure was unable to cope with the demands of its rapid expansion.
Google Cloud results
- Scales without incurring additional costs
- Ensures secure communication between head office and frontline staff
- Reduces DevOps waiting times from 15 minutes to seven minutes
- Enables migration without any downtime or disruption to customers
- Secures future growth plans for the company
Enables growth to 10,000 employees using Google Workspace
Online shopping has forever changed the way we think about retail. Consumers now demand greater choice and convenience, coupled with ever-faster delivery times. This concept has moved a step further when it comes to food, with the rise of a new wave of on-demand grocery delivery services that promise to have goods to your doorstep in a matter of minutes. Investors are also keen, reportedly spending $14 billion on hyper-local startups since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the hope of cashing in on an industry valued at $1 trillion in the U.S. and more than €2 trillion in Europe.
Chief among them is Gorillas, a company born out of a love for cycling. As a business built by delivery people, rather than a delivery firm built by business people, Gorillas stands apart from its competitors. It’s also the fastest startup to achieve unicorn status in its native Germany.
“Once we decided to migrate our infrastructure, there was no question of who we would partner with. Google Cloud offers the best solutions on the market so, for us, the decision was clear from the beginning.
—Jan Schmid, Director of IT & IT Security, GorillasGorillas employs thousands of staff, both in its warehouses and as riders. The legacy infrastructure Gorillas was using wasn’t up to the task of scaling reliably, securely, and effectively, particularly in terms of cost, to meet the growing demands of deploying communication and collaboration tools to this burgeoning workforce. Gorillas turned to Google Cloud for the solution.
“Once we decided to migrate our infrastructure, there was no question of who we would partner with,” explains Jan Schmidt, Director of IT and IT Security at Gorillas. “Google Cloud offers the best solutions on the market so, for us, the decision was clear from the beginning.”
“Google Workspace is awesome. It’s always running, and we never experience any outages. We’ve had the greatest experience since we implemented it, particularly with user management and the admin console. Managing our licensing to meet the demands of our workforce has also been a cost-effective and painless process.”
—Jan Schmid, Director of IT & IT Security, GorillasDeveloping effective company-wide communication with Google Workspace
Gorillas had an existing relationship with Google Cloud, having already adopted Google Workspace for its collaboration and productivity solutions. The company also worked with implementation partner Sastrify, whose approachable, collaborative style made it stand out from other available choices. Google Workspace now enables staff at head office and warehouses to communicate effectively with the entire company.
The company began using the Business Standard edition of Google Workspace but, thanks to its swift growth, soon switched to Enterprise Plus. This allowed Gorillas to do even more with its information, identities, applications, and devices, all while remaining secure in Google Cloud. That included unlimited cloud storage for the Google Workspace suite of solutions, such as Gmail, Google Chat, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Meet, and Google Slides. It also enabled it to take advantage of more advanced features, such as the Secure LDAP service and SAML SSO integration.
“Google Workspace is awesome,” adds Schmidt. “It’s always running, and we never experience any outages. We’ve had the greatest experience since we implemented it, particularly with user management and the admin console. Managing our licensing to meet the demands of our workforce has also been a cost-effective and painless process.”
Migrating to Google Cloud with confidence
When Gorillas began life, it relied on a third-party platform using last-mile delivery companies to power its service. Its founders knew that it would need to leverage a new custom infrastructure, however, if the startup was to grow and find its freedom. Thanks to the positive impacts the company enjoyed when adopting Google Workspace, Google Cloud seemed like a natural fit for this project. Because of these experiences, Schmidt says, Gorillas was confident that Google Cloud could deliver similar scalability, reliability, and security benefits.
Streamlining development processes with a new infrastructure
That’s not to say that the decision to move to Google Cloud was without its challenges, particularly in terms of addressing expectations among colleagues. Google Cloud was new territory for many who had significant expertise with other providers but had never worked with Google Cloud. Josef Azizov, Lead DevOps Engineer at Gorillas, says any fears that colleagues may have had quickly dissipated, however, once they saw what was possible with the new infrastructure.
Azizov and his team have been able to take existing parts of their previous platform, including Cloud SQL, which their previous third-party provider had been using, as part of its setup for managing relational databases. It used Google Cloud’s Database Migration Service to conduct a continuous migration of information. Parts of the previous arrangement were also reconfigured to add efficiencies, while entirely replacing third-party solutions and processes that were no longer suitable with Google Cloud solutions; BigQuery was chosen for the data warehouse, for example.
“In the beginning, there was some trepidation,” Azizov explains, “but the migration was straightforward and our knowledge was easily transferable. We were able to get up and running quickly and we never had any downtime. That was particularly impressive and something that’s really important to us, as we wanted to get our new product to market as quickly as possible without any disruption to our customers.”
The benefits of the new Google Cloud infrastructure have continued since the migration, Azizov says, adding that the team’s been especially impressed with how much faster and more flexible it is. One area that’s particularly seen the benefit is DevOps, where Azizov and his team of software engineers and developers have seen significant improvements, particularly in reducing the time spent waiting for processes to complete jobs from 15 minutes to around seven.
“We’ve really streamlined our development processes,” he adds, “which means we can deliver value to our customers quickly, particularly in terms of new features. Google Cloud has also enabled us to release updates on a daily basis across our apps, back end, and so on.”
Deploying powerful solutions with Google Kubernetes Engine
Gorillas now uses multiple Google Cloud solutions to power its business functions. Central to this process is Google Kubernetes Engine, which the company uses to automatically deploy, scale, and manage its app containers, freeing up its developers to work on other projects. It combines this with Container Registry for managing Docker container images. All of this has resulted in an optimization of the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline at Gorillas.
“Our Google Kubernetes Engine cluster is very important for us,” says Azizov. “It runs all our workloads in multiple environments, including development testing and production, as well as all our services. Everything that we can run on Google Kubernetes Engine, we do. Any time that you can shave off, from the moment that you commit code to the moment that it's all available in an environment, is very valuable time for us.”
“We’re still in the early stages for Gorillas. We’ve made huge changes, and the results have been transformative, but there’s always more. Google Cloud provides us with so many solutions. We’re excited to see what more it can offer.”
—Jan Schmid, Director of IT & IT Security, GorillasLooking forward to an exciting future
Gorillas has come a long way in a short period of time, and Azizov and Schmidt see great potential in the company’s future. They also believe that Google Cloud will play a crucial role in driving their plans forward. This includes continuing to migrate legacy applications and data to Google Cloud, while exploring the full range of solutions that the platform has to offer and deepening its relationship with Google Workspace.
Enhanced security measures are a uniting theme on both fronts, with Azizov keen to implement a Zero Trust model, a decision he says has been heavily influenced by his discussions with Google Cloud on the company’s changing needs. Schmidt, meanwhile, is hoping to expand the use of the Secure LDAP Service, combining it with a FreeRADIUS server setup linked to Cloud Identity, to provide even more secure communication and collaboration over WiFi at warehouses and Gorillas’ headquarters.
Schmidt adds: “We’re still in the early stages for Gorillas. We’ve made huge changes, and the results have been transformative, but there’s always more. Google Cloud provides us with so many solutions. We’re excited to see what more it can offer.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Gorillas
Gorillas is a grocery delivery company offering immediate access to essential needs. Founded in 2020, it has rapidly expanded from its native Berlin to offer services in 55 cities worldwide. It delivers groceries to millions of homes within minutes.