Jellyfish: Reaching thousands of freelancers with Google Cloud
About Jellyfish
Jellyfish is a digital marketing consultancy and Google Cloud partner that specializes in leading digital transformation projects. It has 40 offices spread across the UK, US, EU, APAC region, and South Africa, serving some of the world’s biggest clients.
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Contact usDigital marketing agency Jellyfish made its essential content production platform three times faster for thousands of APAC users by migrating to Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces cost per development environment by 50%
- Encrypts data at rest automatically to help secure personal data
- Improves reliability and availability for growing global client base
3x faster platform speeds across the APAC region
When it comes to content, local knowledge is essential for brands looking to make an impact online. A joke that makes people laugh in Madrid might fall flat in Mexico City, which is why global marketing and digital transformation partner Jellyfish maintains a truly global presence, with 40 offices around the world, from Seoul to São Paolo, ensuring that messages and methods are tailored to their respective markets.
One of the key tools in that mission is ContentPlace, the Jellyfish content production platform. When a fashion brand or online retailer wants to launch a new collection, for example, it requires localized text written for every item, covering everything from product descriptions to technical specifications. Using ContentPlace, Jellyfish can reach out to a creative network of 10,000 registered and assessed freelancers in 4,000 cities, working in more than 75 languages, to get the job done fast.
“ContentPlace is the world's leading performance content production platform for ecommerce businesses,” says Sébastien Chateau, Product Director at Jellyfish. “Our model produces consistently high-quality content in any language at speed and scale, based on a powerful combination of advanced technology and the world's best creative talent.”
“Our content production platform ran from an on-premises data center in France, but it serves clients all around the world and is developed by a team in Bangalore. Switching to the Google Cloud network eliminates our latency problems and gives our development team much more freedom to evolve the application.”
—Sébastien Chateau, Product Director, JellyfishThe ContentPlace web application is what makes that possible. For freelancers, it is a place to register availability, take proficiency tests, and receive work. While for Jellyfish production teams, it serves as a hub for sourcing local talent, tracking progress on projects, and managing cost margins in real time. So when performance issues and lag began to make ContentPlace less responsive for users, particularly in the dynamic APAC region, Jellyfish decided to migrate from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud.
“Our content production platform ran from an on-premises data center in France, but it serves clients all around the world and is developed by a team in Bangalore,” explains Sébastien. “Switching to the Google Cloud network eliminates our latency problems and gives our development team much more freedom to evolve the application.”
“We love the way that Cloud Storage encryption comes as standard. We have to work with a lot of personal data, such as addresses and phone numbers, and previously paid extra for encryption. And with multi-zone deployment, we have failovers ready and are GDPR compliant. It’s all made easy.”
—Sébastien Chateau, Product Director, JellyfishA global network for a global business
Latency is a concern for any organization operating at a distance from its data centers. For Jellyfish, running the ContentPlace platform from on-premises servers in France resulted in performance problems in the APAC region, where the company was growing fast. In addition to latency issues, the architecture proved difficult to scale, time-consuming to maintain, and expensive to run. Slow response times also hampered updates to the platform from the Bangalore-based development team, who could only work with one or two environments at a time.
To resolve these issues, Jellyfish chose to migrate ContentPlace to Google Cloud. “Jellyfish is a Google Cloud partner, so we knew that Google Cloud services would meet the challenge,” says Dia Al Jrab, VP of Engineering. “And we knew that by choosing the right Google Cloud services, we would be able to have a positive impact on costs as well.”
The new architecture for the application was designed in close consultation with the developers of the platform, using Terraform in order to simplify the process of building, changing, and versioning. “With a new infrastructure based on Google Kubernetes Engine, the team creates new development environments with the availability and scalability the developers need, while to facilitate a continuous integration and delivery approach to development, changes are provisioned with Jenkins.” says Wail Laiouar, Cloud Engineer.
For the freelancers who use the platform, user experience is optimized, thanks to a number of Google Cloud products. Migrating the ContentPlace database to Cloud SQL improves reliability to speed up the loading of the web pages, it also offers database backups. Cloud CDN helps ensure fast content delivery and offers detailed data on local latencies, thanks to connections through their nearest region on the Google Cloud network. While Memorystore reduces latencies further still, with application caches that provide sub-millisecond data access.
“We love the way that Cloud Storage encryption comes as standard,” says Sébastien. “We have to work with personal data, such as addresses and phone numbers, and previously paid extra for encryption. And with multi-zone deployment, we have failovers ready and are GDPR compliant. It’s all made easy.”
“We can really rely on Google Cloud to work, in a hands-off way. Google Kubernetes Engine automatically scales up if we have a surge of interest. And there’s enhanced security, a fast network, and failsafe backups, so that even if there were a serious problem, we could restore everything immediately.”
—Dia Al Jrab, VP, Engineering, JellyfishFaster platform, lower costs
Jellyfish reports a 300% increase in the speed of the platform for users in the APAC region. And as well as making it easier for developers to deploy new environments, the new architecture delivers a cost reduction per environment of 50%, dramatically reducing the costs of development work.
“Now, with the new deployment pipeline, we are able to develop more features, deliver them faster, and test them faster,” says Dia. Currently, the team is working on a feature that will recognize upcoming projects and provide real-time information on appropriate, available freelancers currently on the platform.
“We can really rely on Google Cloud to work, in a hands-off way,” says Dia. “Google Kubernetes Engine automatically scales up if we have a surge of interest. And there’s enhanced security, a fast network, and failsafe backups, so that even if there were a serious problem, we could restore everything immediately.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Jellyfish
Jellyfish is a digital marketing consultancy and Google Cloud partner that specializes in leading digital transformation projects. It has 40 offices spread across the UK, US, EU, APAC region, and South Africa, serving some of the world’s biggest clients.