Kahoot!: Gamifying learning for 30 million people with the help of Google Cloud
About Kahoot!
Kahoot! is a learning and engagement platform with the mission of making learning awesome for everyone, including children, students, and employees.
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About Nordcloud
Google Cloud Managed Service Provider Nordcloud helps customers optimize infrastructure, applications, and data on Google Cloud.
Kahoot! uses Google Cloud technologies with the help of Managed Services Provider Nordcloud to scale its interactive learning platform and drive commercial growth.
Google Cloud results
- Enables data democratization through a self-service business intelligence platform
- Accelerates business analytics queries
- Runs 200 crucial microservices
Doubled users from 15 to 30 million in 18 months
Kahoot! is a popular learning and engagement platform that empowers learners of all ages to unlock their full learning potential through its game-based learning solutions suitable for schools, teachers, students, families, and businesses of all sizes. In the last twelve months, over 9 million teachers worldwide boosted classroom participation with Kahoot! while 97% of Fortune 500 companies leverage the platform for training and team building. Kahoot! has hosted hundreds of millions of learning sessions with 8 billion participants (non-unique) in more than 200 countries since its launch.
"In the last decade Kahoot! has transformed the learning experience of everyone. Our products and solutions are great for breaking the ice in multiple settings whether it’s the classroom, at social events, or during a Monday morning meeting. Our secret sauce is to develop game-based learning solutions that combine social interaction and friendly competition capable of engaging everyone in the same room physically, or in hybrid/remote settings," says Jostein Håvaldsrud, Chief Technology Officer at Kahoot!.
Kahoot! relies on secure, low-latency Google Cloud solutions—including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and BigQuery—to cost-effectively scale its learning platform and efficiently deliver educational services to over 30 million users. Kahoot! also partners with Managed Service Provider Nordcloud for advisory support that helps fine-tune their Google Cloud features and business processes.
"Google Cloud seamlessly integrates hosting of Kahoot!-services, Google services and analytics services—making it easy for us to conduct anonymous analysis on the same platform as we are hosting our product."
—Jostein Håvaldsrud, Chief Technology Officer, Kahoot!Enhancing reliability and customer insights with Google Cloud
Before Google Cloud, Kahoot! leveraged virtual machines (VMs) in a way that we could not grow at the pace users increasingly used our products during peak hours.
"The challenge for us is to always deliver a great experience for the millions of users who play Kahoot! at key times of the day," says Håvaldsrud. "With Google Cloud we have been able to scale our capacity to deliver the Kahoot! experience in a faster and more secure way."
Kahoot! aimed to better track engagement and develop new services and features that matched customer preferences.
"Creating actionable business analytics often took hours or even days," recalls Håvaldsrud. "We wanted a more efficient way to run analytic queries on large datasets and visualize meaningful insights."
Kahoot! chose Google Cloud and Google Cloud Managed Service Provider Nordcloud to help scale its educational platform. "Nordcloud has a proven track record of empowering companies to grow on Google Cloud," explains Håvaldsrud. "We rely on Nordcloud’s expertise to help us choose the Google Cloud solutions that best fit our budget and performance requirements."
Nordcloud demonstrated how Google Cloud could support more reliable service delivery during peak times and efficiently scale to reach millions of customers, as well as its interoperability with other Google products like Google Classroom and Google Meet.
"Kahoot! seamlessly integrates with Google Classroom and Google Meet," adds Håvaldsrud. "BigQuery is a great tool for us to handle the amount of data we use to anonymously analyze the user journey of both, on the ecommerce journey of signup and the buying process and also how educators use our products. With BigQuery we are able to run a modern data analysis operation making decisions based on real-time data to improve our products."
"Cloud Storage protects our data against leaks and compromises. If regional outages occur, our applications seamlessly access data in other locations."
—Jostein Håvaldsrud, Chief Technology Officer, Kahoot!Supporting 26.7 million users
Kahoot! worked with Google Cloud to expand its library to reach more than 100 million kahoots generated by users and partners and more than 75 million public kahoots available for free. The company continues to expand its offerings by scaling up Kahoot! Academy, and by launching the Kahoot! Marketplace, a digital space where content creators can create, share, and monetize their content.
Kahoot! also powers its internal business analytics with BigQuery and Pub/Sub, running complex queries on terabytes of data in seconds. "We automatically ingest analytic events and stream them to BigQuery with Dataflow," says Håvaldsrud. "With Google Cloud, we run business analytics at high speeds without any waiting time while visualizing meaningful, actionable data on rich, interactive dashboards and reports."
To support high-availability and protect user privacy, Kahoot! securely stores crucial data on Cloud Storage while taking advantage of key features such as granular access control, automated lifecycle management and automatic data encryption. "Cloud Storage protects our data against leaks and compromises," explains Håvaldsrud. "If regional outages occur, our applications seamlessly access data in other locations."
Kahoot! continues to evaluate additional Google Cloud solutions—such as Looker—with the help of Nordcloud. "Combining BigQuery with Looker further refines the analysis and visualization of data across clouds and applications," concludes Therese Olafsen Mørck, Country Leader, Nordcloud. "Actionable business analytics generated by Google Cloud can empower Kahoot! in the next commercialisation phases of their products and make learning awesome for learners of all ages"
"Actionable business analytics generated by Google Cloud empower Kahoot! to serve its 26.7 million active users."
—Therese Olafsen Mørck, Country Leader, NordcloudTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Kahoot!
Kahoot! is a learning and engagement platform with the mission of making learning awesome for everyone, including children, students, and employees.
About Nordcloud
Google Cloud Managed Service Provider Nordcloud helps customers optimize infrastructure, applications, and data on Google Cloud.