MWM Uses Google Cloud to Coordinate Its Growth Worldwide
About MWM
Founded in 2012 in Paris, MWM designs, develops, and markets music-related mobile apps and connected objects. Ranked among the top ten biggest developers of music apps in the world, MWM has had over 100 million downloads in 182 countries. The company is behind edjing Mix, the world's number one DJ application, which has been voted the Play Store's "Best App of the Year" multiple times. Thanks to the exponential progress of its apps, MWM achieved "Top Developer" status, which recognizes the best Android developers. Website: www.musicworldmedia.com
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Contact usWith Google Cloud, MWM can manage real-time development and deployment of its music apps, while gaining in-depth knowledge of its millions of customers.
Google Cloud results
- Optimizes downloads of all MWM apps
- Provides an overview of user behavior
- Helps improve the quality of code by freeing developers from infrastructure concerns
Since the launch of edjing Mix in 2012, the start-up has expanded its product portfolio to include another dozen or so apps. From karaoke and music players to quizzes, MWM's range of apps covers everything from specialist tools for DJs to music apps for the general public. Each one includes features for storing the user's preferences and playlists, saving mixes and karaoke performances, and even recommending music.
Hundreds of simultaneous downloads per second
From PaaS to IaaS
Since 2013, MWM has used the App Engine virtual servers to port the code for its apps, which are developed in Python. "This means we can focus on the quality of apps without being hampered by deployment, availability, updating, and maintenance issues," says Damien Delépine, Head of Cloud, Web & Big Data at MWM.
The company found that, on average, App Engine can process 300 to 500 requests per second, with peaks of up to 800 simultaneous connections. In 2016, MWM went one step further by changing a third of its services from a platform (PaaS) to a managed infrastructure (IaaS) and container (CaaS) method.
Compute Engine was then complemented by Google Kubernetes Engine. "The architecture of Google's container system separates the different parts of our apps while retaining a high-performance level,” says Damien. “In addition, it has been really easy for us to deploy and test new technologies, such as search engines, user configuration storage services, or even databases replicated on dozens of virtual servers."
Using software containers to separate roles isolates the process of each task within apps. This optimizes resources as the hardware configurations are adapted to each task's profile, according to what they consume the most: computing units, RAM, or storage. MWM currently uses around 40 servers, which are divided into four clusters that are optimized for containers.
"The architecture of Google's container system separates the different parts of our apps while retaining a high-performance level."
—Damien Delépine, Head of Cloud, Web & Big Data at MWMPorting code into Google Cloud is facilitated by Container Registry, which carries out runtime tests before building the apps and sending them into production. Persistent Disk retains important data and "reinjects" this into the production servers at any time.
Finally, "the Google Cloud operations suite monitoring service has quickly become an absolutely crucial decision-making tool,” says Damien. “For example, it revealed that our music-video player generates large outgoing data streams from our servers. We upgraded our apps and now compress this data. Stackdriver therefore contributes to our technical development planning and helps us control our costs."
One Vision
Since 2015, MWM has also used Google Cloud's analysis services to gain an overview of its apps and its customers. By analyzing hundreds of gigabytes of operating data each day, BigQuery highlights potential problems with specific features, regardless of the servers, databases, and mobile platforms (iOS, Android and Windows) concerned. Thanks to this comprehensive overview, the company has been able to improve user retention and monetization of its services.
In terms of marketing, BigQuery supplies community features: shared music lists, charts by genre or country, etc. "By linking BigQuery to the App Engine memory cache service, we are able to offer our users unbeatable service quality," says Damien.
"Google's product range is completely flexible: it gives us free rein over the deployment, coordination, and monitoring of our apps."
—Damien Delépine, Head of Cloud, Web & Big Data at MWMRelational and Non-Relational Databases
MWM uses Cloud SQL to store data from its app storefronts, user interfaces, its corporate website, and even its tutorials and FAQs. Syncing data between apps and data backup is performed using Cloud Storage, while Datastore unifies user accounts across all MWM applications.
Cloud Spanner is also used: "This is a standard but globally distributed relational database, which gives us the best of both worlds: SQL and non-SQL,” says Damien. “We followed the beta version closely, and will soon be using Spanner in production for one of our services."
"All in all, Google's product range is completely flexible: it gives us free rein over the deployment, coordination, and monitoring of our apps. It helps us get a better understanding of our customers and plan development of the features they want. It's an essential tool to help companies like ours in the mobile industry grow quickly," concludes Damien.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About MWM
Founded in 2012 in Paris, MWM designs, develops, and markets music-related mobile apps and connected objects. Ranked among the top ten biggest developers of music apps in the world, MWM has had over 100 million downloads in 182 countries. The company is behind edjing Mix, the world's number one DJ application, which has been voted the Play Store's "Best App of the Year" multiple times. Thanks to the exponential progress of its apps, MWM achieved "Top Developer" status, which recognizes the best Android developers. Website: www.musicworldmedia.com