Philips Hue: Lighting the world with Google Cloud
About Philips Hue
Created as a spin-off from Philips Lighting in 2016, Signify is a Dutch company specializing in lighting design and production. A leader in its market, the company operates in over 180 countries and employs around 35,000 people. In 2021, its revenue topped €6.5 billion.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usSignify (formerly known as Philips Lighting) is a global leader in lighting and smart home solutions, with over 35,000 employees and operations in over 180 countries. With the mission to unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world, Philips Hue- one of Signify's brands, delivers millions of smart and connected light bulbs to their customers every year. Philips Hue uses Google Cloud to manage its millions of Hue Bridges around the world efficiently. Google's highly secure, powerful, and scalable platform is also extremely cost-efficient—the company has reduced its operating costs by 40% with Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Reactivity for rollouts and incident resolution
- Dynamic, automated scaling management
- 40% additional future cost reductions by using new Managed Services, Compute Tau VMs, and Committed Use Discounts (CUDs)
40% reduction in Device Management Cloud spend by migrating to Google Cloud
Created from the spin-off and initial public offering of Philips' lighting business in May 2016, Signify is the world leader in lighting for professionals, consumers, and the Internet of Things. With operations in over 180 countries, the company already has millions of connected smart light points around the world. In 2018, two years after the initial public offering, it changed its name from Philips Lighting to Signify. But regardless of the rebranding, Philips Hue stayed true to its 2016 decision to orient its strategy toward the cloud, by initially choosing to move legacy backend services supporting the connected lights business to Google Cloud solutions and services.
"When we're managing millions of smart objects around the world, we don't just need security, high performance, and scalability. We also need optimized infrastructure costs, without which we couldn't ensure the competitive pricing of our offering. Google Cloud gives us all that, as well as the power of innovation."
—Pedro Torrao, Cloud Solutions Architect at SignifyBuilding a growth strategy with a trusted partner
"When we're managing millions of smart objects around the world, we don't just need security, high performance, and scalability. We also need optimized infrastructure costs, without which we couldn't ensure the competitive pricing of our offering. Google Cloud gives us all that, as well as the power of innovation," says Pedro Torrao, Cloud Solutions Architect at Signify.
The global nature of Philips Hue's operations presents a challenge in itself. The company provides the highest levels of service quality for its connected lighting services. As a result it depends on highly available, resilient, and also elastic Cloud infrastructure and services that can follow different lighting usage patterns around the globe. Philips Hue's mission is to unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. With energy-efficient lighting products, systems, and services, its customers enjoy superior light quality and people live more safely and comfortably. Philips Hue harnesses the extraordinary potential of light to enrich the quality of people's lives and for a sustainable world.
This wide array of services is underpinned by Philips Hue's IoT Device Management Solution, a secure and scalable IoT platform that supports millions of connected devices. It provides a complete set of services to provision and to operate a fleet of millions of always-connected devices all around the world with virtually unlimited scaling possibilities and maximum availability. Based on both managed and in-house developed services it implements cutting edge Cloud Native concepts and was designed using Google Cloud solutions throughout.
Google Cloud for secure, high-performance architecture at a competitive price
From the very beginning, Philips Hue IoT Cloud teams opted for a microservices architecture and containerization, a design model that offers great flexibility in terms of granular scaling. This precise and targeted granular resource management not only enables performance to be optimized, but also improves overall efficiency and operating costs. Then, "Kubernetes naturally became a necessity and Google Cloud was an obvious choice. As the original creator of Kubernetes, Google Cloud has—in the form of GKE—the most advanced implementation and a fully managed environment. That means we can focus on our core task of creating innovative lighting services and delegate infrastructure management to Google Cloud," explains Hafid Azoumi.
"Kubernetes naturally became a necessity and Google Cloud was the obvious choice. As the original creator of Kubernetes, Google Cloud has—in the form of GKE—the most advanced implementation and a fully managed environment. That means we can focus on our core task of creating innovative lighting services and delegate infrastructure management to Google Cloud."
—Hafid Azoumi, Senior Cloud Engineer at SignifyPhilips Hue IoT Device Management Solution is currently distributed across 20 clusters around the world, including development, testing, and staging environments. The production clusters experience huge variations in load, as they can range from 15 to 100 VMs. At peak times, each cluster can come close to 1,000 pods—put simply, 1,000 app instances. To manage these load fluctuations dynamically, Philips Hue IoT Cloud mainly uses Tau VMs, a service forming part of Compute Engine. Designed for horizontal scaling and high performance, they have the potential to further reduce Compute costs by 40% within a year.
"Google Cloud plays a pivotal role in facilitating the design and implementation of our scalable, highly available, and reliable architecture for IoT services at a global scale. By leveraging Google Cloud services and resources, we are able to rapidly produce top quality solutions matching all our customer's expectations and at an optimized cost," says Pedro Torrao.
At the same time, Philips Hue IoT Cloud also uses Google Cloud to ensure the security of its applications and protect its customers. This is especially critical given that, as Pedro Torrao says, "The IoT, by definition, comprises smart objects, which need connectivity at all times. And therefore provide a greater attack surface which makes it imperative to "shift-left" on security. The security tools provided by Google Cloud give us a first line assessment of the state of all our services and infrastructure, including recommendations, allowing us to quickly react and make sure that we keep providing our customers with the most secure services."
Strengthening innovation with Google Cloud services
Since Philips Hue launched in 2012, they are still pleased with the choice for Google Cloud that enabled them to manage their global service offering efficiently using a relatively small cloud team. Pedro Torrao sees this success as being underpinned, in part, by the highly automated nature of the processes put in place thanks to Google Cloud tools, including the Pub/Sub messaging service. The accessibility of Google Cloud, thanks to its APIs (among other things), has also contributed to the extremely high degree of automation. An example of this is how Philips Hue IoT Cloud has easily incorporated its development environments and its continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines into Google Cloud.
"We have great ambitions for the use of Google Cloud services. We are actively exploring solutions like integrations between GKE services and Redis Cluster to improve the performance of our services and provide the expected top level customer experience. That is part of our vision, to keep innovating and exploring new and exciting possibilities."
—Obaid Habib, Senior Cloud Engineer at SignifyHaving tackled device management, Philips Hue is ready to break new ground with additional scalable services and new Google service offerings. "One of our top priorities is to maintain low latencies, so we are currently investigating the possibility of using Google's managed Redis cluster. By using Redis Cluster, we can enhance the performance of our Device Management microservices and streamline their interactions within the multi-cluster MQTT services," says Obaid Habib, Signify Senior Cloud Engineer.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Philips Hue
Created as a spin-off from Philips Lighting in 2016, Signify is a Dutch company specializing in lighting design and production. A leader in its market, the company operates in over 180 countries and employs around 35,000 people. In 2021, its revenue topped €6.5 billion.