Smartproxy began its migration to Google Cloud in 2022. With Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the backbone of its infrastructure, Smartproxy now has a reliable system with built-in redundancy, meaning that if one of its instances fails, it can switch traffic to another instance, with no impact on the availability of its services for its customers. 

Smartproxy’s product development pipeline has become smoother, too. The company is adding automated tests to its continuous integration pipelines, using blue-green deployments to ensure that if anything goes wrong, it will automatically revert to the previous version. This allows Smartproxy to release new features more safely. And because GKE is a managed service, there is no need for Smartproxy’s engineers to spend valuable time maintaining, provisioning, and updating its servers, while the reduction in downtime means customers benefit from a higher availability of services.

“With Google Cloud, we have a more stable system,” says Justinas Tamaševičius, Head of Engineering at Smartproxy. “That’s good for our developers and it's good for our customers too because it means they can use our services without crashes.” 

At the same time, Smartproxy can control its cloud expenditure more effectively as GKE is more cost efficient than its previous on-premise architecture. Its autoscaling feature allows Smartproxy to automatically scale its resources up and down to meet the peaks and troughs in demand, meaning the company only ever pays for what it uses.

BigQuery also helps the Smartproxy marketing team understand how its campaigns are performing and optimize them accordingly. With BigQuery, Smartproxy can gain insights on a wide range of key metrics such as conversion rates, cost-per-acquisition, and lifetime value of customers to understand the efficiency of their marketing spend and make strategic decisions around customer targeting and campaign performance. The marketing team also uses Looker Studio in combination with BigQuery to generate user-friendly reports and graphs to track the performance of campaigns and report back to stakeholders across the business.

When Smartproxy migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud, it knew it would experience latency in its systems for as long as its relational database remained on premise. Smartproxy decided to migrate its relational database to Cloud SQL, but with the database handling all the company’s application and user data, the company needed to handle the migration in the safest possible way to minimize downtime. 

With the Database Migration Service from Google Cloud, Smartproxy simplified the migration, with continuous data replication allowing it to keep its databases in sync to ensure a smooth transition with minimal disruption to services. 

With its relational database now in the cloud with Cloud SQL, Smartproxy’s services operate with low latency once more. The fact that the database is managed by Google Cloud also means downtime is minimized for users, while Smartproxy engineers save time they used to spend maintaining its on-premise database.

“Google Cloud enables us to focus on delivering business value. It has helped to accelerate our development times, because our engineers and developers are free to work on developing and deploying new user features instead of managing our infrastructure,” explains Tamaševičius.