Statsig: Fueling innovation through a powerful experimentation and feature management platform
About Statsig
Based in Bellevue, Washington, Statsig provides developers with a feature management, experimentation, and analytics platform to reduce costs and time-to-market for new innovations while improving productivity and collaboration across development teams.
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About Datadog
Datadog, a Google Cloud partner, provides observability and security solutions for applications, servers, databases, tools, and more through a cloud-based, SaaS data analytics platform.
Statsig uses Google Cloud solutions and the Datadog observability platform to dramatically reduce IT costs while expanding its experimentation and feature management services.
Google Cloud results
- Supports a 10X increase in QPS and API-related data volume ingestion
- Enhances customer SOAs by achieving 99.99% reliability
- At least 50% decrease in end-to-end API latency across all regions
- Reduces in-memory data storage costs by 70%
- Creates new business opportunities through Google Cloud Marketplace
80% reduction in IT costs
Experimentation is a foundation of IT innovation, and the more teams can test and try new things, the better chance they'll discover the next big breakthrough. Enabling developers to succeed requires affordable, intuitive, and agile platforms so they can efficiently experiment and manage new apps and features.
This is where Statsig comes in. The company launched in 2021 to create a one-stop shop for product developers to access everything they need for feature development and management, as well as analytics. Enabling experimentation was a focus from the beginning.
"One of our main competitive advantages is the ease with which developers can experiment within our platform," says Jason Wang, Lead Software Engineer at Statsig. "We provide feature flag integration to more naturally aid discovery, as well as an intuitive console to interact with data and interpret results without a full data science team. We have an incredible engineering team and the speed that they can respond to customer requests is mind-blowing."
After first building its platform on another cloud, Statsig decided to migrate to Google Cloud with the help of its long-time observability partner, and Google Cloud partner, Datadog.
Seeking greater speed, cost efficiency, and reliability
Statsig was primarily concerned about data management costs when it first looked at other cloud providers. The company manages terabytes of data daily, while its customers require enormous amounts of computation and need their experimentation results within a day or less. The legacy cloud provider could not keep up with growth or deliver at the speed Statsig's customers require.
"We started our first Google Cloud project with BigQuery, and that's now the foundation for our data infrastructure and computational capabilities," says Wang. "From there, we wanted to explore the full suite of Google Cloud products, with the API-focused services critical to our decision given how important APIs are to our business."
Core Statsig services, such as feature flags, are deemed as critical services to Statsig's customers. The underlying platform is essential to help the team meet customers' expectations. As a Kubernetes-first team from its beginning, Statsig uses many Kubernetes and its ecosystem features to ensure its engineering excellency. Therefore, the support of cloud-native features is a key to the team when choosing a provider. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provides more support for cloud-native APIs than the other cloud providers Statsig considered.
"Moving over to Google Cloud allowed us to embrace more open-source technologies and adopt APIs with open standards, which make our lives a lot easier as we develop new capabilities and operate existing functionalities," says Wang. "Now, our core API service and computation of data from customers all take place within Google Cloud. This helps from a cost-efficiency standpoint and simplifies managing and maintaining our infrastructure. We see a lot more reliability and stability than we had in the past."
From an additional savings perspective, Memorystore for Redis reduces costs associated with in-memory data store services by 70% compared to Statsig's legacy provider. The company can now transact two million queries per second (QPS).
Additionally, as Statsig works to abstract infrastructure in such a way that makes its engineers' lives easier, the company's developers have started using Gemini for collaboration to build, develop, and manage new components of the company's core platform. The use of Gemini facilitates the migration to Google Cloud and the adoption throughout the company, making it a lot simpler for developers to onboard the new platform.
Easing migration through the right partnership
Statsig has worked with Datadog since it first launched, a relation that has proved essential once the company decided to migrate from its legacy cloud provider to Google Cloud. Datadog is skilled across clouds and eases the lift-and-shift migration of all infrastructure and data capabilities through its observability platform.
"Datadog is a great observability partner, and it's very easy to integrate the platform with our workloads. They also provide real-time ingestion of a lot of metrics that are critical to the operations of our core API service."
—Jason Wang, Lead Software Engineer, StatsigGoogle Cloud-native Datadog integrations gave Statsig the freedom to onboard new Google Cloud services without concerns over pipeline observability, monitoring, and alerts. After the earlier migrations to BigQuery and GKE, Statsig leveraged Datadog observability to expedite subsequent platform migration and maintain performance through dashboards and alerts.
"Neither our customers nor our engineers working on user interfaces and customer consoles noticed that we migrated because of how seamlessly Datadog helped us to manage the move," says Wang. "Datadog is a great observability partner, and it's very easy to integrate with the platform with our workloads. They also support real-time ingestion of a lot of metrics that are critical to the operations of our core API service."
As Statsig has a relatively small team, with 70 employees total, including 30 engineers, the high volume and variety of native Datadog integrations alleviate the need to create ad-hoc solutions and keep Statsig focused on customer experience and platform improvements.
Scaling the platform to empower developers
As a young company, Statsig focuses on running as lean of an operation as possible. Datadog and Google Cloud enable it to do so without sacrificing new business opportunities.
"We can seamlessly handle big increases in load from new customers, which is invaluable for a company of our size," says Wang. "It's been a huge advantage of standardizing on Google Cloud and Datadog solutions and allows us to grow our business with a lot fewer restraints."
—Jason Wang, Lead Software Engineer, Statsig"As a startup, everything in our IT stack can quickly become too expensive, but Google Cloud provides easy-to-use, cost-effective tools that save us time and money," says Wang. "The granularity of billing in Google Cloud is exceptional and puts a lot of control in our hands."
BigQuery, Dataproc, Kubernetes Engine, and other Google Cloud solutions have helped Statsig's platform achieve a 10X increase in QPS while ingesting 10X more data. With bigger names beginning to use the Statsig platform, load balancing in Google Cloud increases stability and avoids problematic increases in spend.
"We can seamlessly handle big increases in load from new customers, which is invaluable for a company of our size," says Wang. "It's been a huge advantage of standardizing on Google Cloud and Datadog solutions and allows us to grow our business with a lot fewer restraints."
"Google Cloud leads the way in most every aspect of modernizing and transforming cloud infrastructure. And with partners like Datadog, it's a win-win for us at Statsig."
—Jason Wang, Lead Software Engineer, StatsigPlatform optimizations amid the migration to Google Cloud have cut overall IT costs by 80%, and Statsig has been able to pass those savings on to customers. Reliability has likewise improved to help Statsig achieve at least 99.99% versus just 99.9% reliability.
Also important, Statsig is now on Google Cloud Marketplace, which enhances its ability to manage sales operations, approve orders, create private offers, and gain greater visibility in the market. The inclusion on Google Cloud Marketplace translates to greater satisfaction among Statsig customers and prospects because of the flexibility to transact through the marketplace.
All of these improvements combine as part of a platform that empowers companies to experiment and manage application features more affordably, effectively, and quickly.
"Even the computational capabilities in Google Cloud are far more modern than other options out there," says Wang. "Google Cloud leads the way in most every aspect of modernizing and transforming cloud infrastructure. And with partners like Datadog, it's a win-win for us at Statsig."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Statsig
Based in Bellevue, Washington, Statsig provides developers with a feature management, experimentation, and analytics platform to reduce costs and time-to-market for new innovations while improving productivity and collaboration across development teams.
About Datadog
Datadog, a Google Cloud partner, provides observability and security solutions for applications, servers, databases, tools, and more through a cloud-based, SaaS data analytics platform.