Trakto leverages Firebase, Cloud Run, and Cloud Storage to expand and map out its development
About Trakto
Trakto is a design platform focused on entrepreneurs and businesses. With its geolocalized template gallery and its drag-and-drop editor, the company helps over 60,000 entrepreneurs build and improve their business communication using design as a tool.
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Contact usAfter migration, the startup segmented its services further and opened new possibilities, increasing the speed of its response to issues, availability for its customers, and number of launches.
Results
- Capability to manage over 50 TB of images
- Always available platforms, with nearly zero downtime
- 40% reduction in the time to develop and maintain microservices and back end
New version deployments increased by 60%
Trakto is a design platform on the rise, particularly in Latin America. Businesses from several industries currently use it to create social media posts, minisites, presentations, business proposals, ebooks, and other materials to help win over more customers and increase sales. Consequently, the startup helps entrepreneurs strengthen their digital presence with a range of template models.
During its structuring process, Trakto reached a milestone in 2020, when it was chosen to receive an investment from the Black Founders Fund. This is a Google for Startups initiative providing funding, without any compensation or shareholdings in return, and access to training for startups founded and led by black Brazilian entrepreneurs. The goal is to increase diversity in the startup ecosystem and support businesses with high growth potential. That is why taking part in this initiative was a watershed event for the company.
“Our participation in the Black Founders Fund boosted our business with credits to invest in cloud resources and the creation of a server-optimization culture. Google’s intervention was a milestone in my journey as a Black CEO from northeastern Brazil. I can say that Google has opened new possibilities for the business.”
—Paulo Tenório, Founder and CEO, TraktoBesides the benefits related to the brand’s expansion, Trakto’s relationship with Google for Startups helped the company notice the need to improve certain aspects of its design platform. After taking part in the Residency Program in 2016, the startup joined Google for Startups Accelerator in 2020. One of Trakto’s challenges during its time in the Accelerator was maintaining the speed of its delivery to customers, which had to keep up with the deployment of new features and internal corrections.
For this reason, the company chose to adopt Google Cloud’s solutions. Its main motivation at the time was how easy it was to develop new products and the scalability provided by Firebase. It also wanted a solution to support 1,000 users per minute at the same time and provide the conditions to ensure a secure service delivery. That is why tests and assessments were essential to prove the feasibility of the idea.
“Google Cloud currently allows us to solve speed and infrastructure issues, mainly using Firebase. We have increased productivity and know that to develop a product, for instance, we can have five professionals instead of a hundred.”
—Jorge Henrique, CTO, TraktoA link between tools and business development
As they improved the platform using Google Cloud, the team understood that Firebase could be even more helpful. Some of this resource’s features used by Trakto include Firebase Hosting to host the platform’s outer layer and front end; Firestore to provide dynamic storage and data security; Firebase Realtime Database to store highly flexible and complex data; and Firebase Authentication, which enables single user authentication in the apps.
Other tools also had a positive impact on the company’s activities. Cloud Storage, used for file backups, provides a flexible space in the environment. Cloud Run's good usability enables the team to focus on improving modifications in the platform. “For us, Cloud Run is strategic for scalability, as it handles the entire delivery pipeline and how the service is set up and made available, so our team can focus on developing and sending modifications,” says Trakto’s CTO.
According to the startup, the migration and development process in Google Cloud has always focused on business development opportunities. The benefits seen after adopting the solutions include the platform’s availability, with 98% uptime in every product; a 60% rise in the number of deployments of new versions; a 40% reduction in the time to develop and maintain microservices and the back end; and increased management capabilities for the CDN (content distribution network), which manages over 50 TB of images.
“After adopting Google Cloud, we managed to segment our services even further. That made us more efficient at responding to issues and threats, gave us more chances to launch new products, and made our customers more confident about service availability.”
—Paulo Tenório, Founder and CEO, TraktoOther features may be put into practice in the coming months. “We have already assessed Google Kubernetes Engine. The first positive aspect we noticed is deployment. There is also the streamlined way to solve errors and the fact that it is open source. That’s why I believe it would take us a month to deploy the process without Google Cloud, while that time can be shortened to a week or even less with it,” claims Jorge Henrique.
Regarding new projects, Trakto aims to have a robust infrastructure to support ongoing and future changes. The company is assessing methods based on computer vision and plans to launch an app that will be available on both iOS and Android.
“In both cases, we need to consume the same database, and that tends to scale up very quickly. We also want to expand Trakto’s free version to increase brand awareness. Therefore, we need an infrastructure capable of keeping processes secure at all times, and Google helps us with that,” the CEO concludes
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Trakto
Trakto is a design platform focused on entrepreneurs and businesses. With its geolocalized template gallery and its drag-and-drop editor, the company helps over 60,000 entrepreneurs build and improve their business communication using design as a tool.