Whatagraph: fast-scaling architecture for a fast-growing startup
About Whatagraph
With over 1,000 customers, and over 15,000 agencies and brands using its insights, Whatagraph integrates with 40+ data sources to give marketing professionals easy-to-use platform and great looking reports, enabling them to make data-driven decisions.
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About DoiT
DoiT provides expert consultancy and unlimited technical support to customers seeking to realize the full promise of cloud technology.
Fast-growing marketing tech startup Whatagraph uses Google Cloud to replace its legacy architecture with agile, scalable infrastructure that enables it to continue to grow at pace.
Google Cloud results
- Peak traffic managed with Cloud Tasks, with spikes expanded from 5 to 30 minutes in an hour
- Engineering team freed from manual tasks with rollback time down from 15 minutes to mere seconds
- Rapid data processing with Cloud Tasks enabled rollout of new reporting feature
Whatagraph builds new architecture with Google Cloud
The world is awash with data. We currently create an incredible 2.5 quintillion bytes of the stuff every day, and by the end of 2025 it is estimated that figure will have increased by a whopping 18,420%, to 463 exabytes (quintillion bytes) daily.
For the marketing agencies having to trawl through it all, identifying the trends and patterns that matter to their clients can be a challenge. The more data they have, the more difficult it becomes to interpret. That's where Whatagraph comes in. With its easy-to-use platform and great looking reports, Whatagraph helps marketing professionals to visualize their data clearly, enabling them to make fast, data-based decisions.
"In the current economic climate, that is an incredibly valuable thing," says Linas Zemaitis, Vice President of Marketing at Whatagraph. "For agencies, it's important not only to deliver value to your clients, but to illustrate that value. With costs now being scrutinized a lot more, it is more important than ever to know that you are as efficient as possible in delivering the return on investment for your client, and that you are able to tell that story to your client and prove your value. That's core to the survival of marketing agencies in the current environment, which is why reporting is more important than ever."
"You can't have a company building simple, easy-to-use products that itself chooses products that are difficult to use. Building sophisticated architecture is more intuitive with Google. It is easy to use, easy to experiment with, and it gives us the flexibility we need to scale up easily and at speed."
—Arturas Lazejevas, CTO, WhatagraphGood riddance to old architecture
As a rapidly growing startup in a highly competitive market, it's important that Whatagraph's technology is agile enough to be able to scale with the business.
However, when Whatagraph CTO Arturas Lazejevas joined the company in early 2020, he found the legacy architecture, which had been pieced together at speed to keep pace with Whatagraph's rapid growth, could no longer keep up with the company's demands.
"I see technology as enablers of products and new product features," says Arturas. "And I realized that our technology wasn't enabling the Whatagraph vision of simplicity and extendability. So we made the difficult decision to rebuild our architecture from scratch."
Determined to build a system that would remove any potential bottlenecks from future growth, Whatagraph moved away from traditional virtual machines to smart horizontal scaling. After some detailed discussions with Google partner DoiT around the need for technology that serves the company's core offering, rather than just technology for technology's sake, Arturas and his team set about using Google Cloud to rebuild their cloud infrastructure.
"You can't have a company building simple, easy-to-use products that itself chooses products that are difficult to use," Arturas notes. "Building sophisticated architecture is more intuitive with Google. It is easy to use, easy to experiment with, and it gives us the flexibility we need to scale up easily and at speed."
Taking the tension out of peak workloads with agile cloud architecture
Due to the patterns of marketing reporting, Whatagraph users tend to flock to the app at the same hour of the same day in a particular region. This results in a spike load in traffic, with extreme peak times sometimes seeing around 1,000x more traffic than at the lowest points. Under its legacy infrastructure, those peak loads could be difficult for Whatagraph to manage without overloading their servers.
Making use of Cloud Run and Cloud Tasks has given Whatagraph the agility to manage those workloads more efficiently, ensuring there is no impact on its customers' ability to access its reporting tools.
"With Cloud Run and Cloud Tasks, we're more in control of our workloads, because we can balance it out, expanding that peak from five minutes in an hour to 30 minutes," explains Arturas. "Which means those spikes and peak traffic are not so scary anymore. It's impressive how well engineered it is."
"With Cloud Run and Cloud Tasks, we're more in control of our workloads, because we can balance it out, expanding that peak from five minutes in an hour to 30 minutes, which means those spikes and peak traffic are not so scary anymore. It's impressive how well engineered it is."
—Arturas Lazejevas, CTO, WhatagraphGiving customers control of their own data
As Whatagraph rapidly expands, so does its product offering. One such expansion is for Whatagraph to give its customers ownership and control of their own data, instead of simply reporting on it, as it does currently.
With data from 40 different sources to process, Whatagraph made use of Cloud Run and Cloud Tasks to build an orchestrator with the flexibility and control to transfer that data to customers' BigQuery accounts.
"With Cloud Tasks, we are able to process a large amount of data at speed," says Arturas. "We can just queue a bunch of tasks and Cloud Tasks controls the workload very well. It spins up, say, 200 instances and Cloud Run processes the data quickly. And we're in control of that, in terms of how many instances we allow, how fast we need the data to be processed and what our priorities are. Meanwhile, our customers can view the progress of their transfer, how much they're being billed, how many instances it's brought up. It's working very well."
By giving customers ownership of their own data in this way, Whatagraph are able to build on the value of their offering by empowering their customers to take control of their own data, make their own calculations and ultimately make even more data-based decisions.
Freeing up developers to focus on core business priorities
At the same time, Whatagraph's Google Cloud architecture has freed up Arturas and his engineering team from time-consuming site maintenance. Resolving a caching issue, for example, which might have resulted in a day's downtime with on-premises systems, can now be resolved in a matter of minutes.
"We're currently moving to Cloud Build, as well, which is speeding up our deployments," adds Arturas. "Previously, in the event of mishaps, rollbacks would usually take 15-20 minutes, but with Google Cloud Run it's seconds. You just push the traffic into another branch, into another container."
An ongoing journey to horizontal, cloud-based architecture
All this saved time allows Arturas and his team to focus their energy on building the architecture that will enable Whatagraph to continue to scale at pace.
"With a fast scaling startup, you have to deprioritize a lot of things," Arturas says. "There are never enough resources to do everything you want to do. So I think Google Cloud gave us the flexibility we needed to scale up easily and at speed. And now it's enabling us to migrate the workloads into the architecture we always dreamed of."
It's a journey that Whatagraph is taking with Google Cloud. "I value the proactive approach that Google takes," says Arturas. "It really feels like they care about us and our solution. I only have to mention something we'd like to do in passing and they're immediately on the case, trying to make it happen. The customer-centricity really is felt."
The destination of this journey is architecture agile and scalable enough to grow as Whatagraph grows, working quietly in the background as it fulfills Whatagraph's promise of providing easy-to-use tools to enable its customers to make powerful data-driven decisions.
"I want our architecture to be always readily available, scaling on demand, and as close to the user as possible," says Arturas. "And I think we can do that with Google Cloud. We're not fully there yet, but we're well on our way."
"I want our architecture to be always readily available, scaling on demand, and as close to the user as possible, and I think we can do that with Google Cloud. We're not fully there yet, but we're well on our way."
—Arturas Lazejevas, CTO, WhatagraphTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Whatagraph
With over 1,000 customers, and over 15,000 agencies and brands using its insights, Whatagraph integrates with 40+ data sources to give marketing professionals easy-to-use platform and great looking reports, enabling them to make data-driven decisions.
About DoiT
DoiT provides expert consultancy and unlimited technical support to customers seeking to realize the full promise of cloud technology.