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Currently on Cloud here at Google. I would like to elaborate "Google CRE seamlessly provisioned extra capacity on behalf of Niantic to stay well ahead of their

Currently on Cloud here at Google. I would like to elaborate "Google CRE seamlessly provisioned extra capacity on behalf of Niantic to stay well ahead of their record-setting growth." Just because you have the resources does not make for a well scaling service. As outlined in the post, "Google CRE worked hand-in-hand with Niantic to review every part of their architecture, tapping the expertise of core Google Cloud engineers and product managers". Look past the chart, this wasn't just an estimate for Google, it was also for Niantic. You don't have unlimited development resources, not every aspect of an application may have had the time to flesh out a scale-able approach. Netflix didn't scale out overnight. I'm sure we've seen their techblog about X extremely specialized framework/tool they've built out over the years. I'm impressed with how quickly Niantic achieved a playable experience.

Fiahil 10y ago
> I'm impressed with how quickly Niantic achieved a playable experience. I have mixed feelings about this, didn't they drop more than half their peak user base to achieve playable experience?
- Kiro 10y ago
  Where did you read that? Pretty sure peak was after all the problems.
  - Fiahil 10y ago
    I experienced it myself. There was chunks of 6+ hours where you could not connect at all, and you had to restart the app every 10 minutes (or every third pokémon), and wait while it was draining your battery like an hungry walrus on its bucket of fish. However, it became perfectly playable after their "tracker patch" (which was the trigger for the massive exodus that followed).
    - Kiro 10y ago
      What tracker patch are you referring to? They changed it several times and I hardly doubt there was any massive exodus due to any of them. The loud minority on reddit is not representative of the game's community in large. When the game experienced the most instability it hadn't even been launched in most countries.
      - Fiahil 10y ago
        The first one, when they dropped third parties and removed the already-bugged step count under close-by pokémons. It's purely anecdotic, but after that release, popular spots (with multiple pokestops and arena in one place) usually crowded with more than 50 people playing actively were down to one dude on a bench. Sure the "loud minority" is not representative of the whole game's community, but they were it's core players. They shaped the game's community (and niantic didn't helped) from the beginning. And it didn't help when those people decided to stop playing. Back to server's issues, Google CREs did a very good job during these times. They can't be blamed for trying to scale an app that was absolutely not designed to get this high.
      - Miner49er 10y ago
        There was the patch that broke the tracker. Then there was the patch that "fixed" the tracker by removing the footsteps but basically kept it how it was. This patch was released on July 30th. Around August 23rd, it was reported that Pokemon Go had lost over 10 million users, down from 45 million sometime in July. Here's the article on that: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/pokemon-go-sheds-more-than-10m-users/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/pokemon-go-sheds-more-...

Fiahil 10y ago

> I'm impressed with how quickly Niantic achieved a playable experience. I have mixed feelings about this, didn't they drop more than half their peak user base to achieve playable experience?

Kiro 10y ago
Where did you read that? Pretty sure peak was after all the problems.
- Fiahil 10y ago
  I experienced it myself. There was chunks of 6+ hours where you could not connect at all, and you had to restart the app every 10 minutes (or every third pokémon), and wait while it was draining your battery like an hungry walrus on its bucket of fish. However, it became perfectly playable after their "tracker patch" (which was the trigger for the massive exodus that followed).
  - Kiro 10y ago
    What tracker patch are you referring to? They changed it several times and I hardly doubt there was any massive exodus due to any of them. The loud minority on reddit is not representative of the game's community in large. When the game experienced the most instability it hadn't even been launched in most countries.
    - Fiahil 10y ago
      The first one, when they dropped third parties and removed the already-bugged step count under close-by pokémons. It's purely anecdotic, but after that release, popular spots (with multiple pokestops and arena in one place) usually crowded with more than 50 people playing actively were down to one dude on a bench. Sure the "loud minority" is not representative of the whole game's community, but they were it's core players. They shaped the game's community (and niantic didn't helped) from the beginning. And it didn't help when those people decided to stop playing. Back to server's issues, Google CREs did a very good job during these times. They can't be blamed for trying to scale an app that was absolutely not designed to get this high.
    - Miner49er 10y ago
      There was the patch that broke the tracker. Then there was the patch that "fixed" the tracker by removing the footsteps but basically kept it how it was. This patch was released on July 30th. Around August 23rd, it was reported that Pokemon Go had lost over 10 million users, down from 45 million sometime in July. Here's the article on that: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/pokemon-go-sheds-more-than-10m-users/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/pokemon-go-sheds-more-...