When Crazy Labs chose Google App Engine, they found that it allowed them to develop faster and had almost no learning curve. Crazy Labs developed its backend in Go, Google’s concurrent programming language, and within a few weeks was up to full speed. Go, like Python, Java and other languages, integrates seamlessly with Google Datastore, Google BigQuery and other Google services.

For code deployment, App Engine replaces outdated instances and switches live traffic to a new version while keeping existing sessions for users on the old version. When Crazy Labs launches a new version, they send it to 5 percent of users, so they can make sure everything works smoothly before pushing the change to the entire user base. This allows them to easily revert to an older version in a matter of seconds if something goes wrong in the new one.

App Engine also automatically collects and stores tens of billions of application logs and ingests them into BigQuery, so Crazy Labs can analyze them if an issue crops up.

Data analysts at Crazy Labs use BigQuery to analyze the gameplay and suggest improvements. Using standard SQL language, Crazy Labs runs queries on these terabytes of information in a few seconds to better understand and, if required, patch the game.a