Recurly’s engineering team decided that Kubernetes was the best option to replace its on-premises data centers and went searching for the right solution.

“After some initial testing, we quickly realized that Google Kubernetes Engine was best suited to achieve our goals as the only PCI-compliant, fully managed Kubernetes solution available,” says Jeff. “As our evaluation continued, we uncovered more reasons to go with Google Cloud over competitors, including the developer-friendly APIs in Google Cloud and the ability to provision services faster and more cost-effectively.”

Recurly had used some cloud solutions in the past, but found it difficult to scale fast enough to support the company’s growth. GCP enabled Recurly to overcome this challenge, providing streamlined access to on-demand compute resources through Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Compute Engine.

“When we deployed our production environment, we scaled our cluster from six nodes to 36 nodes,” says Jeff. “This would have taken hours with our previous provider. With Google Cloud Platform, scaling our environment took just a couple of minutes.”

Faster and more streamlined scaling allows the company to stand up new environments within one week rather than the months that it used to take, translating to much faster time to market for services. Recurly’s engineers have also enjoyed increased productivity all around thanks to the advantages of GCP over its legacy hybrid cloud configuration.

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform makes it easy for us to try new configurations and optimizations, so we’re working faster than ever,” says Chris Barton, a platform architect at Recurly. In addition to focusing on scalability and productivity enhancements, the move to GCP enabled the company to improve system access and security controls.

Moving access management to the cloud

Recurly took advantage of Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) to eliminate access control challenges that security teams faced as engineers and other technical staff were working across several systems within GCP.

“With access to our cloud resources being controlled through Cloud IAM, we can provide read access to our developers all the way through our production environment, so they can better troubleshoot issues. This has empowered our engineering team and allowed them to focus on innovation rather than verification and other routine tasks,” says Jeff.

Recurly also relies on Cloud Pub/Sub for asynchronous processing and Stackdriver for its log management, which has further empowered technical teams to work faster and more securely.

“One of the best benefits we’ve seen since migrating to Google Cloud Platform is a 15 percent decrease in our average response times to clients,” says Chris. “This makes us a far better service provider, and one that our customers can rely on to keep their services running securely and efficiently.”

The intuitive and powerful Google Cloud Platform Console allows Recurly’s managers to effortlessly maintain control over all activities. It eliminated the company’s traditional dual user management framework, which could cause project delays among engineering and operations staff.

“Our engineers can now quickly access resources and our production environments, without straining our IT department,” says Jeff. “It’s been a phenomenal benefit to the business.”