Qoria: Migration to Google Kubernetes Engine

The Client

Qoria (Formerly Family Zone) have developed a cyber safety platform with over 134,000 paying accounts. They provide both internet filtering and time-based control of devices, putting the control back in the hands of parents and schools.

Like many organisations, Qoria were looking to reduce operating costs and enable their engineering teams to work on business problems rather than infrastructure plumbing.

Cloud Native architectures are a key enabler of providing cost effective services and enabling higher levels of agility in business.

Qoria’s aim was to re-platform an existing service, providing a framework for migrating their entire suite of applications to a more cost effective and easier to operate solution.

The Problem

Migration To Google Kubernetes Engine

Qoria asked Mechanical Rock to migrate a service running directly on virtual machines to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Following the initial discovery, Mechanical Rock was engaged to deliver:

1. 30% cost savings on infrastructure costs.
2. Kubernetes knowledge transfer, enabling the team to pursue future migrations.
3. A fully production-ready service to serve customers in a specific region.
4. Best of breed Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tooling to expedite value delivery.

The Solution

Total Cost Savings of 37%

An initial 10% cost saving was achieved by migrating to GCP and tuning virtual machine sizes. Then by adopting containers and Kubernetes to better utilise the virtual machines, Qoria were able to increase savings by a further 27%. GKE, Google’s managed Kubernetes offering, is best of breed and allowed Qoria to perform the required application tuning to deliver a significant improvement in operating costs.

Market Leading Monitoring

By also implementing market leading monitoring tooling, Qoria are now able to test their systems under loads much higher than their typical use case and debug it without impacting end users. By leveraging Google’s internal network, Qoria are able to deliver application performance that is unachievable in their existing service. This benefit will be replicated across all applications as they migrate to the GKE platform on GCP.

Google Cloud Platform services utilised for re-platforming the suite of applications.

The Benefits

The Mechanical Rock solution offered a number of key benefits:

• One-click deployment of all infrastructure required for a region.
• Leveraging Google’s internal network to provide better application performance.
• Infrastructure cost savings of 37%.
• Uniform monitoring of all infrastructure and application components, allowing for simpler operations.
• Zero-downtime deployments using rolling updates, allowing for no customer impact upgrades.
• Infrastructure as code, allowing for repeatable deployments and deleveraging of key resources.
• Operational knowledge spread across the wider team, allowing for better flow of work.

Leveraging Google’s internal network to provide better application performance.