Comment by Fordec
4 years ago
Can I just say I would love a detailed break down of the glorious mess behind the Pokemon GO launch. As a person who both wanted to play from the very start and couldn't even log in and a DevOps person who empathized heavily, I'd love to hear all about the firefighting behind the scenes during those first few hours to weeks.
I’d love to write one. I need to take a look at my NDA again just to make sure I don’t infringe on anything.
I can say one thing: the problems were heavily exacerbated by a few botters trying to scrape the entire planets worth of data every minute so they could charge money for realtime maps of everything. Every time we’d shut them out, they would find another way around the limits. Not fun when we were already so overloaded with real users.
Seconded - is there any article anywhere about the technical side of these early days?
This is one from Google’s side. Note that we had a total of five server engineers compared to their org :)
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...
Also, we got a call from them at one point early on saying we’d broken their global L7 load balancers because of too much traffic :)
if you can't find anything about Pokemon Go, might be worth looking for Ingress instead - I believe that Pokemon Go was sort of based on that mobile game