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CloudGate Story
This is the story of how CloudGate achieved its current leading position in the Japanese market.
slow growth to growing pains
The G Suite and CloudGate ecosystem both experienced relatively tepid growth for the first two and a half years (December 2008 to June 2011; user accounts grew from 10,000 to 50,000) as companies hesitated to abandon their traditional on-premise mail service infrastructure. However, beginning in the summer of 2011, the shift to the cloud underwent an explosive period of growth. This trend was driven in large part by Softbank, who had become a reseller of both G Suite and CloudGate in the spring of 2011.
The pace of G Suite adoption continued at a rapid pace. User accounts increased from 50,000 in the fall of 2011, to 150,000 by the winter of 2012. And this sudden influx of users, CloudGate had a major outage on March 19, 2012.
On that day—a Monday—at 8:15 a.m., we experienced a 40-minute outage during which our users could not login to their G Suite accounts because CloudGate was slow in responding and users were experiencing timeouts.
I still vividly remember the nonstop ringing of the phones that morning from our users and their frustration at not being able to access their email to starts their workday. By 8:55 a.m., our engineers had solved the problem—a temporary capacity problem on our load balance which could not handle the increased number of users. This outage experience served as a crucial reminder for us at ISR as to how vital it was for our end users that our service be available to them at all times. No access to CloudGate meant no access to Gmail, and therefore no access to emails to get their job started. From that day forward, high availability became one of the highest priorities for our CloudGate service.
Personally this outage was one of the most difficult times of my professional life. I felt terrible. I could barely sleep that night. I felt that as a service, we had failed our users. I made a promise to myself that night—in the future, I would make every effort possible to avoid failing our users again.
The G Suite and CloudGate ecosystem both experienced relatively tepid growth for the first two and a half years (December 2008 to June 2011; user accounts grew from 10,000 to 50,000) as companies hesitated to abandon their traditional on-premise mail service infrastructure. However, beginning in the summer of 2011, the shift to the cloud underwent an explosive period of growth. This trend was driven in large part by Softbank, who had become a reseller of both G Suite and CloudGate in the spring of 2011.
The pace of G Suite adoption continued at a rapid pace. User accounts increased from 50,000 in the fall of 2011, to 150,000 by the winter of 2012. And this sudden influx of users, CloudGate had a major outage on March 19, 2012.
On that day—a Monday—at 8:15 a.m., we experienced a 40-minute outage during which our users could not login to their G Suite accounts because CloudGate was slow in responding and users were experiencing timeouts.
I still vividly remember the nonstop ringing of the phones that morning from our users and their frustration at not being able to access their email to starts their workday. By 8:55 a.m., our engineers had solved the problem—a temporary capacity problem on our load balance which could not handle the increased number of users. This outage experience served as a crucial reminder for us at ISR as to how vital it was for our end users that our service be available to them at all times. No access to CloudGate meant no access to Gmail, and therefore no access to emails to get their job started. From that day forward, high availability became one of the highest priorities for our CloudGate service.
Personally this outage was one of the most difficult times of my professional life. I felt terrible. I could barely sleep that night. I felt that as a service, we had failed our users. I made a promise to myself that night—in the future, I would make every effort possible to avoid failing our users again.
“…our company has been able to provide 99.99% service availability for 4 consecutive years…”
Learning from our shortcomings, we adapted multiple precautions to avoid a repeat of that incident. From making drastic changes to our hardware platform, to improving or power outage response strategy, we became better equipped to handle the needs of our customers. With these new countermeasures, our company has been able to provide 99.99% service availability for 4 consecutive years starting from the fiscal year of April 2012.
“…our company has been able to provide 99.99% service availability for 4 consecutive years…”
Learning from our shortcomings, we adapted multiple precautions to avoid a repeat of that incident. From making drastic changes to our hardware platform, to improving or power outage response strategy, we became better equipped to handle the needs of our customers. With these new countermeasures, our company has been able to provide 99.99% service availability for 4 consecutive years starting from the fiscal year of April 2012.
