How Jelly Button slashed analytics costs by $240,000 with Google Cloud

November 2018

Mobile gaming company cuts analytics costs by more than 66% while improving stability and performance

$240,000: Annual Cost Savings
66%: Cost Reduction
500: Events Per Second

“We love to be at the edge of technology. So when we had the opportunity to integrate Google game telemetry architecture into our ecosystem, we jumped at it. With Google, our analytics cost us about a quarter of what we were paying before.”
Nadav Steiner
Infrastructure Team Lead

The Challenge

Jelly Button's existing analytics solution became prohibitively expensive as their games went viral, punishing exponential growth with exceptionally high costs. The system also suffered from monthly shutdowns and API problems that prevented data extraction, leaving the company unable to respond to gamer complaints, bugs, or alerts.

The Solution

Working with DoIT International, Jelly Button implemented the Google Reference Architecture for Mobile Gaming Analytics. They built a new pipeline streaming data directly into Google BigQuery using Google Kubernetes Engine for autoscaling, Cloud Pub/Sub for low-latency event relay, and Cloud Dataflow for data processing. The modular design stores each game's data in separate BigQuery projects for simplified management.

Results

Reduced analytics costs by more than two-thirds, saving $240,000 annually
Eliminated monthly system shutdowns and data loss issues
Achieved near real-time data availability for analysis
Completed migration in under five weeks from start to production

Meet Jelly Button

Acquired by Playtika in 2017, Jelly Button develops and publishes mobile and web games played by millions of players every day worldwide. Pirate Kings, the company's flagship title, has been downloaded more than 80 million times across iOS, Android, and Facebook since its launch in 2014. The game went from 100,000 daily active users to 4 million in two months. Because good games grow and great games go viral, Jelly Button wants to ensure that every product it takes to market is backed by solid infrastructure that scales to match demand.

The Analytics Challenge

A key part of Jelly Button's infrastructure is collecting, storing, and processing player data for analytics, which the company uses for research, marketing, and to improve gameplay. Jelly Button demands a reliable analytics backend that is very low latency, does not lose data, and makes information available for analysis quickly, even when millions of new events arrive every hour. But as Jelly Button became more successful, their widely used product analytics solution became expensive, punishing exponential growth with exceptionally high costs.

Building the Google Cloud Solution

Using the Google Reference Architecture for Mobile Gaming Analytics as a baseline, Jelly Button began streaming data directly into Google BigQuery from its clients. Autoscaling the solution with Google Kubernetes Engine, the team set up Google Cloud Pub/Sub to relay events with low latency through to Google Cloud Dataflow, which filters, maps, and aggregates the raw data for Google BigQuery, making the data available for analysis in near real time. Because the data and analytics on each game is stored in a separate Google BigQuery project in a modular pipeline, managing the process is simple for administrators.

Rapid Implementation with DoIT

Licenses for Jelly Button's previous analytics service were expiring, so they had to work to a tight deadline. DoIT International provided its best talent to launch this project in just under five weeks from start to production, with weekly meetings to review progress. It's the latest in several successful initiatives with DoIT International, including cost optimization and a cloud security review.

Improved Stability and Control

Beyond speed and savings, the new pipeline offers greatly improved stability. In terms of ETL data streaming, Jelly Button now has the big advantage that they can keep all of their data within the company, instead of on a third party. In the past they had problems with APIs, which meant that they couldn't extract data and experienced days of shutdown without any communication. The new pipeline is much more stable because they have all the data within their own systems. They tested it by shutting down the process for 24 hours, then enabling it again. All the data was queuing within the accumulator and was recovered with no data loss whatsoever.

Measurable Results

According to the Jelly Button team, the new Google based solution is more than two-thirds cheaper to run than the system it replaces, saving the company $240,000 per year. In a typical month, processing around 500 events per second, the company spent under $4,000 on Google Cloud Platform services. Using reOptimize, a free cost tracking and optimization tool, Jelly Button easily tracks and controls its Google Cloud Platform costs, keeping budgets controlled and predictable, as well as low.

See how DoiT helps cloud teams control spend

Explore how DoiT Cloud Intelligence helps teams improve visibility, governance, and unit economics across cloud environments.

Visit DoiT Talk to our team

Story overview

What they say

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

When we started working with DoiT, we deployed Flexsave to save time and reduce complexity. We still use it today. But what really stands out is the expert support. Having someone to collaborate with on deep cloud cost topics, someone who really understands the nuances, is incredibly valuable.

Jesper Terkelsen, CTO at Monta

DoiT's Cloud Accelerator turned our AI idea into a shipped product, saving at least three months of development and delivering reliable, explainable insights our customers trust.

Scott Desgrosseilliers, CEO and co-founder, Wicked Reports

DaySmart

Working with DoiT gave us the speed of a startup and the rigor of an enterprise R&D lab. We launched an AI feature in ninety days with zero engineering lift, unified our cloud visibility across multiple products and built a foundation to scale AI responsibly.

Tim Green, SVP of AI, DaySmart

Our AWS environment had grown rapidly, and complexity was outpacing control. DoiT helped us bring structure and clarity, aligning financial and technical decisions through a shared foundation.

Maurizio Trezzi, Director of IT, Vivaticket

DoiT gives us contextual insight into what's happening in our cloud environment. That helps us ensure we're meeting customer needs while managing our costs. It's that central pane of glass that lets engineering and finance work together, powered by the technology and backed by DoiT's people.

Matt Warner, Co-Founder and CEO at Blumira

For anyone considering DoiT: do it. The tools pay for themselves. We've reduced costs, improved visibility, and built a platform that can scale globally with control and confidence.

Matej Serbec, CTO, TradeLocker

DoiT didn't just give us a product – they gave us clarity. Cloud Diagrams has helped our teams understand what we're running, why we're running it, and where we can improve. The real-time visibility is a game changer for engineering, leadership, and everything in between.

Donnie Green, VP of Platform Engineering, Bloomerang

Sentric Music

With maybe 5-10 minutes, Ava had guided me right down into the low-level detail of the services that we were running in our compute environment, named the exact instances that were starting to chew through our money, produced a report for me that showed that this was almost a direct correlation to the cost growth that we were seeing, which meant that we were able to get on top of it pretty much immediately.

Stephen Roughley, Head of Engineering at Sentric Music

Atadex

With DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ managing our procurement and DoiT's engineers acting as an extension of my team, my costs are down, my efficiency is up, and my profitability is up

Mitch Bernet, Founder and CEO at Atadex

Skyral

A key takeaway for me working with DoiT is that the level of professionalism is extremely high. They're an obvious choice if you're looking for a partner to help implement best practices in your cloud environment and reduce cost.

Oliver Young, Senior Technical Manager at Skyral

We knew WhatsApp was the perfect channel for global remittances, but building secure, real-time conversations across languages was a massive challenge. DoiT helped us break through. They didn't just advise, they helped us architect and launch a GenAI solution that's 100x more powerful than what we had. We're now in a completely different league.

Jaime Gonzalez-Gasque, CEO, Reimagination Technologies

Your cloud bill shouldn't be a mystery

Let us show you what ships this week.

Book a demo