PubQuiz

Background

PubQuiz.com is an online platform for live, nationwide quiz events. Traffic spikes sharply during scheduled games and drops off between sessions. Supporting this pattern required an infrastructure that could handle peak demand without wasting resources during idle periods.

Challenges

The legacy AWS setup was no longer viable for a growing event-based business:

• Performance Under Pressure: The existing MySQL RDS instance frequently bottlenecked during live surges, threatening the stability of the national competitions.
• Infrastructure Inefficiency: An “always-on” model meant PubQuiz was paying for peak capacity 24/7, even when user activity was zero.
• Management Burden: High manual maintenance overhead was slowing down the team’s ability to ship new features and manage events effectively.

Solutions

Zazmic executed a “lift-and-shift” migration to Google Cloud, modernizing the architecture into a fully managed, serverless environment.

Key solution components included:

• Serverless Compute Transition
  The Docker/PHP front end was migrated to Google Cloud Run, enabling automatic scaling based on demand. The application now scales down during idle periods and rapidly scales up during peak traffic, aligning resource usage with actual load.
• High-Availability Database Architecture
  The platform was moved to Cloud SQL with read replicas to address performance constraints. This architecture supports high levels of concurrent access while maintaining data consistency during nationwide events.
• Optimized Storage Strategy
  We replaced costly legacy object storage with Google Cloud Storage, providing a more durable, secure, and cost-effective home for the platform’s media assets and backups.
• End-to-End Migration & Handover
  Zazmic led the full migration process, including environment setup and secure data transfer. The engagement concluded with a structured handover, enabling the PubQuiz team to operate and maintain the platform independently on GCP.

Outcomes

The migration transformed PubQuiz from a high-maintenance platform into a highly efficient, automated digital engine. As a result of our collaboration, PubQuiz achieved:

• True Elasticity: The platform now scales on-demand, handling thousands of simultaneous users without manual intervention.
• Drastic Cost Reduction: Switched to a pay-as-you-go model, eliminating the wasted expense of idle, always-on servers.
• Operational Agility: Managed services like Cloud Run and Cloud SQL have significantly reduced the “maintenance tax” on the internal team.
• Reliable User Experience: Zero-lag performance during live events, fostering higher user retention and platform trust.

Conclusion

The PubQuiz migration demonstrates that scalability shouldn’t be a cost burden. By partnering with Zazmic to leverage Google Cloud’s elastic capabilities, PubQuiz has secured a high-performance, cost-efficient foundation that is ready to scale alongside its growing national audience.