PedidosYa improves data processing and analytics with Google Cloud solutions

Latin America’s most innovative companies are facing the challenge of scaling their businesses while staying connected to what’s most important: their customers and users.

Growing is a challenge requiring more tools to help teams throughout their transformation journey.

PedidosYa, a Latin American online food delivery company operating in 15 markets and 400+ cities, now finds itself in that position.

With an app that has been downloaded over 20 million times, the company realized Google Cloud is the ally it needed to overcome growth and 24/7 availability challenges. As a result, it can provide a quality service that’s accessible at any time, anywhere.

The starting point

PedidosYa began by reassessing its growth strategy in the cloud. It then decided to migrate to Google Cloud to develop a cloud platform that allowed it to provide analysts with agile and efficient answers.

Google Cloud’s integrated, managed serverless data platform, with its integration through open source solutions, was the answer the organization was looking for.

The next step was gaining the ability to access data to improve user experience, with Google Cloud tools such as Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and BigQuery.

For example, using Dataflow, the company was able to process data and plan changes to the scheme based on the functional team’s needs. It can also create alerts to track changes and then alter the unprocessed layer’s scheme.

By doing this, the technology department’s teams ensure any changes to the back end, which they do not control, do not affect the top layers. Moreover, with Google Kubernetes Engine, teams reduce the operational load because they know they have a flexible on-demand infrastructure.

Consequently, PedidosYa has overcome one of the main challenges in its migration: keeping up with the increasing demands for analytics. In the past, the company had trouble understanding if an error in a query was caused by performance issues or due to the depletion of the platform's resources.

During this initial phase, the company easily managed and allocated the costs related to each workload through its own cost centers using the Google Cloud tools best suited to each need.

Transformation results

PedidosYa can now democratize access to data using a robust, efficient architecture.

Thanks to BigQuery, the company can now expand its capabilities and increase accuracy using nested structures, avoiding unnecessary fusions, and improving query efficiency.

PedidosYa has managed to cut the total cost per query by 5x using this Google Cloud tool.

In addition, Data Catalog enables solid metadata management. Now, teams can break barriers to access data and make it available for the entire organization.

Having cloud technology with high availability allows partners and employees to operate without distractions and increase their productivity. All they have to focus on is providing added value for customers, with no need to pay attention to potential platform issues.

This allowed PedidosYa to implement role- and level-based access programmatically within the company so that specific previously validated roles can see more confidential information.

These solutions help drive a more automated data-governance experience. By applying Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools to the products, data exchanges and data access become an almost automated experience.

Finally, Google Cloud has helped the company cut the deployment process down to four hours, compared with 16 hours for its legacy platform.

Changes in work culture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic also forced a quicker incorporation of new technologies.

Due to the need for remote working to comply with social distancing policies, the organization went from having 50% of its staff working remotely to 100% in just a week. Successfully navigating this transformation was possible thanks to Google Cloud’s tools.

In the future, PedidosYa plans to add more Google Cloud tools to drive collaborative work and keep improving user experience to promote customer loyalty and growth.