Galataport Google Cloud customer success story: Disaster Recovery

Galataport is a pioneer investment with comprehensive approach to a cruise liner port. Transformational set through historic city harbor into a world-class cruiser liner port and touristic destination, Galataport assures historic city harmoniousness while providing shopping and gastronomy experiences to visitors as well as culture and art offerings. Positioning living and technology center of the region, Galataport manages a detailed orchestration with incremental growth rate of data and complexity. They would like to be ready for the worst-case scenario in order to avoid any service interruption.

Galataport İstanbul manages branch of workloads from cruise and port management to shopping and living center, and this diversified and complex management requires a holistic approach to govern ever-growing data management. While sustaining security, scalability and redundancy and making services available ensuring for a disaster recovery plan is inevitable. Ever-increasing cyber security threads and their potential effects on physical infrastructure damage, being in an earthquake zone, possibilities of other disasters such as fire, flooding, and pandemic effects make recovery systems planning a prioritized survival strategy in case of any disaster.

Building resilience using Google Cloud

Business continuity was a key driver for positioning on Google Cloud. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) was implemented for its scalability and its high availability features. Kubernetes clusters help businesses to scale right size alignment in any need with cost effective pricing structure. However, Galataport's application ran in a single region on Google Cloud within GKE clusters. Having the ability to recover from an unexpected regional failure requires transforming the application into a multi-regional solution without compromising security or flexibility. Because service outages could occur at any time. The network might be down, or the latest deployment might introduce a critical bug, or even a natural disaster beyond anyone’s control might strike. In the wake of a disaster, it's imperative to have a well-tested, relevant, and robust Disaster Recovery plan.

Galataport had been already working with Doğuş Technology, one of the most trusted cloud service provider partners in Turkey, which enabled Galataport to leverage both Google Cloud’s technology and its partner Doğuş Technology’s resources to execute the Disaster Recovery project. A Disaster Recovery plan that has been properly designed and tested ensures that when a disaster strikes, the business continuity bottom line will be minimally affected, so having the right partner and using the right cloud provider technology is vital. Google Cloud offers a robust, flexible, and cost-effective selection of products and features to create a solution to fit any business requirement to build or augment a solution.

Delivering the leveraging power of cloud technology

Designing the architecture of business needs also requires consideration of local regulations. To comply with Turkish data storage legislation and take advantage of the benefits of GKE clustering, Doğuş Technology team developed a solution running on Anthos. Galataport, Doğuş Technology and Google Cloud teamed up to build a customized hybrid solution.

The project was launched with a detailed infrastructure topology demonstration by Doğuş Technology, a partner of Google Cloud and Anthos. VPC peering methodology was followed to distribute IPs from a different hosted project. So, pods and master subnets were decomposed to sustain security for Kubernetes clusters. Setting firewall rules and creating security groups for each port on Kubernetes prevented any traffic interruption between subnets.

As a result of the Google Cloud Disaster Recovery project, recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives were immediately improved. Google Cloud reduced the costs that are associated with both recovery objectives when compared to fulfilling them requirements on premise. Galataport has also benefited from fast, consistent, and scalable performance from Google’s global network which is one of the world’s largest and most advanced backbone network utilizing software-defined networking and edge-caching services. Multiple points of presence (PoPs) across the globe have enabled strong redundancy by mirroring data across storage devices at multiple locations. Scalability is provided by Google Cloud, which is designed to scale like other Google products (like search and Gmail), even in the face of huge traffic spikes. App Engine, Compute Engine autoscalers, and Datastore are managed services that offer automatic scaling that enables your application to grow and shrink based on Galataport’s needs. Galataport has also taken advantage of Google's security model, which has helped keep customers safe on Google applications such as Google Mail and Google Workspace for over 15 years. The site reliability engineering teams at Google ensures high availability and prevents abuse of platform resources along with providing security.

Galataport's Disaster Recovery project protects data from potential loss risks by building resilience against unexpected harm that could affect data. As resources are now distributed across global networks, multiple data centers build resilience against data loss or service disruption, without adding any additional overhead costs for business. This project not only reinforces Galataport's technological approach, but also optimizes the efforts of Galataport’s IT employees, giving them opportunities to pursue other innovative jobs.