Source: Deccan Chronicle (original reporting, June 2020)
ShareChat Completes Full Migration to Google Cloud
Google Cloud announced in June 2020 that ShareChat, an Indian social media platform focused on regional-language content, had fully migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud. The migration covers the platform’s entire backend, moving away from its previous infrastructure setup to standardise on Google Cloud services.
No financial terms of the partnership were disclosed by either party.
Why the Migration Matters: Scale and User Base
ShareChat serves more than 60 million monthly active users across 15 different Indian languages. The platform is particularly popular in tier-II and tier-III cities, where a significant proportion of users connect over 2G mobile networks. This user profile creates a distinctive set of infrastructure challenges:
- High data volume: The platform processes large volumes of posts, likes, views, follower interactions, and media uploads continuously.
- Bandwidth constraints: Serving users on slower 2G connections requires optimised content delivery and minimal payload sizes to maintain a usable experience.
- Multi-language support: Handling 15 regional Indian languages adds complexity to content moderation, search, and recommendations infrastructure.
- Rapid growth: A fast-growing user base demands infrastructure that can scale horizontally without requiring re-architecture.
Key Engineering Goals Driving the Cloud Move
According to Venkatesh Ramaswamy, Vice-President of Engineering at ShareChat, the decision centred on three core engineering priorities:
- Reliability: Ensuring consistent uptime for a platform where users in underserved regions may have limited alternatives for connectivity.
- Scalability: Ability to handle traffic spikes driven by viral content without manual intervention.
- Observability: Gaining deeper visibility into system behaviour to diagnose performance issues faster.
“We made the decision to move and standardise on Google Cloud because we believe this will help us build better future technologies. The advances we have been able to drive with reliability, scalability and observability from day one have also been a major plus.”
— Venkatesh Ramaswamy, Vice-President (Engineering), ShareChat
Google Cloud’s Perspective on the Partnership
Karan Bajwa, Managing Director of Google Cloud India, stated that the partnership is designed to give ShareChat a scalable and reliable infrastructure foundation. The goal, according to Bajwa, is to enable ShareChat to continue delivering secure, cloud-native services to millions of users across India as the platform grows.
Infrastructure Implications for DevOps Teams
For DevOps and platform engineering practitioners, the ShareChat migration illustrates several common considerations when moving a high-traffic consumer platform to a public cloud provider:
- Full migration vs. hybrid: ShareChat opted for a complete migration rather than a hybrid approach, which simplifies operations but requires thorough pre-migration planning to avoid service disruption.
- Observability from day one: The explicit mention of observability as a key benefit suggests investment in tools such as distributed tracing, centralised logging, and metrics dashboards — areas where Google Cloud’s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is relevant.
- Edge performance for constrained networks: Minimising mobile bandwidth impact for 2G users points to use of CDN caching, adaptive bitrate media delivery, and efficient API design — all of which benefit from a cloud provider’s global network infrastructure.
- Cost efficiency at scale: Cloud migration at ShareChat’s scale is often justified in part by shifting from fixed capital expenditure on physical hardware to variable operational expenditure, with the ability to right-size resources based on actual demand.
Context: India’s Regional-Language Internet Growth
ShareChat’s trajectory reflects a broader trend in India’s internet market, where user growth has increasingly come from non-English speakers in smaller cities and rural areas. Platforms targeting this demographic face unique technical constraints — particularly around low-bandwidth delivery, local-language NLP for content understanding, and cost-effective infrastructure to serve price-sensitive markets. Cloud providers with strong presences in the Asia-Pacific region offer relevant advantages in latency, compliance, and partner ecosystem support for these use cases.