ARIGATOBANK: Leveraging Google Cloud for Scalable Donation Platform

ARIGATOBANK Inc. is a financial services business headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The company operates with a focus on social causes, aiming to create a society where people can support and encourage each other. ARIGATOBANK runs a platform called kifutown, which connects people who want to donate money to those in need. Rather than operating as a traditional bank that handles cash directly, ARIGATOBANK serves as an intermediary between donors and recipients. The company's shareholders include Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the popular apparel platform, ZOZO. As of March 2022, the number of donation projects to reach 'deposit' status on ARIGATOBANK's kifutown platform has grown to over 2,000.

ARIGATOBANK Inc., a Tokyo-based financial services business, operates a platform called kifutown that connects donors with those in need of financial aid. The platform has grown significantly, handling over 2,000 donation projects as of March 2022. However, the company faced challenges in managing sudden traffic surges, particularly due to the influence of high-profile shareholder Yusaku Maezawa. A single social media post from Maezawa could lead to a significant increase in traffic, posing a challenge to the platform's infrastructure. The company needed a solution that could handle these traffic surges without impacting availability and latency. Additionally, ARIGATOBANK wanted to maintain development speeds and quality while undertaking progressive development, which required clear delineation of responsibilities and efficient operation of the application server.

ARIGATOBANK turned to Google Cloud to overcome these challenges and support kifutown's future growth. The platform now runs on an architecture centered on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Spanner, Cloud Load Balancing, and Firebase. This architecture can scale flexibly and has the capacity to support demand. GKE operates as a foundation for microservices and Cloud Spanner as a distributed relational database, while Cloud Load Balancing enables flexible scaling. The architecture also features network security provided by Cloud Armor and networking services delivered through Cloud NAT and Cloud Router. The company also uses the fully managed serverless container platform Cloud Run to work efficiently with external SaaS partners. Cloud Spanner's powerful transaction engine made it the best database choice for kifutown, enabling easy management of complex tasks such as transaction conflict detection and retry, while scaling can easily be managed by adjusting settings on a screen.

• The use of Google Cloud's GKE and Cloud Spanner enabled high-speed development with a lean team. The engineers were able to focus on implementing business logic and building infrastructure without distractions. The simplicity of the system allowed for the development of kifutown without any major problems. The platform's infrastructure could handle traffic surges without any major issues, even during high-impact events like Maezawa's 'Money Giveaway to Everyone from Space' campaign. The platform's growth did not require the implementation of any special maintenance systems, and any issues could be dealt with immediately. The use of Cloud Armor also provided protection against potential cyber attacks. The success of the platform has brought ARIGATOBANK one step closer to realizing its vision of 'zeroing people in need of money.'

• Handles 2,000+ donation projects on the platform without requiring any new maintenance systems

• Delivers scalability while maintaining latency within business requirements to accommodate traffic increases

• Enables a small team of engineers to complete the project without compromising work-life balance