We are thrilled to share the highlights of our very first Google meetup hosted at our company premises on 11 Aug 2024. The event was packed with insightful sessions, engaging discussions, and valuable networking opportunities. Here’s a recap of the day’s events.

The Event was organized by Google GDG Team was open to all and entries for the event registered through the GDG event page. Attendees were provided with key details such as location, time, and speaker information beforehand.

Welcome Greeting

The day began with a warm welcome from Saniya Imroze, setting a positive tone for the event. With over 200 attendees comprising students, professionals, and a Nagpur GDG Google team, the atmosphere was charged with enthusiasm and anticipation.

Virtual Google I/O Keynote

Next, we had the privilege of presenting a recorded video by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. He spoke about the Virtual Google I/O Keynote, highlighting the latest innovations and advancements in technology. His insights set the stage for the tech-driven discussions that followed.

Keynote from Perficient Director

Mr. Prashant Nandanwar (Directory Cloud & API) delivered an engaging session, providing an in-depth overview of our company’s expertise in Google products. He shared compelling case studies and elaborated on our strong partnership with Google. His presentation reinforced our commitment to innovation and excellence in the tech industry.

Perficient Director (Cloud & API) Mr. Prashant addressing the attendees

Prashant also introduces his Technical Team members who were specialized in their areas like AWS/GCP Cloud, API, Artificial Intelligent, UI Team to the audience present in the event.

Perficient Director – Prashant Nandanwar with his Team, along with Senior Human Resource Manager Mrs. Shweta Rawlani with her Team.

Session on Generative AI

Following the keynote, Mukta Paliwal delivered an engaging session on Generative AI and the current developments in this space. The audience was fascinated by the possibilities of AI and how it’s shaping the future of technology.

Unleashing Flutter with Gemini

Debasmita Sarkar explored the power of Flutter with Gemini. Her session was a deep dive into unleashing the potential of Flutter, and the audience left with a clear understanding of how to leverage this powerful framework in their projects.

Interactive Quiz by GDG Team hosted

One of the event’s highlights was an interactive quiz organized by the GDG team. The participants eagerly engaged in the quiz, and the winners were rewarded with delicious chocolates. The quiz added a fun and competitive edge to the day, and everyone enjoyed the spirited participation, it was conducted by Henay Lakhwani

Lunch

As the morning sessions concluded, attendees were treated to a delightful lunch, generously sponsored by the Google team. It was a great opportunity for everyone to relax, network, and discuss the exciting topics covered so far.

Exploring APIs with Postman Flows & Google Cloud Gemini

Post-lunch, Ali Mustafa and Aanchal Mishra led an insightful presentation on exploring APIs with Postman Flows and Google Cloud Gemini. Their session provided practical knowledge on utilizing these tools for efficient API management and development.

Beyond the Checkout: Unlocking Payment Success

Later in the day, Namrata More presented an enlightening session on “Beyond the Checkout: Unlocking Payment Success.” Her expertise in the field provided valuable insights into enhancing payment processes and ensuring smooth transactions.

Felicitation & Closing Keynote

The event concluded with a felicitation ceremony and a closing keynote by Saish Adlak, capturing the essence of the day and thanking the speakers, participants, and the Google Nagpur team for their contributions.

Event Highlights

The energy and excitement of the event were captured in photos, reflecting the success of our first Google meetup. Both the attendees and the Google GDG Nagpur team as well speakers were impressed by our company premises and appreciated the smooth organization of the event. Hosting this meetup for the first time was a significant milestone for us, and we’re proud of how well everything turned out.

The Google meetup was a 4-6 hour-long event filled with insightful discussions on Google Vertex, AI, and more. We’re excited about the possibilities ahead and look forward to hosting more such events in the future.

Stay tuned for more updates and check out the event photos we’ve shared below!

GDG Nagpur Team and Speakers with Mr. Prashant Nandanwar and Mrs. Shweta Rawlani

Event Attendees

Caching is technology that enhances the performance of websites—making them load faster when compared to a traditional server without caching. When used correctly and as per application need, caching can reduce the load on the server, which results in lower server resource consumption.

Some Background on the Need for Caching

RAM is an important aspect of any server. A few years ago, companies with websites where users do a lot of transactions daily, or even on an hourly basis, had been spending time and a lot of money purchasing RAM to support the considerable number of users visiting their websites. And believe me when I say lots of users. For example, an idle website could be serving 10K users request per minute.
The e-commerce business model says that if I want to sell my product through the internet, I will have to provide a good looking website to my users that loads pages and processes transactions quickly. Nobody wants to wait for a website that is taking ages to load data.

Daydreaming

So, if I was the owner of any such big company (ex. Walmart, Amazon, Flipkart, etc.), my only option was to spend lots of money buying RAM and CPUs for the server on which my website is hosted, so it loads quickly and keeps users on my website. Because ultimately what I want is for millions of users to visit my website, buy products, complete lots of transactions, and provide me with a profit.

Living in Reality

At this point, what I am doing is spending lots of money to buy hardware for my server (RAM/CPUs) which, in turn, is supporting the thousands of users on my website. Because I’m spending so much to help the website carry that load, the overall profit margin for me is not that much. This is where caching technology comes into the picture, creates a better profit margin for me, and increases the reliability of my website for my millions of users.

How Does Caching Help?

First, let’s understand the basic role of an operating system (OS). The OS does all the calculations for any process running on it using RAM, the disk, and the CPU.  In a normal scenario, when we make any request through a web browser, it goes to the server on which the website we are accessing is hosted. The server OS goes to the disk, gathers the data, and sends it back to the browser for us to see.
And now suppose there are millions of such requests coming to the server because of the website`s popularity and large audience. Then imagine what would happen to the server that is constantly going to and fro to fetch the data from the disk. Any guesses? If you think the server will go down, you are right!
The reason for this would be high CPU utilization combined with high network consumption. If I want my server not to go down, what option would I have? In normal circumstances, I might buy additional hardware like another server, additional RAM, and an additional CPU to support the number of website users.
This is where caching comes in to save the day. I need to simply introduce a caching mechanism on the server, which will cache (store) all of the new requests coming to a server in an organized way, thus reducing the number of to-and-fro data fetch operations to the disk by the OS. The only requests that will now go to the disk through the OS are those whose data is not already present in the caching database. This will reduce the CPU usage and network consumption. Ultimately it will boost the application hosted on my server and give very fast responses to end users. Concerning hardware, using a caching tool on your server will also save your RAM, reducing the amount you will have to purchase and the total cost of hosting your servers. You will also gain application stability by increasing the server uptime. Thus, a large number of users can purchase products through your website and help achieve your targets.

Caching in Action

We at Perficient Linux Hosting, based in Nagpur, India, use the Redis and Memcache caching tools, along with Varnish (if needed) to achieve our clients’ requirements. Each of our client projects has caching enabled for their websites, and the difference it makes in terms of website speed and overall performance is clearly visible, both when we simply surf the website and when we use tools to analyze it. On one particular project, we used the next level of caching mechanism.
This client had complex architecture requirements. The project included 12 e-commerce sites for different countries (.com, .uk, .br, etc.). Each online store had two web servers, a single database server and this client was expecting a high volume of traffic in the near future. The challenge in front of us was to use the same set of available servers to handle the traffic instead of purchasing new hardware. Considering the fact that we had two web servers and one database server for each site, we used Redis Cluster along with HAProxy, a tool we use to balance traffic between a master node and a slave node. We set it up, so one of the two servers acted as the master Redis node and other as the slave node, with a connection to both being handled and monitored by the HAProxy tool, which was installed on the database server.
The way this architecture works is that when cached data is needed, it is retrieved from the master server by HAProxy while, in the background, the cached data is also replicated to the slave node from the master. This means that if the master Redis node fails (because of high traffic, load, network congestion, etc.), HAProxy can make the slave node the master until the actual master comes back up (either through manual intervention or on its own, after the load on the server returns to normal).
This architecture enabled the websites to handle the high traffic the client was expecting and helped our client to exceed its yearly revenue targets for two consecutive years.
This Redis and HAProxy architecture was also the first of its kind for the Perficient Linux hosting team, and we are still providing hosting and support services to that client.
A happy customer? What else could a hosting team want!?