The tech behind Christmas: Google Cloud Platform

There’s no doubt that technology has improved most aspects of life and made us more efficient people, so it follows that Santa and his elves have become more efficient as well. In an amusing blog post on Google’s Cloud Platform blog, Merry, Santa’s “Chief Information Elf” discloses how they’ve made Christmas more efficient by moving operations to Google’s Cloud Platform.

Merry describes how the global population has increased drastically in the past 100 years, so it was logically necessary to move to the cloud:

The world population increased from around 1.6 billion in the early 20th century to 7.5 billion today. The elf population couldn’t keep up with that growth and the increased production of all these new toys using our old methods, so we needed to improve efficiency.

Christmas is evidently more complex than you would think, with the North Pole taking advantage of Google’s “microservices.” These microservices allow Santa and his elves to separate the numerous Christmas tasks from “processing incoming letters from kids, another microservice for calculating kids’ niceness scores, even a microservice for tracking reindeer games rankings.” All very important stuff, we all want to make sure the big guy gets all of our letters, so this microservice ensures that he gets them in a neat and timely manner.

With all these tasks, they needed to upgrade to more powerful machines to handle their workload. Merry says that they tried to run all of this stuff on their own machines but they had power trouble, given that solar isn’t a viable source there so they had to turn to Google for help. GCP allowed Santa’s elves to run their intensive “Christmas Planner application” with the specialized services that Google’s platform offers such as CloudML, BigQuery, and more.

All in all, this is a pretty entertaining, yet effective post showing the capabilities of Google’s Cloud offering. If Santa can run all of his needs in the cloud, so can you.

Thoughts?