More than 2 billion people worldwide now shop online. So it’s no wonder that in the digital economy, a key component to the success of businesses, big and small, is how quickly and efficiently they deliver their products to their customers. Lyve helps businesses across 15 countries, from small restaurants to big online marketplaces, to keep their logistics operations running smoothly.
Founded in 2016 with a vision to reimagine logistics as an enabler of digital transformation and business innovation, Lyve’s core product is a SaaS solution aimed at alleviating the complexity of the last mile delivery, while giving clients an overview of how their operations are running so they can continually improve customer relationships.
“Our software is designed to give clients control and visibility over all delivery-related matters in one dashboard,” explained Grigor Khachatryan, Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Lyve.
George Chogovadze, Lyve’s Chief Technical Officer added: “Our goal is to make it easy for our clients to provide a faster, more accurate and interactive delivery service. We take care of the logistics side of things, leaving them to focus on their core business.”
To enable this, Lyve’s SaaS includes features such as configurable auto-assigning and clubbing, which helps drivers to deliver multiple orders with nearby drop-off locations within one trip. It also offers dynamic route planning and optimisation, helping drivers to travel between destinations more efficiently, and allowing businesses to access the expected time of arrival of each driver. By tracking journeys accurately, Lyve’s clients can keep their customers updated with their delivery status.
“These optimal delivery services can take businesses years to develop internally. We provide it as a module they can plug in and start using on the first day of being onboarded with Lyve,” said Khachatryan.
Khachatryan’s aim is to ensure that this service can be delivered at scale and that Lyve’s technology decisions support business growth while keeping costs low.
“When we started in 2016, we were running on top of one VM and one server, scaling was difficult and expensive. The biggest motivation for us to enhance our technology was the fact that all of our clients operations’ relied on single VM. We needed our products to guarantee reliability and stability to clients, leaving no room for error,” he said.
With this in mind, Lyve searched for infrastructure solutions offering reliability and stability without requiring much maintenance from its small team, which needed to concentrate on developing its products and partnerships. These requirements led Lyve to switch from a monolithic on-premises infrastructure to a micro-services architecture on Google Cloud.
“Our team had positive experiences using Google Cloud solutions in previous companies, from Google Workspace for productivity and collaboration to Google Cloud for compute performance and ease of management. We also compared prices against other cloud providers and found Google Cloud to be the most competitive,” explained Khachatryan. “We were confident to start our migration with a few servers for proof of concepts (POCs) in the early days of the company, so all our SaaS solutions were developed on GCP.”
Helping businesses to be always-on and connected
Because the switch from a monolithic infrastructure to a micro-services architecture was at the core of Lyve’s decision to migrate to the cloud, one of the first solutions it turned to during its migration to Google Cloud was Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). “For us, Google Kubernetes Engine is like water in the desert,” said Khachatryan. “It has solved our scalability and resilience problems by automatically deploying, scaling, and managing our containerised applications. Now, if one component fails, others continue to work so our clients aren’t affected during downtime.”
The company also uses Cloud SQL as its main database, and Memorystore, integrated with Redis, for automating complex tasks, such as patching and monitoring, so that the Lyve team can spend more time on coding. With Compute Engine, Lyve creates virtual machines and runs proof of concepts on them to test ideas and develop new features for its SaaS.
Lyve also uses Firebase to send real-time notifications to drivers and customers, and API Gateway to develop, deploy, and manage APIs securely. A range of Google Maps Platform solutions, such as Maps APIs, power features of Lyve’s software such as the map interface on its dashboard that enables store managers to visualise the journey of their products from when they leave the store until they reach the customer.
“We use almost all networking, logging, and monitoring solutions that Google Cloud provides. It supports almost every aspect of our operations,” said Khachatryan. “It’s important to us that our clients, drivers, and their customers are always connected and get real-time updates. To make that possible, our own infrastructure needs to be always on and working in real-time, and Google Cloud is up to that task.”
Working together, from anywhere in the world
But it’s not just Lyve’s technology team that uses Google Cloud solutions. All new employees are onboarded through the creation of a corporate Gmail account, after which point their access to other applications and collaboration tools is automated.
“This saves us a lot of time, which is not to be undermined during a startup’s hyper-growth phase,” said Khachatryan. “If team members want to use new tools or try something new, we integrate those with Single Sign-On on Google Cloud, instead of spending time and IT resources on creating new accounts and managing them every time people join the company.”
Meanwhile, with all company documents and data saved on a central location on Drive and Cloud Storage, Lyve has visibility over who has access to what. Attending Lyve’s Abu Dhabi headquarters has also become optional for all staff, since all meetings happen on Google Meet.
“We get security alerts from Google Workspace that help us train employees if we notice any accessibility red flags, for example, and these issues are solved by IT without bothering anyone or interfering with our operations,” said Khachatryan. “The ease of use of these tools, and the fact that they are secure, means Lyve can hire talent from all over the world and that unexpected events, such as lockdown measures during a global pandemic, do not inflict any operational changes because we are equipped to work remotely.”
Empowering businesses to deliver with the right technology
Next, Lyve is investing in automating the dispatching logic in its last-mile delivery solutions, which determine how orders are assigned to drivers. It is also integrating its solutions with multiple delivery partners in different parts of the world to give clients more flexibility in how they utilise and optimise fleets. If a business is based in the Middle East and has started to serve customers in Europe but doesn’t have a fleet there, Lyve helps them find one from partners that fit their criteria so they can start delivering as soon as possible to new customers worldwide.
“Long-term; our goal is to enable every business, big or small, to utilise their delivery fleets in the best, most cost-effective way possible on our SaaS platform, and to help them deliver every order on time,” said Khachatryan. “Our next project aims to help small business owners integrate with us easily without IT expertise, so anyone can compete in an always-active digital marketplace. We can focus on this because we no longer have scalability and reliability issues ourselves, thanks to our partnership with Google Cloud. We look forward to continuing to grow together.”
