When Skillz was experiencing rising storage costs, they needed to find a data warehouse solution that would reduce the amount they were spending on storage costs. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was identified as a possible solution, because of its pricing structure. However, since their transactional data was coming into a MySQL server, they needed to ingest data into the data warehouse in near real time to get a true and timely idea of user activity and performance. The Skillz environment had many layers and included very complex code, along with geographical data that required customization and optimization. Their current Amazon RedShift instance had latency issues and did not provide the performance they needed. In the long term, Skillz wanted to move to an ‘event-driven’ analytics structure. But they couldn’t do this with the high cost and low performance of their current solution. The data collected was critical to driving the player experience for Skillz users. “We use that data to customize offers by region or interest, segment our markets, deliver relevant campaigns, or even to perform fraud and cheater detection,” said Miriam Aguirre, VP Engineering at Skillz. “We were running these applications hourly to customize these different features, then finding ourselves wishing we could do that much more quickly.”